Selected Opinions about Ken Knabb

—Oliah Kraft, Allergic to This World (Oregon, 2007)

REXROTH ON THE WEB

Although Kenneth Rexroth complained considerably about new technologies in his later years, his work has enjoyed good fortune on the World Wide Web.

In 2000, I put an expanded version of Morgan Gibson’s study Kenneth Rexroth: Poet of East-West Wisdom online at my Light and Dust site. . . . At the time I put Gibson’s study on-line, Ken Knabb had made a good start on his Rexroth Archive. By securing permission to reprint significant amounts of work from the Rexroth Trust and New Directions, Knabb was able to build what to me is the most thorough and useful site for a 20th Century poet on the web today. As much as this is the result of Knabb’s hard work and judicious choices, it also reflects and enhances characteristics of Rexroth’s personality and opus.

The large volume of reprints at Knabb’s site inherently make it an ideal resource for Rexroth’s fans. But the fans aren’t the most important people on the web. The first of the major virtues of the site comes from the way it uses web technology to bring new readers to Rexroth. Knabb has a large mailing list, and sends out notices when he adds new entries to the site. The entries, in turn, get listed in search engines quickly enough. At the present time, search engines form the literary world’s most important source of access to new material. Knabb can get a sense of how this works from reader feedback. Within days of the addition of Rexroth’s essay on Henry Miller at the site, Knabb received dozens of e-messages from people with comments such as, “This is the best thing I’ve seen on Miller. Who is this guy Rexroth, anyway?” Knabb includes articles Rexroth wrote for newspapers and other now difficult to find sources, often in conjunction with current events. When the Taliban dynamited Buddhist statues, for instance, Knabb put up an article by Rexroth on the Buddhist art of the region. For Rexroth, poetry was news that stayed news in a literal sense as well as in the more abstract sense that Ezra Pound meant the phrase. Seeing Rexroth as a poet and essayist in love with the world, the varieties of his interests and his ability to comment on just about anything succinctly and memorably, mean that in the infinitely indexed and cross-referenced environment of the web he will always find new readers. Rexroth perpetually recommended books, paintings, music, religious and political organizations to his acquaintances. The web allows him to continue to do that long after his death. . . .

If the web seems a medium almost designed for Rexroth, Rexroth’s suitability to it makes important comments on the nature of readers and literature today. At a time when literature turns in on itself as a cabal of theorists, readers demonstrate that they have not given up on poetry. There are still plenty of people who want to read Homer and Montaigne, Tu Fu and Sappho, major figures in the development of Christianity as well as Buddhism, Utopian Communalism and Song Dynasty science, The Tale of Genji and the Kalevala. The list now includes people whose first publications Rexroth arranged or whom he first reviewed. If he has the most useful 20th Century author’s site on the web, he earned it.

—Karl Young (Rexroth symposium, Kanda University, Japan, October 2007)

REVIEW OF SECRETS PUBLICS

Ken Knabb has so thoroughly assimilated French language and culture that I sometimes have the impression that I’m talking with a compatriot. He does, however, retain that eminently North American quality of speaking clearly and directly, without showing off his intelligence or drawing attention to himself. Does this mean that his work is a sort of “Situationist International for Dummies”? No, although it could undeniably serve as such — anyone who is unfamiliar with the SI, or radical critique, or the American counterculture should put his book at the very top of their reading list.

But Secrets Publics is also the work of a particular individual. Knabb’s successive writings reflect the development of a perspective that is both penetrating and personal. His seemingly casual tone should not make us overlook his variety of experience and erudition, nor his agility and subtlety. Knabb is personally involved in everything he writes, always present as a participant rather than a mere witness or observer. This is what enables him to tackle the most diverse topics while remaining low-key and grounded.

—Jean-Pierre Depétris (October 2007)

[Another more extensive article by Jean-Pierre Depétris]
[Other French reviews of Secrets Publics]

2007 AND I

In an attempt to understand my life and the society in which I find myself, I read widely. Amongst other things, I took in academic social science, fashionable theorists such as Zizek and Negri, less fashionable figures such as Takis Fotopoulos, old Marxists such as Korsch, newer strands of Marxism such as that of CLR James, Castoriadis, and the Italian theorists of the 60s and 70s, plus a selection of contemporary anarchists and non-Leninist communists. Although I found some fragments of illumination here and there (for example, in the work of a group of British sociologists who have looked at the development of a hedonistic night-time economy to replace the decayed heavy industrial economy of parts of Britain), I was driven to the conclusion that only the work of the situationists provided a substantial basis for a critical theoretical engagement with the alienations of the ordinary person in advanced capitalist societies.

Looking around for contemporary material that draws on situationist theory, I soon found that the individuals who had been associated with the “Declaration Concerning the Center for Research on the Social Question” and the “Notice Concerning the Reigning Society and Those Who Contest It” and who had largely been responsible for extending situationist theory after the demise of the SI had largely abandoned the field. The one exception, of course, is you. I see that you have refined and added to your invaluable translations of the situationists (especially with your translation of The Society of the Spectacle) and that you added a number of new works of your own (notably the autobiography and “The Joy of Revolution”) in a new style that evidently aims for greater simplicity of expression. However, my sense is that in the post-Notice period you have somewhat stepped back from a critical examination of the development of contemporary alienation (and the resistance to it). Relatedly, you seem to have grown publicly rather uncritical about your own cultural consumption (Rexroth, rock-climbing, meditation, folk music, etc). This is not to say that there is no criticism at all, but at least some your personal enthusiasms touch on important developments in commodity society about which you are silent. For example, meditation would appear to be one facet of a constellation of “non-material” and non-mundane consumption that now offers distinction, enlightenment or patient resignation to sectors of society who have either satisfied their basic needs to their own satisfaction or consumed the more ordinary and tangible commodities to the point of nauseous exhaustion. Moreover, in an age in which ecological pressures, and the patent failure of increased consumption to produce a better quality of life, might yet dictate a general shift away from resource-intensive consumption, “spiritual” practices might perhaps best be thought of as an avant-garde laboratory for the reformed alienation of coming years. Your own experience might shed light on these hypotheses. . . .

Looking further afield, I see numerous new translations of texts by the SI and former members of the SI albeit that the majority appear to be execrable (Bill Brown in particular has converted the unavailable into the unreadable on a quite industrial scale). Sadly, there appears to have been very few fresh and incisive applications and developments of situationist theory in recent years. Worse still, elements of the academy have taken up the situationists with gusto, transforming abstracted and misunderstood fragments of that theory into material for empty speculation, disarmed analysis, inconsequential debate, and the approval-seeking displays of bored students in search of qualifications.

—Wayne Spencer (January 2008 letter to Ken Knabb, posted at the author’s blog)

[The same blog also features our subsequent correspondence about some of these issues: A Discussion with Ken Knabb.]
 

WHEN IN ROME . . .

Pope Guy Debord announced in the last official tract of the Situationus Internationalus, Veritable Split In The International, that his shit doesn’t stink and neither do his ideas. One example among dozens in this work of nuanced self-worship contrasts the sublime perfection of the official Situationist organization with the tragic frailty of its acolytes, “The truest cause of the misfortune of the spectators of the S.I. does not stem from what the S.I. did or did not do”. Raoul Vaneigem, today’s featured Situationist anti-star, did not display Debord’s global arrogance, his view of the Situationists is focused on an organizational failure, “I broke [off] because the radicality that had been the priority in May 1968 was in the process of dissolving into bureaucratic behavior.” He maintains a tacit acceptance of the entire body of theoretical work, hovers magisterially above the entire post 68 scene and picks and choses mainly irrelevant coffee house themes to glorify as a senior statesman beyond reproach.

Since the fateful year of MCMLXXI, Debord’s cardinals, including monsignors Ken Knabb and Donald Nicholson-Smith, have been charged by papal bull (shit) with placing the blame for the continuation of this shitty world elsewhere, i.e. everywhere else.

Their mandate is to provide logic to the illogical, rationale to the irrational, the appearance of truth to the lie. Sound familiar? They have been given the task of dealing with the question of how a radical movement could fail to achieve its self-proclaimed goal — the destruction of the spectacle and the commodity — without that failure in any way implicating “the most radical ideas of our time.” And their approach is simple: talk about anything and everything but that historical link and never allow the subject to come up. This is how the vaudevillian career of Knabb with all its huckstering eclecticism makes sense. Why else offer us this furiously paced spectacle of a weekly concert hotline, manic cheerleading for the rambling life of a beatnik, the autobiography of a mild mannered friend of boredom, and his goofy chronicles of computer dating exploits, if not to create misdirection from the obvious — the core ideas that the cardinals have curated for us over decades are old, stale, tired, no longer radical, and this charade is ultimately all an exercise in misdirection, a slight of hand, a diversion, a can-can dance to keep us around. And this is how the issuance of a forty five year old classic can be seen. Where are the new classics?

Outside of the Vatican, if theory and consciousness are real forces in the world dedicated to destroying this society, theory must accept responsibility for every day that the world goes on in this insufferable and inhuman way. Our misery is our fault. The scandal of the cardinals and their followers consists of believing that it is possible for the thought of the SI to be correct while the enemies of the Situationists still rule, as if the question of the truth of the critique is not a practical question, a question of its power and of the annihilation of its enemies.

Another reason the cardinals believe that the critique of the SI is perfect is as simple as this: they have no choice. They have no new ideas themselves and have never had any, and to praise the perfection of their worn out catechism passes as an act of radical commitment and makes them look busy. But this inability to conceive of a dynamic critique of changing social conditions not only takes the form of the endless repetition of received ideas and their mechanical application to whatever social situation arises, it also consists of the active suppression of a critique of the SI and of the world. Knabb, who 40 years ago assumed the role of curator of the museum as well as popularizer and explainer of all things Debordicus and Situationus, in particular is guilty of withholding sacrilegious ideas that threaten to undermine the Church. (Of course, the benignly literary Nicholson-Smith would rather provide us with the umpteenth translation of Vaneigem than help make available a single sentence that could shed light on why radical subjectivity has failed to produce a radical world.) Knabb’s familiarity with the writings of Jean Pierre Voyer date from 1972 when he translated Reich: How To Use. His purposeful and conspiratorial silence on the subsequent work of Voyer and his pointed refusal to bring texts such as There Is No Society Of The Spectacle into the arena of theoretical debate, while he feigns to be a partisan of serious critical discussion, is not accidental or incidental any more than priests buggering young boys. Knabb is the Church’s official censor and suppressor of critical theory and he is comfortable in the role.

Jean Pierre Voyer, author of There Is No Society Of The Spectacle, who was once picked by Debord to be his successor, and who was excommunicated when he dared criticize the catechism, is today the creator of a coherent body of work that addresses the most important critical and philosophical issues of our time. His writings will be introduced to an American audience in an anthology to be published by Little Black Cart in early 2014. This text will appear in that anthology.

—Isaac Cronin, pamphlet distributed February 2013 at appearances of Donald Nicholson-Smith in
San Francisco and Oakland (discussing his new translation of Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life)

The anthology referred to was eventually published under the title:
It’s Crazy How Many Things Don’t Exist: Selected Writings of Jean-Pierre Voyer.

REVIEW OF THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE: ANNOTATED EDITION

Guy Debord
The Society of the Spectacle
Translated and annotated by Ken Knabb
Bureau of Public Secrets, Berkeley, 2014. 150pp., $15 pb

As a book whose reputation tends to eclipse its actual content, The Society of the Spectacle has always, since its original 1967 publication, bitterly contended with its interpreters and the society that its two hundred and twenty-one short theses diagnose. Any chatter surrounding the work or its author, Guy Debord, bears uncoincidental pertinence to the book’s central protagonist—a society for which the public relations industry affirms a priori models of commensurable social discourse at odds with accommodating perspectives decidely intent on its abolition. It is of little curiosity then why Debord’s writing has always proceeded with the caution and meticulous precision of a war strategist. For example, in introducing his 1988 amendment on the development of the spectacle, Debord forewarns his reader that, “I obviously cannot speak with complete freedom. Above all, I must take care not to give too much information to just anybody. Our unfortunate times thus compel me, once again, to write in a new way. Some elements will be intentionally omitted; and the plan will have to remain rather unclear. Readers will encounter certain decoys, like the very hallmark of the era” (Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, London, Verso, 1998).

One gets the sense that Debord almost doesn’t trust any sentence immediately after it has been written. This puts the reviewer in the curious position of having to evaluate less a lucid argument on the development of Marx’s critique of the fetish character of the commodity social form, than something more closely resembling a riddle whose author provocatively flatters himself for “never engaging in any activity that could pass for socially honest” (Debord, “This Bad Reputation”, 2010).

It is with Ken Knabb’s newest edition of The Society of the Spectacle however that Debord’s purportedly opaque critique of reified social life under postwar capitalism is potentially illuminated. Here, and through his own online publishing platform “Bureau of Public Secrets,” Knabb presents both an updated version of his own—what is a third—English translation of the book, as well as a featured set of annotations collecting together the theoretical and historical references and allusions implicitly or explicitly embedded within the text. (Knabb’s first print rendition sans annotations was published by Rebel Press in 2004.) The annotations consist, on the one hand, of additions by Knabb and others clarifying various contextual references, and on the other, of an incorporated list of all citations and appropriations Debord himself assembled in order to best equip translators of the book. (Unfortunately, the edition never specifies which annotations were collected by Debord, and which ones were editorially added over the years.)

With conscious neglect for any professional standards against plagiarism, both Debord and the Situationist International—whose ideas clamorously permeated the social upheaval of May 1968—infamously utilized the cultural language of society in order to undermine its own apparent stability. Through this practice of détournement—whose predecessors are found in prewar avant-garde collage as much as within the movement of immanent criticism found in Hegel and Marx—the lies of a society are refuted by what it says about itself. If to quote is to lack the belief and daring of one’s own authority, détournement is to concede that one cannot help but speak the language of an alien authority and nonetheless attempt to unravel it from within.

There can be little doubt that Knabb’s newest version evokes these methodological aspects of Debord’s work. As an exercise somewhere between defilement and homage, Debord utilizes an array of philosophical, historical and literary sources to critically outline the extent to which the commodity economy has, through the twentieth century, developed its fetish character into a social form mediated by images. As Debord writes, the spectacle “is nothing other than the economy developing for itself. It is at once the faithful reflection of the production of things and a distorting objectification of the producers” (§16). Debord’s notion of a society of the spectacle nonetheless remains a largely misunderstood diagnosis of the phenomena of reification. Knabb’s annotated edition thereby assists in elucidating the book within a theoretical tradition that, if left at the surface of Debord’s allegedly cryptic formulations, is often buried by the disciplinary efforts of postmodernism, media or cultural studies, or simply as a step in the history of avant-garde movements. Instead, even a momentary glance at the annotations yields an unrelenting critical heritage for Debord that principally follows the intellectual line of Hegel, Marx, Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, and the twentieth century workers’ movement. Unyieldingly looming is the perspective of totality and the inextricable adherence the movement of history has with the self-conscious realization of human freedom. Indeed, beginning with the initial sentence of the book, it is Marx—with Hegel following close behind—that is Debord’s single most referenced source.

The annotations allow a novice reader—unequivocally the edition’s most suitable recipient—to become privy not only to the intellectual prowess Debord brandishes for the tradition of modern dialectical thought and its corresponding battles within the First, Second and Third Internationals, but also for his attention to a range of other ventures in the social sciences and humanities. Facilitated by the annotations, the reader can move through the text and discern an eclectic composition of sociology, urbanism, historiography, psychoanalysis, political theory, philosophy, and literature, including the masterly stylists of the aphoristic tradition. Amid his panoramically chosen sources however, Debord finds only selective affinity, commandeering voices to serve his own purpose as a puppeteer might manipulate the wooden legs of an otherwise lifeless figure. Hegel’s fragments on love are used to articulate social isolation (§29), while the opening lines of Virgil’s Aeneid now lament the topsy-turvy world of commodities (§66); Machiavelli is employed to make explicit the implicit scientism of the utopian socialists (§83), while Heraclitus helps demonstrate the inability of petrified thought to grasp the antagonistic essence of its own society (§195). Such a method, now exposed through Knabb’s edition, acquires a particularly concentrated elucidation in Debord’s penultimate chapter wherein an uncredited verbatim passage from Lautréamont’s Poésies masquerades as its own thesis: “Ideas improve. The meaning of words plays a part in that improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress depends on it. It sticks close to an author’s phrasing, exploits his expressions, deletes a false idea, replaces it with the right one” (§207).

For Debord, who weighed his words more carefully than most, the technique of détournement carries the legacy of critical theory insofar as it speaks the language of contradiction by contradicting. By undermining and conflicting with the original meaning of his sources, Debord affirms, through his partisan analysis, the stimulus of negative thought unafraid at turning the gun on its own presumptions. The Society of the Spectacle’s own affinity to this tenet of dialectical thought is most clearly expressed in the following thesis, itself an appropriation of a passage from Marx’s Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital: “The very style of dialectical theory is a scandal and abomination to the prevailing standards of language and to the sensibilities molded by those standards, because while it makes concrete use of existing concepts it simultaneously recognizes their rediscovered fluidity and their inevitable destruction” (§205).

Aside from Debord’s prepared compilation of sources, Knabb’s added notations and commentary vary in both quality and merit. Most common are remarks that provide unmentioned allusions, such as §20 for which Knabb informs the unfamiliar reader of the overtones of Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity. Also worthwhile are the comments which offer, however abbreviated, explications on the concept of an individual thesis, for example in §3 whereby Knabb calls attention to a particular characterization of the spectacle as definably heterogeneous, or in §64 which briefly explains Debord’s use of the term “bureaucratic capitalism.” Another notable example concerns the epigraph of Chapter 3, an excerpt from the postwar journal of the Chinese Communist Party whose use Knabb clarifies in accordance with the theme of the chapter itself. On more than one occasion, the most fruitful aspects of Knabb’s commentary consist of listing Debord’s sourced material, some sober speculation on the meaning of its usage, an esoteric historical anecdote, general conceptual clarification, and references to other Situationist writing. Indeed, the references to additional Situationist material are probably the most invaluable components of Knabb’s additions.

Some of these commentaries nonetheless fall short, such as §104, which merely supplies a curt intuitive definition of “state capitalism” and offers no further information on the concept’s history. Some referenced associations remain largely speculative as to whether or not Debord actually had such sources in mind, or whether or not they are merely editorial extrapolations. These commentaries often portray passages as alluding to common idioms or dictums that bear no real implication for the content of the book, while others appear wholly arbitrary. For example, when, in §134, Debord refers to “divisions among Greek communities,” Knabb feels inclined to mention Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War; or in §178, when a description of the inherent importance of journeying elicits from Knabb a passage from Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night. Most regrettable however are Knabb’s overt and excessively didactic notations, which are on the cusp of resembling condensed Wikipedia entries. While some are more tolerable than others, such as explanations of the Fronde (§140), condottiere (§46), or the Lysenko fiasco (§108), some approach the swindle of a narrow edification, for example the biographical introductions to Marx and Engels (§78-79), a factory-standard narrative on the Spanish Civil War (§94), or a simplistically barren definition of urbanism (§169). Many notations simply list the years of birth and death of historical figures. Even if Knabb’s edition is most appropriate for readers utterly unaccustomed to Guy Debord, annotations explaining whom Stalin was seems to, perhaps justifiably, expect the worst from his readership (§70). Deservedly or not, since Knabb’s English translation is generally thought to be more pedagogic than the two other English translations of the book (Fredy Perlman of Black & Red in 1970/1977 and Donald Nicholson-Smith for Zone Books in 1994), his annotations do little to change this opinion.

Additionally lamentable are Knabb’s missed opportunities for having a set of notations accompany The Society of the Spectacle. For example, Debord’s frequent description of alienation as the recession of activity into mere contemplation might have been best supplemented with notation on the strong role that the “contemplative stance” plays for Lukács in History and Class Consciousness. Additionally, in §156, Debord utilizes Marx’s concept of dead and living labor for which Knabb in the notation oddly quotes the Communist Manifesto for its phrase, “the past dominates the present’—instead of making the more explicit connection to Volume One of Capital and the role of surplus labor in the accumulation process. Finally, the last chapter examines a specific notion of ideology, and at one point, Debord compares it to Karl Mannheim’s concept of “total ideology.” Left unexamined are the exact differences between the two understandings of ideology.

On the whole, one cannot help but grasp a dramatically different tone in Knabb’s latest edition as compared with those that came before it. A principle of dissection reigns over the experience of uncovering what Debord’s thorny critique might afford. By the end, the annotations have submerged the subtlety of détournement simply into an aggregated pastiche. Since everything is listed in the back, one no longer stumbles upon an idea that, for instance, looks vaguely familiar and compels the reader to reflectively grapple with its meaning. Instead, the resonance of the ideas collapses against a disenchanted laundry list of proprietorship of who said what. One is prohibited from wandering through the edition and is incessantly tempted to jump to the end and prematurely spoil the identity of the killer. Ours is, without fail, an epoch without the strength to pause in the presence of an idea. As a tutorial to the theoretical work of the Situationist International and Debord, Knabb’s edition irrefutably excels. However, as a work that takes seriously the notion that there is peril in revealing too much all at once—and that perhaps revolutionary critique should be an impartial burden rather than easily adaptable to prevailing modes of discourse—Knabb’s edition is remiss to have forgotten that sometimes less is more.

—Eric-John Russell, in The Marx and Philosophy Review of Books (Kent, England, January 12, 2015)

[This is the complete review.]

A PALINODE FOR THE BUREAU
[comments on the above review]

A little over two years ago I applauded Eric-John Russell’s review of Ken Knabb’s revised translation of The Society of the Spectacle, saying:

Knabb’s attempt to make Debord’s work more accessible seems to have ossified it — perhaps inadvertently.

On further reflection, I now believe this assessment was wrong. Indeed, unless we reckon with the context of Debord’s work in a similar fashion to Knabb (a context moreover receding rapidly into an inaccessible past accessible only through its various and often contradictory representations), we will make no sense of it, either as a work of its time or as a work of continuing relevance.

To be absolutely clear, it is my previous assessment that I now consider in error. Russell’s review, despite some rhetorical exaggeration (“everything is listed in the back”) raised both the advantages and disadvantages of Knabb’s latest edition of Debord’s book. My cheering of Russell from the sidelines, however, emphasised only what I then unfairly characterised as the “increasing inadequacy of Knabb’s translation of the Situationist project.”

In his review, Russell raised some important questions about the way ideas are presented in capitalism, in particular those ideas deployed in the critique of capitalism, and how such critical ideas can be overwhelmed by the lack of considered reflection, as well as the often implicit and explicit attention given to the ownership of ideas (rather than their critical use). Nonetheless, I hailed Russell’s criticisms in a sectarian spirit which ultimately undermined the critical worth of my comments. Moreover, I now believe that Russell’s key criticism of the purported deficiency of Knabb’s revised translation is wrong. This is not to say there is no critical worth in Russell’s review; rather it is to draw attention to my maladroit interpretation and use of it.

In the review, Russell drew attention to Knabb’s addition of many explanatory footnotes. For Russell, this addition was unquestionably problematic:

Since everything is listed in the back, one no longer stumbles upon an idea that, for instance, looks vaguely familiar and compels the reader to reflectively grapple with its meaning.

Nonetheless, Russell appeared to be caught between acknowledging the usefulness of Knabb’s explanatory notes, and decrying what he perceived as their implicit prohibition of discovering the multiple sources of Debord’s détournements:

As a tutorial to the theoretical work of the Situationist International and Debord, Knabb’s edition irrefutably excels. However, as a work that takes seriously the notion that there is peril in revealing too much all at once — and that perhaps revolutionary critique should be an impartial burden rather than easily adaptable to prevailing modes of discourse — Knabb’s edition is remiss to have forgotten that sometimes less is more.

Russell’s point that “[o]urs is, without fail, an epoch without the strength to pause in the presence of an idea” is well made. However, it is questionable whether one can hold Knabb’s translation to account for this. During the time of the SI—1957-1972—Situationists were resistant to the overly exegetical apparatus of academic citation, preferring to use and re-use ideas rather than inter them and endlessly interrogate them for little or no purpose. However, the SI’s time has passed, and the references and context of the SI are often lost to those of us who did not participate in the movement of 1968 and its immediate aftermath. Indeed, today, in order to make sense of the SI, one needs to excavate the historical context of the SI itself, not to mention the many and varied references and détournements that draw upon a vast array of literary, philosophic and political antecedents. With Knabb’s new translation, remarkably free of annoying in-text footnotes, a reader can easily choose to read Debord’s work as it was originally presented, largely free of citations — or not, as the case may be. The overly abstract conception of such a reader, implicit in Russell’s review, seems to preclude the possibility of multiple readings, i.e. readings that variously pay attention to the notes, or ignore them depending on the perceived needs or desires of particular readers and their context. No doubt The Society of the Spectacle can be read in a non-reflective fashion. However, Russell over-burdens Knabb’s scholarly footnotes with a role that is almost certainly beyond either their intent or purpose.

Russell is on firmer ground when he identified some striking lacunae in Knabb’s footnotes, such as the absence of clearer references to the notion of “alienation” used by Debord, his debt to Lukács’s notion of the “contemplative attitude,” and the central importance of Marx’s early and mature work in Debord’s conceptualisation of the past dominating the present in societies of commodity production. Similarly, I raised in my original post the question of providing a more complete picture of Debord’s 1967 text, by including translations of Debord’s later reflections on this work in his later Preface to the Fourth Italian Edition (1979), and his book length Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988). Certainly, it is here that we can criticise Knabb’s presentation. Additionally, we can take issue with his translation, and contest the efficacy of his choices in the name of clarity and fidelity to the original. But to question the need for a comprehensive scholarly supplement to The Society of the Spectacle, particularly in the midst of so much sloppy and mendacious “scholarship” on Debord and the group, surely only contributes to the confusion that reigns around commentary on the SI and its bequest to the present.