Tokens of exchange through the Lens of the Situationist International: The Spectacle, the Gift and the Individual

Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle” (1967) contains entire sentences copied from Marx’s Capital, often modified by replacing the word “capital” with “spectacle”. Accordingly, the two words were always used, by the situationists, as if they were equivalent to each other. In this respect, the following paper argues that, for the situationists, commodities and entertainment not only share the same elements of a common language but are the same language, which consequently produces individuals and their worldview. And while the situationists owe their main ideas to Hegel and Marx, there are also visible traces in their theories of concepts borrowed from the fields of anthropology and semiotics. This is especially noticeable from the situationists’ adoption of the notion of “potlatch” formulated by Marcel Mauss (1925). As it will be analyzed in this paper, contrary to Mauss’s view who saw the gift as a symbol of power relations, for the situationists the gift is the negation of commodity: it is not a ritual of exchange, but an act based on the unconditional receiving and giving of oneself, in the society of abundance.