Radical media, politics and culture.

Will Self Reviews Two New Books on Situationism

Autonomedia writes: "The Game of War: the life and death of Guy Debord
Andrew Hussey Jonathan Cape, 420pp, £18.99


The Map is Not the Territory
Alan Woods and Ralph Rumney Manchester University Press, 204pp, £25



When did the avant-garde die? It sounds like a title for the sort of frothy filler you might find, nowadays, fringing the review pages of any mainstream newspaper - and that, in itself, confirms the avant-garde's demise. But if you were looking for a plausible date, place and motive for the auto-destruction of that current which laid claim to being - by virtue of exclusivity, originality and audacity - the radical harbinger of cultural and political change in European society, it would have to be on 30 November 1994 in a large, gloomy farmhouse in the large, gloomy, remote French department of the Auvergne, where, as day faded into night, Guy Debord, once the leader of the Situationist International, put a gun to his breast and stopped his heart for ever.



Read the review here"