Malcolm McLaren, the spectacle, and why ideas must escape the academy
In June, I found myself standing outside Malcolm McLaren’s old house in Stoke Newington.
McLaren had been dead for sixteen years, but the mischief seemed very much alive. Looking at the house, I found myself thinking that he may have been the most successful Situationist who ever lived.
This is partly because almost everyone has heard of Malcolm McLaren and almost nobody has heard of the Situationists.
The academics will object immediately. McLaren was not a member of the Situationist International. He borrowed from Situationism, simplified it, commercialised it and probably misunderstood parts of it. He turned revolutionary theory into clothes, slogans, records and publicity stunts.
Exactly.
That is why he was so successful.
The Situationist International was a small revolutionary movement formed in Europe in the late 1950s. Its most famous member was the French theorist Guy Debord, whose best-known work, The Society of the Spectacle, argued that modern life was increasingly being replaced by representations of life.
The spectacle was not simply television or advertising. It was a social order in which our desires, relationships and understanding of the world were mediated by images and commodities. We no longer merely lived. We watched ourselves living. We acquired objects, identities and experiences that had already been packaged and explained to us.
This was a powerful idea.
Unfortunately, it was explained in language almost perfectly designed to prevent ordinary people from discovering it.
This is a recurring problem with intellectual movements that claim to be interested in human liberation. They begin with a desire to awaken people and end by developing a vocabulary that keeps those people outside. The theory becomes more intricate, the sentences become longer and the audience becomes smaller. Eventually, the only people capable of discussing the liberation of ordinary people are academics with the necessary specialist training.
If you want to liberate people from something, it is probably a good idea to make sure they have some idea what you want to liberate them from.
Malcolm McLaren understood communication.
Or perhaps, more accurately, he understood attention.
He recognised that ideas do not travel through society simply because they are correct. They travel because someone gives them a form people can see, hear, wear, repeat, desire or become angry about.
Working with Vivienne Westwood, McLaren helped turn a shop on the King’s Road into a changing sequence of cultural provocations. The shop changed its name, its clothes and its identity: Let It Rock, Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die, SEX, Seditionaries and eventually World’s End. It did not explain a theory of alienation. It made alienation fashionable.
The clothes were not illustrations accompanying the ideas. They were the ideas made visible.
The same thing happened with the Sex Pistols.
The Pistols did not hold seminars about the spectacle. They swore on television. They antagonised the record industry. They attacked the symbols of British respectability. Jamie Reid gave the revolt its graphic language: ransom-note lettering, détourned photographs, the Queen with her eyes and mouth obliterated. McLaren provided the stories, manipulations and provocations that ensured people could not look away.
A French theoretical critique became an English cultural event.
Millions of people who had never heard of Guy Debord encountered something descended from his ideas. They encountered it as music, fashion, scandal, typography, attitude and theatre. They may not have understood Situationism, but they understood that the world being presented to them was constructed—and that it could therefore be vandalised.
This seems to me a considerable achievement.
Naturally, it was full of contradictions. McLaren attacked consumer culture by selling things. He opposed the spectacle by creating spectacles. He challenged manufactured identity while manufacturing the Sex Pistols. He presented rebellion as something that could be purchased in a shop on the King’s Road.
But these contradictions do not disqualify him from Situationism. They are what make him such a perfect expression of it.
McLaren did not stand outside the spectacle and explain it. There may no longer have been an outside. Instead, he entered it, manipulated it and demonstrated how it worked. He showed that authenticity itself could be manufactured, packaged and sold—and that the exposure of this process could become another product.
Even the rebellion against the spectacle became spectacle.
The Situationists might reasonably say that this proved their point. McLaren might reasonably say that nobody would have noticed their point without him.
The dispute depends upon what we mean by success.
If the purpose of an idea is to sustain a body of scholarship, success can be measured in citations, conferences and the continued production of theoretical sophistication. But if the purpose of an idea is to change how people see the world, then its ability to escape its original custodians must count for something.
An idea that remains perfectly preserved inside the academy may be intellectually successful. Culturally, it is a museum piece.
McLaren let the idea escape.
He did not release it intact, of course. No idea survives contact with the wider culture intact. It is simplified, distorted, misunderstood, commercialised and combined with other things. People use it for purposes its creators never intended. They turn it into music, fashion, jokes and slogans. They take the useful pieces and leave the footnotes behind.
The academy often regards this as corruption.
It may simply be communication.
There is something revealing about the academic suspicion of people who make difficult ideas accessible. Simplification is treated as a form of intellectual dishonesty, as if obscurity were evidence of depth. But a theory of ordinary life that ordinary people cannot understand has failed one fairly important test.
People don’t buy homework.
McLaren understood that people rarely adopt ideas because they have followed the argument carefully from first principles. They adopt them because the ideas attach themselves to an emotion, an image, a story or a moment in their lives. The meaning arrives afterwards, if it arrives at all.
This does not make people stupid. It makes them human.
Most of the ideas that shape societies are not carried by the people who explain them most precisely. They are carried by the people who give them memorable form. Religious movements understand this. Political movements understand it. Advertisers certainly understand it. Academics frequently pretend not to.
McLaren understood it instinctively.
He also understood that the person who creates the disturbance may matter more than the person who owns the theory. The Situationists supplied some of the intellectual explosives. McLaren carried them into popular culture, added music, clothes, sex, profanity and the monarchy, and lit the fuse.
Was the resulting explosion exactly what Guy Debord intended?
Almost certainly not.
Successful ideas rarely remain under the control of the people who invented them.
There is a temptation, particularly among intellectuals, to believe that influence should follow a clean chain of custody. The original thinker develops the idea. Responsible interpreters explain it faithfully. An informed public eventually understands and applies it.
Culture does not work like that.
Culture is a disorderly system of theft, imitation, mistranslation and reinvention. Ideas travel sideways. They acquire disguises. They enter through shops, records, films, advertisements and jokes. Often the people most deeply influenced by an idea have no idea where it came from.
This is not necessarily a defect. It may be the only way an idea becomes part of the world.
McLaren’s genius was not theoretical sophistication. It was cultural transmission. He recognised that an idea could be smuggled into society inside a record, a T-shirt or an outrage. By the time the authorities realised what was happening, the children were already wearing it.
The irony, of course, is glorious.
The Situationists produced a critique of a society dominated by images and commodities. Their most effective popular exponent became famous by producing images and commodities. They wanted to disrupt the spectacle. McLaren became exceptionally good at creating it.
He won by losing on every theoretical point.
Or perhaps he demonstrated that the line between subverting the spectacle and succeeding within it had already disappeared.
That question has become even more important since McLaren’s time. Today, every political movement, personal identity and act of resistance must compete inside systems built to convert attention into value. Opposition supplies content. Outrage produces engagement. Criticism increases circulation. The spectacle does not merely tolerate attacks upon itself; it distributes and monetises them.
McLaren would have understood the business model immediately.
He would also have understood that refusing to participate offers no guarantee of purity. An idea that never enters the machinery may avoid corruption, but it also avoids influence. It remains immaculate and irrelevant.
This is the problem faced by anyone who wants to communicate an idea beyond a small circle of people who already agree with it. You can preserve control, or you can release the idea into culture. You cannot reliably do both.
Once released, it will be misunderstood. It may be trivialised. Someone will put it on a T-shirt. Someone else will sell the T-shirt. Eventually, an academic will write a paper explaining why everyone involved got the theory wrong.
But people will have heard of it.
That is why, standing outside McLaren’s house in Stoke Newington, I thought of him as the most successful Situationist.
Not the most faithful. Not the most sophisticated. Not even necessarily the one who understood Situationism best.
The most successful.
He took ideas that might have remained inside obscure books and intellectual arguments and released them into popular culture. He allowed them to become contaminated by commerce, celebrity, music, fashion and contradiction. In doing so, he reached millions of people whom the theorists of liberation had somehow neglected to speak to.
The academics are entitled to say Malcolm McLaren was not a real Situationist.
Almost everyone else is entitled to ask who the Situationists were.