Signs and meaning in the digital age?
The ultimate aftermath of 1968 – the final disintegration of the ‘Public Sphere’, perhaps. The triumph of the ‘Society of the Spectacle’. The Situationists vindicated! Well, vindicated negatively. 1968 was an emblematic moment which spectacularised the idea of change itself, but, as always, history plays strange tricks and the change which came wasn’t the one that had been expected. It was the end of Fordism, the end of Keynesianism, the end of classic social democracy, the beginning of a new world order, constructed around a string of world cities linked by a lattice of electronic communications which facilitated a sweeping reconfiguration of world capital.
Was Marx vindicated? And all his discredited theories about the organic composition of capital and the immiseration of the proletariat proved correct?
It looks that way, doesn’t it?