the most pertinent revolutionary experiments in culture have sought to break the spectator’s psychological identification with the hero
... One of the contradictions of the bourgeoisie in its phase of liquidation is that while it respects the abstract principle of intellectual artistic creation, it at first resists actual creations, then eventually exploits them. This because it must maintain a sense of criticality and experiment research among a minority, but must channel this activity toward strictly compartmentalized utilitarian disciplines and avert any concerted overall critique and research. In the domain of culture the bourgeoisie strives to divert the taste for innovation, which is dangerous for it in our era, toward certain degraded, innocuous and confused forms of novelty. Through the commercial mechanisms that control cultural activity, avant-garde tendencies are cut off from the segments of society that could support them, segments already limited because of the general social conditions…
—Guy Debord, Writings from the Situationist International, 1957
