General Editor's Introduction

The first pages of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle ([1967] 1994) argue that all that was once-lived reality has become representation. Productions and conditions of life—previously embodied—accumulate into a set of images that form only partial realities. The spectacle, then, is society's unreality, omnipresent, and covertly divisive. Thus social relations between people are mediated through images of the spectacle, making space for distorted worldviews (Weltanschauung) to actualize. He says, “In a world that really has been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood” (14). Truth as falsehood seems to be an apt description of the breach of the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021. The events provide a spectacular representation of the ongoing racial trauma of capitalism, and law enforcement's hands-off approach confirmed the long-understood pact between white supremacy and policing. This issue of TSQ was produced in the fog of this...