There was a special issue of Ootober in 1997 entitled Rereading Debord, Rereading Situationists is a careful analysis of the Situationist legacy, a project of archival retrieval, reconstruction, and historicization. In the Anglo-American world the reception of Debord and the Situationists is in terms of the modernist avant garde's agitation and contestation--a radical opposition to the spectacle-culture of industrial capitalism.

It is the final manifestation of the historical avant-garde engaged in a struggle over the possible meanings of culture, as over the legacy of the historical avant-garde, with a broad spectrum of postwar cultural producers