Spectators do not find what they desire; they desire what they find.

'How are we to understand the obvious (but scandalous) fact that in Debord's case politics was largely writing -- that it turned on the building of an inimitable polemical and expository style, assembled over decades, born from a series of engagements with, on, and against the French language? Second, what does it mean that this, the only political writing of our time -- the only such writing to have a chance of surviving its circumstances, I believe, the writing that will be seen by future ages to have kept the possibility of politics alive -- issued from a situation so thoroughly at odds with the century, or with most of the terms in which the century chose to present itself? Why was distance and embattlement, of which Debord was the ultimate exponent, so often the source of insight and sanity in his case, not "paradise for a sect"? What does it tell us about the age that its true voice -- its adequate description -- came so exultantly from the margins?'

T J Clark on Debord