The Society of the Spectacle

Two hundred and twenty-one paragraphs in nine chapters on unnumbered pages, with occasional black-and-white photographs only hieroglyphically related to the text, an anonymous translation from the original French boasting a lack of copyright, my copy of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle snuggled down into my library and moved with me through seven residences before I finally read it. When I did, it had me from the opening epigram: Ludwig Feuerbach's observation that in modernity "the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness."

This book is penetrating, provocative, prescient, and probably peerless. Although it seems to share many of the same concerns, it gave me a reading experience diametrically opposed show more to the one that I had recently with Heidegger (The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays). Every sentence in Heidegger seemed to be an invitation to dream, accumulating a load of lofty but cloudy impressions with only a remote analogy to the world of daily life. By contrast, each sentence in Debord demanded that I wake up, and appreciate the urgency of my routine inability to see the real conditions of living in which I am immersed.

One might read a passage on modern alienation like paragraphs 24 and 25 and think that Debord was describing a capitalist phase that the Internet is helping us to transcend--that our 21st-century technologies supply the means of real communication among the proletariat. But in truth, his direst observations are now more true than ever. Digital "social media" atomize society into quantifiable, surveilled packets. The 'net habitué who strives to develop his "personal brand" is the epitome of Debord's paragraph 33: "Separated from his product, man himself produces all of the details of his world with increasing power, and thus finds himself ever more separated from his world. The more his life is now his product, the more he is separated from his life." Caught in the Web, a netizen experiences diminishing dialogue, as it is supplanted by podcast (messages strewn from the virtual pods in which we are encased) and other forms of self-monitoring reportage. Real communication is increasingly impoverished by the economizing of bandwidth: telephoning rather than visiting, texting rather than telephoning, we are more and more removed from the humanity, let alone the full expressions, of our interlocutors.

The title of Chapter 4 "The Proletariat as Subject and Representation" contains a clear nod to Schopenhauer, but the substance of that chapter is a comprehensive and devastating critique of socialism, anarchism, and communism from the left. It supplies a clear-headed historical perspective that must have been up-to-the-minute in 1967, and has lost little of its accuracy as a result of later events and revelations. (Debord can be faulted retrospectively for overvaluing the potential of the "revolutionary workers' Councils" of his own day.)

My reading allows me to infer an intimate relationship of this book to subsequent French philosophy. It appears to supply the foundations of Baudrillard's later work. It explains (or perhaps even determined) Foucault's motives in casting himself as "post-Structuralist" (see paragraphs 201 and 202). While Derrida got the term "deconstruction" from Nietzsche, his actual agenda seems to have been fully forecast by the single-sentence paragraph 205 of this book by Debord, which calls for the "necessary destruction" of "existing concrete concepts" in a dialectical process.

So, perhaps it was important for me to wait so long before reading Society of the Spectacle, a book I've owned for years, so that I could really appreciate its import and consequence. In any case, it's good that the wait is over. show less

Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative as Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960s to the present, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life in the late twentieth century. Now finally available in a superb English translation approved by the author, Debord’s text remains as crucial as ever for understanding the contemporary effects of power, which are increasingly inseparable from the new virtual worlds of our rapidly changing image / information culture.

“In all that has happened in the last twenty years, the most important change lies in the very show more continuity of the spectacle. Quite simply, the spectacle’s domination has succeeded in raising a whole generation moulded to its laws. The extraordinary new conditions in which this entire generation has lived constitute a comprehensive summary of all that, henceforth, the spectacle will forbid; and also all that it will permit.”― Guy Debord (1988) show less

A mindblowing and poetic critique of modern alienation and mediation interwoven with history lessons (capped with a history of history), attacks on various Marxist and anarchist factions, and sections of such obtuseness I'm still not sure if the fault was mine or the book's. Still, more genius per page than the leading brand and it looks good in a cafe.

Guy Debord wrote/published this book in 1967. The book is tough to read, and some passages may seem opaque. You may need familiarity with Marxian philosophy to appreciate one chapter.

However, his analysis of society and history is frightening and relevant. The analysis becomes more relevant by the day.

Definitely, buy the book and read it.

"What brings people into relation with each other by liberating them from their local and national limitations is also what keeps them apart. What requires increased rationality is also what nourishes the irrationality of hierarchical exploitation and repression. What produces society's abstract power also produces its concrete lack of freedom"

I believe we are moving increasingly faster into a superficial present. War and peace are the only guardrails.

Most are well-aware of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman and the Propaganda Model presented in Manufacturing Consent, of how the media is pure propaganda. But the idea of 'spectacle' being something part of our daily lives, not just in the media, of our consumer society as one of consuming spectacles virtually everywhere, is under-studied, under-talked about and more relevant than ever. Guy Debord relates it all to technology, without bowing to a weak primitivist stance. He helps us realize that technology controls virtually everything now. He was prescient. Think mobile phones, internet, Blackberries, Facebook, Twitter, clictivism, Google, if you still that it's far-fetched.

The intellectual technologies and practices Google has pioneered show more promote the speedy, superficial skimming of information and discourage any deep, prolonged engagement with a single argument, idea, or narrative. ‘Our Goal,’ says Irene Au, ‘it to get users in and out really quickly. All our design decisions are based on that strategy.’ Google’s profits are tied directly to the velocity of people’s information intake. The faster we surf across the surface of the Web - the more links we click and pages we view - the more opportunities Google gains to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. It’s advertising system, moreover, is explicitly designed to figure out which messages are most likely to grab our attention and then to place those messages in our field of view. Every click we make on the Web marks a break in our concentration, a bottom-up disruption of our attention - and it’s in Google’s economic interest to make sure we click as often as possible.”

In layman's terms, A.D.D. is rampant. We need to be concerned, we need to reclaim the cyber commons and we need to read, slowly, and surely. This book is important in its understanding of how technology/spectacle when controlled by capital alienates, marginalizes, dissipates commonality, community. Google or capitalism does not intend to empower the individual with technology, they intened to make money. A consumer-oriented, historically amnesiac, attention deficit, and mobility addicted society of a never-ending cycle of spectacle is what they need.

This kind of book is what I think we need.

Pure genius. show less

Disclaimer:
This book/essay is not written in a straightforward manner, and it's not always clear what the author is trying to say (if anything at all). Some of it feels just like arbitrary subject-object inversion ("are you watching TV... or is it watching you? Is X doing Y... or is Y doing X? "). This means I can't honestly tell if the ideas I got out of this work were actually put in by the author, or whether it was some sort of verbal Rorschach where you see what you want.

Overall though, I was deeply fascinated by what I think this was about, and I think it has lots of deep insight and 'food-for-thought' about our entertainment-based society.