Society of the Spectacle

[This post is a contribution to the Politics & Movies Blog-a-thon, running from November 4-9 at The
Cooler.]
The arguments of the Situationist Guy Debord, as radical as they were at the time he first made them,
might today seem somewhat familiar and even blas, on their surface at least: culture is a distraction from
material reality; it is in the interests of societal elites to keep the masses docile; workers are alienated
from the results of their labor in industrial society. To some extent, these ideas have been thoroughly
absorbed into radical and leftist thought in the 40 years since Debord first published his seminal 1967
tract Society of the Spectacle. And yet, there is a sense that the full implications of Debord's radical
understanding of the conditions of reality has hardly been understood or acted upon. His dense,
dialectical book, and the film of the same name that he made in 1973, posit an approach to cultural reality
that can best be thought of as political science fiction. In examining the "spectacular" foundations of
modern life, Debord acknowledges and discusses the usual meanings of "spectacle" entertainment,

advertising, consumer fetishism, the commodification of sexuality but goes even further by suggesting
that the visible world itself has become the spectacle that blinds us to the true state of things. Debord's
spectacle is a politicized proto-Matrix vision in which invisible forces conspire to create an artificial reality
that is utterly committed only to its own continuation. The society of the spectacle is the world itself and
everything in it, a mass delusion in which virtually everyone is imprisoned, an endless cycle of repetitious
labor and the empty ritual "pleasure" of vacations or weekends.
The book The Society of the Spectacle was first published in 1967 and a year later became a key text of
the May 1968 student uprisings in France. It is a complex, dazzling polemic, with a distinctively French
dialectical wit and a proclivity for punning language, reversals of meaning, and contradictory ideas. For
Debord, contradiction is a holy grail: the spectacle that we all live is built upon a foundation of
irreconcilable opposites, and to see these contradictions is to understand the absurdity of modern society.
The film version, made six years later, is Debord's attempt to illustrate his text, further develop his ideas,
and provide concrete visual examples of the kinds of things he wrote about. The film is also something of
a valedictory for the events of May 1968, a celebration of the "formless" revolt that Debord sees as the
first step in truly overthrowing the oppressive conditions of modern culture.

The film's presentation of Debord's ideas about the spectacle follows closely from the form of the original
book, which consists of 221 numbered paragraphs that each present a fully formed idea. The book's
structure is additive, the individual theses somewhat isolated from one another, and yet also building
upon the precepts and concepts laid down in the book as a whole. The film compounds this fragmentary
structure by excerpting liberally from the text, recontextualizing Debord's words as elements in the film's
ever-present voiceover. This narration rarely goes silent, its rapid pace and profusion of contradictory
ideas approximating the dense texture of Debord's prose, which insists on unerringly precise definitions.
"The spectacle is not a collection of images," he says towards the beginning of both book and film,
"rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images." These "is"/"is not" dialectics
appear frequently; Debord defines his ideas by first limning their boundaries, declaring what they are not
before tracing what they are. His precision can be exhausting, and it is hardly possible to exactly follow
his argument at all times upon seeing the film for the first time, even with prior knowledge of the source
text one can only imagine the foundering of someone seeing the film without any sense of its context
and origins. Debord's words work better in print than in film, available to extended study instead of flying
by at a steady pace. To some extent he sacrifices the clarity of his writing by translating it to a different
medium.

However, the film of Society of the Spectacle is hardly just a transposition of the book, and Debord's
unique conception of the cinema creates a wholly new artwork from his source material. One would
expect a writer with such a thoroughly developed ideology of images to think long and hard before
creating his own images, lest he accidentally contribute to the spectacle he sought to undermine. Indeed,
the structure of this film reflects a careful consideration of the way that text and images flow into one
another, creating a commentary on images, representation, and the spectacle of culture. In this respect, it
is instructive to compare Debord with another French veteran of May 1968 whose films reflect upon the
relationships between images and reality: Jean-Luc Godard, of course. Godard and Debord were loose
contemporaries, but they had little direct interaction, and to some extent they were opposed: Debord's
Situationist International, always concerned with defining in-groups and out-groups, declared Godard to
be an insufficiently radicalized reactionary. The reason for this denunciation might very well lie in the
different approaches the two men took to treating images in their work.
Debord's concept of dtournement a word the Situationists coined to describe the recycling of artistic
elements in a new context to express a different meaning than the original artist is subtly different from
Godard's approach to pastiche and genre homage. Whereas Godard incorporated references to literature
and Hollywood film with a satirical or polemical edge, making them his own, Debord's cut-and-paste
quotations are generally left whole, appropriated without authorial comment. Debord frequently inserts
intertitles or on-screen text (a very Godardian touch) that either print material from his book or cite other
works, sometimes with attribution (Marx, Toqueville) and sometimes without (a passage of
Shakespeare's Richard III). At several points in the film, he excerpts at length from films by Orson Welles,
Nicholas Ray, John Ford, Sergei Eisenstein, and others, simply allowing these ragged chunks of other
films to exist, if somewhat uncomfortably, within his own. There is rarely any satirical perspective in these
insertions, or even any direct correspondence with the narration. The point is simply to co-opt the
spectacle, to put its images in a context where the spectacle is continuously undermined, where the
contrast between the spectacular and the non-spectacular can become clear. To a similar end, Debord
appropriates fashion photography and bits of soft-porn sexual images, spectacular images whose
function in society is obliquely described by the voiceover. When Godard would include sexual images in
the work of his radical period as he did most radically in the abrasive Numro Deux his presentation
of sexuality often aggressively deconstructed and defused the expected reactions. This is not the case
with Debord, who allows unaltered images of commercialized sexuality to exist within the fabric of his film,
trusting in the contradiction between image and text to awaken thought instead of visceral reaction. It's
not always a successful tactic, since the directness of sexual images makes them particularly resistant to
such attempts at recontextualization, but it is also a logical outgrowth of Debord's fundamental principles.
To do more than simply show images and speak about them would be to risk becoming spectacle.

Indeed, this danger is explicitly acknowledged by Debord, in a prescient segment on the commodification
of dissatisfaction. To illustrate this section, Debord chooses images of teen rock n' roll bands, their
sexualized contortions and pseudo-violent spasms standing in for a more meaningful rebellion against the
spectacle. Debord's basic point is that the spectacle is, at this point in history, the totality of life, and
that anything can be co-opted or absorbed by this overwhelming force. In rock n' roll, youthful
dissatisfaction with the conditions of life is packaged, given a concrete form and thus made salable.
Revolution is channeled into loud music and sex idols, and the youth gather to witness a rock concert
rather than to form a revolution. This is why Debord sees salvation in the formless, the literally
unspeakable or inexpressible, that which cannot be commodified and sold to the masses. A counterpoint
to youth rebellion as a commodity is proletarian revolution itself as a commodity, a reality that exists in the
Soviet Union under Stalin. In one of the film's most devastating and dense scenes, Debord's voiceover
describes the creation of the bourgeoisie spectacle in a nominally anti-bourgeoisie context, as footage of
Stalin giving a speech plays out silently. For Debord, Stalinist oppression is quite possibly the epitome of
the spectacular society, an absurd illusion in which Soviet officials must simultaneously inhabit
contradictory identities: as proletarian revolutionaries and as totalitarian bureaucrats. This creates a
paradoxical government whose representatives can never totally inhabit either of these opposite poles,

instead vacillating between public statement of proletarian ideals and private membership in a
governmental structure whose elite nature contradicts the aims of the proletariat.
This is a potent example of the illusions and disjunctions that exist at the heart of contemporary reality,
and Debord's intellectual clarity and rigor help to unearth and explore these spectacular manifestations.
One can assume, from the way he uses footage of Mao shaking hands with Nixon and Kissinger as an
illustration of international interconnectedness, that Debord sees all the world's governments as equally
culpable in holding this spectacular veil across the eyes of the masses. For Debord, to engage in more
specific political critique would be to miss the point, since the world's problems are not limited by locale or
government but are foundational, inscribed in the very makeup of our society. His film was radical and
surprising when it was made, in 1973, and it remains today an eye-opening examination of global power,
control, and oppression.

Guy Debord predicted our distracted

society
The Society of the Spectacle offered in 1967 an eerily accurate
portrait of our image-saturated, mediated times
The Big Ideas podcast: Guy Debord's 'society of the spectacle'. Link to this audio

"In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all life presents as an immense
accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a
representation."
With echoes of the most rapier-like prose written by Marx and Engels (eg "The history of all hitherto
existing society is the history of class struggles"), so begins Guy Debord's The Society of the
Spectacle, the treatise on the modern human condition he published in 1967. It quickly came to be
seen as the set text of the Parisian vnements of the following year, and has long since bled into
the culture via no end of people, from the Sex Pistols to the Canadian troublemakers who call
themselves Adbusters.
Its title alone is now used as shorthand for the image-saturated, comprehensively mediated way of
life that defines all supposedly advanced cultures: relative to what Debord meant by it, the term
usually ends up sounding banal, but the frequency with which it's used still speaks volumes about
the power of his insights. Put another way, there are not many copyright-free monographs
associated with arcane leftist sects that predicted where western societies would end up at 40 years'
distance, but this one did exactly that.
The Society of the Spectacle maps out some aspects of the 21st century directly: not least, so-called
celebrity culture and its portrayal of lives whose freedom and dazzle suggest almost the opposite of
life as most of us actually live it. Try this: "As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial
objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive
specialisations that they actually live." The book's take on the driving-out of meaning from politics is
also pretty much beyond question, as are its warnings about "purely spectacular rebellion" and the
fact that at some unspecified point in the recent(ish) past, "dissatisfaction itself became a
commodity" (so throw away that Che Guevara T-shirt, and quick).
But there are also very modern phenomena that fit its view of the world: when Debord writes about
how "behind the masks of total choice, different forms of the same alienation confront each other", I
now think of social media, and the white noise of most online life. All told, the book is full of
sentences that describe something simple, but profound: the way that just about everything that we
consume and, if we're not careful, most of what we do embodies a mixture of distraction and
reinforcement that serves to reproduce the mode of society and economy that has taken the idea of
the spectacle to an almost surreal extreme. Not that Debord ever used the word, but his ideas were
essentially pointing to the basis of what we now know as neoliberalism.

Some brief history. Debord was the de facto leader of the Situationist International, a tiny and everchanging intellectual cell who drew on all kinds of influences, but whose essential worldview
combined two elements: an understanding of alienation traceable to the young Marx, and an
emphasis on what left politics has never much liked: the kind of desire-driven irrationality celebrated
by both the dadaists and surrealists. The ideas in The Society of the Spectacle drew on obvious
antecedents Hegel, Marx, Engels, the Hungarian Marxist George Lukacs and also pointed to
what was soon to come: not least, postmodernism, and the "hyperreality" diagnosed by Jean
Baudrillard.
To sum up the book's substance in a couple of sentences is a nonsense, but here goes: essentially,
Debord argues that having recast the idea of "being into having", what he calls "the present phase of
total occupation of social life by the accumulated results of the economy" has led to "a generalised
sliding from having into appearing, from which all actual 'having' must draw its immediate prestige
and its ultimate function."
Like most of The Society of the Spectacle, you have to read such words slowly, but they hit the spot:
he is talking about alienation, the commodification of almost every aspect of life and the profound
social sea-change whereby any notion of the authentic becomes almost impossible. Whether their
writers knew anything about Debord is probably doubtful, but as unlikely it may sound, one way of
opening your mind to the idea of the spectacle is maybe to re-watch two hugely successful movies
about exactly the blurring of appearance and reality that he described: The Matrix and The Truman
Show.
It's also an idea to read The Revolution of Everyday Life by Debord's one-time accomplice Raoul
Vaneigem, which works as a companion piece to The Society of the Spectacle. Vaneigem writes
more in a more human register than Debord, and is a more straightforward propagandist:
"Inauthenticity is a right of man Take a 35-year-old man. Each morning he takes his car, drives to
the office, pushes papers, has lunch in town, plays pool, pushes more papers, leaves work, has a
couple of drinks, goes home, greets his wife, kisses his children, eats his steak in front of the TV,
goes to bed, makes love, and falls asleep. Who reduces a man's life to this pathetic sequence of
cliches? A journalist? A cop? A market researcher? A socialist-realist author? Not at all. He does it
himself, breaking his day down into a series of poses chosen more or less unconsciously from the
range of dominant stereotypes."
The words point up something very important: that the spectacle is much more than something at
which we passively gaze, and it increasingly defines our perception of life itself, and the way we
relate to others. As the book puts it: "The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation
among people, mediated by images."
How we confront the spectacle is a subject for another piece: in essence, the Situationists'
contention was that its colonisation of life was not quite complete, and resistance has to begin with
finding islands of the authentic, and building on them (though as what some people call late
capitalism has developed, such opportunities have inevitably shrunk, a fact captured in the bleak
tone of Debord's 1989 text Comments on the Society of Spectacle, published five years before he
killed himself). In truth, the spectacular dominion Debord described is too all-encompassing to
suggest any obvious means of overturning it: it's very easy to succumb to the idea that the spectacle

just is, and to suggest any way out of it is absurd (which, in a very reductive sense, was Baudrillard's
basic contention).
What is incontestable, though, is how well the book, and Debord's ideas, describe the way we live
now. The images that stare from magazine racks prove his point. The almost comic contrast
between modern economic circumstances and what miraculously arrives to disguise them the
Queen's Jubilee, the Olympics confirms almost everything the book contains. My battered copy
features a much-reproduced photograph from post-war America: an entranced cinema audience, all
wearing 3D glasses. But when I read it now, I always picture the archetypal modern crowd:
squeezed up against each other, but all looking intently at the blinking screens they hold in their
hands, while their thumbs punch out an imitation of life that surely proves Debord's point ten
thousand times over.

Guy Debord/ Society of the Spectacle - summary: chapter

1:" Seperation Perfected"
Society of the Spectacle -chapter 1 - chapter 2 - chapter 3

Chapter one of Guy Debord's "Society of the Spectacle" deals with the changing relation between
direct experience and mediated representation in modern times, and it opens with the assertion
that"Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation" (thesis 1). Debord has
a very negative and critical stance towards these developments which for him serve for the
individualization and separation of human beings and the reinforcement of exploitative class society
under advanced capitalism.

For Debord the spectacle is not a collection of images, "but a social relation among people,
mediated by images" (4) and he assigns the spectacle with reifying capacities, justifying society as it
is. However, for Debord there is no separation between material "real life" and the false represented
one, the spectacle. They are intertwined to such a degree that "the true is a moment of the false" (9),
by displaying life, the spectacle negates them by reducing them to mere appearance. The
spectacle's capacity for domination is its self-containment and "The basically tautological character
of the spectacle flows from the simple fact that its means are simultaneously its ends."(13). The
spectacle aims at nothing other than itself.

One of the key and most famous notions in Debord's "Society of the Spectacle" is "the obvious
degradation of being into having and from having into appearing" (17). And as articulated is the
second chapter of "Society of the Spectacle", late capitalism has turned appearance into a
commodity, which is the root of all evil in Debord Marxist eyes.

The spectacle has power because It demands obedience, seeing things they way they are
represented, but its one-sidedness rules out any possibility of a dialogue.The spectacle, according to
Debord, has also a neo-religious aspect to it in being "the technical realization of the exile of human
powers into a beyond"(20), meaning that we assign the meaning of our existence to something
which is beyond our immediate life which are enslaved to their representation (just think about your
Facebook profile).

The spectacle is a vehicle for separation and the creation of the "lonely crowd" and it originates from
the loss of unity in the world. It is an exploitative mechanism for in the spectacle, one part of the
world represents itself to the world and is superior to it (29). Debord also has a Foucauldian
panopticon notion of "What binds the spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation at
the very center which maintains their isolation. The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as
separate" (29) With people trying to understand themselves through a representation, they in fact
lose all hope of coherently and unitarily live their own life. "(the more he accepts recognizing himself
in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and his own
desires"(30)) "This is why the spectator feels at home nowhere, because the spectacle is
everywhere" (ibid). with representation ruling over "the society of the spectacle", the unified direct
human relations are replaced with the fragmented adherence to the spectacle which isolates us.

Guy Debord / Society of the Spectacle summary: Chapter two:

"commodity as spectacle"
Society of the Spectacle -chapter 1 - chapter 2 - chapter 3

According to Guy Debord in "Society of the Spectacle", the notion of commodity, in its Marxist sense, has
transcended in advanced capitalism to the form of the spectacle. "The world of the commodity is thus
shown for what it is, because its movement is identical to the estrangement of men among themselves
and in relation to their global product" (37). Commodity is essentially tied with the quantitative, which
negates any unique intrinsic value and equals everything in our life through the medium of currency.

Debord describes an historical Marxist development of commodity by which societies free themselves
from the task of surviving only to be enslaved to what granted them this freedom ("Economic growth frees
societies from the natural pressure which required their direct struggle for survival, but at that point it is
from their liberator that they are not liberated" (40)).

"The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life" (42)
commodities for Debord are superimposed like geological layers, with the spectacle on top. If the first
industrial revolution subjected humans to physical commodities and alientated them from the product of
their own labor, the subsequent development of capitalism as alienated them from a more advanced
product of again their own labor, the representation of their lives. At first capitalism cared only about the
worker's work and not his leisure time, but with abundance obtained, it now seeks his cooperation not as
a mere producer, but as a consumer as well, and here is where the spectacle comes into play. The
economy can never once and for all defeat privation, it can only move further away from it by
paradoxically nurturing it. The new privation is no longer (materially) related to survival, but to something
more elevated, something of a "false privation" (like "false consciousness), and in Debord's phrasing:
" The real consumer becomes a consumer of illusions. The commodity is this factually real illusion, and
the spectacle is its general manifestation" (47).

" The spectacle is the other side of money: it is the general abstract equivalent of all commodities" (49).
The spectacle is for Debord "a pseudo-use of life" in being, like money, the abstract representation of
value which created equivalence between things that are not comparable. " At the moment of economic
abundance, the concentrated result of social labor becomes visible and subjugates all reality to

appearance, which is now its product" (50). When providing for a society is being replaced by the need to
provide for the economy's growth " the satisfaction of primary human needs is replaced by an
uninterrupted fabrication of pseudo-needs" (51). In other words, the society of the spectacle is for Debord
a society which no longer needs a developing economy for its survival, but rather one which has to
provide for the survival of the ever developing economy

Guy Debord / Society of the Spectacle summary: "Unity and

Division within Appearance"
vSociety of the Spectacle -chapter 1 - chapter 2 - chapter 3

In chapter three of "Society of the Spectacle" Guy Debord suggests the dialectical, seemingly
paradoxical, nature of the spectacle. He asserts that " The spectacle, like modern society, is at once
unified and divided" (54). This is a bit tricky to grasp but the idea here is that contradictions in society,
which are present in the spectacle, are themselves being contradicted by it, a reversal of meaning, so that
out of division comes unity.

Here the society of the spectacle functions in a manner similar to Gramsci's notion of hegemony. It can
contain contradiction, for example, by offering "false models of revolution to revolutionaries" (57). By
assigning each with his place in the spectacle "The division of spectacular tasks preserves the entirety of
the existing order and especially the dominant pole of its development" (58). The spectacle also has a
capacity of banalizing things with everything being diverse but actually the same, producing what Debord
calls "pseudo-enjoyment". Even rebellion is conducted within the terrain of the spectacle and thus is in
fact a part of it, a part of what it allows and another example of how contradiction merges into unity within
the spectacle. This, for Debord, "reflects the simple fact that dissatisfaction itself became a commodity as
soon as economic abundance could extend production to the processing of such raw materials" (59). The
spectacle also serves imperialism by invading the social surface of underdeveloped countries even before
economic dominance is gained.

Debord looks to the cultural phenomenon of "the celebrity", which he understands as " the spectacular
representation of a living human being" (60). The celebrity is a form of production, a shallow spectacle of
a role and life style. As agents of the spectacle they appear on stage as the opposite of the individual, the
opposition ("enemy") of the individual in themselves as well as in others. " Passing into the spectacle as a
model for identification, the agent renounces all autonomous qualities in order to identify himself with the
general law of obedience to the course of things" (61). The diversity of celebrity characters is in truth a
unity of their adherence to presuppositions of their culture about a successful way of living. This is of
course the opposite of the notion of the celebrity is one which fulfils himself to the highest degree. " The
admirable people in whom the system personifies itself are well known for not being what they are; they
became great men by stooping below the reality of the smallest individual life, and everyone knows it"
(ibid).

When treating the value and function of commodities in the society of the spectacle Debord hold true to
the notion about the deterioration from being into having (commodities) and form having into merely
appearing, thus "The satisfaction which no longer comes from the use of abundant commodities is now
sought in the recognition of their value as commodities: the use of commodities becomes sufficient unto
itself" (67). Commodities no longer have any intrinsic value, not use value in any material functional
sense, but rather only "spectacular" value, which might me found in what is now widely know and
criticized as a "brand". Bebord further claims that "The pseudo-need imposed by modern consumption
clearly cannot be opposed by any genuine need or desire which is not itself shaped by society and its
history" (68) and the result is for him the "falsification of social life" (ibid).

Debord describes this process of falsification in the society of the spectacle by showing how a new
product (think of the iPhone or iPad) hold promise of being the ultimate thing for you, but by the time you
realize it is not, there is something new to hand on to. This "fraud of satisfaction"(70) is easily
recognizable with the change in products ("That which asserted its definitive excellence with perfect
impudence nevertheless changes") and therefore "Every new lie of advertising is also an avowal of the
previous lie" (70). The rapid replacement of consumer products reveals to illusionary nature of the society
of the spectacle. The paradox of the spectacle for Guy Debord is the contradiction between natural
condition of constant change and its inclination of appearing as essential