the society of the spectacle by guy debord

Rather, we reinforce this state of affairs when we lend our attention to the spectacle. We are not just innocent dupes or victims in this cataclysmic shift from being to appearing, he insisted. As one of his biographers, Andy Merrifield, elaborated, “Spectacular images make us want to forget - indeed, insist we should forget.”īut in Debord’s view, forgetting doesn’t absolve us of responsibility. Images have become so ubiquitous, Debord warned, that we no longer remember what it is we have lost. The authentic nature of the products we make with our hands and the relationships we make with our words have been removed, replaced by their simulacra. Like body snatchers, commodities and images have hijacked what we once naïvely called reality. The “image,” for Debord, carried the same economic and existential weight as the notion of “commodity” did for Marx. And the pixels had become the stuff of our very lives, in which we had relegated ourselves to the role of walk-ons. Instead, Debord argued, everything that men and women once experienced directly - our ties to the natural and social worlds - was being mulched, masticated and made over into images. The spectacle was much more than what occupied the screen. In the 220 theses that follow, Debord, a founding member of the avant-garde Situationist group, develops his indictment of “spectacular society.” With this phrase, Debord did not simply mean to damn the mass media. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.”

And perhaps more than any other 20th-century philosophical work, it captures the profoundly odd moment we are now living through, under the presidential reign of Donald Trump.Īs with the first lines from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “The Social Contract” (“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”) and Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” (“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”), Debord, an intellectual descendant of both of these thinkers, opens with political praxis couched in high drama: “The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. With its descriptions of human social life subsumed by technology and images, it is often cited as a prophecy of the dangers of the internet age now upon us. “The Society of the Spectacle” is still relevant today. It was a thin book in a plain white cover, with an obscure publisher and an author who shunned interviews, but its impact was immediate and far-reaching, delivering a social critique that helped shape France’s student protests and disruptions of 1968. Nearly 50 years ago, Guy Debord’s “The Society of the Spectacle” reached bookshelves in France.

The society of the spectacle by guy debord