Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967); extract + free full text (PDF)
For me its Debord’s praxis which remains important today, a praxis which included interventionalist, radical thinking, and gave meaning to the ideas he produced. I would say of the same of the Frankfurt School, Castoriadis, Cixous or anyone else. Their ideas were directed at particular historical opportunities, i.e. they were part of a social-historical doing, but the psychosocial terrain is as radically changing as our social experience, because it is the very same stuff. It has completely transformed for us even in the last 30 years or so. However, his elastic, radical, tenacious thinking style is inspiring for praxis, for our elastic thinking/doing, and grasped as praxis his thinking tools as well gain their significance and can be used to address our dynamic context. I think the biggest echo from the Situationists may have been through artistic and cultural praxis and hence a subaltern legacy that would be hard to demonstrate. Anyhow, I post a link to the full text of Debord’s classic theoretical work Society of the Spectacle (1967 – click here or at the end), and post the first page here…
(Begins with quote from Ludwig Feuerbach…) “
But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence… illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.”
Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity
1
The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.
2
Images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost forever. Apprehended in a partial way, reality unfolds in a new generality as a pseudo-world apart, solely as an object of contemplation. The tendency toward the specialization of images of the world finds its highest expression in the world of the autonomous image, where deceit deceives itself. The spectacle in its generality is a concrete inversion of life, and, as such, the autonomous movement of nonlife.
3
The spectacle appears at once as society itself, as a part of society and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is that sector where all attention, all consciousness, converges. Being isolated and precisely for that reason this sector is the locus of illusion and false consciousness; the unity it imposes is merely the official language of generalized separation.
4
The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.
Free full text: Guy Debord‘s Society of the Spectacle
(1967)
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aw oh my! such a coincidence I spoke to a girl in a bar nonstop about Debord for 2 hours. I think she hates me now: ] can’t wait to read this text tomorrow! xx!
Requestor
April 1, 2011 at 11:57 pm
Hi..have you read Anselm Jappe’s critique of Debord? Fascinating, really good. I would be interested in what you make of it.
Also, Aufheben had an article on the Situationists about two years ago which, by their standards, was actually rather excellent. If you can fish it out, do! If not, I am sure I could find the link…
(Essentially, Jappe finds limitations in Debord’s reading of Feuerbach and Lukacs, but can’t remember much else now, will go look it up…
Sean
April 3, 2011 at 4:13 pm
Thanks – I certainly will: to be quite honest I do have reservations about his theoretical work: I felt he under-appreciated Hegel as well, and while the whole grasp of mediation via the image is crucial, he didn’t have a good deal to say about the non-spectacular. I think his work was a seminal cultural intervention though, so from the praxis point of view I think this work is important: I struggle even more though with the comments on the Spectacle which I only recently read. I’ll look up Aufheben and Jappe on Scribd and so forth: many thanks for the lead!
Aaron Asphar
April 3, 2011 at 8:57 pm
Regarding ‘the non spectacular’: I think the S.I did account for this in their particular account of the dialectic of production. Debord’s film ‘A Passage of a Few People Through Time’ is a rembarkable meditation on what a world beyond commodity production could become, but it is a poem remarkably rooted within present conditions at the same time.
What is interesting also about the S.I is that they were attempting to comprehend a world where consumption had triumphed as a (temporary) stay on the internal crisis of capitalism. If Marx’s Capital was a critique of production, some say Debord’s Society of the Spectacle is a 20th century rejoiner – a critique of consumption. This aspect of captialist development stumped all its critics at the time: the enormous amount of plant and machinery left over from World War II in Europe and the USA was put to good use – mass commodification was inacted, and the S.I. project can perhaps be seen as an attempt to comprehend this new development.
Sean
April 5, 2011 at 9:48 am
This is really illuminating: I’m very interested to see Debord’s film – its something that doesn’t sound unfamiliar but I must have known it before I’d taken as much of an interest in the Situationists: I’ll have a look for that online. The WW total warfare society thing is an important point to connect with the spectacle: and the Eightees would surely seem like a spectacular peak. I think it picks up something over the last 20 years owing to the relentless alienation/dissociation/dislocation, and although allot of subjective impoverishment/disempowerment, there also really does seem to be a radicalization of marginalized/displaced groups who are responding either with mental illness/asocial behaviours, alienated froms of cultural production, drug use and hence alienated forms of sociality, all of which is in some spheres stirring up an anti-spectaclular (I think of it as emotional/somatic) dynamic: I relate this to the return to negative theology in critical theory (eg Eagleton/Kristeva), picking up the conter dynamic as fundamentalism/terror/radicalism/revolutionary subjectivity/creativity as possible expressions. Its all new to me though and I’m stumped as to how things might pan out. Anyway, thanks for this interesting msg and this Debord suggestion. Many thanks, Aaron
Aaron Asphar
April 5, 2011 at 10:24 am