Guy Debord was a founding member and the prime theoretician of the Situationist International, an art school that developed out of the later stages of the Surrealist movement. They were reacting against commodity fetishism, as it was defined by the Surrealists, the idea that consumer goods hold a magic power over their owners. Eventually the artistic side of the group fell away and the remainder of the SI turned to urban guerilla politics. They played a key role in the events of May 1968 in France. Debord’s Society Of the Spectacle outlines his concept of what commodity fetishism does to the masses and how it alienates them from themselves.
This short treatise utilizes ideas from Hegel and Marx. From Hegel’s phenomenology we get a description of a “geist”, which could be defined as a type of motivational spirit that defines a particular society and era. Debord here is defining this geist as the Spectacle, the post-World War II capitalist boom in which a deluge of luxury consumer items were made available to the masses. Along with this surge of material goods came advertising, a solidification of the hierarchical nature of society, and the resulting psychological anomie. This is where Marx comes in.
Marx, in his day, introduced the concept of “worker alienation”, the syndrome where a factory laborer feels no personal connection to the machinery they operate. They spend the majority of their time pulling levers and turning gears on machines they don’t understand to make products they will never afford to buy in order to make money for the bourgeoisie that they will never personally know. The end result is the disappearance of meaning in life. Debord extends and shifts this idea to mid/late capitalist society where the consumer finds identity in what they own. While the existentialists said “you are what you do”, the Situationists said “you are what you own”. If people’s identity is defined by what they buy, then they invest most of their mental energy into the purchase of consumer goods, most of which have no functional or inherent value, and become alienated from themselves. Lacking reflective self-consciousness, anomie and depression become more intense as they get blindly led like rats through the capitalist maze with no exit, being lured along by advertisers in pursuit of fulfilling an elusive desire that they can not even control or comprehend.
Guy Debord was a radical leftist but he had no sympathy for communism despite his use of Marx in his critique of society. A whole section of this book is about the miseries of the Soviet Union, a corporatist political construct in which state ideology is the spectacle, or geist, to which people collectively adhere. Communism has no room for individual expression because individuality leads to disruptions in the direct line of communication from the dictators of the ruling class to the submissive block of factory and farm workers whose sole purpose is to follow orders, maintaining the functionality of the state machinery. Debord thus concludes that, while both communism and capitalism are inherently miserable and oppressive systems, capitalism is better because it leaves open more possibility for subversion. An individual can buy a printing press or a movie camera and make consumer goods, like newspapers and films, that can be weaponized to destroy the domination of the spectacle, freeing the masses from the illusion.
These are some of the most interesting ideas in the book. Other topics briefly covered are the spectacle’s evolution throughout history, its relation with time and space, and the need for the proletariat to awaken to their role as subjective actors in the historical process. That last point could use further development and criticism. Debord falls into the same trap that makes so many leftists ineffectual: leftists are good at diagnosing and articulating society’s problems but they fall short when it comes to providing plausible solutions. Society Of the Spectacle is no exception in this regard.
Guy Debord’s short tract lays out a vision of the spectacle as a motivating but damaging illusion that drains modern society of its passions, vivacity, and meaning. As a philosophical work, it does not argue or assert its argument. Debord instead describes it as he sees it and lets the reader decide on its accuracy and merit. The critique is rudimentary but would later get elaborated on by Jean Baudrillard. If you think Situationism is outdated or inaccurate, try applying the idea of commodity fetishism to the current obsession with smartphones and tablets. The younger generation lives their social lives by creating internet personas on social media platforms; they manufacture their own image and identity and invest so much energy into doing so that the end result is epidemic proportions of depression, loneliness, suicide, mental illness, and social dislocation. Agoraphobia has become normalized. Recent studies have shown that IQ levels have been dropping since the internet became the central focus of our culture. Debord’s thesis may have been rudimentary in its time but it also was prescient, seminal, and prophetic.
Debord, Guy. Society Of the Spectacle. Black & Red, Detroit: 1983.
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