Notes on Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle (1967)
Richard Kahn
10/14/01

Introduction:
Debord was the cranky genius that headed the multi-council collective of the Situationist International through the 1960's and '70s.  This avant-garde group was the true progeny of the Surrealists, with Henri Lefebvre and the Lettrists (1950's) providing the lineage tangent point.  Lefebvre was interested in radicalizing "everyday life" by experimenting with and promoting new experiences of social space.  While situationists echoed these practical concerns, Debord himself drew upon the history of Marxist philosophy, the history of avant-gardeism (with its corresponding split between art and business), structuralism and post-structuralism, as well as 20th century critical theory to develop ideas about the all-pervading spectacle of modern capitalist society and its degradation and colonization of individual existence.  Debord and the SI took part in (and helped to provoke) the student uprising in Paris of May, 1968 which culminated briefly in a Marxist revolution in which intellectuals and workers occupied the administration of the city, spurring students in major cities across the globe to revolutionary action.  The sell out of the French Communist Party, as well as the general lack of revolutionary resolve, doomed the uprisings, resulting in their failure.  Later, in his Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988), Debord bristled against the prevailing tendency of the Left to romanticize 1968 and celebrate its legacy.  To the contrary, Debord announced that the Spectacle had since evolved into an "integrated" form in which even 1968, Situationist practice, and Guy Debord himself were now marketed as timeless iconic lies capable of further distancing people from the very things these lies had fought for in their day.  Debord committed suicide in 1994, dying from alcoholism, shooting himself through the heart.  He said that the very perfection of suicide lay in its ambiguity.
The Society of the Spectacle is a consciously difficult (esoteric) book of theory.  What was it that Debord was fighting against?  It is common now to speak of the McDonaldization of the globe – this is one spectacular aspect.  A more choice symbol of the integrated Spectacle might be the political and economic rise of the global demand for MTV.  "I want my MTV," as a slogan charts the move from capitalist pitch to hegemonic style: signifying present reality.  The spectacle of MTV was prefigured by the Futurist F.T. Marinetti in his manifesto against traditional theater (The Variety Theatre1913).  Demanding that theatrical art express and represent the power and speed of the new mass industrial situation, Marinetti defines "the Variety theatre"  as a poetic invocation to Debord's own Spectacle.  Marinetti writes:

1.	The Variety Theatre, born as we are from electricity, is lucky in having no tradition, no masters, no dogma, and it is fed by swift actuality.
2.	The Variety Theatre is absolutely practical, because it proposes to distract and amuse the public with comic effects, erotic stimulation, or imaginative astonishment.
3.	The authors, actors, and technicians of the Variety Theatre have only one reason for existing and triumphing: incessantly to invent new elements of astonishment.  Hence the absolute impossibility of arresting or repeating oneself, hence an excited competition of brains and muscles to conquer the various records of agility, speed, force, complication, and elegance.
4.	The Variety Theatre is unique today in its use of the cinema, which enriches it with an incalculable number of visions and otherwise unrealizable spectacles (battles, riots, horse races, automobile and aeroplane meets, trips, voyages, depths of the city, the countryside, oceans, and skies).
5.	The Variety Theatre, being a profitable show window for countless inventive forces, naturally generates what I call 'the Futurist marvellous', produced by modern mechanics.  Here are some of the elements of this 'marvellous': (a) powerful caricatures; (b) abysses of the ridiculous; (c) delicious, impalpable ironies; (d) all-embracing, definitive symbols; (e) cascades of uncontrollable hilarity; (f) profound analogies between humanity, the animal, vegetable and mechanical worlds; (g) flashes of revealing cynicism; (h) plots full of the wit, repartee, and conundrums that aerate the intelligence; (i)  the whole gamut of laughter and smiles, to flex the nerves; (j) the whole gamut of stupidity, imbecility, doltishness, and absurdity, insensibly pushing the intelligence to the very border of madness; (k) all the new significations of light, sound, noise, and language, with their mysterious and inexplicable extension into the least-explored part of our sensibility; (l) a cumulus of events unfolded at great speed, of stage characters pushed from right to left in two minutes ('and now let's have a look at the Balkans': King Nicolas, Enver-Bey, Daneff, Venizelos, belly-blows and fistfights between Serbs and Bulgars, a couplet, and everything vanishes);  (m) instructive satirical pantomimes; (n) caricatures of suffering and nostalgia, strongly impressed on the sensibility through gestures exasperating in their spasmodic, hesitant, weary slowness; grave words made ridiculous by funny gestures, bizarre disguises, mutilated words, ugly faces, pratfalls. 

Map of the Spectacle:

This relationship is not abstract but rather is situated in a socio-economic history of power (e.g. division of labor).  The history of controlled society unfolds as the institutionalizing of culture and the industrializing / objectifying of inverted part/whole relations.

These myriad relations represented as cultural expressions: each a transformation of the whole in itself, but taken for a mere part of the whole as it is socially represented.

The whole of society – the totality of its myriad relations.

                                                                          

     Spectacle:
   1.   A carnival show,
2.	A technology (lens) 
that allows the blind to see:
the objectification 
of vision.

              

Advanced capitalist society is characterized by the heretofore unparalleled extension of "inverted culture" into everyday life such that people mistake the commodification of existence for living when in fact it represents dying.  They think they are being entertained (i.e. are enjoying themselves) when in fact they are being pacified. 

As society becomes more powerful it generates a greater complexity of parts – this manifests as fragmentation: of controlling institutions into bureaucracies of specialization, and of the individual into an alienated, schizophrenic consumer of a chaos of images that come to accurately represent him/her because they have made the consumer over into an image of themselves.

                                                                                    

The Media & Why We Are Out of Touch:
	Nothing is experienced directly but the experience of mediation.  The powerful rise of the mass media is the institutionalization of this spectacular effect – their job, solely to image reality and provide the lens through which individuals know what is going on.  Again, this is part and parcel of the process of the total occupation of social life  by the commodity  – the image is itself a commodity.  But selling people images of the real which they can hopelessly use as substitutes for the real is to sublimate the real for the addiction of spectacle.  This pathology works by confounding desire such that people desire the images of desire (voyeurism) as a hopeless surrogate for the active desiring which images replace (immediatism).  Beyond pornography, then, which is itself a form of information, information becomes the ultimate voyeur's commodity in advanced capitalist societies.  It allows reality to be abstracted, bought & sold, and controlled.  The information society is a control society, and as this information itself represents (1st) a form of abstract entertainment and then (2nd) a curious mixture of obviously staged entertainment spectacle with more traditional information, the spectacle of the infotainment society becomes manifest…a society of passive, image voyeurs.

     Being                                                  Having                                        Appearing
Characterized by creative		Characterized by the rise of		Characterized by the
praxis: imaginative self-		the object / commodity as		image of the object –
determination.				use-value.				its evocation of 
										possible uses.

You create a game to play. 		You buy a game that tells		You watch a game
					you how to play.			that tells you how to
										play, that it is fun to
										play, and exciting to
										watch and emulate.

Final Words from Guy Debord (Commentary on the Society of the Spectacle):
The society whose modernization has reached the stage of the integrated spectacle is characterized by the combined effect of five principal features: incessant technological renewal; integration of state and economy; generalized secrecy, unanswerable lies; an eternal present.
––––––
Never before has censorship been so perfect.  Never before have those who are still led to believe, in a few countries, that they remain free citizens, been less entitled to make their opinions heard, wherever it is a matter of choices affecting their real lives.  Never before has it been possible to lie to them so brazenly.  The spectator is simply supposed to know nothing, and deserve nothing.  Those who are always watching to see what happens next will never act: such must be the spectator's condition.
––––––
Such a perfect democracy constructs its own inconceivable foe, terrorism.  Its wish is to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results.  The story of terrorism is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive.  The spectators must certainly never know everything about terrorism, but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else must be acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic.
––––––
At the beginning of 1988, a certain General Noriega suddenly became world famous.  He was the unofficial dictator of Panama, a country without an army, where he commanded the National Guard.  Panama is not really a sovereign state: it was dug out for its canal, rather than the reverse.  Its currency is the dollar, and the army which runs it is similarly foreign.  Noriega had thus devoted his entire career…to serving the occupying power as its chief of police.  He imported drugs into the United States, since Panama was not bringing him sufficient revenue, and exported his 'Panamanian' capital to Switzerland.  He had worked with the CIA against Cuba and, to provide adequate cover for his business activities, had also denounced some of his rivals in the import trade to the US authorities, obsessed as they are with this problem.  To the envy of Washington, his chief security advisor was the best on the market: Michael Harari, a former officer with Mossad, the Israeli secret service.  When the Americans finally decided to get rid of this character, some of their courts having carelessly condemned him, Noriega proclaimed that he was ready to defend himself for a thousand years – against foreigners, and against his own rebellious people; in the name of anti-imperialism he quickly received public support from the more austere bureaucratic dictators in Cuba and Nicaragua.
	Far from being a peculiarly Panamanian phenomenon, this General Noriega, who sells everything and fakes everything, in a world which does precisely the same thing, was altogether a perfect representative of the integrated spectacle, and of the successes it allows the assorted managers of its internal and external politics: a sort of statesman in a sort of state, a sort of general, a capitalist.  He is the very model of our modern prince, and of those destined to come to power and stay there, the most able resemble him closely.  It is not Panama which produces such marvels, it is our times.

Images of 1968: 
      "Return to Normal"	   "Reforms - Choloroform"      "Press – Not to be Swallowed"

"Be Young and Be Quiet" – 			"Voting Against Capital is Not Enough"
after  "Sois belle et tais toi", or 
"Just sit there and look pretty".
Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Carpenter's They Live (1988)
	While extending beyond Debord's general thoughts on the nature of Spectacle to consider the pervasive nature of violence in society, A Clockwork Orange ends with related images when the protagonist Alex, a violent fan of Beethoven, is captured and sent by the state for rehabilitation.  This rehabilitation (Ludovico treatment) consists of forcing Alex to watch endless hours of filmed "ultra-violence" to deafening versions of his favorite composer.  The film cuts to a pacified, smug Alex in the hospital who indulges himself in being fed eggs by the nurse staff.

	They Live opens with shots of the protagonist walking through heavily run-down industrial zones.  This informs us that he is in a world of mass economic hardship. The protagonist is a drifter, looking for any sort of work just to buy food.  As he wanders the city, he notices people creeping in and out of a church at unsociable hours. These people get especially edgy when police helicopters make their increasingly frequent sweeps across the area. 
Strange things are happening throughout the city. A preacher spouting doom is arrested by the police, a weird group of scientists are tapping into TV broadcasts and saying strange things about invaders. These broadcasts urge people to wake up, shake off their apathy and take a look at what is really happening in the world. 
Events come to a head when the city is cleared by the police, using excessive violence. The protagonist manages to escape and finds his way back to the church. In the church he finds a laboratory and a box filled with sunglasses. When he puts on the glasses he has a huge surprise. 
The alien invasion has already happened, and they have been living amidst him for years. The glasses enable one to see subliminal messages as well as the aliens' real faces!  In fact, the aliens are treating Earth as just another developing zone – prime real estate space.  Money is labeled with This Is Your God, and everywhere there are subliminal signs telling us to eat more, sleep more, consume more, etc. The protagonist goes off on a mad rampage that ends with the apparent death of loads of "innocent" civilians.