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. 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.
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." 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. Debord was the de facto leader of the Situationist International, a tiny and ever-changing 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. Not that Debord ever used the word, but his ideas were essentially pointing to the basis of what we now know as neoliberalism.
#The spectacle full
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. 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).īut 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. 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.
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. 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.
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