"society of the spectacle"

[noble brown]

guy debord. who is he and what is this "society of the spectacle"? got the book but cant get past the first few chapters. its virtually incomprehensible, at least to me it is. the middle seems accessable but still dont have a firm grasp on this spectacle thing so it leaves me missing out. anyone?

[blake 3:17]

It's a very very difficult book. I've read it several times and am challenged at giving a brief summary. Some of Debord's films are on Youtube and they actually give a better sense than the book. The Situationists come out of an anarcho-communist tradition and I've heard some workerist/syndicalists keen on them, but they didn't work -- more time drinking and making odd films and collages. I'm fine with that. I think it's just good to be aware of.


I think it is useful to put into some historical context -- Debord was one of the more imaginative thinkers on the Left to approach new questions which emerged in the post war period -- a huge economic boom, the expansion of popular media, the expansion of the ability of parts of the working class to consume. He's often very funny in an eccentric and dry way. Other folks on the same questions would include Adorno, Raymond Williams, Marshall McLuhan, Herbert Marcuse and Jean Baudrillard all coming to quite different answers.

There are a few decent books on the Situationists. Sadie Plant has an OK book. Stewart Home's book Assault ON Culture is pretty good. The whole text is available here: http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/sp/assault.htm

This book is pretty good too, used to have a copy but long gone: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=7210

[RedMaterialist]

guy debord. who is he and what is this "society of the spectacle"? got the book but cant get past the first few chapters. its virtually incomprehensible, at least to me it is. the middle seems accessable but still dont have a firm grasp on this spectacle thing so it leaves me missing out. anyone?

All human relations are now media events.

[Widerstand]

'Society of the spectacle' is one of the core Situationist's text. They were a sort of anarchist/communist/avantgarde art group, frankly I've never got the fuzz about them. I think one of their core thesis was that all of modern, post-war society is about media spectacle.

[cenv]

Check our Larry Law's Spectacular Times (http://nntk.net/main.php?g2_itemId=251) -- it's a more straightforward introduction to some of Debord's basic ideas. For me, what helped me get a feel for the significance of his ideas when I was first puzzling through his work was trying to think of a practical example for everything he talked about, since he writes in very general language.

I think the best background for reading Society of the Spectacle, though, is reading all you can about Marx's concepts of alienation, fetishism, and reification, as well as some of the 20th-century theorists who extended them. For instance, Debord drew alot from Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness, and there are close parallells between him and the French Marxist Henri Lefebvre who published Critique of Everyday Life.

Finally, fellow situationist Raoul Vaneigem wrote a book called The Revolution of Everyday Life which you should check out if you haven't already. He deals with a lot of the same concepts but from a much more subjective perspective, which can make it more fun to read as well as easier to see what the ideas mean on a concrete, personal level.

[KC]

I'd recommend the film over the book. It's more accessible.

[noble brown]

All human relations are now media events.


this helped ALOT! all bs aside. now that i know what he meant by the spectacle, its starting to make sense cause now i know the contexts.

[black magick hustla]

SoS is hard because it uses a lot of hegelian jargon and hegelian concepts. Some of the sentences are literal appropiation of some of hegel´s passages

[RED DAVE]

das ding an sich:

Society of the Spectacle (http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/16)

RED DAVE