The Society of the Spectacle

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Bad translation? This isn't readable at all.
One of the most important books of the 20th Century
This should be required reading for first years.
One of the most important and most overlooked philosophical texts of the 20th century
essential

The Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord
Manufacturer: Zone Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0942299795

One of the most important and most overlooked philosophical texts of the 20th century.......2006-02-01

He begins by outlining three basic spectacles that are found and then dives completely into the integrated spectacle, a French/Italian model of ideology that differed from Russian/German and American models. Though not even one hundred pages in length, the pages pack an impressive punch that no reader can deny. In order to understand what I am speaking about, you should do yourself a favor and grab a copy of Debord's work. You do not have to agree with what he is saying to gain from the experience.

But the brevity of the book makes sense when you realize this--RE: the spectacle, 1) see S.O.T.S. 2) take a look around you from your reading chair 3) ask, what are the few changes in 20 years? 4) write a brief and get back to lived experience.

The integrated spectacle combines the diffuse, subtle domination of that system which goes by the label "liberal democracy" with tactics practiced by the concentrated, dictatorial mode of the spectacle in past communisms and facsisms. Which means: today, the rulers of the integrated spectacle dictate/script the appearance of an ever-unfolding narrative/fantasy of liberal democracy, complete with all the nitty-gritty details, plot twists and turns, shocking surprises, and pleasant mysteries at which to gawk and gasp and coo. Caravaggio would be jealous of such veristic, theatrical bravado! But what is really happening is something else altogether, hidden behind the misinformation and unverifiable information in the spectacle.

Terrorism is the invented enemy of the perfected, integrated, yet fragile spectacle, which needs an external enemy, seemingly worse than itself, in order to look good and survive by comparison.

Secrecy is everywhere and yet we accept it in passing (our state of alienation conditions us to know nothing about too much anyway, so secrecy seems natural, almost a relief from concern). Is anyone asking: Do we need to know anything more than what we are told by the spectacle? Is is even possible to know more?

Experts do our thinking for us, or at least we are not given enough information in a condition of generalized secrecy to make up our own minds. Experts are intercessors, like priests of old, who stand between us and the spectacular governments with their ultimate knowledge of what's really up in the universe. And we must respond to their statements, which can be lies or truths (but we'll never know), with FAITH, since government usurps the position formerly held by God.

Finally, the integrated spectacle has made a whole new method of government possible. Debord wonders if the rulers of the spectacle have yet to realize what they can do with their new spectacular tools? Will the possiblilites become apparent in a flash of lightening?

Writer, artist, filmmaker, provocateur, revolutionary, and impresario of the Situationist International, Guy Debord shunned the apparatus of publicity he dissected so brilliantly in his most influential work, The Society of the Spectacle. In this ambitious and innovative biography, Vincent Kaufmann places Debord's very hostility toward the inquisitive, biographical gaze at the center of an investigation into his subject's diverse outputâfrom his earliest films to his landmark works of social theory and political provocationâand the poetic sensibility that informed both his work and his life.

Instead of providing a conventional day-to-day account of Debord's life, Kaufmann deftly locates his subject within the historical and intellectual context of the radical social, political, and artistic movements in which he participated. He traces Debord's development as an intellectual: his involvement with the lettrist movement in the early 1950s, his central role in the Situationist International from 1957 to 1971 and in the events of May 1968, and the productive and frequently misunderstood period between the dissolution of the situationists and his suicide, during which time Debord clarified the rules of his war against inauthenticity.

As Kaufmann makes clear, for Debord political thought and action were inseparable from aesthetics and poetic expression. Whether envisioning the recovery of a lost, protocommunist age of authenticity and transparency in The Society of the Spectacle or critically assessing the possibility of revolution against postmodern capitalism two decades later, Debord advocated and practiced an art of defiance, a concurrently martial and melancholic poetics. Avoiding the mythologies about Debord that both admirers and critics have cultivated, Kaufmann provides a groundbreaking and generous assessment of Debord and his uncompromising struggle against a corrupt civilization.

Vincent Kaufmann is professor of French language and literature at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland.

Robert Bononno, a teacher and translator, lives in New York City.

This book gathers together previously unpublished texts and acts as a useful supplement to 'The Situationist International Anthology' edited by Ken Knabb. Fortunately for the art historian Tom McDonagh (who edits the book) and the other art historians who add complementary blurbs on the back of the jacket, most of these previously unpublished texts were written when the SI still had an enthusiasm for art. Post '63 the political came to dominate their work. This was almost a realization that they were on the defensive, that in the socio-political world of the mid-60's art as a means of authentic experience had been pushed to the margins. 'The poetry of the streets' was the only sure-fire way of taking back everyday life. This form of aggressive poetry eventually culminated in the events of May '68 in Paris.

California it seems was the nemesis of the SI's Latin Quarter. The radicalism that evolved from the Beat Generation in the U.S. is dealt with by nothing but contempt by Debord and his cohorts. Freudian psychology: "We know that the unconscious imagination is poor, that automatic writing is monotonous"p.33; ecology: "...a greater domination of nature, a greater freedom."p.42; and eastern spirituality: "...the mental infirmity of American capitalist culture has enrolled in the school of Zen Buddhism"p.80 This searing revulsion of American hippie culture may have been one of the reasons the SI was so attractive to certain strains within the punk movement from Malcolm McLaren to the Gang of 4 (who's 'Natural's Not In It' is the best distillation of situationist ideas set to music).

What also sets the situationists apart from the radicals within the U.S. was their unbridled enthusiasm for technology. This might seem like evidence of their utopian strain, a throwback to pre-war surrealism. But a belief that technology will eventually relieve us of unnecessary toil is an idea that goes back as least as far as the 18th century. As far as I can deduce from the early texts included here, the most impressive and imaginative of the early situationists was not Debord or even Asger Jorn, but the Dutch painter Constant Nieuwenhuys. His 'A Different City for a Different Life' is fascinating in its vision of a situationist city in a post-capitalist world. New Babylon would be constructed above ground level with most of the traffic condemned below. Moving walls, changeable spaces, climate-controlled communities, neighbourhoods designed for different individual emotions and the creation of a variety of environments to facilitate chance encounters. What could be a greater experimental realization of Marx's dictum that consiousness is shaped by environment?

Constant's early technological optimism contrasts sharply with Debord's later political pessimism. For by the mid-60's it was clear that not only would imaginative and non-alienating uses of technology not be on the horizon, but that a stronger defensive must be made for existing environments that were about to be totally consumed for capitalist techne. One is reminded of New York's Parks Commissioner Robert Moses and his hubristic schemes to run expressways through every borough of New York. When it finally came to running one through bohemian Lower Manhatten, an anti-Moses action group was formed to put a stop to the idea of motorwaying old communal neighbourhoods into the ground. As such maybe 'derives' are still possible in Lower Manhatten?

In Mustapha Khayati's 'Captive Words', there seems to be a slight acknowledgement of some structualist arguments that were bandied around at the time, "Power resides in language, which is the refuge of its police violence."p.174 Detournement - the situationist subversion of the signifier - was probably the most powerfully striking method of conveying dialectical conflict in the later 20th century. Khayati looks back to the dadaists in whom "the innocence of words was....consciously attacked."p.175 The situationists sought to challenge traditional signifieds by constant subversion of popular signifiers. This attack on comfortable images provoked an immediate questioning of received meanings. Their natural artistic sympathies were with the European avant-garde but they also disavowed much of it due to its often political ambiguity and its sometime outright reactionary nature. In the words of Greil Marcus "The situationist program....came down to Lautreamont and workers councils."p.14

Of the essays on the SI, Jonathan Crary's 'Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory', proved to be more than a little contentious, if all the more illuminating for it. He takes a sentence from Debord's 'Comments on the Society of the Spectacle' written in 1988 in which he states that when he wrote the original back in 1967, the spectacle was barely 40 years old. Crary then theorizes on what Debord meant by placing the beginning of the spectacle in 1927 or around the late 20's. He gives a number of insightful reasons, including 1: 1927 saw the technological perfection of television; 2: 'The Jazz Singer' premiered in 1927 and saw the birth of synchronized sound; 3: The rise of facism in the late 20's and its emphasis on using all available mediums to propogate its ideas.

I leave you with Theo Frey's vision of our Internet future written in 1966(!) "Henceforth a universal communication network supresses the distance between things while increasing the distance between people, the future solution will consist in making people circulate less and information circulate more. People will stay at home, transformed into mere audiovisual 'receivers' of information."p.170

Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory 455
Why Art Can't Kill the Situationist International 467
Letter and Response 489

* Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (The Verso Classics Series) by Guy Debord

* The Situationist City by Simon Sadler
* Situationist International Anthology by Ken Knabb
* Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century by Greil Marcus * The Tribe by Jean-Michel Mension, Donald Nicholson-Smith (Translator)
* May '68 and Its Afterlives by Kristin Ross
* Considerations on the Assassination of Gérard Lebovici by Guy Debord, Robert Greene
Revolution of Everyday Life
by Raoul Vaneigem)
* Beneath the Paving Stones: Situationists and the Beach, May 1968

The Game of War: The Life and Death of Guy Debord

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The Game of War: The Life and Death of Guy Debord
Andrew Hussey
Manufacturer: J. Cape
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 022404348X

Though well-known for his founding of the avant-garde Situationist International movement and his prominent political and cultural activism, Guy Debord was nonetheless a surprisingly elusive and enigmatic figure, spending his last years in an isolated farmhouse in Champot, France. Andy Merrifield's Guy Debord pushes back the farmhouse shutters and opens a window onto Debord's life, theory, and art. Merrifield explores the dynamics of Debord's ideas and works, including the groundbreaking Howls for Sade and his 1967 classic, The Society of the Spectacle. Debord understood life as art, Merrifield argues, and through that lens he chronicles Debord's stint as a revolutionary leader in the 1950s and 1960s, his time in Spain and Italy during the 1970s and the reclusive years leading up to his death in 1994. Dada and Surrealism's legacy and punk rock's god, Guy Debord spun theories on democracy, people, and political power that still resonate today, making Merrifield's concise yet comprehensive study an invaluable resource on one of the foremost intellectual revolutionaries of the twentieth century.

Guy Debord (1931â€“1994) was the most influential member of the Situationist International, the avant-garde group that triggered the May 1968 revolt in France.

While Debord's written work (including The Society of the Spectacle) is some of the most notorious in the world of political and cultural radicality, deemed "the cornerstone cliche of postmodernism," his films have until now remained tantalizingly inaccessible.

Ken Knabb's translation of Debord's Complete Cinematic Works accompanies the long-awaited English versions of these films, which will be coming soon to the United States. The scripts are illustrated with 62 stills, and Debord's own annotations help elucidate the subtleties of these astonishing works, unparalleled in cinematic history.

This anthology comprises 3 pamphlets-The Poverty of Student Life; Totality for Kids; and The Decline and Fall of the Spectacular Commodity Economy plus eyewitness accounts of the Paris May '68 events. Much of the Situationist creed was produced in pamphlet form and these 3 were crucial in creating the Situationist legend. They provide both an introduction to the ideas of the Situs and a provocatively seductive invitation to a life of freedom & revolt which prefigues many of the themes of today's mass protestors. Illustrated throughout with photos of the May '68 events and the graffiti that played such a famous role. The 7"X7" size replicates size of the Parisian cobblestones used by the protestors.