( a vastly updated blog post from 2015)
"The society whose modernisation has reached the stage of integrated spectacle is characterised by the combined effect of 5 principal factors; incessant technological renewal, integration of state and economy, generalised secrecy, unanswerable lies and eternal present - the spectator is simply supposed to know nothing and deserves nothing. Those who are watching to see what happens next will never act and such must be the spectator's condition ."
- Guy Debord.
Guy Debord
Guy Debord was born on December 28, 1931, in Paris, France, a witer and director who became a leading figure of the French Situationist International In his fascinating book first published in June 1967, the Society of the Spectacle , he argued that to succumbing to alienation caused by capitalism we have let our lives become colonised by an immersive experience.
" In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immene accumulation of spectacles," Debord's book begins, "Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation." The political consequence of this separation from shared felt experience is key to understanding both how we experience the world and how we can change it.
This spectacle has replaced social interaction and human needs. While this is superficially satisfying it makes us isolated and lonely individuals. It is still one of the greatest theoretical examinations of our social-cultural conditions describing in pinpoint accuracy the dreadful corporate globalization sweeping the planet, The spectacle accompanies us throughout our lives via news propaganda, advertising and entertainment, and yes social media,alienating us from ourselves and our desires in order to facilitate the accumulation of capital..
For Debord the spectacle presented itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned, It's sole message is :"What appears is good; what is good appears," The passive acceptance it demands is already effectively imposed by its monopoly of appearances. its manners of appearing without allowing any reply. Debord , warned us that mass media had replaced religion in offering repressive pseudo-enjoyment of the world. Real life has become subordinated to its mediated appearance. " The medium is the message" declared Marshall McLuhan around the same time. Few appreciated the significance of the statement back then, but now we bear witness to rapid changes in the way we relate to each other and our planet.
The text https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/guy-debord-the-society-of-the-spectacle.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1r_mORBe5b6eH__t7_A8iSz9ppVP2IwVVcmiVuTrqulmA5SZAwDlvSH6Q was a primary influence not only on the near- revolution of May 1968 in Paris, but also on the ethos of London's underground press and certain aspects of punk ideology, The SI developed out of an earlier Left Bank mix of avant garde politics, influenced by Dada, Surrealism and Lettrism, carrying out programmes of provocation, graffiti and anti-party revolutionary outrage. The Situationists were concerned to articulate a 'theory of moments," propagating ideas of pleasure and depicting the personal as intrinsically political ("boredom is always counter revolutionary " sneered one of their mottoes.From 1962, the Situationists increasingly applied their critique not only in culture but to all aspects of capitalist society. Seeking to free us from the power of the spectacle in order to mount a credible challenge to capitalism, the Situationists introduced the tactic of detournement, an attempt to turn the powers of the spectacle against itself.
Guy Debord emerged as the most important figure among their number: he had been involved in the Lettrist International, and had made several films, including Hurlements en faveur de Sade (1952) Inspired by the libertarian journal Socialisme on Barbarie, the Situationists rediscovered the history of the anarchist movement, particularly during the period of the First International, and drew inspiration from Spain, Kronstadt, and the Makhnovists. They described the USSR as a capitalist bureaucracy, and advocated workers' councils. But they were not entirely anarchist in orientation and retained elements of Marxism, especially through Henri Lefebvre's critique of the alienation of everyday life.
Debord dissolved the SI (proclaiming its victory over history) in 1972, their impact has been assured. Again today, we need to break with conventions, consensus, break out of our desolate paradigms, and learn to be free.
Sadly on November 30th 1994 aged 67, racked by depression, after a life of hard drinking , that had led to a diagnosis of peripheral neuritis, a debilitating and extremely painful condition whereby the body's nerve endings burn away in the isolated village of Champot high in the Auvergne, Guy Debord shot himself with a single bullet to the heart. He remains however one of the most important contemporary thinkers, with a capital place in the history of ideas from the second half pf the second half of the 20th century.
The following film La Societe du Spectacle (Society of the Spectacle) is a black and white 1973 film based on his book. It was Debord's first feature-length film. It uses found footage and detournement in a radical criticism of mass marketing and its role in the alienation of modern society.
The 88 minute film took a year to make and incorporates footage from feature films, industrial films, news footage. advertisements and still photographs. The films include The Battleship Potemkin, October, Chapeav, The New Babylon, The Shanghai Gesture, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Rio Grande, They Died with Their Boots On, Johnny Guitar and Mr Arkadin, as well as other Soviet films.
Events such as the murder of Lee Harvard Oswald (who assassinated U.S, President John F, Kennedy in 1963), the Spanish Civil War of 1936 -1939, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the Paris riots in May 1968 are represented, and people such as Mao Zedong, Richard Nixon and the Spanish anarchist Durutti.Throughout the film, there is a voiceover (of Debord) and inter-titles from The Society of the Spectacle but also texts from the 1968 Occupation Committee of the Sorbonne, Machiavelli, Marx, Tocqueville, Emile Pouget, and Soloviev. Without citations, these quotes are hard to decipher, especially with the subtitles (which exist in the French version) but that is part of Debord's goal "to problematize recept" (Greil and Sanborn) and force the viewer to be active. In addition , the words of some of the authors are detourned through deliberate misquoting.
In 1984, Debord withdrew his films from circulation, because of the negative press and the assassination of his friend and patron Gerard Lebovici. Since Debord's suicide in 1994, Debord's wife Alice Becker-Ho has been promoting Debord's film. A DVD box set titled Guy Debord: Oeuvres cinematographiques completes came out in 2005 and contains Debord's seven film.
The cover of the film is derived from a photo of Life magazine photographer J.R. Eyerman.
On November 28, 1952, at the Paramount Theatre(Oakland, California), took place the premiere screening of film Bwana Devil, by Arch Oboler, the first full-length, color 3D (aka ' Natural Vision') motion picture. Eyerman took a series of photos of the audience wearing 3D glasses.
Life magazine used one of the photos as the cover of a brochure about the 146-1955 decade. The photo employed by Debord shows the audience in " a virtually trance-lie state of absorption, their faces grim, their lips pursed," however, in the one chosen bt Life, " the spectators are laughing, their expressions of hilarity conveying the pleasure of an uproarious active spectatorship "Cheers to Ubuweb http://www.ubu.com/film/debord.html
I'm sure if Debord was alive today, he would almost certainly be extending his analysis of the spectacle to the Internet and social media. He would no doubt be horrified by social media companies like Facebook and Twitter, which monetize our friendships, opinions and emotions. It seems that our
internal thoughts and experience are now commodifiable assets. His viewpoint still bears an uncomfortable truth on our present day lives. One could say that our age is not so much the Society of the Spectacle, as it is the Society of immersion and manipulation, and many simply are so immersed they do not not realize it is happening.
Do we remain passive, carry on being manipulated, relying on the artificiality of the spectacle,or start thinking beyond it's confinement?The future is unwritten
Spectacle (Society of the Spectacle)
Poetry of the Spectacle
Here the SPECTACLE is captured and made to expose itself (if even for a brief moment) by turning its most beloved mystifying commodity, the computer, back onto itself to the benefit of language. It slowly dies a dramatic death of Lettritic convulsions.
SPECTACLE
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived is now merely represented in the distance.
The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images. The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images.
The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual description produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized.
Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the goal of the dominant mode of production. It is not a mere decoration added to the real world. It is the very heart of this real society's unreality. In all its particular manifestations - news, propoganda, advertising, entertainment - the spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by the production. In both form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system. The spectacle also represents the constant presence of this justification since it monopolizes the majority of the time spent outside the production process.
The spectacle is both the meaning and the agenda of our particular socio-economic formation. It is the historical moment in which we are caught.
The spectacle presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned. Itssole message is: "What appears is good, what is good appears." The passive acceptance it demands is already effectively imposed by its monopoly of appearances, its manner of appearing without allowing any reply.
The first stage of the economy's domination of social life is brought about an evident degradation of being into having - human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but what one possessed. The present stage, in which social life has become completely dominated by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from appearing -all "having" must derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances.
POETRY
The problem of language is at the heart of all the struggles between the forces striving to abolish the present alienation and those striving to maintain it. It is inseperable from the very terrain of those struggles. We live within language as within polluted air. Despite what humorists think, words do not play. Words work - on behalf of the dominant organization of life. Yet they are not completely automated: unfortunately for the theoreticians of information words are not in themselves "informationist", they contain forces that can upset the most careful calculations. Words coexist with power in relation analogous to that which proletarians have with power. Employed by it almost full time, exploited for every sense and nonsense that can be squeezed out of them, they still remain in some sense fundamentally alien to it.
Under the control of power, language always designates something other than authentic experience. It is precisely for this reason that a total contestation is possible. The organization of language has fallen into such confusion that the communication imposed by power is exposing itsefl as an imposter and a dupery. An embryonic cybernetic power is vainly trying to put out language under the control of the machines it controls, in such a way that information would henceforth be the only possible communication. Even on this terrain resistances are beng manifested, electronic music could be seen as an attempt ( obviously limited and ambiguous) to reverse the domination by detourning machines to the benefit of language. But there is a much more general and radical opposition that is denouncing all unilateral "communication," in the old form of art as well as in the modern form of informationism. It calls for a communication that undermines all seperate power. Real communication dissolves the state.
Power lives of stolen goods. It creates nothing, it co- opts. If it determined the meaning of words, there would be no poetry but only useful "information." Opposition would be unable to express itself in language; any refusal would be nonverbal, purely lettristic. What is poetry if not the revolutionary moment of language, inseperable as such from the revolutionary moments of history and the history of personal life?
Society of the Spectacle Pt 1 &2
Here Debord's 1967 text is remade into a contemporary context.
Also includes Marshall McLuhan and John Berger
Made by Aska (check the credits for more)
Sound by the amazing Pippin Kenworthy
Pt 1
Pt 2
Put the mirror to the moment make yourself aware
Facilitate, reconcile, get a new idea
The pulsating spectacle, is not easy to forget
Today randomly ordinarily, perception shifts
When the prism cracks, get yourself a new silhouette
Unharness camarardie, viva situationniste!
.
Debord dissolved the SI (proclaiming its victory over history) in 1972, their impact has been assured. Again today, we need to break with conventions, consensus, break out of our desolate paradigms, and learn to be free.
Sadly on November 30th 1994 aged 67, racked by depression, after a life of hard drinking , that had led to a diagnosis of peripheral neuritis, a debilitating and extremely painful condition whereby the body's nerve endings burn away in the isolated village of Champot high in the Auvergne, Guy Debord shot himself with a single bullet to the heart. He remains however one of the most important contemporary thinkers, with a capital place in the history of ideas from the second half pf the second half of the 20th century.
The following film La Societe du Spectacle (Society of the Spectacle) is a black and white 1973 film based on his book. It was Debord's first feature-length film. It uses found footage and detournement in a radical criticism of mass marketing and its role in the alienation of modern society.
The 88 minute film took a year to make and incorporates footage from feature films, industrial films, news footage. advertisements and still photographs. The films include The Battleship Potemkin, October, Chapeav, The New Babylon, The Shanghai Gesture, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Rio Grande, They Died with Their Boots On, Johnny Guitar and Mr Arkadin, as well as other Soviet films.
Events such as the murder of Lee Harvard Oswald (who assassinated U.S, President John F, Kennedy in 1963), the Spanish Civil War of 1936 -1939, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the Paris riots in May 1968 are represented, and people such as Mao Zedong, Richard Nixon and the Spanish anarchist Durutti.Throughout the film, there is a voiceover (of Debord) and inter-titles from The Society of the Spectacle but also texts from the 1968 Occupation Committee of the Sorbonne, Machiavelli, Marx, Tocqueville, Emile Pouget, and Soloviev. Without citations, these quotes are hard to decipher, especially with the subtitles (which exist in the French version) but that is part of Debord's goal "to problematize recept" (Greil and Sanborn) and force the viewer to be active. In addition , the words of some of the authors are detourned through deliberate misquoting.
In 1984, Debord withdrew his films from circulation, because of the negative press and the assassination of his friend and patron Gerard Lebovici. Since Debord's suicide in 1994, Debord's wife Alice Becker-Ho has been promoting Debord's film. A DVD box set titled Guy Debord: Oeuvres cinematographiques completes came out in 2005 and contains Debord's seven film.
The cover of the film is derived from a photo of Life magazine photographer J.R. Eyerman.
On November 28, 1952, at the Paramount Theatre(Oakland, California), took place the premiere screening of film Bwana Devil, by Arch Oboler, the first full-length, color 3D (aka ' Natural Vision') motion picture. Eyerman took a series of photos of the audience wearing 3D glasses.
Life magazine used one of the photos as the cover of a brochure about the 146-1955 decade. The photo employed by Debord shows the audience in " a virtually trance-lie state of absorption, their faces grim, their lips pursed," however, in the one chosen bt Life, " the spectators are laughing, their expressions of hilarity conveying the pleasure of an uproarious active spectatorship "Cheers to Ubuweb http://www.ubu.com/film/debord.html
I'm sure if Debord was alive today, he would almost certainly be extending his analysis of the spectacle to the Internet and social media. He would no doubt be horrified by social media companies like Facebook and Twitter, which monetize our friendships, opinions and emotions. It seems that our
internal thoughts and experience are now commodifiable assets. His viewpoint still bears an uncomfortable truth on our present day lives. One could say that our age is not so much the Society of the Spectacle, as it is the Society of immersion and manipulation, and many simply are so immersed they do not not realize it is happening.
Do we remain passive, carry on being manipulated, relying on the artificiality of the spectacle,or start thinking beyond it's confinement?The future is unwritten
Spectacle (Society of the Spectacle)
Poetry of the Spectacle
Here the SPECTACLE is captured and made to expose itself (if even for a brief moment) by turning its most beloved mystifying commodity, the computer, back onto itself to the benefit of language. It slowly dies a dramatic death of Lettritic convulsions.
SPECTACLE
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived is now merely represented in the distance.
The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images. The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images.
The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual description produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized.
Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the goal of the dominant mode of production. It is not a mere decoration added to the real world. It is the very heart of this real society's unreality. In all its particular manifestations - news, propoganda, advertising, entertainment - the spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by the production. In both form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system. The spectacle also represents the constant presence of this justification since it monopolizes the majority of the time spent outside the production process.
The spectacle is both the meaning and the agenda of our particular socio-economic formation. It is the historical moment in which we are caught.
The spectacle presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned. Itssole message is: "What appears is good, what is good appears." The passive acceptance it demands is already effectively imposed by its monopoly of appearances, its manner of appearing without allowing any reply.
The first stage of the economy's domination of social life is brought about an evident degradation of being into having - human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but what one possessed. The present stage, in which social life has become completely dominated by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from appearing -all "having" must derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances.
POETRY
The problem of language is at the heart of all the struggles between the forces striving to abolish the present alienation and those striving to maintain it. It is inseperable from the very terrain of those struggles. We live within language as within polluted air. Despite what humorists think, words do not play. Words work - on behalf of the dominant organization of life. Yet they are not completely automated: unfortunately for the theoreticians of information words are not in themselves "informationist", they contain forces that can upset the most careful calculations. Words coexist with power in relation analogous to that which proletarians have with power. Employed by it almost full time, exploited for every sense and nonsense that can be squeezed out of them, they still remain in some sense fundamentally alien to it.
Under the control of power, language always designates something other than authentic experience. It is precisely for this reason that a total contestation is possible. The organization of language has fallen into such confusion that the communication imposed by power is exposing itsefl as an imposter and a dupery. An embryonic cybernetic power is vainly trying to put out language under the control of the machines it controls, in such a way that information would henceforth be the only possible communication. Even on this terrain resistances are beng manifested, electronic music could be seen as an attempt ( obviously limited and ambiguous) to reverse the domination by detourning machines to the benefit of language. But there is a much more general and radical opposition that is denouncing all unilateral "communication," in the old form of art as well as in the modern form of informationism. It calls for a communication that undermines all seperate power. Real communication dissolves the state.
Power lives of stolen goods. It creates nothing, it co- opts. If it determined the meaning of words, there would be no poetry but only useful "information." Opposition would be unable to express itself in language; any refusal would be nonverbal, purely lettristic. What is poetry if not the revolutionary moment of language, inseperable as such from the revolutionary moments of history and the history of personal life?
Society of the Spectacle Pt 1 &2
Here Debord's 1967 text is remade into a contemporary context.
Also includes Marshall McLuhan and John Berger
Made by Aska (check the credits for more)
Sound by the amazing Pippin Kenworthy
Pt 1
Pt 2
Put the mirror to the moment make yourself aware
Facilitate, reconcile, get a new idea
The pulsating spectacle, is not easy to forget
Today randomly ordinarily, perception shifts
When the prism cracks, get yourself a new silhouette
Unharness camarardie, viva situationniste!
.
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