By: Tom Bunyard (2025) related tags: #GuyDebord #SpectacleSociety

I started reading the book, and I felt a bit hazy on what was even being truly referenced. I've long known that people have used this book to talk about visual imagery, but the overly simplistic structure of Debord's writing seems to imply something else. As a result, I found this (among others). This singular line has helped clarify what it is that I found initially jarring:

We are ‘spectators’, for Debord, not just of too many screens and images, but of an entire form of social life that escapes our collective control; and, in his view, that state of affairs could only be superseded through total, transformative, revolutionary social change (hence the sense in which the book was committed, to quote Debord’s remark again, to ‘doing harm to spectacular society’).

And along with this line:

Debord and the SI described a whole host of different things as ‘spectacular’: religion, dogma, hierarchical and institutional roles, forms of political leadership, etc., were all cast in these terms.

The confusion that I had about what it was doing is made clear, especially since I have only ever seen this book utilised within media critique... and most of what I've read of the book thus far felt to be dealing with far more than visual imagery (while, as this article also indicates, utilising visual imagery as a more concrete example).

I want to keep the following lines for their framing:

Debord’s central claim, then, is that we have become ‘spectators’ not just of a world full of TV screens and visual imagery, but of a mode of social life governed by our own alienated activity. We are alienated passengers, in his view, within a form of social life that we create, interact within, and perpetuate, but which moves and operates according to its own effectively independent agenda; dazzled ‘spectators’ of a kind of collective performance, albeit a performance in which we ourselves act

The revolution that the book advocates (and which, we should remember, it purported to herald) is thus a new mode of communism in which collective control would be taken not just of the means of providing for society’s material needs, but of the means of shaping lived time itself.

And I do want to keep these bits around because the reception to what is (largely) quite obvious is amusing and highlights how media doesn't actually do the job we're told it does:

The Times Literary Supplement went so far as to describe The Society of the Spectacle and The Revolution of Everyday Life, respectively, as ‘the Capital and What Is to Be Done, as it were, of the new movement’; Le Monde spoke of the ‘negative and provocative violence’ of the two books’ tone and demands, and remarked that their extravagant hostility ‘staggers thought’, and made reading them ‘disagreeable’; The New York Times observed that, for Debord, ‘One has to destroy all authority, especially that of the state, to negate all moral restrictions, to expose fossilised knowledge and all “establishments”.’

It doesn't matter that May 1968 would happen after their publication (or, it does, but not insofar as it should for deeming these ideas “dangerous”) because the ideas here are not altogether inaccurate or dangerous. They are largely honest and very accurate, even more so today.

As [Debord] later remarked, ‘Many [books] are not even opened; few are copied on to walls’.

This is just cool.

Unitary urbanism, psychogeography, the dérive and détournement all emerged at this time; and most importantly, so too did the constructed situation.

This is something I want to come back to because it sounds intriguing.

Debord held that the early decades of the twentieth century had harboured the potential for an entirely new form of social life: one in which art and the everyday might fuse. This possibility was afforded by the potential conjunction, at that time, of the revolutionary workers’ movement and avant-garde art. The workers’ movement was a growing power, and it was demanding more from life; avant-garde art, meanwhile, was attacking the norms and institutions of the extant art world, and whilst moving ever further away from functioning as a means of representing life, it was also gesturing, in surrealism, towards ways of enriching and refiguring life itself. This moment of potential was, however, missed: the workers’ movement succumbed to hierarchy and authority, art degenerated into the empty repetition of familiar forms, and the commodity triumphed (this set of ideas lies at the root of Debord’s later contentions that the emergence of a fully spectacular society could be dated back to the start of the twentieth century). This led to the view that, for culture to advance to a new stage, and to thereby realise the potential that it harboured, grand social change was required; and in the absence of revolution – caused, in part, by the workers’ movements subordination to the strictures of party and statist politics – culture had been stagnating. In the 1950s, then, Debord can be found remarking that the ‘retreat of revolutionary politics’ had caused the ‘movement of cultural discovery’ to culminate ‘around 1930’, and that ‘the premises for revolution, on the cultural as well as the strictly political level, are not only ripe, they have begun to rot’.

There are actually a lot of pieces that I just want to keep to return to. I don't have any commentary on this except that it just feels... prescient? But it's really not because he was already seeing it in the 1950s and 1960s, and we're just in an exaggerated environment of this shit.

Their relationship with the SI broke down in 1962 over mutual accusations of plagiarism, but it was clearly a productive exchange for both parties.

Sometimes the plagiarism thing really just sounds more like who wants credit for “world changing” rather than anything of value.

In 1962, the SI underwent a major split. By this time, Debord had come to the view that, if the task was to alter society and culture, so as to enable an entirely new form of social life, then the role of a genuine avant-garde, within this context, must be to foment social revolution; and, if the extant art-world was part of the problem that needed to be addressed, continued engagement within the art-world could only be reactionary.

Even outside of art, this feels like a relevant thought to have. Much in the way that people want to work within institutions to “change them from inside,” but the institution often changes them before they can change it.