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3.93 AVERAGE
3.93 AVERAGE
informative
reflective
sad
fast-paced
I've purchased and given this book away more times than I can possibly remember. One of the great works of Situationism in general and Debord in particular. I find this work to become more and more relevant as time goes on. It seemed every time I pick it up again after a lapse of a year or two there's some further incursion of the Spectacle, some additional screen, some extra inch of mediation, to contend with.
challenging
dark
informative
slow-paced
This is not an easy book.
Translated directly from the French, it is dense and often impenetrable. Debord forsakes any responsibility other than expounding his theory directly, which left me reading and re-reading pages to try and follow his path. And he leans heavily on Marxist, post-Marxist structuralist, and other ideological vocabularies, relying on a shared foundation of understanding that is likely rare these days.
And that may be part of the point. The current society of the spectacle, in the end, is distraction that serves to separate us from history or the idea that it can be any other way than the market demands. Connecting ourselves to prior modes of thought, or god forbid any form of class-consciousness is strictly verboten. We no longer are, we have, and moreover, we no longer really have, but only appear.
Understanding is unnecessary because an inner life has become a liability in the Spectacle.
It is remarkable that this book, written in the mid-sixties, is so prescient about the direction of our society, where production has accelerated to the point where consumption is a full-time job and desire is mediated by influencers. It is the dense and inscrutable partner to a set of books from the period, like “Amusing Ourselves to Death” or “Small is Beautiful” that make the 60s such a wonderfully prescient source of ideas about understanding our life and fate.
We have been effectively erased by the ideology of mass culture, want, addiction, and influence. We exist to work, and have relegated life to the space of “non-work,” and it will destroy us until we see the spectacle for what it is, just the empty, gaping maw of the market and its relentless need to destroy our sense of solidarity, diversity, and identity in a morass of non-fulfilling consumption.
This is a book for radicals, and I hope it finds its mark.
Translated directly from the French, it is dense and often impenetrable. Debord forsakes any responsibility other than expounding his theory directly, which left me reading and re-reading pages to try and follow his path. And he leans heavily on Marxist, post-Marxist structuralist, and other ideological vocabularies, relying on a shared foundation of understanding that is likely rare these days.
And that may be part of the point. The current society of the spectacle, in the end, is distraction that serves to separate us from history or the idea that it can be any other way than the market demands. Connecting ourselves to prior modes of thought, or god forbid any form of class-consciousness is strictly verboten. We no longer are, we have, and moreover, we no longer really have, but only appear.
Understanding is unnecessary because an inner life has become a liability in the Spectacle.
It is remarkable that this book, written in the mid-sixties, is so prescient about the direction of our society, where production has accelerated to the point where consumption is a full-time job and desire is mediated by influencers. It is the dense and inscrutable partner to a set of books from the period, like “Amusing Ourselves to Death” or “Small is Beautiful” that make the 60s such a wonderfully prescient source of ideas about understanding our life and fate.
We have been effectively erased by the ideology of mass culture, want, addiction, and influence. We exist to work, and have relegated life to the space of “non-work,” and it will destroy us until we see the spectacle for what it is, just the empty, gaping maw of the market and its relentless need to destroy our sense of solidarity, diversity, and identity in a morass of non-fulfilling consumption.
This is a book for radicals, and I hope it finds its mark.
Está especialmente bien la parte en la que se molesta en intentar explicar qué está diciendo.
Boy this was a challenging read. Either I'm not smart enough to understand most of what he wrote, or he has a serious clarity problem. Either way, I understood maybe 20% of it, but I suspect I agree with 99%.
Society of the Spectacle may be considered a classic in the modern Marxist cannon. It is composed of about 221 aphorisms divided between 9 chapters:
1. Separation Perfected
2. The Commodity as Spectacle
3. Unity and Division within Appearances
4. The Proletariat as Subject and Representation
5. Time and History
6. Spectacular Time
7. Environmental Planning
8. Negation and Consumption in the Cultural Sphere
9. Ideology in Material Form
Within these chapters, Guy Debord lays out his foundational thesis of the spectacle which is “not a collection of images; rather a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (Appr. #4). At his time, Debord knew nothing of social media. Therefore, the images that mediated social relationships (as commodities) were most likely that of film, television, print advertisements, and art-as-commodity.
In terms of popular understanding, chapters one through three are the most influential chapters of the book. Just as Marx’s starting point in Capital is the Commodity, Debord’s starting point is his own historical position when images have become commodities. For this reason, it is vital for readers to have at least a basic understanding of Marx’s theory of the Commodity, as it is discussed in detail.
But the ‘Commodity as Spectacle’ is merely a starting point! In chapter 4, Debord continues to leverage interesting criticisms of 20th century Marxist projects, anarchism, social democracy, and bourgeoisie production. Chapters 5 and 6 are basically a genealogy of time which shows how by converting time into value, capitalism has continued to alienate humans from their lived experience. In the later chapters, we find many of Debord’s positive and negative proposals.
Negative: To eradicate the conditions that abstract time, and separate us from our lives experience.
Positive: To create an immediate bond of theory and practice in the form of direct democracy and workers councils.
Is this book worth reading? Yes. However, readers should be aware that Debord’s dialectal writing style often makes concepts more challenging then they need to be. With that being said, this rigor is what makes Debord so enjoyable. For me, it’s not a boook you read once, but one that you constantly return to.
1. Separation Perfected
2. The Commodity as Spectacle
3. Unity and Division within Appearances
4. The Proletariat as Subject and Representation
5. Time and History
6. Spectacular Time
7. Environmental Planning
8. Negation and Consumption in the Cultural Sphere
9. Ideology in Material Form
Within these chapters, Guy Debord lays out his foundational thesis of the spectacle which is “not a collection of images; rather a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (Appr. #4). At his time, Debord knew nothing of social media. Therefore, the images that mediated social relationships (as commodities) were most likely that of film, television, print advertisements, and art-as-commodity.
In terms of popular understanding, chapters one through three are the most influential chapters of the book. Just as Marx’s starting point in Capital is the Commodity, Debord’s starting point is his own historical position when images have become commodities. For this reason, it is vital for readers to have at least a basic understanding of Marx’s theory of the Commodity, as it is discussed in detail.
But the ‘Commodity as Spectacle’ is merely a starting point! In chapter 4, Debord continues to leverage interesting criticisms of 20th century Marxist projects, anarchism, social democracy, and bourgeoisie production. Chapters 5 and 6 are basically a genealogy of time which shows how by converting time into value, capitalism has continued to alienate humans from their lived experience. In the later chapters, we find many of Debord’s positive and negative proposals.
Negative: To eradicate the conditions that abstract time, and separate us from our lives experience.
Positive: To create an immediate bond of theory and practice in the form of direct democracy and workers councils.
Is this book worth reading? Yes. However, readers should be aware that Debord’s dialectal writing style often makes concepts more challenging then they need to be. With that being said, this rigor is what makes Debord so enjoyable. For me, it’s not a boook you read once, but one that you constantly return to.
My reading and studies in philosophy aren't really in-depth enough, I don't think, for me to say anything particularly enlightening about Debord's most famous little book here. What I think I've understood from it is fascinating and I think still quite relevant--if not even more so than at the time of the book's composition. I think that the spectacle is still growing in its reification of social life, if perhaps a tad more interactive in the age of the web--or at least I hope that's the case.
I've had Zone Books big compendium of Situationist writing for some time and was going to settle in to read that to get a bigger picture of the group's thinking as a whole, so I thought I'd refresh my memory of Society beforehand--as I had read it back in the late 1980s when I was first led to the SI through Malcolm MacLaren, Jamie Reed, and the Sex Pistols. Now I kind of wish I'd started with the bigger book as much of Society, I fear, was over my head. The most challenging thing about the book, in a way, is figuring out precisely what Debord means by "the spectacle." I mean, I feel like I get it. Mass media, television, movies... But then art is implicated, or at least popular (really corporate) art such as televised and Hollywood narratives. It's a pretty broad concept in a single word. And, as a fiction writer, I began wondering what role art plays in this manifesto of a kind of praxis that might liberate humanity/break down the social classes that Debord outlines here. How much is my own writing a part of the spectacle and what can I do to liberate humanity from the a-historical spectacular class stasis? I wish Debord were still around to tell me.
OK, on to the greater book and, hopefully, greater comprehension on my part.
I've had Zone Books big compendium of Situationist writing for some time and was going to settle in to read that to get a bigger picture of the group's thinking as a whole, so I thought I'd refresh my memory of Society beforehand--as I had read it back in the late 1980s when I was first led to the SI through Malcolm MacLaren, Jamie Reed, and the Sex Pistols. Now I kind of wish I'd started with the bigger book as much of Society, I fear, was over my head. The most challenging thing about the book, in a way, is figuring out precisely what Debord means by "the spectacle." I mean, I feel like I get it. Mass media, television, movies... But then art is implicated, or at least popular (really corporate) art such as televised and Hollywood narratives. It's a pretty broad concept in a single word. And, as a fiction writer, I began wondering what role art plays in this manifesto of a kind of praxis that might liberate humanity/break down the social classes that Debord outlines here. How much is my own writing a part of the spectacle and what can I do to liberate humanity from the a-historical spectacular class stasis? I wish Debord were still around to tell me.
OK, on to the greater book and, hopefully, greater comprehension on my part.
I feel smarter than everyone else for having read this book. Many occurrences of "bourgeoisie" and "proletariat". Where are my Gauloises
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced