The consequences are both disastrous and innocuous. For Debord, though, the relentless pounding of images had pulverized even that haven. But even as we were alienated from our working lives, Marx assumed that we could still be ourselves outside of work. We are no longer, he announced, what we make. The sun never sets, Debord dryly noted, “on the empire of modern passivity.” And in this passive state, we surrender ourselves to the spectacle.įor Marx, alienation from labor was a defining trait of modernity.
Rather, we reinforce this state of affairs when we lend our attention to the spectacle. We are not just innocent dupes or victims in this cataclysmic shift from being to appearing, he insisted. As one of his biographers, Andy Merrifield, elaborated, “Spectacular images make us want to forget - indeed, insist we should forget.”īut in Debord’s view, forgetting doesn’t absolve us of responsibility. Images have become so ubiquitous, Debord warned, that we no longer remember what it is we have lost. The authentic nature of the products we make with our hands and the relationships we make with our words have been removed, replaced by their simulacra. Like body snatchers, commodities and images have hijacked what we once naïvely called reality. The “image,” for Debord, carried the same economic and existential weight as the notion of “commodity” did for Marx. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.” And perhaps more than any other 20th-century philosophical work, it captures the profoundly odd moment we are now living through, under the presidential reign of Donald Trump.Īs with the first lines from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “The Social Contract” (“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”) and Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” (“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”), Debord, an intellectual descendant of both of these thinkers, opens with political praxis couched in high drama: “The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. With its descriptions of human social life subsumed by technology and images, it is often cited as a prophecy of the dangers of the internet age now upon us. “The Society of the Spectacle” is still relevant today.
It was a thin book in a plain white cover, with an obscure publisher and an author who shunned interviews, but its impact was immediate and far-reaching, delivering a social critique that helped shape France’s student protests and disruptions of 1968. Nearly 50 years ago, Guy Debord’s “The Society of the Spectacle” reached bookshelves in France.