Society of the Spectacle [Paperback]

The leading Situationist was not out to win friends and influence people. He was the Andre Breton of the Situationists and excommunicated people from the group because he didn't like their looks. He was also an alcoholic who committed suicide when the booze started to sap his health.

Regardless, his theory of the spectacle remains the only political idea in post-modernism that actually has some practical political uses. (Giorgio Agamben makes quite effective use of it in his Homo Sacer, even if he only mentions it twice.)

What is the spectacle? Debord writes that it is a social relation mediated by images. What the heck does that mean? If you look at modern consumer societies, immense efforts are undertaken by the people in them to keep up appearances, to look healthy and upright. (There are best sellers with titles like How to Win Friends and Influence People.) Debord, like WS Burroughs, says it's all hogwash. It's sort of like in JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, where the protagonist's main complaint about everybody is that they're phony. This remains a vital insight and will last. If you listen to the gangsta rappers right, they're making the same point. (They're just murdering the wrong people. (Just joking, we should ALL get along.))

As for Nicholson-Smith's translation, I can't say I actually like it. He reverts back to the Fredy Perlman translation from Black & Red in some parts, a translation which Debord denounced. A case in point is the mistranslation of Debord's sampling of Hegel that "In the world which is on its head, the true is a moment of the false." It should read, and would be a lot more accessible as, "In the world which is upside down, the true is a moment of the false." This is the translation which is used in the later Comments to the Society of the Spectacle. And you can find a similar phrase in Hegel's Phenomenology. (Just look up "truth" in the index.) If you can find it, buy the far superior and much cheaper Practical Paradise chapbook of this classic.

And the Promised Land, as Debord sees it, is TOTAL CONSUMPTION. This is the edict and goal of contemporary consumer society. The fact that it has grown out of and usurped religious feeling makes the SPECTACLE a competitive product to formal religion. Certainly, Islam feels its power and threat. Certainly, the Middle East is reacting to it, through individual and state sponsored terrorism against the West.

Debord is a difficult read, but ultimately worth it. His insights are penetrating, remarkable, and have proven to be more acute with the passing of time. Private and public over consumption has become a disease and the hallmark of an age that has debt financed prosperity for too long.
For me, Debord's has number of chief insights that signify trouble ahead for our current economic system. One of them is the apparent and obvious falling use values for goods in abundance (many of them psuedo goods - things we don't really need). Having long fulfilled our need for food, clothing, and shelter, our current economic growth is contingent upon consistently manufacturing psuedo needs that must feed upon the boundless desires of persons in an unending pursuit of gratification through purchasing new products and services.

The problem appears when the next disillusionment, Debord tells us, occurs not with religion or politics but within the commodity itself. Product prestige evaporates into vulgarity soon after its purchase...at this point; the actual poverty of production stands revealed - but too late. By this time another product will demand attention...the continuous process of replacement means that fake gratification cannot help but be exposed as new models are released every year but yet remain all to similar. Why upgrade, we ask?

For the sake of Dell, GM, Microsoft, Target, Home Depot and so on, we had certainly better. Herein lies the rub picked off by Debord: "By the time that the society has become contingent upon the economy, the economy has in point of fact become contingent on society...he economy begins to lose its power."
A society/economy built upon an illusion of needs will certainly be a fragile on at best. Such a society/economy, whose growth rests upon expanding the market of pseudo commodities, has apparently developed a penchant for reporting pseudo revenue earnings (think Enron, etc). This is all very predictable and very much Debordian.

Debord is reminiscent of McLuhan, full of arcane wisdom and prolix, and a prophet of the current society nonetheless. He predicted our growing devotion to quantitative trivia that arise from a juxtaposition of roles and competing spectacles, and a never-ending succession of, what he calls, "paltry contests - from competitive sports to elections." All this, he says, fuels an abnormal need for representation, to compensate for the feeling of being at the margins of existence. This seems to be modern man, slavishly devoted to commodities, celebrities, politicians, sports teams and sports heroes, compensating for the loss felt by the dividing line being the self and the world that Debord calls THE SPECTACLE.

Although it is not for lightweights or the nonchalant, I do highly recommend this book as a guide to understanding some of the psychological complexes at work in the new society/economy.