Comments on the Society of the Spectacle [Hardcover]

Guy Debord (Author), Malcolm Imrie (Translator)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0860913023 | ISBN-13: 978-0860913023 | Publication Date: January 1991

“Guy Debord is a time bomb, and a difficult one to defuse.”—Michael Löwy.

First published in 1967, Guy Debord's stinging revolutionary critique of contemporary society, The Society of the Spectacle has since acquired a cult status. Credited by many as being the inspiration for the ideas generated by the events of May 1968 in France, Debord's pitiless attack on commodity fetishism and its incrustation in the practices of everyday life continues to burn brightly in today's age of satellite television and the soundbite. In Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, published twenty years later, Debord returned to the themes of his previous analysis and demonstrated how they were all the more relevant in a period when the "integrated spectacle" was dominant. Resolutely refusing to be reconciled to the system, Debord trenchantly slices through the doxa and mystification offered tip by journalists and pundits to show how aspects of reality as diverse as terrorism and the environment, the Mafia and the media, were caught up in the logic of the spectacular society. Pointing the finger clearly at those who benefit from the logic of domination, Debord's Comments convey the revolutionary impulse at the heart of situationism.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Guy Debord is a time bomb, and a difficult one to defuse.A" Michael Lowy --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 104 pages
• Publisher: Verso Books (January 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0860913023
• ISBN-13: 978-0860913023
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,883,152 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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29 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sorry, No Backstage Passes, September 25, 2001

By 

Carmen Salazar (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (Verso Classics) (Paperback)

The book at first seems a slip down a few notches from S.O.T.S. because it is shorter and Debord seems a lot less interested in his topic, or getting us interested in his topic. Who can blame him?

But the brevity of the book makes sense when you realize this--RE: the spectacle, 1) see S.O.T.S. 2) take a look around you from your reading chair 3) ask, what are the few changes in 20 years? 4) write a brief and get back to lived experience.

Some highlights:

The integrated spectacle combines the diffuse, subtle domination of that system which goes by the label "liberal democracy" with tactics practiced by the concentrated, dictatorial mode of the spectacle in past communisms and facsisms. Which means: today, the rulers of the integrated spectacle dictate/script the appearance of an ever-unfolding narrative/fantasy of liberal democracy, complete with all the nitty-gritty details, plot twists and turns, shocking surprises, and pleasant mysteries at which to gawk and gasp and coo. Caravaggio would be jealous of such veristic, theatrical bravado! But what is really happening is something else altogether, hidden behind the misinformation and unverifiable information in the spectacle.

Terrorism is the invented enemy of the perfected, integrated, yet fragile spectacle, which needs an external enemy, seemingly worse than itself, in order to look good and survive by comparison.

Secrecy is everywhere and yet we accept it in passing (our state of alienation conditions us to know nothing about too much anyway, so secrecy seems natural, almost a relief from concern). Is anyone asking: Do we need to know anything more than what we are told by the spectacle? Is is even possible to know more?

".....Eddieeeee, anoootherrr drinkkkkk!!!...."

Experts do our thinking for us, or at least we are not given enough information in a condition of generalized secrecy to make up our own minds. Experts are intercessors, like priests of old, who stand between us and the spectacular governments with their ultimate knowledge of what's really up in the universe. And we must respond to their statements, which can be lies or truths (but we'll never know), with FAITH, since government usurps the position formerly held by God.

Finally, the integrated spectacle has made a whole new method of government possible. Debord wonders if the rulers of the spectacle have yet to realize what they can do with their new spectacular tools? Will the possiblilites become apparent in a flash of lightening?

How will we spectators know if and when this has occured?

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sequel to one of the greatest works of our age, May 8, 2008

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Robert Moore (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (Verso Classics) (Paperback)

Guy Debord's THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE is one of the most widely quoted and important works of the past fifty years. Society as spectacle has become one of the most frequently used descriptors for modern consumer society and the media that reinforces its basic principles. For instance, in only the past couple of weeks I have encountered frequent mentions of Debord in Telotte's REPLICATIONS: A ROBOTIC HISTORY OF THE SCIENCE FICTION FILM as well as an essay on a number of recent important SF films by Bukatman (contained in Kuhn's first anthology of essays on SF film, ALIEN ZONE) entitled "Who Programs You? The Science Fiction of the Spectacle." One encounters Debord's central image in literary critics like Fredric Jameson and a host of writers on popular culture such as Greil Marcus (especially in his LIPSTICK TRACES: A SECRET HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY).

Marcus's discussion of the Spectacle is at best vague, but I believe that is part of the source of its power. One sees -- to stay on the level of the SF film -- in movies like ROBOCOP the spectacle in full bloom, as the mass media through advertising pushes onto the public utterly irrational products like the 6000 SUX, a large luxury automobile that explicitly celebrates its horrible gas mileage and somehow makes this a reason for desiring it (in the course of the film a gunman holding hostages makes one of his demands a huge car that gets "really sh*tty gas mileage, like the 6000 SUX"). One can associate a wide range of phenomena with the Spectacle, from the endless hawking of products that are supposed to result in "a better you" to political regimes like the Bush administration that used the explicit, bald-faced lie as its primary tool for governing to our endless preoccupation with pseudo-celebrities like Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and the contestants on AMERICAN IDLE (yeah I know that is spelled wrong). It is a flexible and versatile image that gets at our brute suspicion that our world is increasingly obsessed with what is not important but with what is trivial and unimportant. Debord's insight that the system of the spectacle elevates untruths to the level of uncontested beliefs is constantly on view, such as the absurd contention that the American news media -- one of the most conservative and compliant to the needs of the corporations that own it -- is "liberal." And when entities as the very conservative American news media or politicians like the fiscally conservative Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter are defined as "liberal" it shifts the "center" so far to the right as to make the far, far right seem mainstream. And the few voices that point this out -- such as Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who points out that he is, while the most liberal current member of the U. S. Supreme Court, in fact a moderate conservative -- are ignored. The celebrities, the pageant, the epic verbiage, the spectacle obscures history and prevents any other understanding either of history or of what kind of society would actually serve our real needs.

Both the major virtue and a major vice of both THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE and Debord's COMMENTS are the almost complete lack of structure. The former is written as a series of over 200 "Theses" that ramble over a host of matters. These are loosely arranged in chapters but I emphasize the word "loosely." Many comments are immediately clear and easily understood. Some passages are opaque to anyone who is not intimate with the most obscure debates concerning Marxist and Communist history. Some theses are brilliantly written and cut to the heart of our contemporary society; some theses are so dull and irrelevant that they may be guilty of killing brain cells. To say that THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE is uneven is an understatement. The upside is that if you don't understand one page, nothing has been said to prevent you from understanding the next; if one page is flat, the next can be thrilling.

COMMENTS ON THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE is, compared to the earlier work, very easy to read and understand. There is still some vagueness, but there is little that is impenetrable. It does a somewhat better job of connecting up the various bits and parts. He is more explicit here about precisely what his targets are. There might be a small parallel to a passage in Kierkegaard that he quotes at length in THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE. PHILOSOPHICAL FRAGMENTS (actually "Crumbs" -- it is a Biblical reference to the crumbs that fell from the rich man's table; here Kierkegaard imagines himself as the poor subjective thinker who has to content himself with the crumbs from the table of the great objective philosopher Hegel -- so far no translator has been willing to give the book the less impressive but more accurate title) deals with the problem of Christianity "algebraically" (in the Swenson translation), while the much larger sequel CONCLUDING UNSCIENTIFIC POSTSCRIPT "clothes it in its historical dress." So THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE is more abstract; the COMMENTS more concrete. He makes several explicit (and scathing) references to Reagan; his allusions in the first book are far more illusive.

Despite Debord's hesitancy to be as clear as he might about his overall argument, his intent is clear: to indict the alliance and collusion between mass media, celebrity culture, market capitalism (and its expression in consumerism -- nicely captures in the title of Lizabeth Cohen's A CONSUMERS' REPUBLIC: THE POLITICS OF MASS CONSUMPTION IN POSTWAR AMERICA), and politics. And by remaining less than utterly specific, he made his work all that much more usable by other thinkers and writers. THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE remains one of the most important books for anyone interested in modern culture and society with which to be familiar, while the COMMENTS is an important tool in aiding that familiarity.

5 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Debord, as always, is brillant., February 1, 2006

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Crag Talent (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (Verso Classics) (Paperback)

Should be read in conjunction with the Society of the Spectacle for full understanding, but can stand on its own.

Notice how accurately Debord predicts, in the 1980s, the current neverending and unwinnable "war on terrorism" that the spectacle system produced.