Society of the Spectacle

My title says it all. If you have any interest in understanding the modern system (correctly termed the "spectacle-commodity system" by Debord) read this. Debord's "Comments on the Society of the Spectacle," written 20 years later, is also excellent and might even be a better starting point. It is less dense and more succinct.

"Religion served the interests of the masters, expounding and embellishing what society could not deliver. Power as a separate realm has always been spectacular, but mass allegiance to frozen religious imagery was originally acknowledgment of loss, an imaginary compensation for a poverty of real social activity...the modern spectacle, by contrast, depicts what society can deliver..." 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

Society of Spectacle has sometimes been characterized as a kind of dated meditation on consumer society and media, a diatribe on popular culture and pop psychology. It in fact, a far more important book of political and philosophical thought. Debord eposes the fallacies and perceptions of society and its manipulation and subjegation. In part a revision of scientific Marxism, necessary to account for the divergence (or at least the anomalies) in the path of 20th Century capitalism from that predicted in Capital (as perhaps moderated by the socialist movement), and also a critical response to the utter failure of established communism to produce a free society. The brutal ideological bureaucracy and dictatorship in China and Russia had fully embraced capitalist methods of imposing the illusionary ideals of Debord's thesis on its people, but without capitalism's productive success. This was too much to ignore in the exhilarating, if naive, atmosphere at the barricades in the 60's, which accounts for this books appeal at that time.Society of Spectacle is existentialist Marxism, buttressed by Freud and the behavioural sciences maybe, but still one which retains the fundamental qualitative legacy of Marx and the philosophical thread begun with Hegel. Its a fascinating and challenging book on political theory, one which is an authentic attempt modernize classic communist and anarchist dogma into a theory which fuses with and responds to history and society as a whole. Few people are going to be convinced by this now, but there is a strand of irrefutable truth in its analysis of the consumer society, and the predicament of the individual caught up in our commodity and market driven culture, which makes for a penetrating and worth while read.