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Title: Society of the Spectacle
ISBN: 0946061122
Author:
Guy Debord
Publicate Date: 2005-04-04
Publish: 2005-04-04
List Price: $16.95
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Paperback
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1: One of the most important -- and influential -- books of our age
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.
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2: In the long line of Marxist tracts
Debord was a key member of the Situationists, that notable group of Parisien flaneurs (well, drunks, to be frank) who thought that by traversing the patchwork of the city on foot they could bring down the imposter structures of capitalist society from within. Sadly (or happily, depending on your socio-political point of view), they failed. But Debord's legacy remains in this fascinating book, broken down into Tractatus style fragments, a deeply philosophical book that examines the unreal nature of modern capitalism, the value of the commodity, something false, phoney, unreal. What happens, of course, is disillusionment with the commodity itself - Christmas presents received two days ago, at the time of writing, across the world are already discarded in cupboards, their value next to worthless as attentions move on.
Debord draws greatly on dialectics, that Hegelian structure of world history, inverted in a materialist fashion by Marx. Reality has given way to the spectacular - pseudo cities and countryside, not involving anything of reality or substance. People are alienated, wrapped up in a seizure of commodifying themselves to the hilt. And are miserable, of course. How to resolve this? Well, you could start by walking through the streets of your neighbourhood, intent on reclaiming the genuine and unravelling the structures of capitalism from...
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3: Bad translation? This isn't readable at all.
I'm not sure if the translation is confusing, or the ideas being presented are confusing, or both. But this philosophical book is a lot of words written without saying much. I'm writing this because I purchased the book after reading the 17 reviewers who rated this book five stars. I was looking forward to an excellent treatise.
But instead I found the ideas confusing and random. It was difficult to
determine exactly was being presented.
I did like the Euclidean/Tractatus numbering system for the propositions.
But the ideas in those propositions weren't clearly written or easily understood by me.
To give you some background on me, I'm no fan of Hegel.
Ernest Becker's works give me a lot of insight, as do Nietzsche's.
I think this book assumes the reader is well-versed in Hegelian thought.
Maybe the reader needs to complete the Phenomenology of Mind before this work is accessible.
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4: One of the most important books of the 20th Century
Read it and find out why...
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5: This should be required reading for first years.
I haven't read any of the other translations of this text, however, this one reads quite fluidly.
The scope of the book sets the tone for one's consideration of contemporary events and societal relations. As research for a project on collaboration amongst individuals, the book was helpful in demonstrating that many forces are at work and are behind everything that exists in the world. This relates to collaboration in that each of us in a collaboration brings different histories to the table. The book also helps to illuminate the notion of the impossibility of non-collaboration. Even if the individual is from birth completely independant of others (which of course is quite improbable) their very existance comes into being through the cooperation of at least two separate forces (eg. the parents).
Debord shows us that the (two or more) forces which have led us to this point in history have done so, whether willingly or otherwise, together.
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