Debord, Guy

Guy Debord (1931–1994) was a founding member of the Situationist International and author of the influential La société du spectacle (1967) (The Society of the Spectacle, 1977). Largely self-taught in avant-garde artistic circles, Debord forged a critique of consumer society grounded in the young Marx and influenced by Henri Lefebvre and, through Lucien Goldman, by the young Georg Lukács. Although he denied the accusation (and the praise), La société du spectacle was often described as the inspirational philosophy behind the Parisian student revolts of May 1968. At the heart of his theory is the thesis that whereas in Marx's day, relations between people appeared to them in the fantastic guise of relations between objects, by the mid 1960s, the role of objects had been overcome ...