Society of the Spectacle

The writings of Guy Debord, and the idea of a society of almost total commodity-based reification the society of the spectacleis likely to remain the most significant legacy of Situationist thought. Debord's major work, The Society of the Spectacle, published in 1967, is a critique on the nature of the individual's identity in French society.

Debord was born in Paris in 1931 and grew up in the Mediterranean city of Cannes. He dropped out of the University of Paris, where he had been accepted to study law, to become a poet, revolutionary writer, and filmmaker. He founded the Lettrist International (perhaps most famous for disrupting the Cannes Film Festival in 1951) with Gil J. Wolman. This is a postsurrealist group of poets and writers that seeks the destruction of bourgeois cultural ideas and values by reducing its languagesymbolized by the written wordto onomatopoeic syllables. The Lettrist ideas and interventions are represented by the journal ION. From 1957, Debord determined the actions of the Situationist International (SI), an activist movement that sought to set itself up as “the only contemporary power against the forces of the past.” At the founding meeting, Debord presented a programmatic text titled “Report on the Construction of Situations,” in which he outlined the strategies of the SI in relation to the cultural avant-garde. In the 1960s, Debord took the leading role in the SI movement and was a supporter of the Paris uprising of 1968. His major written work is the SI-inspired The Society of the Spectacle. In the 1970s, he disbanded the SI movement, and continued with filmmaking supported by the financial backing of Gerard Lebovici. Debord's two major films are the Society of the Spectacle of 1973, and the autobiographical We Turn in a Circle at Night and We Are Consumed by Fire (In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni) of 1981. Debord committed suicide (shooting himself through the heart at his cottage in Champot) on November 30, 1994.

The SI is a political and artistic movement that centered on Debord's ideas and interventions. The movement is represented by a journal of the same name published between 1958 and 1969. Debord and his colleagues attempt to create a series of strategies to engage in Marxist class struggle by reclaiming a sense of individual autonomy from the pervasive embrace of the spectacle: “All of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles” (The Society of the Spectacle, p. 12). These strategies include the most-cited neologisms derive and detournement, and draw on the traditions of the historical avant-garde, Dada, and surrealism in particular. Derive might be described as a productive wandering, a Situationist drifting through the city to map the pyschogeography of different communities. Rather than being imprisoned by the daily routines of life, Debord urged citizens to follow their emotions in such wonderings and reconsider the urban spaces in which they and others live and work; this idea allies with Henri Lefebvre's call for the Critique of Everyday Life. Such wanderings led Debord to the belief that cities and their modes of spatial organization control populations through their design (the notion of spatial politics). Detournement suggests diversion, deflection, or hijacking for prohibited or political purposes. In this strategy, an artist reuses well-known elements to create a new work with a different, often contrary, message. This notion is anticipated by Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades, Bertolt Brecht's understanding of Umfunktionerung, and Dada photomontages. This strategy is also practiced contemporarily, as in Andy Warhol's Coca-Cola bottles, Brillo boxes, and Campbell's soup cans, in which consumer gratification is mimicked and appropriated, or in the work of the Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles, who silk-screens political messages onto empty glass Coca-Cola bottles and then “reintroduces” [Page 774]them into the capitalist system. Such strategies, in the hands of the Situationists, attempt to confront the power of the spectacle with its own commodity detritus. Capitalist products thus subvert capitalism itself.

...