kagablog

Debord began to use the word ’spectacle’ with increasing frequency around the middle part of 1963. The term had been first used in print in L’Internationale situationniste 3 in 1959, in an article probably penned by Guy Debord, which gave rare approval to Alain Resnais’ film Hiroshima mon amour. This film, scripted by Marguerite Duras, had caused a stir on its release when its unconventional treatment of a Franco-Japanese love story had led to its being dropped as France’s official entry at that year’s Cannes Festival, apparently on the grounds that it was too uncommercial, too literary and too political for American tastes. The film’s visual content was uncompromising. The famous opening shots of the film present a montage of images of Hiroshima and the wounded, fragmented bodies of its inhabitants, intercut with images of a couple making love. These are accompanied by Emannuelle Riva’s elliptical, stilted commentary. There is an essential separation between voice and image which marks out the film’s theme of memory and dislocation.

It was precisely this aspect of the film which pleased Debord, who saw this deliberate disassociation of text and image as being in line with the various Situationist strategies that sought to ‘reduce the cinema to nothing’. This technique, he wrote, marked a leap forward in the development of the ‘cinematographic spectacle of the world’ towards ‘free cinema’, a cinema which, like the ‘free jazz’ currently espoused by Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, sought to extend the limits of the art to breaking point. ‘It is likely that than’, Debord wrote, ‘the freedom of the cinema will be superseded, forgotten, in the development of a world where the spectacle will no longer be dominant. The fundamental feature of the modern spectacle is the representation of its own ruin.’

The term ’spectacle’ was here used for the first time not only to denote visual representations of the world which denied or distorted its reality, but also an ideology which shaped that representation. The phrase, as it was now being used by Debord, came from Nietzsche. In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy in the Spirit of Music, Nietzsche had argued that the origins of all modern forms of thought lay in the realization that life could not be truly represented in art.

This separation between art and life, for Nietzsche, had a political dimension. More specifically, it was traditionally argued by contemporary commentators that the ‘chorus’ in Greek tragedy represented the mood and will of the people. This, argued Nietzsche, was patently untrue, indeed an impossibility in a community which had not yet begun to conceive of political relations in terms of democracy or equality. The chorus were then passive spectators of a process in which they could neither participate nor act upon. ‘What kind of artistic genre,’ wrote Nietzsche, prefiguring Situationist positions on art, ‘could possibly be extracted from the concept of the “spectator”, and find its true form in the “spectator as such”? The spectator without the spectacle is an absurd notion. We fear that the birth of tragedy is to be explained neither by any high esteem for the moral authenticity of the masses nor by any concept of the spectator without a spectacle: and we consider the problem too deep to be even troubled by such superficial considerations.’

The realization of this separation, according to Nietzsche, was the moment which heralded the arrival of ‘the second spectator’ who was no longer passive or controlled by events. This ’second spectator’ was also in this sense what Nietzsche called ‘the theoretical man’, the artist who was able to announce a break with the past and imagine the future. Towards the end of his life Nietzsche also began to use the term ’spectacle’ to denote the lack of real meaning in the passing events of modern life. ‘A riot or a newspaper in a big city are both deep down no more than “spectacle”, an absence of authenticity,’ Nietzsche wrote in a fragment from 1880, prefiguring early definitions of what the Situationists termed ‘the modern spectacle’.

Andrew Hussey
The Game of War: The life and death of Guy Debord
2001

Guy Debord’s THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE, originally published in 1967, is easily the most important radical book of the twentieth century.

Contrary to popular misconceptions, Debord’s book is neither an ivory tower “philosophical discourse” nor an impulsive “rant” or “protest.” It is an effort to clarify the nature of the situation in which we find ourselves and the advantages and drawbacks of various methods for changing it. It examines the most fundamental tendencies and contradictions of the present society — what is really going on behind the spectacular surface phenomena that we are conditioned to perceive as the only reality.

This means that it needs to be reread many times, but it also means that it remains as pertinent as ever while countless radical and intellectual fads have come and gone. As Debord noted in his later “Comments on the Society of the Spectacle” (1988), in the intervening decades the spectacle has become more pervasive than ever, to the point of repressing virtually any awareness of pre-spectacle history or anti-spectacle possibilities: “Spectacular domination has succeeded in raising an entire generation molded to its laws.”

Debord’s strategy is to cut through the mass of false solutions so as to open the way for real ones. His method may seem negative and abstract, but his aim is positive and concrete. No matter how many times you read his book, you will never really understand it until you use it. Which means using your imagination and experimenting for yourself. The purpose of the book is to help you do just that.

* * *

Ken Knabb’s translation of THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE is online at http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord

The translation is also available in book form — http://www.bopsecrets.org/cat.htm

A new PDF version is online at http://www.bopsecrets.org/images/sos.pdf

Debord also made a film of his book, which is available in various formats — http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord.films/index.htm

Related texts by Debord and other members of the Situationist International
are online at http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/index.htm

Until now it has generally been assumed that film is a completely unsuitable medium for presenting revolutionary theory. This view was mistaken. The lack of any serious attempts in this direction stemmed simply from the historical lack of a modern revolutionary theory during virtually the entire period of the cinema’s development; as well as from the fact that the potentials of cinematic composition, despite so many declarations of intent on the part of filmmakers and so much feigned satisfaction on the part of a miserable public, have as yet scarcely been liberated.

Published in 1967, The Society of the Spectacle is a book whose theoretical insights have profoundly influenced the new current of social critique that is now more and more openly undermining the established world order. Its present cinematic adaptation, like the book itself, does not offer a few partial political critiques, but a total critique of the existing world; that is, a critique of all aspects of modern capitalism and of its general system of illusions.

The cinema is itself an integral part of this world, serving as one of the instruments of the separate representation that opposes and dominates the actual proletarianized society. As revolutionary critique engages in battle on the very terrain of the cinematic spectacle, it must thus turn the language of that medium against itself and give itself a form that is itself revolutionary.

The text and images of this film form a coherent whole; but the images are never mere direct illustrations of the text, much less demonstrations of it (cinematic “demonstrations” are in any case never reliable due to the unlimited possibilities of manipulation offered by the unilateral editing of the material). Instead, the film’s use of images (whether photographs, newsclips, or sequences from preexisting films) is governed by the principle of détournement, which the situationists have defined as “communication that includes a critique of itself.” The images through which spectacular society presents itself to itself are taken and turned against it: the spectacle’s means should be treated with insolence. As a result, in a certain sense this film, coming at the end of the cinema’s pseudo-autonomous history, incorporates all the memories of that history. It can thus be seen simultaneously as a historical film, a Western, a love story, a war movie, etc. Like the society it examines, it also presents a number of comical aspects. In talking about the spectacular order, and about the commodity domination that it serves, one is also talking about what this order hides: class struggles and strivings toward real historical life, revolution and its past failures, and the responsibilities for those failures. Nothing in this film is made to please the fashionable blockheads of leftist cinema: it has equal contempt for what they respect and for the style in which they express that respect. One who is capable of understanding and denouncing an entire socio-economic formation will denounce it even in a film. Objections to our “extremism” are meaningless, because current history is already on the verge of going beyond the most extreme possibilities imagined.

Theses that have never before been presented in the cinema will now appear there in a never before seen form, simply because for the first time a filmmaker has undertaken an uncompromising critique.

In the socio-economic context, the total freedom required to create such a film obviously means that the producer must renounce any claim to exert any preliminary control over the director, whether by insisting that he present a synopsis or by seeking to obtain from him any other sort of meaningless commitment. This has been recognized in the contract between the filmmaker and the producer, Simar Films: “It is understood that the filmmaker will carry out his work in complete freedom, without any control or supervision whatsoever, and without even being obliged to pay the slightest attention to any comment that the producer might make regarding any aspect of the content or of the cinematic form that the filmmaker feels appropriate for his film.”

Considering that this film itself expresses its meaning in a sufficiently comprehensible manner, the producer and the filmmaker believe that it is unnecessary to provide any further explanations.

1974

From a Simar Films brochure announcing the opening of Guy Debord’s film The Society of the Spectacle (Paris, April 1974). This translation is from Debord’s Complete Cinematic Works (AK Press, 2003, translated and edited by Ken Knabb), which includes the scripts of all six of Debord’s films along with illustrations, documents and extensive annotations. For further information, see Guy Debord’s Films.

See also The Society of the Spectacle (soundtrack of the film) and The Society of the Spectacle (the book on which it is based).

first published on the web by the bureau of public secrets

music - joel assaizky
vocal & lyrics - aryan kaganof
video edited by the isidore isou remix collective
3min37sec
june 2009

watch it here

http://www.meanwhile.co.za/MEANWHILE8/?p=321

Chapter 1 “Separation Perfected”

But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence… illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.

Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity

1

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

2

The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.

3

The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation.

4

The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.

5

The spectacle cannot be understood as an abuse of the world of vision, as a product of the techniques of mass dissemination of images. It is, rather, a Weltanschauung which has become actual, materially translated. It is a world vision which has become objectified.

6

The spectacle grasped in its totality is both the result and the project of the existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corollary consumption. The spectacle’s form and content are identically the total justification of the existing system’s conditions and goals. The spectacle is also the permanent presence of this justification, since it occupies the main part of the time lived outside of modern production.

7

Separation is itself part of the unity of the world, of the global social praxis split up into reality and image. The social practice which the autonomous spectacle confronts is also the real totality which contains the spectacle. But the split within this totality mutilates it to the point of making the spectacle appear as its goal. The language of the spectacle consists of signs of the ruling production, which at the same time are the ultimate goal of this production.

8

One cannot abstractly contrast the spectacle to actual social activity: such a division is itself divided. The spectacle which inverts the real is in fact produced.

Lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle while simultaneously absorbing the spectacular order, giving it positive cohesiveness.

Objective reality is present on both sides. Every notion fixed this way has no other basis than its passage into the opposite: reality rises up within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real.

This reciprocal alienation is the essence and the support of the existing society.

9

In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false.

10

The concept of spectacle unifies and explains a great diversity of apparent phenomena. The diversity and the contrasts are appearances of a socially organized appearance, the general truth of which must itself be recognized. Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is affirmation of appearance and affirmation of all human life, namely social life, as mere appearance. But the critique which reaches the truth of the spectacle exposes it as the visible negation of life, as a negation of life which has become visible.

11

To describe the spectacle, its formation, its functions and the forces which tend to dissolve it, one must artificially distinguish certain inseparable elements. When analyzing the spectacle one speaks, to some extent, the language of the spectacular itself in the sense that one moves through the methodological terrain of the very society which expresses itself in the spectacle. But the spectacle is nothing other than the sense of the total practice of a social-economic formation, its use of time. It is the historical movement in which we are caught.

12

The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than “that which appears is good, that which is good appears”. The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance.

13

The basically tautological character of the spectacle flows from the simple fact that its means are simultaneously its ends. It is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory.

14

The society which rests on modern industry is not accidentally or superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally spectaclist. In the spectacle, which is the image of the ruling economy, the goal is nothing, development everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself.

15

As the indispensable decoration of the objects produced today, as the general exposé of the rationality of the system, as the advanced economic sector which directly shapes a growing multitude of image-objects, the spectacle is the main production of present-day society.

16

The spectacle subjugates living men to itself to the extent that the economy has totally subjugated them. It is no more than the economy developing for itself. It is the true reflection of the production of things, and the false objectification of the producers.

17

The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life brought into the definition of all human realization the obvious degradation of being into having. The present phase of total occupation of social life by the accumulated results of the economy leads to a generalized sliding of having into appearing, from which all actual “having” must draw its immediate prestige and its ultimate function. At the same time all individual reality has become social reality directly dependent on social power and shaped by it. It is allowed to appear only to the extent that it is not.

18

Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior. The spectacle, as a tendency to make one see the world by means of various specialized mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly), naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs; the most abstract, the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present-day society. But the spectacle is not identifiable with mere gazing, even combined with hearing. It is that which escapes the activity of men, that which escapes reconsideration and correction by their work. It is the opposite of dialogue. Wherever there is independent representation, the spectacle reconstitutes itself.

19

The spectacle inherits all the weaknesses of the Western philosophical project which undertook to comprehend activity in terms of the categories of seeing; furthermore, it is based on the incessant spread of the precise technical rationality which grew out of this thought. The spectacle does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality. The concrete life of everyone has been degraded into a speculative universe.

20

Philosophy, the power of separate thought and the thought of separate power, could never by itself supersede theology. The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion. Spectacular technology has not dispelled the religious clouds where men had placed their own powers detached from themselves; it has only tied them to an earthly base. The most earthly life thus becomes opaque and unbreathable. It no longer projects into the sky but shelters within itself its absolute denial, its fallacious paradise. The spectacle is the technical realization of the exile of human powers into a beyond; it is separation perfected within the interior of man.