Society of the Spectacle
Comments on the Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord critiques the pervasive influence of the spectacle in modern society, exploring its impact on reality, historical knowledge, and individual perception, while arguing against its integrated control over culture and politics.
monoskop.orgThe Situationist writer, Guy Debord, whose book, The Society of the Spectacle, became the bible of the ‘événements’ in France in 1968, denounced the commoditisation of leisure and accused capitalism of colonising all aspects of life. To view the spectacle –in this case
Elizabeth Wilson • Love Game: A History of Tennis, from Victorian Pastime to Global Phenomenon
Here are the first two sentences of Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle: “In post-industrial societies where mass production and media predominate, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly experienced has been replaced with its representation in the form of images.” He wrote that in 1967! Imagine wh... See more
Haley Nahman • #100: New idea trending
Keely Adler added
Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle: “Debord introduced the concept of recuperation: the process by which subcultural ideas and images become commodified and reincorporated into mainstream society,” she writes. In other words, ideas that subvert the establishment tend to get adapted by the establishment in their most docile forms, and are thu... See more
Haley Nahman • #100: New idea trending
Keely Adler added
The spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by an accumulation of images that serve to alienate us from a genuinely lived life. The image is thus an historical mutation of the form of commodity fetishism.
The Society of the Spectacle Quotes by Guy Debord
sari added
Spectacle, he writes, is the expropriation of that possibility; it is the production of a one-way communication that he characterizes as “a generalized autism.”
Jonathan Crary • 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
“Products” are hardly just devices or physical apparatuses, but various services and interconnections that quickly become the dominant or exclusive ontological templates of one’s social reality.