In Progress

Society of the Spectacle is a foundational work from the Situationist movement active in Europe in the 1950s and 60s, written by Guy Debord, founding member and central figure of the group Situationist International. The work applies Adorno and the Frankfurt School’s Marxist theory of the commodification of culture to mass media and society and develops a series of short theses that describe a superficial society concerned above all with image. Debord is operating in a very strongly Marxist framework, which assumes that the proletariat, the commodity, history, and the world operate according to the general principles laid out by Marx. Debord is primarily concerned with the spectacle, a notion that has become a signifier of artifice and hollowness found in popular culture.

Debord offers no epistemological grounding for his idea. He works primarily through shaping a Marxist-inspired lexis of descriptors for characteristics of modern life, and tracing connections from the society to the individual. The primary limitation of the work is that there is simply no evidence used to support Debord’s arguments. The short theses that compose the entirety of the work are digestible and compelling in structure, but are also easy to challenge in validity.

Debord’s ideas have left their mark on modern thinkers in a number of areas, including but hardly limited to media studies and youth culture studies. The notion of society as a spectacle is often employed when discussing popular culture and its alienating effects, and the adjective spectacular is often used to describe apolitical youth concerned with the image in identity through music, fashion, and art.

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Fredy Perlman, Jon Supak. Detroit: Black & Red, 1970. Print.

Posted on November 20th, 2008 by DeepthiW
Filed under: Books, Media, School, Uncategorized