the spectacle is the guardian of sleep: Guy Debord
The Society of the Spectacle was written, as Guy Debord once put it, ‘with the deliberate intention of doing harm to spectacular society.’ Following the book’s publication in 1967, he and the Situationist International (SI) declared that it sought ‘nothing other than to overthrow the existing relation of forces in the factories and the streets’, and that it ‘makes no attempt to hide its a priori engagement’ in revolutionary social change. Its intended audience were all ‘those who are enemies of the existing order and who act efficaciously, starting from this position’, not the academics and cultural commentators who would later come to adopt it. Debord reserved particular contempt for such ‘specialists of the semblance of discussions’, especially when they claimed to find value in The Society of the Spectacle whilst shying away from its formidable militancy. ‘Of all those who have quoted from this book in order to acknowledge some importance in it’, he wrote in 1979, ‘I have not seen one up till now who took the risk to say, even briefly, what it was about’.
The situation is not vastly different today: The Society of the Spectacle is often valued as a description of certain aspects of modern society, rather than as an attempt to articulate that society’s transformation. This is not to deny that the book can be employed as a useful tool or reference point in such descriptions. Debord himself acknowledged this, albeit disparagingly: ‘The critical concept of spectacle’, he wrote, ‘can undoubtedly … be vulgarised into a commonplace hollow formula of sociologico-political rhetoric to explain and abstractly denounce everything, and thus serve as a defence of the spectacular system’. Yet the book was meant to do more than this. It was intended to function not just as an interpretation of modern society, but in a manner more akin to a work of strategy, that is, as an intellectual component of a practical, concrete and decidedly combative project of social change.
Debord once stated that he was ‘not a philosopher’, but rather ‘a strategist’. This stance became more prominent in his work during the 1970s, when he became increasingly preoccupied with theorising the patterns of intrigue, surveillance and manoeuvre that followed the uprisings of 1968. 7 He was, however, fascinated by strategy and military history throughout his life, and a ‘strategic’ approach to the role of radical theory can be discerned in his work from at least the late 1950s onwards. He became increasingly invested in Hegelian Marxism and the theme of praxis at that time, and by the early 1960s, he had come to the view that the SI needed to produce theory capable of identifying, clarifying and facilitating such praxis in the revolutionary pursuit of a new form of social life. In many respects, these efforts culminated in The Society of the Spectacle. Like a work of strategy, that book attempted to set out the nature, stakes and challenges of an impending social conflict; and, like any piece of strategy, its value, for Debord, could only be ascertained practically.
This means that one of the ways in which this book might be assessed today is by treating it on its own terms and considering just how efficacious its analyses really were. I shall touch on this below. My primary aim, however, is preliminary to such an assessment: I want to demonstrate that The Society of the Spectacle was indeed meant to function as a contribution towards a project of social transformation, rather than as a mere work of ‘sociologico-political rhetoric’. This will require reconstructing the ideas that underpin its uncompromising drive towards praxis. Doing so will lead to the view that Debord may have been rather more of a philosopher than he wanted to admit, insofar as his ‘strategic’ book rests upon a set of philosophical ideas about time, history and social life.
‘Historical life’
Debord’s theory of ‘spectacle’ is centred around a broadly young-Marxian view of social life, according to which the latter is an ongoing, mutable construction. On this view, the history of human society is a process of constant social change and conflict, in which the norms and practices that articulate social activity are steadily generated, employed, contested and revised. This is a self-constitutive process, for Debord; history is not governed or steered by anything other than human action. It is not always conducted in a fully self-determining manner, however, because the structures that emerge within it can frame their inhabitants’ understanding of their own collective agency in flawed, partial and socially divided ways….
Society of the Spectacle / इमेज – Image: A Poem on Deaths in the Age of Covid
After the truth-shower 