An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord’s ‘The Society of the Spectacle’ | Hacker News Reader

An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord’s ‘The Society of the Spectacle’

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87 pointschippy20 comments

I've felt endless frustration with Debord's and SI's ideas since I stumbled on them about 10 years ago. I know there is something hidden beneath this life, and these works are simply pointing in its general direction. For a long time I thought truth was encompassed by the concept of "authenticity", in terms of expression and being as a human. That idea of mine was struck down pretty swiftly by a simpatico social theorist I admired on Twitter, he responded to my question, "What is authenticity, exactly?" with the answer "Don't worry, nothing is real. Everything is constructed."

Should I live in the woods as a hermit? Not engage with consumerism? What do I do with this information?

These questions have been the main source of my frustration. The closest lifestyle I've encountered that jibes with these ideas is punk. Even then, taking on the identity of "punk" is like putting on a funny mask over your original mask and yelling, "Look everyone, it's really me!"

Yes agreed, and SotS covers this :-)

The most radical lifestyle I believe is one in which we choose to actually live, that is to make our own decisions based on an unmediated direct relationship with our own life. Not to follow other people's direction (especially me) but instead to investigate and to try to understand to the best of our abilities how best to lead our life.

It's no co-incidence that both Thoreau and Gandhi referred to the way they lived their life as experiments. Not beholden to some mediated truth but intent on direct living and experiencing reality for themselves.

Have you read up on Moxie Marlinspike stuff? He's an anarchist, sailer, security researcher, runs WhisperSystems & etc(there's also a documentary he did on getting an old boat, fixing it, and go sailing with his friends). To me that's what a non-alienated life looks like, you do stuff you want and love(my main issue with working for others is that it kills my enjoinment of programming!).

I think the issue is not about "what lifestyle", thinking is lifestyle terms seems to be a byproduct of living in the spectacle society itself! To me this stuff is first and foremost about truth in life, true freedom, but of course this path is arduous, there are uncountable layers of overly-simplified semi-truths over us.

To speak with Debord: Punk has been subsumed within spectacular society.

Interestingly, Debord seemed to have proposed a life style of Derive, aimless wandering, following one's desires. To me, this resembles the mind set that he tries to attack. Both tell individuals "You are a snowflake! Follow your inner desires!"

Maybe the more during counter life style against the fads and suppressions of the spectacle society, is a devotion to objectivity and naked facts.

Punk was invented by Malcolm McLaren to sell Vivienne Westwood's clothes. Punk had it's time, I suspect that the people that bought into this identity would have been just as likely to be 'football casuals' if they had been born a decade later or be sporting 'hipster beards' had they been born two decades later. So yes, just a mask to put on.

Even Thoreau didn't live as a hermit - Walden was very much a break from everyday life for him. So I think like all such material the value is helping us to try and live before we die. Because one thing you can say about a less mediated life is that it's more fulfilling and more satisfying.

This was the aim of Thoreau, Gandhi and of course the Buddha - to live life directly without any mediation between oneself and reality. And to greater or lesser degrees they all achieved that.

All these viewpoints, Situationism, Marxism etc. can be dogma or just little clues to help us live a more fulfilling and satisfying life.

I personally got from this book the understanding that human interaction is becoming increasingly mediated - and passive.

So we go from tribal-agro-cultures where the tribal group (say 140 people or so) interact with each other on a daily continuous basis. To our current situation where we spend a large proportion of our time interacting indirectly with our social group, passively observing the spectacle (newspapers, television news, gossip columns, fictional tv, documentaries etc.) and for many the direct (unmediated) interaction is limited to the nuclear family and maybe one or two close friends.

In this sense we no-longer 'own' our lives as we have become extensions of the medium (and therefore the media) itself. Just like Marxism warns of the danger of a life mediated by the means of production so SI warns against life being mediated by the spectacle (that is a consensus world view created by a handful of people).

The spectacle though is nothing new, it's been around a long time i.e. history is written by the victors - those that control the media provide the story into which we weave our lives. They describe who the bad guys are, who the good guys are, what is acceptable and what isn't. And it's woven into such an incredibly integrated way that we confuse it with reality.

Of course nothing we experience is fundamentally real, that's basic neurology isn't it ;-) everything we experience is a construct of our senses in-combination with our perception. The vast majority of planet earth is empty void - yet we see everything as solid.

But there are degrees of abstraction - and an authentic life (in the sense of Walden) is one with the least mediation. An example of the most direct experience is anything that allows you to focus on the actual sensory data and it's nature - this of course is the realm of insight meditation. At the other extreme is a life consisting entirely of TV consumption - and most of us somewhere in between.

This all boils down to me as the question are you living your life or just watching it like so much television.

Your Twitter friend sounds like Camus (that's a compliment). Camus asserts that there is no revelation, no hope that the universe can be revealed and understood. Not even with the scientific method. But that the act of existing itself (and trying to be happy) was in its own way a rebellion: that we are constantly choosing to create or adopt meaning. I think DeBord's exegesis for all of us is to be more conscious of the fact that we are adopting meaning all the time and perhaps try and create it consciously for ourselves instead. This is where your idea of "authentic" really resonates. You have good instincts.

I've struggled with the same frustrations. It's easy to trace a historical line through several notable moments and thinkers and conclude that an alternative experience of life is possible, but I increasingly suspect that: (a) per your correspondent, if "...nothing is real[,] everything is constructed," then it's because there's a fundamental function of human psychology that compels us to perceive dramatic narratives all around us and weave ourselves into them; (b) this function is what the society of the spectacle is built on and exploits; (c) it's seldom realistic to escape these mechanisms. You can perhaps escape the _society_ of the spectacle by removing yourself to more isolated and "authentic" circumstances, but I'm not sure you can permanently escape the compulsion to live yourself within spectacles of your own creation. If that's true, there's the small consolation that it's authentically human to do it. ...These are just my thoughts, now, mid-life, after many years of contemplating these things. For another (perhaps surprising) authority on the subject, I recommend Proust.

The problem with the Situationists is that they have no political program. They refuse to describe how they would like the world to be, instead coming up with convoluted explanations for why doing so is unnecessary and counterproductive. The assertion is basically that capitalism is so terrible that once we get rid of it, things will obviously be much better.

Apologists have tried to fill in the gaps with a utopian vision [1] where we maintain the a similar standard of living but without wasting energy on conspicuous consumption. I agree that developing a culture that avoids conspicuous consumption would probably mean we could get by with less work. However there would still be enough work leftover to either require capitalism, or socialist style forced labor, both of which situationists explicitly reject.

[1] see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Widmer

Hmm, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhheiPTdZCw anyone?

(Finish the video before replying.)

I absolutely loved this when I first read it in the early 90s, it's amazing how it seems more accurate as time has gone on.

Don't dream here, be-he-here ... ;-)

Is that a modified Rocky Horror reference?

for an excellent and knowledgable look at the si, its origins and legacy read The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International by McKenzie Wark [1], author of the si influenced look at technology 2004's A Hacker Manifesto

https://www.versobooks.com/books/1869-the-beach-beneath-the-...

Thanks :)

This reminded me of the Spectacular Time by Larry Law

Jesus is the only way to a real life

I feel like this XKCD strip is basically Debord's argument in modern terms and a response it: https://xkcd.com/1314/

And yes in a sense it's strangely prophetic that we now live in a world where we feel compelled to do things like tweet and instagram and facebook and etc etc etc.... That we seek out experiences to make a spectacle of them, and that we see the world that way(e.g.): https://xkcd.com/77/

But what I really take issue with is this need to blame it on capitalism, and not human nature.

We constantly strive to compete with each other, socially - and now we have means to do so on a much broader scale before. I don't think capitalism has some sort of "dark agenda" that pushes this forward. Advertisers use this against us, Facebook taps into it, etc, but it's human nature; one of those many cognitive biases that causes us to seek what we think we want, not what will actually make us happy.

Pre historic people were almost certainly showing off to other pre historic people - and others were watching. Let's not pretend it's just because of Capitalism we feel compelled to do this.

I do believe that debord was aiming for more than shallow moralizing about the evils of capitalism. Marx certainly considered capitalism a step forward. But if we use the word capitalism at all, we are assuming that it constitutes a useful independent variable for analysis; cultural, sociological, or otherwise. Debord does a deft job at this analysis, irreducible to the average complaints about Facebook or twitter. For example, how might Debord's critiques be applied to the phenomena constituting the Arab Spring? Think about what sparked the Arab spring. Think about the Egyptian revolutionaries' adoption of the Guy Fawkes mask. Juxtapose those 'spectacles' against Debord's observation that 'the "society of the spectacle" offers false models of revolution.'

imho, these illustrations are probably counter-productive insofar as they turn debord into a parody of himself, a straw man to knock over, rather than what he was: a truly dangerous thinker.

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