Society Of The Spectacle - advice and thoughts for the 1st time reader.

[revol68]

The whole thing is just bits nicked from elsewhere (not a criticism). The chapter on The Proletariat as Subject and Representation is one of the bst bits of post war radical writing. The rest is now fairly standard (see many recuperating fuckwits) - and there's a gaping hole called production. It's all wrong as it insists on fighting a battle on the terrain of consciousness - in that sense it's your standard orthodox marixsm despite its attacks on its parents.

yeah it never goes beyond the sphere of circulation, though I'd say the weakest part of it is the implied essentialist dualism that it relies on. On the one hand the domination of the spectacle is total and on the other somehow it is juxtaposed to 'real desires and needs'. This of course ties in with it's overlooking of production as it doesn't address the production of subjectivity in any adequate manner.

Apart from that it has some pithy one liners but it is hugely overrated as a political text.

 

[revol68]

Well, a lot of autonomist thought argue that those desires that situs and the left see as expressions of capital (or us at second hand at best) are impostions/demands that we put on capital - it's a pro-consumerism approach in a sense. And that's becasue autonomism didn't ignore production which Debord largely did.

yeah, by overlooking production of both the subject and industrial form they miss out the contradictions that are inherent in the process and so therefore Debord's concept of the spectacle is total, unified and smooth.

 

[kyser_soze]

I've been reading the Wikisource version of this, and it's difficult to pick out the 'at the time' radical stuff from mainstream ideas now - for example, marketing as the religious priesthood of capitalism (a situation that has changed substantially - while marketing might still be a priesthood of cap, only a few can still hold out using the 'dark arts' approach of making advertising semi-mystical to clients these days...); the idea that cap society in it's totality is the spectacle seems, to me, to be wholly logical and to an extent obvious...and that at it's heart it's narcissistic...altho I would say that all power structures are self-regarding in that sense...

 

[belboid]

As far as Debord's view is concerned people like Adam Curtis are every bit as much a part of creating the spectacle as Fox News.

as is Debord these days

 

[taffboy gwyrdd]

Quick update. I got busy and didn't have the time to carry on with serious study. Then I took some advice from here and elsewhere and went back to Marx in preperation (Communist Manifesto). It is easier going than I remember Marx being, possibly the influence of Engels.

Will get back to debord soon enough, minded of everything said here and thankful for it.