Society Of The Spectacle

 Society of the Spectacle : Guy Debord (1967) 

Contents: 

Cover

Contents Page

Introduction by Tom Vague :The Boys Scouts Guide to the Situationist International

Preface by Sam Cooper

Society of the Spectacle (Translation : Black & Red, 1977) 

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The Boy Scout's Guide to the Situationist International

Tom Vague 

London Psychogeography 2011 Vague 62

Situationist International Definitions

Constructed Situation A moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organisation of a unitary ambiance and a game of events.

Situationist Having to do with the theory or practical activity of constructing situations. One who engages in the construction of situations. A member of the Situationist International.

Situationism A meaningless term improperly derived from the above. There is no such thing as situationism, which would mean a doctrine of interpretation of existing facts. The notion of situationism is obviously devised by anti-situationists.

Psychogeography The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.

Psychogeographical Relating to psychogeography. That which manifests the geographical environment's direct emotional effects.

Psychogeographer One who explores and reports on psychogeographical phenomena.

Derive (Drift) A mode of experimental behaviour linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of transient passage through various ambiances. Also used to designate a specific period of continuous deriving.

Unitary Urbanism The theory of the combined use of arts and techniques for the integral construction of a milieu in dynamic relation with experiments in behaviour.

Detournement (Diversion) Short for: detournement of pre-existing aesthetic elements. The integration of present or past artistic production into a superior construction of a milieu. In this sense there can be no situationist painting or music, but only a situationist use of these means. In a more primitive sense, detournement within the old cultural spheres is a method of propaganda, a method which testifies to the wearing out and loss of importance of those spheres.

Culture The reflection and prefiguration of the possibilities of organisation of everyday life in a given historical moment; a complex of aesthetics, feelings and mores through which a collectivity reacts on the life that is objectively determined by its economy. (We are defining this term only in the perspective of the creation of values, not in that of the teaching of them.)

Decomposition The process in which the traditional cultural forms have destroyed themselves as a result of the emergence of superior means of dominating nature which enable and require superior cultural constructions. We can distinguish between an active phase of the decomposition and effective demolition of the old superstructure – which came to an end around 1930 – and a phase of repetition which has prevailed since then. The delay in the transition from decomposition to new constructions is linked to the delay in the revolutionary liquidation of capitalism. Internationale Situationniste 1 June 1958

Michèle Bernstein, Asger Jorn, Colette Caillard & Guy Debord, date unknown

The Society of the Spectacle and the Revolution of Everyday Life

The Situationist International formed in 1957 out of the Lettrist International; a Parisian avant-garde art group who predated punk by almost 30 years in painting slogans on their trousers. Owing as much to Dada and the Surrealists as Marx and Bakunin, the Situationists’ starting points were that the original working class movements had been crushed, by the bourgeoisie in the west and the Bolsheviks in the east; trade unions and leftist political parties had sold out; and capitalism could appropriate even the most radical ideas and return them safely in the form of harmless ideologies. 

In opposition to this process, leading Situationist Guy Debord formulated his theory of the Spectacle: ‘The moment when the commodity has achieved the total occupation of life.’ He argued in the Internationale Situationiste journal that through computers, television, rapid transport systems, etc, capitalism controlled the very conditions of existence. Hence the world we see is not the real world but the world we are conditioned to see: the Society of the Spectacle. Debord saw the end result as alienation, but didn’t necessarily see this as a bad thing as he felt this would eventually break the stranglehold of spectacular society. People were already rebelling against mass commodity culture; affluent young Americans were dropping out in Haight Ashbury, San Francisco, while in the Watts suburb of Los Angeles less affluent black Americans burnt down shopping centres. 

To the Situationists such spontaneous revolts against the Spectacle were evidence of its vulnerability. But before it could be overcome, the Spectacle’s safety net – recuperation – had to be dealt with. To survive, spectacular society has to have strict social control; this is retained by its ability to recuperate potentially revolutionary situations. By changing chameleon-like it can resist attack, creating new roles, cultural forms and encouraging participation in the construction of the world of our own alienation. Alternative lifestyles can be turned into commodities, safely recuperated and sold back to people, inducing a yearning for the past. For those bored with the possession of mere things, the Spectacle is capable of commodifying the possession of experiences in the form of package holidays, pop culture, etc. Spectacular society is made complete by the recuperation of the environment. The recuperators realised that people would resist the damage caused by the growth of the Spectacle; heavy industry and consumerism; to their physical surroundings. Hence environmental recuperation or the ‘new urbanism’; replacing disordered urban-sprawl with more manageable structures like industrial estates, new towns, super-stores and shopping malls.

The Situationists' answer to the new urbanism was the reconstruction of the entire environment, according to the needs of the people that inhabit it. This was to be nothing short of the Revolution of Everyday Life (the title of the companion book to The Society of the Spectacle – by Raoul Vaneigem). Unlike traditional revolutionary groups, the Situationists were not concerned with the improvement of existing society or reforming it, but in destroying it and putting something new and better in its place. They argued that mechanisation and automation had potentially eliminated the need for all forms of traditional labour, leaving a hole, now known as leisure time. Rather than fill this hole with ‘specialist art’, the Situationists wanted a new type of creativity to come out of it. This new environment has to be brought about by the construction of situations.

On the Poverty of Student Life: Strasbourg 1966

‘To make the world a sensuous extension of man, rather than have man remain an instrument of an alien world, is the goal of the Situationist revolution. For us the reconstruction of life and the rebuilding of the world are one and the same desire. To achieve this, the tactics of subversion have to be extended from schools, factories, and universities, to confront the Spectacle directly. Rapid transport systems, shopping centres, museums, as well as the various new forms of culture and the media, must be considered as targets, areas for scandalous activity.’ Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

The Situationists first hit the headlines in 1966 when a group of ‘pro-Situ’ activists infiltrated the Strasbourg University students’ union and set about scandalising the authorities. After forming an anarchist appreciation society, they printed up Situationist-inspired ‘Return of the Durutti Column’ flyposters and invited the SI to write a critique of the university and society in general.

Return of the Durruti Column’ flyposter

The resulting pamphlet, On the Poverty of Student Life: Considered in its economic, political, sexual, and particularly intellectual aspects, and a modest proposal for its remedy (Ten Days that Shook the University) by the Tunisian Situationist Mustapha Omar Khayatti, was designed to wind up the apathetic students by confronting them with their subservience to the family and the state: 

"The whole of (the student's) life is beyond his control, and for all he sees of the world he might as well be on another planet... Every student likes to feel he is a Bohemian at heart; but the student Bohemian clings to his false and degraded version of individual revolt. His rent-a-crowd militancy for the latest good cause is an aspect of his real impotence... he does have marginal freedoms; a small area of liberty which as yet escapes the totalitarian control of the Spectacle; his flexible working hours permit adventure and experiment. But he is a sucker for punishment and freedom scares him to death: he feels safer in the straightjacketed space-time of the lecture hall and the weekly essay. He is quite happy with this open prison organised for his benefit... The real poverty of his everyday life finds its immediate phantastic compensation in the opium of cultural commodities... he is obliged to discover modern culture as an admiring spectator... he thinks he is avant-garde if he's seen the latest Godard or 'participated' in the latest 'happening'. He discovers modernity as fast as the market can provide it: for him every rehash of ideas is a cultural revolution. His principal concern is status, and he eagerly snaps up all the paperback editions of important and 'difficult' texts with which mass culture has filled the bookstore. Unfortunately, he cannot read, so he devours them with his gaze…’

The university was described as: ‘The society for the propagation of ignorance... high culture with the rhythm of the production line... without exception the lecturers are cretins... bourgeois culture is dead... all the university does is make production-line specialists.’ Existing student rebels such as the Dutch Provos and the Berkeley students were criticised for fighting the symptoms (nuclear arms, the Vietnam war, racism, censorship), not the disease, and for sympathising with western society's apparent enemies; China especially, whose cultural revolution was described as ‘a pseudo-revolt directed by the most elephantine bureaucracy of modern times.’ But the pamphlet did have a good word for the Committee of 100's ‘Spies for Peace’ scandal; in which the anti-nuclear movement invaded secret fallout shelters reserved for the British government; and working class youths rebelling against the boredom of everyday life:

‘The 'delinquents' of the world use violence to express their rejection of society and its sterile options. But their refusal is an abstract one: it gives them no chance of actually escaping the contradictions of the system. They are its products – negative, spontaneous, but none the less exploitable. All the experiments of the new social order produce them: they are the first side-effects of the new urbanism; of the disintegration of all values; of the extension of an increasingly boring consumer leisure; of the growing control of every aspect of everyday life by the psycho-humanist police force; and of the economic survival of a family unit which has lost all significance. The 'young thug' despises work but accepts the goods. He wants what the Spectacle offers him – but now, with no down payment. This is the essential contradiction of the delinquent's existence. He may try for a real freedom in the use of his time, in an individual assertiveness, even in the construction of a kind of community.

‘But the contradiction remains, and kills (on the fringe of society, where poverty reigns, the gang develops its own hierarchy, which can only fulfil itself in a