The Society of the Spectacle is a 1967 book by Guy Debord, which developed concepts relating to modern culture and commodity fetishism. The book also contains sharp criticism of Leninism in all its variants and presents a council communist alternative. It continues to influence a variety of philosophical and political movements. Guy Debord (December 28, 1931-November 30, 1994) was a member of the Lettrist International, Socialisme ou Barbarie and a founder and chief essayist of the Situationist International (SI). ... In Marxist theory, commodity fetishism is an inauthentic state of social relations, said to arise in complex capitalist market systems, where social relationships are confused with their medium, the commodity. ... Vladimir Lenin in 1920 Leninism is a political and economic theory which builds upon Marxism (the forerunner of Communism) and is a branch in its own right (it has been the dominant branch of Marxism in the world since the 1920s). ... Council communism was a radical Left movement originating in Germany and the Netherlands in the 1920s. ...
Stam (2000) notes that "Postmodernism was anticipated without the term in Guy Debord'sSociety of the Spectacle (1967), where the French situationist argued that everything that had once been directly lived had in the contemporary world transmuted into a representation". (Stam 2000:300) This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Guy Debord (December 28, 1931-November 30, 1994) was a member of the Lettrist International, Socialisme ou Barbarie and a founder and chief essayist of the Situationist International (SI). ... The Situationist International (SI), an international political and artistic movement, originated in the Italian village of Cosio dArroscia on 28 July 1957 with the fusion of several extremely small artistic tendencies: the Lettrist International, the International movement for an imaginist Bauhaus, and the London Psychogeographical Association. ... In mathematics, a group representation is a way of viewing a group in some more concrete way. ...
See also
Don Letts interview, mentioning the influence of Situationism on Punk Ideology and Dialectics, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm Maclaren --
In analyzing the spectacle we are obliged to a certain extent to use the spectacle’s own language, in the sense that we have to operate on the methodological terrain of the society that expresses itself in the spectacle.
The spectacle inherits the weakness of the Western philosophical project, which attempted to understand activity by means of the categories of vision, and it is based on the relentless development of the particular technical rationality that grew out of that form of thought.
The spectacle was born from the world’s loss of the unity, and the immense expansion of the modern spectacle reveals the enormity of this loss.
In 1967, in a book entitled The Society of the Spectacle, I showed what the modern spectacle was already in essence: the autocratic reign of the market economy which had acceded to an irresponsible sovereignty, and the totality of new techniques of government which accompanied this reign.
It is true that this spectacular critique of the spectacle, which is not only late but, even worse, seeks 'attention' on the same level, inevitably sticks to vain generalities or hypocritical regrets; just as futile as the clowns who parade their well-mannered disillusion in newspapers.
The society whose modernization has reached the stage of the integrated spectacle is characterized by the combined effect of five principal features: incessant technological renewal; integration of state and economy; generalized secrecy, unanswerable lies; an eternal present.
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