Situationism
1957 – 1972
Life has been replaced by images of life, and the response is not to protest against them but to construct situations that cannot be watched.
- Active
- 1957 – 1972
- Where
- Paris
- Also
- Internationale situationniste
- Status
- extinct
- Tradition
- Modern European
The claim
The spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relation between people mediated by images. What was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
What it held
Debord's argument extends Marx's commodity fetishism into the visual. Under early capitalism, being was reduced to having; under the developed form, having is reduced to appearing. The spectacle is not television or advertising as such but the condition in which experience is routinely mediated back to us as something to watch.
The practical programme is deliberately small-scale. The dérive is a drift through a city following its emotional contours rather than its intended routes, mapping what the planners did not design for. Détournement is the hijacking of existing material — a comic strip with new captions, an advertisement rewritten — which turns the culture industry's own products against it. Both aim at the construction of situations: moments organised so as to be lived rather than consumed.
The group was small, expelled its own members constantly, and dissolved itself in 1972 rather than become an institution. Its slogans were on the walls of Paris in May 1968, which is either its vindication or, on Debord's own later account, the beginning of its recuperation.
How it argued
Dérive, détournement and the construction of situations, published in a journal that refused copyright and encouraged reproduction without permission.
What it was arguing against
Consumer capitalism, orthodox communist parties, urban planning that separates work from leisure, and art as a specialised activity.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether the theory of the spectacle explains anything or renames it. Whether the group's practice was politics or performance.
Common misconceptions
That the spectacle means the media. Debord is explicit that it is a social relation, and that identifying it with any particular technology misses the argument.
How it began
The merger of several small avant-garde groups in 1957, out of Lettrism and the remnants of surrealism, with an unusual proportion of the membership expelled within a few years.
What became of it
Dissolved by its own members in 1972. Debord killed himself in 1994, having spent the intervening years watching his analysis become more accurate.
Lasting influence
May 1968 directly. Punk, through the graphic strategies. Culture jamming, adbusting and much protest aesthetics since.
Why it still matters
A theory of life mediated back to itself as images, written in 1967, reads very differently after two decades of social media.
Put another way
A city redesigned so that every street leads to a shop window.
Where to start
The first chapter of Debord, or Vaneigem, who wanted to be read.
The surprising bit
The Society of the Spectacle is 221 numbered paragraphs and no argument in the conventional sense. It was written as something to be quoted rather than followed, and it has been.
In their own words
All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.
The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.
Connections
- Answers
- Classical Marxism
- Opposed by
- Classical Marxism
The verdict
A small group that dissolved itself on principle and whose central diagnosis has aged better than almost anything written that decade.