Forlag: Oversat af Louise Bundgaard og Gustav Johannes Hoder
Aleatorik & Antipyrine (København)
(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Guy Debord La societe du spectacle is available in a new Danish translation with the title The spectacular community. It is a special kind of book. When it came out in 1967, it was an attempt to map a new historical situation in order to help a communist revolution on the way.
Not many of these books existed in 1967, and there are even fewer today, with few daring to embark on such an ambitious affair as drawing an overall picture of it Kapitalisticy society and its contradictions. With the spectacular community, Debord described the crucial political factors of the second half of the 20th century. He was fully aware of the provocation of such an undertaking. In the 1960s, politicians as well as sociologists and others were already talking about the disappearance of the class society. About how past conflicts had now been overcome. Debord disagreed, and the book's 221 theses show again and again that it was not the case that, on the contrary, the conditions for a revolution were ripe.
Visibility worship
One of the challenges of rereading Debord's book today is the simplified internalization of the book's title and its analysis of the role images play today. From Reagan over Berlusconi to Trump, we all know that images play a key role in mediating politics. Events such as 9/11, Snowden's unveiling of NSA surveillance, and Cambridge Analytica's impact on the 2016 US presidential election have established that the political game is characterized by both visibility and misinformation and covert influence. We often talk about that spin.
The symbolic production apparatus produced images, advertisements, slogans, brands and virtual happiness in a staggering movement.
Debord's analysis, however, is not an analysis of the way politics is wrapped. It is a far more comprehensive analysis of an expansion of the alienation forms of capitalist society and how alienation has taken the form of image. That's what Debord describes as the "spectacular" that surrounds society and submits it. According to Debord, who is a student of Marx, capitalist society is characterized by contradiction. But this contradiction is now held together by figurative forms of domination that not only penetrate everyday life, but also make it difficult to view society and form a picture of it, so that one understands how things are connected.
New forms of control
Debord performs an analysis of the emergence of new ones kontrolforms. He draws on Marx's analysis of the commodity and on various later expansions of the criticism of the political economy – not least Georg Lukács' analysis of reification. According to Debord plays imageis a pivotal role in the spectacular community, but not in a simplistic media-scientific sense, where it is about false or true images. Instead, it is the entirety of the economic, political and cultural processes of capitalist society that Debord analyzes. It is an analysis of how human relationships, including language, have been staged.
The alienation has been expanded, it has spread from the factory and the production process and now penetrates into areas of human life that were not previously subject to commodity – areas such as leisure but also art. That is why Debord and the situationists at one point abandoned the art institution. It is only to the extent that art takes the form of transcendent actions outside of art that it is true to the historical potential of art and contributes to a critique of the spectacular, they concluded. The situationistss situation was the opposite of the spectacle, it was the aesthetic-revolutionary self-creation of the proletariat.
Immanent criticism
It is the historical analysis of the extension of submission, what Marx called subsumption, that tends to give Debord's analysis a particularly dramatic dimension, which momentarily makes it the grand decay story of how man has ended up losing dominion to technology. That's a risk Debord is willing to take.
It is immanent criticism like polemic, and polemic may tend towards the caricature. But it was a matter of all or nothing for Debord, the counter-revolution accelerated, the symbolic production apparatus producing images, advertisements, slogans, brands and virtual happiness in a staggering movement. That is why it was about making a total criticism; limited criticism would merely confirm the existing, only a coherent critique of materialized ideology was relevant.
Revolutionary antiquity
Therefore, Debord's book is not written as a dry and boring academic dissertation. It consists of 9 chapters and 221 theses, each hammering away at the spectacular commodity economy and its pictorial dominance.
It is not sociology or political science that Debord is engaged in, it is rather revolutionary antiquity, a form of political writing that calls for action and challenges institutionalized ways of thinking. A writing that refuses to follow the rules and live up to all kinds of academic standards of good scientific practice or ways of arguing. The spectacular community is a shout-out, a battle script where content and form are inextricably linked. Debord writes at once controlled and aphoristic. The theses are written in a special style characterized by a cool elegance, what Debord himself called the "style of negation".
Practical criticism
The spectacular community was an intervention in which Debord attacked the spectacle, but only the dominant forms of the spectacle were at his disposal. The book's analysis was therefore inextricably linked to a "practical criticism". Only when the theoretical criticism of the spectacle merged with "the practical flow of negation in society" would it come true, Debord wrote.
May '68 is long overdue, and Debord's hopes for a revolutionary excess of capitalism did not materialize. The following four decades were largely a long defeat. But since 2016, the hidden civil war within the existing community has reached a point where it erupts in open confrontation: In France, Nuit debout, the Yellow West and now the pension strikes constitute a discontinuous protest movement that points beyond. Again, "constructed situations" are being brought against the spectacle.
