The society of the spectacle
The Society of the Spectacle ( La société du Spectacle ) is the main work of the French artist and philosopher Guy Debord , published in 1967 . It is a philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel , Karl Marx and Georg Lukács trained radical indictment of modern Western and Eastern industrial society , the capitalism , the socialist bureaucracy , the shape of the goods and the modern concomitant administration techniques . The book had a great influence on the French student movement in Paris in May 1968 , later achieved cult status in art and subculture and is still read at universities today as a media-theoretical and political work.
content
The spectacle
At the center of Debord's book is the spectacle , the organization, the totality and the context of all economic and most of the cultural or political processes in the modern industrial state of the late 20th century, and the social relationship between people that emerges from this. In the spectacle , everyone, whether boss or worker, man or woman, careerist or rebel, only plays his assigned role . Society works like a soulless, perfectly organized machine that only simulates opposition, history and time seem frozen (Debord). Debord often uses metaphors of sleep for this.
“The whole life of the societies in which the modern production conditions prevail appears as a monstrous collection of spectacles. Everything that was directly experienced has escaped into an idea . "
The reality would invisible has behind a make-believe world of advertising stereotypes, propaganda, but again very real impact on people's lives. What is actually experienced or longed for is increasingly being replaced by its representation, by its surrogate - Debord also anticipates ideas from postmodernism here (the symbol no longer denotes anything, no longer refers to something real, but stands for itself, thus becoming a substitute itself: hyperreality ).
Debord's spectacle can be understood as the bureaucracy, the technocracy , the world of PR and advertising, the world of propaganda and control in the Eastern Bloc, as the market and its laws or as alienation according to Marx, but all of these are only partial aspects and approximations Debord's understanding of the term. All aspects have one thing in common for Debord: the economy has become independent, human, cultural life - and with it the course of history - has frozen. The individual and his freedom are threatened by the spectacle.
Society of the Spectacle
The current “society of the spectacle” in the West is a society that celebrates the superficial, wants to find fulfillment in consumption, looks at and admires itself in the media and considers everything to be measurable and purchasable, “in which the goods themselves in one of you look at the created world ”(p. 41).
Society seems to be hypnotized by the sight of a “true, real” life as an image, as a cliché , while at the same time lively, human emotions diminish in their everyday lives. However, the pictures could never actually keep their promises:
"Their vulgarized pseudo-festivals, parodies of dialogue and the gift, stimulate an additional economic expenditure, but only bring back the disappointment that is always compensated by the promise of a new disappointment."
The role model and hero of the society of the spectacle is the film, television, pop or political star . It serves as a model for all that one has to deny oneself. The star is the "spectacular representation of a living person" who "concentrates" the "image of a possible role" in itself, the "object of identification with the shallow, apparent life, which is the dismemberment of the really experienced production specializations", ie the real experienced subjective everyday life, "should outweigh." (p. 48)
Politics is also becoming a show and show business becomes politics:
“There the governmental power is personalized into a pseudo-star, here the star of consumption can be acclaimed as pseudo-violence through the experience of plebiscite . But these star activities are just as diverse as they are truly global. "
Society has moved away from people's real needs . By specializing in the world of work, thinking about the needs and concerns of people is fragmented, rationalized and thus turned against them, while social technologies serve the administration of people.
Spectacle and ideology
The spectacle can convey different ideologies:
"The spectacle is ideology par excellence because it represents and expresses the essence of every ideological system in its fullness: the impoverishment, the subjugation and the negation of real life."
The spectacle is the uninterrupted speech that the present order holds about itself, its praising monologue. (P. 24) It is the sun that never sets in the realm of modern passivity. It covers the whole surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory. (P. 17) It is the opposite of the dialogue . (P. 19), because it puts everything up for debate - just not yourself:
"The attitude required in principle by the spectacle is this passive acceptance, which it has actually achieved through its way of appearing irrefutable, through its monopoly of appearances."
Debord's criticism of the spectacle can also be read as a criticism of the idea of constant economic growth :
“In the spectacle […] the end goal is nothing, development is everything. The spectacle does not want to lead to anything other than itself. "
For Debord it was not the philosophical reflection on a “good life” that led to the spectacle, but the other way round the spectacle seems to express special types of thinking, ideologies to which human concerns then have to subordinate: It does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes them Reality. (P. 20)
For Debord, his function is to "make history forget in culture" (p. 165). The idea that there is also social progress in addition to technical progress seems to be a thing of the past in the spectacle. However, the Debord spectacle does not represent a uniform or deliberate conspiracy , nor does it pursue any long-term strategy other than its own preservation. The only nihilistic law of the spectacle is a tautology : what appears is good, what is good appears. (P. 17)
East and West
Debord set the beginning of the development of the spectacle to be around the 1920s. The revolutionary workers' movement was between the First and Second World War destroyed been: by fascism on the one hand and the Stalinist bureaucracy on the other hand, this has represented the beginning of the spectacle.
He made a distinction between a concentrated spectacle in totalitarian states such as the Eastern Bloc or under fascism ( leadership cult , authoritarian rule, state capitalism ) and a - more modern, more subtle - diffuse spectacle in the West, the concentrated spectacle clearly being false, clumsy and violent recognizing is no matter what the underlying ideas are:
“If every Chinese has to learn Mao and consequently be Mao, that means that he has 'nothing else to be'. Wherever there is concentrated spectacle, there is also the police. "
He turns against all kinds of communist parties (also beyond Stalinism ), but even against the famous theorists of anarchism (for Debord only the specialists of freedom ) who have unalterable ideas about freedom, and supporters who then follow them as in other ideologies. Debord sees the Soviet Union, China or the Eastern bloc states as mere totalitarian dictatorships:
"The ruling totalitarian ideological class is the power of an upside-down world: the stronger it is, the more it asserts that it does not exist, and its violence primarily serves to assert its non-existence."
The socialist bureaucracy of the 20th century is the stepchild of capitalism. The proletariat first lost its perspective and then its illusions , but not its essence . It could only be the respective individual himself who initially made subjective demands for himself, no leader, no party, no organization could represent it. Nevertheless, Debord also rejects the western liberal counter-model, because here, too, real freedom has not been realized for him:
"In both cases it is just a picture surrounded by desolation and horror [...] in the quiet center of misery."
The world of goods
Debord criticizes life under capitalism, which transforms all aspects of life into goods ( totality of goods , commodification ) and only mediates or simulates human experiences or relationships through images (e.g. in sales psychology ).
The subject is for Debord with his individual talents, desires and shortcomings gear of a system, it is considered viewers in a mass society, as a mere consumer of his own life left. It fits into the consumer society , which is determined by the human image of Homo oeconomicus . For Debord goods have long since taken control of human life and have achieved their own autonomy:
The spectacle is the moment in which the commodity has come to fully occupy social life. The relationship to the commodity has not only become visible, you don't even see anything else: the world you see is your world. (P. 35)
The economy transforms the world, but only into a world of economy. (P. 34)
Not only work, but also consumption has become a “duty” for the “masses”, all life is ruled by the “dictatorship” of “economic production” (p. 35).
It is things that rule and are young that drive away and replace one another. (P. 51)
The reified person shows evidence of his intimacy with the goods. (P. 54), Here Debord refers to Marx's concept of commodity fetishism . Debord's criticism of consumerism: In the meantime, people accept to become a commodity themselves.
Incompatible assertions crowd the stage of the united spectacle of the affluent economy, just as various star wares present their contradicting furnishing plans to society, in which the spectacle of automobiles demands smooth traffic that destroys the old city centers, while the spectacle of the city itself requires museums -Quarter needs. (P. 53)
For Debord, the consumer of the goods experiences only a fragmentary sequence of the individual "promises of happiness" of the purchased products, without ever being really satisfied - although this is the primary quality that is attributed to the affluent society as a whole.
Debord:
The object, which had a prestige in the spectacle, becomes vulgar as soon as it enters the house of this consumer and of all others at the same time. Too late he reveals his essential poverty, which of course stems from the misery of his production. But another object already justifies the system and demands to be recognized. (P.56)
He is also correspondingly negative about the promises made by advertising:
Every new lie in advertising is also an admission of the previous lie. (P.56)
Advertising for time has replaced the reality of time . (P. 137)
The audience
For Debord, everyday life in modern societies is characterized by the conformism and passivity of the people living in them: beyond work and consumption, their lives are only determined by the quantitative , not (anymore) by the qualitative . In the course of this development, the decline of art, culture, creativity and the interest of people in one another are deplored. Debord sees a former violent suppression of aspirations for freedom by the police and the state apparatus increasingly being replaced by seemingly harmless measures of cybernetics , psychology and sociology (see also the later term biopolitics ).
For Debord, the average citizen ( Otto normal consumer ) is in the metaphorical position of a passive spectator. In his job he does what he is asked to do with indifference and does not question it. In his free time he looks in amazement at the stars appearing and retiring and admires them, otherwise behaves inconspicuously, does what one expects of him, moves with the times, consumes and says what one consumes and says, but loses himself doing it yourself.
Instead of recognizing their own needs, people in the spectacle orientate themselves to prefabricated, mass media disseminated images (clichéd lifestyles, role offers, desired behaviors) and try to imitate them.
What connects the audience with one another is only an irreversible relationship to the center itself, which maintains their isolation. The spectacle unites what is separate, but only as something separate. (P. 26)
The alienation of the viewer [...] is expressed as follows: the more he watches, the less he lives; the more he accepts to recognize himself in the prevailing images of need, the less he understands his own existence and his own desire. The externality of the spectacle [...] appears in the fact that his own gesture no longer belongs to him, but to someone else who performs it for him. The viewer does not feel at home anywhere, because the spectacle is everywhere. (P. 26)
Freedom of choice is limited to the choice between products and offers on the market. This life, however, creates through its lack of intensity, through the separation from one another in the roles (Debord: This society, which abolishes the geographical distance, takes up the distance again inside as a spectacular separation. P. 146) emptiness, despair, boredom and weariness with individuals who would have to be whitewashed through increased consumption of increasingly unusual products, gadgets , stars, ideologies or fashions. Religion, too, is only interpreted as a further facet of the spectacle, and as an older form.
The spectacle itself assimilates rebellion in a perfidious manner and uses it for itself ( recuperation ); dissatisfaction also becomes a commodity . Debord in a modification of a quote from Theodor W. Adorno (“There is no right life in the wrong”): In the really wrong world, the true is a moment of the wrong (p. 16).
The perspectives
According to Debord, people should therefore reappropriate the world and history :
The world already has the dream of a time of which it must now be conscious in order to really experience it. (P. 142)
The moment society discovers that it depends on the economy, the economy actually depends on it. (P. 40)
The struggle between tradition and innovation, which is the inner principle of development in historical societies, can only be continued through the constant victory of innovation. (P. 158, all page numbers refer to the edition of Edition Tiamat )
Debord understood this in 1967 as a call for a worldwide revolution , which must be supported by the rejection of the spectacle by people who have seen through its laws. In doing so, he was guided by anarchist council models of generalized self-administration , but his theory also refers to the concept of class .
After 1968, Debord questioned more and more pessimistically whether all of this could succeed; for him the spectacular tendencies increased more and more in the years after 1968 until his death. In any case, he saw his book as a weapon against the hated spectacle. He remained true to his hostility to the spectacle until his death: he did not appear in the mass media, gave no interviews, and did not allow himself to be portrayed, despite great demand.
classification
background
Debord's thinking is shaped by the affluent society of the 1960s, which was not yet shaken by subsequent economic crises and mass unemployment. It is the criticism of a capitalism that seems to be working perfectly. In his analysis, he was based primarily on observations of everyday life in French post-war society in the 1960s, and how this was reflected in the media.
In doing so, he refers, among other things, to the history of anarchism , but also to motifs by Hegel and to texts such as Das Kapital by Marx or History and Class Consciousness by Georg Lukács . For Debord, the central point in Marx is not exploitation , but an alienation that affects everyone and appears not as oppression but as comfort. Working time and free time are increasingly organized and structured in a similar way.
As a pioneer and co-founder of the artist group “ Situationist International ”, Debord tried to draw practical conclusions from his theoretical considerations.
In addition, in 1988 Debord wrote the Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle , which summarizes developments since the 1970s.
Both the student revolt in France at the end of the 1960s and protagonists of the punk movement cited motifs in the book (e.g. as criticism of consumerism), often in a simplified form and without knowledge of their origin.
If even today there is sometimes critical talk of a political or media spectacle , if fun society or consumerism are criticized, then these terms resonate with a remnant of what Debord described.
Debord's thoughts and the term spectacle in connection with media should also find a continuation in a media criticism that called for a turn away from television consumption or the participation of the audience in the theater of the 1970s and continued up to the discussions about interactivity in the media in the Developed in the 1970s and 1980s. Debord always sharply rejected such endeavors and readings of his text; for him they fell short, rather represented a caricature of what he himself was calling for.
The special criticism of a society that seems to consist only of its surfaces is one reason for continued interest in Debord's theses, more than 40 years after their publication. They are also becoming more topical again in view of the debates about neoliberalism and privatization.
Related ideas
The Frankfurt School exercised a similar social criticism as Debord. The book Dialectic of the Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno - therein v. a. the chapter culture industry. Enlightenment as mass fraud - was received during the student protests of 1968 in Germany in a similar way to Debord's book in France. There are also related ideas in Herbert Marcuse's work . Many of Debord's ideas were later taken up again by philosophers such as Jean Baudrillard and Giorgio Agamben .
Cultural pessimism
There seems to be a superficial proximity in Debord's criticism to a conservative cultural pessimism , which also deplores the alienation and commercialization of the world, but wants to return to premodern myths (such as nature , nation , religion , ancestral cult) in the face of modernity and postmodernity . Debord's philosophy of an artist , which u. a. also developed from the thinking of existentialism , points in an opposite direction and wants to break new ground ( postmodernism ). Art is able to provide a new language that is necessary for this .
Opposing positions and criticism
Opposing positions can be found u. a. in social theories of liberalism .
With the idea of an open society, Karl Popper represented an opposing position that is still current today: freedom, prosperity and democracy have actually been realized in Western societies. Francis Fukuyama described the end of the story in 1992 , this time as a definitive, positive fact. Norbert Bolz created an image of consumerism as the “immune system of world society” against “fanatical ideologies”, he promised “always the new”.
In 2005, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter took the view in their book Konsumrebellen that a fundamental criticism of consumerism in the tradition of Debord (“a radical Marxist”, Heath / Potter) was not tenable, “wrong”; they particularly criticized Debord's concept of the spectacle. It suggests that pragmatic political action is unnecessary:
So we live in a world of total ideology, completely alienated from our true nature. [...] The old-fashioned interest in social justice and the abolition of class society is a thing of the past in such a world. ("Consumer rebels", p. 18)
Heath and Potter object: We don't live in the Matrix, we don't live in the spectacle. The world in which we live is much less spectacular. [...] There is no overarching system that integrates everything. […] There is only an abundance of social institutions, jumbled together to share the benefits and burdens of social cooperation - in a way that we sometimes find right and that is usually extremely unjust. ("Consumer rebels", p. 21)
Decades of the "counterculture rebellion" (Heath / Potter) have changed nothing, more than that, counterculture is "counterproductive". It is not “ hedonism ” and fundamental opposition, but arduous pragmatic political action that would bring about desirable change (“consumer rebels”, p. 22).
There are also left-wing extremist criticisms of Debord's work and the ideas of the Situationists in general. a. Esotericism , intellectualism , and elitist thinking or misunderstandings and errors in their interpretation of Marx's capital .
According to Foucault's partner Daniel Defert , Michel Foucault's " Monitoring and Punishing " is directed directly against Debord. Foucault tries to show "that modern society is not based on the society of the spectacle, but on control and surveillance."
A more up-to-date philosophical reading of the book questions Debord's idea of a real, authentic life that is opposed to the spectacle , must emancipate itself from the spectacle, from alienation. The idea of original authenticity , as it is e.g. B. already found in Romanticism , represent a fiction in itself. As an artistic counter-position z. B. those considered by Andy Warhol .
Trivia
After the first edition had appeared in France and met with great interest, Debord was to be awarded the so-called Sainte Beuve Literature Prize in 1968 and celebrated with a cocktail party. Then Debord told his publisher Edmond Buchet, that he radically opposed to literary prizes is and this blunder better avoided should be, because otherwise it is not capable would be younger Situationists of violence deter against the judges. The idea was then rejected again.
The rights to the book in France are now held by Alice Debord or the Gallimard publishing house .
In Germany there was a pirated print, later an edition by Nautilus Verlag. Ironically, the work was the subject of a copyright controversy in 2005 between the current owner, Tiamat-Verlag, and activists who had provided a link to an illegal PDF file of the book. The famous anti-copyright of the SI referred - from a legal point of view - only to the contents of the SI magazine in which it appeared. Debord's book had only appeared there in excerpts. Debord's philosophy that his book represents an accusation of precisely those conditions in which the (digitally reproducible) philosophical work of a dead author becomes the property and the subject of legal disputes because it is also supposed to be a commodity was not considered. The English and French versions of the network variant are supposedly tacitly tolerated by the relevant publishers. The German version can still be found on the Internet.
Movie
There is also a "film version" of the Gesellschaft des Spektakels : A film collage designed by Debord in 1973 , the allegorical scenes from Hollywood films, Soviet cinema, soft porn, documentary film material from the May riots in France in 1968 and other material with a spoken word Comment Debords connects and thus puts it in new contexts.
- The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord (1973) English / French subtitles (1:28:09 hours)
Quotes
- The spectacle is capital in such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image. (P. 27)
- Where the real world is transformed into mere images, the mere images become real beings and the effective motivations for hypnotic behavior. (P. 19)
- In the epoch of its dissolution, art [...] is an art of change and at the same time the pure expression of impossible change. The more grandiose its claim, the more its true realization lies beyond it. […] Their avant-garde is their disappearance. (P. 146)
- The culture that has become a commodity through and through must also become the star commodity of spectacular society. (P. 166)
- Only the real negation of culture preserves its meaning. It can no longer be cultural. (P. 177)
(The Society of the Spectacle)
- The meaningless discussion about the spectacle, that is, about what the owners of this world are up to, is organized by the spectacle itself: emphasis is placed on the enormous means of the spectacle in order not to say anything about their extensive use. The term spectacle is often preferred to that of the media sector. One wants to designate a simple instrument, a kind of public service enterprise, which manages with impartial "professionalism" the new wealth of communication for all by means of mass media, communication that has finally brought it to unilateral purity, in which the decision already made is blessedly admire. Commands are communicated, and in perfect harmony are those who have given them and those who will say what they think of them. (Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle, p. 197)
- Since the 1968 riots [...] never succeeded in overthrowing the prevailing social order, the spectacle [...] has intensified everywhere. That is, it has spread in all directions to the extreme ends, increasing its density in the center. It has even learned new defensive techniques, as is usually the case with attacked powers.
(Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle, p. 194)
- In reading this book, one must bear in mind that it was knowingly written with the intention of harming the society of the spectacle.
(Debord 1992 in the foreword to the third edition of the French edition)
See also
- Situationist International
- Social criticism , criticism of capitalism , cultural pessimism
- Commodity fetish , consumerism , culture industry - enlightenment as mass fraud
literature
- Guy Debord: The Society of the Spectacle. Edition Tiamat, Berlin 1996.
- Guy Debord: The Society of the Spectacle. Friends of the classless society (ed.): Volume V of the text series of the SI , Berlin 2006.
- Vincent Kaufmann: Guy Debord. The revolution in the service of poetry. Munich 2004.
- Anselm Jappe: Guy Debord. Berkeley 1999.
- Giorgio Agamben: The Coming Community. Merve, Berlin 2003.
- Biene Baumeister, Zwi Negator: Situationist Revolutionary Theory . An appropriation. Vol.I: Enchidrion. Stuttgart 2005.
- Biene Baumeister, Zwi Negator: Situationist Revolutionary Theory . An appropriation. Vol.II: Small Organon. Stuttgart 2005.
- Greil Marcus : Lipstick Traces. From Dada to Punk - cultural avant-garde and their ways from the 20th century . Rogner & Bernhard at Zweiausendeins, Hamburg 1992, ISBN 3-8077-0254-7 . (Texts critical of culture with reference to the work of Debord)
- Invisible Committee: The Coming Insurrection . Edition Nautilus , Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-89401-732-3 .
- Empire or hegemon: is the decision still free? In: Freitag (newspaper) ; u. a. about Giorgio Agamben on the trail of Debord (at the bottom of the page)
Web links
- The society of the spectacle .
- The Society of the Spectacle at Wikisource (English)
- Anselm Jappe: The concept of the spectacle - excerpt from his Debord biography
- Where not only Baudrillard went to school at textem
- Symposium 2005 of the art collective monochrom on Debord's theses
- about Kino, Debord and the MedienKunstNetz spectacle
- La Société du spectacle in the Internet Movie Database (English) Information on the film
- David M. Boje Spectacle and Inter-Spectacle in The Matrix and Organization Theory . Film analysis on "Matrix" with regard to spectacles
- The American book cover (image)
- The film ( MPEG ) at UBUWEB (under: Guy Debord)
