Against the Spectacle

“ 1. In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived is now merely represented in the distance.

…

4. The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.”

— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle.

As some of you may know, Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle was selected as the reading for Wednesday’s Theory for Dinner- a monthly exchange of food and ideas hosted at Latitude 53. Revisiting this text in preparation for this gathering has brought a few questions forward when considering what, precisely, we are to make of Guy Debord today.

While The Society of the Spectacle is a little longer than the ideal Theory for Dinner text, it’s easy enough to break it down into bite-sized pieces. Debord writes in point form, pumping out pithy statements, each of which can be chewed-over in their own right. Don’t worry if you can’t get all the way through Debord’s short book for Wednesday- just find a few ideas that make your head spin. The first chapter is particularly good in this regard.

Who the hell was Guy Debord?

Guy Debord was a Marxist, anti-Stalinist writer and film maker based out of Paris in the mid-late 20th century. Best known for his leadership of the Situationist International, Guy Debord played a pivotal role in voicing and directing dissatisfaction with both sides of the ideological divide of the cold war.

The Situationists, an internally divided group of avantgarde artists and political activists, were distinguished in their anti-art perspective, opposing the creation and validation of art in-and-as-much as it remained separated from all other aspects of life. Believing that more than enough images were in circulation- and that innovation for its own sake promoted an irresponsible division of art from politics- the Situationists adopted a confrontational and challenging attitude towards art and visual culture. They adapted collage and chance techniques from Surrealism and used them to disrupt the circulation and customary habits of all imagery- from high art to mass culture. In many ways they can be seen as precursors to Ad-busters, punk and graffiti writing. Their enemy was complacency and consumer passivity and their weapons were formed by recycling the detritus of this system back into circulation in a way that would disrupt apathy.

The short-term goal of the group was to create ‘Situations’: fleeting moments of freedom from physical and psychological toil that allowed more for authentic relations between individuals, their communities, and their environment. The long-term goal was revolution: the creation of an anti-authoritarian system free from the manufactured consent of both consumer-society and the totalitarian state.

What the hell is ‘the spectacle’?

Guy Debord, let us never forget, was a Marxist, though he didn’t sit easily with many of those who share that title. The first point of The Society of the Spectacle is a play off the opening line of Capital, which reads, “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities.’” What Debord is doing here is attempting to extend Marxist thought into his historical present- then experiencing the rise of the middle class rather than the rumbling of proletarian revolution.

Marx had developed the theory of alienation, a keystone in Marxist theory that supposes that factory system alienates workers from their labor and its products through the separation of the means of production from the producers. Standard stuff right? Good thing we don’t work in factories? Well Guy Debord takes this further, claiming that it is not only labor and its products that are alienated through a system of commodity production, but rather the whole of human relations have been commodified and alienated in turn. What’s worse, these relations no longer exist in any authentic way in Debord’s eyes, having rather become commodities of appearance: a series of spectacles that create a system of constructed and shallow desires. It’s often difficult to ascertain the root of our wants now that need is largely a redundant consideration, but according to Debord, what we want most of all is appearance rather than experience- to see and be seen with our Apple products rather than to use them.

Advertising is probably the first thing that jumps into mind when trying to summon an example of the spectacle. The branding of merchandise and experiences has always perplexed me in the scandalous success of its semiotic drift. Other aspects of modern life too are entrenched in spectacle. Fashion in all its forms has become the great hermenutic tool of social groups, while gender, racial, and heteronomative standards are upheld and entrenched. Political rhetoric all too often fails to leave this realm, while dragging reality TV into the light of this analysis would be almost too easy.

Arguably, we’re sold a falsified construction of human relations that center around consumer productions and I think this does affect our lived experiences with one another. Is our understanding of what it means to be a woman not unaffected by years of looking at perfume ads? Are our expectations for what love and ‘the couple’ can mean not slowly determined by the crust formed by years of bad movies? Do you ever catch yourself posing for imagined spectators, observing the quiet narrative of your life, complete with product placement? Can you live your life, as the Situationist slogan suggests, without dead-time?

The spectacle, in short, is the pervasive separation of appearing from living. Or, as Debord puts it, “.. a global social practice split into reality and image” (point 7).

How does art relate to ‘the spectacle’?

Images certainly seem to be regarded with great suspicion by Debord and the Situationists. Often accused of ‘being an agent of the spectacle’, or being too easily declawed and re-appropriated into the spectacle, art has often struggled with its own problems between being a commodity and an appearance. Even the most radical works cannot resist commodification.

Witness the phenomena of putting art on t-shirts; this surely is the appearance of a cultural commodity rather than the embodiment of an aesthetic or conceptual experience.

One school of thought is to cease to make art, and to focus one’s efforts towards the détournement of visual materials high and low that are already out in the culture at large. There are many punks, ad-busters, and modern Situationists hard at work producing this kind of work. Billboards are jacked, signs are vandalized, and imagery is appropriated into an altogether different sphere. And yet, I think we delude ourselves if we imagine this to be a static process; too often ad-busting is appropriated into the lexicon of advertisers and counter-culture once again becomes the new commodity cool. At best, détournement is an on-going and perpetual battle, and I don’t imagine that the odds are stacked in any activist’s favor.

So how else do we make artistic interventions into the spectacle? Perhaps by creating heterotopias and refuges outside of its reach? While suffering no illusions as to ever purely achieving such a thing, I certainly believe that we can do more to construct relational conditions that are conducive to exchange rather than endless appearing. There are many examples this goal expressed through art- from Joseph Beuys to Rebecca Belmore- but just to keep it local, I can think of two Edmonton experiments.

First would be Amy Shostak’s recent work for In/stall/ed, entitled My Dido, The Orator. Consisting simply of her grandfather, a coffee table with some of his favorite books and some chairs, the work was almost entirely relational. I wish I had mentioned Debord in my conversation with Amy’s Dido, as I’m sure he’d have something spirited and unexpected to add to my analysis. While the work depended on the considerable force of Mr. Shostak’s personality, it was nevertheless based around conditions that I’d like to see realized more often between strangers and myself.

Another glimpse of these anti-spectaculist strategies can be found in Edmonton’s Weekly Collective, a loosely organized group in pursuit of “That Great Idea.” I was particularly impressed with the tin-can telephone they hung between the high level and blue bridges that cross the North Saskatchewan. What would you say to a stranger barely visible, connected to you through a tense cord and a primitive amplifier? That’s the sort of thing I want to find out.

And yet…

As much as I find the theory of the spectacle useful way of thinking about my relation to commodities and to others, I’m not totally convinced that it’s the only way to engage in these reflections and reformations. There’s a risk, I think, in constructing oneself as an avantgarde savant in a sea of sheeple. Afterall, the creation of a counter-culture- even an anti-culture- doesn’t remain effective for long. Other thinkers, such as Murray Bookchin, have dismissed Debord and Situationism as self-indulgent radicalism. Bookchin raises these fears far better than I could in saying, “if they claimed to have invented the theory of the spectacle, I would say that they were the spectacle of theory.”

Even Debord himself failed to live up to his principles. He ruled over the Situationists with a Stalinist severity, expelling almost everyone but himself before the movement inevitably collapsed. He removed himself from public life, withdrew all his films from circulation, and eventually committed suicide. There’s definitely a danger implicit to method of revolution that leads to the worst in human nature finding its way out in all its destructive potential.

Even so, I still find The Society of the Spectacle to be a terrible useful little manual to thinking about the ethics of imagry, commodites and their interrelated circulation. Debord’s project, thankfully, hasn’t ended with him or his immediate movement. I very much look forward to explore some of these ideas (as well as any suprises that are brought to the table) with you on Wednesday. The potluck starts at 7 pm- it would be great if you could make it.

If not, please enjoy “The Situationist”:

I’m so sorry. I just really like puns.

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