In 1966, a group of radical students, dissatisfied with their social and ideological position within post-war capitalist society, published a pamphlet at the University of Strasbourg, in France. The pamphlet, which bankrupted the coffers of the Strasbourg student union, scathingly denounced every aspect of student life, claiming the French student "was already a very bad joke" (Knabb 317). These radicals, somehow elected to the presidency of the student union, then dissolved their offices, claiming "[the student union] was nothing more than a mechanism for integration into an unacceptable society" (Jappe 82). This spirit of revolt, eschewing the "proper" bureaucratic channels for the efficient redress of perceived grievances, precisely indicates the attitudes of the pamphlet's authors, the Situationists.

By 1966, the Situationists had evolved from a mishmash of political, cultural, and artistic fringe groups to a coherent revolutionary organization. Their immanent objective: a radical critique of both consumer capitalist and authoritarian socialist society in their respective totalities. The aforementioned pamphlet made great strides for their international recognition, as denunciations poured in from every hallowed sector of bourgeois society: church, state, professionals, reformists, and the university itself. Manifestly behind the acerbic bombast of student life – that the "various institutions which govern his daily life" would only stop shitting in his face to come around and bugger him – the Situationists presented a rigorous analysis of the current world-historical state of capitalism, which they dubbed "the spectacle-commodity economy", or, as it continued to advance itself, merely "the spectacle". In the world of the spectacle, the critique of which the Situationist International spent most of its intellectual time, the position of the student holds particular interest as a metaphor for the impossibility of life as a whole.

The student's primary social function, qua student, is the initiate (Knabb 320): as such, his process of learning within the university (institutional organization of ignorance) consists of internalizing the constraints, mediations, and seductions of the dominant ideology. Though the more vocally conservative sectors of society hail student life as an unprecedented time of experiment and freedom, the student persists in spending his time as conventionally as possible (and we all know society places no limits on conformism), "preferring the security of the strait-jacketed daily space-time organized for this benefit by the guardians of the system" (Knabb 323). The student, conventionally, spends his time in material and ideological consumption. More than any other target market in society, the student greedily consumes the cultural spectacle: falling at the feet of professors, attending meaningless lectures and symposia, and watching the latest Godard. Any attempt to circumvent the mass-produced cultural spectacle, the preferred pedagogy of the bourgeois student, meets with mediation. The student qua activist remains as counter-revolutionary as the student qua consumer, because his pathetic rebellion against the spectacle falls precisely into the dominant ideology, expressed as the dominant antagonism. Thus, the student can support the French Communist Party, join the Revolutionary Communist Youth, or read any number of fashionable "radical" magazines. Such a pitiful attempt at societal critique only succeeds as an indictment of the self – the student's attempt to escape spectacular cultural production progresses only so far as his understanding of life: which is to say, nowhere.

At this point lucidity dawns on our metonymy: the summary effect of the spectacle for all its spectators – not just students – is the denial of life, and its subsequent replacement with life's image, mere survival.

Any discussion which ponders the summary effects of the spectacle begs for a definition of the term, spectacle. The Situationists use the term spectacle to describe the system of social relations concomitant with the highest level of consumer capitalism: the spectacle-commodity economy. Fundamentally, the Situationist make no claim as to the earthshaking originality of their theories, rather they have no desire to "launch novelties on the culture market". Guy Debord, primary theorist of the spectacle, thus declares "Plagiarism is necessary. Progress demands it" (Debord §207), emphasizing the importance of understanding and re-appropriating the past for building a theory of the present. In this light, Situationist theory can be seen as a radical adaptation of what should be important in modern philosophy and revolutionary theory: therefore, any exposition of the spectacle must also be its ontology. I conceive of this ontology as building upon three distinct threads: early Marxian thought, the importance of everyday life, and revolutionary play. My analysis tends to focus on the first.

The Situationists place themselves firmly within an early Marxian tradition of commodity criticism, often referred to as Marxian humanism, which focuses primarily upon the alienating effects of capitalism on man. The central thrust of such criticism attacks capitalism not on the basis of practical evils (i.e. vitiation, the reduction of worker to what he needs to survive) but more on the notion than capitalism is inimical to human freedom. Though this strain of Marxian thought also shows prominently in Capital, it dominates Marx's earlier works, including the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Contribution to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: an Introduction, and The German Ideology, from which I may occasionally quote. After Marx, in the first quarter of the twentieth century, two men famously carried the banner of Marxian humanism: Hungarian philosopher George Lukacs and Italian revolutionist Antonio Gramsci. Because the Situationists acknowledge their heavy debt the ideas Lukacs presents in his 1923 treatise History and Class Consciousness, I cast him as the primary theoretical mediator between the Situationist critique of the spectacle and Marx's critique of capital.

For Guy Debord, self-proclaimed and widely recognized ringleader of the Situationist International, the spectacle parodied capital. Furthermore, the spectacle concluded the internal logic of capital, and thus the society of the spectacle sits at the highest, latest, stage of capitalism. Thus, as a book that parodies, extends, quotes, and plays with its Marxian (and Hegelian) ancestors, Society of the Spectacle is most accurately a work of detournement.

Detournement, a central Situationist technique, first originated in the wordplay of the poet Lautreamont, a central Situationist hero. The Situationists formally reincarnate detournement as "the integration of present or past artistic production into a superior construction of a milieu" (Knabb 45). Furthermore, within the old cultural spheres, detournement is "a method of propaganda, a wearing out and loss importance of those spheres" (Knabb 46). Practically, detournement manifests itself as the "reuse of preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble" (Knabb 55), and often appears as collage, subvertising, or parody. In literature, philosophy, or radical theory, detourned writing often takes the form of plagiarism. In a detourned sentence, the author modifies one or two words in an un-attributed quotation, thus producing a synthesis of his meaning alongside the negation of the old meaning.

Conceiving Debord's book as a detournement of Marx is not a novel endeavor; most evidently, the first line of his book directly parodies that of Capital. Reading the spectacle as a detournement of capitalism presents a little more theoretical intrigue. Debord translates the language of Marxian analysis to his own vocabulary, synthesizing his meaning with Marx's upon each term he appropriates, then edifies his version as the orthodox description of the current historical moment. In particular, I see Debord detourning two distinct ideas of Marx's analysis, through the lens of Lukacs, to arrive at his (Debord's) notion of the spectacle: capital as a social relation and the role of capital in shaping society.

"Capital is not a thing but a social relationship between persons mediated by things"

- Capital, p776

Marx comes to reveal the hidden. The brilliance of capitalism lies in its deceptive capacity – the objects we see as unremarkable, objective items and institutions (sweaters, Leland Stanford's railroad) conceal a history of development from nature (naked sheep, decimated forests) through human social relations (sweatshops, Chinese immigrant labor). The ideology of exchange naturally disassociates labor from its products, allowing (limiting?) consumers to regard commodities as ahistorical, only thinking about their current market price. Hence objectivity – the objective market objectively determines the objective price by what it (the market) will objectively bear. Marx seeks to shred this veil of objectivity. In pointing out that capital has a social ontology beyond its objective mediators (things), Marx reveals the subjective alienation (forced) labor produces. This revelation changes the whole topology of discourse: no economist can persevere in discussing only the objectively quantifiable elements of political economy without addressing the essentially subjective character of the relation between worker and production.

Debord understands the brilliance of Marx's demystification of the commodity, and follows suit in exposing the image. His thesis, "the spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images" (Debord §4), detourns Marx's quote above. First, Debord re-conceives the fundamental unit of exchange as the image, not capital. From there, Debord reinterprets Marx's revelation for the spectacular age: just as capitalism sought to hide the alienation and reification implicit in the social function of the laborer, the society of the spectacle obscures the humiliation and isolation implicit in the social function of the spectator. Debord argues against a critique of the spectacle that focuses merely on the preponderance of images, because images are not the essential character of the spectacle – passivity is. Rather, Debord analyzes the alienation of wrapping one's life up with images, especially images other people created. As Marx unveiled alienated labour as an essential feature of capitalism, Debord unveils the passivity of the professional spectator, he who stares catatonically through the progression of his own history, as an essential feature of the spectacle.

One of the best-popularized aspects of Marx's philosophy is the base-superstructure metaphor that underlies his theory of historical materialism. Essentially, Marx claims the social and political relations of society hinge upon society's underlying economic structure. That is, in an age where the instruments of production undergo revolutionary change, such as the origins of the Industrial Revolution, the concomitant social relations must likewise undergo a change: "they [must] be burst asunder; they were burst asunder" (Tucker 478). In theorizing this relationship, Marx does not impose a strict 1:1 relationship on forms and relations of production, but merely emphasizes "the economic structure of society" is the real basis on which a juridical and political superstructure arises, and to which definite forms of social conscience correspond" (Fromm 217). As such, capital holds politics on a kite-string – though the latter is able to breeze this way and that, a release or contraction by the former – a break in the forms of production – causes immediate and drastic effects its charge.

In revising Mark's claim that capital shapes society to his own that the spectacle shapes society, Debord once again extends and negates Marx's position. Debord takes what he find valuable as his own – the notion that social relations are historically contingent on their economic bases – and adjusts the vocabulary to fit his own theoretical framework. Thus, capital becomes spectacle and 'economic basis' reads 'spectacle-commodity economy'.

According to Debord, "the spectacle corresponds to the historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life" (Debord §42). If so, then the spectacle's colonial programme is faithfully imperial. It takes the raw goods of daily experience (man, woman, bread, wine) refines them in its image production factories (stereotypes, televisions, churches, supermarkets) and sells them back to the natives at a vicious margin. From a Situationist perspective, in fact, the margin is incalculable. Instead of living spontaneously, the spectacle's enforced passivity and commodity rule make us pay for what was once both free and priceless: the commodification and mediation of daily experience make life cheap and surviving expensive.

At this point of total colonization, the fact that society remains recognizable is a marvel itself. Society, "in its length and breadth", in Debord's words, "becomes capital's faithful portrait" (Debord §50). Not just any capital mind you, but Situationist capital, which is to say spectacle, or "capital where it becomes accumulated to the point of image" (Debord §34). In such a world, following Marx's move of separation and abstraction – divining the intricacies of the correspondence between political superstructure and economic base – becomes impossible. The spectacle – "the sun that never sets on the empire of modern passivity" (Debord §13) – now covers the entire globe, and gives no hints as to its anything.

Really, according to the spectacle itself, there is no ontology. The spectacle unilaterally imposes itself as the end of history, the eternal present, the end of autonomy, and the ultimate telos. In society of the spectacle, "the commodity contemplates itself in a world of its own making" (Debord §53).

Such a description is grim indeed. The spectacle tightens the noose that capital rigged, further squeezing the life out of the proletariat. Of course, in the Situationist model we all melt into the psychological proletariat; not only do we lack control of the means of production, we have been robbed of the means of emotions. Within Marx's diachronical model, philosophers and workers alike had room to wiggle between the changing forms of production and their loosely tethered relations of production. The spectacle allows no margins but its own. In rewriting society as spectacular rather than economic, Debord stresses his own point: workers (and non-workers to a greater degree) are no longer immiserated in their lives, for they have abdicated life altogether.

Starting in the "Organisation of Appearance", Vaneigem begins to dissect the machinery of the spectacle. He sees the narrative of the spectacle as working to ensure "the coherence of myth" (its own) except for occasional punctures in the party story, at which point the "coherence of myth" turns into a frenzy to save the "myth of coherence": "what had formerly had been taken for granted had suddenly to be vigorously asserted" (Vaneigem 125). At such points, ruptures in the grand machinery like the Revolution of May 1968, the spectacle hauls out support from its strongholds – economists, academics, government, the media – and prods those who ordinarily have no function but the maintenance of their own passivity to vociferously offer their own support. Of course, this careful organization falters more and more with the incredible fragmentation of the modern spectacle. The ubiquitous and fleeting character of modern ideologies – no longer simply the ideologies of church and state but those of Backstreet Boys and Pokemon besides – are often contradictory. The spectacle has entered such a state of complexity as to have lost all calculation. As such, Vaneigem claims we are in the historical moment of the decomposition of the spectacle, and thus there is no better time to be re-proposing the virtues of life and love. Naturally, "the decomposition of the spectacle entails a spectacle of decomposition. It is in the logic of things the last actor should film his own death;" (Vaneigem 126) there are no missed opportunities for production nor consumption within the spectacle.

Within such complexity, the spectacle maintains control over individual members of society through the notion of the role. The primitive idea of the role is that of alienation: to have man's thoughts and actions be produced externally then consumed internally. Rather than letting woman set his own priorities and decide his own habits, the spectacle pounces upon this opportunity for consumption – both material and ideologically. Witness mechanism of the sort: the university and the image. The university is an idea factory: the professors produce (or more often, recycle) ideas and the students move through as on a conveyor belt, consuming whatever is put in front of them. Some universities, the more liberal ones, take flak from the establishment for allows their students to choose between three or four different conveyors belts, but the basic role of passive consumption remains the same. Image factories operate in much the same way, but "it is not through the dissemination of ideas that cinema, an its personalized form, television, win the battle for our minds." Rather, it is the dissemination of gestures: in watching an internalizing the models whose images are produced for our enjoyment, we understand the proper range of responses in a given situation. It's not just that every thirty-year old man has his hair cut like George Clooney; it's that every thirty-year woman brushes her hair out of her eyes in the same anxious gesture like Meg Ryan. According to Vaneigem, even our personal tics and idiosyncrasies are manufacture en masse.

This internalization of societal values – after a limited choice of which set of values we would like to internalize – formalizes as the role. The role is the atomic unit of the spectacle, which gets imposed upon every member of society in order to better shape that member's life. The phraseology is difficult because it's difficult to say whether the individual imposes such roles on herself or the spectacles does the dirty work by itself. In either case, Vaneigem sees roles as enemy foot-soldiers in the battle for our minds – we either internalize their virtues or prejudices or develop our own. For Vaneigem, to blindly accept a spectacular role is pick from "a museum of images, a showroom of stick figures" (Vaneigem 128) – no matter which one we choose, we abdicate love and subjectivity for the shadow of a life. The antidote to such shallow living is direct, immediate (in the radical of sense of without mediation) experience: "Roles are eroded by the resistance put up by lived experience and spontaneity will eventually lance the abscess of inauthenticity and pseudo-activity" (Vaneigem 130). If that's the case, then why are roles so predominant, so seductive? Why, once one has come to the reversal of perspective, fall back into a role: the libertine, the philosopher, the leader, or even the radical? What is so seductive about the role?

Vaneigem begins to explore this question on the level of appearances. He points to the necessity of playing parts in certain situations, "parts which appear to answer our desires but which are really antagonistic to them" (Vaneigem 131). Vaneigem attributes the general feeling of "the absurdity of actions" to exactly this: the internalization of a foreign, alienatory role. Even more insidious, Vaneigem notes that though the spectacle often pigeonholes certain personalities into certain roles: the teacher's pet, the high school poet, the drama queen, other's not directly assigned roles by the spectacle choose their own out of the mixed bag they've internalized through spectacular media. Thus, the great promise of socialism realized on the level of inauthenticity – to every woman his role! For the first time in the history of man's oppression of man, the ruling power takes from the rich to give to the poor – bad luck that the handouts are shares of alienation and not bread! Here we seek the author's bitter poster-boy of the role, The Thirty-Five Year-Old Man: "Each morning he starts his car, drives to the office, pushes papers, has lunch in town, plays pool, pushes more papers, leaves work, has a couple of drinks, goes home, greets his wife, kisses his children, eats his steak in front of the TV, goes to bed, makes love, and falls asleep. Who reduces this man's life to this pathetic sequences of cliches?" (Vaneigem 133). The answer, of course, is that he himself does. It is by his own choice that he only orders drinks he's seen on TV, bases his pool game on The Color of Money, and choreographs his lovemaking to July's column in Mens’ Health. Each of his actions, no matter what he drew from where, comes to his live as a foreign commodity, and as such negates his internal desire to live and ends up alienating him. One can almost here Vaneigem scoff "his pleasures are so mitigated, yet so demonstrative, that they can only be a facade". Which is precisely what perplexes Vaneigem – why give up the opportunity for direct, lived pleasure, the pleasure that we all – even the Thirty-Five Year-Old Man – daydream of every day, for a role? Such daydreams, when uncensored, have force untold: "who can gauge the power of an impassioned daydream, of pleasure taken in love, of a nascent desire, of a rush in sympathy?" (Vaneigem 134).

Vaneigem finds his answer in the double character of the role. For the passive woman, the role is not merely a threat to his own experience, it provides mediation against the chaos of the world, from what they might be missing. With a role, there is no doubt about the 'way of living'; it has been decided for you. In Vaneigem's words, "the role is at once a threat and a protective shield... they impoverish real experiences but also protect this experience from consciousness of its impoverishment" (Vaneigem 139). Typical Situationist babble? Without roles, woman could collapse from fear of possibility. This is the onus of love, for a life in love with itself knows no limits and consequently knows no paths through the desert of life. As the Ivan Chtcheglov wrote in 1953 (Knabb 1):

Love leaves us wandering, confused, parched, in want of shade – of the comfort of the role. Such a comfort is the illusion of an oasis, a seduction into the metropolis of policed roads that pave the spectacle. Those who eschew such illusions must find their own ways, rejoice in their own wanderings, build their own haciendas. Such a dramatic break, from the constraint over the role into the pure poetry of love, is a difficult maneuver at the least, tending towards mysticism and solipsism. Vaneigem's answer, another element at the core of the Situationist project, is play. To inject play into one's everyday role is to subvert it towards life and love. It is to detourn the role itself, and thus detourn everyday life. Precisely because the role is so ubiquitous, merely shrugging it off would be a waste of potential, a missed opportunity for play. In detourning the role, we are negating its alienatory effect on us – it becomes ours once again – and we are transcending its manufactured meaning. Like Jacques Vache, who listed his famous talents then wrote "Now I am going to stay at home and let others explain and debate my personality in light of the above mentioned indications," (Vaneigem 140) Vaneigem impresses upon us the need to detach ourselves from our roles, to better turn them against those who perceive us through spectacular lenses (Vaneigem 150):

Vaneigem's project is to maintain the protective aspect of roles for the time being, while simultaneously detourning their projective side. The idea that woman can and should be defined by a stereotype is "inherently ridiculous" (Vaneigem 150), so why not treat them as such? The detournement of the role is our best opportunity to wreak havoc on everyday life in the name of an honest desire to live.

appendix home