When Debord says that "All that was once directly lived has become mere representation," he is referring to the central importance of the image in contemporary society. The Society of the Spectacle is a critique of contemporary consumer culture and commodity fetishism, dealing with issues such as class alienation, cultural homogenization, and mass media. ĭebord encouraged the use of détournement, "which involves using spectacular images and language to disrupt the flow of the spectacle." In the Situationist view, situations are actively created moments characterized by "a sense of self-consciousness of existence within a particular environment or ambience". Debord analyzes the use of knowledge to assuage reality: the spectacle obfuscates the past, imploding it with the future into an undifferentiated mass, a type of never-ending present in this way the spectacle prevents individuals from realizing that the society of spectacle is only a moment in history, one that can be overturned through revolution. In his analysis of the spectacular society, Debord notes that the quality of life is impoverished, with such a lack of authenticity that human perceptions are affected, and an attendant degradation of knowledge, which in turn hinders critical thought. "The spectacle is not a collection of images," Debord writes, "rather, it is a social relation among people, mediated by images." The spectacle is the inverted image of society in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, in which "passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity". Each thesis contains one paragraph.ĭebord traces the development of a modern society in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation: "All that once was directly lived has become mere representation." Debord argues that the history of social life can be understood as "the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing." This condition, according to Debord, is the "historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life."
THE SPECTACLE SERIES
The work is a series of 221 short theses in the form of aphorisms. Debord published a follow-up book Comments on the Society of the Spectacle in 1988.
The book is considered a seminal text for the Situationist movement. Guy Debord’s own (anti)films are given a modern counterpoint by satirical interventions in a visual work that is not afraid to criticise neither itself nor the cult around Debord and situationism.The Society of the Spectacle ( French: La société du spectacle) is a 1967 work of philosophy and Marxist critical theory by Guy Debord, in which the author develops and presents the concept of the Spectacle. In 27 episodes, Farhat unfolds his theses through conversations with situationism expert Mikkel Bolt, Andreas Malm (‘How to Blow Up a Pipeline’), critic Valerie Kyeyune Backström and professor of film Jyoti Mistryothers, among others. What to do? And how do you film a notoriously complicated theory that attacks the very image itself? Artist Roxy Farhat and filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson (‘Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975’) bring Guy Debord’s ideas into the 21st century. We live in a continuous sensory bombardment of distractions that keep us in the role of passive consumers – a condition that has not exactly improved since the revolutionary 60s. Since 1967, Guy Debord’s critical manifesto ‘The Society of the Spectacle’ has been an essentiel theoretical basis for any attempt to analyse the capitalist society of images that permeates every aspect of life in the Western world. Satirical and self-critical film adaptation of Guy Debord’s theoretical masterpiece, and a frontal attack on the all-encompassing spectacle we live in. Roxy Farhat, Göran Hugo Olsson / Sweden / 2023 / 94 min / World Premiere You don’t hate Mondays, you hate capitalism.
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