By John Damellos
This year marks a quarter of a century since the suicide of Guy Debord, one of the patriarchs of political discord and creator of the Situationist Movement. Since 1967, when his theory of the spectacle, explained the nature of late capitalism's historical decay, we are fully aware that authentic social life has been replaced with its representation. We know that the history of social life can be understood as "the decline of being into having and having into merely appearing." Thus, it is ironic that despite his warnings, not only have we become even more comfortably numb, but we have managed to let the spectacle obscure real human history and we encourage the virtual "to entirely replace the material in the course of history, a point at which", as J. Curcio suggests "we can truly say would be the end of history."
This year marks a quarter of a century since the suicide of Guy Debord, one of the patriarchs of political discord and creator of the Situationist Movement. Since 1967, when his theory of the spectacle, explained the nature of late capitalism's historical decay, we are fully aware that authentic social life has been replaced with its representation. We know that the history of social life can be understood as "the decline of being into having and having into merely appearing." Thus, it is ironic that despite his warnings, not only have we become even more comfortably numb, but we have managed to let the spectacle obscure real human history and we encourage the virtual "to entirely replace the material in the course of history, a point at which", as J. Curcio suggests "we can truly say would be the end of history."
In a world that is truly topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false."The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than "that which appears is good, that which is good appears."
The present phase of total occupation of social life by the accumulated results of the economy leads to a generalized sliding of having to appearing, from which all actual "having" must draw its immediate prestige and its ultimate function.
The spectacle is the existing order's uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue.
... The fetishistic, purely objective appearance of spectacular relations conceals the fact that they are relations among classes: a second nature...seems to dominate our environment.
Guy Debord
What Guy Debord proposed was that we have long reached that historical threshold, "at which the commodity completed its colonization of social life." Reality has been replaced by an inverted image of society in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, and "passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity".
Living in our consumer society is mostly about having; advertisers use spectacular images to convey what people need and must have and foremost, how to appear. The reality in news bulletins is also a commodity, and it has become, as Debord would argue, a social relation among people, mediated by spectacular images.
During this process, Debord argues that “the quality of life is impoverished with such a lack of authenticity that human perceptions are truly affected; consequently, the degradation of knowledge hinders critical thought and as the purpose of knowledge is to soften reality, the spectacle obscures real history, imploding it with the future into a homogenous mass, a type of never-ending present.
In this fashion, the spectacle averts individuals from realizing that our spectacular society is nothing but a moment in time and space, one that can be overturned through revolution.
To deconstruct such a reality, we have to wake up the spectator -who has been drugged by spectacular images- by applying détournement, a set of revolutionary images and language that aims to disrupt the flow of the capitalist spectacle by "turning expressions of the capitalist system and its media culture against itself".
Debord insisted that détournement can be a spectacle as well, as long as it serves the purpose of convincing the individual to construct radical situations that bring a revolutionary reordering of life, politics, and art.
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