Guy Ernest Debord's Society Of The Spectacle

In 1957 a movement had started comprised of avant-garde artist, intellectuals and political theorist. Their main goal was to attempt to fuse the fields of theoretical disciplines into a modern and in depth critique of mid-20th century advance capitalism. This movement was named “Situationist International”.

One of the leading founders of this movement was Guy Ernest Debord, who was a writer, Marxist theorist and filmmaker. Debord was responsible for writing what was seen as the handbook for the Situationist movement, it was named Society of the Spectacle.

Society of the spectacle was written and published in France in 1967. Debord intended for this book to draw out the ideologies and mannerism of neo liberal capitalism that exists in westernised societies. The book was written so that the Situationist International would have a book of theory.

Society of the Spectacle consists of 221 short theses, each one about a paragraph in length and all within 9 chapters. The book attempts to deal with the progression and augmentation of capitalist societies, which Debord and his accomplices named the spectacle. One of the books main goals was to give a wider perspective on how the spectacle affects our everyday lives from our perception of time and history, our locality within the built environment, the strengths of media, our social relations and the subjective experiences that the spectacle has created. the main theme in the book is the concept of representation as a philosophical dilemma. Debord talks about how the spectacle is accumulated to the point where it becomes an image. He goes on to say “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything th...

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...italist development wherein 'all that was once lived has moved into representation and the concept what we want to see goes ahead of what we see.

Debord wrote society of the spectacle in 1967 with the intentions to raise awareness of the ideologies of the emerging capitalist movement. Forty-seven years later and the book still speaks volume about modern day neo liberalism and capitalism. This book gives a crucial insight on the spectacle and how it thrives in the modern world. But it must be noted that this book wasn’t written with the objective to stop the current perception of the world but rather to undo the suppression of which the spectacle has created. If representations are encoded into a mass media to reinforce the dominant ideologies in society, then it is crucial that as designers we are aware of the responsibility we hold by bringing our ideas into images.