The Society of the Spectacle

In this chapter, Debord returns to his analysis of the Spectacle in order to show how its logic can be seen at work within the domain of cultural and intellectual life (e.g. literature, painting, poetry, sociology, anthropology, ethnology, and philosophy). The complicity of the arts in preserving the alienating function of the Spectacle is due to the fact that the Spectacle functions in order to “make history forgotten within culture” (Section 192).

Similarly, regarding the intellectual domain, Debord views the popularity of structuralism within the humanities and social sciences as also providing a historical analyses of certain social phenomena such as language, human societies, social groups, and even abstract ideas. For Debord, what art, culture, and academic works share in this regard is their failure at grasping the historical nature of the objects of their respective studies. Such a failure is damning, says Debord, precisely because the erasure of history is equivalent to repressing the truth of Marx’s own insight: history is the history of class struggle and, today, it is waged by the proletariat in the name of the collective emancipation of all of humanity. Thus, to repress the historical dimension within aesthetic or intellectual endeavors is to condemn oneself to always falling short of the aim of actualizing universal freedom. 

In this chapter, Debord synthesizes his earlier arguments regarding the logic of the spectacle and the nature of capitalist society. For Debord, the logic of the spectacle is the highest expression of Ideology, understood as the ways in which individuals falsely identify with their position within capitalist society. As Debord remarks, the spectacle is ideology par excellence precisely because not only do individuals view themselves according to positions that are not their own (as workers, as poor, as exploited), individuals also increasingly distance themselves from the history of workers struggles, which is the only framework that provides individuals with a true understanding of their life possibilities under capitalism, while also providing them with the framework that would be capable of transforming their exploited and alienated existence into a fully-emancipated and liberated life. It is in this way that the spectacle, which was initially defined as an inverted world in the opening chapter, produces an inverted knowledge, or false consciousness, of who we are in reality.