Expository Essay on the Society of the Spectacle

The Society of the Spectacle

The Society of the Spectacle is a book written by Guy Debord for the Situationist movement in 1967. In this book that is a mixture of Guy Debord’s own philosophy and Marxist philosophy, Debord’s idea of the “spectacle” is presented. The book is made up of 221 paragraph long theses. These theses as a whole make up Debord’s idea of the spectacle. In a very basic sense, the spectacle is the way the mass media interacts with people and society. “The Society of the Spectacle” became a very important text for the movement that Debord helped found, the Situationists.

One of the theses within the book is “All that once was directly lived has become mere representation” (https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm). This is Debord’s way of saying that authentic social life and interactions have become replaced with representations. Media replaces people’s social life and fills in the holes with advertisements and things like that. The spectacle also becomes a replacement for real historical people and events. It sugarcoats things of the past, causing people to not be able to view them as they are. It also sugarcoats the future, causing people to not be able to look ahead and plan for the future, and only be able to live in the present, where the spectacle can exert more control over your life.

“The spectacle is not a collection of images, rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (same reference as before). In this statement, Debord clarifies that the spectacle is not just the media, or just people. If one were missing, the spectacle would not exist. The media and people form two pillars that hold up the spectacle, and if one were to disappear, the spectacle would fall. But,the spectacle is not to be mistaken for its own independent thing. It is a connection, or a network, so deeply ingrained within the media and society that it has become a part of both.

Debord thinks that the spectacle dulls human knowledge and perception, forms a lens over the human “eye” that slightly