The Spectacle Looks Back into You: The Situationists and the Aporias of the Left

Abstract

Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle: the foremost work of the Situationist movement, appeared almost half a century ago. Owing to a remarkable convergence of ideas and events, it quickly became a historically momentous work, and it has since become a classic of modern radical thought. Whether it is, as its translator Ken Knabb claims, “arguably the most important radical book of the twentieth century,”¹ Dcbord deserves credit for drawing attention to the major transformations that had taken place in the system of social domination. Specifically, he showed that critics of advanced capitalism needed to shift their focus from a preoccupation with the authoritarian state and repressive productionist ideology as the salient mechanisms of domination, and instead focus more intently on the power of the commodity and of the corisumptionist imaginary.