ancient cities

distinguished between a concentrated form of the
spectacle found under state bureaucracies, whose
maintenance depended upon ideology condensed
around a dictatorial figure and buttressed by police
power, and a diffuse form that he associated with
the abundance of commodities within modern
capitalism. He later argued that, having emerged
in the 1920s, the spectacle had become integrated
by the 1980s, permeating all reality. In developing
Marxist debates about commodity fetishism and
alienation, Debord’s approach ran counter to contemporaneous
structuralist readings of Marx in
France by Louis Althusser, whose influence in
urban studies would be felt particularly through
the work of Manuel Castells on the urban question
in the early 1970s. Instead, Debord was influenced
by Georg Lukács and by the critique of everyday
life initiated by Henri Lefebvre, and he formed a
mutually influential association with the latter for
several years around the end of the 1950s.
Not only is time shaped under the rule of the
commodity within the society of the spectacle, so
Debord argued, but so is space. Debord and the
situationists gave particular importance to the role
of urbanism in this regard, arguing that the production
of urban spaces within capitalist societies
became a means for people to be separated, isolated,
and controlled even as they were massed
together through the demands of urban production.
Debord defined urbanism as “the mode of
appropriation of the natural and human environment
by capitalism, which, true to its logical development
toward absolute domination, can (and
now must) refashion the totality of space into its
own peculiar décor.” It was in this spirit that he
lamented the destruction of Paris and other cities,
the displacement of large parts of their populations
along class and ethnic lines, and the eradication of
memory and senses of the past. Yet if powerful
forces shape urban space into “environments of
abstraction,” then a key aim of revolutionary
struggle is to contest those environments and to
seek the transformation of both space and society.
Debord described proletarian revolution as a “critique
of human geography” through which people
would be able to construct their own urban spaces
and events in a process of emancipatory struggle,
and he looked ultimately toward the dissolution of
classes, the disalienation of realized democracy,
and the establishment of workers’ councils, whose
Society of the Spectacle
753
power “can be effective only if it transforms the
totality of existing conditions.”
Spectacular Politics
Debord acknowledged how easily the concept of
the spectacle could lose its critical bite and become
simply another empty formula of sociologico-
political rhetoric. To avoid this fate he argued that
its theorization must join forces “with the practical
movement of negation within society” while,
at the same time, revolutionary class struggle must
itself develop a critique of the spectacle. To understand
Debord’s writings on the society of the spectacle,
it is therefore necessary to situate them
alongside his political critiques of events and
issues around the world, including those published
in the 12 issues of the journal Internationale situationniste
between 1958 and 1969, such as his
accounts of class struggle and power in Algeria
and China, and of the riots in the Watts district of
Los Angeles in 1965. It is also necessary to place
them alongside attempts to fuel revolutionary
actions and to find new modes of political organizing.
Debord and the situationists strongly
rejected the vanguardism of much of the Left at
the time and sought to forge connections with
alternative movements, some of which found
expression on the streets in the revolutionary
actions in Paris in May 1968.
Since that time, variations on the term society of
the spectacle have gained increasing currency, and
references to Debord in academic and art circles
have become increasingly common. Such references
have tended to be partial, however, and the
political force that distinguishes Debord’s critique
has, in contrast, found its most receptive audience
among radical activists and theorists seeking to
oppose dominant power relations under conditions
of “spectacular” commodity production and
aiming to construct spaces and times beyond the
social power of the spectacle. In this sense the relevance
of Debord’s arguments to current times is
asserted with particular vigor and clarity by
Anselm Jappe, who has done most to position
them within the Marxist tradition. It is also used
by the group Retort in their analysis of capital and
spectacle in a new age of war, to make sense of the
current importance of struggles over the image
realm, in particular those surrounding and following