-- Leo's gemini proxy
-- Connecting to oberdada.pollux.casa:1965...
-- Connected
-- Sending request
-- Meta line: 20 text/gemini; lang=fr
This should be a classic in media studies.
Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (originally published in 1988)
Already at the outset, Debord modestly surmises the Comments will be welcomed by some fifty or sixty readers, half of which "will consist of people who devote themselves to maintaining the spectacular system of domination, and the other half of people who persist in doing quite the opposite." Debord, taking notice of attentive and influential readers of a different persuasion than his, feels that he "cannot speek with complete freedom" or give away too much information.
Self-censorship may be a more acute problem today than when Debord wrote his Comments. But some of the repression we now identify as responses to 9/11 or the Charlie Hebdo attacks was beginning to form. For example, Debord already identified the problem of surveillance and over-collecting of intelligence, only to make it harder to find the real suspects.
For Debord, the Spectacle is virtually a synonym for the mass media with its distractions, loss of long-term memory, and avoidance of analysis and contextualisation. If something isn't mentioned on the news for three days, it's as if it had never existed. By regurgitating two or three sensational headlines, everything else can be memoryholed.
The Society of the Spectacle, the original work from 1967, is much better known and more influential. There is a film version as well, juxtaposing clips from advertising and Hollywood films with Debord's theoretical narrative. Spectacle is about appearances, and appearance is what counts, not the underlying substance. The original text is, as I remember it from reading it some ten years ago, unimpressive and rather theory-laden. The Comments, however, while still dense and partly hard to penetrate gets into concrete details to a larger extent. And most surprisingly, it shows how foresighted Debord was.
An english translation of the Comments was published by Verso in 1990. The whole book, about 100 pages, can be found online. Some quotes from The Society of the Spectacle can be read here:
Completely unrelated to this, the Oberdada Guide to Obscure Metal has now been updated and expanded. You find it from the main page.
-- Response ended
-- Page fetched on Tue May 21 18:11:31 2024