'One should bear in mind when reading this book that it was written with the deliberate intention of doing harm to spectacular society' --Guy Debord.
Originally published in France in 1968 The Society of the Spectacle is a brilliantly lucid analysis of the forms of social control and domination under modern capitalism. Since its publication it has had an enormous underground influence both on active revolutionaries and on radical cultural and political theory. Prescient in its condemnation of the image as the tool used by Capital to alienate us from the reality of our everyday lives, The Society of the Spectacle is more relevant than ever in the era of information and virtual technologies.
Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative as Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960s up to the present, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism and everyday life in the late twentieth century.
Guy Ernest Debord was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, hypergraphist and founding member of the groups Lettrist International and Situationist International. In broad terms, Debord's theories attempted to account for the spiritually debilitating modernization of the private and public spheres of everyday life by economic forces during the post-WWII modernization of Europe. Alienation, Debord postulated, could be accounted for by the invasive forces of the 'spectacle' - "a social relation between people that is mediated by images." Central to this school of thought was the claim that alienation is more than an emotive description or an aspect of individual psychology; rather, it is a consequence of the mercantile form of social organization which has reached its climax in capitalism. Debord committed suicide, shooting himself in the heart at his property on November 30, 1994.
Ken Knabb (born 1945) is an American writer, translator, and radical theorist, known for his translations of Guy Debord and the Situationist International. His own English-language writings, many of which were anthologized in Public Secrets (1997), have been translated into over a dozen additional languages. He is also a respected authority on the political significance of Kenneth Rexroth.