Paul MattickIs contemporary capitalism the society of the spectacle that Guy Debord described in his book of 1967?This question is worth asking because the terms of Debord’s description of present-day capitalism have been—as he predicted they would be—absorbed by the dominant discourses of cultural and social criticism. In the humanities and particularly in art writing, reference to “the spectacle” is everywhere; it has eclipsed the earlier fixation on Benjamin’s “aura,” and compared to the Situationist catchphrase even the pessimistic jargon of Theodor Adorno, with its powerful gravitational pull on academic culture-mongers, is fading in influence. Nothing could, of course, have been more antithetical to Debord than this kind of “success.”[1] In his view, by the 1960s art was long finished as anything but pseudo-critique or simple commerce, while for sociologists and social and political commentators generally he had nothing but contempt.Still, the ubiquity of the concept of the “spectacle” demonstrates neither the accuracy nor the inaccuracy of Debord’s understanding of society. While he himself insisted that “a general theory calculated [to fight the war of freedom]” must be “perfectly unacceptable,” it must also “first of all not appear obviously false …”[2] Its acceptability does not, however, prove its falsity.The positive reception of Debord—at least of his vocabulary, if not of his analysis in its totality—is in part explained by the kinship of Situationist theory with a central strain of Western academic social thought. Debord’s contrast between precapitalist “community” and a society which is “a mere sum of solitudes” (§70, 46)[3] is a distant echo of Tönnies’s contrast betweenand, the contrast that structures the mainstream sociological tradition. The changes played on this dichotomy in the social thought of the 1950s—by writers as different as C. Wright Mills and Randall Jarrell—are strikingly close to Debord’s focus on the decline of earlier working-class values, the emergence of leisure as a new arena of alienation, and the cultural centrality of consumerism. (Debord’s debt to Henri Lefebvre’s exploration of similar themes is well known.)While thinkers like Mills are today largely ignored by adepts of the spectacle, Debord’s version of these ideas has gained particular acceptance because of the way he linked them to the newly socially prominent mass media through his signature concept. Thus he equated the loss of “the former unity of life”—meaning both the collectivity ofand the coherent experience of an individual—with the replacement of “all that once was directly lived” by “mere representation,” which becomes “the official language of generalized separation” () (§1, 12). The images broadcast by the spectacle are “detached from every aspect of life”; the original coherence of a society or a life is replaced by a fictional totality assembled from representations of selected aspects of life. These fragments come from “news or propaganda, advertising, or the actual consumption of entertainment,” an activity structured by the relations between images (§12, 13). In this way, “lived reality” incorporates “the spectacular order” (§8, 14). Such descriptions are bound to ring at least somewhat true to anyone who lives in our world, saturated by media imagery— now with the addition of the internet and cell phone--that can seem to provide the only vocabulary for understanding experience.Thus Debord took a great truism of popular sociology and social criticism, the shift from production to consumption as basic to individual identity in post-1945 capitalism, and gave it a unique twist. He described the move from one economically determined identity to another, from activity to passivity, as shaped particularly by the practice of spectatorship. This spectatorship is not limited to the simple act of watching television or going to the movies. One seems to be what one appears—and not just for others: in a literalization of Riesman’s “other-directedness,” one seems to oneself what othersin one’s choice of clothing, haircut, car, or friends, all selected from the array of signifiers presented by the media spectacle. In this way the concept of “spectacle” is also a version of the critique of “mass culture” central to the dour view of contemporary society shared by a range of ex-leftists, from Dwight MacDonald and Clement Greenberg to Theodor Adorno. Where they differ is in Debord’s abandonment of “high art” as a realm of resistance to commodity culture; in his view, with the artworld success of Surrealism in the late 1920s, art itself had become part of the dominant spectacle. For Debord—and this is the heart of his efforts around 1960 to move the Situationist International away from its earlier involvement in avant-garde art activities—resistance to the commodity could take place only in actual politics, even if the main political activity open to a small group like the S.I. was that of writing.The spectacle, unlike mass culture, has a directly political significance. As a pseudo-unity assembled from social fragments, the spectacle functions not onlythe modern state, “which, as the product of the general form of the social division of labor and organ of class rule, is the general form of all social division” (§24, 20), but as a key component of its activity: the state rules through the spectacle—through mass rallies, television appearances of “leaders,” actions calculated for their symbolic value (like American military adventures intended to reverse the “Vietnam syndrome”), and so forth—as much as through the army and police. And like the state, the spectacle is a product of “the reigning economic system,” (§28, 22) which, starting with the “separation of worker and product,” (§26, 21) culminates with the submission of all individuals to the movement of commodities that makes up the economy. The logic of the commodity “is one with men’s estrangement from one another and from the sum total of what they produce” (§37, 26).While this analysis of commodity production and the state forms it has brought with it derives, of course, from Marx, Debord stakes a claim to originality with his temporal location of the society of the spectacle as a particular era of capitalism: it “corresponds to the historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life” (§42, 29). While he does not specify that historical moment, it is clear that he is speaking of the social order that emerged in the wake of the Second World War. More exactly, one form of spectacle, the “concentrated,” emerged around 1930 in the forms of Stalinism and Nazism; afterward came the “diffuse” spectacle which, “urging wage-earners to choose freely among a great variety of new commodities,” represented “the Americanization of the world …”[4] The first form represented “the moment when anarose in radical opposition to the working class itself” (§100, 69). The second form is “capitalism in its affluent stage,” (§105, 74) when capitalism produces “so great an abundance of commodities … that a surplus ‘collaboration’ is required of the workers”: in addition to producing they must also consume (§43, 30; see §64, 42).The concept of spectacle, that is, incorporates the Keynesian ideology of the mid-century period: the idea that capitalist prosperity now, at any rate, rests on mass consumption. The two forms of spectacle have in common therefore not just dependence on falsifying imagery but also a state-managed (to different degrees) economy (another idea that Debord shared with thinkers of the time, including, on the ultra-left, the much-despised Cornelius Castoriadis). What was hailed by the then political-economic orthodoxy as a triumph of capitalism, with its provision of material wealth for all, reappeared from a negative perspective as the soullessness of consumerism, with interpersonal bonds broken by the individual pursuit of commodity-satisfied pleasures (in the Freudian terminology of Marcuse’s, for instance, this idea appears as “repressive desublimation”). Debord speaks of “the falling rate of use value” (§47, 32), in evident contrast to the falling rate of profit central to Marx’s analysis of capitalism as a crisis-prone system; here it is the inherently dissatisfactory nature of commodities, not capitalism’s inability to sustain accumulation, that both powers the endless striving for more of the same and can potentially lead to rebellion against this system of forced consumption. Even while rejecting a general contrast between “pseudo-needs” and “authentic needs,” because all needs are socio-historical, Debord insists that “the commodity in the stage of its abundance attests to an absolute break in the organic development of social needs.” In place of the “organic development” of past history comes the “mechanical accumulation” of commodity production run amok: another venerable pair of oppositions put to work in specifying the present moment.Debord was not wrong to speak of the “Americanization” of world capitalism: the outcome of World War II was indeed the economic and political dominance—at least over the “West”-- of the United States. It is also true that the vast surge in labor productivity accomplished during the war years and afterward made possible a striking increase in real wages for American and, eventually, European, Japanese, and other workers. Beyond this, the illusion of a possible unbounded accumulation and unbounded production of goods was fostered generally by the fact of the Golden Age, as economists call it, that characterized world capitalism between the end of the war and 1973, a period of exceptionally high growth rates, absolutely and per capita, in the industrialized nations. It hardly needs to be pointed out these days that capitalism seems to be still as susceptible to old-fashioned crisis as ever. But already by the late 1960s economists had noticed a slackening in profit rates, and the collapse in growth after the mid-seventies was inescapable. Soon enough, far from being required to consume, workers saw wages stagnate and even decline, while unemployment rose sharply in Europe and to some extent in the U.S. By 1990, Japan had entered into something very like a depression. The supposed consumer society, it turned out, was rather short-lived. It was theof a shift from production to consumption as socially central that lived on.This is not enough reason to throw out Debord’s concept, however, for it can still be argued that the population of capitalist countries remains mesmerized by the spectacle, even if its promises are increasingly unfulfilled. We will return to this in a moment. First, however, it must be said that the idea, which Debord shared with many others, of a deep kinship of the Soviet system with so-called Western capitalism has been borne out by history, though he had it backwards: “planning,” in the West, turned out to be mostly illusory, while the state-run systems became ever more embroiled, through debt and trade, in the capitalist world market. Further, one cannot quarrel with Debord’s location of the origin of Stalinism in the original Bolshevik state established by Lenin and Trotsky with their party of “professional revolutionaries.” On the other hand, one feature of the really-existing “concentrated spectacle” seems to have been the lack of belief in it—especially after 1956—by people who experienced it first hand: it was not so much Muscovites, East Berliners, or Poles as Western intellectuals and leftwing activists who believed in the socialist state. And one could hardly describe that state, with its endless queues and archaic bribery system, as successfully colonized by the commodity. The idea that both forms of spectacle lived by exploiting the working class is certainly true, but otherwise the parallel Debord drew between them is not convincing.How much of Debord’s analysis holds for today’s capitalism? Apart from all the reverential quotation of that single term, “spectacle,” I am aware of only one serious attempt to deal with this question: a volume published ten years ago by the San Francisco collective Retort under the title,[5] Focusing on the current combination of atavistic brutality in the service of economic interests with a modern politics of imagery and appearances, the Retort authors argue that the state, ever more imbricated with the economy it is increasingly called on to manage, has come “to live or die by its investment in, and control of, the field of images” (2005, 21). Consequently, “the present condition of politics” makes sense only when “approached from a dual perspective—seen as a struggle for crude, material dominance, but also (threaded ever closer into that struggle) as a battle for the control of appearances” (Ibid, 31). Like Debord, at least before 1968, Retort sees a political weakness in this entanglement in imagery become essential to both economy and state.Like Debord, these authors assert that the spectacle is “a structural necessity of a capitalism oriented toward the overproduction of commodities, and therefore the constant manufacture of desire for them …” With the “colonization of everyday life” by the commodity spectacle, “possessable and discardable objects do the work of desiring and comprehending for us, forming our wishes, giving shape to our fantasies …” (ibid, 178). In Debord’s paraphrase of Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism, the spectacle “is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (§4, 12). The problem is that such a “social process that is hollow at the core,” to return to Retort’s words, produces a society “of loosely attached consumer subjects, each locked in its plastic work-station and nuclearized family of four.” (2005, 21) This in turn produces what Retort—employing another late-‘50s truism—calls a “weak citizenry,” without “those stronger alliances and identifications,” like nationalism or corporate allegiances, “which the state must call on, repeatedly, if it is to maintain the dependencies that feed the consumer beast” (ibid, 34). It is this civic weakness that, the authors believe, might provide an opening for Left politics.The image of work and family conjured up by this analysis seems to be the product of people who know little about either the reality of work life or contemporary family structure. Similarly, the picture of an atomized citizenry, much like that of solitary bowlers conjured up a decade ago by public-policy expert Robert Putnam, is quite distant from reality. To take a single but salient example, it ignores the variety of forms of social contact developed by computer-literate young people. “Commodities are now all that there is to see,” Debord asserted in; “the world we see is the world of the commodity” (§42, 29). But this is no more true today than it was in 1967. Just as the four authors ofthemselves, I am certain, see much besides commodities—their relations with each other and their discussion group, their relationships with lovers and families, and the political questions that interest them—so do even the most impoverished members of society as well as those still able to make a good enough living to spend it on camcorders as well as housing and food. It seems to me that it is not in the supposed weakness of social bonds but in people’s repeatedly demonstrated capacity to mobilize their social relationships in defense of perceived interests that any possibility of a future revolutionary politics resides.Retort’s analysis is equally unconvincing with respect to what it considers the state’s dependence on imagery, central though pictures and pageants indubitably are to political machinations of all sorts. Exhibit A, according to, is 9/11, as event and image: Just as the Twin Towers were an image of financial capital as well as an actual place of business, so their destruction was “designed above all to be visible” (2005, 26) as an attack on capitalist modernity itself. And because of what they claim is the central role of spectacle in the current mechanism of power, the authors say, “The state was wounded in September in its heart of hearts and we see it still, almost four years later, flailing blindly in the face of an image it cannot exorcize, and trying desperately to convert the defeat back into terms it can respond to” (2005, 25). The chief example of those terms was, of course, the American attack on Iraq.But in fact the image of the burning towers was quickly turned into an image of united America, even as the American government used the occasion to launch a long-desired war. The fact that this war did not go very well reflects not the difficulty in finding the image of victory “the war machine has been looking for” (2005, 35) but the actual limits of American power in the Middle East. The Retort authors assert that the spectacle is not only “the key form of social control … but also a source of ongoing instability,” (2005, 189) because “too much of the texture of everyday life is captured and circulated” by image-machinery. But this is to place too much weight on imagery, as either stabilizer or destabilizer of the social order. Contrary to popular belief, it was neither television coverage of the Vietnam War nor student demonstrations against it, but the actual inability of the U.S. to defeat the Communist army at an acceptable cost, that ended that war. Similarly, the pictures from Abu Ghraib went around the world without much impact on the war or even on the practice of torture, despite the fears and hopes of interested parties that they would amount to political dynamite.It is not surprising that ancestors of the critique of the spectacle, such as Matthew Arnold’s lament for the displacement of an authentic culture embedded in time by the cheap commercialism of industry, or Theodor Adorno’s contrast of the human meaningfulness of modernist high art with the false emotionality of commercial culture, are still taken up by writers and professors. Views of this type, after all, celebrate the particular social role claimed by such people as the remaining representatives of civilized values in a darkening world. The popularity of Debord’s version must, in contrast, rest in part on the increasingly visible place of formerly high culture within the market system, as well as by the declining possibility of deep belief in political ideology. But it must also be its distance from the detailed reality of social and political life that renders it available for use, contrary to Debord’s intentions, in art writing and sociological ruminations.It would, however, be wrong to reduce Debord’s work to its current condition of intellectual touchstone. It is notable that one element is generally left out of even the more politically engaged contemporary reception of Debord’s analysis: his location of the alternative to the spectacle in the governance of society by associated workers’ councils, an idea whose importance may not be evident to those no longer in thrall to Leninist politics, to which it provided the chief historical alternative.[6] It is, however, exactly in this element that Debord’s attachment to the basic terms of Marx’s analysis of capitalism and its future antithesis resides. And it is this attachment, as well as his attempt to specify the current condition of capitalism, that gives his book its evident power. Although we do not actually live in the society of the spectacle as Debord describes it, the conclusion he drew from his effort to understand the contemporary world remains basic: that “the very evolution of class society … obliges the revolutionary project to becomewhat it always was” (§123, 89-90)—the recreation of social life by the producers themselves. Despite appearances—the common idea that we live in a “media society”—Debord’s critique of representational politics is more important than his critique of visuality, and the aspect of his thinking that will last the longest.2008; revised 2015.[1.] See the excellent survey in Gianfranco Marelli,(Arles: Éditions Sulliver, 1998).[2.] Guy Debord,[1988] (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 129.[3.] References are to the translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith:(New York: Zone Books, 1995). I give the number of the section of Debord’s text, followed by the page in this edition.[4.] Guy Debord,[1988] (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 21.[5.] Iain A. Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts,(London: Verso, 2005). For my review of this text, see http://brooklynrail.org/2005/12/express/a-riposte-to-retort . Retort’s reply can be found at http://brooklynrail.org/2006/02/express/whither-jeff-wilson-retort-to-paul-matti [6.] Try, for instance, to locate this concept in the 492 pages of Tom McDonough, ed.,(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004).