The Society of the Spectacle

And we are going to be reading the first three chapters of the classic of situationist theory, even though the author would have literally, literally would have punched you if you had use that particular phrase.

The book is The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord.

First published in, I think, 67 in France under the French title La Société du Spectacle.

English edition started to come out very early from 1970.

Do you know what I mean? That sort of idea.

Yes, yeah.

I mean, the question that haunts the society of the spectacle, like it is going to haunt the work of people like Jean Baudrillard who are influenced by it later is, well, what do you think culture was like before this or before capitalism? Because if you look back at medieval culture, it seems like people believed a lot of weird bullshit, as I like to put it.

And we're being told what to think by priests, and we're quite miserable a lot of the time.

But it was an interesting experience nonetheless.

But The Society of the Spectacle, I mean, the idea...

That's his book, isn't it? No.

The idea that 9-11 was invented and didn't happen, I mean, has sort of generated a whole...

And we'll, we'll go, we'll talk a little bit more about, like, his, his history and the ideas that he produced.

He wrote the, definitely the main text of the Situationists, which is The Society of the Spectacle, which is published in 1967, I think.

There's, there's a lot of people who are at pains to basically highlight the fact that the Situationists were not just about Guy Debord, because Society of the Spectacle is kind of, like, the famous book which from a 21st century perspective kind of crosses into the mainstream in a way.

And I mean, maybe that's something to debate as well, about whether these ideas, a lot of which are about trying to fight against the cooption of, of being co-opted, sorry, by capitalism, was in fact co-opted by, by the mainstream.

Well, look, I wanna be fair to the situationists 'cause, uh, like we've just been saying that a lot of their ideas are sort of dated, or some of their ideas seem dated because they were created in a very specific hysterical, historical era and a hysterical manner.

But like when I went back to read some of this stuff, like there were bits which I thought were, had dated quite well, and like one of those is like this idea of the spectacle.

So The Society of the Spectacle is the Guy Debord book from '67.

I'm not sure how robust the idea is, but like it seems even more relevant now than it did when I first read this.

Their doctrine of detournement, taking an image from mainstream culture and turning it into a critique, became Reed's playbook.

He'd been reading Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle while editing a magazine spread on punk.

That text, in his view, made it clear that the only way to subvert capitalism was by hijacking its symbols before they could be commodified again.

So when he scratched out the queen's face with paint, he wasn't just making a political statement.