Spectacle
In the age of mass media after World War II, twentieth century leftists in the West modernized Marxism, producing work and giving lectures that commented on the socioeconomic effects of the advancements in technology. In 1967, a Dialectics of Liberation conference was held in London, at which many radical activists and philosophers spoke. Here, Herbert Marcuse described the affluent society in the modern world, and the need for liberation from it. The affluent societies were class-based, capitalistic societies with the most advanced breakthroughs in technology. They are societies that are sustained through mass-production of consumer goods, and a Keynesian control of demand: the creation of false needs. To function, the affluent society must subjugate and control its population through methods of physical and psychological repression. This same year, Guy Debord—a more radical Marxist thinker of the Situationist International—published a text called The Society of the Spectacle that describes a society in which all social relationships are reduced to mere representation, mediated entirely by images. The idea that a society of the spectacle seeks to manipulate those within it into conformity, into a blind acceptance of an unfulfilled life was an important influence on the French student revolts in 1968.
At its inception, The Marxist path to communism relied on a revolution from the workers—the proletariat—who did not own the means of production in Industrialized societies. On a mass scale, this revolution would—in theory—turn the class system on its head before breaking it apart altogether. The result would be a classless, collectivized society in which members would, in effect, give what they could, and take only what they needed.
But in the first half of the twentieth century, Capitalistic Western societies advanced beyond Industrialism, and entered the post-Industrial period in which information and media became the primary modes of production and consumption. Certain aspects of Marxist theory no longer applied. The post-Industrial society now operated in a realm that was once removed from reality, and the ability to mass-produce and quickly disseminate media meant power. The society of the spectacle benefits from using the power of images to exploit the function of a sign system: the advertisement for a banana becomes a more accurate manifestation of “banana-ness” than the actual fruit. The representation replaces the actual. In the twentieth century, the power of labor was undermined by technology.
Marcuse’s affluent society “develops to a great extent the material and even cultural needs of man - a society which, to use a slogan, delivers the goods to an ever larger part of the population.” It’s a society that sustains itself by creating false need, and consumer goods that promise satisfaction until the next need is created. Debord calls this society “an immense accumulation of spectacles,” in which “all that once was directly lived has become mere representation.” Defined as “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images,” the spectacle has permeated all life to the point at which it isn’t obvious to the naked eye.
As a philosophical text, The Society of the Spectacle situates Marxism within the framework of post-Industrial, post-war Capitalism. It’s composed of 221 short theses that re-interpret Marxist notions of commodity fetishization in post-Industrial societies, and the role of mass media. Debord is important to consider when discussing the events of May 1968 in Paris.
The revolts of that year started in January at a university in Nanterre, culminating in May as protests escalated. The uprising spread to the Sorbonne on May 3rd, and students formed a temporary, fragile alliance with French communists and workers unions within the next few weeks, causing massive strikes. It began as an unnecessary police intervention predicated on an alleged fight between the revolutionary “enraged” students at Nanterre, and their right-wing classmates. Over the next month, the rapidly growing movement threatened the very framework of what was becoming a post-Industrial, spectacular society. By May 20th, nearly ten million workers were on strike. The revolt was chaotic and disorganized, even refused to articulate itself.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the more recognized student protestors stated that the movement had “grown much larger” than could have been foreseen in an interview with John-Paul Sartre on May 20th. Now that the movement had grown so large, Cohn-Bendit still considered spontaneity to be important. In his own words, “Our movement’s strength is precisely that it is based on an ‘uncontrollable’ spontaneity, that it gives an impetus without trying to canalize it or use the action it has unleashed to its own profit.” For Cohn-Bendit, the movement would only succeed if it was consciously an anti-spectacle: chaotic in nature, the movement was impossible to be manipulated, impossible to control.
Students and sympathizers were not only revolting against restrictions placed on expression and free speech, poor working conditions or learning environments. May 1968 was an existential crisis: a war waged on a shackled life inside Plato’s cave, an existence bound by work and fear of boredom, succinctly described in spray paint on a Parisian wall in 1968: “Métro, boulot, dodo,” which translates to “Commute, work, sleep.”
Debord expands Marx’s theory of alienation beyond the proletarian classes to the entire experience of human life within a network of spectacles. As the spectacle is both the means and the end of society—the chief product and the mode of production—and the spectacular society is one based in a synthesized reality that directs our own, participation in that society is to devalue direct experience, making it obsolete. Debord argues a life within the spectacle is degraded and estranged, a step further from Schopenhauer’s true nature of things. By gradually eradicating the necessity of direct experience, the spectacular society obscures reality further, causing confusion as to where it lies. Thesis 19 states: “So far from realizing philosophy, the spectacle philosophizes reality, and turns the material life of everyone into a universe of speculation.” The rate at which the French movement spread in 1968, and the threat it posed to established authority is testament to how deeply a post-Industrial ennui had entered into the national psyche, and a reminder of how obvious the spectacle can appear
