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Between mass society and revolutionary praxis: The contradictions of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle

2012; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 15; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/1367549412442208

1460-3551

Richard L. Kaplan,

Philosophy, Sociology, Political Theory

In 1967, Guy Debord published his landmark analysis of the spectacle. Building on Marx’s theory of alienation, the spectacle describes our passive, quasi-visual relation to the social world. The individual, divorced from the collective praxis that constructs our social world, is reduced to consuming corporate-supplied entrancing narratives. This article explicates and assesses Debord’s theory. Its most serious defect is Debord’s rejection of the necessary intermediation of social life by culture and communication. Furthermore, his analysis subscribes to the trope of mass society, which sees the populace as culturally denuded, divorced from community and subject to the imposition of false needs. Against this alienated world, Debord pits the ideal of a collective revolutionary subject that freely creates society. However, both terms – alienated masses and revolutionary collective – are implicitly dependent upon liberal individualism, which abstracts individuals from the cultural traditions and social relations in which they are embedded.