Guy Debord: The Society of the Spectacle

Guy Debord (1931-1994) was the most influential member of the Situationist International, the avant-garde group that triggered the May 1968 revolt in France. His book The Society of the Spectacle is by some considered the most important theoretical book of the twentieth century. But while Debord's written work is some of the most notorious in the world of political and cultural radicality, deemed "the cornerstone cliché of postmodernism," his films have until now remained tantalizingly inaccessible. After being withdrawn from circulation for nearly two decades (by Debord himself, to call attention to the 1984 assassination of the producer of the films, Gerard Lebovici), all six films were featured in a special "Guy Debord Retrospective" at the 2001 Venice Film Festival and re-released in France in 2002. The most famous of the films is Debord's cinematic adaptation of his own book, The Society of the Spectacle. As passages from the book are read in voiceover the text is illuminated, via direct illustration or various types of ironic contrast, by clips from Russian and Hollywood features (Potemkin, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Johnny Guitar, etc.), TV commercials, softcore porn, newsreels, and documentary footage. Some of the other films evoke Debord's adventures in the bohemian underworld of Paris during the 1950s, and in others Debord attacks the film medium itself, directly challenging the viewer by critiquing the traditional separation of spectacle and spectator. Ken Knabb's translation of Debord's Complete Cinematic Works accompanies the long-awaited English versions of these film.The scripts are illustrated with 62 stills, and Debord's own annotations help elucidate the subtleties of these astonishing works, which are like nothing else in cinema history. Paperback edition. AK Press, ISBN 1-902593-83-9

Exploding as politically revolutionary at the heart of the Paris 1968 uprisings, the Situationist International has proved a tenaciously compelling radical movement in terms of asthetics and political theory.This crucially important book is not only a philosophical landmark, it is also a cult classic that has has established the Situationist movement -- of which Debord was the key member -- as one of the most influential of the twentieth century.This new translation by John McHale is the first officially authorised in English. The book has previously been available only in underground or online formats, so McHale's work promises to bring the work of the Situationists to an even wider audience.The Real Split in the International sees Debord not only evaluate the movement as a whole, but also signal the end of it. For him, it had become clear that the Situationist's success had produced -- within its own ranks as well as outside them -- a host of fans and 'onlookers' who amounted to little more than consumers of a radicality that had become fashionable. In this way the movement had begun to encompass the very 'society of the spectacle' that the Situationists had challenged. There was a danger that Situationist theory could turn into ideology -- Debord's reaction was to break up the movement. About The Translator John McHale has translated Alice Becker-Ho's Les Princes du Jargon, her L'Essence du Jargon and Guy Debord's Panégyrique Volume 2. He lives in London.Guy Debord was a revolutionary theorist, a film-maker, the indisputable head of the Situationists, and a key figure in the constellation of French theorists and intellectuals from the 1960s onwards. He committed suicide in 1995 at the age of 63. Identifying everyday life as the terrain of revolutionary activity, he added new and apposite dimensions to Marxist thinking in the late twentieth century:The Society of the Spectacle, his seminal work, characterised a society resting not only on the alienated labour of workers, but on the alienated lives of spectators.