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

Theoretical foundations of the spectacle

In formulating his concept of the spectacle, Debord builds his ideas on solidly Marxian foundations, employing such elaborated concepts as alienation, commodity fetishism and reification. Notwithstanding his periodic denunciations of such French Marxists as Jean-Paul Sartre and Cornelius Castoriadis, ⁶ Debord’s work sits comfortably in the western Marxist tradition, which Alvin Gouldner praised for its recovery of subjectivity, agency and culture (see Gouldner, 1980). ⁷ Thinkers in this tradition follow the early Marx and seek to highlight the roots of the social order in the sensuous, practical, constitutive activity of interacting humans (Marx 1978a). ⁸

In this tradition, the key model of action commencing from Marx’s materialist turn was to conceive of humans as conscious, creative actors. People work on the natural world, and as they fabricate the object world around them, they culturally mold themselves. For Marx, this process of objectification helped unfold the essential attributes of the human species: its ‘species being’. Labor created a multifaceted, rich cultural world in which we could unfold potential aspects of our personalities (Marx 1978b, 1978c; see also Heller, 1974; Honneth, 1998). Debord embraces this perspective, noting in theses 125 and 126 that ‘man’s being’ is not a given quality, but instead essentially negative. Human nature is always in a process of becoming, unfolding through history and changing social institutions.

However, Marx declared that objectification becomes alienation when the ruling class appropriates the fruits of labor. The creative accomplishments of workers appear as the property of another, as foreign, and indeed become another means for their exploitation. Workers lose access to their created wealth, while that wealth emerges as an alien power. The poorer classes lack the time, money and education to access the developed cultural riches of society, even as the work process is stripped of all freedom and creativity. Marx attacked a rigid division of labor and the poor wages that blocked a well-rounded personality. Marx’s ideal of the free, creative, multifaceted personality, which descended from romanticism’s critique of modern society (Marx 1978c), ⁹ certainly found its echo in the thought, revolutionary prescriptions and bohemian lifestyle of Debord.

For Marx, a practical result of this alienation was ideology: a systematic obscuring of the constitutive role of labor in creating society’s wealth and institutions (Markus, 1983). ¹⁰ As each individual working consciousness becomes isolated from other laboring individuals, and as one’s own work is progressively split up into specialized tasks, the connection between one’s laboring activity and the products created is lost. The isolated worker fails to see how their work is entwined with that of other workers in the production of their shared world and, instead, passively observes an already given world that seems to be a fixed, natural entity. Oppression and exploitation are rendered invisible, natural traits of the social order. Debord joins Marx in this emphasis on alienation, declaring ‘separation’ or alienation to be the origin of the spectacle. In thesis 25, he remarks that the division of labor is the ‘alpha and omega’ of the spectacle. For this reason, Society of the Spectacle commences with a section of 34 theses entitled ‘Separation Perfected’. He writes that the ‘incessant refinement of the division of labor into a parcelization of gestures, which are then dominated by the independent movements of machines and working for an ever-expanding market’, dissolves ‘all community and all critical sense’ (thesis 25).

For Marx, the evolving social organization of work also intensifies this alienation and systematic obscuring of the essential role of labor in creating and reproducing society’s wealth and institutions. The efficiency and profitability criteria of exchange value increasingly organize the actual process of production, which is detached from workers’ routines, control and knowledge. The creations of living labor – its products and its profits – are split off from the worker and turned into the machinery of production, with all technical know-how concentrated in the hands of managers, engineers and machines. Workers become the tenders of machines, not the masters. In Marx’s language, living labor becomes the servant of past exertions, or what he termed ‘dead labor’ (Marx, 1974[1867], 1976). The abstract quantitative logic of the commodity increasingly organizes all social life. In this manner, workers confront an immense, technical apparatus without recognizing how this apparatus is grounded in their social labor. Instead of a relation of subject to subject, the isolated individual subject contemplates the social world as an external, naturally given object. Implicitly the world appears as an immense visual spectacle to the passive, distanced observing subject. Debord pointedly summarizes this perspective in thesis 20, emphasizing its impact on subjective consciousness of the worker: ‘[T]he spectacle is the technical realization of the exile of human powers into a beyond. It is separation perfected in the interior of man.’

After Marx, the most crucial theorist for Debord’s concept of the spectacle is the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukacs. Indeed, a quote from Lukacs serves as the epigraph to the book’s second section, ‘The Commodity as Spectacle’: ‘The commodity becomes crucial for the subjugation of men’s consciousness … as labor is progressively rationalized’ (Lukacs, 1971[1923]: 86). It was Lukacs who rendered the Hegelian motifs in Marxism their most explicit and systematic, making the dialectic and the creation of a reified second nature in human consciousness a powerful theme that was then taken up by Debord along with other French Marxists. ¹¹ In his 1923 tome History and Class Consciousness, Lukacs (1971[1923]) presented a systematic account of the philosophical and ontological implications of Marx’s dialectical perspective, and extended Marx’s analysis of the dynamics of alienation to all social institutions under capitalism. As market imperatives invaded social domains that were previously organized by traditional cultural and communicative norms, Lukacs argued that those domains became subject to the criteria of efficiency (governed by the media of money), abstracted from local control or communicative organization and lost their capacity to function as meaningful or comprehensible arenas of human action. ¹² The grounding of those domains in human labor and social relations is lost from view, and price appears to be an intrinsic attribute of the object, a phenomenon that Marx labeled ‘commodity fetishism’. Quoting (or more accurately, offering a ‘detournement’, or twisting, of) Lukacs, Debord says in thesis 24: ‘The fetishistic appearance of pure objectivity in spectacular relationships conceals their true character as relationships between human beings and between classes.’ ¹³

Drawing upon Max Weber, Lukacs pursued his theory of the functionalization and rationalization of diverse social spheres according to the requirements of the capitalist economy. Alongside the economy, such differentiated realms as law and government are designed to respond to the general demands of a capitalist economy for routine predictability, control and efficient calculable inputs. Those domains also take on the attributes of separate and naturalized social phenomena that are systematized and rationalized according to their own established values. ¹⁴ They become separated from the creative capacity of society’s laboring members and cut off from everyday life. As Debord says in theses 194–202, these differentiated institutions, these worked-up forms of social relations, are described and institutionalized in part through ‘abstract categories’ which, in turn, drive the naturalization of historical institutions deeper into social consciousness.

While some spheres are rationalized for efficiency and economic functionality, others, notably art and religion, become the repository for the lost social aspirations of humanity. ¹⁵ Detached from everyday social life, they become the rarified arenas of experts who supposedly guard them from contamination by the greed of capitalism, and the demand for relevance or crude vulgar desires of the purportedly regressive masses.

The spectacle realized

Debord subscribes to Lukacs’ analysis of the supposed universal separation and reification in modernity. Passivity and isolation reign as the individual contemplates a fragmented, naturalized world governed by seemingly immutable laws. However, for Debord, society contrives an image of its lost unity and forgotten creative praxis. Consumer society, with its proliferation of goods and culture industry narratives, offers the populace an illusory image of happiness and unity. If the alienated economic apparatus that confronts the isolated worker can be considered a first approximation of the idea of the spectacle, then this centralized production of fantastic, contrived cultural images constitute the spectacle proper in Debord’s theory. In these media-packaged and corporate-supplied depictions of the good life, all the social attributes actually denied to the general populace – independent power, freedom, social connection and meaningful social action – are repackaged as ‘consumer choice’, or as features of the lives of celebrities in Hollywood and Washington, DC suitable for vicarious consumption. ¹⁶ This spectacle of the good life rests on actual separation of the individual from the collective action, community and communication that creates our social reality. Debord remarks: ‘The spectator’s consciousness, imprisoned in a flat universe, bound by the screen of the spectacle behind which his life has been deported, knows only the fictional speaker who unilaterally surround him with their commodities’ (thesis 218). ‘In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation’ (thesis 1).

Debord’s spectacle – this contrived illusion of meaningful life that displaces all actual participation – operates in three main arenas in advanced capitalist societies. First, there flourishes a full-blown world of goods, with each symbolically constructed, manipulated commodity aspiring to offer its own illusory version of the good life (theses 50, 59, 65–66, 31). ¹⁷ Second, capitalism systematically remaps the physical world to promote efficient markets, consumerism and social control: a process that Debord explores through the category of ‘urbanism’ in a section entitled ‘The Organization of Territory’. Finally, there is the metastasis throughout society of a virtual life enacted in media products. Despite their seeming differences, Debord argues there is a unity among all the spectacle’s manifestations. In thesis 6 he remarks, ‘In all its specific forms – as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment – the spectacle is the present models of socially dominant life’. In thesis 10, he adds, ‘The concept ‘unifies and explains a great diversity of apparent phenomena’. ¹⁸

In the absolutely alienated world of the spectacle, says Debord, the populace finds connection, community and purpose only through the intermediation of corporate-contrived, government-manufactured and media-supplied narratives of stars, celebrities and leaders. Such passive consumption of spectacles of freedom and social connection only serves to confirm further the masses in their passivity and separation. As Debord says in thesis 29: ‘Spectators are linked solely by their one-way relationship to the very center, which keeps them isolated from each other.’ The production of an illusory world of communication, connection and purpose hides the counterfeit nature of the world.

Debord argues that the spectacle form is the natural outcome of the accumulation of capital and successive rationalizations of the economy. He writes in thesis 34: ‘The spectacle is capital accumulated to such a degree that it becomes an image.’ However, against Debord, it is questionable that this newly created spectacle of the image can be assimilated to the logic of the passive, fragmented worker confronting the spectacle of the alienated world of work. The construction of symbolic images is governed by another logic than mere economic efficiency. Cultural codes, possessing their own unique patterns of coherence and meaning, still need to be employed, and cultural production requires its own distinctive personnel organization and resources. ¹⁹

Crucial to Debord’s formulations, and those of later thinkers, is the timeline of capitalist development. In this chronology, social formation evolves from a liberal, competitive market economy to organized corporate capitalism – or what some term ‘consumer capitalism’. Debord briefly indicates this new logic in theses 42 and 43, stating that ‘in the second industrial revolution, consumption for the masses becomes a duty supplementary to alienated production’. As historians have repeatedly argued, in 19th-century ‘society of production’, the economy was a separate social sphere, while culture was autonomously organized by communities, subcultures and publics (Ewen, 2001; Gottdeiner, 1997; Leiss et al., 1990). In contrast, in the 20th-century ‘society of consumption’, in Debord’s society of the spectacle all social spheres of life, including culture, become reflexively organized according to the dictates of maximizing sales or increasing political power. In the terms of Robert Dunn, ‘consumer culture represents an unprecedented interpenetration of cultural and economic forces’ (Dunn, 2008: 52–53). As Debord elucidates in thesis 46, ‘use value’ (that is, the utility and meaning of an object, which Marx took as natural or relatively unproblematic) is now subjected to ‘exchange value’: the strategic imperatives of maximizing profit fully determine the forms and contents of culture and, in turn, the rhythm and rhymes of everyday life are reduced to a quantitative struggle for survival.

A new apparatus composed of mass production, marketing and media along with government propaganda, turns culture and leisure into an increasingly commodified, manipulated arena where the populace passively consumes reified fantasies and stimuli. As Debord writes in thesis 42: ‘The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has obtained total occupation of social life.’ In thesis 43 he explains that ‘the commodity take[s] charge of the workers’ … ‘“leisure and humanity” because now political economy can and must dominate these spheres’.

As a consequence, says Debord, ‘the satisfaction of primary human needs is replaced by … pseudo needs’ (theses 219, 30, 51, 59, 68, 70). He denies the ability of individuals, groups and classes to continue to determine their own needs through autonomous communication. In the totally administered world of the spectacle, we are left with a culture, indeed a language, that is corrupted and controlled. In the end, what appears as our reality is an absolutely false illusion that blocks our perception of the actual social relations and alienated labor at the base of the spectacle. It is a world that has become ‘topsy-turvy’ (thesis 9), and ‘The real consumer becomes a consumer of illusions’ (thesis 47). For Debord, only through a revolutionary break and total social reorganization – based on extreme democratic participation, worker control and worker councils throughout society – will we be able to reclaim authentic community, communication and culture.

Debord’s historical accounting parallels the work of such thinkers as Jurgen Habermas and prefigures that of Jean Baudrillard, Alain Touraine, Frederic Jameson and George Ritzer. Collectively, these social theorists thematize how capitalism progressively colonizes social life beyond the arena of production proper, expanding into leisure-time, family activities and civil society in general. These analysts of postmodernity, or late capitalism, suggest that capitalism tendentially destroys the cultural fabric of society, either through the strategic administering of meaning by profit-oriented corporations or through the destruction of society’s historicity: that is, the connection of individuals to their capacity for historical action or praxis. ²⁰

Historians too have argued for series of wide-ranging interrelated changes concomitant with the rise of the consumer society. Debord’s work can be considered one particularly potent probing of this new social world and its politics, psychology and symbolic economies. In this new social reality, personal identity has shifted its location: no longer based in one’s roles as citizen or worker with a practical involvement in the production of a shared social world, it instead has become centered in consumption and the vicarious satisfactions of identifying with stars and celebrities. ²¹

Insights of the theory of the spectacle

The 221 theses of Debord’s slim book forcefully articulate some key dimensions of our contemporary spectacular world. Here, I would like to highlight three. First, they detail the banal fantasies that supposedly overwhelm popular culture in spectacular society, displacing all qualitative organic culture. Second, they outline inequalities in the power to name and define our world. Third, they underscore a dimension seemingly intrinsic to every society: the production of representations of society as a unified, meaningful whole. I want to focus on these three arguments, recognizing that in the pithy pronouncements of Debord’s book, a plethora of powerfully suggestive, but also elusive and underdeveloped, insights are offered about contemporary consumer society.

First, for Debord, in the alienated society of late capitalism, a change in the very form and content of cultural representation necessarily accompanies the loss of individual voice, group interaction and participatory accomplishment. The spectacle, founded on the extreme isolation and passivity of the audience, offers regressive, banal fantasies to make up for the loss of meaningful action and connection. ²² In largely complementary terms, Debord presents an analysis of both the banalization and the fantastic portrayal of enlarged celebrity personalities implicit in media spectacles.

Alienation necessarily entails forgetting the historical nature of institutions and the role of individuals in accomplishing their social world. Workers are no longer able to understand how the institutions surrounding them are a product of creative historical action accomplished by social groups in contention. They cannot see how their own purposive action could encompass the present givens of the social world and transform them in line with an envisioned future (Jameson, 1984). ²³ Cultural narratives consequently lose their depth, unable to figure social context and history in any coherent way. ‘Under the shimmering diversion of the spectacle, banalization dominates modern society’, Debord declares in thesis 59.

In this world of quantitative, abstracted sameness – atomized, homogenized and assimilated by the drive of commodity production – depth and the qualitative particular is lost (thesis 38). Debord says participation in particular communities and personal relations reaching back into an entangled past and extending into a common destiny together – in other words, depth – is replaced by an administered surface sameness (see theses 133, 142–143, 186–187). A sense of time as pushing into the future and entailing significant human creations of new meaning and social relations is forgotten, displaced by a perpetual sameness, disconnected from particular identities and communities. Indeed, Debord remarks in his reflections on the socially instituted nature of time that ‘the growing domination of the irreversible time of [commodity] production tends to eliminate, socially lived time’ (thesis 142 and sections 5–6).

Frederic Jameson’s dialectical theory of postmodern culture helps to explicate this dimension:

If, indeed, the subject has lost its capacity actively to extend its pro-tensions and re-tensions across the temporal manifold and to organize its past and future into coherent experience, it becomes difficult enough to see how the cultural productions of such a subject could result in anything but “heaps of fragments” and in a practice of the randomly. (Jameson, 1984: 71. And see thesis 142 and sections 5–6)

Historical styles sever their connection to their surrounding social conditions and history. Once supposedly expressive of an organic particular social formation, or imposed by an overweening artistic personality, styles break from any social mooring in meaningful action. As Debord states in thesis 186, society ‘must lose all the references of a really common language until the time when the rift within the inactive community can be surmounted by the inauguration of the real historical community’. Aesthetic styles float without history, only to be recycled by a cultural industry that is desperate to connect to and stir the audience. Numerous authors, but foremost Jameson, draw upon Lukacs’ and Debord’s accounting of the loss of historicity and the detachment of representation from organic praxis to explain the rise of postmodernism, with its concomitant loss of depth and meaning. Representations float free and evolve into glib and mobile signifiers, with a concomitant emphasis on surface, pastiche, flash and glitter. As narratives lose historical depth, they become banal, atrophied accounts of media personalities. ‘Media stars are spectacular representations of living human beings,’ writes Debord in thesis 60. They distill ‘the essence of the spectacle’s banality into images of possible roles’. As institutions fade into the background and collective action disappears, the exaggerated dramas of individual personalities shine bright. ²⁴

Elaborating beyond Debord, we might say that narratives become either the trivial, if overwrought, emotional dramas of relationships with intimate others (for women), or the fantasies of the power of charismatic, virtuous heroes (for men), who by themselves fight and defeat evil, while all institutional limits and obstacles are conveniently forgotten. ²⁵ As Debord reiterates, identification with stars shining in the media spotlight and their diverse dramatic roles functions as a ‘compensation’ for the individual’s lost freedom and purpose in everyday life.

Second, Debord highlights the inequalities in production of cultural meaning. This theme dates back to the origins of Marxism, beginning in 1845 with Marx’s ‘The German Ideology’:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas … The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. (Marx, 1978c: 172)

However, Debord’s efforts to analyze the forms of modern public communication and their weaknesses are extremely rudimentary. He is inhibited from fully exploring the deficiencies of public communication by his Marxian model of materialist praxis, which focuses on exchanges with nature instead of social interactions, and because he operates within a mass society perspective (which I will discuss later).

Debord points to two aspects of communicative power: first, concentration of the means of communication in the hands of corporations, managers and experts; and, second, the isolation of the individual worker, who is cut off from all dialogue with peers. Debord elaborates a model of absolute separation and displacement: ²⁶ all means of speech have been concentrated in the hands of experts who now pretend to speak for the whole. ‘By means of the spectacle, the ruling order discourse endlessly upon itself in an uninterrupted monologue of self praise’ (thesis 24). In contrast, the population sits silent and entranced by visions of pseudo-intimacy that it so desperately craves.

To some extent, this stratification in speech and silencing of the population points to the ‘media’. Presciently, Debord points to the synthetic, even virtual, world that surrounds us today with electronic media. He emphasizes the seeming metastasis throughout the body politic of contrived media narratives, powerfully packaged in vivid formats for easy consumption. ²⁷ The media have, as their foundation, the extraction of communication from face-to-face relations in particular locales and times, thus permitting the transmission of a message across time and space. Debord writes:

If the spectacle, taken in the limited sense of mass media, which are its most glaring superficial manifestation, seems to invade society as mere equipment, this equipment is in no ways neutral but very suited to [the spectacle’s] total self-movement. If the social needs of the epoch in which such techniques are developed can only be satisfied through their mediation, if the administration of this society and all contact among men can no longer take place except through the intermediary of this power of instantaneous communication, it is because this ‘communication’ is essentially unilateral. (thesis 24)

With the development of media industries, the local folk community loses control over its culture as its communications tendentially become the province of distant experts who stylize the message to a mass audience for a profit. The media intervene and mediate, subjecting popular communication to more instrumental calculations and effectively reifying and administering public communication – or so Debord would claim. ²⁸

Lastly, like a number of anthropologists, Debord thematizes society’s representation of itself, what Claude Lefort has called society’s ‘mise en scène’ or self-staging (see theses 63, 54, 29). However, far from constituting a permanent and intrinsic dimension of social life, for Debord this representation is implicated in alienation. To a certain extent, in Marxian theory any representation of the social whole derives from the original sin of social division and alienation: the division between mental and manual labor (see Marx, 1978c; Vajda, 1980). In thesis 180 Debord says:

Culture is the general sphere of knowledge and of representations of lived experiences within historical societies divided into classes. It is a generalizing power which itself exists as a separate entity, as division of intellectual labor and as intellectual labor of division.

In place of a unity of collective action and understanding, a select group – be they priests, intellectuals or journalists – creates a distinct cultural perspective of the social whole, cut off from and denying its roots in social production.

Rather then accepting the permanent, decentered and dialogical dimensions of social representation, Debord adopts an extreme perspective: he sees all representation as alienation. He believes that once the revolutionary collective actor is summoned to life, culture (aka alienated representation, or the spectacle) will disappear. Thus, he writes in thesis 180: ‘Culture is the terrain of the quest for lost [social] unity. In the course of this quest, culture as a separate sphere is obliged to negate itself.’

The trope of the masses

While Debord’s ideas of social action and the collective revolutionary actor reproduce liberalism’s emphasis on the free, conscious actor, his notion of the alienated mass tracks liberalism second moment: the threatening crowd. The two terms – rational disciplined individual and alienated masses – were united in their emphasis on the individual in abstraction from overarching social relations and subtending cultural traditions. ³²

Liberalism’s notion of the sovereign, self-determining individual always applied only to the elite male white subject. In opposition to this agent of disciplined reason, society was also populated by subjects to whom reason did not apply. Liberalism, in fact, entailed a second term: an other, as the poststructuralists, starting with Edward Said, tell us: women, children, other racial groupings, plebeians and peasants, the mentally disabled and ill were all understood as by nature not possessing the requisite discipline and rationality to be free individuals (Frederickson, 2007; Huyssen, 1986). They lacked the internalized moral character, will and reason to forge an independent path as individuals. To a great extent, these groups embodied in the ‘masses’ operated as a projective fantasy for the elite. They were seen as containing all the urges and desires that threatened to overwhelm the increasingly repressive, ascetic bourgeois ego and its allied liberal institutions of limited democracy and private property.

In the modern era, industrial civilization had triumphed, supposedly breaking the ‘cake of custom’: workers were pried from the hierarchical social relations of natural authority, and commonsense cultural norms and routines built up over centuries of daily practice were shattered (Burke, 1978; Williams, 1958). In Marx’s famous words: ‘All that is solid melts into air.’ Purportedly set free from organic community and tradition and thus individualized, the masses were left culturally denuded and atomized. ³³ They were understood as passive, isolated blank slates. With only weak reasoning capabilities and driven by their desires and instincts, the masses were supposedly susceptible to manipulation by the culture industry or demagogic leaders who played on their fears and fancies (Falasca-Zamponi, 1997). Yet, as the 19th century wore on, these social groups increasingly intruded into public life, integrated into society’s central institutions of politics, culture and economics. The appearance of the masses in the public realm called into question the allegiance to private property, underpinning the market and rational deliberation governing the classical conception of democracy (see Barrows, 1979; Habermas, 1990; Schudson, 1978). ³⁴ Supposedly, no new culture could be invented by these blind, driven, deficient individuals – certainly not an organic traditional folk culture. Instead, a corrupt, kitsch commercial culture would flourish, supplying prefabricated emotions and ideas to mass publics. ³⁵ This culture distorts the populace’s true humanity and reflects either the imposed tastes of the elites, or the vulgarity of the masses whose desires are not restrained by any self-discipline or character.

This concept of the weak, inert, hysterical mass functioned as a trope for much of social theory from the late 19th century into the 1960s. Masses, as a ‘theme’ in Robert Nisbet’s terms, or as a ‘paradigmatic assumption’ in Kuhn’s words, subtly and durably informed the theoretical categories of social analysis (Bell, 1960; Bramson, 1961; Nisbet, 1976; see also Haney, 2008). Indeed, as historians of social theory such as H. Stuart Hughes (1958), Talcott Parsons (1937) and Richard Hofstadter (1962) show, the reworking of utilitarian theory in the late 19th century and its devolution into forms of social Darwinism, elite theory and naturalism were driven by the elite reaction to the entry of the masses into the public realm.

An alternative cultural theory: lifeworld and agency

It is my contention that this (elite, projective) fantasy of the anomic masses deeply defines Debord’s theory of the alienated society of the spectacle, with his depiction of the populace as denuded of all culture, atomized, passive and buying into a fantastic world of banal, contrived narratives. In this sense, Debord’s model of the active collective revolutionary subject and the passive alienated masses downplays the ongoing significance of the cultural lifeworld. In contrast, a conception of the lifeworld and the social interaction necessary to sustain it comprises a powerful conceptual alternative to Debord’s implicit dependence on liberal individualism or philosophy of the subject.

The lifeworld constitutes a kind of invisible, permanent cultural envelope or, in Geertz’s metaphor, a ‘web of signification’, into which we as individuals are born and socialized. While elements of the cultural lifeworld can be problematized and challenged, as Habermas (1987) argues, this always occurs against the background of largely implicit, unthematized cultural assumptions that deeply inform our thought. Permanently entangled in the ‘web’ of the lifeworld and not culturally denuded, individuals in fact possess rich cultural resources (albeit usually invisible) through which they can interpret cultural messages and signs. Neither is the individual merely passive in the face of given cultural texts and messages. As a variety of recent theoretical perspectives contend – from ethnomethodology and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of practical reason, to the ethnographies of the Birmingham School and hermeneutic philosophy – the individual is a highly skilled, meaning-interpreting and meaning-generating being (e.g. Pollner, 1991; Willis and Corrigan, 1980). ³⁶

In fact, in order to comprehend the meanings of cultural communication, individuals must actively, albeit tacitly, deploy their cultural resources and understandings. The reception of a text’s meaning – the completion of the hermeneutic circle – requires the audience to employ complex skills in interpretation, typically filling in gaps of assumed meanings and contexts for a message to become coherent. Reception of a message, as Walter Benjamin often argued, is a process of creation that produces new texts and new meanings. ³⁷ For Habermas, this cultural activity is a necessary step in the continuance and regeneration of the cultural lifeworld. In contrast, Debord ironically operates with a form of textual reification – a fetishism that detaches cultural texts from the productive context in everyday life that is necessary to give them meaning – and he assumes that the meaning can be unilaterally imposed by cultural industry creators (see Radway, 2001). Furthermore, in addition to active interpretation and strong cultural resources from the lifeworld, the internalized meanings that guide interpretations typically reflect the cultural understandings of subcultures, families, networks and interpretive communities, not isolated individuals (Katz and Liebes, 1993). Neither a blank slate nor isolated, the individual is relatively insulated from the persuasive power of any single cultural message.

In the end, a new cultural paradigm emerges where the production and reception of cultural messages are understood as part of a noisy conversation (Bakhtin, 1982) between unequal participants against the background of the cultural lifeworld. No doubt such an alternative paradigm should not celebrate the permanent, reflexive reasoning activity of the masses as if this was a solution to the cascade of problems inundating our contemporary world. Nevertheless, it offers the key starting point for analyzing the potentialities for social change or stagnation.

Conclusion

Guy Debord proposes a radical, critical account of contemporary society, one that sees the alienation and calculating rationality of capitalism extending deeply into our shared cultural world. In the society of the spectacle the populace, isolated and disempowered, sits enraptured before a screen bright with tales of freedom and community. These media-contrived, mass-manufactured stories function as the dominant ideology of late capitalism and leave the audience more isolated and more passive, all the while craving new, additional entrancing narratives.

Despite the cogency and insight of Debord’s analysis, severe theoretical deficiencies limit its utility. In tandem with the individualistic action perspective of liberalism, Debord and more generally Marxian theories of praxis abstract action from the ongoing cultural lifeworld in which it unfolds. Consequently, and despite pursuing radical criticism of contemporary society and its bourgeois theories, Debord’s hidden dependency on classical liberalism radically undermines his capacity to analyze the cultural resources, community and communication that persist in late capitalism. Debord is left with an overly despairing account of the alienation and passivity in spectacular society, along with a romantic fantasy of the immediate and transparent society in the revolutionary future.