6 This stance became more prominent in his work during the 1970s, when he became increasingly preoccupied with theorising the patterns of intrigue, surveillance and manoeuvre that followed the uprisings of 1968. It was intended to function not just as an interpretation of modern society, but in a manner more akin to a work of strategy, that is, as an intellectual component of a practical, concrete and decidedly combative project of social change.ĭebord once stated that he was ‘not a philosopher’, but rather ‘a strategist’. 5 Yet the book was meant to do more than this. Debord himself acknowledged this, albeit disparagingly: ‘The critical concept of spectacle’, he wrote, ‘can undoubtedly … be vulgarised into a commonplace hollow formula of sociologico-political rhetoric to explain and abstractly denounce everything, and thus serve as a defence of the spectacular system’.
This is not to deny that the book can be employed as a useful tool or reference point in such descriptions. The situation is not vastly different today: The Society of the Spectacle is often valued as a description of certain aspects of modern society, rather than as an attempt to articulate that society’s transformation. ‘Of all those who have quoted from this book in order to acknowledge some importance in it’, he wrote in 1979, ‘I have not seen one up till now who took the risk to say, even briefly, what it was about’. Debord reserved particular contempt for such ‘specialists of the semblance of discussions’, especially when they claimed to find value in The Society of the Spectacle whilst shying away from its formidable militancy. 2 Its intended audience were all ‘those who are enemies of the existing order and who act efficaciously, starting from this position’, 3 not the academics and cultural commentators who would later come to adopt it. 1 Following the book’s publication in 1967, he and the Situationist International (SI) declared that it sought ‘nothing other than to overthrow the existing relation of forces in the factories and the streets’, and that it ‘makes no attempt to hide its a priori engagement’ in revolutionary social change. The Society of the Spectacle was written, as Guy Debord once put it, ‘with the deliberate intention of doing harm to spectacular society’.
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