From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960s up to the present, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism and everyday life in the late twentieth century. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title.įew works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative as Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle.

Also an artist and filmmaker, he is the author of Memoires and Commentaires sur la société du spectacle.Ī Swerve Edition, distributed for Zone Books. Guy Debord was one of the most important participants in the activities associated with the Situationist International in the 1960s. In a sweeping revision of Marxist categories, the notion of the spectacle takes the problem of the commodity from the sphere of economics to a point at which the commodity as an image dominates not only economic exchange but the primary communicative and symbolic activity of all modern societies. Today, Debord's work continues to be in the forefront of debates about the fate of consumer society and the operation of modern social power.

At the same time it was one of the most influential theoretical works for a wide range of political and revolutionary practice in the 1960s. Originally published in France in 1967, Society of the Spectacle offered a set of radically new propositions about the nature of contemporary capitalism and modern culture. For the first time, Guy Debord's pivotal work Society of the Spectacle appears in a definitive and authoritative English translation.

Society of the spectacle