ACFM Microdose: Reading The Society of the Spectacle

Nadia Idle (0:02)

This is Acid Man.

Jeremy Gilbert (0:20)

Hello, and welcome to ACFM, the home of the Weird Left. I'm Jeremy Gilbert, and I'm here as usual with my friends, Nadia Idle.

Nadia Idle (0:28)

Hello.

Jeremy Gilbert (0:29)

And Keir Milburn.

Keir Milburn (0:30)

Hello.

Jeremy Gilbert (0:30)

And this is a microdose episode, a follow up, if you will, to our main trip episode on Situationism. And we are going to be reading the first three chapters of the classic of Situationist theory, even though the author would have literally, literally would have punched you if you had used that particular phrase.

The book is The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord. First published in, I think, 67 in France under the French title Le Suci de du Spectacle. English editions started to come out very early from 1970 I think, of course, to make it all more convenient for everyone, we're working from two different editions. But we're going to be reading the first three chapters. The book is organized into aphorisms, so it won't matter about page numbers. It's basically each separate paragraph is numbered. So we'll be able to explain what we're referring to quite easily. But why are we doing this book? Well, we're doing it, well, quite obviously, really, because we did an episode about Situationism, or the Situationist International, perhaps we should say.

This is the most famous book to have come out of that movement, and the most influential one, the one that's been widely read, widely published and republished. And we're going to go through it and think about some of its ideas, like where they came from, what they've been doing subsequently, to what extent they're still useful today. So guys, any thoughts before we really get cracking with this, like Nadia?

Nadia Idle (2:03)

When I went back and read it this time, I thought to myself, wow, this is a work of very quotable, sexy phrases. If anything, in an ironic way, this is almost like the most Instagrammable phrase book that we've done so far. But I also thought to myself, reading some of the phrases, is this hyperbole with some of the things that came up? The way he's phrased some of the concepts. I also thought to myself, could this have been written by AI in a way?

So as we go through, we'll see that there are a lot of choice phrases, which I think will make sense to a critique of capitalism today. But also in some way, some of the pieces, some of the aphorisms that I read, I thought I actually have no idea what this, what Guy Debord is trying to get across, like, is this hyperbole?

That's a kind of critique in a way. I mean, I think it's a very valuable piece to read. Like you said, Jeremy, we're only going through the first three chapters. But as listeners will hopefully find out, I'm very excited about this. I just wanted to kind of posit this idea of the way it's written and the way ideas are presented. You know, in the 21st century, you could be thinking, is this written by AI?

Keir Milburn (3:30)

I've got a couple of points. The first one is we're doing this reading. We're going to read through aphorism by aphorism, hopefully not every word. Just pick out the choice ones, as Nadia says. But, you know, whenever we do this, we say you can go and download a copy of this off the internet. In fact, if you go to libcom.org, I presume, you can get, you know, you can download chapter by chapter and just read along if you so desire. But a comment on its quotability, Nadia, is like in loads of ways, like loads of this are sort of, it's sort of quoting other people basically and changing them. So like the opening aphorism is an alteration of the opening sentence of Capital by Marx, basically. So perhaps you can understand it as like he's detourning a load of quotes basically. And so detourment, we talked about this in the episode about Situation International. It's a way in which they sort of like try to take existing culture and twist it in a way.

It came to mind when you were mentioning that because Guy Debord, much later in life, writes an autobiography of a sort called Panegerek. And it's an autobiography just made up of quotations by other people. He's not got an original word in there basically. We're not going to pick up all of these references.

There are certainly some in there. And like, you know, so that's part of what he's doing basically. He's sort of like, he's framing his own sort of original thoughts, such as they are, amongst what already exists. But he's doing it in a sort of almost explicit way by like really ostentatiously sort of detourning famous sayings, et cetera, from the history of philosophy and like revolutionary thought.