February 27, 2003

Professor Erick Heroux

Department of English
National Chengchi University
heroux@nccu.edu.tw

Our Time and Their Time:

Overview of Chapters 5 and 6 of Guy Debord’s The Society o f the Spectacle

• Introductory Remarks:
Debord’s book from 1967 serves as a centerpiece that clearly connects up with and informs
many of the other texts on our bibliography: viz., that by Lefebrve his erstwhile colleague, and
with Fredric Jameson who periodically cites him, and with Hardt & Negri who claim that his book
HI
is today more relevant than ever before , and with Virilio, whose similar sounding arguments
about the new imposition of postmodern space and time can be read as an update or dialogue with
Debord’s situationist critique. This is a predominantly Parisian or “continental” intellectual
neomarxist discourse which is supplemented on our list by rather distinct and varied views from
scholars in the U.S. such as Edward Said’s postcolonial view, feminist views, etc. Looking back
at our previous meetings, I believe that even Bakhtin’s earlier and more literary detection of
diverse chronotopes can be clarified and recontextualized by seeing how Debord detects the
shifting deployment of space-times in the extra-textuality of historical periods.
Debord’s book is rigorously grounded in the left-Hegelian strand (i.e., Lukacs on reification)
[2]
and also moving further toward what is today called the “autonomist” political position. One
should not confuse this with a late-Lukacsian apology for Stalin or even for bolsheviks, since it is
obvious that Debord wrote against both versions of a spectacle society: east and west,
“concentrated” bureaucratic totalitarianism on one side and “diffuse” consumerist societies on the
13]
other. Moreover, The Society o f the Spectacle can also be read apart from its Hegelian
underpinnings, yet still offering valuable critical analysis of advanced modern societies. The
composition is dense, rich in references to historical shifts, arguing with competing views that the
intended reader is supposedly versed in. One innovative style here is in its “detourned” phrases
which simultaneously quote a precursor yet twist the meaning, appropriating and updating
traditional commentary for the new contexts of our times. This is similar to an allusion, yet a
detourned phrase shows the conceptual “necessity” of its ironic twists while also revealing its
historical development in the history of ideas. Finally, Debord’s approach is totalizing without
apologies - both its virtue and limitation. Beyond the audacity of its utopian seriousness, for me
the importance of Debord’s book is in its very deliberate language of critique that dialectically
carves out a specific and consistent position; and in the book’s sense of history, of potential
progress that has been suppressed, and hence also of historicity or the tragedy of time passing
[4]
without fulfillment. Later writers who take up similar themes on something as nebulous as “the
spectacle” seem to lack something of Debord’s precise and penetrating expression: i.e., Virilio at
first glance seems gnomic and random by comparison, while Hardt & Negri seem eclectic and
sloppy in their theoretical diction. Jameson too is always in a hurry, and while preferable to the
unimaginative functional prose of academia, he is chatty and rambling rather than succinctly
coherent as in Debord. Merely to put these figures in the same company is very high praise, yet
 one wishes that a writer of Debord’s caliber was actually imitated more today.
Discussing this material presents some difficulty, as it would seem to require a rather extensive
background in modern European history and philosophy. But it seems to me useful in that our
notions of “representation” should be reconstructed by above all grasping why Debord and the
situationists were so much against a kind of representation-as-separation in politics and in media:
the spectacle. Nevertheless, not all representations are trapped within the “spectacle” as Debord
took pains to point out that he was a filmmaker! My immediate problem in summarizing this book
is much like the old heresy of the paraphrase: how do I represent Debord without separating my
audience from the means to understand him? My immediate problem echoes the opening words in
one of Debord’s experimental films, The Critique o f Separation:
“We don’t know what to say. Sequences of words are repeated; gestures are recognized.
Outside us. O f course some methods are mastered, some results are verified. Often it’s
amusing. But so many things we wanted have not been attained, or only partially and
not like we imagined. What communication have we desired, or experienced, or only
[5]
simulated? What real project has been lost?”

• Chapter 5: Time & History

Theses numbered:
125: This is a moment of that left Hegelian dialectics I mention above. Wonderful observation that
history has always existed but not in a historical form. The consciousness of history increases with the
development of human awareness, humanizing time. Are we fully conscious of history yet? Implies
that no we aren’t, still evolving there, but since we have “humanized” time, or adapted it in an
anthropocentric manner with our calendars, clocks, holidays, chronologies, etc., then we are becoming
aware gradually.

126 - 130: Debord begins a genealogy of temporalities (or chronotopes) beginning with prehistory.
For the earliest primitive society, “time is immobile like an enclosed space” in which humanity exists
in a mythical “perpetual present”. But even this primitive beginning is already also beginning the
humanization of time and the temporalization of humanity. Later with the emergence of slightly more
complex societies, time and mortality are confronted by negating them with the invention of cyclical
time. This 2nd stage of our genealogy imposes the circle of returning seasons and everything else,
including the society’s generations. This cyclical time Debord also notes is static: it precludes the idea
of progress, development, evolution, innovation. 127 is especially interesting in terms of a
chronotope, a uniform social space traversed by nomads does not escape from a static temporality.
(We might ask, don’t our postmodern nomads likewise remain trapped in a global space that precludes
the dimension of historical struggle?) Both ancient nomadism and settled agrarianism project a static
cycle, their myths reflect their material organization. Social conflict is contained, although soon
enough a powerful elite class emerges that appropriates both surplus value and surplus time. This elite
group of rulers becomes the first agency of history, using historical time (or at least irreversible time)
for its own ends above the static cyclical time it imposes on the rest of society. (Here I think of
ancient Egypt as one example, where the whole of society is organized around a cult of death denial in
the form of an eternal afterworld for the ruling class, while their mythology promotes a static cyclical
time on this world for everyone else.) This is also the origin of those chronologies of the kings, and of
wars against other kingdoms. History as noble chronology and as foreign conquest emerged as
something separated from the everyday life of the people. The noble line invades the peasant cycle,
ironically introducing an irreversible time from the outside that it tried to prevent.

131 - 132: “Writing is the rulers’ weapon”. Its beginnings are in service to the ruling class, bearing an
“impersonal memory” for the affairs of the State. In other words, the earliest uses of writing are
deployed within the regime of an elite chronology, but they would seem thus automatically to
undermine the stasis of cyclical time. Nevertheless, at this stage, these conflicting class temporalities
remain essentially separate.

133: Herodotus as the father of western historiography is cited to evoke the next development of a
“general language of historical communication”. Notice how Debord yokes together the ownership of
irreversible time with the freedom of those who “experience a qualitative richness of events”. The
irony is that this irreversible time also brings in a fear of oblivion. This echoes his films and texts on
the situationists’ grasping for historicity and history.

134 - 135: That mention of Herodotus launches Debord into a rapid march through the history of
western civ. These two theses are about the Hellenic and Hellenistic worlds. Greek arts of rhetoric
and philosophy and historiography blossom because the society is organized around debates between
those who share power (not yet including everyone, e.g., slaves, women, landless, and such). This
partial phase in our genealogy is that “Historical time became conscious in Greece, but it was not yet
conscious of itself.” With the rise of the Romans, we fall into semihistorical religions. State
mythology.

136 - 138: Rise of Christianity & fall of the Roman Empire. Monotheism (those desert religions of
Judeo-christian-muslim theology) brings in a new temporal regime, much like a dialectical synthesis
of the former cyclical time and irreversible time. A “compromise” and a contradiction. Eschatology
(or, the end of the world is soon thank god) is beyond cyclical time, yet it aborts history. The Middle
Ages sees the long slow process of undermining cyclical time by historical time. (Remember the
danse macabre and the medieval expectation of one’s imminent death as compensated for by one’s
personal salvation through religion.) Religious sense of irreversible time leading out into a separate
eternal realm is now spread among even the peasants instead of cyclical time. Feudal hierarchy is
split between Church and State, leading to complex diversification of “potential historical life”
especially with the gradual rise of the bourgeoisie and its emphasis on production, of secular and
practical development. During the consequent waning of the Middle Ages, waves of peasant revolts
expressed milleniarian dreams of the eternal realm brought down into the mortal world, reflecting the
impossible contradictions of chronotopes at a time when society was beginning to rapidly change, the
old compromises passing away with the rise of capitalism. (Debord defends his own revolutionary
longings against charges by Norman Cohn that modern revolutionaries simply repeat the old
milleniarian pattern. Basically he argues that w e’re in two very different chronotopes or
consciousnesses of historical temporality. Perhaps the peasant revolt was the unconscious version as it
remained trapped in the contradictory-compromise temporality of its time.)

139 - 140: The Renaissance and the growth of the secular middle class. Think of Petrarch’s emphasis
on fame rather than salvation, of Machiavelli analyzing worldly power as separate from eternity.
Irreversible time is enjoyed - and suffered.

141 - 144: Moving rapidly into the next phase with the triumph of the 18th and 19th century bourgeois
revolutions and industrialization brings a “profoundly historical” temporality of economic production
which continually (re)transforms the whole of society all the way down to the farmer. History is no
longer just the chronology of the elite class, but a general movement of the whole society -- but
relentless and ignoring individuals. Ironically the new “democracy” here is only this general dread of
a runaway history out of control. “History” itself becomes commodified as an abstract separate form.
Soon the owning class wants to freeze history as it is, the status quo which possesses a reified time, but
already it has created another class, the proletariat which because it is working at the base of economic
production, wishes to seize the irreversible time of production, of the general movement of the whole
society. The proletarians demand to live the time they are working to produce. A new social
contradiction: economic production creates continual change and a working class that wants to seize
that change, while the owning class now wants to stop time without also stopping the economy.
Solution: the passivity of medieval myth, Christian time is brought back in (an anachronism?).

145 - 146: Global time, universal history, capitalist domination leads to a global spectacle, the
temporality of an abstract time of the market in which history is suppressed. This commodified time
or time of exchange value reflects only the owning class. This brings us up to our period of
globalization, circa 1967, and leads to the next chapter. . . .

Debord’s rapid genealogy thus evokes a general grasp that 1. social chronotopes change according to
deep “materialist” shifts in social organization, in the mode of production. 2. This process includes
contradictory temporalities according to class divisions. 3. Historical irony rears its head several
times, wherein the temporality subverts its own purposes or the temporality that succeeds ends up
stifling the very class that adopts it. 4. Historical awareness in anything like a Marxist sense is
relatively recent, emerging out of a long slow socio-economic developments. The rise of a Marxist
proletarian as the agent of historical progress has since been suppressed first by the reimposition of an
anachronistic religious time and second by the advent of spectacular time.

• Chapter 6: Spectacular Time

[Due to lack of time and space myself, I will only give a very condensed summary of this chapter.]
Spectacular time, our chronotope today or the one which the system ideally tends toward despite our
attempts to realize other temporalities, is “pseudocyclical tim e.” It is the time that suits the society of
the spectacle in which images are commodified and commodities are imagified - the whole process
functioning to keep reproducing the relations of production under capitalism. This is a society riven
and structured by an array of “separations” and reifications. The proletarians are separated first from
awareness of their status and function as producers, then from historical time. Stasis is maintained by
a “cycle” of new commodities, new brands, new models, yet the whole of social organization is thus
frozen in time and prevented from participating in real change.

155: “Spectacular time is the illusorily lived time of a constantly changing reality.”

160: Existential authenticity as being-toward-death (which at least the previous eras of history tried to
deal with) is now absent, buried beneath the spectacle. The spectator is separated from this authentic
existence, and now denies the import of death (moreover within the commodification system, even
death itself is a business that markets to consumers a tidy, safe, clean “death” worry free). But for
Debord, this denial of death with its widespread inauthenticity is because we have not begun to live in
real historical time. We are separated from life in behaving only as passive spectators of a life sold to
us. Hence death cannot enter this image - nor even growing old, since consumerism is always young
again. Immaturity is imposed by advanced capitalism.

163: Instead of our spectator’s temporality, Debord recommends the invention of a “federation of
independent times” playful and collective, ending the separations noted above. This would be
autonomous and equivalent to the local “Councils” of active participation and dialogue that Debord
recommends in other chapters. 164: “The world already dreams of such a time. In order to actually
live it, we only need to become fully conscious of it.”
[Duchamp famously named Greenwich Village in NYC as the “Republic of Dreams” promoting its
bohemian life and acting as if it had become independent from the rest of the city. For those who
reject this as foolish utopianism, we might raise the current existence of autonomous communities in
which people do live out a kind of playfully independent chronotope. Greenwich Village circa 1920 -
1965 was a semi-autonomous community, until it succumbed to the spectacle society. And hundreds
of such little communities exist today, though they are not allowed to appear in the spectacle for
obvious reasons. Christiania in Denmark is another example, where homeless squatters appropriated
an abandoned military base, creating a thriving community for the past 40 years of artists and nearly
every profession of people by the hundreds who participate in their collective life without a
domineering government. In the realm of fantasy, literature, and pop culture, as Debord concludes, the
world already dreams of this - yet it can actually be lived if one becomes conscious of how to
overcome the array of separations. Given the alternative that we are faced with on the front page of
the daily news, I cannot argue that Debord’s recommendation is inadvisable. Our “end of history” is
turning out to look increasingly grim.]

• Appendix A: Passages from Empire that raise The Society o f the Spectacle

"The outside [of imperial control] has also declined in terms of a rather different
modern dialectic that defined the relation between public and private
in liberal political theory. The public spaces of modern society,
which constitute the place of liberal politics, tend to disappear in the
postmodern world. According to the liberal tradition, the modern
individual, at home in its private spaces, regards the public as its
outside. The outside is the place proper to politics, where the action
of the individual is exposed in the presence of others and there
seeks recognition. In the process of postmodernization, however,
such public spaces are increasingly becoming privatized. The urban
landscape is shifting from the modern focus on the common square
and the public encounter to the closed spaces of malls, freeways,
and gated communities. The architecture and urban planning of
megalopolises such as Los Angeles and Sao Paolo have tended to
limit public access and interaction in such a way as to avoid the
chance encounter of diverse populations, creating a series of protected
interior and isolated spaces. Alternatively, consider how the
banlieu [suburbs] of Paris has become a series of amorphous and indefinite
spaces that promote isolation rather than any interaction or communication.
Public space has been privatized to such an extent that it
no longer makes sense to understand social organization in terms
ofa dialectic between private and public spaces, between inside
and outside. The place of modern liberal politics has disappeared,
and thus from this perspective our postmodern and imperial society
is characterized by a deficit of the political. In effect, the place of
politics has been de-actualized.
In this regard, Guy Debord’s analysis of the society of the
spectacle, more than thirty years after its composition, seems ever
more apt and urgent. In imperial society the spectacle is a virtual
place, or more accurately, a non-place of politics. The spectacle is
at once unified and diffuse in such a way that it is impossible to
distinguish any inside from outside—the natural from the social,
the private from the public. The liberal notion of the public, the
place outside where we act in the presence of others, has been both
universalized (because we are always now under the gaze of others,
monitored by safety cameras) and sublimated or de-actualized in
the virtual spaces of the spectacle. The end of the outside is the
end of liberal politics." (Hardt and Negri 188-189).

Spectacle of the Constitution

“The open field of struggle that seems to appear from this analysis,
however, quickly disappears when we consider the new mechanisms
by which these hybrid networks of participation are manipulated
from above. In effect, the glue that holds together the diverse
functions and bodies of the hybrid constitution is what Guy Debord
called the spectacle, an integrated and diffuse apparatus of images
and ideas that produces and regulates public discourse and opinion.
In the society of the spectacle, what was once imagined as the public
sphere, the open terrain of political exchange and participation,
completely evaporates. The spectacle destroys any collective form of sociality— individualizing social actors in their
separate automobiles
and in front of separate video screens— and at the same time imposes
a new mass sociality, a new uniformity of action and thought.
On this spectacular terrain, traditional forms of struggle over the
constitution become inconceivable.
The common conception that the media (and television in
particular) have destroyed politics is false only to the extent that it
seems based on an idealized notion of what democratic political
discourse, exchange, and participation consisted of in the era prior
to this media age. The difference of the contemporary manipulation
of politics by the media is not really a difference of nature but a
difference of degree. In other words, there have certainly existed
previously numerous mechanisms for shaping public opinion and
public perception of society, but contemporary media provide enormously
more powerful instruments for these tasks. As Debord says,
in the society of the spectacle only what appears exists, and the
major media have something approaching a monopoly over what
appears to the general population. This law of the spectacle clearly
reigns in the realm of media-driven electoral politics, an art of
manipulation perhaps developed first in the United States but now
spread throughout the world. The discourse of electoral seasons
focuses almost exclusively on how candidates appear, on the timing
and circulation of images. The major media networks conduct a
sort of second-order spectacle that reflects on (and undoubtedly
shapes in part) the spectacle mounted by the candidates and their
political parties. . . .” (Hardt and Negri 321 322).

From Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri, Empire. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 2000.

[1]
See Appendix A below for two passages from Hardt & Negri’s Empire where they go further than merely recommending
Debord in their discussions of social spaces.
[2]
The most interesting and clear appropriation of the Italian strain of autonomia that I have found is Nick Dyer-Witheford’s
impressive Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits o f Struggle in High Technology Capitalism (U of Illinois Press, 1999). Published
before Hardt and N egri’s Empire, Dyer-Witheford draws upon and modifies their earlier works, explaining how they should be
applied to our globalizng information society now.
[3]
Chapter 4 on “The Proletariat as Subject and as Representation” consists of Debord’s argument with-against the Leninist or
Soviet use of marxism, culminating in his call for renewed theory rather than ideology. See especially thesis # 112. The
terms “diffuse” and “concentrated” are explained in theses # 63 - 65. It is interesting that Debord predicted the fall of
communist countries and the rise of a globally “integrated” spectacle. For this, see especially his Comments on the Society o f
the Spectacle, Trans. Malcolm Imrie (Verso Classics Series 1988). Available online at
http://www.notbored.org/commentaires.html
141
This sense of sad historicity is more evident in Debord’s later memoir, Panegyric (1989).
[5]
From Debord’s voiceover in the film, Critique de la separation (1961), translated by Ken Knabb (2003), and available
online at http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord.films/separation.htm

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