Spectacle of what?

Abstract (of sorts)

What is at stake in the Situationist critique of the spectacle is the idea of what the spectacle falsifies.
For some philosophical critics of the spectacle, it is precisely this which reveals the theory’s
shortcomings. Guy Debord’s elaboration, they argue, is merely an updated version of Plato’s
indictment of mimesis and poetry. Debord thus demonstrates his philosophical naivety by arguing
that behind or beyond the false representations of the spectacle lies the possibility of recovering
“true” life. However, this line of argument singularly fails to understand the critique of the spectacle
on its own terms, instead reducing the critique to a merely philosophical problem. Debord is largely
uninterested in the age old philosophical and religious problem of an ineffable “true world” and its
material representations. Rather, he is concerned with the way falsehood is a moment of the truth
of capitalist social relations, and, in particular, how this produced falsehood tends to develop under
the impact of the technological refinement of material representations in the context of commodity
production, exchange and consumption. Debord names ‘spectacle’ the metaphysical assumptions
and concrete reality conjured by the commodity through its colonisation of everyday life. Contrary
to his scholastic opponents, Debord does not oppose truth to the spectacle—indeed, such an
opposition is already encompassed in the spectacle’s reign. Rather he poses the possibility of
fashioning a world that does not require the projection and alienation of human powers into an
ethereal otherworld, whether secular or religious.

Keywords: appearance, artificiality, Jean Baudrillard, Cornelius Castoriadis, falsehood, Ludwig

Feuerbach, Guy Debord, ideology, Karl Marx, orthodox Marxism, the critique of Marxism,
metaphysics, mimesis, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, reality, representation, the Spectacle, truth

***

What we see every night is not real. The question is, How unreal? Partially? Or—completely?
— Phillip K. Dick, Faith of Our Fathers

In order to avoid certain pitfalls, some concepts can only be properly used if we understand how
they have been philosophically refined. The Situationist concept of ‘spectacle,’ developed mainly by
Guy Debord, is like this. However, to reduce our understanding of Debord's critique of contemporary
society merely to a philosophical problem is to risk distortion. The term ‘spectacle’, or more
accurately ‘commodity-spectacle’, does not refer to any supposed error of “Being”—an argument
prominent in philosophy since Parmenides. The spectacle is not a perceptual fault in the makeup of
the human animal. Rather, the spectacle refers to an historical and social process, by which error is
materialised in social practice.

What is metaphysical, then, is not the concept of the spectacle but rather of the social order that it
criticises. At issue, metaphysically speaking, is the hierarchy of commodity value by which all life
today is ordered and judged. Nonetheless, critics, opponents and falsifiers of Debord continue to
accuse him of a philosophical naivety in this respect, as if in his rush to account for the historical
emergence of a commodity-spectacle he fell back into ancient idealism. Here, to show how the
concept of the spectacle is a valuable tool of social critique, we will set the record straight.
 Spectacle of What? A.P. Hayes, July 2018

The most common philosophical criticism that has been levelled at Debord’s conception of
‘spectacle’ is that it merely replicates Plato’s schema of a “true” world of perfect forms and the
“false” world of phenomenal reality (for instance, by Jean-Luc Nancy). Or, only slightly more
charitably, we hear that Debord retreated to a “Feuerbachian” problematic (for instance, by Jacques
Rancière). On this latter reading, Debord naively misunderstands Karl Marx’s rejection of Ludwig
Feuerbach’s critique of religion. The upshot of both readings is that the ‘spectacle’ simply is the false
representation of the ‘true’.

Besides lacking the power to explain how commodities are valued, such crude assessments of the
“truth” and “falsity” of reality invites substance dualism. It is precisely such abstractions from the
history of philosophy that Debord wants to avoid as a materialist—ideas of a really real, substantially
different essence, somehow “behind” deceptive daily experience. As we will see, such charges are in
themselves abstractly philosophical in a highly relevant sense.

Take Jean Baudrillard’s The Mirror of Production (1973). It is hard to engage with Baudrillard’s
criticisms in good faith, simply because so much of his apparent rejection of Debord was made
amidst a more far reaching and largely unacknowledged appropriation.1 For instance, his
descriptions of a succession of ‘mutations’ in the emergence of capitalism, resulting in the ‘third
mutation’ in which no aspect of life remains beyond market domination, bears more than an
accidental resemblance to the concept of the spectacle.2 Baudrillard’s “twist” on the Situationist
critique is to assert nothing else exists apart from the spectacle.

Baudrillard’s claimed “improvement” on the Situationists was to indict them for ‘fidelity’ to Marxist
orthodoxy and the proletariat. Apparently, ‘behind the organisation of the spectacle, labour-power
is still apparent’.3 Baudrillard believed that the Situationists, like Marx, implicitly posed ‘labour-
power’ as the irreducible ground of human nature. Accordingly, behind the spectacle of ideological
superstructure, ‘labour-power’ was recoverable beyond its exploitation. However, apart from the
remarkable absence of the base/superstructure schema in The Society of the Spectacle, we also find
that Debord did not use ‘labour-power’ in the way Baudrillard asserts. Debord was at pains to
demonstrate how the reduction of human activity to ‘labour time’ was linked with the historical
emergence of a capitalist ruling class. Indeed, for Debord as for Marx, the capitalist exploitation of
labour-power cannot be understood separately from the capitalist reduction of human activity to
labour-power.4 Thus, we can understand why the Situationists, in contrast to Baudrillard’s belief and
misguided representations, called for the recovery of the free play of human powers beyond their
reduction to labour-power for sale.

For Marx, the base/superstructure was ultimately founded on the produced opposition and
separation of mental and manual labours, itself emerging in pre-capitalist class hierarchies.
However, such a produced, and so artificial distinction, reached a ne plus ultra with the emergence
of capitalist social relations. To misunderstand the economic base as somehow “behind” the
ideological superstructure, was to reproduce the alienating schema of the mental and manual that
Marx identified as an aspect of class hierarchy, separation and domination.

1
Anselm Jappe has recently outlined in some detail the breadth of Baudrillard’s daylight robbery in his article
‘Baudrillard, détournement par excès’, Lignes, no. 31, février 2010. Available online here: http://www.palim-
psao.fr/article-baudrillard-detournement-par-exces-par-anselm-jappe-47593356.html.
2
Jean Baudrillard. The Mirror of Production. Translated by Mark Poster. St. Louis: Telos Press, [1973] 1975, pp.
119-129.
3
Ibid., p. 120
4
See Guy Debord. The Society of the Spectacle, chapter 5, and in particular thesis 140.

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 Spectacle of What? A.P. Hayes, July 2018

One of the first accusations against Debord’s ‘Feuerbachian filiation’ was made by François Châtelet
in his 1968 review of The Society of the Spectacle.5 Implicit in Châtelet’s charge is that the concept of
spectacle remained at the level of Feuerbach’s dualist schema of abstract, “real” life, and its ideal
mirroring in religious ideology. However, in making his point, Châtelet only demonstrated his
incapacity to read either Debord or Feuerbach.6 As if in anticipation of this very criticism, Debord
cautioned his readers regarding the nature of the spectacle:

One cannot abstractly oppose the spectacle and actual social activity […]. The spectacle
which inverts the real is actually produced. Lived reality is materially invaded by the
contemplation of the spectacle, and at the same time absorbs the spectacular order by
giving it a positive attachment.7

Debord’s critical presentation of the spectacle charts a social relation that is simultaneously ‘sensible
and suprasensible’ (Marx). The spectacle is neither ‘a collection of images’ (thesis 4), nor merely ‘a
supplement or decoration added to the real world’ (6). Rather, ‘it is a social relation between people
mediated by images’ (4). Nonetheless, these ‘images detached from every aspect of life’ (2) and
merged into the ‘new unity’ of the mass media are true moments of the falsehood of the spectacle.

However, to reduce the spectacle to ‘autonomised images’ (thesis 2) is a misinterpretation of the

concept. It is to understand only the manufactured autonomy of appearance. Even though the
spectacle can be examined by way of the consumption of ‘its particular forms—news, propaganda,
advertising, entertainment’ (6), to reduce it to these elides the entailed production of these forms.
Any autonomy is only apparent: ‘The social practice confronted by an autonomous spectacle is also
the real totality which contains that spectacle’ (7). Apparent autonomy is only a moment of its
production and consumption, and so a moment of false appearance.

Marx appropriated Feuerbach, rather than rejecting him outright. As the Situationists argued,
Feuerbach constituted the ‘crux of the movement from Hegelian alienation to the new political and
anthropological critique’, rather than merely an obstacle to such.8 What was objectionable in
Feuerbach’s criticism, by Marx’s reckoning, was not the idea that ‘the essence of man’ was other
than what it seemed, but rather that by abstracting ‘the essence of man’ Feuerbach had, in part,
remained at the level of abstraction he purported to criticise:

Feuerbach starts off from the fact of religious self-estrangement [Selbstentfremdung], of the
duplication of the world into a religious, imaginary world, and a secular [weltliche] one. His
work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. He overlooks the fact that
after completing this work, the chief thing still remains to be done. For the fact that the
secular basis lifts off from itself and establishes itself in the clouds as an independent realm
can only be explained by the inner strife and intrinsic contradictoriness of this secular basis.9

Marx rejected the idealistic presentation of abstract essence, not ‘essence’ itself. Thus, ‘the essence
of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual’, but rather, ‘in reality, it is the ensemble

5
François Châtelet. ‘La Dernière Internationale’, Le Nouvelle Observateur, 3 janvier 1968.
6
See Internationale Situationniste, ‘Comment on ne comprend pas des livres situationniste’, internationale
situationniste no. 12, septembre 1969, pp. 44-45. Available in English translation here:
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/12.situbooks.htm.
7
Debord. The Society of the Spectacle, 1967, thesis 8.
8
Internationale Situationniste, ‘Domenach contre l’aliénation’, internationale situationniste no. 10, mars 1966,
p. 81. Partial English translation available here: http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/10.domenach.htm.
9
Karl Marx. 'Theses on Feuerbach [1845].' In Karl Marx & Frederich Engels Collected Works, Vol.5. New York:
International Publishers, 1976, thesis 4.

3
 Spectacle of What? A.P. Hayes, July 2018

of the social relations’.10 As already noted, it is to be ‘explained by the inner strife and intrinsic
contradictoriness of this secular basis’, what we can reasonably term an historical essence. By the
time of Capital (1867), Marx argued that the contemporary essence of modern, capitalist societies
could be found in the way such societies fetishized the commodity. What Marx would call ‘this
fetishism of the world of commodities’ was ‘nothing but the definite social relation between men
themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things’. As if to
underline his critical appropriation of Feuerbach he continued:

In order, therefore, to find an analogy [for this fetishism] we must take flight into the misty
realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures
endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with
the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands.11

The metaphysics of the fetish is a product of commodity production. As Marx would later quip, ‘all
science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their
essence’.12 Likewise, by abstracting the commodity from its process of production we fetishize not
only individual commodities. By forgetting the process of production of commodities in toto, we also
fetishize commodity production itself.

For the Situationists, the critique of appearance is not merely the philosophical indictment of
‘appearance’ qua ‘essence.’ It is also the putting into question of the apparent autonomy given to
appearance under spectacular conditions. This apparent autonomy is the concomitant of a world in
which the commodity-products appear as the real bearers of social relations, the bizarre
personification of the results of human practice. Complex social relations that are inherited,
produced and reproduced across the depths of time and space are reduced to mere appearances,
isolated fragments and commodified things that falsify the truth of what they purport to represent.
As Debord remarked, ‘the spectacle […] is nothing but the economy developing for itself. It is
[simultaneously] the faithful [fidèle] reflection of the production of things and an unfaithful [infidèle]
objectification of the producers’ (thesis 16). The relationship between the ‘faithful’ and ‘unfaithful’ is
a real product under particular, historical conditions. The apparent autonomy of the spectacle, of
the spectacular economy is, in fact, its most enduring product.

Baudrillard is not alone in mistaking Debord. In his work Being Singular Plural (1996), Jean-Luc Nancy
has argued that that the critique of the ‘spectacle’ replicates the idea of a split between a
spectacular ‘appearance’ and the non-appearing ‘essence’. Here we meet again Baudrillard’s charge
that the spectacle is merely the redescription of orthodox Marxism. Nancy adds to this that that the
critique of the spectacle paradoxically only ‘moves within mere appearance’ itself, as is indicated by
its inability to pose the opposite of the spectacle as anything but the ‘un-appropriable secret of an
originary property hidden beneath appearances’.13 To sustain this critique, Nancy becomes yet
another commentator to find traditional metaphysics under Debord’s bed:

this very intuition is interpreted only as the reign of appearance, as the substitution of the
spectacle for authentic presence; appearance is understood, here, in the most classical way,

10
Ibid, thesis 6.
11
Karl Marx. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, [1867] 1976, p. 165.
12
Karl Marx. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 3. Translated by David Fernbach. London: Penguin
Books, [1894] 1991, p. 956.
13
Jean-Luc Nancy. Being Singular Plural. Translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O'Byrne. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, [1996] 2000, p. 51. Translation modified.

4
 Spectacle of What? A.P. Hayes, July 2018

namely, as “mere appearance” (surface, secondary exteriority, inessential shadow), and

even as “false appearance” (semblance, deceptive imitation). In this respect, critique
remains obedient to the most trenchant and “metaphysical” tradition of philosophy,
“metaphysical” in the Nietzschean sense: the refusal to consider an order of “appearances,”
preferring, instead, authentic reality (deep, living, originary—and always on the order of the
Other).14

Common to Nancy, Baudrillard (and, as we will see Jacques Rancière as well), is this insistence on
locating the metaphysical error of the critique of the spectacle, as if what Debord critically describes
was an error immanent to the theory, rather than the world so described. What they miss, caught up
in their abstract denunciation of abstraction, is that the commodity-spectacle is the manifestation of
metaphysics—‘ideology materialised’ in Debord’s words.15 Debord did not abstractly indict
‘representation’, nor endorse the veiled depths of lost authenticity, so much as critically describe,
and call for the supersession of the real falsehood of the spectacle—namely, the instantiation of a
metaphysical order embodied in the hierarchy of commodity values and hence capital itself. 16

More recently, in his work The Emancipated Spectator (2008), Jacques Rancière has again reduced
the critique of the spectacle to a merely philosophical question. He accuses Debord of repeating
Plato’s critique of mimesis—i.e. representation—via Marx’s early appropriation of Ludwig
Feuerbach’s critique of religious ideology.17 For Rancière, Debord’s critique is lumbered with an
implicit morality. The autonomy of representation, signified by the reign of the commodity-
spectacle, is irreducibly ‘bad’, and will only be made ‘good’ with the elimination of the ‘exteriority’
and ‘distance’ embodied in the spectacle.

However, inexplicably missing from Rancière’s argument is an account of the relationship between
‘representation’ as such and the ‘autonomy of representation’ that is the signature product of the
commodity-spectacle. Indeed, this argument must be absent in order to reduce Debord’s critique of
the spectacle to a garden variety moral criticism of representation. Debord’s critique of the
spectacle is not and never has been an argument against the perils of representation as opposed to
immediacy. Rather, Debord attempted to account for the way the rise to dominance of the
commodity economy exploited the possibilities of representation, particularly under the reign of
industrial reproduction and fragmentation of commodity relations.

14
Ibid., p. 52. There is a case to be made for Nietzsche partially retreating to a Feuerbachian position. Marx
located Feuerbach’s error in his abstract conception of man. Indeed, his criticism of Feuerbach resembles
Nietzsche’s argument against ‘the fable’ of the ‘true world’ of the philosophers and the priests. However, at
times, Nietzsche’s criticism of the metaphysical assumptions of secular modernity remained at the level of the
ideas he rightly rejected; i.e. in disabusing the ‘lie’ of metaphysics and religion in favour of the apparent world
of the senses, he understood the lie only in terms of its ideal nonsense, rather than as a force acting within
practical activity (as practice and as practical consciousness). See, 'Twilight of the Idols (1889).' In The Portable
Nietzsche, edited by Walter Kaufmann, pp. 463-563. New York: Penguin Books, 1982, in particular the sections
‘“Reason” in philosophy’ and ‘How the “True World” Finally Became a Fable’.
15
Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, chapter 8.
16
Benjamin Noys has made a similar criticism of Jean-Luc Nancy. Noys argues that Nancy illegitimately reduces
Debord’s political critique, or rather his ‘anti-political’ critique, to a philosophical one. Noys certainly captures
the practical sense of Debord’s critique against this reduction. However, in doing so he risks losing its
philosophical, and anti-philosophical dimensions, namely the critique of the materialisation of the
metaphysical worldview of the commodity-spectacle. See Noys, The Persistence of the Negative, Edinburgh
University Press, 2010, pp. 97-98.
17
Jacques Rancière. The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, [2008] 2009, pp. 6-7,
chapter 1 passim.

5
 Spectacle of What? A.P. Hayes, July 2018

Rancière’s criticism of Debord resolves itself into a familiar charge levelled at the Situationists: an
impossible desire to do away with mediation, in favour of a nebulous immediacy. But again, when
forced to cash out this claim such critics can only rely upon decontextualized citation. What is at
issue in the critique of the spectacle is not mediation and its elimination, but rather the form of
mediation—in this case what we can reasonably call a spectacular mediation. In the year before The
Society of the Spectacle was published, the Situationists noted that an erstwhile comrade, Cornelius
Castoriadis, had suddenly discovered that ‘true needs’ did not lay below or beyond the false needs
of the ‘pseudo-reality’ of capitalism. Even though the Situationists have often been lumbered with
just such a conception (true needs ‘beneath’ false, immediacy beyond mediation, etc.), they rejected
Castoriadis’ dogmatic enunciation of this “insight”:

[this] pseudo-reality itself shows, negatively, what it hides. That all the needs that solicit or
could solicit the production of commodities are equally artificial or arbitrary is what belies
the dazzling contradiction of advertising in the social spectacle, which speaks of what it does
not sell and does not sell that which it speaks of.18

Pointedly, the authors of this article noted the disparity between ‘what advertising promises and
does not give publicity to’, in order to argue that the pseudo nature of such advertised needs was
precisely bound up with the implied, albeit largely false promises of advertising. Debord returned to
this idea in The Society of the Spectacle: ‘Clearly, the pseudo-need imposed in modern consumption
cannot be opposed to any need or authentic desire which is not itself shaped by society and its
history’ (thesis 68). However, in the face of the tendency for commodity abundance to be posed
autonomous to ‘the organic development of social needs’, ‘living desire’ is overwhelmed by the
‘unlimited artificiality’ of industrial production. Here ‘mediation’ itself is cast adrift, and any
meaningful relationship between desire and its satisfaction is broken: ‘The cumulative power of an
autonomous artificiality above all leads to the falsification of social life’ (thesis 68).

If we look at Marx, particularly the Marx of Capital, we can find something similar. For instance,
Marx’s conception of ‘human nature’, albeit a ‘nature’ that is liable to self-transformation, is
nonetheless bound and thus limited in its ‘metabolic relationship’ with the rest of nature. Of course,
such a relationship is not beyond its own transformations, human and non-human. However, to pose
a human praxis of ‘unlimited artificiality’ is precisely to deny the metabolic nature of species life.
Indeed, in this age of runaway environmental destruction and degradation, the idea of a metabolic
relationship takes on a new resonance.

Why then, the persistence of this misrepresentation of Debord? In The Society of the Spectacle,
Debord noted how ‘philosophy […] was never by itself able to supersede theology’ (thesis 20).
Indeed, in another nod to Marx’s critical appropriation of Feuerbach, Debord continued:

The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion. Spectacular technology
has not dispersed the religious clouds in which men [dis]placed their own alienated powers;
it has merely bound them to a terrestrial base. Thus, this more earthly life becomes opaque
and stifling.

Perhaps paradoxically, Debord considered the spectacle as the ‘inheritor of all of the weakness of
the Western philosophical project’ (thesis 19). Here we approach Debord’s understanding of Marx’s
critical appropriation of Feuerbach: ‘The spectacle […] does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes

18
Internationale Situationniste. ‘Socialisme ou Planète’, internationale situationniste no. 10, mars 1966, p. 79.
English translation available here: https://thesinisterquarter.wordpress.com/2013/10/31/socialism-or-
planete/.

6
 Spectacle of What? A.P. Hayes, July 2018

reality’. The charges of Châtelet, Baudrillard, Nancy and Rancière, appear, as it were, like Marx’s
critical appropriation of Feuerbach, only in reverse. Misunderstanding what Marx took and
continued to take from Feuerbach throughout his life, namely his presentation of the phenomenal
experience of life under the domination of commodities as in part a ‘suprasensible’ fetishism of
commodities, they retreated into the merely philosophical denunciation of Debord.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Gerald Keaney for editorial assistance and suggestions.

Postscript

A common way to imagine the spectacular falsification of life is to imagine a Matrix like deception.
This trope was incarnated in numerous science fiction stories of the 1950s and 60s—for instance, in
works of Daniel Galouye, Walter Miller, Frederick Pohl and most famously, Philip K. Dick. The idea
that the naturalisation of commodity relations falsifies everyday life is presented
contemporaneously with, though perhaps not in the explicit fashion of, Debord’s critique of
commodification. Dick’s Faith of Our Fathers (1968) is notable for abandoning the familiar territory
of truth hidden behind the false. Dick presented a world in which the one, hallucinatory reality
obscured ‘a variety of authentic experiences’. In a world in which the ‘real’ metabolic relationship
between the human and the non-human is liable to transformation, the idea of multiple ‘authentic
experiences’ resonates against the totalitarian domination of market relations.

And some examples: Daniel F. Galouye, Tonight the Sky Will Fall! (1952); Frederick Pohl, Tunnel
Under The World (1955); Walter M. Miller, Jr., The Darfsteller (1955) Philip K. Dick, The Defenders
(1953), The Mold of Yancy (1954), The Penultimate Truth (1964), Faith of Our Fathers (1968).

Anthony Hayes
Canberra, July 2018

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 Spectacle of What? A.P. Hayes, July 2018

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