Guy debord

Jonathan Fenby’s admirably lucid history of France and Sudhir Hazareesingh’s lively if flawed guide to the French mind

The thoughts of Guy Debord on the Society of the Spectacle written in 1988; two decades after his original celebrated work on the subject.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 1967.

Radical America #04.05: Society of the Spectacle

Debord: At home in The Spectacle

Guy Debord (1931-1994)

Archive One thousand four hundred sheets of Bristol paper covered in miniature, cautious, cadenced, rounded script. The hand writing continues even when there is not enough surface to contain everything that is needed to be said; the lines get thinner and thinner and increasingly close together, like the jets of smoke acrobatic pilots draw in the sky. There are minimal variations in the script, even though the works span a period of forty years. I’m curious to decipher the words, and go…

Born in Paris in 1931, Guy Debord was a founding member of the radical group Situationist International; one of the group’s slogans was: “Boredom is always counterrevolutionary. Always.” He published Society of the Spectacle in 1967; the text influenced the May 1968 worker and student revolts, during which quotations from it were painted as graffiti in Paris streets. Debord

We don’t experience place as maps would have us believe. We might technically exist within the map, an orientation marker besieged by the total sum of data, every landmark, park and street swarming around us at all times. But our perspective is only partial – a patchwork of neighbourhoods, structures… Read More