The Concept Of The Spectacle: From The Esthetic Practices Of Lettrism To The Socio-philosophical Conception Of Guy Debord

Abstract

The subject of this article is the genesis of the socio-philosophical interpretation of the concept of the spectacle, known from the book The Society of the Spectacle (1967) by the French philosopher and fi lmmaker Guy Debord. The author presents an analysis of an array of Debord’s texts from different years, with the goal of distinguishing and examining the main stages of the formation of the concept and the transformation of its meaning. The study goes from the implicit presence of the concept in the avant-garde practices of the representatives of the Letterist artistic movement (including Debord himself) to the first, purely esthetic and cultural interpretation of the concept, presented in works by Debord in 1957–1960 — and further, to the semantic extension of the concept presented in Debord’s 1960 article “Preliminaries Toward Defi ning a Unitary Revolutionary Program,” and to the completed socio-philosophical concept as presented in two books, The Society of the Spectacle and Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. The article also examines the events of Debord’s political and artistic biography which formed the context of the process under study.

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