The Company of the spectacle (delivers)

See also: the Company of the spectacle

the Company of the spectacle is a book of Guy Debord published in 1967.

The sentence of opening is a diversion of the sentence of opening of the Capital of Karl Marx:

“Richness of the companies in which reign the capitalist mode of production is announced like a " immense accumulation of marchandises". ” (first sentence of Marx)
“All the life of the companies in which the modern conditions of production prevail announces like an immense accumulation of spectacles . ” (first sentence of the Company of the Spectacle)

The book is arranged like a Essai Politique using the form of the thesis, and not like a work of Philosophie, of which he says that it must find its realization and either its discussion, to take again the word of Karl Marx. In that it exposes its subject rather in an affirmative way than discursive, it does not seek to show, or even to convince, but to show: an example in the sobriety of its thesis 9, qu ' it states in only one line:

“In the world really reversed , truth is one moment of the forgery. ”

This relative laconism compared with other works situationnists as those of Raoul Vaneigem made relatively difficult the later comments of the text, by the use of Guy Debord of the style hégelien. If Guy Debord reveals in his book an interpretation of criticism marxienne of the Fétichisme of the goods developed in the first chapter of the first book of the Capital (1867), itself making following the Théorie of alienation exposed in its Manuscrits of 1844 , its originality is located precisely in the description of the contemporary advance of the Capital on the life of the every day, in the means which it employs and in his modern purposes of conquest, in its influence on the world through goods.

The thesis of the author

the Company of the spectacle is primarily a radical criticism of the goods and its domination on the life, which is found in the particular form of the Aliénation of the Consumer society. The concept of spectacle refers to a mode of reproduction of the company based on the reproduction of the goods, increasingly more and increasingly more similar in their variety. Overflow preaches an acting out of the conscience that one has his own life, towards illusory pseudo-life which imposes to us the capitalist company, particularly since the post-war period.

According to Overflow, the spectacle is the completed stage of capitalism, it is during concrete of the organization of the goods. The spectacle is a economic Idéologie, in the sense that the contemporary company légitimise the universality of a single vision of the life, by imposing it on the directions and the conscience of all, via a sphere of demonstrations audio-visual, bureaucratic, political and economic interdependent. This, in order to maintain the reproduction of the to be able and the Aliénation: the loss of living life. Also the concept takes several significances. The spectacle is at the same time the apparatus of propaganda of the influence of the capital on the lives, as well as a “ social relationship between people mediatized by images ”. Overflow compares the spectacle with the religion of the goods.

External bonds

complete Texte
Film in line
Ansi that the second: Refutation.

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