La Société du spectacle Reading Order

La Société du spectacle (The Society of the Spectacle, 1967) by Guy Debord is the founding theoretical text of the Situationist International — the most systematic statement of their critique of contemporary capitalism and the one work that survived the movement's dissolution in 1972 to become a canonical text of critical theory. Debord argues that all of modern life has been replaced by its representation — the accumulation of spectacles. Where Marx analyzed the commodity as the basic unit of capitalist society, Debord analyzes the spectacle: the commodity has now colonized all of social life, and the once-active masses have been reduced to passive spectators of their own existence. The text is written in 221 numbered theses, imitating Hegel and Marx but also the tradition of political manifesto and Situationist détournement — the practice of subverting existing cultural materials by lifting them from context and reassembling them with new meaning. Written in 1967, the text seemed prophetically confirmed by the May 1968 uprising in Paris, in which the Situationist slogans ('Sous les pavés, la plage!') appeared on the walls. Debord wrote a companion commentary in 1988, Commentaires sur la société du spectacle, arguing that the spectacle had by then become 'integrated' — neither the concentrated (Stalinist/Fascist) nor the diffuse (consumerist) spectacle but a total fusion of both.