My former English teacher* recommended I read about Guy Debord, but I couldn’t find much about him in ML circles. What do you make of him?

*He’s not a Marxist himself; he said he doesn’t know enough about Marxism to consider himself one.

  • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    3·
    4 days ago

    Debord is essential reading along with Baudrillard. The 20th century saw the rise of mass psychology, marketing and propaganda, and mass media. These three things dictate the social relationship you have with power structures. It’s imperative that we understand how we’re tricked into supporting our own oppression. Because the city is a collection of these narratives by concentrated power structures, understanding psychogeography is essential for urbanist theory. The city’s landscape creates the mindsets of its residents and the main task of critical geography is understanding where those development choices lead people to more or less toxic ways of interacting with the world.

    Baudrillard is less of a Marxist than Debord, who I think is firmly rooted in Marxist theory, but Simulacra and Simulation is a brilliant book for understanding the actual processes behind Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. Language and imagery are the tools power structures use to communicate to you. The more abstract they are, the more they can be distorted and used against you. With that book you gain a formal process for being able to look at an image and see how it’s corrupted from its original meaning to reinforce existing power structures.

    I will say that if you decide to read Society of the Spectacle it’s written in a really weird way where it’s like 200+ aphorisms that elaborate on the central idea of spectacle. It isn’t easy to follow and I really recommend using supplemental podcasts like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3bZOd5-6qE

  • davel@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    61·
    6 days ago

    I don’t know much about Debord. I haven’t read The Society of the Spectacle, but I have faith that it is/was an important work.

    My heuristic for mid-century European leftist intellectuals is: what does Gabriel Rockhill[1][2] think of them? Rockhill doesn’t seem to have a lot to say about Debord in particular, but what little I see isn’t negative.

    1. https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Gabriel_Rockhill ↩︎

    2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Rockhill ↩︎

    • Muad'Dibber@lemmygrad.ml
      101·
      6 days ago

      I’ve read society of the spectacle (well half before I had to stop). It was mostly french /continental philosophy nonsense. Overly complicated language without much substance beneath. There might be some halfway decent things in there, but it’s buried by the language and target audience.

      Gramsci is always clearer when it comes to bourgeois ideology.

      • davel@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
        9·
        6 days ago

        If we only read MLs, we’d run out of books pretty quickly, and we’d miss important works written by non-MLs. As long as you have a solid ML foundation, non-ML works shouldn’t give you cooties.

        • Onewhoexists@lemmygrad.mlOPEnglish
          42·
          6 days ago

          Just to clarify, I didn’t mean to imply that Society of the Spectacle doesn’t have value, (which I think it does,) just pointing out that Debord was an ultra-leftist. I definitely should have made that clearer in my original reply, though. Sorry for the misunderstanding.