Debord Kaplan

7/28/2019 Debord Kaplan

1/22


2/22


3/22

Kaplan 459

It is my argument that both of Debords terms alienated masses and revolutionary

collective are secretly dependent upon the atomized perspective of liberal individual-

ism. Both terms abstract the individual from subtending cultural traditions and the over-

arching social relations in which they are embedded. Thus this article seeks to explore

the logic of Debords influential theory, propounding its insights and exposing the defi-ciencies of its underlying theoretical foundations.

Theoretical foundations of the spectacle

In formulating his concept of the spectacle, Debord builds his ideas on solidly Marxian

foundations, employing such elaborated concepts as alienation, commodity fetishism

and reification. Notwithstanding his periodic denunciations of such French Marxists as

Jean-Paul Sartre and Cornelius Castoriadis,6 Debords work sits comfortably in the west-

ern Marxist tradition, which Alvin Gouldner praised for its recovery of subjectivity,agency and culture (see Gouldner, 1980).7 Thinkers in this tradition follow the early

Marx and seek to highlight the roots of the social order in the sensuous, practical, consti-

tutive activity of interacting humans (Marx 1978a).8

In this tradition, the key model of action commencing from Marxs materialist turn

was to conceive of humans as conscious, creative actors. People work on the natural

world, and as they fabricate the object world around them, they culturally mold them-

selves. For Marx, this process of objectification helped unfold the essential attributes of

the human species: its species being. Labor created a multifaceted, rich cultural world

in which we could unfold potential aspects of our personalities (Marx 1978b, 1978c; seealso Heller, 1974; Honneth, 1998). Debord embraces this perspective, noting in theses

125 and 126 that mans being is not a given quality, but instead essentially negative.

Human nature is always in a process of becoming, unfolding through history and chang-

ing social institutions.

However, Marx declared that objectification becomes alienation when the ruling class

appropriates the fruits of labor. The creative accomplishments of workers appear as the

property of another, as foreign, and indeed become another means for their exploitation.

Workers lose access to their created wealth, while that wealth emerges as an alien power.

The poorer classes lack the time, money and education to access the developed culturalriches of society, even as the work process is stripped of all freedom and creativity. Marx

attacked a rigid division of labor and the poor wages that blocked a well-rounded person-

ality. Marxs ideal of the free, creative, multifaceted personality, which descended from

romanticisms critique of modern society (Marx 1978c),9 certainly found its echo in the

thought, revolutionary prescriptions and bohemian lifestyle of Debord.

For Marx, a practical result of this alienation was ideology: a systematic obscuring of

the constitutive role of labor in creating societys wealth and institutions (Markus,

1983).10 As each individual working consciousness becomes isolated from other laboring

individuals, and as ones own work is progressively split up into specialized tasks, the

connection between ones laboring activity and the products created is lost. The isolated

worker fails to see how their work is entwined with that of other workers in the produc-

tion of their shared world and, instead, passively observes an already given world that

seems to be a fixed, natural entity. Oppression and exploitation are rendered invisible,


4/22

460 European Journal of Cultural Studies 15(4)

natural traits of the social order. Debord joins Marx in this emphasis on alienation,

declaring separation or alienation to be the origin of the spectacle. In thesis 25, he

remarks that the division of labor is the alpha and omega of the spectacle. For this rea-

son, Society of the Spectacle commences with a section of 34 theses entitled Separation

Perfected. He writes that the incessant refinement of the division of labor into a parceli-zation of gestures, which are then dominated by the independent movements of machines

and working for an ever-expanding market, dissolves all community and all critical

sense (thesis 25).

For Marx, the evolving social organization of work also intensifies this alienation and

systematic obscuring of the essential role of labor in creating and reproducing societys

wealth and institutions. The efficiency and profitability criteria of exchange value

increasingly organize the actual process of production, which is detached from workers

routines, control and knowledge. The creations of living labor its products and its prof-

its are split off from the worker and turned into the machinery of production, with alltechnical know-how concentrated in the hands of managers, engineers and machines.

Workers become the tenders of machines, not the masters. In Marxs language, living

labor becomes the servant of past exertions, or what he termed dead labor (Marx,

1974[1867], 1976). The abstract quantitative logic of the commodity increasingly organ-

izes all social life. In this manner, workers confront an immense, technical apparatus

without recognizing how this apparatus is grounded in their social labor. Instead of a

relation of subject to subject, the isolated individual subject contemplates the social

world as an external, naturally given object. Implicitly the world appears as an immense

visual spectacle to the passive, distanced observing subject. Debord pointedly summa-rizes this perspective in thesis 20, emphasizing its impact on subjective consciousness of

the worker: [T]he spectacle is the technical realization of the exile of human powers into

a beyond. It is separation perfected in the interior of man.

After Marx, the most crucial theorist for Debords concept of the spectacle is the

Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukacs. Indeed, a quote from Lukacs serves as the epi-

graph to the books second section, The Commodity as Spectacle: The commodity

becomes crucial for the subjugation of mens consciousness as labor is progressively

rationalized (Lukacs, 1971[1923]: 86). It was Lukacs who rendered the Hegelian motifs

in Marxism their most explicit and systematic, making the dialectic and the creation of areified second nature in human consciousness a powerful theme that was then taken up

by Debord along with other French Marxists.11 In his 1923 tome History and Class

Consciousness, Lukacs (1971[1923]) presented a systematic account of the philosophi-

cal and ontological implications of Marxs dialectical perspective, and extended Marxs

analysis of the dynamics of alienation to all social institutions under capitalism. As mar-

ket imperatives invaded social domains that were previously organized by traditional

cultural and communicative norms, Lukacs argued that those domains became subject to

the criteria of efficiency (governed by the media of money), abstracted from local con-

trol or communicative organization and lost their capacity to function as meaningful

or comprehensible arenas of human action.12 The grounding of those domains in human

labor and social relations is lost from view, and price appears to be an intrinsic attribute

of the object, a phenomenon that Marx labeled commodity fetishism. Quoting (or more

accurately, offering a detournement, or twisting, of) Lukacs, Debord says in thesis 24:


5/22

Kaplan 461

The fetishistic appearance of pure objectivity in spectacular relationships conceals their

true character as relationships between human beings and between classes.13

Drawing upon Max Weber, Lukacs pursued his theory of the functionalization and

rationalization of diverse social spheres according to the requirements of the capitalist

economy. Alongside the economy, such differentiated realms as law and government aredesigned to respond to the general demands of a capitalist economy for routine predict-

ability, control and efficient calculable inputs. Those domains also take on the attributes

of separate and naturalized social phenomena that are systematized and rationalized

according to their own established values.14 They become separated from the creative

capacity of societys laboring members and cut off from everyday life. As Debord says

in theses 194202, these differentiated institutions, these worked-up forms of social rela-

tions, are described and institutionalized in part through abstract categories which, in

turn, drive the naturalization of historical institutions deeper into social consciousness.

While some spheres are rationalized for efficiency and economic functionality, oth-ers, notably art and religion, become the repository for the lost social aspirations of

humanity.15 Detached from everyday social life, they become the rarified arenas of

experts who supposedly guard them from contamination by the greed of capitalism, and

the demand for relevance or crude vulgar desires of the purportedly regressive masses.

The spectacle realized

Debord subscribes to Lukacs analysis of the supposed universal separation and reifica-

tion in modernity. Passivity and isolation reign as the individual contemplates a frag-mented, naturalized world governed by seemingly immutable laws. However, for Debord,

society contrives an image of its lost unity and forgotten creative praxis. Consumer soci-

ety, with its proliferation of goods and culture industry narratives, offers the populace an

illusory image of happiness and unity. If the alienated economic apparatus that confronts

the isolated worker can be considered a first approximation of the idea of the spectacle,

then this centralized production of fantastic, contrived cultural images constitute the

spectacle proper in Debords theory. In these media-packaged and corporate-supplied

depictions of the good life, all the social attributes actually denied to the general

populace independent power, freedom, social connection and meaningful socialaction are repackaged as consumer choice, or as features of the lives of celebrities in

Hollywood and Washington, DC suitable for vicarious consumption.16 This spectacle of

the good life rests on actual separation of the individual from the collective action, com-

munity and communication that creates our social reality. Debord remarks: The specta-

tors consciousness, imprisoned in a flat universe, bound by the screen of the spectacle

behind which his life has been deported, knows only the fictional speaker who unilaterally

surround him with their commodities (thesis 218). In societies dominated by modern

conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles.

Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation (thesis 1).

Debords spectacle this contrived illusion of meaningful life that displaces all actual

participation operates in three main arenas in advanced capitalist societies. First, there

flourishes a full-blown world of goods, with each symbolically constructed, manipulated

commodity aspiring to offer its own illusory version of the good life (theses 50, 59,


6/22


6566, 31).17 Second, capitalism systematically remaps the physical world to promote

efficient markets, consumerism and social control: a process that Debord explores

through the category of urbanism in a section entitled The Organization of Territory.

Finally, there is the metastasis throughout society of a virtual life enacted in media prod-

ucts. Despite their seeming differences, Debord argues there is a unity among all thespectacles manifestations. In thesis 6 he remarks, In all its specific forms as informa-

tion or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment the spectacle is the present

models of socially dominant life. In thesis 10, he adds, The concept unifies and

explains a great diversity of apparent phenomena.18

In the absolutely alienated world of the spectacle, says Debord, the populace finds

connection, community and purpose only through the intermediation of corporate-

contrived, government-manufactured and media-supplied narratives of stars, celebrities

and leaders. Such passive consumption of spectacles of freedom and social connection

only serves to confirm further the masses in their passivity and separation. As Debordsays in thesis 29: Spectators are linked solely by their one-way relationship to the very

center, which keeps them isolated from each other. The production of an illusory world

of communication, connection and purpose hides the counterfeit nature of the world.

Debord argues that the spectacle form is the natural outcome of the accumulation of

capital and successive rationalizations of the economy. He writes in thesis 34: The spec-

tacle is capital accumulated to such a degree that it becomes an image. However, against

Debord, it is questionable that this newly created spectacle of the image can be assimi-

lated to the logic of the passive, fragmented worker confronting the spectacle of the

alienated world of work. The construction of symbolic images is governed by anotherlogic than mere economic efficiency. Cultural codes, possessing their own unique pat-

terns of coherence and meaning, still need to be employed, and cultural production

requires its own distinctive personnel organization and resources.19

Crucial to Debords formulations, and those of later thinkers, is the timeline of capi-

talist development. In this chronology, social formation evolves from a liberal, competi-

tive market economy to organized corporate capitalism or what some term consumer

capitalism. Debord briefly indicates this new logic in theses 42 and 43, stating that in

the second industrial revolution, consumption for the masses becomes a duty supplemen-

tary to alienated production. As historians have repeatedly argued, in 19th-centurysociety of production, the economy was a separate social sphere, while culture was

autonomously organized by communities, subcultures and publics (Ewen, 2001;

Gottdeiner, 1997; Leiss et al., 1990). In contrast, in the 20th-century society of con-

sumption, in Debords society of the spectacle all social spheres of life, including cul-

ture, become reflexively organized according to the dictates of maximizing sales or

increasing political power. In the terms of Robert Dunn, consumer culture represents an

unprecedented interpenetration of cultural and economic forces (Dunn, 2008: 5253).

As Debord elucidates in thesis 46, use value (that is, the utility and meaning of an

object, which Marx took as natural or relatively unproblematic) is now subjected to

exchange value: the strategic imperatives of maximizing profit fully determine the

forms and contents of culture and, in turn, the rhythm and rhymes of everyday life are

reduced to a quantitative struggle for survival.


7/22

Kaplan 463

A new apparatus composed of mass production, marketing and media along with

government propaganda, turns culture and leisure into an increasingly commodified,

manipulated arena where the populace passively consumes reified fantasies and stimuli.

As Debord writes in thesis 42: The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has

obtained total occupation of social life. In thesis 43 he explains that the commoditytake[s] charge of the workers leisure and humanity because now political econ-

omy can and must dominate these spheres.

As a consequence, says Debord, the satisfaction of primary human needs is replaced

by pseudo needs (theses 219, 30, 51, 59, 68, 70). He denies the ability of individuals,

groups and classes to continue to determine their own needs through autonomous com-

munication. In the totally administered world of the spectacle, we are left with a culture,

indeed a language, that is corrupted and controlled. In the end, what appears as our real-

ity is an absolutely false illusion that blocks our perception of the actual social relations

and alienated labor at the base of the spectacle. It is a world that has become topsy-turvy (thesis 9), and The real consumer becomes a consumer of illusions (thesis 47).

For Debord, only through a revolutionary break and total social reorganization based

on extreme democratic participation, worker control and worker councils throughout

society will we be able to reclaim authentic community, communication and culture.

Debords historical accounting parallels the work of such thinkers as Jurgen Habermas

and prefigures that of Jean Baudrillard, Alain Touraine, Frederic Jameson and George

Ritzer. Collectively, these social theorists thematize how capitalism progressively colo-

nizes social life beyond the arena of production proper, expanding into leisure-time,

family activities and civil society in general. These analysts of postmodernity, or latecapitalism, suggest that capitalism tendentially destroys the cultural fabric of society,

either through the strategic administering of meaning by profit-oriented corporations or

through the destruction of societys historicity: that is, the connection of individuals to

their capacity for historical action or praxis.20

Historians too have argued for series of wide-ranging interrelated changes concomi-

tant with the rise of the consumer society. Debords work can be considered one particu-

larly potent probing of this new social world and its politics, psychology and symbolic

economies. In this new social reality, personal identity has shifted its location: no longer

based in ones roles as citizen or worker with a practical involvement in the productionof a shared social world, it instead has become centered in consumption and the vicarious

satisfactions of identifying with stars and celebrities.21

Insights of the theory of the spectacle

The 221 theses of Debords slim book forcefully articulate some key dimensions of our

contemporary spectacular world. Here, I would like to highlight three. First, they detail

the banal fantasies that supposedly overwhelm popular culture in spectacular society, dis-

placing all qualitative organic culture. Second, they outline inequalities in the power to

name and define our world. Third, they underscore a dimension seemingly intrinsic to

every society: the production of representations of society as a unified, meaningful whole.

I want to focus on these three arguments, recognizing that in the pithy pronouncements of


8/22


Debords book, a plethora of powerfully suggestive, but also elusive and underdevel-

oped, insights are offered about contemporary consumer society.

First, for Debord, in the alienated society of late capitalism, a change in the very form

and content of cultural representation necessarily accompanies the loss of individual

voice, group interaction and participatory accomplishment. The spectacle, founded onthe extreme isolation and passivity of the audience, offers regressive, banal fantasies to

make up for the loss of meaningful action and connection.22 In largely complementary

terms, Debord presents an analysis of both the banalization and the fantastic portrayal of

enlarged celebrity personalities implicit in media spectacles.

Alienation necessarily entails forgetting the historical nature of institutions and the

role of individuals in accomplishing their social world. Workers are no longer able to

understand how the institutions surrounding them are a product of creative historical

action accomplished by social groups in contention. They cannot see how their own

purposive action could encompass the present givens of the social world and transformthem in line with an envisioned future (Jameson, 1984).23 Cultural narratives conse-

quently lose their depth, unable to figure social context and history in any coherent way.

Under the shimmering diversion of the spectacle, banalization dominates modern soci-

ety, Debord declares in thesis 59.

In this world of quantitative, abstracted sameness atomized, homogenized and

assimilated by the drive of commodity production depth and the qualitative particular

is lost (thesis 38). Debord says participation in particular communities and personal rela-

tions reaching back into an entangled past and extending into a common destiny together

in other words, depth is replaced by an administered surface sameness (see theses133, 142143, 186187). A sense of time as pushing into the future and entailing signifi-

cant human creations of new meaning and social relations is forgotten, displaced by a

perpetual sameness, disconnected from particular identities and communities. Indeed,

Debord remarks in his reflections on the socially instituted nature of time that the grow-

ing domination of the irreversible time of [commodity] production tends to eliminate,

socially lived time (thesis 142 and sections 56).

Frederic Jamesons dialectical theory of postmodern culture helps to explicate this

dimension:

If, indeed, the subject has lost its capacity actively to extend its pro-tensions and re-tensions

across the temporal manifold and to organize its past and future into coherent experience, it

becomes difficult enough to see how the cultural productions of such a subject could result in

anything but heaps of fragments and in a practice of the randomly. (Jameson, 1984: 71. And

see thesis 142 and sections 56)

Historical styles sever their connection to their surrounding social conditions and his-

tory. Once supposedly expressive of an organic particular social formation, or imposed

by an overweening artistic personality, styles break from any social mooring in meaning-

ful action. As Debord states in thesis 186, society must lose all the references of a really

common language until the time when the rift within the inactive community can be

surmounted by the inauguration of the real historical community. Aesthetic styles float

without history, only to be recycled by a cultural industry that is desperate to connect to

and stir the audience. Numerous authors, but foremost Jameson, draw upon Lukacs and


9/22

Kaplan 465

Debords accounting of the loss of historicity and the detachment of representation from

organic praxis to explain the rise of postmodernism, with its concomitant loss of depth

and meaning. Representations float free and evolve into glib and mobile signifiers, with

a concomitant emphasis on surface, pastiche, flash and glitter. As narratives lose histori-

cal depth, they become banal, atrophied accounts of media personalities. Media stars arespectacular representations of living human beings, writes Debord in thesis 60. They

distill the essence of the spectacles banality into images of possible roles. As institu-

tions fade into the background and collective action disappears, the exaggerated dramas

of individual personalities shine bright.24

Elaborating beyond Debord, we might say that narratives become either the trivial, if

overwrought, emotional dramas of relationships with intimate others (for women), or the

fantasies of the power of charismatic, virtuous heroes (for men), who by themselves fight

and defeat evil, while all institutional limits and obstacles are conveniently forgotten.25

As Debord reiterates, identification with stars shining in the media spotlight and theirdiverse dramatic roles functions as a compensation for the individuals lost freedom

and purpose in everyday life.

Second, Debord highlights the inequalities in production of cultural meaning. This

theme dates back to the origins of Marxism, beginning in 1845 with Marxs The German

Ideology:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas The class which has the

means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of

mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the meansof mental production are subject to it. (Marx, 1978c: 172)

However, Debords efforts to analyze the forms of modern public communication and

their weaknesses are extremely rudimentary. He is inhibited from fully exploring the

deficiencies of public communication by his Marxian model of materialist praxis, which

focuses on exchanges with nature instead of social interactions, and because he operates

within a mass society perspective (which I will discuss later).

Debord points to two aspects of communicative power: first, concentration of the

means of communication in the hands of corporations, managers and experts; and, sec-ond, the isolation of the individual worker, who is cut off from all dialogue with peers.

Debord elaborates a model of absolute separation and displacement:26 all means of

speech have been concentrated in the hands of experts who now pretend to speak for the

whole. By means of the spectacle, the ruling order discourse endlessly upon itself in an

uninterrupted monologue of self praise (thesis 24). In contrast, the population sits silent

and entranced by visions of pseudo-intimacy that it so desperately craves.

To some extent, this stratification in speech and silencing of the population points to

the media. Presciently, Debord points to the synthetic, even virtual, world that sur-

rounds us today with electronic media. He emphasizes the seeming metastasis through-

out the body politic of contrived media narratives, powerfully packaged in vivid formats

for easy consumption.27 The media have, as their foundation, the extraction of commu-

nication from face-to-face relations in particular locales and times, thus permitting the

transmission of a message across time and space. Debord writes:


10/22


If the spectacle, taken in the limited sense of mass media, which are its most glaring superficial

manifestation, seems to invade society as mere equipment, this equipment is in no ways neutral

but very suited to [the spectacles] total self-movement. If the social needs of the epoch in

which such techniques are developed can only be satisfied through their mediation, if the

administration of this society and all contact among men can no longer take place except

through the intermediary of this power of instantaneous communication, it is because this

communication is essentially unilateral. (thesis 24)

With the development of media industries, the local folk community loses control over

its culture as its communications tendentially become the province of distant experts

who stylize the message to a mass audience for a profit. The media intervene and medi-

ate, subjecting popular communication to more instrumental calculations and effectively

reifying and administering public communication or so Debord would claim.28

Lastly, like a number of anthropologists, Debord thematizes societys representationof itself, what Claude Lefort has called societys mise en scne or self-staging (see

theses 63, 54, 29). However, far from constituting a permanent and intrinsic dimension

of social life, for Debord this representation is implicated in alienation. To a certain

extent, in Marxian theory any representation of the social whole derives from the original

sin of social division and alienation: the division between mental and manual labor (see

Marx, 1978c; Vajda, 1980). In thesis 180 Debord says:

Culture is the general sphere of knowledge and of representations of lived experiences within

historical societies divided into classes. It is a generalizing power which itself exists as aseparate entity, as division of intellectual labor and as intellectual labor of division.

In place of a unity of collective action and understanding, a select group be they priests,

intellectuals or journalists creates a distinct cultural perspective of the social whole, cut

off from and denying its roots in social production.

Rather then accepting the permanent, decentered and dialogical dimensions of social

representation, Debord adopts an extreme perspective: he sees all representation as alien-

ation. He believes that once the revolutionary collective actor is summoned to life, cul-

ture (aka alienated representation, or the spectacle) will disappear. Thus, he writes in

thesis 180: Culture is the terrain of the quest for lost [social] unity. In the course of this

quest, culture as a separate sphere is obliged to negate itself.

Critique of spectacular theory

In his thin volume, Debord fluctuates between an exaggerated dystopia of universal

alienation in the society of the spectacle and an inflated utopia of collective revolutionary

action. In their excess of hope or despair, both terms reflect the incorporation into

Debords analysis of the deficiencies of liberal ideas of individual freedom and action. In

his model of the revolutionary collective subject, Debord proposes an idea of the subject

unhindered by entanglements with the object world and uncontaminated by the com-

plexities of communication with other subjects and cultural mediation. In contrast, in his

model of the alienated society of the spectacle, Debord depicts dependent individuals


11/22

Kaplan 467

completely enthralled to alien forces and, most particularly, centralized cultural produc-

tion. In both situations, he presents an overstated picture of the autonomy or heteronomy

of the subject. In both cases, as in liberal individualism, the subject is depicted in abstrac-

tion from structuring institutions, and the cultural lifeworld within which they are always

embedded and in dialogue.Debords gyrations mimic the historical movement of liberal thought itself and its

eventual decomposition into mass society theory. Liberal individualism, dating back to

the philosopher Ren Descartes, began with the idea of the individual consciousness

understood as autonomous, self-controlled and rational. The individual is free and capa-

ble of using impartial, reflective reason to understand the surrounding world and mold it

according to a plan or vision. By purposive creative action the individual takes up the

brute, natural givens of the physical world and transforms them. The individual appears

as a principle of purposive animation and solid ideals against the plasticity and passivity

of the dead material world.Traditional liberalism emphasized the claims to knowledge and moral meaning that

find their foundation in individual consciousness. In its turn, Marxism highlights the role

of the laboring individual who works on the natural world and transforms it according to

conscious plans. Marx famously elucidated this model of materialist action in volume 1

ofCapital:

A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an

architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the

best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it inreality. (Marx, 1967[1867]: 178)

For the Marxian model of labor, as for liberalism, the starting point is the individual, who

thinks and acts unhindered by the external laws of the natural world or the internal needs

and desires of the body. The subject imposes their will and categories upon the brute

material world, in contrast with being entangled in nature or engaging in dialogue with

other individuals on the base of a shared cultural lifeworld. Freedom is defined here as

the ability to create the world and define oneself without limit, based upon ones personal

cultural vision. As can be readily seen, this model of the liberal individual ignores theways in which the individuals thinking and cultural plans are given by the surrounding

socialcultural order, and how action is implicitly structured by the sets of social rela-

tions in which we are embedded. Inevitably, if the individual fails to match this stringent

model of freedom, they are seen as a captive of alien forces and subject to categories,

rules and forces imposed from the outside. This model of individual action evidently

neglects the process-oriented, pragmatic, context-dependent but active dimension of the

individuals decisions.

It must be admitted that Marxism, especially in its Hegelian versions, represents a

critique of liberal individualism and its contemplative, abstract individual who observes

or acts upon a static external reality, objectifying it through transparent representations

and categories. Nevertheless, the Marxian model of work still retains a residue of this

liberal model, especially in its lack of theorizing our entanglement with the object world,

social interaction or intersubjectivity. Once we turn to Debords model of collective


12/22


revolutionary action, the indebtedness of his theory to liberalism becomes even more

pronounced.

By and large, revolutionary collective action in Debord can be understood as the indi-

vidual laboring subject writ large. Through radical direct action, diverse individuals can

dispense with separation and alienation and become one unified, transparent, collectiverevolutionary subject. Thus in thesis 74, Debord writes, The subject of history can be no

one other then the living producing himself, becoming master and possessor of his world

which is history and existing as consciousness of his game.29

In revolutionary society, social institutions, which had appeared as naturally given

and imposed an impoverished life upon privatized individuals, become subject to collec-

tive human control. In upholding a strong notion of praxis, Hegelian Marxism always

risked devolving into a form of voluntaristic idealism in which a free act of collective

will imposes its vision upon the social order. In this revolutionary praxis, action suppos-

edly achieves a transparency and immediacy that dispenses with cultural representation.Here, as is typical to the western Marxist tradition, Debord displays his distaste for the

differentiated, objectified institutions of modernity, seeing them as only reification (see

Breines, 1979). As Debord writes in thesis 75, revolutionary thought seeks to compre-

hend the dissolution of what exists and, in the process, breaks down every separation. In

this fashion, he neglects the diverse social goods accomplished by this operation of

decentering and differentiation that Habermas termed social modernization.

Debords understanding of collective active, like that of Marx, fails to recognize soci-

etys permanent plurality and conflicting visions. That plurality would need to be coor-

dinated and adjudicated through the mechanisms of speech and politics, albeit with alltheir limitations and deficiencies.30 Humanity, of course, constitutes itself not just

through labor on the world, but also by social interaction through the medium of culture

and language. The revolutionary desire to eliminate alienation within productive activity

could hardly address the inequalities, social divisions and confusion that permanently

afflict humanity with its attempts to achieve understanding and agreement through

speech (see Honneth and Joas, 1988; Lee, 1998).31

The trope of the masses

While Debords ideas of social action and the collective revolutionary actor reproduce

liberalisms emphasis on the free, conscious actor, his notion of the alienated mass tracks

liberalism second moment: the threatening crowd. The two terms rational disciplined

individual and alienated masses were united in their emphasis on the individual in

abstraction from overarching social relations and subtending cultural traditions.32

Liberalisms notion of the sovereign, self-determining individual always applied only

to the elite male white subject. In opposition to this agent of disciplined reason, society

was also populated by subjects to whom reason did not apply. Liberalism, in fact, entailed

a second term: an other, as the poststructuralists, starting with Edward Said, tell us:

women, children, other racial groupings, plebeians and peasants, the mentally disabled

and ill were all understood as by nature not possessing the requisite discipline and ration-

ality to be free individuals (Frederickson, 2007; Huyssen, 1986). They lacked the inter-

nalized moral character, will and reason to forge an independent path as individuals. To


13/22

Kaplan 469

a great extent, these groups embodied in the masses operated as a projective fantasy for

the elite. They were seen as containing all the urges and desires that threatened to over-

whelm the increasingly repressive, ascetic bourgeois ego and its allied liberal institutions

of limited democracy and private property.

In the modern era, industrial civilization had triumphed, supposedly breaking thecake of custom: workers were pried from the hierarchical social relations of natural

authority, and commonsense cultural norms and routines built up over centuries of daily

practice were shattered (Burke, 1978; Williams, 1958). In Marxs famous words: All

that is solid melts into air. Purportedly set free from organic community and tradition

and thus individualized, the masses were left culturally denuded and atomized.33 They

were understood as passive, isolated blank slates. With only weak reasoning capabilities

and driven by their desires and instincts, the masses were supposedly susceptible to

manipulation by the culture industry or demagogic leaders who played on their fears and

fancies (Falasca-Zamponi, 1997). Yet, as the 19th century wore on, these social groupsincreasingly intruded into public life, integrated into societys central institutions of poli-

tics, culture and economics. The appearance of the masses in the public realm called into

question the allegiance to private property, underpinning the market and rational delib-

eration governing the classical conception of democracy (see Barrows, 1979; Habermas,

1990; Schudson, 1978).34 Supposedly, no new culture could be invented by these blind,

driven, deficient individuals certainly not an organic traditional folk culture. Instead, a

corrupt, kitsch commercial culture would flourish, supplying prefabricated emotions and

ideas to mass publics.35 This culture distorts the populaces true humanity and reflects

either the imposed tastes of the elites, or the vulgarity of the masses whose desires are notrestrained by any self-discipline or character.

This concept of the weak, inert, hysterical mass functioned as a trope for much of

social theory from the late 19th century into the 1960s. Masses, as a theme in Robert

Nisbets terms, or as a paradigmatic assumption in Kuhns words, subtly and durably

informed the theoretical categories of social analysis (Bell, 1960; Bramson, 1961; Nisbet,

1976; see also Haney, 2008). Indeed, as historians of social theory such as H. Stuart

Hughes (1958), Talcott Parsons (1937) and Richard Hofstadter (1962) show, the rework-

ing of utilitarian theory in the late 19th century and its devolution into forms of social

Darwinism, elite theory and naturalism were driven by the elite reaction to the entry ofthe masses into the public realm.

An alternative cultural theory: lifeworld and agency

It is my contention that this (elite, projective) fantasy of the anomic masses deeply

defines Debords theory of the alienated society of the spectacle, with his depiction of the

populace as denuded of all culture, atomized, passive and buying into a fantastic world

of banal, contrived narratives. In this sense, Debords model of the active collective revo-

lutionary subject and the passive alienated masses downplays the ongoing significance

of the cultural lifeworld. In contrast, a conception of the lifeworld and the social interac-

tion necessary to sustain it comprises a powerful conceptual alternative to Debords

implicit dependence on liberal individualism or philosophy of the subject.


14/22


The lifeworld constitutes a kind of invisible, permanent cultural envelope or, in

Geertzs metaphor, a web of signification, into which we as individuals are born and

socialized. While elements of the cultural lifeworld can be problematized and chal-

lenged, as Habermas (1987) argues, this always occurs against the background of largely

implicit, unthematized cultural assumptions that deeply inform our thought. Permanentlyentangled in the web of the lifeworld and not culturally denuded, individuals in fact

possess rich cultural resources (albeit usually invisible) through which they can interpret

cultural messages and signs. Neither is the individual merely passive in the face of given

cultural texts and messages. As a variety of recent theoretical perspectives contend

from ethnomethodology and Pierre Bourdieus concept of practical reason, to the eth-

nographies of the Birmingham School and hermeneutic philosophy the individual is a

highly skilled, meaning-interpreting and meaning-generating being (e.g. Pollner, 1991;

Willis and Corrigan, 1980).36

In fact, in order to comprehend the meanings of cultural communication, individualsmust actively, albeit tacitly, deploy their cultural resources and understandings. The

reception of a texts meaning the completion of the hermeneutic circle requires the

audience to employ complex skills in interpretation, typically filling in gaps of assumed

meanings and contexts for a message to become coherent. Reception of a message, as

Walter Benjamin often argued, is a process of creation that produces new texts and new

meanings.37 For Habermas, this cultural activity is a necessary step in the continuance

and regeneration of the cultural lifeworld. In contrast, Debord ironically operates with

a form of textual reification a fetishism that detaches cultural texts from the produc-

tive context in everyday life that is necessary to give them meaning and he assumesthat the meaning can be unilaterally imposed by cultural industry creators (see Radway,

2001). Furthermore, in addition to active interpretation and strong cultural resources

from the lifeworld, the internalized meanings that guide interpretations typically reflect

the cultural understandings of subcultures, families, networks and interpretive commu-

nities, not isolated individuals (Katz and Liebes, 1993). Neither a blank slate nor iso-

lated, the individual is relatively insulated from the persuasive power of any single

cultural message.

In the end, a new cultural paradigm emerges where the production and reception of

cultural messages are understood as part of a noisy conversation (Bakhtin, 1982) betweenunequal participants against the background of the cultural lifeworld. No doubt such an

alternative paradigm should not celebrate the permanent, reflexive reasoning activity of

the masses as if this was a solution to the cascade of problems inundating our contempo-

rary world. Nevertheless, it offers the key starting point for analyzing the potentialities

for social change or stagnation.

Conclusion

Guy Debord proposes a radical, critical account of contemporary society, one that sees

the alienation and calculating rationality of capitalism extending deeply into our shared

cultural world. In the society of the spectacle the populace, isolated and disempowered,

sits enraptured before a screen bright with tales of freedom and community. These

media-contrived, mass-manufactured stories function as the dominant ideology of late


15/22

Kaplan 471

capitalism and leave the audience more isolated and more passive, all the while craving

new, additional entrancing narratives.

Despite the cogency and insight of Debords analysis, severe theoretical deficiencies

limit its utility. In tandem with the individualistic action perspective of liberalism, Debord

and more generally Marxian theories of praxis abstract action from the ongoing culturallifeworld in which it unfolds. Consequently, and despite pursuing radical criticism of

contemporary society and its bourgeois theories, Debords hidden dependency on classi-

cal liberalism radically undermines his capacity to analyze the cultural resources, com-

munity and communication that persist in late capitalism. Debord is left with an overly

despairing account of the alienation and passivity in spectacular society, along with a

romantic fantasy of the immediate and transparent society in the revolutionary future.

Acknowledgements

Long overdue thanks to members of the 1978 Lukacs study group Arun Kapil, Bob Barros and,

of course, Frank Adler for helping to clarify the complexities of reification.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or

not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1. See the different translations ofSociety of the Spectacle and other writings from Debords

group, Situationist International, at www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/situ.html. For the sake of

clarity, I have sometimes referred to later translations.

2. Henri Lefevbre says I knew Guy Debords character and the way he had of imitating Andre

Breton by expelling everyone in order to get at pure and hard little core. Later in this inter-

view he remarks, They began to insult everyone In the end, everything became oriented

toward a kind of polemical violence (Ross, 1997: 81). See the justifications offered early on

in Debord (2009).

3. Jappe offers a useful overview of Debords life and thought. Focusing here on one text, we

aim at systematic theoretical analysis and not intellectual history.4. As befits the word, the concept of the spectacle implicitly draws on a metaphor of passive

watching of an overwhelming staged show. Against the understanding of vision as passive

observation of a distant, given object, Maurice Merleau-Ponty offers a more complicated

analysis of the operations of vision, emphasizing its active dimensions (see the discussion in

Jay, 1998). Debord discusses the affinity of the spectacle to vision in theses 1819.

5. Foucault discussed the antinomies of this liberal vision of the individual actor, with its con-

trast between the unencumbered free spirit and the subject who is entangled in an unfree

social and material world (see Foucault, 1970).

6. One article in the Situationist International organ reads: poor Lukacs, poor Sartre, poorBarthes, poor Lefebvre, poor Cardan [Castoriadis]! Once the specialized thinkers step outside

of their domain, they can only be dumbfounded spectators of some neighboring and equally

bankrupt specialization which they were ignorant of but which has become fashionable

(quoted in Anon, 1996: 26).


16/22


7. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1974[1955]) also detailed a similar lineage to western Marxism in

hisAdventures of the Dialectic.

8. France during the 1930s to 1950s was marked by the recovery of Hegelian thought, most

forthrightly in the in the famous lectures of Alexandre Kojve, then articulation during the

1950s of a version of Hegelian Marxism around the Arguments journal and, in particular, withHenri Lefebvre, a close associate of Debord, in addition to the existential Marxism of Sartre

and Merleau-Ponty. They emphasized praxis or the active human subjects role in the consti-

tution of society and the entanglement of subject and object, while criticizing the mechanical

objectivistic science of orthodox communism with its naturalistic accounting of the laws

of society (see Gombin, 1975; Poster, 1975) Also useful on social and intellectual context is

Christofferson (2004).

9. Marx was drawing on 19th-century romantic notions of the expressive unified personality,

says Charles Taylor (1979).

10. As Markus makes clear, this is only one of the definitions of ideology operating in Marx.

11. Parts of LukacsHistory and Class Consciousness were published in Arguments in 19571958. Lukacs thought figures prominently in Merleau-Pontys Adventures of the Dialectic

(1974[1955]). Lucien Goldmann, praised by Debord, functioned as an important mediator of

Lukacs thought in France (see Poster, 1975). In the novelAll the Kings Men by Debords

then-wife Michele Bernstein, the character modeled on Debord is asked: What are you really

into? His response: Reification.

12. On media and disembedding, see Giddens (1990).

13. A guide to Debords use of others words in SOS, whether as direct quotes, altered or par-

odied, can be found in Not Bored! March 2007, also at: http://www.notbored.org/SOTS-

detournements.html.

14. Lukacs draws on Weber to develop this perspective (see Weber, 1958).15. On art, see Brger (1984). Situationist International as a movement first emerged out of the

Lettrist International, of an art-focused avant-garde group. Since Situationist Internationals

origins in 1957, however, Debord and company called into question all art that was distinct

from everyday life. They insisted, instead, on the need to transform everyday life, partly

with aesthetic expressive means against its subordination to, and regimentation by, bureau-

cratic and market logics. See the Situationist Internationals 1957 statement: Report on the

Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency's Conditions of

Organization and Action, in Knabb (2006). During the late 1950s and early 1960s, this posi-

tive program was reflected in Situationist International ideas of drive, the situations and

unitary urbanism. In contrast, SOS is largely a critical, theoretical social analysis that does notarticulate positive strategies for resisting reification (see Gombin, 1975; Sheringham, 2005).

16. For a powerful discussion of the spectacle of the president, see Miroff (1982).

17. The French seem to have a special genius when it comes to considering the nature of symbolic

codes in consumer society. In 1957, Roland Barthes famously took up popular culture as the

terrain for extended, semiotic analysis inMythologies (1972[1957]). By 1972, Baudrillard had

critically probed the disjunction between the economic logics of circuits of exchange value

and the construction of symbolic codes that socially determine use value. Pierre Bourdieu, of

course, outlined a taxonomy and economy of taste and status in consumer culture.

18. Official history, which is a version of the spectacle, delegates to our leaders all power to

make significant changes and to act for the nation, seen as an unproblematic unified com-munity. A major task of the news media is to produce this official history, which aims to deny

social conflict. On official history, see the introduction in Sobchack (1995); on the media see

Kaplan (2003).

19. Cf. the discussion of two economies in Fiske (1987), also Dunn (2008). While a first eco-

nomic account of the spectacle grounds alienated representation in the logic of the commodity


17/22

Kaplan 473

economy, a second version in Society of the Spectacle points to the alienated ideological

power held by organizations (parties and state) and social classes that gains a distinct social

power separate from and over general society. Debord follows the Marx of the German

Ideology here, situating the origins of the spectacle in the rise of state power. In part this is

a critique of the power intrinsic to all alienated, separate organizations and classes, not justthose based in a market capitalist economy. Here, Debord joins others on the French extreme

Left in the 1960s, such as Socialisme ou Barbarie, in making an argument for participatory

democracy, criticizing bureaucratic organizations and their authoritarian hierarchies of power

and knowledge. They depart from a critique that focuses only on economic power and prop-

erty relations juridically defined. This posture allowed the far Left, or gauchisme, to encom-

pass orthodox communist parties and the Soviet Union in their criticisms. Considerations too

of epistemology appear here. True knowledge, the dialectical perspective argues, depends

upon creative collective praxis, in contrast with the knowledge of orthodox Marxism, which

claims to scientifically understand the natural laws of the capitalist economy and functions as

a legitimating ideology for the partys power operations. For a succinct, incisive overview ofgauchisme, see Gombin (1975). Debord connects his second perspective on the spectacle to a

general Marxian philosophy of history.

20. See the useful discussion in Dunn (1998). Lipsitz (1990) offers a more complicated account

of the potential for historical memory in mass commercial culture than Debord.

21. Leo Lowenthal, a member of the Frankfurt School, offered an early version of this analysis.

See Lowenthal (1985[1944]). Other writers have detailed the breakdown of utilitarianism

and its reformulation in ideas of pragmatism and fluid selves and the importance of com-

munication to the production of collective social life (see Erenberg; 1981; May, 1980). Some

writers equate the new focus on consumption with a new hedonism and individualism (see

Dunn, 2008). Others, however, persuasively argue that consumption is aimed at reinforcingthe social relations and social identities most valued by the consumer, in particular the family

and peer groups (Miller, 1998; Schudson, 1997).

22. Varied scholarly traditions, like the Frankfurt School and feminist film theory, have grappled

with the cultural industries production of contrived, banal and psychologically retrograde

narratives: for example, Adorno and Horkheimers The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as

Mass Deception (2002). For a powerful critique of the Frankfurt School view of the culture

industry, see Honneth (1998).

23. Debord discusses the cultural conception of time in different social formations in sections

56, theses 125164.

24. Historians have repeatedly noted the rise of a culture of personality, focusing on charismaticleaders and media stars at the turn of the 20th century (see Falasca-Zamponi, 1997; Rogin,

1971; Sussman, 1984).

25. Cf. Arendt (1958) on fantasies of the leader as all-powerful and able to mold society accord-

ing to their vision.

26. See thesis 26 and 28. As the general drift of the present discussion might suggest, Debord

contradictorily dissects a logic of both communication and economic alienation. His Marxism

pushes him to assimilate the logic of communication to the alienated, calculating rationality

of commodity production, and to assume that the market and its assumption of an atomis-

tic society adequately describes culturalcommunicative relations. Even as he highlights the

new, strategic, aesthetic, designed cultural dimensions of late capitalism, he assesses this newcultural world as totally determined by economic alienation.

27. As other critical theorists have argued, such synthetic experiences utilizes psychological and

semiotic codes to offer simplified narratives that speak to our fantasies and desires, a process

that Leo Lowenthal equates to psychoanalysis in reverse (Funkhouser and Shaw, 2000). On

reified codes, see Adorno (1982).


18/22


28. Thanks to Richard Widdick for emphasizing this point in conversation. In general, see

Thompson (1995).

29. This model of the collective subject can be partly understood as the historical descendent of

the social imaginary of the absolutist monarchy. In this cultural vision, the king is conceived as

a god-like, unified, self-sufficient creator who is able to freely exercise sovereignty and trans-form the social order according to his wishes (see Cohen, 2005; Flynn, 2005; Mousnier, 1970).

On the continued historical impact of the absolutist imaginary, see de Tocqueville (1955).

30. Compare Merleau-Pontys criticisms of Sartre and his Cartesian illusions, discussed in

Poster (1975).

31. In contrast with Debords accounting of the spectacle, we might say that privatized con-

sumption of synthetic fantasies displace not necessarily the real, but the more egalitarian

exchange of dialogue in the public sphere.

32. These two poles of liberal individualism the reasoning elite and the unthinking mass track

deeply into the categories of social science. Max Weber, for example, privileged the action

of individuals when he detailed the foundational concepts of his social theory in Economyand Society (1978). As Lowith (1993) and Mommsen (1970) argue, Weber was committed to

highlighting the free, conscious choices of individuals in social action. His categories implic-

itly see the individual as the generator of action prior to social conditions and cultural repre-

sentations. Furthermore, Webers fourfold ideal types of action essentially revolve around the

opposition between the conscious, disciplined action of the elite individual, and the depend-

ent, unconscious action of the mass. Purposive-rational and value-rational action represent

the freely chosen action of the disciplined individual, while habit and affect can be seen as

referring to the blind, driven mass (on habit see Camic, 1986).

33. Haney (2008) offers a gloss on classical sociologys reliance on the opposition of communal

gemeinschaft and individualized gesellschaft to define modern society.34. The authoritarian rule of would-be dictators was one solution to this new perception of the

threat (and potentiality) of the crowd unleashed in public life, this crisis of liberalism. Fascist

leaders, possessing entrancing charisma and a dictatorial will, would give authoritarian form

to the threatening, disruptive chaos and energy of the masses. They sought to impose harmo-

nious order in a new aesthetic politics. At the same time, they would supposedly overcome

the desiccated institutions of liberalism with more effective and meaningful social organiza-

tions (Falasca-Zamponi, 1997; Schorske, 1980).

35. On fears of mass culture in France, see Beaujour (2005) and Clifford (2002).

36. For example, cultural studies has extensively debated the issue of mass culture. The cat-

egory of everyday life articulated in France by Lefevbre, among others, also engages in adebate over mass society and the nature of ordinary pragmatic social action by individuals

(see Sheringham, 2006).

37. Theoretical accounts of cultural communication typically engage in a retrospective reconstruc-

tion of the message, assuming coherence and closure of the cultural text. They are blind to

the practical interpretive activity of the audience. Meaning production by the audience is an

active, creative practice that typically does not rise to the level of explicit thematized dis-

course; instead, it operates as part of the taken-for-granted skills, dispositions and frames of

the individual actor. We might say that between strategic reason and normative rules, between

conscious discursive reason and the blind obedience to tradition and habit, lies another active

but decentered form of action and agency: what Pierre Bourdieu analyzed through the categoryof practical reason. For Bourdieu, the everyday, ongoing active dimensions of individual prac-

tical reason are hidden by its largely tacit form, and by the conceptual blinders of intellectuals

who are devoted to the explicit logic of discursive reason (see Bourdieu, 1990; Lee, 1998).


19/22

Kaplan 475

References

Adorno T (1982) On the fetish-character in music and the regression of listening. In: Gebhardt E

(ed.) The Frankfurt School Reader. New York: Continuum Publishing, pp.270299.

Adorno T and Horkheimer M (2002) The culture industry: Enlightenment as mass deception. In:

Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp.194236.

Anon (1996) Workers councils: Cornelius Castoriadis and the SI. Not Bored! 26. Available at:

www.notbored.org/councils.html (accessed 12 April 2012).

Arendt H (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Bakhtin MM (1982) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Barrows S (1979) After the commune: Alcoholism, temperance and literature in the early Third

Republic. In: Merriman J (ed.) Consciousness and Class Experience in 19th-Century Europe.

New York: Holmes & Meiers, pp.205218.

Barthes R (1972[1957])Mythologies (trans. Lavers A). London: Paladin.

Beaujour M (2005) Culture. In: Kritzman LD (ed.) The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century

French Thought. New York: Columbia University Press, pp.181185.

Bell D (1960) The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. London:

Collier-MacMillan.

Bourdieu P (1990) The scholastic point of view. Cultural Anthropology 5(4): 380391.

Bracken L (1997) Guy Debord: Revolutionary. Venice, CA: Feral House.

Bramson L (1961)Political Context of Sociology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Breines P (1979) The Young Lukacs and the Origins of Western Marxism. New York: Seabury

Press.

Brger P (1984) Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Burke P (1978)Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. New York: HarperCollins.

Camic C (1986) The matter of habit.American Journal of Sociology 91(5): 10391087.Christofferson MS (2004)French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of

the 1970s. New York: Berghahn Books.

Clifford J (2002) The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and

Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Cohen JL (2005) The self-institution of society and representative government: Can the circle be

squared? Thesis 11 80: 937.

de Tocqueville A (1955) The Old Regime and the French Revolution. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Debord G (1983) Society of the Spectacle. Detroit, MI: Black and Red Press.

Debord G (2009) Correspondence: The Foundation of the Situationist International (June

1957-August 1960 (trans. Kendall S and McHale J). New York: Semiotexte.Dunn R (1998)Identity Crises: A Social Critique of Postmodernity. Minneapolis, MN: University

of Minnesota Press.

Dunn R (2008)Identifying Consumption: Subjects and Objects in Consumer Society. Philadelphia,

PA: Temple University Press.

Erenberg L (1981) Steppin Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture,

1890-1930. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.

Ewen S (2001) Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer

Culture. New York: Basic Books.

Falasca-Zamponi S (1997) Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolinis Italy.

Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Fiske J (1987) Television Culture. New York: Routledge.

Flynn B (2005) The Philosophy of Claude Lefort: Interpreting the Political. Evanston, IL:

Northwestern University Press.


20/22


Foucault M (1970) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York:

Pantheon.

Frederickson K (2007) Liberalism and the time of instinct. Victorian Studies 49(2): 302312.

Funkhouser GR and Shaw E (2000) How synthetic experience shapes social reality. In: Graber D

(ed.)Media Power in Politics. Washington, DC: CQ Press, pp.6674.Giddens A (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Gombin R (1975) The Origins of Modern Leftism (trans. Perl MK). New York: Penguin Books.

Gottdeiner M (1997) The Theming of America: Dreams, Visions and Commercial Spaces. Boulder,

CO: Westview Press.

Gouldner A (1980) The Two Marxisms. New York: Oxford University Press.

Habermas J (1987) The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Habermas J (1990) The Structural Change of the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Haney D (2008) Americanization of Social Sciences: Intellectuals and Public Responsibility in

Postwar United States. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Heller A (1974) The Theory of Need in Marx. London: Allison & Busby.Hofstadter R (1962) Social Darwinism in American Thought. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Honneth A (1998) The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy.

Buffalo, NY: State University of New York Press.

Honneth A and Joas H (1988) Social Action and Human Nature. New York: Cambridge University

Press.

Hughes HS (1958) Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of Europeans Social Thought,

18901930. New York: Alfred Knopf.

Huyssen A (1986)After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism.Bloomington,

IN: Indiana University Press.

Jameson F (1984) Postmodernism or, the cultural logic of late capitalism.New Left Review 146: 5292.Jappe A (1999) Guy Debord. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Jay M (1998)Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought.

Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Kaplan R (2003) America journalism goes to war, 18982001: A manifesto on media and empire.

Media History 9(3): 209219.

Katz E and Liebes T (1993) The Export of Meaning: Crosscultural Readings of Dallas. Cambridge:

Polity Press.

Knabb K (ed.) (2006) Situationist International Anthology. Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public

Secrets.

Lee O (1998) Culture and democratic theory: toward a theory of symbolic democracy.Constellations5(4): 433455.

Leiss W, Jhally S and Kline S (1990) Social Communication in Advertising(2nd edn). London:

Routledge.

Lipsitz G (1990) Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture. Minneapolis,

MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Lowenthal L (1985[1944])Literature and Mass Communication. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction

Books.

Lowith K (1993)Karl Marx and Max Weber. New York: Routledge.

Lukacs G (1971) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press.Markus G (1983) Concepts of ideology in Marx. Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory

7(12): 84103.

Marx K (1967[1867]) Capital, Vol. 1. New York: International Publishers.

Marx K (1974[1867]) Capital, Vol. 1. New York: International Publishers.


21/22

Kaplan 477

Marx K (1976) Results of the immediate process of production. In: Capital. London: Penguin,

pp.9431083.

Marx K (1978a) Theses on Feuerbach. In: The Marx-Engels Reader(ed. Tucker R). New York:

W.W. Norton, pp.143145.

Marx K (1978b) Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844. In The Marx-Engels Reader(ed.Tucker R). New York: W.W. Norton, pp.66125.

Marx K (1978c) The German ideology. In: The Marx-Engels Reader(ed. Tucker R). New York:

W.W. Norton, pp.146200.

May L (1980) Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry.

New York: Oxford University Press.

Merleau-Ponty M (1974[1955]) Adventures of the Dialectic. Evanston, IL: Northwestern

University Press.

Miller D (1998)A Theory of Shopping. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Miroff B (1982) Monopolizing the public space: The president as a problem for democratic pol-

itics. In: Cronin TE (ed.) Rethinking the Presidency. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co.,pp.218232.

Mommsen W (1970) Max Webers political sociology and his philosophy of world history. In:

Wrong DH (ed.)Max Weber. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, pp.183194.

Mousnier R (1970) The exponents and critics of absolutism, In: Cooper JP (ed.) The Cambridge

Modern History, Vol. 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.104131.

Nisbet RA (1976) Sociology as an Art Form. New York: Oxford University Press.

Parsons T (1937) The Structure of Social Action. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Pollner M (1991) Left of ethnomethodology: The rise and decline of radical reflexivity.American

Sociological Review 56(3): 370380.

Poster M (1975) Existential Marxism in Postwar France. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress.

Radway J (2001) Girls, zines and the miscellaneous production of subjectivity in an age of unceas-

ing circulation (Paper 18 in Speakers Series). Minneapolis, MN: Center for Interdisciplinary

Studies of Writing, University of Minnesota.

Rogin M (1971) Max Weber and Woodrow Wilson: The iron cage in Germany and America.

Polity 3(4): 557575.

Ross K (1997) Lefebvre on the Situationists. October79: 6983.

Schorske C (1980)Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture. New York: Knopf.

Schudson M (1978)Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers. New York:

Basic Books.Schudson M (1997) Delectable materialism: Second thoughts on consumer culture. In: Crocker D

and Linden T (eds)Ethics of Consumption. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, pp.249268.

Sheringham M (2005) Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sheringham M (2006) Everyday life. In: Kritzman LD (ed.) The Columbia History of Twentieth-

Century French Thought. New York: Columbia University Press, pp.203205.

Sobchack V (ed.) (1995) The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event

London: Routledge.

Sussman W (1984) Culture As History. New York: Pantheon.

Taylor C (1979)Hegel and Modern Society. New York: Cambridge University Press.Thompson J (1995)Media and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Vajda M (1980) The limits of the Leninist opposition.New German Critique 19: 167175.

Weber M (1958) Religious rejections of the world and their direction. In: From Max Weber:

Essays in Sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.2426.


22/22


Weber M (1978)Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (trans. Roth G and

Wittich C). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Williams R (1958) Culture and Society, 17801950. London: Chatto & Windus.

Willis P and Corrigan P (1980) Cultural forms and class mediations. Media, Culture and Society

2(3): 297312.

Richard L Kaplan is an independent scholar. He is the author ofPolitics and the American Press:

The Rise of Objectivity, 18651920 (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and numerous articles on

journalism history and cultural theory, including Blackface in Italy: Cultural power among nations

in the era of globalization in Global Culture: Media, Arts, and Cultural Policy in a Global Context

(eds. Diana Crane, Nobuko Kawashima and Ken'ichi Kawasaki, Routledge, 2002), and American

journalism goes to war, 18982001: A manifesto on media and empire, Media History (9(3),

2003). Currently he is investigating how the conceptual pair of practical reason and discursive

reason might transform our understanding of such concepts as semiotic myth and mass society.

Documents

Debord Kaplan