Our unfortunate times thus compel me, once again, to write in a new way. Above all, I must take care not to give too much information to just anybody. I obviously cannot speak with complete freedom.
For example, in introducing his 1988 amendment on the development of the spectacle, Debord forewarns his reader that, It is of little curiosity then why Debord’s writing has always proceeded with the caution and meticulous precision of a war strategist. Any chatter surrounding the work or its author, Guy Debord, bears uncoincidental pertinence to the book’s central protagonist – a society for which the public relations industry affirms a priori models of commensurable social discourse at odds with acccommodating perspectives decidely intent on its abolition. The extraordinary new conditions in which this entire generation has lived constitute a comprehensive summary of all that, henceforth, the spectacle will forbid and also all that it will permit.As a book whose reputation tends to eclipse its actual content, The Society of the Spectacle has always, since its original 1967 publication, bitterly contended with its interpreters and the society that its two hundred and twenty-one short theses diagnose. Quite simply, the spectacle’s domination has succeeded in raising a whole generation moulded to its laws. “In all that has happened in the last twenty years, the most important change lies in the very continuity of the spectacle. Now finally available in a superb English translation approved by the author, Debord’s text remains as crucial as ever for understanding the contemporary effects of power, which are increasingly inseparable from the new virtual worlds of our rapidly changing image / information culture. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960s to the present, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life in the late twentieth century. Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative as Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle.
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