The society of the spectacle

Debord's short book is a prescient and driven polemic about how the "spectacle" became normalised in capitalist society in the postwar west. Written in 1967, much of the book has stood the test of time but much of it seems like an unfinished chapter in a broader critique. It is written in a series of short arguments, many of which don't quite address the spectacle, but make a broader comment on Marxist theory. Some of the observations, on advertising and individualism, influenced a generation of thinking.



The strongest argument of this book is in the repeated assertions of the spectacle as a colonising action. This, repeated in each chapter, is emphasised and remains relevant in current dialogue about our colonised structures.