Thank you Guy Debord!: a guest blog by Thomas Fuller

Reading Guy Debord, finally, The Society of the Spectacle, can't say what's taken so long, modest disappointment with myself for reading it now when I could have read it in 1967, though I was only 17 then and didn't have the equipment or the language, as it was orginally published in French.

I was reading Salinger when I was 17, and then Jack Kerouac, and Lenny Bruce's autobiography: I remember my mother finding a copy of Bruce's autobio in my room and asking me, where did you get this?, then shaking her head and putting the book back gently on the desk where she'd found it, a pretty tolerant move for a woman then in her 50s and as innocent and naive as they come.

Somehow, I can't remember how, though I wish I could, Lenny Bruce led to Wm. Burroughs and Burroughs to Allen Ginsberg and by then I was pretty much launched into my career of independent, autodidactic, split-shot, side-saddle reading which has now, better late than not at all, led to Guy Debord.

Without Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, a book comprised of 221 entries, some as short as a short paragraph and some as long as a small chain of long sentences, there would be no Naomi Klein, a writer whose book Shock Doctrine awakened me to a certain social/cultural milieu embedded as a set of political practices otherwise undetected by both the general public & yours truly, or, I suspect Noam Chomsky for that matter, whose observation, "Remember, the first job of any government is to control its own population" was and is still so useful to me.

As is true with any good writer, good writing is clear thinking and Debord was a clear thinker about complex, confusing, essentially moral issues in which the historical antecedents are so vast they've taken up cellular occupancy in the life of the individual and therefore in our so-called social/political order. 

No. 16 (of 221):

"The spectacle subjects living human beings to its will to the extent that the economy has brought them under its sway. For the spectacle is simply the economic realm developing for itself--at once a faithful mirror held up to the production of things and a distorting objectification of the producers."

No. 17 is as trenchant, as No. 16, speaking as it does of our economic life being downgraded, from being into having, where the whole our social life is taken over by the accumulated products of the economy.