Alienation and the Corporate Takeover of Culture:
Guy Debord’s Theory of the Spectacle
Richard L. Kaplan
Department of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara
“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.”
-Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord, who died in 1994, published La société du spectacle, a manifesto of 221
theses on contemporary capitalist culture in France in 1967. First translated into English 1977
and now published in numerous editions across the globe,
his volume has obtained the status of
a cult classic in critical cultural analysis, increasingly influential and increasingly cited. This
paper contends, however, that in his effort to thematize the general pervasive, fantastic,
ideological and power-laden dimensions of contemporary corporate media culture, Debord’s
theoretical formulations are highly suggestive and provocative but ultimately misleading and
defective.
Debord, an independent revolutionary intellectual, relies on a highly limited conception
of social action and a highly circumscribed notion of the range of social institutions that define
modern society. Consequently, he perceives only two alternatives for society, two opposed
models – one of absolute alienation in the society of the spectacle, the other a utopian vision of
an unalienated, unmediated, undistorted society of transparent direct human action. While the
idea of society as a spectacle offers a salient, potentially illuminating description for our
increasing mass-mediated, corporate-constructed world and its blatant irrationalities, Debord’s
theory presents an overly one-dimensional depiction of the contending forces of our era and the
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