degree in which individual subjects are integrated into this alienated cultural construction. Along
with a sophisticated theoretical apparatus, Debord inherited from Marx an inability to adequately
thematize the symbolic-cultural dimensions of social life, and in addition, he married those
deficiencies to notions of mass society
common among 1950’s and 1960’s intellectuals. In such
a mass society theory, only the few, such as the modernist artist, are able to forge out of their
own creativity and productivity a new vision of the world, while the rest of society’s members
suffer the delusions of imposed, reified stereotypical categories that hides their own creative
praxis them.
For Debord, all objectification, that is the creation of institutions in the world, is a
reification and alienation. Entranced by an image of the revolutionary subject in full mastery of
itself -- a totally unified subject that is in control of its destiny -- Debord fails to see both the
permanence of power and alienation and the ways in which objectified institutions and
differentiation are the necessary condition for the realization of diverse human goods. This paper
considers the logic of Debord’s influential theory, its insights, and its underlying deficient
theoretical foundations.
The Marxist theorist Guy Debord would seem to be a sectarian’s sectarian -- doomed to
be as forgotten as the decaying newspapers in which he scribbled his screeds, tracts, and
invectives. Debord’s modus operandi, often as not, consisted in the entering one of the small,
marginal French or European ex-Trotskyist groups and then denouncing and splitting from that
revolutionary sect. He punctuated these departures with short jargon-filled tracts, which often
overflowed with invectives against his fellow travelers and proclamations of his true
revolutionary status, in opposition to those lackies who have betrayed their revolutionary
birthright for a mess of pottage. Since his suicide, however, Debord's name has been resurrected
2
Convention