Talk:The Society of the Spectacle

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On the Spectacle as the Entire Political Foray

This is just kind of my own take, but I've always interpreted the Spectacle as not just the mass media, but, also, the entire political foray. I like this article and think that it gives a good synopsis of the text, but do wonder if I'm not correct about this and if it shouldn't be expanded by that account. I mean, it more or less reads like the Spectacle and mass media are basically synonymous, which my be true, but I've always sort of thought that the Spectacle includes the theatre of politics as well. Granted, Guy Debord was an obscurant and I am an autodidact, and, so, it's kind of anyone's guess about all of this, but to my reading of The Society of the Spectacle, Debord wasn't just talking about the mainstream news, consumerist culture, or whatever you might see on television, but, also, the diffuse information warfare that had come to characterize the so-called "political arena".

I mean, it's a little bit unrealistic to just include any old person's hot takes on this text in this article, as it could get pretty far out pretty quickly, but, I don't know, I just feel like the Spectacle is more than just the mass media and that, while maybe not in every political context, it ought to be forbidden to forbid on this talk page. Daydreamdays2 (talk) 22:41, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

@Daydreamdays2 It's definitely not just media - I believe Debord says that explicitly. I don't think anyone could argue that politics in a liberal, capitalist democracy isn't Spectacle, really. As for this article, it's almost entirely referenced simply to the work itself, and could certainly do with some secondary sources, if you've a mind to add any. -- asilvering (talk) 01:45, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

Oh, whoa, you think that I should edit the article. No, I'm just an ideas guy.

I'm all seriousness, though, I wouldn't really know where to begin, since, as popular as this text is, I feel like the Situationist International retains this aura where people don't often actually talk about them. I don't know if I'll have time to, but I do suppose that I can try and find where he says that in the text, at least. Daydreamdays2 (talk) 12:04, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

@Daydreamdays2 I grabbed a couple of reasonably recent ones from a quick search and added them to Further Reading. If you're interested and looking for somewhere to start, a good first step on nearly any topic is to find a recent source and ruthlessly pillage its bibliography. Even if you're paywalled out of reading an article, the bibliographies themselves are often open-access. You can also try searching citations of Society of the Spectacle itself on google scholar or something similar, though this tends to involve more work to weed through since you'll also turn up everyone simply referring to the book rather than discussing it at length. -- asilvering (talk) 17:17, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

Oh, cool. And, yeah, I suppose that I could stand to actually research something once in awhile, as opposed to just surfing this place. Daydreamdays2 (talk) 23:42, 10 October 2023 (UTC)