NOTES TO PAGES 643–45ation of religion and Luka ́cs’s usage of Weber. ‘‘In 1923, Luka ́cs recorded the passing of all totality
and implicitly adopted Max Weber’s notion of the ‘‘disenchantment of the world’’; Debord indeed
evokes continued global domination by a ‘‘banalizing trend’’ (Society of the Spectacle, §59), but he
sees this as arising from a spurious reconstruction of the totality, from a totalitarian dictatorship of
the fragmentary’’ (Jappe,Guy Debord, 25). Jappe suggests an analogy between a ‘‘disenchantment
of the world’’ (for which he offers no citation) and a ‘‘banalizing trend,’’ which is not uncalled for.
Nonetheless, I am not convinced by the analogy, which glosses over what Debord says of ‘‘the
vestiges of religion’’ inSociety of the Spectacle, §59.
- Foucault, like Debord, was a major exponent of the illusive aspect of ‘‘gratification,’’ so
touted in the 1960s, and he spoke repeatedly of control via stimulation. See Foucault, ‘‘Body/
Power,’’ inPower/Knowledge, 59. See also hisThe History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction,
trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1995). - Ludwig Feuerbach,The Essence of Christianity(Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1989), xix,
in Debord,Society of the Spectacle, §10; translation amended by D. Nicholson-Smith; emphasis
Debord’s. - Debord,Society of the Spectacle, §§3, 25 etc.
- Ibid., §1.
- Jappe,Guy Debord,8.
- Debord,Society of the Spectacle, §20.
- For the termsituationists, I use Debord’s 1958 definition: ‘‘An international association of
situationists can be considered to be a union of the workers of an advanced sector of culture, or, to
be exact, to be a union of all those who reclaim the right to a labor that social conditions presently
harness, and thus as a quest seeking the organized positioning of professional revolutionaries in
culture’’ (Guy Debord, ‘‘Theses sur la Re ́volution Culturelle,’’Internationale Situationniste1:21
[thesis 4], my translation). - My analysis of the spectacle not only owes a considerable debt to the first part of Jappe’s
Guy Debordbut essentially subsumes it, in part for the sake of brevity. As regards my use of the
termpower, it is important to recall that, unlike Foucault, Debord is profoundly indebted to the
Marxist tradition and presents power as a priori separated from the worker/consumer qua subject.
Debord opposed the division between bourgeoisie and proletariat, preferring to posit a class of
masters (whichdoes notcomprise subjects, only implied ‘‘system managers’’), against a ‘‘proletari-
anised world’’ separated from power and dominated by the spectacle. (See Debord,Society of the
Spectacle, §26–29, 33.) - Ibid., §§25, 39.
- Ibid., §25. See also §23.
- Read somewhat against the grain, Debord’s spectacle reflects some of Foucault’s thoughts,
inThe Order of Things, about the discourse of man. In a further, lesser parallel, the two thinkers set
up the implications of their respective concepts very differently. But compare Debord on the specta-
cle’s distortion of life to Foucault’s ‘‘There was no longer any transparency between the order of
things and the representations that one could have of them; things were folded somehow into their
own thickness and onto a demand exterior to representation. It is for this reason that languages
with their history, life with its organization and its autonomy, and work with its own capacity for
production appeared’’ (The Order of Things, 264). - Debord,Society of the Spectacle, §§60, 72.
- Clark, Foreword to Jappe,Guy Debord, ix.
- Compare Adorno’s ‘‘What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of
private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of
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