Ebook: Spectacular Logic in Hegel and Debord: Why Everything is as it Seems

Revisiting Guy Debord’s seminal work, The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Eric-John Russell locates Debord’s work within the legacy of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Deepening the analysis between Debord and Marx by revealing the centrality of Hegel’s speculative logic to both, Debord’s intellectual debt to Hegel is painstakingly traced in a way that treads new ground for critical theory. By delving into these pivotal roles, played by Hegel’s speculative philosophy, and Marx’s successive critique of political economy, the key role of the speculative is brought to the fore with deep implications for critical theories of society.
Moving beyond the more obvious connections between Debord and Marx allows for new readings of Hegel’s work as it relates to TheSociety of the Spectacle. Drawing extensively from The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and Science of Logic (1812), to illustrate the lasting impact of Debord’s critical theory of twentieth century capitalism, and reveal new possibilities for the critique of capitalism. One such possibility requires us to fully grasp capitalism in terms of a logic of appearances, and with it to see Debord’s text anew as an unacknowledged, yet potentially profound resource for contemporary critical theory. Doing away with any crude conflation of ideas between Debord and Marx, the concept of the spectacle is re-positioned as an original contribution to critical theories of society. This new approach to Debord’s seminal text offers a way through his aphoristic style, re-injecting the original text with philosophical rigor and contemporary relevance.
The book examines the work of Guy Debord, author of The Society of the Spectacle and leading theoretician of the Situationist International (SI), and argues how the spectacle is a category that systematically derives from both Marx’s critique of political economy and the dynamic of Hegel’s speculative philosophy. The society of the spectacle consists in a peculiar form of domination developed through the autonomy of the commodity economy within the capitalist mode of production in which human activity becomes structured by objective forms of appearance. However, the central argument is that Debord did not simply find within Hegel’s philosophy the language necessary to speak to the problems of capitalist society, but that Hegel’s speculative logic emerges as a really existing rationality, an active force in the world, that gives structural coherence to the organization of appearances within society. In a word, the level of conceptual thinking found within Hegel’s speculative philosophy is argued to constitute the actuality of the society of the spectacle. At its core, Debord’s theory of the spectacle is a logic of commensurability, an identity of and within difference historically grounded within the principle of commodity exchange which reproduces without extinguishing qualitative distinctions in a relation of equivalence. For this, the spectacle is argued to be a social structure of unity-in-separation, modeled on elements of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic, which gives speculative identity to seeming dualities and antinomies. This is the speculative nature of the spectacle. The book thereby pulls Debord away from the discourses in which he is normally situated, such as media studies and avant-garde art history, and instead examines his work within the lineage of German Idealism, Left Hegelianism, Hegelian Marxism, Marxist Hegelianism and Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Tracing Debord’s diagnosis out of this lineage makes explicit the merit of theorizing capitalism in terms of a modality of appearing by emphasizing the difficulty in seeing the world not as it really is.