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European Journal of Cultural
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DOI: 10.1177/1367549412442208
2012 15: 457European Journal of Cultural StudiesRichard L Kaplan
Society of the SpectacleDebord'sBetween mass society and revolutionary praxis: The contradictions of Guy
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European Journal of Cultural Studies
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e u r o p e a n j o u r n a l o f
Between mass society andrevolutionary praxis: Thecontradictions of GuyDebords Society of theSpectacle
Richard L KaplanIndependent Scholar
Abstract
In 1967, Guy Debord published his landmark analysis of the spectacle. Building on Marxstheory of alienation, the spectacle describes our passive, quasi-visual relation to the social
world. The individual, divorced from the collective praxis that constructs our social world,
is reduced to consuming corporate-supplied entrancing narratives. This article explicates
and assesses Debords theory. Its most serious defect is Debords rejection of the necessary
intermediation of social life by culture and communication. Furthermore, his analysis subscribes
to the trope of mass society, which sees the populace as culturally denuded, divorced from
community and subject to the imposition of false needs. Against this alienated world, Debord
pits the ideal of a collective revolutionary subject that freely creates society. However, both
terms alienated masses and revolutionary collective are implicitly dependent upon liberal
individualism, which abstracts individuals from the cultural traditions and social relations inwhich they are embedded.
Keywords
Alienation, consumer society, Marxism, mass society, media, philosophy of consciousness,
spectacle
In 1967, Guy Debord published Society of the Spectacle, a manifesto of 221 theses on
contemporary capitalist culture in France1 (Debord, 1983[1967]). First translated intoEnglish in 1977 and now published in numerous editions across the globe, his volume
Corresponding author:
Richard L Kaplan, 1648 Loma Street, Santa Barbara, CA 93103, USA.
Email: [email protected]
ECS15410.1177/1367549412442208KaplanEuropean Journal of Cultural Studies2012
Article
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458 European Journal of Cultural Studies 15(4)
has obtained the status of a cult classic in critical cultural analysis, increasingly influen-
tial and increasingly cited.
As a Marxist theorist and independent intellectual, Debord would seem to be the very
model of a sectarian. Emerging out of the scattering of leftist avant-garde small groups
that probed the boundaries of art and radical politics during the 1950s (Bracken, 1997;Jappe, 1999), more often than not his modus operandi consisted of merging with and
then splitting from one group after another. He punctuated these sectarian adventures
with short jargon-filled tracts that often overflowed with invectives against his fellow
travelers and proclamations of his own true revolutionary status.2His destiny, it would
appear, was to be as forgotten as the decaying newspapers and journals in which he scrib-
bled his screeds and tracts. However, since his suicide in 1994, Debords name has been
resurrected and become a theoretical touchstone in Left critical theory. The term central
to Debords work the spectacle is now a theoretical commonplace, entering into an
expanding number of articles and books, while biographies of Debord and explicationsof his ideas have multiplied.3
Building on Marxian theories of reification and alienation, the spectacle describes the
citizens passive, quasi-visual relation to the social world.4Government, economy and other
institutional spheres appear as external, law-bound natural entities. The individual, divorced
from the collective, creative praxis that constructs the social world, is reduced to consuming
entrancing corporate-supplied narratives, which confirm us in our passivity even as they
celebrate the freedom and purposeful lives of our leaders and elite celebrities.
Debord serves up a severe indictment of contemporary capitalist culture. Isolation,
fantasy, ideological blindness, manipulation have come to absolutely define our sharedsocial world. In contrast with the divisions and losses of our contemporary society of the
spectacle, he holds out hope for another, more ideal society. Against the profound aliena-
tion of late capitalism, he poses the utopian vision of a communist society of transparent,
direct human action and community. In essence, he argues that one must either choose
revolutionary socialism, or acquiesce to barbarism.
While the idea of society as a spectacle offers a salient, potentially illuminating
description of our increasingly commodity-saturated, mass-mediated, image-dominated
and corporate-constructed world with all its blatant irrationalities, this article argues that
Debords theoretical formulations are ultimately misleading and defective. In his effortto thematize the pervasive, fantastic, ideological and power-laden dimensions of contem-
porary corporate media culture, Debords theory offers a one-dimensional understanding
of the contending forces of our era, and overestimates the degree in which individual
subjects are integrated into this alienated cultural construction.
Along with a sophisticated theoretical apparatus, Debords analysis (like Marxs)
implicitly depends upon ideas of liberal individualism, which supposedly he opposed
theoretically and fought politically. In other words, Debords theory is entangled in what
Jrgen Habermas (1990) has termed the aporias of the philosophy of consciousness. 5
Implicitly, his theory revolves around an exaggerated notion of a self-sufficient, autono-
mous, self-legislating collective subject. Against this romantic idea of the collective
revolutionary subject, Debord juxtaposes an image of the populace of contemporary
mass society as completely dependent and manipulated.
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Kaplan 459
It is my argument that both of Debords terms alienated masses and revolutionary
collective are secretly dependent upon the atomized perspective of liberal individual-
ism. Both terms abstract the individual from subtending cultural traditions and the over-
arching social relations in which they are embedded. Thus this article seeks to explore
the logic of Debords influential theory, propounding its insights and exposing the defi-ciencies of its underlying theoretical foundations.
Theoretical foundations of the spectacle
In formulating his concept of the spectacle, Debord builds his ideas on solidly Marxian
foundations, employing such elaborated concepts as alienation, commodity fetishism
and reification. Notwithstanding his periodic denunciations of such French Marxists as
Jean-Paul Sartre and Cornelius Castoriadis,6Debords work sits comfortably in the west-
ern Marxist tradition, which Alvin Gouldner praised for its recovery of subjectivity,agency and culture (see Gouldner, 1980).7 Thinkers in this tradition follow the early
Marx and seek to highlight the roots of the social order in the sensuous, practical, consti-
tutive activity of interacting humans (Marx 1978a).8
In this tradition, the key model of action commencing from Marxs materialist turn
was to conceive of humans as conscious, creative actors. People work on the natural
world, and as they fabricate the object world around them, they culturally mold them-
selves. For Marx, this process of objectification helped unfold the essential attributes of
the human species: its species being. Labor created a multifaceted, rich cultural world
in which we could unfold potential aspects of our personalities (Marx 1978b, 1978c; seealso Heller, 1974; Honneth, 1998). Debord embraces this perspective, noting in theses
125 and 126 that mans being is not a given quality, but instead essentially negative.
Human nature is always in a process of becoming, unfolding through history and chang-
ing social institutions.
However, Marx declared that objectification becomes alienation when the ruling class
appropriates the fruits of labor. The creative accomplishments of workers appear as the
property of another, as foreign, and indeed become another means for their exploitation.
Workers lose access to their created wealth, while that wealth emerges as an alien power.
The poorer classes lack the time, money and education to access the developed culturalriches of society, even as the work process is stripped of all freedom and creativity. Marx
attacked a rigid division of labor and the poor wages that blocked a well-rounded person-
ality. Marxs ideal of the free, creative, multifaceted personality, which descended from
romanticisms critique of modern society (Marx 1978c),9certainly found its echo in the
thought, revolutionary prescriptions and bohemian lifestyle of Debord.
For Marx, a practical result of this alienation was ideology: a systematic obscuring of
the constitutive role of labor in creating societys wealth and institutions (Markus,
1983).10As each individual working consciousness becomes isolated from other laboring
individuals, and as ones own work is progressively split up into specialized tasks, the
connection between ones laboring activity and the products created is lost. The isolated
worker fails to see how their work is entwined with that of other workers in the produc-
tion of their shared world and, instead, passively observes an already given world that
seems to be a fixed, natural entity. Oppression and exploitation are rendered invisible,
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460 European Journal of Cultural Studies 15(4)
natural traits of the social order. Debord joins Marx in this emphasis on alienation,
declaring separation or alienation to be the origin of the spectacle. In thesis 25, he
remarks that the division of labor is the alpha and omega of the spectacle. For this rea-
son, Society of the Spectaclecommences with a section of 34 theses entitled Separation
Perfected. He writes that the incessant refinement of the division of labor into a parceli-zation of gestures, which are then dominated by the independent movements of machines
and working for an ever-expanding market, dissolves all community and all critical
sense (thesis 25).
For Marx, the evolving social organization of work also intensifies this alienation and
systematic obscuring of the essential role of labor in creating and reproducing societys
wealth and institutions. The efficiency and profitability criteria of exchange value
increasingly organize the actual process of production, which is detached from workers
routines, control and knowledge. The creations of living labor its products and its prof-
its are split off from the worker and turned into the machinery of production, with alltechnical know-how concentrated in the hands of managers, engineers and machines.
Workers become the tenders of machines, not the masters. In Marxs language, living
labor becomes the servant of past exertions, or what he termed dead labor (Marx,
1974[1867], 1976). The abstract quantitative logic of the commodity increasingly organ-
izes all social life. In this manner, workers confront an immense, technical apparatus
without recognizing how this apparatus is grounded in their social labor. Instead of a
relation of subject to subject, the isolated individual subject contemplates the social
world as an external, naturally given object. Implicitly the world appears as an immense
visual spectacle to the passive, distanced observing subject. Debord pointedly summa-rizes this perspective in thesis 20, emphasizing its impact on subjective consciousness of
the worker: [T]he spectacle is the technical realization of the exile of human powers into
a beyond. It is separation perfected in the interior of man.
After Marx, the most crucial theorist for Debords concept of the spectacle is the
Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukacs. Indeed, a quote from Lukacs serves as the epi-
graph to the books second section, The Commodity as Spectacle: The commodity
becomes crucial for the subjugation of mens consciousness as labor is progressively
rationalized (Lukacs, 1971[1923]: 86). It was Lukacs who rendered the Hegelian motifs
in Marxism their most explicit and systematic, making the dialectic and the creation of areified second nature in human consciousness a powerful theme that was then taken up
by Debord along with other French Marxists.11 In his 1923 tome History and Class
Consciousness, Lukacs (1971[1923]) presented a systematic account of the philosophi-
cal and ontological implications of Marxs dialectical perspective, and extended Marxs
analysis of the dynamics of alienation to all social institutions under capitalism. As mar-
ket imperatives invaded social domains that were previously organized by traditional
cultural and communicative norms, Lukacs argued that those domains became subject to
the criteria of efficiency (governed by the media of money), abstracted from local con-
trol or communicative organization and lost their capacity to function as meaningful
or comprehensible arenas of human action.12The grounding of those domains in human
labor and social relations is lost from view, and price appears to be an intrinsic attribute
of the object, a phenomenon that Marx labeled commodity fetishism. Quoting (or more
accurately, offering a detournement, or twisting, of) Lukacs, Debord says in thesis 24:
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Kaplan 461
The fetishistic appearance of pure objectivity in spectacular relationships conceals their
true character as relationships between human beings and between classes.13
Drawing upon Max Weber, Lukacs pursued his theory of the functionalization and
rationalization of diverse social spheres according to the requirements of the capitalist
economy. Alongside the economy, such differentiated realms as law and government aredesigned to respond to the general demands of a capitalist economy for routine predict-
ability, control and efficient calculable inputs. Those domains also take on the attributes
of separate and naturalized social phenomena that are systematized and rationalized
according to their own established values.14They become separated from the creative
capacity of societys laboring members and cut off from everyday life. As Debord says
in theses 194202, these differentiated institutions, these worked-up forms of social rela-
tions, are described and institutionalized in part through abstract categories which, in
turn, drive the naturalization of historical institutions deeper into social consciousness.
While some spheres are rationalized for efficiency and economic functionality, oth-ers, notably art and religion, become the repository for the lost social aspirations of
humanity.15 Detached from everyday social life, they become the rarified arenas of
experts who supposedly guard them from contamination by the greed of capitalism, and
the demand for relevance or crude vulgar desires of the purportedly regressive masses.
The spectacle realized
Debord subscribes to Lukacs analysis of the supposed universal separation and reifica-
tion in modernity. Passivity and isolation reign as the individual contemplates a frag-mented, naturalized world governed by seemingly immutable laws. However, for Debord,
society contrives an image of its lost unity and forgotten creative praxis. Consumer soci-
ety, with its proliferation of goods and culture industry narratives, offers the populace an
illusory image of happiness and unity. If the alienated economic apparatus that confronts
the isolated worker can be considered a first approximation of the idea of the spectacle,
then this centralized production of fantastic, contrived cultural images constitute the
spectacle proper in Debords theory. In these media-packaged and corporate-supplied
depictions of the good life, all the social attributes actually denied to the general
populace independent power, freedom, social connection and meaningful socialaction are repackaged as consumer choice, or as features of the lives of celebrities in
Hollywood and Washington, DC suitable for vicarious consumption.16This spectacle of
the good life rests on actual separation of the individual from the collective action, com-
munity and communication that creates our social reality. Debord remarks: The specta-
tors consciousness, imprisoned in a flat universe, bound by the screen of the spectacle
behind which his life has been deported, knows only the fictional speaker who unilaterally
surround him with their commodities (thesis 218). 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 (thesis 1).
Debords spectacle this contrived illusion of meaningful life that displaces all actual
participation operates in three main arenas in advanced capitalist societies. First, there
flourishes a full-blown world of goods, with each symbolically constructed, manipulated
commodity aspiring to offer its own illusory version of the good life (theses 50, 59,
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462 European Journal of Cultural Studies 15(4)
6566, 31).17Second, capitalism systematically remaps the physical world to promote
efficient markets, consumerism and social control: a process that Debord explores
through the category of urbanism in a section entitled The Organization of Territory.
Finally, there is the metastasis throughout society of a virtual life enacted in media prod-
ucts. Despite their seeming differences, Debord argues there is a unity among all thespectacles manifestations. In thesis 6 he remarks, In all its specific forms as informa-
tion or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment the spectacle is the present
models of socially dominant life. In thesis 10, he adds, The concept unifies and
explains a great diversity of apparent phenomena.18
In the absolutely alienated world of the spectacle, says Debord, the populace finds
connection, community and purpose only through the intermediation of corporate-
contrived, government-manufactured and media-supplied narratives of stars, celebrities
and leaders. Such passive consumption of spectacles of freedom and social connection
only serves to confirm further the masses in their passivity and separation. As Debordsays in thesis 29: Spectators are linked solely by their one-way relationship to the very
center, which keeps them isolated from each other. The production of an illusory world
of communication, connection and purpose hides the counterfeit nature of the world.
Debord argues that the spectacle form is the natural outcome of the accumulation of
capital and successive rationalizations of the economy. He writes in thesis 34: The spec-
tacle is capital accumulated to such a degree that it becomes an image. However, against
Debord, it is questionable that this newly created spectacle of the image can be assimi-
lated to the logic of the passive, fragmented worker confronting the spectacle of the
alienated world of work. The construction of symbolic images is governed by anotherlogic than mere economic efficiency. Cultural codes, possessing their own unique pat-
terns of coherence and meaning, still need to be employed, and cultural production
requires its own distinctive personnel organization and resources.19
Crucial to Debords formulations, and those of later thinkers, is the timeline of capi-
talist development. In this chronology, social formation evolves from a liberal, competi-
tive market economy to organized corporate capitalism or what some term consumer
capitalism. Debord briefly indicates this new logic in theses 42 and 43, stating that in
the second industrial revolution, consumption for the masses becomes a duty supplemen-
tary to alienated production. As historians have repeatedly argued, in 19th-centurysociety of production, the economy was a separate social sphere, while culture was
autonomously organized by communities, subcultures and publics (Ewen, 2001;
Gottdeiner, 1997; Leiss et al., 1990). In contrast, in the 20th-century society of con-
sumption, in Debords society of the spectacle all social spheres of life, including cul-
ture, become reflexively organized according to the dictates of maximizing sales or
increasing political power. In the terms of Robert Dunn, consumer culture represents an
unprecedented interpenetration of cultural and economic forces (Dunn, 2008: 5253).
As Debord elucidates in thesis 46, use value (that is, the utility and meaning of an
object, which Marx took as natural or relatively unproblematic) is now subjected to
exchange value: the strategic imperatives of maximizing profit fully determine the
forms and contents of culture and, in turn, the rhythm and rhymes of everyday life are
reduced to a quantitative struggle for survival.
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Kaplan 463
A new apparatus composed of mass production, marketing and media along with
government propaganda, turns culture and leisure into an increasingly commodified,
manipulated arena where the populace passively consumes reified fantasies and stimuli.
As Debord writes in thesis 42: The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has
obtained total occupation of social life. In thesis 43 he explains that the commoditytake[s] charge of the workers leisure and humanity because now political econ-
omy can and must dominate these spheres.
As a consequence, says Debord, the satisfaction of primary human needs is replaced
by pseudo needs (theses 219, 30, 51, 59, 68, 70). He denies the ability of individuals,
groups and classes to continue to determine their own needs through autonomous com-
munication. In the totally administered world of the spectacle, we are left with a culture,
indeed a language, that is corrupted and controlled. In the end, what appears as our real-
ity is an absolutely false illusion that blocks our perception of the actual social relations
and alienated labor at the base of the spectacle. It is a world that has become topsy-turvy (thesis 9), and The real consumer becomes a consumer of illusions (thesis 47).
For Debord, only through a revolutionary break and total social reorganization based
on extreme democratic participation, worker control and worker councils throughout
society will we be able to reclaim authentic community, communication and culture.
Debords historical accounting parallels the work of such thinkers as Jurgen Habermas
and prefigures that of Jean Baudrillard, Alain Touraine, Frederic Jameson and George
Ritzer. Collectively, these social theorists thematize how capitalism progressively colo-
nizes social life beyond the arena of production proper, expanding into leisure-time,
family activities and civil society in general. These analysts of postmodernity, or latecapitalism, suggest that capitalism tendentially destroys the cultural fabric of society,
either through the strategic administering of meaning by profit-oriented corporations or
through the destruction of societys historicity: that is, the connection of individuals to
their capacity for historical action or praxis.20
Historians too have argued for series of wide-ranging interrelated changes concomi-
tant with the rise of the consumer society. Debords work can be considered one particu-
larly potent probing of this new social world and its politics, psychology and symbolic
economies. In this new social reality, personal identity has shifted its location: no longer
based in ones roles as citizen or worker with a practical involvement in the productionof a shared social world, it instead has become centered in consumption and the vicarious
satisfactions of identifying with stars and celebrities.21
Insights of the theory of the spectacle
The 221 theses of Debords slim book forcefully articulate some key dimensions of our
contemporary spectacular world. Here, I would like to highlight three. First, they detail
the banal fantasies that supposedly overwhelm popular culture in spectacular society, dis-
placing all qualitative organic culture. Second, they outline inequalities in the power to
name and define our world. Third, they underscore a dimension seemingly intrinsic to
every society: the production of representations of society as a unified, meaningful whole.
I want to focus on these three arguments, recognizing that in the pithy pronouncements of
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464 European Journal of Cultural Studies 15(4)
Debords book, a plethora of powerfully suggestive, but also elusive and underdevel-
oped, insights are offered about contemporary consumer society.
First, for Debord, in the alienated society of late capitalism, a change in the very form
and content of cultural representation necessarily accompanies the loss of individual
voice, group interaction and participatory accomplishment. The spectacle, founded onthe extreme isolation and passivity of the audience, offers regressive, banal fantasies to
make up for the loss of meaningful action and connection.22In largely complementary
terms, Debord presents an analysis of both the banalization and the fantastic portrayal of
enlarged celebrity personalities implicit in media spectacles.
Alienation necessarily entails forgetting the historical nature of institutions and the
role of individuals in accomplishing their social world. Workers are no longer able to
understand how the institutions surrounding them are a product of creative historical
action accomplished by social groups in contention. They cannot see how their own
purposive action could encompass the present givens of the social world and transformthem in line with an envisioned future (Jameson, 1984).23 Cultural narratives conse-
quently lose their depth, unable to figure social context and history in any coherent way.
Under the shimmering diversion of the spectacle, banalization dominates modern soci-
ety, Debord declares in thesis 59.
In this world of quantitative, abstracted sameness atomized, homogenized and
assimilated by the drive of commodity production depth and the qualitative particular
is lost (thesis 38). Debord says participation in particular communities and personal rela-
tions reaching back into an entangled past and extending into a common destiny together
in other words, depth is replaced by an administered surface sameness (see theses133, 142143, 186187). A sense of time as pushing into the future and entailing signifi-
cant human creations of new meaning and social relations is forgotten, displaced by a
perpetual sameness, disconnected from particular identities and communities. Indeed,
Debord remarks in his reflections on the socially instituted nature of time that the grow-
ing domination of the irreversible time of [commodity] production tends to eliminate,
socially lived time (thesis 142 and sections 56).
Frederic Jamesons dialectical theory of postmodern culture helps to explicate this
dimension:
If, indeed, the subject has lost its capacity actively to extend its pro-tensions and re-tensions
across the temporal manifold and to organize its past and future into coherent experience, it
becomes difficult enough to see how the cultural productions of such a subject could result in
anything but heaps of fragments and in a practice of the randomly. (Jameson, 1984: 71. And
see thesis 142 and sections 56)
Historical styles sever their connection to their surrounding social conditions and his-
tory. Once supposedly expressive of an organic particular social formation, or imposed
by an overweening artistic personality, styles break from any social mooring in meaning-
ful action. As Debord states in thesis 186, society must lose all the references of a really
common language until the time when the rift within the inactive community can be
surmounted by the inauguration of the real historical community. Aesthetic styles float
without history, only to be recycled by a cultural industry that is desperate to connect to
and stir the audience. Numerous authors, but foremost Jameson, draw upon Lukacs and
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Kaplan 465
Debords accounting of the loss of historicity and the detachment of representation from
organic praxis to explain the rise of postmodernism, with its concomitant loss of depth
and meaning. Representations float free and evolve into glib and mobile signifiers, with
a concomitant emphasis on surface, pastiche, flash and glitter. As narratives lose histori-
cal depth, they become banal, atrophied accounts of media personalities. Media stars arespectacular representations of living human beings, writes Debord in thesis 60. They
distill the essence of the spectacles banality into images of possible roles. As institu-
tions fade into the background and collective action disappears, the exaggerated dramas
of individual personalities shine bright.24
Elaborating beyond Debord, we might say that narratives become either the trivial, if
overwrought, emotional dramas of relationships with intimate others (for women), or the
fantasies of the power of charismatic, virtuous heroes (for men), who by themselves fight
and defeat evil, while all institutional limits and obstacles are conveniently forgotten.25
As Debord reiterates, identification with stars shining in the media spotlight and theirdiverse dramatic roles functions as a compensation for the individuals lost freedom
and purpose in everyday life.
Second, Debord highlights the inequalities in production of cultural meaning. This
theme dates back to the origins of Marxism, beginning in 1845 with Marxs The German
Ideology:
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas The class which has the
means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of
mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the meansof mental production are subject to it. (Marx, 1978c: 172)
However, Debords efforts to analyze the forms of modern public communication and
their weaknesses are extremely rudimentary. He is inhibited from fully exploring the
deficiencies of public communication by his Marxian model of materialist praxis, which
focuses on exchanges with nature instead of social interactions, and because he operates
within a mass society perspective (which I will discuss later).
Debord points to two aspects of communicative power: first, concentration of the
means of communication in the hands of corporations, managers and experts; and, sec-ond, the isolation of the individual worker, who is cut off from all dialogue with peers.
Debord elaborates a model of absolute separation and displacement:26 all means of
speech have been concentrated in the hands of experts who now pretend to speak for the
whole. By means of the spectacle, the ruling order discourse endlessly upon itself in an
uninterrupted monologue of self praise (thesis 24). In contrast, the population sits silent
and entranced by visions of pseudo-intimacy that it so desperately craves.
To some extent, this stratification in speech and silencing of the population points to
the media. Presciently, Debord points to the synthetic, even virtual, world that sur-
rounds us today with electronic media. He emphasizes the seeming metastasis through-
out the body politic of contrived media narratives, powerfully packaged in vivid formats
for easy consumption.27The media have, as their foundation, the extraction of commu-
nication from face-to-face relations in particular locales and times, thus permitting the
transmission of a message across time and space. Debord writes:
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466 European Journal of Cultural Studies 15(4)
If the spectacle, taken in the limited sense of mass media, which are its most glaring superficial
manifestation, seems to invade society as mere equipment, this equipment is in no ways neutral
but very suited to [the spectacles] total self-movement. If the social needs of the epoch in
which such techniques are developed can only be satisfied through their mediation, if the
administration of this society and all contact among men can no longer take place except
through the intermediary of this power of instantaneous communication, it is because this
communication is essentially unilateral. (thesis 24)
With the development of media industries, the local folk community loses control over
its culture as its communications tendentially become the province of distant experts
who stylize the message to a mass audience for a profit. The media intervene and medi-
ate, subjecting popular communication to more instrumental calculations and effectively
reifying and administering public communication or so Debord would claim.28
Lastly, like a number of anthropologists, Debord thematizes societys representationof itself, what Claude Lefort has called societys mise en scne or self-staging (see
theses 63, 54, 29). However, far from constituting a permanent and intrinsic dimension
of social life, for Debord this representation is implicated in alienation. To a certain
extent, in Marxian theory any representation of the social whole derives from the original
sin of social division and alienation: the division between mental and manual labor (see
Marx, 1978c; Vajda, 1980). In thesis 180 Debord says:
Culture is the general sphere of knowledge and of representations of lived experiences within
historical societies divided into classes. It is a generalizing power which itself exists as aseparate entity, as division of intellectual labor and as intellectual labor of division.
In place of a unity of collective action and understanding, a select group be they priests,
intellectuals or journalists creates a distinct cultural perspective of the social whole, cut
off from and denying its roots in social production.
Rather then accepting the permanent, decentered and dialogical dimensions of social
representation, Debord adopts an extreme perspective: he sees all representation as alien-
ation. He believes that once the revolutionary collective actor is summoned to life, cul-
ture (aka alienated representation, or the spectacle) will disappear. Thus, he writes in
thesis 180: Culture is the terrain of the quest for lost [social] unity. In the course of this
quest, culture as a separate sphere is obliged to negate itself.
Critique of spectacular theory
In his thin volume, Debord fluctuates between an exaggerated dystopia of universal
alienation in the society of the spectacle and an inflated utopia of collective revolutionary
action. In their excess of hope or despair, both terms reflect the incorporation into
Debords analysis of the deficiencies of liberal ideas of individual freedom and action. In
his model of the revolutionary collective subject, Debord proposes an idea of the subject
unhindered by entanglements with the object world and uncontaminated by the com-
plexities of communication with other subjects and cultural mediation. In contrast, in his
model of the alienated society of the spectacle, Debord depicts dependent individuals
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Kaplan 467
completely enthralled to alien forces and, most particularly, centralized cultural produc-
tion. In both situations, he presents an overstated picture of the autonomy or heteronomy
of the subject. In both cases, as in liberal individualism, the subject is depicted in abstrac-
tion from structuring institutions, and the cultural lifeworld within which they are always
embedded and in dialogue.Debords gyrations mimic the historical movement of liberal thought itself and its
eventual decomposition into mass society theory. Liberal individualism, dating back to
the philosopher Ren Descartes, began with the idea of the individual consciousness
understood as autonomous, self-controlled and rational. The individual is free and capa-
ble of using impartial, reflective reason to understand the surrounding world and mold it
according to a plan or vision. By purposive creative action the individual takes up the
brute, natural givens of the physical world and transforms them. The individual appears
as a principle of purposive animation and solid ideals against the plasticity and passivity
of the dead material world.Traditional liberalism emphasized the claims to knowledge and moral meaning that
find their foundation in individual consciousness. In its turn, Marxism highlights the role
of the laboring individual who works on the natural world and transforms it according to
conscious plans. Marx famously elucidated this model of materialist action in volume 1
of Capital:
A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an
architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the
best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it inreality. (Marx, 1967[1867]: 178)
For the Marxian model of labor, as for liberalism, the starting point is the individual, who
thinks and acts unhindered by the external laws of the natural world or the internal needs
and desires of the body. The subject imposes their will and categories upon the brute
material world, in contrast with being entangled in nature or engaging in dialogue with
other individuals on the base of a shared cultural lifeworld. Freedom is defined here as
the ability to create the world and define oneself without limit, based upon ones personal
cultural vision. As can be readily seen, this model of the liberal individual ignores theways in which the individuals thinking and cultural plans are given by the surrounding
socialcultural order, and how action is implicitly structured by the sets of social rela-
tions in which we are embedded. Inevitably, if the individual fails to match this stringent
model of freedom, they are seen as a captive of alien forces and subject to categories,
rules and forces imposed from the outside. This model of individual action evidently
neglects the process-oriented, pragmatic, context-dependent but active dimension of the
individuals decisions.
It must be admitted that Marxism, especially in its Hegelian versions, represents a
critique of liberal individualism and its contemplative, abstract individual who observes
or acts upon a static external reality, objectifying it through transparent representations
and categories. Nevertheless, the Marxian model of work still retains a residue of this
liberal model, especially in its lack of theorizing our entanglement with the object world,
social interaction or intersubjectivity. Once we turn to Debords model of collective
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468 European Journal of Cultural Studies 15(4)
revolutionary action, the indebtedness of his theory to liberalism becomes even more
pronounced.
By and large, revolutionary collective action in Debord can be understood as the indi-
vidual laboring subject writ large. Through radical direct action, diverse individuals can
dispense with separation and alienation and become one unified, transparent, collectiverevolutionary subject. Thus in thesis 74, Debord writes, The subject of history can be no
one other then the living producing himself, becoming master and possessor of his world
which is history and existing as consciousness of his game.29
In revolutionary society, social institutions, which had appeared as naturally given
and imposed an impoverished life upon privatized individuals, become subject to collec-
tive human control. In upholding a strong notion of praxis, Hegelian Marxism always
risked devolving into a form of voluntaristic idealism in which a free act of collective
will imposes its vision upon the social order. In this revolutionary praxis, action suppos-
edly achieves a transparency and immediacy that dispenses with cultural representation.Here, as is typical to the western Marxist tradition, Debord displays his distaste for the
differentiated, objectified institutions of modernity, seeing them as only reification (see
Breines, 1979). As Debord writes in thesis 75, revolutionary thought seeks to compre-
hend the dissolution of what exists and, in the process, breaks down every separation. In
this fashion, he neglects the diverse social goods accomplished by this operation of
decentering and differentiation that Habermas termed social modernization.
Debords understanding of collective active, like that of Marx, fails to recognize soci-
etys permanent plurality and conflicting visions. That plurality would need to be coor-
dinated and adjudicated through the mechanisms of speech and politics, albeit with alltheir limitations and deficiencies.30 Humanity, of course, constitutes itself not just
through labor on the world, but also by social interaction through the medium of culture
and language. The revolutionary desire to eliminate alienation within productive activity
could hardly address the inequalities, social divisions and confusion that permanently
afflict humanity with its attempts to achieve understanding and agreement through
speech (see Honneth and Joas, 1988; Lee, 1998).31
The trope of the masses
While Debords ideas of social action and the collective revolutionary actor reproduce
liberalisms emphasis on the free, conscious actor, his notion of the alienated mass tracks
liberalism second moment: the threatening crowd. The two terms rational disciplined
individual and alienated masses were united in their emphasis on the individual in
abstraction from overarching social relations and subtending cultural traditions.32
Liberalisms notion of the sovereign, self-determining individual always applied only
to the elite male white subject. In opposition to this agent of disciplined reason, society
was also populated by subjects to whom reason did not apply. Liberalism, in fact, entailed
a second term: an other, as the poststructuralists, starting with Edward Said, tell us:
women, children, other racial groupings, plebeians and peasants, the mentally disabled
and ill were all understood as by nature not possessing the requisite discipline and ration-
ality to be free individuals (Frederickson, 2007; Huyssen, 1986). They lacked the inter-
nalized moral character, will and reason to forge an independent path as individuals. To
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Kaplan 469
a great extent, these groups embodied in the masses operated as a projective fantasy for
the elite. They were seen as containing all the urges and desires that threatened to over-
whelm the increasingly repressive, ascetic bourgeois ego and its allied liberal institutions
of limited democracy and private property.
In the modern era, industrial civilization had triumphed, supposedly breaking thecake of custom: workers were pried from the hierarchical social relations of natural
authority, and commonsense cultural norms and routines built up over centuries of daily
practice were shattered (Burke, 1978; Williams, 1958). In Marxs famous words: All
that is solid melts into air. Purportedly set free from organic community and tradition
and thus individualized, the masses were left culturally denuded and atomized.33They
were understood as passive, isolated blank slates. With only weak reasoning capabilities
and driven by their desires and instincts, the masses were supposedly susceptible to
manipulation by the culture industry or demagogic leaders who played on their fears and
fancies (Falasca-Zamponi, 1997). Yet, as the 19th century wore on, these social groupsincreasingly intruded into public life, integrated into societys central institutions of poli-
tics, culture and economics. The appearance of the masses in the public realm called into
question the allegiance to private property, underpinning the market and rational delib-
eration governing the classical conception of democracy (see Barrows, 1979; Habermas,
1990; Schudson, 1978).34Supposedly, no new culture could be invented by these blind,
driven, deficient individuals certainly not an organic traditional folk culture. Instead, a
corrupt, kitsch commercial culture would flourish, supplying prefabricated emotions and
ideas to mass publics.35This culture distorts the populaces true humanity and reflects
either the imposed tastes of the elites, or the vulgarity of the masses whose desires are notrestrained by any self-discipline or character.
This concept of the weak, inert, hysterical mass functioned as a trope for much of
social theory from the late 19th century into the 1960s. Masses, as a theme in Robert
Nisbets terms, or as a paradigmatic assumption in Kuhns words, subtly and durably
informed the theoretical categories of social analysis (Bell, 1960; Bramson, 1961; Nisbet,
1976; see also Haney, 2008). Indeed, as historians of social theory such as H. Stuart
Hughes (1958), Talcott Parsons (1937) and Richard Hofstadter (1962) show, the rework-
ing of utilitarian theory in the late 19th century and its devolution into forms of social
Darwinism, elite theory and naturalism were driven by the elite reaction to the entry ofthe masses into the public realm.
An alternative cultural theory: lifeworld and agency
It is my contention that this (elite, projective) fantasy of the anomic masses deeply
defines Debords theory of the alienated society of the spectacle, with his depiction of the
populace as denuded of all culture, atomized, passive and buying into a fantastic world
of banal, contrived narratives. In this sense, Debords model of the active collective revo-
lutionary subject and the passive alienated masses downplays the ongoing significance
of the cultural lifeworld. In contrast, a conception of the lifeworld and the social interac-
tion necessary to sustain it comprises a powerful conceptual alternative to Debords
implicit dependence on liberal individualism or philosophy of the subject.
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470 European Journal of Cultural Studies 15(4)
The lifeworld constitutes a kind of invisible, permanent cultural envelope or, in
Geertzs metaphor, a web of signification, into which we as individuals are born and
socialized. While elements of the cultural lifeworld can be problematized and chal-
lenged, as Habermas (1987) argues, this always occurs against the background of largely
implicit, unthematized cultural assumptions that deeply inform our thought. Permanentlyentangled in the web of the lifeworld and not culturally denuded, individuals in fact
possess rich cultural resources (albeit usually invisible) through which they can interpret
cultural messages and signs. Neither is the individual merely passive in the face of given
cultural texts and messages. As a variety of recent theoretical perspectives contend
from ethnomethodology and Pierre Bourdieus concept of practical reason, to the eth-
nographies of the Birmingham School and hermeneutic philosophy the individual is a
highly skilled, meaning-interpreting and meaning-generating being (e.g. Pollner, 1991;
Willis and Corrigan, 1980).36
In fact, in order to comprehend the meanings of cultural communication, individualsmust actively, albeit tacitly, deploy their cultural resources and understandings. The
reception of a texts meaning the completion of the hermeneutic circle requires the
audience to employ complex skills in interpretation, typically filling in gaps of assumed
meanings and contexts for a message to become coherent. Reception of a message, as
Walter Benjamin often argued, is a process of creation that produces new texts and new
meanings.37For Habermas, this cultural activity is a necessary step in the continuance
and regeneration of the cultural lifeworld. In contrast, Debord ironically operates with
a form of textual reification a fetishism that detaches cultural texts from the produc-
tive context in everyday life that is necessary to give them meaning and he assumesthat the meaning can be unilaterally imposed by cultural industry creators (see Radway,
2001). Furthermore, in addition to active interpretation and strong cultural resources
from the lifeworld, the internalized meanings that guide interpretations typically reflect
the cultural understandings of subcultures, families, networks and interpretive commu-
nities, not isolated individuals (Katz and Liebes, 1993). Neither a blank slate nor iso-
lated, the individual is relatively insulated from the persuasive power of any single
cultural message.
In the end, a new cultural paradigm emerges where the production and reception of
cultural messages are understood as part of a noisy conversation (Bakhtin, 1982) betweenunequal participants against the background of the cultural lifeworld. No doubt such an
alternative paradigm should not celebrate the permanent, reflexive reasoning activity of
the masses as if this was a solution to the cascade of problems inundating our contempo-
rary world. Nevertheless, it offers the key starting point for analyzing the potentialities
for social change or stagnation.
Conclusion
Guy Debord proposes a radical, critical account of contemporary society, one that sees
the alienation and calculating rationality of capitalism extending deeply into our shared
cultural world. In the society of the spectacle the populace, isolated and disempowered,
sits enraptured before a screen bright with tales of freedom and community. These
media-contrived, mass-manufactured stories function as the dominant ideology of late
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Kaplan 471
capitalism and leave the audience more isolated and more passive, all the while craving
new, additional entrancing narratives.
Despite the cogency and insight of Debords analysis, severe theoretical deficiencies
limit its utility. In tandem with the individualistic action perspective of liberalism, Debord
and more generally Marxian theories of praxis abstract action from the ongoing culturallifeworld in which it unfolds. Consequently, and despite pursuing radical criticism of
contemporary society and its bourgeois theories, Debords hidden dependency on classi-
cal liberalism radically undermines his capacity to analyze the cultural resources, com-
munity and communication that persist in late capitalism. Debord is left with an overly
despairing account of the alienation and passivity in spectacular society, along with a
romantic fantasy of the immediate and transparent society in the revolutionary future.
Acknowledgements
Long overdue thanks to members of the 1978 Lukacs study group Arun Kapil, Bob Barros and,
of course, Frank Adler for helping to clarify the complexities of reification.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or
not-for-profit sectors.
Notes
1. See the different translations of Society of the Spectacleand other writings from Debords
group, Situationist International, at www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/situ.html. For the sake of
clarity, I have sometimes referred to later translations.
2. Henri Lefevbre says I knew Guy Debords character and the way he had of imitating Andre
Breton by expelling everyone in order to get at pure and hard little core. Later in this inter-
view he remarks, They began to insult everyone In the end, everything became oriented
toward a kind of polemical violence (Ross, 1997: 81). See the justifications offered early on
in Debord (2009).
3. Jappe offers a useful overview of Debords life and thought. Focusing here on one text, we
aim at systematic theoretical analysis and not intellectual history. 4. As befits the word, the concept of the spectacle implicitly draws on a metaphor of passive
watching of an overwhelming staged show. Against the understanding of vision as passive
observation of a distant, given object, Maurice Merleau-Ponty offers a more complicated
analysis of the operations of vision, emphasizing its active dimensions (see the discussion in
Jay, 1998). Debord discusses the affinity of the spectacle to vision in theses 1819.
5. Foucault discussed the antinomies of this liberal vision of the individual actor, with its con-
trast between the unencumbered free spirit and the subject who is entangled in an unfree
social and material world (see Foucault, 1970).
6. One article in the Situationist International organ reads: poor Lukacs, poor Sartre, poorBarthes, poor Lefebvre, poor Cardan [Castoriadis]! Once the specialized thinkers step outside
of their domain, they can only be dumbfounded spectators of some neighboring and equally
bankrupt specialization which they were ignorant of but which has become fashionable
(quoted in Anon, 1996: 26).
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7. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1974[1955]) also detailed a similar lineage to western Marxism in
hisAdventures of the Dialectic.
8. France during the 1930s to 1950s was marked by the recovery of Hegelian thought, most
forthrightly in the in the famous lectures of Alexandre Kojve, then articulation during the
1950s of a version of Hegelian Marxism around the Arguments journal and, in particular, withHenri Lefebvre, a close associate of Debord, in addition to the existential Marxism of Sartre
and Merleau-Ponty. They emphasized praxis or the active human subjects role in the consti-
tution of society and the entanglement of subject and object, while criticizing the mechanical
objectivistic science of orthodox communism with its naturalistic accounting of the laws
of society (see Gombin, 1975; Poster, 1975) Also useful on social and intellectual context is
Christofferson (2004).
9. Marx was drawing on 19th-century romantic notions of the expressive unified personality,
says Charles Taylor (1979).
10. As Markus makes clear, this is only one of the definitions of ideology operating in Marx.
11. Parts of Lukacs History and Class Consciousnesswere published in Arguments in 19571958. Lukacs thought figures prominently in Merleau-Pontys Adventures of the Dialectic
(1974[1955]). Lucien Goldmann, praised by Debord, functioned as an important mediator of
Lukacs thought in France (see Poster, 1975). In the novelAll the Kings Menby Debords
then-wife Michele Bernstein, the character modeled on Debord is asked: What are you really
into? His response: Reification.
12. On media and disembedding, see Giddens (1990).
13. A guide to Debords use of others words in SOS, whether as direct quotes, altered or par-
odied, can be found in Not Bored! March 2007, also at: http://www.notbored.org/SOTS-
detournements.html.
14. Lukacs draws on Weber to develop this perspective (see Weber, 1958).15. On art, see Brger (1984). Situationist International as a movement first emerged out of the
Lettrist International, of an art-focused avant-garde group. Since Situationist Internationals
origins in 1957, however, Debord and company called into question all art that was distinct
from everyday life. They insisted, instead, on the need to transform everyday life, partly
with aesthetic expressive means against its subordination to, and regimentation by, bureau-
cratic and market logics. See the Situationist Internationals 1957 statement: Report on the
Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency's Conditions of
Organization and Action, in Knabb (2006). During the late 1950s and early 1960s, this posi-
tive program was reflected in Situationist International ideas of drive, the situations and
unitary urbanism. In contrast, SOS is largely a critical, theoretical social analysis that does notarticulate positive strategies for resisting reification (see Gombin, 1975; Sheringham, 2005).
16. For a powerful discussion of the spectacle of the president, see Miroff (1982).
17. The French seem to have a special genius when it comes to considering the nature of symbolic
codes in consumer society. In 1957, Roland Barthes famously took up popular culture as the
terrain for extended, semiotic analysis inMythologies(1972[1957]). By 1972, Baudrillard had
critically probed the disjunction between the economic logics of circuits of exchange value
and the construction of symbolic codes that socially determine use value. Pierre Bourdieu, of
course, outlined a taxonomy and economy of taste and status in consumer culture.
18. Official history, which is a version of the spectacle, delegates to our leaders all power to
make significant changes and to act for the nation, seen as an unproblematic unified com-munity. A major task of the news media is to produce this official history, which aims to deny
social conflict. On official history, see the introduction in Sobchack (1995); on the media see
Kaplan (2003).
19. Cf. the discussion of two economies in Fiske (1987), also Dunn (2008). While a first eco-
nomic account of the spectacle grounds alienated representation in the logic of the commodity
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Kaplan 473
economy, a second version in Society of the Spectaclepoints to the alienated ideological
power held by organizations (parties and state) and social classes that gains a distinct social
power separate from and over general society. Debord follows the Marx of the German
Ideology here, situating the origins of the spectacle in the rise of state power. In part this is
a critique of the power intrinsic to all alienated, separate organizations and classes, not justthose based in a market capitalist economy. Here, Debord joins others on the French extreme
Left in the 1960s, such as Socialisme ou Barbarie, in making an argument for participatory
democracy, criticizing bureaucratic organizations and their authoritarian hierarchies of power
and knowledge. They depart from a critique that focuses only on economic power and prop-
erty relations juridically defined. This posture allowed the far Left, or gauchisme, to encom-
pass orthodox communist parties and the Soviet Union in their criticisms. Considerations too
of epistemology appear here. True knowledge, the dialectical perspective argues, depends
upon creative collective praxis, in contrast with the knowledge of orthodox Marxism, which
claims to scientifically understand the natural laws of the capitalist economy and functions as
a legitimating ideology for the partys power operations. For a succinct, incisive overview ofgauchisme, see Gombin (1975). Debord connects his second perspective on the spectacle to a
general Marxian philosophy of history.
20. See the useful discussion in Dunn (1998). Lipsitz (1990) offers a more complicated account
of the potential for historical memory in mass commercial culture than Debord.
21. Leo Lowenthal, a member of the Frankfurt School, offered an early version of this analysis.
See Lowenthal (1985[1944]). Other writers have detailed the breakdown of utilitarianism
and its reformulation in ideas of pragmatism and fluid selves and the importance of com-
munication to the production of collective social life (see Erenberg; 1981; May, 1980). Some
writers equate the new focus on consumption with a new hedonism and individualism (see
Dunn, 2008). Others, however, persuasively argue that consumption is aimed at reinforcingthe social relations and social identities most valued by the consumer, in particular the family
and peer groups (Miller, 1998; Schudson, 1997).
22. Varied scholarly traditions, like the Frankfurt School and feminist film theory, have grappled
with the cultural industries production of contrived, banal and psychologically retrograde
narratives: for example, Adorno and Horkheimers The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as
Mass Deception (2002). For a powerful critique of the Frankfurt School view of the culture
industry, see Honneth (1998).
23. Debord discusses the cultural conception of time in different social formations in sections
56, theses 125164.
24. Historians have repeatedly noted the rise of a culture of personality, focusing on charismaticleaders and media stars at the turn of the 20th century (see Falasca-Zamponi, 1997; Rogin,
1971; Sussman, 1984).
25. Cf. Arendt (1958) on fantasies of the leader as all-powerful and able to mold society accord-
ing to their vision.
26. See thesis 26 and 28. As the general drift of the present discussion might suggest, Debord
contradictorily dissects a logic of both communication and economic alienation. His Marxism
pushes him to assimilate the logic of communication to the alienated, calculating rationality
of commodity production, and to assume that the market and its assumption of an atomis-
tic society adequately describes culturalcommunicative relations. Even as he highlights the
new, strategic, aesthetic, designed cultural dimensions of late capitalism, he assesses this newcultural world as totally determined by economic alienation.
27. As other critical theorists have argued, such synthetic experiences utilizes psychological and
semiotic codes to offer simplified narratives that speak to our fantasies and desires, a process
that Leo Lowenthal equates to psychoanalysis in reverse (Funkhouser and Shaw, 2000). On
reified codes, see Adorno (1982).
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Richard L Kaplanis an independent scholar. He is the author ofPolitics and the American Press:
The Rise of Objectivity, 18651920(Cambridge University Press, 2002) and numerous articles on
journalism history and cultural theory, including Blackface in Italy: Cultural power among nations
in the era of globalization in Global Culture: Media, Arts, and Cultural Policy in a Global Context
(eds. Diana Crane, Nobuko Kawashima and Ken'ichi Kawasaki, Routledge, 2002), and American
journalism goes to war, 18982001: A manifesto on media and empire, Media History (9(3),
2003). Currently he is investigating how the conceptual pair of practical reason and discursive
reason might transform our understanding of such concepts as semiotic myth and mass society.