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Historical Materialism #155
Debord, Time and Spectacle: Hegelian Marxism and Situationist Theory
Debord, Time and Spectacle addresses the philosophical content of Guy Debord and the Situationists' work. It reconstructs the Hegelian and Marxian elements of Debord's theory of 'spectacle', and presents a critical reading that foregrounds his concerns with time and history.
430 pages, Paperback
Published January 8, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 17, 2019
This book is superb. I've always found Debord exciting and it is wonderful to find a book that delves in a serious way into Debord's theory of time and history which is crucial but almost always ignored in commentary on Debord. This book adds a whole new depth to one's understanding of Debord and, also, of Marxism. It has got me fascinated with Debord all over again. There are layers and layers to peel back. It shows what a profound thinker Debord was and what a highly significant book Society of the Spectacle remains.
May 16, 2024
An excellent new reading of Debord that succeeds at reconstructing Debord's view of a Hegelian Marxism. Bunyard builds an exciting model of Debords thought from Hegel's Absolute that aligns with Debord's problematic of Spectacle (the separation of subject and object that alienates human agency from temporal self-determination). From there Bunyard's reading articulates a philosophy of theory-praxis, a process of self-determinate historical action in which human agents create their own lived time in history.
July 3, 2024
While not necessarily a book for everyone, individuals interested in temporality studies as it relates to phenomenology and Cultural Marxism will find this book an excellent introduction to Dubord’s work on spectacle. Additional advantage is here as the book also is written as a resource for interpreting his works based on DuBord’s evolving ideas across his life.
February 15, 2026
‘Debord, Time And Spectacle’ Tom Bunyard (Haymarket Books)
I am recommending this book, and reviewing it at some length (this is long!!), for a reason: because for anyone who is concerned about the nature of cultural communications or the dynamics of change in societies (and do we need some of that right now!), and is ready to read ‘Debord, Time And Spectacle’ critically and creatively, Tom Bunyard’s book has the theoretical insights and a supply of raw strategic materials to significantly alter, or at worst inform, your thoughts and actions.
It is in tune with the ironies of the half-life of situationist ideas (and of their key articulator Guy Debord), that it is a little documented practice from the earlier International Letterist manifestation of the Situationist International, the dérive as the instrument of psychogeography (which barely gets a mention in Tom Bunyard’s book), that continues to exert a profound influence on arts, theory and some activism, while their theory and thinking around cultural and social dynamics and strategies for change receive comparatively little attention. For while their drifting practice was communicable and transferable via the repertoires of others, their theories – by their complexity and contradictions – have remained largely the preserve of experts. Tom Bunyard’s ‘Debord, Time And Spectacle’ is a powerful attempt to put that right.
Characteristic of situationist theory, this book is a project alive with contradictions, and it is testimony to his rigour that Bunyard skirts none of them. Instead, he attempts to build them into an operating entity with abiding relevance. The central attraction around which Bunyard constructs his Debordian orrery is the Hegelian theorisation of Concept, Idea and Absolute. This is something of a leap, given that – by Bunyard’s own admission – Debord never formally adopted Hegel’s philosophy into his or the official theories of the Situationists. However, there is something revelatory about this sidestep. For it pulls theories of constructed situations and of the Society of the Spectacle out of their customary shapes, exposing some of their less-than-explicit mechanics.
Bunyard acknowledges the debt Debord owed to theorists Georg Lukács, Jean-Paul Sartre and Henri Lefebvre in articulating life as a banal everyday (subjected to alienation within a social system of oppressive capitalist social relations) that is prone to disruption in ‘moments’ or by the construction of ‘situations’. These disruptions prefigure a coming reunification of subject and object in a “total man”, which Bunyard associates (and suggests that Debord associates) with Hegel’s idea of an Absolute. While, this argument is presented in ‘Debord, Time And Spectacle’ as a development from contrasting ideas about those ‘moments’ – for Sartre and Lefebvre these were glimpses of an absolute unity that was forever receding from the individual, for Debord they constitute the historical praxes by which a society might be transformed – the contradiction presented is itself revealing. For, whether the ‘moment’ is characterised optimistically or pessimistically, there is a hint here that it may be the very aspiration (in utopian hopefulness or existential hopelessness) to the Absolute that is at the root of not s few of the problems with which Tom Bunyard grapples? For this Absolute, which he expertly identifies lurking within the theories of Debord, is a structural return of the ‘God’ (or in Debord’s terms “History”) to which Hegel addressed his ideas. In achieving totality, and mastery over their own lives, humans (here mostly described as masculine) require – in a situationist neo-Marxist formulation – mastery over nature; it never escapes its own anthropocentrism. Its world is almost exclusively human and cultural; it tends towards an ‘end of pre-history’ beyond which lies what Karl Marx (in his ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844’) called ‘the humanisation of nature’!
It might seem, then, that the theories under close examination in ‘Debord, Time And Spectacle’ are running themselves into a familiar cul-de-sac. Yet by placing its discussion within the context of Debord’s innovative idea of ‘the Spectacle’, though not as usually presented, it can swerve this dead end, at least for a fruitful while.
Most people who are a least aware of there being a Theory of the Society of the Spectacle are likely to associate it with the origins and development of mass media in the twentieth century. However, as Bunyard vividly explains, mass media within capitalist social relations was, in Debord’s formulation, only the fullest realisation of a Spectacle which was may be thousands of years old, and primarily characterised not by obfuscatory or diversional representations but by “separation”, by the deleterious effects of image-production and representation in generating the alienation of humans from themselves, and from autonomy and self-creation.
If we take Debord’s approach to time and the Spectacle seriously – which would be easier if he had somewhere addressed in detail the origins and emergence of a millennia-old ideology of separation – then we can at least speculate on the nature of the subject/object separation to which he alludes. For others have paid attention to this. For example, the philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon discusses a subject-object unity of consciousness among hunter-gatherers, which he thought is to some extent recoverable for us at ‘privileged points’, being those sites where an ancient people found a direct connection with the ‘other’ all around them. As in the transmission of psychogeography, what is crucial here is the focus on practice and a thing-itself (in this case an ancient site, we can only deduce or guess at the practice), which Debord’s theory of an ancient Spectacle omits. Yet, if we broadly accept the ideas of David W. Anthony in ‘The Wheel, The Horse and Language’ (largely in tune with those of David Graeber and David Wengrow in ‘The Dawn Of Everything’ and James C. Scott’s ‘Against The Grain’), then the emergence around 5,000 years ago of horse-taming, and the wheel-based technology of wagons and chariots as part of a new patriarchal society led by chiefs, warriors and priests and based on cattle herding, seems to have disrupted hunter-gathering – which had been reliant on immersion in both the small and large scale dynamics of more-than-human others, with the cultural capability of making a Gobekli Tepe – and become the introduction point for key components of an ideology of dominant separateness. These would include warmongering, nature-husbandry, misogyny and warrior myths; all of which, in muted forms, one could argue, Debord partially fell for.
If we remove the aspiration to an Absolute (given how, as tending to what Jacques Lacan would call a ‘Big Other’ it appears to sit too happily within an ideology of separation), but retain the ideas around ‘moments’ and ‘situations’, we have a vision of life as uneven, in which an everyday is not only the necessary contradiction-ridden context for its momentary and situational disruptions but is also continually pulled out of shaped by its own unevenness (of which ‘moments’ and ‘constructed situations’ are its expressions [and not representations]). In this vision of life, subject/object unity is not an aspiration to “totality” or mastery over self and nature, but a subjection of a multiplicitous and in itself uneven self to the unnervingly alien constituents of wobbly and mutant nature.
While nature and ecologies play little if any part in Bunyard’s arguments, he subjects Debord’s latent Hegelianism to a wonderful examination in the middle parts of his book; delving deep into the nuances of negation. For, like the Dadaists, the International Lettrists/situationists were forged in disgust at a culture that had delivered world war. They both sought to completely undo culture. Dada quickly spawned a movement to create a sur-reality based on dreams, but which would eventually subjugate itself before the Absolute Big Other of the Leninist party (in Stalinist and Trotskyists forms). It is perhaps understandable, then, that Debord returned to pre-Marxian philosophy to dig at the source of the problem; yet his contemporaries (Lukács, Sartre, and Lefebvre early on) described a disruptive negation that could do no more than give a tragic glimpse of a disappearing alternative, of a startling but temporary moment that would always e retreating out of view.
If this book (and Debord) struggles to find a clear theoretical resolution to all this, then perhaps it is because the book, like the situationists, is caught between a prospect of repeated negations and the Idea (for Debord, this was communism) oscillating with its morbid stalling in an Absolute of pure prospect and decrepit reality. Tom Bunyard, however, can articulate a more positive, if constrained, dynamic once he comes to address how time works with a negation in Debord’s thought. For the negation of the present is only possible because a future is active in a present and drawing it towards what it is not, being a future that is never arrived at because it is a negation of the present. Without a future being present in its negative disruptive sense there can, thus, be no present, for the present is only possible as a becoming to the nothingness of the future. While the past is, equally, only possible in the present, for without the repeated representation and reformulation of the past, the past does not exist, and so everything in being (short of time travel) relies on a future-in-the-present; that is, in a becoming. Thus politics is not about a feasible future, but about how the imagining of such a feasibility can make a present possible; this is similar to the emphasis on flow and plasma (desire over orgasm, becoming over being or realisation) in the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari in which, by a process of “n minus 1” (negation, in Hegelian terms) multiple desires are possible without an end or satisfaction. Rather than “be careful what you wish for”, it should be “wish for whatever you want to, but then leave those wishes to themselves”.
There can be no ‘end of history’ for Debord. Just as he pushed back the origins of separation and Spectacle thousands of years before mass media, so he imagined a radical future negation of separation of subject and object as an end to pre-history and the beginning of history, in which a total ‘man’ would enter an “open future” by mastery over ‘himself’ and the forces of nature.
Debord’s humanism defeats his project! Once declaring the countryside as too boring for a dérive, the International Lettrists condemned themselves to the limits of urban anthropocentrism, without more-than-human allies and only the most unreliable of human ones. Their heroic rejection of the separation created by and for those with mastery over us humans need not, therefore, result in us seeking to become masters over others (either over our multiple other selves or over more-than-humans), but can rather encourage us towards a realisation of unevenness, of becomings that tend beyond separation.
I am recommending this book, and reviewing it at some length (this is long!!), for a reason: because for anyone who is concerned about the nature of cultural communications or the dynamics of change in societies (and do we need some of that right now!), and is ready to read ‘Debord, Time And Spectacle’ critically and creatively, Tom Bunyard’s book has the theoretical insights and a supply of raw strategic materials to significantly alter, or at worst inform, your thoughts and actions.
It is in tune with the ironies of the half-life of situationist ideas (and of their key articulator Guy Debord), that it is a little documented practice from the earlier International Letterist manifestation of the Situationist International, the dérive as the instrument of psychogeography (which barely gets a mention in Tom Bunyard’s book), that continues to exert a profound influence on arts, theory and some activism, while their theory and thinking around cultural and social dynamics and strategies for change receive comparatively little attention. For while their drifting practice was communicable and transferable via the repertoires of others, their theories – by their complexity and contradictions – have remained largely the preserve of experts. Tom Bunyard’s ‘Debord, Time And Spectacle’ is a powerful attempt to put that right.
Characteristic of situationist theory, this book is a project alive with contradictions, and it is testimony to his rigour that Bunyard skirts none of them. Instead, he attempts to build them into an operating entity with abiding relevance. The central attraction around which Bunyard constructs his Debordian orrery is the Hegelian theorisation of Concept, Idea and Absolute. This is something of a leap, given that – by Bunyard’s own admission – Debord never formally adopted Hegel’s philosophy into his or the official theories of the Situationists. However, there is something revelatory about this sidestep. For it pulls theories of constructed situations and of the Society of the Spectacle out of their customary shapes, exposing some of their less-than-explicit mechanics.
Bunyard acknowledges the debt Debord owed to theorists Georg Lukács, Jean-Paul Sartre and Henri Lefebvre in articulating life as a banal everyday (subjected to alienation within a social system of oppressive capitalist social relations) that is prone to disruption in ‘moments’ or by the construction of ‘situations’. These disruptions prefigure a coming reunification of subject and object in a “total man”, which Bunyard associates (and suggests that Debord associates) with Hegel’s idea of an Absolute. While, this argument is presented in ‘Debord, Time And Spectacle’ as a development from contrasting ideas about those ‘moments’ – for Sartre and Lefebvre these were glimpses of an absolute unity that was forever receding from the individual, for Debord they constitute the historical praxes by which a society might be transformed – the contradiction presented is itself revealing. For, whether the ‘moment’ is characterised optimistically or pessimistically, there is a hint here that it may be the very aspiration (in utopian hopefulness or existential hopelessness) to the Absolute that is at the root of not s few of the problems with which Tom Bunyard grapples? For this Absolute, which he expertly identifies lurking within the theories of Debord, is a structural return of the ‘God’ (or in Debord’s terms “History”) to which Hegel addressed his ideas. In achieving totality, and mastery over their own lives, humans (here mostly described as masculine) require – in a situationist neo-Marxist formulation – mastery over nature; it never escapes its own anthropocentrism. Its world is almost exclusively human and cultural; it tends towards an ‘end of pre-history’ beyond which lies what Karl Marx (in his ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844’) called ‘the humanisation of nature’!
It might seem, then, that the theories under close examination in ‘Debord, Time And Spectacle’ are running themselves into a familiar cul-de-sac. Yet by placing its discussion within the context of Debord’s innovative idea of ‘the Spectacle’, though not as usually presented, it can swerve this dead end, at least for a fruitful while.
Most people who are a least aware of there being a Theory of the Society of the Spectacle are likely to associate it with the origins and development of mass media in the twentieth century. However, as Bunyard vividly explains, mass media within capitalist social relations was, in Debord’s formulation, only the fullest realisation of a Spectacle which was may be thousands of years old, and primarily characterised not by obfuscatory or diversional representations but by “separation”, by the deleterious effects of image-production and representation in generating the alienation of humans from themselves, and from autonomy and self-creation.
If we take Debord’s approach to time and the Spectacle seriously – which would be easier if he had somewhere addressed in detail the origins and emergence of a millennia-old ideology of separation – then we can at least speculate on the nature of the subject/object separation to which he alludes. For others have paid attention to this. For example, the philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon discusses a subject-object unity of consciousness among hunter-gatherers, which he thought is to some extent recoverable for us at ‘privileged points’, being those sites where an ancient people found a direct connection with the ‘other’ all around them. As in the transmission of psychogeography, what is crucial here is the focus on practice and a thing-itself (in this case an ancient site, we can only deduce or guess at the practice), which Debord’s theory of an ancient Spectacle omits. Yet, if we broadly accept the ideas of David W. Anthony in ‘The Wheel, The Horse and Language’ (largely in tune with those of David Graeber and David Wengrow in ‘The Dawn Of Everything’ and James C. Scott’s ‘Against The Grain’), then the emergence around 5,000 years ago of horse-taming, and the wheel-based technology of wagons and chariots as part of a new patriarchal society led by chiefs, warriors and priests and based on cattle herding, seems to have disrupted hunter-gathering – which had been reliant on immersion in both the small and large scale dynamics of more-than-human others, with the cultural capability of making a Gobekli Tepe – and become the introduction point for key components of an ideology of dominant separateness. These would include warmongering, nature-husbandry, misogyny and warrior myths; all of which, in muted forms, one could argue, Debord partially fell for.
If we remove the aspiration to an Absolute (given how, as tending to what Jacques Lacan would call a ‘Big Other’ it appears to sit too happily within an ideology of separation), but retain the ideas around ‘moments’ and ‘situations’, we have a vision of life as uneven, in which an everyday is not only the necessary contradiction-ridden context for its momentary and situational disruptions but is also continually pulled out of shaped by its own unevenness (of which ‘moments’ and ‘constructed situations’ are its expressions [and not representations]). In this vision of life, subject/object unity is not an aspiration to “totality” or mastery over self and nature, but a subjection of a multiplicitous and in itself uneven self to the unnervingly alien constituents of wobbly and mutant nature.
While nature and ecologies play little if any part in Bunyard’s arguments, he subjects Debord’s latent Hegelianism to a wonderful examination in the middle parts of his book; delving deep into the nuances of negation. For, like the Dadaists, the International Lettrists/situationists were forged in disgust at a culture that had delivered world war. They both sought to completely undo culture. Dada quickly spawned a movement to create a sur-reality based on dreams, but which would eventually subjugate itself before the Absolute Big Other of the Leninist party (in Stalinist and Trotskyists forms). It is perhaps understandable, then, that Debord returned to pre-Marxian philosophy to dig at the source of the problem; yet his contemporaries (Lukács, Sartre, and Lefebvre early on) described a disruptive negation that could do no more than give a tragic glimpse of a disappearing alternative, of a startling but temporary moment that would always e retreating out of view.
If this book (and Debord) struggles to find a clear theoretical resolution to all this, then perhaps it is because the book, like the situationists, is caught between a prospect of repeated negations and the Idea (for Debord, this was communism) oscillating with its morbid stalling in an Absolute of pure prospect and decrepit reality. Tom Bunyard, however, can articulate a more positive, if constrained, dynamic once he comes to address how time works with a negation in Debord’s thought. For the negation of the present is only possible because a future is active in a present and drawing it towards what it is not, being a future that is never arrived at because it is a negation of the present. Without a future being present in its negative disruptive sense there can, thus, be no present, for the present is only possible as a becoming to the nothingness of the future. While the past is, equally, only possible in the present, for without the repeated representation and reformulation of the past, the past does not exist, and so everything in being (short of time travel) relies on a future-in-the-present; that is, in a becoming. Thus politics is not about a feasible future, but about how the imagining of such a feasibility can make a present possible; this is similar to the emphasis on flow and plasma (desire over orgasm, becoming over being or realisation) in the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari in which, by a process of “n minus 1” (negation, in Hegelian terms) multiple desires are possible without an end or satisfaction. Rather than “be careful what you wish for”, it should be “wish for whatever you want to, but then leave those wishes to themselves”.
There can be no ‘end of history’ for Debord. Just as he pushed back the origins of separation and Spectacle thousands of years before mass media, so he imagined a radical future negation of separation of subject and object as an end to pre-history and the beginning of history, in which a total ‘man’ would enter an “open future” by mastery over ‘himself’ and the forces of nature.
Debord’s humanism defeats his project! Once declaring the countryside as too boring for a dérive, the International Lettrists condemned themselves to the limits of urban anthropocentrism, without more-than-human allies and only the most unreliable of human ones. Their heroic rejection of the separation created by and for those with mastery over us humans need not, therefore, result in us seeking to become masters over others (either over our multiple other selves or over more-than-humans), but can rather encourage us towards a realisation of unevenness, of becomings that tend beyond separation.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews