The Society of the Spectacle (2nd edition)

"In 1970, Black & Red and Radical America co-published the first English translation of Guy Debord’s La Société du spectacle, originally published in French in 1967. A group of friends that included Fredy and Lorraine Perlman, Don Campbell, Judy Campbell,4 Hannah Ziegellaub, and Jon Supak, met together regularly to read through the text and translate it. Over the course of the Printing Co-op’s life, The Society of the Spectacle would be reprinted more than any other Black & Red publication. Lorraine Perlman estimates that 30,000 copies have been printed over the years.5For many years, the Black & Red edition was the only available translation in English. There was no contact between Debord and Black & Red, but there was also no reason to believe Debord was not satisfied with their English translation. A second English translation, by Donald Nicholson-Smith, was published in 1994 by Zone Books.6 In a letter to Nicholson-Baker, Guy Debord wrote: “I think that professional publishers are generally prefera-ble to the ‘pirates,’ even the most sympathetic ones, for their distribution, which surpasses the limits of a too-closed milieu and also because they quite often allow the author a chance to verify if the translation is correct.” The Black & Red translation is still in print today, distributed by AK Press.Society of the Spectacle was the most influen-tial book to capture the spirit of the Situationist International. The 1970 Black & Red translation is “unauthorized,” and marked as such on its title page. Furthermore, it is full of images that are reproduced without copyright. Debord directly addresses the situationist position on détournementand plagiarism in Society of the Spectacle when he writes: “Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It squeezes the phrase of an author, makes use of its expressions, rubs out a false idea, replaces it with a true idea.”7He continues, “Détournement is the oppositeof citation, of the theoretical authority which is always falsified by the mere fact of becoming a citation.” All of the members of the group that translated Society of the Spectacle were new to Detroit in 1970. Hannah Ziegellaub and Jon Supak had come from New England, where they had taken part in actions against Harvard, and were drawn to the work of Black & Red.8 Ziegellaub stayed with the Perlmans in Detroit’s North End, and the others lived nearby. They met at the Perlmans’ apartment almost daily for two months to read, translate, and discuss the texts. They spoke about how the text applied to their current situation. The Perlmans and Ziegellaub were the best French speakers in the group. Lorraine Perlman recalls that although the writing was difficult, the text was rich with ideas. The French edition is unillustrated, but as the group read the text in Detroit, they were inspired to collect images that paired well with ideas in the text.9 Ziegellaub’s annotated copy of the original includes notes in the margins that reference certain visuals or images they may have considered including. For instance, next to thesis 38, the words “protectors of liberty” are handwritten in the margin, a reference to Detroit police cars that bore those words in 1970. Another note, next to thesis 45, reads “rows of secretaries.”10Lorraine Perlman recalls that Campbell, in particular, had a knack for finding images that fit the themes of the book. They would go to the third floor of the Main Branch of the Detroit Public Library, a grand, three-story building on Woodward Avenue, to visit the image collection. These could be checked out, so they would take them back to the Print Co-op to photograph and use either whole or as collages.The image collection is still at the library today, though none of the exact photos that appear in the 1970 edition of Society of the Spectacle could be found. The collection is comprised of photographs and illustrations that were cut out of magazines, laminated, and sorted into folders labeled with keywords, which are stored in file cabinets. There are folders for things like “calculating machines,” “office buildings,” and “automobiles.” The way that the images are organized en-courages reading them as stand-ins for language, which is how a lot of the photographs and illustrations function throughout Society of the Spectacle and other publications that came out of the Co-op in the early 1970s. Unlike a Google image search, where a specific image of, say, an office building might be tagged in multiple ways—as “midcentury architecture,” “black and white,” “office building,” etc.—images in the library collection can only be sorted into one folder. It puts a higher emphasis on the tag that was selected by the library worker who cut out the image and chose which folder to place it in.11The book was typeset in Univers at Fifth Estateon an IBM Selectric Composer. Peter Werbe, of Fifth Estate, recalls that they often used Univers because the sans serif typeface was modern in appearance.12 There is evidence of human error and effort throughout the early printings: the images on the inside are not always cut at straight angles, nor do they always reproduce well. In the first edition, each major section of the book opens with a quotation laid over a large image. In these instanc-es, the cuts made by the person who typeset and trimmed the quote out of a larger sheet of paper are sometimes visible against the image behind it. The position of the section heads on the page is not always consistent. In the first edition, the numbers for theses 126 and 127 are missing (this is corrected in the second printing of that edition). The words at the top of the right-facing page of that spread are noticeably darker than on the left, as if the ink were not distributed evenly. Later editions are reproduced more cleanly, as their printing skills improved.Over the course of the many print runs of Society of the Spectacle different paper stock would be used, depending on what could be acquired cheaply. One run is printed with a light pink textured cover stock. Another print run uses coated text stock with a cockled cover.Campbell selected the cover images that appeared on both the first and second editions. The front cover of the first edition bears a black-and-white photograph of a drab office building with a grid of illuminated windows. Some people, desks, and stacks of paper are visible through the windows. The back cover shows a full bleed image of audience members in 3-D glasses in a theater. This iconic image has, in many ways, become synonymous with this text. In later editions, this is the image that appears on the front cover. It is a photograph by J. R. Eyerman that originally appeared in Life magazine. The image resonates with the title of the book—the society of the spectacle is the people in the audience, all of them watching a screen which is out of frame—we ourselves are the society of the spectacle. The book is organized into nine sections comprised of numbered theses. The Detroit translators deliberately placed certain photographs near specific theses. One example is the use of photos of the Wonder Bread and Hostess Cake Pavilions from the 1939 World’s Fair paired with Debord’s thesis 12. Debord states that the spectacle “presents itself as an enormous unutterable and inaccessible actuality. It says nothing more than ‘that which appears is good, that which is good appears.’” It demands “passive acceptance, which in fact it has already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply.” Here, the spectacle is bread turned into a house of wonders. The pavilion is itself a reproduction of packaged Wonder Bread, with its iconic red and blue circles. Other photographs from the World’s Fair are used throughout the book, but it’s nice to consider the use of the Wonder Bread image, in particular, with relation to commodities and the spectacle. First of all, there was a Wonder Bread factory just a few blocks from the Co-op (it is now Motor City Casino). Second, bread figures often in political texts, and it’s interesting to look at it here in this context.13 Karl Marx has a long discussion of factory-made bread in Capital (“the adulteration of bread”).14 In 1970, Wonder Bread was the epitome of factory-made bread. Another nice text-image connection happens between a photograph of the 1964 World’s Fair Unisphere and thesis 24, which discusses the “essentially unilateral” means of communication concentrated in the hands of a few. The Unisphere is a huge globe designed to represent global interdependence, with three large orbit rings for Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, and Telstar, the first active communication satellites. Telstar, owned by AT&T, was part of an international experiment to transmit communications over the Atlantic Ocean.15Because all of the photographs are uncaptioned it’s not always clear what is what, but some of the other identifiable ones include a sign for Cadillac, with the tag line “Standard of the World” below it; a detail of a photo showing the sign for Willis Bar, a “workman’s palace”; and a photograph of a Detroit police car emblazoned with the words “Protectors of Liberty.” Lorraine Perlman noted in conversation that one of their objectives when they were choosing images was to emphasize the fact that Debord’s text could apply to one’s local context—in their case, Detroit.16Despite their work on the translation of Society of the Spectacle, Fredy and Lorraine Perlman were not interested in joining the Situationists, who were notoriously sectarian. After the publication of Society of the Spectacle, Radical America and Black & Red would receive angry letters from members of the U.S. branch of the SI demanding that they destroy all copies of the book (see “To Nonsubscribers of Radical America”). Toward the end of the 1970 edition of Society of the Spectacle, near thesis 119, the Detroit translators included a photograph of Situationists at a café in Paris. It follows a discussion of the need for worker’s councils to develop power in order for a proletarian movement to succeed. From the vantage point of Detroit, they saw Debord as a writer who espoused anti-authoritarian ideas while at the same time cultivating devotion among his followers." The Detroit Printing Co-op by Danielle Aubert.