Customer Reviews
Completely torturous, unreadable, piece of navel gazing garbage - By: Lark, 14 Sep 2008 
I cant believe that this book has had a single positive review & am tempted to believe that there something of an "emperor's new clothes" dynamic going on, intellectuals tell you what's hot, you'd like to be an intellectual yourself, therefore you agree.
The writing style is horrendous & convoluted in the extreme, for entire chapters I thought that I must surely be missing the point or lacked the insight being an initiate of some strange mystery school would provide.
The entire idea, from what I can tell, is that consumer society & economy have alll sorts of ways of stealing your time, identity etc. & selling it back to you. No matter how much you attempt to develop yourself independently you are, in reality, only working to buy a sembalance of yourself. Everyone's reduced to a spectator & bystander.
Now the problem is that this is easily said, in a single paragraph, & other authors have hit upon this alienating aspect of modern life before but it doesnt deserve an entire book, some of them summed it up in a paragraph.
In addition I would say that its a very weak criticism of consumer culture, society & economy, lots of people are more than content with being relegated to the position of spectator, or so it would seem. The popularity of socialism, for instance, in third world nations for instance has often been premised upon the idea of fast tracking the country to the point that Guy criticises.
The promises, hopes or vision of socialism elsewhere couldnt provide the same alllure or attraction compared with the prospect of constructing an identity through consumer choices & accessorise, accessorise, accessorise ruled the day.
To acknowledge my bias I'm not a fan of continental philosophy, classical philosophy, anglo-american philosophers can appear pedantic, repetitive & conservative by contrast but they are not inaccessible or convoluted in their style. It depends what sort of read you want but I think this will prove a disatisfying read to anyone who thinks about it.
society of the spectacular! - By: Mr. M. J. Bowen, 09 Nov 2006 
This book - in conjunction with some secondary literature & other NOT RANDOM situ texts - is one of the few which can come to revolutionise your perception ALL THE WAY DOWN. Of course : it is obscure & relies on a familiarity with alot of marxist terminology - but it bares, & demands, repeated readings which demonstrates how these concepts have alot of life in them! If I was to formulate its thesis then today it would be : you are always watching others do things instead of doing something which would exceed the gaze of another watching you. This is the road towards de-reification et al...
Disconcertingly accurate statement of things in general. - By: , 07 Nov 2001 Don't let the other reviews put you off, this is a great book, although I've not read this translation. It's nothing as tedious as a critique of consumerism or the like - its a reallly revolutionary book. The surprise that such a thing can exist tends to disorientate its younger readers for a while.
Get it, read it, resist his tendency to overwhelm you with his impressive grasp of reality, & then go around feeling superior to everybody else while musing on how to overthrow the autonomous rule of our products, preferably in your lifetime. I recommend it.
Personal helicopters - By: , 03 Sep 2001 To put things into perspective, this is a Guy (boom boom to you too, dewd) who reckoned everyone would have their own private helicopter by c. 1980 - prescient, huh?
Still, without TSotS Vaneigem's brilliant Revolution of Everyday Life could never have the resonance it does, so credit where it's due - & GD did invent pyschogeography as a discipline...
A thorough-going deconstruction of modernity - By: , 01 Aug 2000 As trenchant as Foucault & as dogmatic as Wittgenstein, rarely has a work of political or cultural criticism provided such a thorough-going & penetrative exposition of the modern world's formulation of life as commodity. Debord's approach is refreshingly independent of conventional leftist thought, owing little to the positivist teleolgy of Marx of the ruralistic utopianism of Kropotkin. Though not without its faults, especiallly his sometimes confused & overly 'clever' prose, Debord's work is a true modern classic, a revolutionary text for the consumer age. Far from seeming dated it becomes more relavent with time - witness the growth of surrogate programming (gardening programmes, cooking programmes & 'fly-on-the walll' documentaries) of fabricated experience as commodity. I reccomend this book to anyone who feels bemused by the banality of everyday life.
