There’s this politician, see.......

OK I should enlarge on that. I ran into Guy DeBord on the web about 10 years ago, and it’s veracity seemed entirely obvious to me the moment I read it. It explains so much about the time we live in. And The Donald is such an obvious manifestation of the whole ‘spectacle’ mentality. It’s what got him elected. I don’t want to divert the thread by attracting the inevitable rejoinders from the resident Trumpets, but still, seems obvious to me.

Next chapter, I think I won't just restrict myself to schizophrenic ranting, there'll also be some good old fashioned philosophical buggery. I really dislike the Freudian typology of the mind, so as much as I can I'll try and interpret the unconscious as the habituated and reflexive, and the conscious as effortful comportment and cogitation. In this framework, the Id resembles reflexive comportment manifesting a collection of inter-related desires, the Ego resembles the differential weighting of the field of potentials characteristic of this manifestation, and the Superego resembles the historical aggregation-through-distribution of these differential weighting schemes.

35.
In the essential movement of the spectacle, which consists of taking up all that existed in human activity in a fluid state so as to possess it in a congealed state as things which have become the exclusive value by their formulation in negative of lived value, we recognize our old enemy, the commodity, who knows so well how to seem at first glance something trivial and obvious, while on the contrary it is so complex and so full of metaphysical subtleties.

I think this is reasonably transparent, the spectacle is structured like a network of commodities, and we can expect the play of equivalences which expresses the character of the commodity-form to have a strong analogy to the spectacle. I have in mind the good regulator principle, every efficient regulator of a system is also a model of that system. Debord sets the spectacle up as a model of sorts earlier:

Remember 6:

6. The spectacle grasped in its totality is both the result and the project of the existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corollary consumption. The spectacle’s form and content are identically the total justification of the existing system’s conditions and goals. The spectacle is also the permanent presence of this justification, since it occupies the main part of the time lived outside of modern production.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

36. This is the principle of commodity fetishism, the domination of society by “intangible as well as tangible things,” which reaches its absolute fulfillment in the spectacle, where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible par excellence.

A reference to the generalisation of commodity fetishism to the constitutive components/processes of culture: {Spectacle <-regulation-> Economy}. We can expect the regulator to be projective in the sense that the spectacle isn't a transliteration (substitution of components) of all economic processes, but I think we can say that the spectacle is a subprocess of the economy. In systems-theoretic terms (not like Debord likes cybernetics), the spectacle is an economic process generated by a novel filtration and representation of the economy as well as an increase in its scope. Note 'selection' of images, not automatic inclusion and representation. In category theoretic terms, the spectacle can probably be thought of as the image of a forgetful functor from the material conditions of the economy to a space of inter-related images with its own governing dynamics.

An exposition of the way these images have come to impose themselves on us can be found in Rick Roderick's lecture series 'The Self Under Seige'. Paraphrased, "what happens if you stop watching TV for a week? You don't know anything! Is the war still on? What the hell happened?'. The same thing can be said if you avoid social media - you lose out on a major region of how sense is negotiated and must wait until its most major events become excessively spectacular to become represented on older forms of media (like the news). The hyper-commodification of engagement (through advertising and data) in social media probably sets up a supervenience relation (at minimum) between the spectacle and its economic base, no S changes without E changes, however minor they may be.

37.
The world at once present and absent which the spectacle makes visible is the world of the commodity dominating all that is lived. The world of the commodity is thus shown for what it is, because its movement is identical to the estrangement of men among themselves and in relation to their global product.

How does the spectacle render the world absent? The world in terms of its social practices doesn't 'naturally' have to consist predominantly of a discretised tableaux of image objects. I think it might be worthwhile updating this discrete character of the spectacle - probably inspired by the growth of television, popular music and consumer culture more generally consisting of distinct concreta always-already gift-wrapped - to include a continuous element which remains unsuppressed. People can become brands, everyone has a minimal form of self-branding through the generation of credit histories ,work references and the dizzying stream of meta-data generated about us every day. Work references and examination reckon your capacity as a worker and can consist in an extensive psychometric evaluation; not just your capacity for the job but your whole being is probed. The sheer ridiculousness of it produces laughter and tears on a daily basis - eg refusing someone a job as a cleaner because they couldn't complete a fucking magic square.

We have moved on from that point too, the data stream leaves ghostly traces of our soul behind, and the administrators of these technologies can turn this into a modelling of consumer behaviour in general; and thus is a further form of commodification. The consumer as a consumer is also commodified through exchange value of the mathematised propensities of their desires and habits. Significance suffers a constant effacement in its quantification as a set of repeating propensities; every human becomes easily summarised and thus easily encoded. The results of this surface coding (discretisation into commodity-images) and deep-coding (the hidden activity you leave behind through technology like social media) is a transposition of life to what was unlived within it.

38.
The loss of quality so evident at all levels of spectacular language, from the objects it praises to the behavior it regulates, merely translates the fundamental traits of the real production which brushes reality aside: the commodity-form is through and through equal to itself, the category of the quantitative. The quantitative is what the commodity-form develops, and it can develop only within the quantitative.

The explosive growth of mathematical and computer science in the broad sense goes along with this, and the expansive data gathering and analysis that occurs as a result of the developed technologies from these fields. Perhaps this can be stated as a mathematisation of capital. Debord seems to want to say that there's a profound lack in the social life consisting in the spectacle, but he's not advanced what is lacking as a positive thesis yet. The Partially Examined Life podcast's (@Baden) comment on this was very prescient (paraphrased): "as usual with Marxist critique, the critique is devastating but the positive project sorely lacking".

39.
This development which excludes the qualitative is itself, as development, subject to qualitative change: the spectacle indicates that it has crossed the threshold of its own abundance; this is as yet true only locally at some points, but is already true on the universal scale which is the original context of the commodity, a context which its practical movement, encompassing the Earth as a world market, has verified.

The dialectical contrast of qualitative and quantitative is bollocks of the first degree in my book. Change of forms of energy are far more complicated than can be spanned by these quantities when interpreted as laws of nature as in diamat. Generalising this from nature to society and to the individual is intellectual self flagellation and loses both the specificity of each category and the possibility of novel relational dynamics between them. IE, seeing the qualitative and quantitative as antipodes in an alternating sequence of dynamics doesn't let you see how they smoothly interpenetrate (no diamat leaps with metaphysical necessity here); people leave a surprising amount of themselves on sites through their meta-data and mathematical modelling of what they do on the site, the lossy mapping from expressive activity to database content is an occlusive augmentation of the qualitative aspects of experience that facilitates its control. Similarly motivating differentials of intensity are a mirror of the quantitative in the qualitative. To the extent I can, I'll try to translate things out of diamat categories.

I was going to raise that at some point actually, but I think it's worthwhile to continue to explicate the issue (and critique at that level) before moving on to solutions or lack thereof. Anyway, I personally think the picture is bleak almost beyond hope and the problem is accelerating. The spectacle involves commodification right down to the level of identity itself. We're communicably ourselves only insofar as we're social selves, and we're connected socially only insofar as we integrate ourselves into the process of the spectacle, which delimits the logic of personal exchange. Worse, the isolation caused by this process of self-commodification and self-abstraction throws us into further need of the salve the spectacle offers us. Of course, it's not a hole we can dig ourselves out of. "Success" then becomes the exclusive domain of the spectacle, and self-development, except in its terms, the mark of failure, isolation and ridicule.

To the extent I can, I'll try to translate things out of diamat categories. — fdrake

Yes, it would be helpful if you could rephrase this criticism.

Succinctly put. I appreciated how neatly condensed this is:

Worse, the isolation caused by this process of self-commodification and self-abstraction throws us into further need of the salve the spectacle offers us. Of course, it's not a hole we can dig ourselves out of. "Success" then becomes the exclusive domain of the spectacle, and self-development, except in its terms, the mark of failure, isolation and ridicule.

Just in case, diamat=dialectical materialism or 'materialist dialectics', in my view it's a confused pile of bookum, and the only insights that you get from considering it are much neater to think of in systems theoretic terms. At least, that's how I'm going to interpret them, or try to. Similarly with any Freudianism, I'll do what I can to translate the statements into dual process theory, which I mentioned earlier to @TimeLine.

Forgot to say, if you're actually reading my notes, was there anything you want me to throw more words at?

You're doing plenty of work already. :) It's me who should be throwing more words at the discussion. I'm just not grasping 39 and your critique thereof. Any further explanation of that would be appreciated.

Oh. There's this thing in dialectical materialism called the dialectic of quality and quantity. It's in Engels and those in Lenin's heritage. Anti-dialectics has a good summary of the dialectic and highlights a lot of problems with it. The entire site is gold, it's written by an incredibly grumpy English analytical marxist postman.

Cheers. I'll motor over there.

40.
The development of productive forces has been the real unconscious history which built and modified the conditions of existence of human groups as conditions of survival, and extended those conditions: the economic basis of all their undertakings. In a primitive economy, the commodity sector represented a surplus of survival. The production of commodities, which implies the exchange of varied products among independent producers, could for a long time remain craft production, contained within a marginal economic function where its quantitative truth was still masked. However, where commodity production met the social conditions of large scale commerce and of the accumulation of capitals, it seized total domination over the economy. The entire economy then became what the commodity had shown itself to be in the course of this conquest: a process of quantitative development. This incessant expansion of economic power in the form of the commodity, which transformed human labor into commodity-labor, into wage-labor, cumulatively led to an abundance in which the primary question of survival is undoubtedly resolved, but in such a way that it is constantly rediscovered; it is continually posed again each time at a higher level. Economic growth frees societies from the natural pressure which required their direct struggle for survival, but at that point it is from their liberator that they are not liberated. The independence of the commodity is extended to the entire economy over which it rules. The economy transforms the world, but transforms it only into a world of economy. The pseudo-nature within which human labor is alienated demands that it be served ad infinitum, and this service, being judged and absolved only by itself, in fact acquires the totality of socially permissible efforts and projects as its servants. The abundance of commodities, namely, of commodity relations, can be nothing more than increased survival.

I think 'unconscious' there is figurative rather than Freudian, so I'm saved some effort. I think this is just noting the historical progression from commodity capitalism to financial capitalism while noting that the latter was always a real possibility of the former. But the process of transformation from commodity centric to financial centric is irreversible since the economy now is 'a process of quantitative development' - the incessant changes of numbers on screens. But it makes enough food to bring more people as a % out of starvation every year, so there's that. So it'll keep going; and Debord says that since this keeps happening, the accumulation of capital obtains a sufficient rate to vaporise social life into images. So it's characterised as a highly likely development once a capitalist gets going because money makes money. M-C-M' again, but it's decontextualised in the sense that going from M to M' transverses national boundaries. Such boundaries are formally traversed millions of times a second - a long way from merchant caravans and the town market.

I think 'the pseudo-nature' is referring to some conceptual composite of economic relations, the cities which built up around them, and the replacement of nature through grid iron. EG Inner city kids in London need to be told light doesn't come from their eyes, part of introductory science class can be turning the lights off, closing the shutters and allowing them to see darkness for the first time.

Another reference to the commodification of everything in "acquires the totality of socially permissible efforts'. Coding/decoding things from economic analysis to the analysis of corresponding social processes then back again is a usual bit of Marxist methodology.

More negative connotations, the spectacle producing forms of life which are 'nothing more than increased survival'.

This one's big, I probably missed a few things in it.

41. The commodity’s domination was at first exerted over the economy in an occult manner; the economy itself, the material basis of social life, remained unperceived and not understood, like the familiar which is not necessarily known. In a society where the concrete commodity is rare or unusual, money, apparently dominant, presents itself as an emissary armed with full powers who speaks in the name of an unknown force. With the industrial revolution, the division of labor in manufactures, and mass production for the world market, the commodity appears in fact as a power which comes to occupy social life. It is then that political economy takes shape, as the dominant science and the science of domination.

This is picking up on the financialization of capital as prefigured in 40. There's a sketch from one of the episodes of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle (which I looked for and couldn't find) which manages to get a huge laugh from saying: "remember... things? stuff that actually has a material existence" during one of his many satirical observational comedy routines. I think there's a general sense of 'how abstract things are' which this highlights and plays on, which is interpreted by Debord as being produced from/indicative of the operation of the spectacle.

I think this is another time to appeal to the good regulator principle. Political economy as a subject is producing economic models which, irrelevant of their veracity, are used to shape economic doctrine. Usually through think-tanks, rather than having politician-economist-philosophers. Those who influence politics through it are rarely in the news for people who're so influential; it's probably quite accurate to say political economy as practiced in think-tanks is the hidden dialogue of the ruling class, a 'science of domination and the dominant science'. I have a personal frustration here since even when the UK government produces an economic manuscript they don't provide anonymised or summary forms of the data for independent verification and analysis. It's pretty undemocratic, as the think tanks almost certainly have access to the data and thus can paint us reasonably informed citizens as unqualified to comment by fiat. Despite it being very likely that there would be considerable demand for productions dealing with the data in a government independent, scientific way.

@StreetlightX

Do you have any opinions on dialectical materialism? I'm not particularly keen on it and shunted @Baden the way of an analytical Marxist eviscerating the quality/quantity dialectic. Do you have any suggestions for a less critical introduction?

A friend of mine pointed out something pretty cool. It might be possible to take the commodification of everything as a methodological posit and look at spectacular commodities (image objects) in economic terms. He then applied this to Jordan Peterson's explosive growth, searching for analogies to Amazon, and looked at it in terms of supply and demand. I have cool friends.

'Dialectical Materialism' is one of those phrases that has always struck me as meaning whatever one wanted it to - an empty signifier, as it were, open to accepting whatever meanings one were to foist on it. It hasn't been very relavent to my own interests so far, so I'm relatively indifferent to it.

It's one of the Marxian left's chief causes of circular firing lines. Rather, it names the space for unsubstantiated and endless theoretical disagreement. Depending on your organisation, you can be publicly shamed for being 'undialectical' or having 'one-sided materialism'. It's a stupid heritage to deal with.

I have always understood the term to be a polemic against the notion that it is the dialectical logic of consciousness which determines the unfolding of history, rather it posits the economic means of production and the nature of humanity as the interacting factors which drive the dialectical logic of historical unfoldment. The truth probably lies somewhere in between.

That's certainly an element of it. If it was constrained to social forces - a statement of some genealogical-historical method - the ideas that 'conceptually contrary ideas give rise to oppositional social forces' and 'conflicts in the sphere of the economy give rise to oppositional social forces and conceptually contrary concepts' seem reasonably close to capturing its use with less jargon. But then you have diamat people ranting about dialectics like Hegelian ideals and about melting wax/boiling water.

I'd like to interpret it as a kind of proxy language for discussing social change, and hopefully there won't be too much that I miss.

@Baden

Have you had time to study 'dialectical materialism'? If so - what did you find out about it?

42. The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life. Not only is the relation to the commodity visible but it is all one sees: the world one sees is its world. Modern economic production extends its dictatorship extensively and intensively. In the least industrialized places, its reign is already attested by a few star commodities and by the imperialist domination imposed by regions which are ahead in the development of productivity. In the advanced regions, social space is invaded by a continuous superimposition of geological layers of commodities. At this point in the “second industrial revolution,” alienated consumption becomes for the masses a duty supplementary to alienated production. It is all the sold labor of a society which globally becomes the total commodity for which the cycle must be continued. For this to be done, the total commodity has to return as a fragment to the fragmented individual, absolutely separated from the productive forces operating as a whole. Thus it is here that the specialized science of domination must in turn specialize: it fragments itself into sociology, psychotechnics, cybernetics, semiology, etc., watching over the self-regulation of every level of the process.

I don't think this is saying much new, other than giving a preliminary account of the qualitative nature of commodities. They're 'everywhere' and 'deep structured' in the sense that commodity requirements are a turtles all the way down kind of thing. When all is commodified, each social need no matter how obscure must be addressed with (and constituted by) a regime of commodities. There's a strengthening of the 'relations between people become relations between things' you find in the fetishism of commodities in Marx to 'relations between all things (in a broad sense) become relations between commodities' - an intensification identified with the building of capital. The 'geological layers of commodities' is interesting, I'd like to call it something like the 'fractalization of desire and production', in which commodities take on the character of a corpuscle of embodied desires, layers of advertising and identity-signalling at the same time as the real production of commodities becomes spatially dispersed. And of course these new layers of commodities need their own characteristic science - but I don't really think it's fair to dismiss entire disciplines as sciences of domination. Unless it's meant in something close to the formal sense of techne in Heidegger.

43. Whereas in the primitive phase of capitalist accumulation, “political economy sees in the proletarian only the worker” who must receive the minimum indispensable for the conservation of his labor power, without ever seeing him “in his leisure and humanity,” these ideas of the ruling class are reversed as soon as the production of commodities reaches a level of abundance which requires a surplus of collaboration from the worker. This worker, suddenly redeemed from the total contempt which is clearly shown him by all the varieties of organization and supervision of production, finds himself every day, outside of production and in the guise of a consumer, seemingly treated as an adult, with zealous politeness. At this point the humanism of the commodity takes charge of the worker’s “leisure and humanity,” simply because now political economy can and must dominate these spheres as political economy. Thus the “perfected denial of man” has taken charge of the totality of human existence.

Debord's fleshing out this generalised commodification again - tracing out the transformation of the proletarian into the consumer. I think it's worth pausing here and reflecting on what extra is added by thinking of a proletarian as a consumer rather than as a proletarian tout court.

First, C-M-C' doesn't change insofar as the proletarians will still have to sell their wage labour to partake in the expanded sphere of commodities. But someone whose typical 'moment' in the circulation of capital is M-C-M' is still a consumer 'in his leisure and humanity'. On the level of ideology, there is a lessened distinction between the proletarian and the bourgeoise. The 'humanism of the commodity' is probably referring to the commodities (and the subdomain of image objects with its privileged status) and their relations mediating all of social life.

I don't think this is too much of an exaggeration, and there's certainly a sense in which it's true. Socialising where I live is almost always organised around an activity requiring money expenditure - movies, potlucks, smoking etc for raw consumption, skiing and other activities for closer personal bonds -. There are not that many opportunities to socialise if you're bookish even working at a university. My friends in Britain report similar things, socialising is mediated by the 'social event' - which typically also generates hyper-commodified image objects (on social media) and subjectivises people to make these objects 'in their leisure and humanity'. While it is socially necessary to organise around commodities in the broad sense - this is the kernel of commodity fetishism in the old sense -, we voluntarily - in most senses - organise ourselves on social media and live a kind of 'shadow life' therein. Without this 'shadow life' we are reclusive social subjects, despite social media offering new forms of isolation and widespread commodification in the previously discussed senses.

The humanism of the commodity also has a vacuous sense as a personal brand, in which a person's personality itself is transformed into a use value and its dark mirror, exchange value.

Haven't had a lot of time this weekend for this, but I did read a decent amount of the article, which is a fairly comprehensive critique of the aspect of the theory it deals with, which I hadn't been aware of. And I read a few other bits and pieces too. So, looks like they took philosophy, tried to make it science and ended up with—largely—pseudoscience. There's political wish fulfilment written all over the quality/quantity notion, for example. Oh, "leaps!". How convenient. Just what we need. And Stalin's diamat seems to mix in some self-serving political elements with quantity and quality relations becoming a metaphor and justification for (although maybe I'm reading too much into it) the fierce social stratification he imposed (the nomanklatura represent a leap in quality, so it's only natural they should get all the good stuff, and so on—came across a quote for that, but can't find it at the minute). Anyway, as a theory, it falls down on testability, precision, logical consistency, and parsimony at least. I don't know though from what I've read if Debord was mostly just paying lip service to it.

44. The spectacle is a permanent opium war which aims to make people identify goods with commodities and satisfaction with survival that increases according to its own laws. But if consumable survival is something which must always increase, this is because it continues to contain privation. If there is nothing beyond increasing survival, if there is no point where it might stop growing, this is not because it is beyond privation, but because it is enriched privation.

Difficult to interpret without an appeal to the logic of dialectic. We have growth internalising its own negation (privation) and expanding while/due to manifesting the negation with transformed character. Maybe an undialectical heresy of interpretation could be:

"Economic growth sustains itself to the extent that it incorporates the creation of new desires and needs", run away positive feedback. It's usually possible to transpose the description of dialectical transformations into cybernetic ones by attempting to characterise the material factors the internalised negation/opposition expands over and how they function as a dual condition of possibility and continual source of actualisation. In this case, economic growth is coupled with the commodification of everything. We have the commodification of social potentials through advertising and the opportunity costs of omitted adverts; and thus growth is efficiently coupled to the generation of advertising marks.

Wars are usually voluntary in some sense too, they're chosen. The spectacle isn't volitional though. Reading war figuratively to give something superlative to the description.

Haven't had a lot of time this weekend for this, but I did read a decent amount of the article, which is a fairly comprehensive critique of the aspect of the theory it deals with, which I hadn't been aware of. And I read a few other bits and pieces too. So, looks like they took philosophy, tried to make it science and ended up with—largely—pseudoscience. There's political wish fulfilment written all over the quality/quantity notion, for example. Oh, "leaps!". How convenient. Just what we need. And Stalin's diamat seems to mix in some self-serving political elements with quantity and quality relations becoming a metaphor and justification for (although maybe I'm reading too much into it) the fierce social stratification he imposed (the nomanklatura represent a leap in quality, so it's only natural they should get all the good stuff, and so on—came across a quote for that, but can't find it at the minute). Anyway, as a theory, it falls down on testability, precision, logical consistency, and parsimony at least. I don't know though from what I've read if Debord was mostly just paying lip service to it or what?

I don't know Debord's position on it. My intuition is similar to yours - it's pseudoscientific claptrap at best, authoritarian newspeak at worst. If the typologies of Marxism on wiki are reliable in providing broad strokes distinctions, the Marxism of the Situationist movement was very critical of Mao and Stalin and considered itself even more left! I'm just hoping that there's nothing which can't be translated out of the diamat accent...

Been busy with other abstract things competing for my attention. I wanted to leave this here for future comment. What would Debord think of messages like this?

No one likes ads. We know that. But without ads this site simply could not exist.
Please be fair to us and others and consider turning them on.
Alternatively, for £1.29 ($2) you can turn off ads permanently (one-off payment!)

Well I finished the book today. Breaking it down point by point and then expanding on each of them on here was very time consuming. I'll write up chapter summaries and criticisms over the next while, and try to ape the style because Debord absolutely encourages (not figuratively, he literally asks for it) damning critique while borrowing his voice.

Very condensed summaries for the first few chapters are as follows.

Chapter 1 - essentially a phenomenology of the spectacle, looking at how it structures experiences and how that enstructurating is related to a Marxian conception of the economy. The major theoretical highlight, in my view, is some notion of equivalence between:

(1) the passivity of consumption
(2) the alienation of people from each-other
(3) the alienation of people from themselves
(4) the coupling of 1,2,3 reproducing 1,2,3
(5) the equivalence of (4) with the valorisation -the generation of social necessity- of passive consumption.

It's kind of a knot, the spectacle as a social process which delimits the social and then projects that delimitation to people in general. The equivalence being a kind of coimplication - if (1) is occuring it requires and induces (2) etc. That the spectacle as a process does something very strange to all the different ways time is measured when considering 1->3 as ways people spend time (time as a commodity) comes back in chapter 5 and 6.

Chapter 2 - looking at how the spectacle is implicit in the commodity form, it's a Marx reference heavy chapter. Debord is drawing out the social and economic implications of the commodification of everything. To reference a recent discussion with @StreetlightX, it's an interpretation of commodification as substrate independent. Debord doesn't put it this way, but a central point is that space of possibilities for being an entrepreneur is essentially limitless, since commodity production also contains the production of desire for those commodities. Separation of commodities into discretized units within production (congealed lumps of human labour) induces the 'successive' character of the spectacle.

It is a series of events which has forgotten their generating time expenditures (actions). This discretisation - the simplification of time as time expenditure within a work day links back to chapter 1 and creates a space for the analysis of social and spectacular time in chapters 5 and 6 respectively.e substrate independence of commodification also plays a role in chapter 7, in which substrate independence is generalized to production process independence - providing a partial account of why it was so easy for capitalism to flourish in countries that sustained powerful workers movements after the movements died.

Chapter 3 -
is largely a tirade on the spectacle as a primary generator of false consciousness. In delimiting what is socially permitted, it simultaneously monopolizes the conceptual scheme for public expression. There is a kind of 'social democracy of images' which comes to dominate every aspect of our social lives. This is quite neatly expressed, IMO, through these lyrics from Bomb the Music Industry's 'All Ages Shows', which I'll reference again later:

All of my work was done
I turned the TV on and I forgot that I can turn it off

We live up on the top
They leave the door unlocked
So just come in
I don't need to buzz you up
And I never go anywhere

as a primary generator of false consciousness, it also structures how opinions change over time - the analogy of an externally generated conceptual scheme for social life is useful again here. This structuring of opinions over time is also an annihilation of history, in the sense that the spectacle delimits what is and is not part of the current narrative; modes of expression have their conditions of possibility in the conceptual scheme of their presentation. Thus, the spectacle is a 'chatter of the ruling class to itself'.

Chapters 4 to the end resist condensed summary, they're concerned with the transformation of 'the historical subject of revolution' and how it relates to the prefigured 'temporality of the spectacle' and the spatiality of global commodity production. Debord takes Soviet Russia's political climate as an early model of spectacular production (brief analogy - think of the show trials as a series of images imposed on the Russian proletariat delimiting the sphere of legitimate political activity), then looks at the distinctions between Marxian 'linear time of revolutions' - in which history culminates deterministically, the 'linear time' of the ruling class and how it constrains and develops the spectacle and concept of history at work in a populace.

A suggestive hyper-condensed summary might be: we react to the 'generators' of social life and history is indexed to the salient events which are presented, which has a useful resonance ideological state apparatuses; only the spectacle is not spatiotemporally localised, it is a generator of social temporality and a reflection of the disgust capitalist production has to geographical boundaries. The subject of history, in terms of how it is refracted by and projected into the spectacle, becomes the satiated consumer, abstracted from all of their history. From my notes:

The historical subject of bureaucracy underwent a transformation to the corporation. Thus the geographic limits placed on the domain of any specific ideology was gently destroyed through the universality of international market competition and its corresponding laws. The working class, those subordinated to this now delocalized corporate power, was thus abstracted away from its geographic localisations and is now a silent witness to its determinations in the distributed network of negotiations and trade constituting global markets.

Then, the phenomenology in chapters 1->4 of the worker's time expenditure culminates in a description of the conditioned 'cyclical' (really cylindrical) time of the work action/day/month/year. Lastly how the spectacle penetrates and structures the remaining time (helpful analogy - TV schedules as organizers of proletarian leisure time relativizing its expenditure to the continuous time of image production). Then there's a big but sympathetic fuck you to art which I don't understand as anything but a leftist intellectual insistence on the transformative nature of 'real revolutionary art' on populaces.

The final chapter invites the reader to produce a critical conception of what is universal in humankind, what new organisations will facilitate resistance to the terrifying power in coupled imperialism and global markets? What remains of humanity when the historical subject is a legal person rather than a person? Debord invites us to think carefully - what new practices can return humanity to humanity? How do we act politically in an age where politics has been separated from its people? Where 'what is to be done' is a maxim to make the headlines...

Edit: I forgot to include the second set of lyrics from the song. They're apposite in describing the temporality induced by working life under the spectacle:

In a trashed room in 1996
A fourteen year old punk and in a flash I'm my parents
And we'll never know love, 'cause I was too busy talking to my Green Day posters
They never said nothing to me...

Can you stay here?
Can we blast the Descendents?
Can we turn our phones off and get lost in The Simpsons?
I feel inches away from getting swallowed by darkness
And I know that you're tired, but can you draw back the curtains for me?