With and Against Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle: A Case Study of Live Earth, its Politics, its Contradictions, and its Political Potential

This thesis explores the environmental movement’s controversial use of spectacular media to incite socio-ecological change. An analysis of Al Gore’s 2007 Live Earth event forms the basis for an exploration, critique, and reformulation of spectacular theory within the context of the climate crisis. An exploration of Guy Debord’s influential theory of spectacular society, as articulated in his 1967 text The Society of the Spectacle, engages Live Earth’s spectacular environmentalism with the following theoretical problem: does the spectacle simply reiterate a discourse and mode of interaction that re-inscribes the destructive network of capital and consumption by existing as a consumable object, or are the effects of the spectacle less predetermined? Furthermore, if there exists within the contemporary spectacular event some recoverable political potential, does this potential outweigh the negative material waste created by the event? In the first part of this thesis, Debord’s understanding of spectacular organization provides a forceful critique of an event such as Live Earth; however, three limitations to an Debordian understanding of the contemporary spectacular commodity are identified: th