| The author very much wanted to go back in time, to enjoy how things used to be (before "The Spectacle") -- at least, in the sense that they want to restore human-experience to what they perceive its historical condition to have been. When the author critiques a mythical "Golden Age" in the part you quoted, they were critiquing a specific mythical "Golden Age" that they attributed to Fascism. Overall, the author's basically describing how a memetic-monster, "The Spectacle", emerged and sustains itself as a parasite on humanity. The author wants to go back to how things were before the parasite started taking over. The author really spreads things out, but for some quick quotes to highlight their position... 1. The author argues that "The Spectacle" had a beginning: > [73:] The spectacle began when the bourgeoisie won the economy, and became visible when the bourgeois politicians put their interests into action within politics. ...which subsumed humanity's ability to live directly once it began: > [73:] [...] Everything that had been directly lived has been relegated to history. 2. After it emerged, "The Spectacle" then went through a growing process: > [39:] The contemporary inability of the language to adequately describe the spectacle is itself evidence of the enormous development of the spectacle. While this development may not yet be evenly distributed across all localities, this change has progressed to such an extent that it is verified by the existence of a globalized marketplace. 3. "The Spectacle"'s development gradually eroded humanity's connection to reality itself: > [48:] Exchange value was previously understood as derived from use value. Now, however, within the inverted reality of the spectacle, [...] the actual use value of the commodity has been diminished as its connection to directly lived reality has been gradually eroded. 4. The author advocates a return to prior existence, before all of this stuff ("The Spectacle") started happening: > [178:] A consciousness of history that threatens the spectacle is to discover the force potentially capable of reappropriating space for lived time. 5. In the final paragraph of the book (Paragraph 221), the author sums up their position on returning humanity to (the author's perception of) historical-existence: > [221:] Self-emancipation in the contemporary period is emancipation from our material basis within falsified reality. This “historic mission of establishing truth in the world” [...] by returning power [...]. [...] This can only be made possible when individuals are “directly linked to world history”—where dialog within the council arms itself to defeat its own conditions. --- To note it, the terminology of a mythical-"Golden Age" tends to be derisive; even those who believe in mythical-golden-ages wouldn't tend to use such terminology. So, I'm not claiming that the author uses those words or explicitly describes their position as such. Rather, my point's that the author is using that basic pattern: stuff used to be better in the past (humans lived "directly experienced" life, things were more "authentic", etc.), then bad things emerged ("The Spectacle" emerged and started subsuming human-experience, made things inauthentic, etc.), and now people should try to get back to how things used to be ("emancipation from our material basis within falsified reality", "returning power", accomplish "“historic mission of establishing truth in the world”", "reappropriating space for lived time", etc.). That said, the author does seem rather bleak about being able to return things to how they were before; it comes off as quite defeatist and morbid. Unfortunately, the author may not have been particularly mentally well.. their way of thinking appears to have been diseased. |
He isn't advocating for a return to the past, or to the structures of the past. For Debord, Spectacle exists independently of humanity; history, however is specific to human beings, as it corresponds to humanity's existence in time, and to its awareness of that existence. He contends that human beings are capable of shaping and determining their own lives and circumstances. Consequently, history, in his view, is something that can be made: we can consciously shape our own existence in time. His critique of Spectacle is that Spectacle has dominated history for its own purposes, beyond the control of humanty.
History, therefore, is not just a retrospective catalog of events for Debord, and nor is it just the discipline of studying such events. Instead, it is a process through which human agents shape themselves and their world, and through which they come to know themselves through such activity. This isn't a return to a golden past, but an assertion of control and emancipation from the existing force of Spectacle that determines history outside our control.
> 5. In the final paragraph of the book (Paragraph 221), the author sums up their position on returning humanity to (the author's perception of) historical-existence: >> [221:] Self-emancipation in the contemporary period is emancipation from our material basis within falsified reality. This “historic mission of establishing truth in the world” [...] by returning power [...]. [...] This can only be made possible when individuals are “directly linked to world history”—where dialog within the council arms itself to defeat its own conditions.
Here again, he is advocating not a return to some mythic past, but to take conscious control of history, to create meaning in our own lives. I fail to see where he is advocating for a return, nor "what" to return to.