the society of the spectacle by guy debord

The spectacle isn’t just an advertisement on TV but a way of being in the world which fundamentally affects our experience and our relationships with other people. The Image and the Fleeting World “Screen ad for swedish oat drink”, 10 October 2020, by Arno Senoner via Unsplash Anything can be appropriated and sold back to the people. You throw a rock at the spectacle, it puts it in a museum. It sells them back their revolt in the form of Che Guevara T shirts for 6.99$ and a discount on Das Capital from Amazon. It takes every aspect of life and sells it back to the consumer, completely sterilized of its vitality. It is the oil which keeps the engine running, the viewer passive, lost in the stream of images. Without the spectacle, the system malfunctions. The spectacle isn’t just a cherry on top of the current social order, it is its very essence. People find themselves caught in its net and the power of the spectacle seems inescapable. The system of spectacle marks a negation of life.

Quite to the contrary, the spectacle is reality, the necessary alienation which supports the system from which it grows. The spectacle doesn’t mean “fake” or “illusory” for Debord. The current system doesn’t confront us as an actual physical entity given to us directly in our experience but as a reified net of social relations, all entangled in the accumulation of capital. It also serves as a justification of the current system and mode of production. The spectacle for Guy Debord is the dominant model of life, the heart of the mode of production. It always turns out that the product which was supposed to solve all your problems didn’t actually do that, again and again. Guy Debord asks us: if these products are supposed to fill some deep desire inside us, why do they get replaced in every cycle of production by a new product? Each advertisement is itself an admission of the lie in the previous one. As soon as this is revealed, a new product that promises the same things is revealed to the consumer who gladly plays along, over and over again. With mass production, the product loses its unique aura. On one hand it tries to present itself as a unique, ground-breaking object that can make you become one of the select few people able to possess it at the same time, it is produced on a mass scale. In every new product, there exists tension. The society of the spectacle and mass media began to emerge. The average family could now afford a TV and a radio. The attention was turned towards consumption: how to get people to buy what was produced, to get them to feel like they needed it. Taxes on the rich were relatively high across advanced capitalist countries, which brought about higher wages and better standards of living to the rest of the population.

After WW2, capitalism entered a golden age.

The society of the spectacle by guy debord