the society of the spectacle by guy debord

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. The extraordinary new conditions in which this entire generation has lived constitute a comprehensive summary of all that, henceforth, the spectacle will forbid and also all that it will permit.After WW2, capitalism entered a golden age.

Quite simply, the spectacle’s domination has succeeded in raising a whole generation moulded to its laws. “In all that has happened in the last twenty years, the most important change lies in the very continuity of the spectacle. Now finally available in a superb English translation approved by the author, Debord’s text remains as crucial as ever for understanding the contemporary effects of power, which are increasingly inseparable from the new virtual worlds of our rapidly changing image / information culture. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960s to the present, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life in the late twentieth century. Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative as Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle.

The society of the spectacle by guy debord