Society of the spectacle
Explanation
The society of the spectacle is the central thesis of the homonymous book by Guy Debord (1931-1994), published in 1967. Debord was the principal theorist of the Situationist International (1957-1972), a group of avant-garde artists, intellectuals and activists who radicalised surrealist and Marxist ideas, with enormous influence on the French May 1968. The Society of the Spectacle is one of the most penetrating works for thinking about contemporary consciousness.
The fundamental thesis is that advanced capitalism has reached a phase in which the whole life of societies in which modern conditions of production reign presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation. The commodity not only dominates as thing (as in Marx's Capital with its commodity fetishism) but has colonised all of life in the form of images, representations, spectacles.
The spectacle, according to Debord, is not simply the media (television, cinema, advertising) but a social relation between people mediated by images. Everyday life is impoverished, becomes passive contemplation of representations, of celebrities, of consumption, of lifestyles. The contemporary subject no longer acts but watches; no longer lives but consumes images of life. The structural separation between producers and product is generalised to the whole of experience.
Debord distinguishes between concentrated spectacle (totalitarianisms, where a leader or party embodies the spectacle: fascism, Stalinism) and diffuse spectacle (liberal democratic capitalism, where the spectacle is distributed across multiple stars, products, fashions). In Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988) he adds the integrated spectacle, which combines the two previous forms in contemporary societies (media + market + state).
The Situationist response was the détournement (diversion, critical appropriation of existing cultural elements to subvert their meaning) and the construction of situations (active generation of moments of authentic, unmediated, collective, creative life). The urban drift (conscious wandering through the city to discover its psychogeography), the artistic-political creations of the Situationists, the May 1968 interventions (graffiti such as Beneath the cobblestones, the beach, Forbid forbidding, All power to the imagination) express this search for non-spectacular life.
For the theory of consciousness, the society of the spectacle proposes that contemporary consciousness is fundamentally a spectated consciousness: we experience ourselves through the supposed gaze of others, through the images of ourselves that we produce and consume (selfies, social networks, personal branding), through continuous comparisons with celebrities and media ideals. This intuition has proven astonishingly prophetic: with social networks, the internet, the digital image culture, Debord's analysis is even more applicable today than in 1967. Contemporary authors such as Byung-Chul Han (The Burnout Society, The Transparency Society), Jonathan Crary (24/7, on capitalism and sleep), extend and update these analyses. Consciousness as spectacle internalised by itself is one of the most enduring diagnoses of contemporary critical thought.
Strengths
- Prescient diagnosis of image culture.
- Direct applicability to the contemporary digital sphere.
- Practical proposals of resistance (situationism).
- Powerful literary synthesis.
Main critiques
- Totalising: is any sphere left non-spectacular?
- Romanticisation of 'direct life' problematic.
- Risk of paralysing pessimism.