provides a number of important theoretical insights for critically understanding the transformation of the spectacle and its role today. According to Debord, the spectacle that has emerged represents a new form of social control that is quite different from, but contains the political traces of, earlier forms of spectacle that were instrumental to fascism. Debord views the spectacle as a product of the market and a new form of cultural politics. He argues that the spectacle represents a “new stage in the accumulation of capital [in which] more and more facets of human activity and elements of everyday life were being brought under the control of the market.”46 The spectacle, in other words, is no longer put to use for the creation of a mythical unity of superior beings. It now operates for its own purpose—complete commercialization, commodification, and marketization. Indeed, in its willful manipulation of desires through the sophisticated deployment of mechanisms that prompt people to tolerate conditions that ordinarily would appear politically oppressive, the spectacle is in fact, a predatory strategy and politically fascistic. Such mechanisms resonate with Reich’s concerns about the ability to manipulate large sectors of society by inducing a form of mass psychosis of consent that manipulates reasoning and conscience and thus normalizes the most abhorrent form of subjugation and violence.
Under late capitalism, the spectacle has been reforged in the crucible of mass consumption and the mass media, producing new modes for power to advantage itself through the domination of everyday life. Although the spectacle is often viewed by the public as mere entertainment, disconnected from power and politics, Debord insists that “the spectacle is the self-portrait of power in the age of power’s totalitarian rule over the conditions of existence.”47 For Debord, new technological developments in communications now establish the mode of information as a category as important for reproducing social life as labor had been for Marx. Moreover, for Debord, the society of the spectacle is not a discrete element of social existence; it has become a constituting activity that refigures the very nature of common sense and social relations.
According to Debord, the “whole of life [now] presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.”48 The educational force of the culture, whether it be “news or propaganda, advertising or the actual consumption of entertainment” has been transformed into a spectacle, which “epitomizes the prevailing model of social life.”49 Debord rightly recognizes that the dynamics of domination under late capitalism can no longer be explained exclusively within the primacy of the economic sphere and its exploitative mode and relations of production. Rejecting conventional Marxist notions of social reproduction, Debord follows the lead of Antonio Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, and other neo-Marxist theorists arguing that domination is secured increasingly through “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images,”50 and that capitalism has successfully employed an image industry to transform commodities into appearances and history into staged events. Under such circumstances, the “society of the spectacle” “proclaims the predominance of appearances and asserts that all human life, which is to say all social life, is mere appearance.”51 The degree to which society permits visual mediation—screen culture—to become its primary mode of education, self-understanding, and socializing is the degree to which it opens the door for spectacle to dominate as a depoliticizing substitute for unmediated social formations, thinking, and creativity. Thus, according to Debord, “any critique capable of apprehending the spectacle’s essential character must expose it as a visible negation of life—and as a negation of life that has invented a visual form for itself.”
In Debord’s theory, media have become the quintessential tool of contemporary capitalism, and consumerism is its legitimating ideology. Or, to cite Debord’s famous quip, “the spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.”52 What is crucial about Debord’s theory is that it connects the state’s investment in social reproduction to its commitment to, “and control of, the field of images—the alternative world conjured up by the new battery of ‘perpetual emotion machines’ of which TV was the dim pioneer and which now beckons the citizen every waking minute.”53 Not only is the world of images a structural necessity for capitalism, it affirms the primacy of the pedagogical as a crucial element of the political. It enforces “the submission of more and more facets of human sociability—areas of everyday life, forms of recreation, patterns of speech, idioms of local solidarity . . . to the deadly solicitation (the lifeless bright sameness) of the market.”54
By exposing how the spectacle colonizes everyday life, Debord shows how power operates through a merger of state and corporate forces that seek both to control the media through which society experiences itself and to completely depoliticize and redefine the agency of citizenry in terms of prefabricated choices of consumerism and the status of ownership. Under contemporary capitalism, state-sanctioned violence makes its mark through the prisons, courts, police surveillance, and other criminalizing forces; it also wages a form of symbolic warfare mediated by a regime of consumer-based images and staged events that narrow individual and social agency to the dictates of the marketplace, reducing the capacity for human aspirations and desires to needs embodied in the appearance of the commodity. In Debord’s terms, “the spectacle is the bad dream of modern society in chains, expressing nothing more than its wish for sleep.”55
Contemporary culture has long become a society organized around a vast array of commodities, various image-making technologies used to promote them, and numerous sites from which to circulate them that leaves no spaces for contemplating that other worlds are possible. For Debord, our “society of the spectacle” is a form of soft violence that perpetually cultures the conformity, inactivism, and passivity necessary to repress critical engagement and resistance by relentlessly privatizing, marginalizing, or openly criminalizing educational and liberatory forces.
Debord’s notion of the spectacle makes a significant contribution in mapping a new form of social control associated with the accumulation of capital. He makes clear that the whole industry of leisure, consumption, entertainment, advertising, fantasy, and other pedagogical apparatuses of media culture has become a crucial element of life, and thus a primary condition of politics. Debord does not argue that commodities were the source of domination. As Eugene L. Arva points out, Debord insists that “the system of mediation by representation (the world of the spectacle, if you wish) has come to bear more relevance than commodities themselves.”56 Participation in commodity culture and its symbolic networks, rather than simple ownership of commodities, has become an essential feature of social status and belonging. Debord thus furthers our understanding that domination has to be analyzed as part of a politics of consent in which all aspects of social life are increasingly shaped by the communication technologies under the control of corporate forces.
Although Debord has been accused of overestimating the all-encompassing power of the spectacle, media, and other control mechanisms of late capitalism (“a permanent opium war”),57 he never harbors the often politically crippling pessimism of the Frankfurt School. His Society of the Spectacle “reads, rather, as a warning against the paralysis of the senses, the lethargy of the mind, and the political inertia with which a primarily visually determined, visually accessible, and most visually livable reality threatens” any viable notion of the autonomous subject.58 He militates against the dystopian notion of the totally administered society and begins advancing forms of political rupture and cultural insurgency that connect individual and collective agency to historical critique and creative social transformation. For Debord, the struggle for collective freedom was impossible without self-emancipation.
Yet the enormous analytic challenge facing Debord reveals itself in precisely that which, in a globalizing post-9/11 world, his theory cannot sufficiently explain. As Lutz Koepnick points out, we now live in a culture “characterized by hybrid multimedia aggregates and diversified strategies of consumption.”59 Within this new era, technology and media merge, resulting in a massive cultural reorganization involving the production, distribution, and consumption of information and images. Not only has the old model of a monolithic system of media control and cultural
