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 Proletariat as Subject and RepresentationĨ.After WW2, capitalism entered a golden age.
As Debord noted in his follow-up work, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988), "spectacular domination has succeeded in raising an entire generation molded to its laws."Ĥ. Most people today have scarcely any awareness of pre-spectacle history, let alone of anti-spectacle possibilities. It has, in fact, become even more pertinent than ever, because the spectacle has become more all-pervading than ever - to the point that it is almost universally taken for granted. This makes it more of a challenge, but it is also why it remains so pertinent nearly half a century after its original publication while countless other social theories and intellectual fads have come and gone. Contrary to popular misconceptions, Debord’s book is neither an ivory tower “philosophical” discourse nor a mere expression of “protest.” It is a carefully considered effort to clarify the most fundamental tendencies and contradictions of the society in which we find ourselves.
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