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32 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
published in France in 1967, this text takes a ‘situationist’ perspective on
broadcast media. Debord’s argument is that capitalist culture presents
itself as an immense assemblage of spectacle. But spectacle for him is not
just ‘a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated
by images’ (epigram no. 4). The spectacle even promotes itself as an agent
of the unification of society as a whole. It is the domain of society which
‘concentrates all gazing and all consciousness’ (epigram no. 3).
For Debord, the modern media, for which he contends the term ‘mass
media’ is a ‘superficial manifestation’ (aphorism 24), are agents both of
political power and of urbanization. They secure the complacency of the
population to inequality and hierarchy:

The oldest specialization, the specialization of power, is at the root of the
spectacle. The spectacle is thus a specialized activity which speaks for all
the others. It is the diplomatic representation of hierarchic society to itself,
where all other expression is banned. (aphorism 23)

At the same time the spectacle is a practical agent for the dual unification
and separation of individuals around the principle of private consumption:

The spectacle originates in the loss of the unity of the world, and the gigantic
expansion of the modern spectacle expresses the totality of this loss: the
abstraction of all specific labor and the general abstraction of the entirety
of production are perfectly rendered in the spectacle, whose mode of being
concrete is precisely abstraction. (aphorism 29)

Debord describes the situation of the spectacle – as simply one represen-
tation of the real – splitting off and separating from the real as though it
has transcended it:

The spectacle is nothing more than the common language of this separa-
tion. What binds the spectators together is no more than an irreversible
relation at the very centre which maintains their isolation. The spectacle
re-unites the separate, but re-unites it as separate (aphorism 29).

In Debord’s account, a view which is restated by Fredric Jameson (1991)
nearly two decades later, the image is – following a somewhat Lukácsian
trajectory – presented as ‘the final form of commodity reification’.
Six years prior to Debord’s publication, across the Atlantic, the
phenomenon was receiving theoretical attention in the form of Daniel
13
Boorstin’s publication of The Image (1962). Boorstin saw television and
cinema as an extension of the de-naturing and de-realization of modern
society wrought by the electronic management of the environment. In
modern society,

distinctions of social classes, of times and seasons, have been blurred as
never before. With steam heat we are too hot in winter; with air conditioning