Page 122 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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5

Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle

Introduction

An important theme of the preceding chapters is the degree to
which mass communications align or co-opt the cultures and societies
in which they operate. For instance, Kracauer’s concept of the mass
ornament recognizes that media do not simply slot into prior social
structures, but serve to shape or restructure their whole environ-
ment in a complex mix of social and technical interactions (a point
further developed in McLuhan’s work). From this book’s critical
perspective, rather than media producing a qualitative change that
offers new forms of social empowerment, they represent a subtle but
pervasive vehicle for the enhancement of capitalist dynamics and
commodity values. In this chapter we explore the work of the French
activist and thinker Guy Debord (1932–94), and argue that the
account of the mass-media society presented in his most influential
text The Society of the Spectacle (first published in 1967) represents a
1
crucial moment of transition between those thinkers that we have
addressed in historical terms – representatives of the then, and
contemporary critical assessments of the role of the media now –
Debord’s concept of the spectacle represents a crucial hinge point
between the work of the Frankfurt School and those offered by later
figures encountered in Part 2. In presenting his thesis, Debord drew
heavily on the conceptual legacy of Hegelianism and Western
Marxism, and in this regard he employed the same theoretical ‘tool
kit’ as the Frankfurt School. This places him in a transitional
position, at once indebted to dialectics, while at the same time
furnishing the insights that allowed a later generation of media
critics (in particular Baudrillard) to break with this tradition and
fashion a ‘post-Marxist’ critique of media.
Debord’s thought is essential for a critical account of the contem-
porary mediascape. It further develops Benjamin’s key insight that
mechanical reproduction creates qualitative change in social condi-
tions (through its quantitative expansion of mediated content) by
adopting a more specific focus upon the ways in which those new

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