Page 123 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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108 Then
social conditions so created are suffused with commodity values. The
Frankfurt School’s analysis addresses this qualitative change in terms
of increased alienation and exploitation from a relatively traditional
Marxist perspective. Debord’s analysis provides a fresh critical insight
that focuses more upon the role the image plays in this alienation.
We have previously seen how Kracauer explored some of the cultural
implications of Marx’s account of the commodity form. A defining
feature of capitalism, is the way in which the specific properties of
an object (use-value) become subordinated to a new abstract,
generic property (exchange-value). Using concepts such as Ratio and
mass ornament, Kracauer is a key critical theorist for the way in which
he traces how this process of abstraction reaches further and further
into cultural life so that the previously discrete and autonomous
realm of culture increasingly becomes merely the aesthetic reflex of
underlying economic influences. Critical accounts of the media from
Debord onwards have focused upon this process of abstraction and
its various manifestations of which Benjamin and Kracauer were only
able to see the beginnings.
In the age of mass media, exchange-value has in its turn morphed
into the society-wide spread of sign-value. Heavily processed images
have now become a defining social category. The mass media are no
longer instruments of re-presentation, as mirrors of pre-existing
socio-political conditions, but, as McLuhan argues, they can be
described as total environments. The media annexes and transforms
its social and cultural milieu, refashioning it in its own image. As
such media come to dictate the structure and expression of everyday
life, they permeate and determine all personal and collective rela-
tions, they construct and determine the wishes, desires and thoughts
of the individual, who becomes merely a relay station, a medium
among media. This situation in its totality, Debord christened the
spectacle, and he believed that its logic lay beneath the transformation
of the West into a consumerist culture in the post-war period.

Debord’s theory of the spectacle: the background

Before dealing in detail with his key concepts, it is worth outlining
the very particular circumstances under which Debord formulated
his ideas. He is unique among our assembled company in having
never attended university (Hussey 2001). He operated quite outside
the world of scholarly journals, conferences, and research grants.
Thus, while his life corresponded with the great flowering of radical
thought that took place in post-war France, he was far removed from
the world of its more celebrated intellectual stars whom he regarded
as bourgeois ideologues incapable of truly radical thinking. His
sphere was that of the avant-garde and underground politics with

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