Page 128 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

JOBNAME: McGraw−TaylorHarris PAGE: 7 SESS: 11 OUTPUT: Mon Oct 8 09:06:49 2007 SUM: 4AC7810F
/production/mcgraw−hill/booksxml/tayharris/chap05

Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle 113
turned and rerouted. The Situationists thus took adverts, comic
strips, section of film and inserted subversive commentaries.
Détournement is thus the creative re-appropriation of cultural frag-
ments that are then reassembled to expose the hidden dynamics of
consumer capitalism.

The Society of the Spectacle: the argument

The Society of the Spectacle, Debord’s major text was published in
French in 1967, and translated into English shortly after. It offers a
singularly timely, systematic and comprehensive account of the forces
at play within the new consumer society. At the most rudimentary
level the spectacle can be understood in terms of the infiltration of
the mass media (in particular visual media such as television, film,
and photography which offer vivid but essentially false images of
life) into many aspects of contemporary life.

Origins: commodity capital and consumerism

For Debord it would be a grave error to see the media and the
spectacle as synonymous. While The Society of the Spectacle can be
defined as one in which the media has an active role in creating
what passes for reality, such a society cannot be explained solely in
terms of media. An adequate account of the spectacle must describe
its genesis, that is, how a spectacular society emerges from an earlier
industrial capitalist society. Debord locates this in the processes of
commodification and reification as originally described by Marx and
developed more explicitly by Lukács . The spectacle represents an
2
unprecedented development within society due to the qualitative
change it brings to social experience and thus to this point Debord
is in agreement with Benjamin. Its nature is determined by the basic
operations of the capitalist system. This is set out most clearly in the
text’s second chapter ‘Commodity as spectacle’, prefaced by the
following citation from Lukács:
The commodity can only be understood in its undistorted
essence when it becomes the universal category of society as a
whole. Only in this context does the reification produced by
commodity relations assume decisive importance both for the
objective evolution of society and for the stance adopted by
men towards it. Only then does the commodity become crucial
for the subjugation of men’s consciousness to the forms in
which this reification finds expression … As labor is progres-
sively rationalized and mechanized man’s lack of will is

Kerrypress Ltd – Typeset in XML A Division: chap05 F Sequential 7

www.kerrypress.co.uk - 01582 451331 - www.xpp-web-services.co.uk
McGraw Hill - 152mm x 229mm - Fonts: New Baskerville