Page 130 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle 115
here is that, in a mass-media society, the commodity form and the
media become so well aligned that they mutually reinforce and
inter-penetrate each other. A crucial aspect of Debord’s development
of the theorists we have previously encountered in these pages, is his
account of how the environment created by this intertwining
assumes a society-wide presence – McLuhan’s notion that the medium
is the message. Whatever the nominal content of the mass media,
Debord argues that its ultimate effect is to be found and felt in the
environment it creates irrespective of any attempts to use individual
media for specific purposes.
If nineteenth-century capitalism concentrated primarily on the
worker as a source of mechanical labour, and treated other needs
and desires (for instance those of leisure and pleasure) as irrelevant,
then the capitalism of the spectacle involves bringing these external
3
aspects of life inside the circuit of capital . Subsequently, under the
spectacle the proletariat finds itself ‘suddenly redeemed from the
total contempt which is clearly shown … by all the varieties of
organization’ and ‘in the guise of the consumer’ is subject to
displays of ‘zealous politeness’ (1977: N43). In this manner capital-
ism recuperates the elements of life from which the worker was
formerly alienated, but in doing so it in fact alienates all the more.
Moreover, to the extent that alienated life forms the basis of the
spectacle, life is doubly alienated: under the spectacle we are alienated
from alienation by alienation! The society of the spectacle thus represents a
general process of abstraction that proceeds from a pre-capitalist
condition of unmediated ‘being’, to the original distinguishing
feature of capitalism – its investment in possessing or ‘having’ – to a
further stage of evolution, namely, the spectacular valorization of
image or ‘appearing’ from which ‘all actual ‘‘having’’ must draw its
immediate prestige and its ultimate function’ (1977: N17). The
spectacle becomes life’s double – the material real becomes increas-
ingly subordinate to its mediated appearance as a society-wide
expression of the original move from use-value to exchange-value.
Debord concisely defines the spectacle as ‘the concrete inversion
of life … the autonomous movement of the non-living’ (1977: N2).
It is a spectre – a form of ‘non-life’, the accumulation of dead
labour converted into images that haunt the living. Although the
image is privileged and most immediate expression of the spectacle
it is not simply ‘a product of the techniques for the dissemination of
images’ but a ‘social relation among people mediated by images’. It
is an image of the world that has become concrete. Just as exchange
(in the form of the commodity) remade the object of human labour
in its own image, so the spectacle as a radical disembedding of
exchange from physicality remakes the world literally in its own
image. This results in a culturally pervasive and domineering tautol-

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