Page 131 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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ogy that is powerfully resistant to perspectives other than its own
self-enclosed one. The spectacle in the form of the media, fashion,
advertising and the entire spectrum of mass-produced objects con-
tinually affirms itself: its ‘form and content are … the total justifica-
tion of the existing system’s conditions and goals’ (1977: N6).
Debord’s thesis is explicitly iconoclastic and characterized by a
4
certain scopophobia – a contempt or hatred for images . Recalling
McLuhan’s delineation of the literate, ocular-centric European sen-
sibility, Debord regards the spectacle as the heir of the ‘Western
philosophical project’ and its commitment to ‘comprehend activity
in terms of the categories of seeing’, which has been realized in the
form of media technologies and the ‘precise technical reality which
grew out of this thought’ (1977: N19). The spectacle becomes a
paradoxical concretization of an otherwise immaterial ocular-centric
bias based on images to create a technological milieu in which
abstract images produce very real effects.

Boorstin and the pseudo-event
Additional insight into Debord’s spectacle can be approached
through the work of an American contemporary – Daniel Boorstin.
While far removed from the avant-garde aesthetic and revolutionary
Marxist politics of the Situationists, Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to
Pseudo-Events in America (first published in 1961) nevertheless articu-
lated the crucial elements of the spectacular society, and in this
respect demonstrates that it was not simply a Parisian phantasm but
a phenomenon apparent even to the soberest of commentators
(Boorstin was a historian by training, and The Image his only work on
the media). Boorstin argued that contemporary (that is, those of
1961) media operating in combination had resulted in the emer-
gence of what he calls the pseudo-event, which had the following
closely related and cumulative characteristics:
1 It is not spontaneous: it has been planned or spun in advance. For
example, a press conference or staged interview. Reminiscent of
Benjamin’s account of the way in which traditional aura becomes
undermined by mechanical reproductions, and prefiguring
Baudrillard’s later writings about the undermining of reality by
simulations, Boorstin argues: ‘We begin to be puzzled about what
is really the “original” of an event. The authentic news record of
what “happens” or is said comes increasingly to seem to be what
is given out in advance … The story prepared “for future release”
acquires an authenticity that competes with that of the actual
occurrences on the scheduled date’ (Boorstin [1961] 1992: 19).
2 It is produced, from the beginning, in order to be reported or reproduced.
The press release illustrates this particular quality of an event
whose whole meaning resides only within the media itself and

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