Page 134 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle 119
+ Awareness of pseudo-events becomes knowledge: the self-referential
media community that decides the newsworthiness of items is
reinforced by a cultural environment in which knowledge of
pseudo-events increasingly becomes more important than more
traditional forms of knowledge.
+ The geometric progression of pseudo-events: as a result of all the
previous factors, pseudo-events propagate further pseudo-events to
provide the basis of the contemporary media-sponsored blurring
of reality and the simulated world of media. In Boorstin’s words:
‘By this new Gresham’s Law of American public life, counterfeit
5
happenings tend to drive spontaneous happenings out of circula-
tion’ (Boorstin [1961] 1992: 40). The exception to this trend is
the periodic occurrence of truly spontaneous events such as
Hurricane Katrina. However, even here, there is a tendency for
reporting to quickly revert to the grammar of pseudo-events once
the initial trauma of the natural disaster has been extensively
covered.

The alienation of the image: separation perfected
Debord argues that Boorstin’s pseudo-event does not equate to his
concept of the spectacle because he thinks he can exempt private
life, or the notion of ‘the honest commodity’, in other words to
uphold a preserved space which is not infiltrated by the values of the
spectacle:

Boorstin finds that the results he depicts are caused by the
unfortunate … encounter of an oversized technical apparatus
for image diffusion with an excessive attraction to the pseudo-
sensational. Boorstin fails to understand that the proliferation
of ‘pseudo-events’ which he denounces flows from the simple fact
that … history itself haunts modern society like a spectre,
pseudo-histories are constructed at every level of consumption
of life in order to preserve the threatened equilibrium of
present frozen time.
(1977: N200; emphasis added)
The spectacle is part of the process of alienation and separation
produced by the combined and related effects of capitalism’s
increasing commodification of traditional social life and the decline
of aura brought about by media technologies. Capitalist production
fragmented the life-world of the worker. In other words it alienated
him from the object of his labour and separated him from the
traditional creative experience he would previously enjoy with fellow
workers and his role within the wider community. This alienation
was a by-product of the institution of industrial capitalism, more

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