Page 135 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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120 Then
than a deliberate strategy. However, consumer capitalism as embod-
ied in the spectacle engages directly with the alienation of the
industrial process. The spectacle involves the recuperation of the
masses’ alienation – the very fact that the masses are distanced from
traditional values by the industrialized process of manufacture,
provides the space for the spectacle to be sold to them as an
additional aspect of manufacture, the manufacture of a pseudo-
reality to replace their traditional reality – hence Debord’s descrip-
tion of the spectacle as ‘separation perfected’.
The spectacle offers a false totality, an imminent but ultimately
elusive image of completion and integration, whose apparent cohe-
sion merely disguises actual alienation. The allure of the spectacle is
in direct proportion to the estrangement felt by its individual
members. Each product offered by the consumer society reflects the
lustre of the spectacle in its totality ‘every individual commodity is
justified in the name of grandeur of the production of the totality of
objects’ (1977: N65), and promises the consumer the chance to cross
the divide between their alienated, fallen state and spectacle’s
perfection. This lustre, however, being merely reflected, vanishes as
soon as the commodity is removed from its setting within the
spectacle, and becomes a mere object – the possession of an
alienated individual as distant as ever from the spectacle’s pseudo-
totality:
Therefore the already problematic satisfaction which is sup-
posed to come from the consumption of the whole, is falsified
immediately since the actual consumer can directly touch only
a succession of fragments of this commodity happiness, frag-
ments in which the quality attributed to the whole is obviously
missing every time.
(1977: N65)
This analysis is reminiscent of Adorno’s conception of the relation-
ship between the general and the particular within the culture
industry. Instead of the tension between the two that is indicative of
true art, in the culture industry and society of the spectacle, a false
identity is created so that in consuming commodities the buyer
continually buys into an illusion of fulfilment (Adorno’s notions that
‘the diner must be satisfied with the menu’ and we continue to
practise the magic of commodities upon ourselves). The spectacle is
the avowed enemy of all forms of community and (non-mediated)
collective action. All conceptions of collectivity are carefully policed,
and are either incorporated or, if resistant, stigmatized. The specta-
cle jealously guards its unifying force, it must be the only represen-
tation of the life-world it denies. Hence the importance the media
places on generating various forms of ersatz community – the
Banality TV explored in the following chapters. Banal and formulaic

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