Page 136 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle 121
intrigues are manufactured to imitate village life along with organ-
ized expressions of collective sentiment, such as national days of
mourning and televised ‘charithons’.

Time and space in the spectacle

We have established that for Debord the spectacle cannot be
reduced to the image and its technologies, which are the result of a
pre-existing dynamic within capitalism. The media emerges within an
environment already radically altered by capitalism, not least in the
form of a wide-ranging reconfiguration of the categories of space
and time in conformity with its demands. This is in keeping with our
previous exploration of Benjamin and Kracauer’s work given that, as
previously cited, Benjamin starts his Essay with an epigraph from
Paul Valéry claiming that time and space have been irretrievably
changed due to the advent of the camera, while Kracauer argues
that it profoundly alters traditional forms of human cognition and
memory. Building upon these insights by tracing more closely the
complex links between media technology and culture, Debord
argues that industrial capitalism involves an increasing spatialization
of time ‘a commodity-time, namely exchangeable units and the
suppression of the qualitative dimension’ (1977: N149). According to
Debord, spectacular capitalism represents a significantly more cultur-
ally invasive development from previous mode of industrial capital-
ism. The capitalism of the society of the spectacle colonizes those
aspects of life industrial capitalism still left alone. For example,
pre-capitalist time could be described as cyclical, it involved various
recurring cycles, marked by holidays, feasts, and so on.
Reminiscent of Kracauer’s ‘Travel and dance’ essay, in The Society of
the Spectacle we observe a ‘pseudo-cyclical time’ assembled from the
remnants of a pre-capitalist cyclical time. It subjects any cyclical
elements to manipulation as an opportunity for profit. Thus vaca-
tions, festivities, the alternation of working week and weekend, these
occasions serve as sites of consumption. Vacations are festivals of
image-consumption, in the sense that a certain image of leisure is
purchased in a form of conspicuous consumption, as well as the
consumption of images in the more restricted sense of taking
holiday snaps or ‘taking in the sights’. Spectacular time involves a
spatialization of cyclical time in accordance with the logic of
production. It is sold back to the producer qua consumer in the
form of time-saving goods, which in turn free up time for other
forms of consumption. In this fashion capitalism: ‘orientates itself
toward towards the sale of “completely equipped” blocks of time,
each one constituting a single unified commodity which integrates a
number of diverse commodities’ (1977: N152). The modern vacation

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