Page 137 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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122 Then
highlights the space/time transformation under the spectacle. Space
like time becomes a consumable commodity, the particularity of
place is converted into a consumable (as in having ‘done Thailand’).
For Debord this reflects a more general banalization of space, a
reconstruction that eliminates all singularity, capitalism thus remakes
the totality of space into its own setting. Although this process
involves the extirpation of particularity it nonetheless involves the
creation of various forms of second-order distinctions between
spaces, forms of zoning and differentiation that accord with oppor-
tunities for profit. Thus Debord provided an early description of
what has subsequently been examined in terms of urban theming
(see Sorkin 1992; Hannigan 1998; Gottdiener 2001). In space as in
time, capitalism at once homogenizes and differentiates, in order to
return at a profit what it has appropriated.

The spectacle revisited: Debord’s Comments

In 1988, on the twentieth anniversary of the appearance of The
Society of the Spectacle, Debord published a small pamphlet, translated
into English as Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1991) in whose
pages he reassessed his theory of the spectacle in the light of the
social, cultural and political trends of the intervening decades. His
conclusions were far from optimistic. And while deriving some grim
satisfaction at his accurate diagnosis, as he wrote in 1992 in the
introduction to the third edition of his major work: ‘A critical theory
of the kind presented here needed no changing … the general
conditions of the long historical period that it was the first to
describe accurately were still intact. The continued unfolding of our
epoch has merely confirmed and further illustrated the theory of
the spectacle’ (Debord 1994: 1). Debord could only despair at the
6
naivety of the solutions he formerly entertained. Gone is the
confidence in the possibility of cultural revolution. Indeed the
spectacle of 1988 mocks such aspirations, for under the ‘integrated
spectacle’ art has fused with life, the aesthetic has infiltrated every
dimension of social (as evidenced by the emergence of ‘designer’ as
a free floating prefix in the 1980s). Likewise the language of Marx
and Hegel, and the unshakable certainty of an analysis framed in its
terms is conspicuous for its absence in contemporary political and
ideological discourse. Comments is therefore uniformly pessimistic,
and offering no alternative to dominant conditions, is confined ‘to
recording what is’ and refuses to speculate ‘on what is desirable, or
merely preferable’ (1991: s. N1). This pessimistic inventory is
founded in a recognition of the recuperative power of the spectacle.
The spectacle like a spectre cannot be killed but rises with redou-
bled vigour from each fresh challenge to its hegemony.

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