Page 138 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle 123
The spectacle, like the culture industry that preceded it, has a
stubborn ability to turn everything to profit no matter how radical
the critique. This is exemplified by the fate of Debord’s own thesis.
The Society of the Spectacle is a condition that all acknowledge, that
society is spectacular becomes unworthy even of mention. Debord
argues that: ‘The empty debate on the spectacle … is thus organized
by the spectacle itself: everything is said about the extensive means at
its disposal, to ensure that nothing is said about their extensive
deployment’ (1991: s. N3; original emphasis). The cultural role of
the spectacle is thus both acknowledged and at the same time left
unaddressed. The thesis’s explanatory force is diffused through the
efforts of numerous minor commentators who offer revisions and
refinements that effectively renounce the all-important totality of its
critique (the uncritical cultural populists). In concentrating on
individual factors and pseudo-events, ultimately empty debates encour-
age the illusion that the spectacle can be redeemed through the
reforming of a given component (such as advertising, political and
corporate propaganda, sex, violence, and so on). For Debord the
substitution or elision of ‘the spectacle’ and ‘media’ performs an
allied function. It conceals the agency of the system behind an
apparently neutral technical network. The spectacle thus hides in
plain sight (a paradox that forms a consistent theme in Part 2), a
situation that leaves its anonymous consumers with the ‘vague’ but
widespread ‘feeling that there has been a rapid invasion which has
forced people to lead their lives in an entirely different way; but this
is experienced rather like some inexplicable change in climate’
(1991: s. N2). Debord’s reassessment in his Comments on the Society of
the Spectacle awards technology a minor role in the evolution of the
spectacle, arguing that while technology has undoubtedly advanced
in the intervening years, it cannot be seen as major force behind the
spectacle, since the latter was already well established. Thus the
spectacle thesis remains unimpressed by the developments in media
technology, and the radical changes that have taken place in the
decades since Debord’s Comments, would, if Debord were alive today,
elicit the same response.

The integrated spectacle
In 1967 Debord distinguished between two forms of spectacular
society – the diffused spectacle of Western Europe and the ‘concen-
trated’ spectacle of the Eastern bloc. This concentrated spectacle
came to an end with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.
According to Debord this was the occasion of a new form of
spectacle, the integrated spectacle, a ‘rational combination’ of the most
successful features of its precursors. The integrated spectacle is both

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