Page 140 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle 125
the photo-shopping out of history and culture, its editing in
conformity with a ‘ceaseless circular passage of information’: ‘When
social significance is attributed only to what is immediate, and to
what will be immediate immediately afterwards, always replacing
another, identical, immediacy, it can be seen that the uses of the
media guarantee a kind of eternity of noisy insignificance’ (1991:
N6).
The institution of a perpetual present is one example of the
manner in which the spectacle eliminates the forces that threaten its
reign. Another strategy discussed by Debord is the destruction of
rational thought by the image. In losing their immediate access to
the external world in favour of the mediation of the image or
screen, the individual is deprived of their autonomy of thought,
since the processed pseudo-experience of the spectacle entirely
determines thought. Consequently, whoever ‘governs at will this
simplified summary of perceptible world’, ensures a continued
control over the viewer. The spectacle’s programmers minimize the
opportunity or temptation for independent thought. This editorial
control of the image and, equally importantly, of the juxtaposition of
images, presents the spectacle with new tools for subjugation of
thought. The image, as Debord notes, is a schematic summary
(recall here McLuhan’s comments of the televisual mosaic) of the
‘real’. As such it is compressed, and stripped of ‘extraneous’
information. This editing when combined with global reach of the
spectacle creates a compressed, contracted double of the ‘real’, in
which what is shown is isolated ‘from its context, its past, its
intentions and consequences’, that is, divorced from its causal and
therefore logical relations. Moreover, in its ability to combine these
decontextualized images, the integrated spectacle effectively substi-
tutes its combinatory power for synthetic operations of independent
logical thought. False associations and judgements are generated and
disseminated en masse, via the technologies of the image. Thus
Debord observes:
Since no one can contradict it, the spectacle has the right to
contradict itself, to correct its own past. The arrogant attitude
of its servants, when they make known some new, and perhaps
still more dishonest version of certain facts, is to harshly correct
the ignorance and bad interpretations they attribute to the
public, while the day before they themselves were busy dissemi-
nating the error, with their customary assurance.
(1991: s. N10)
Anyone familiar with the perplexing, protean shifts in the justifica-
tions of such Anglo-American policies as the Gulf conflicts as related
by the mass media will appreciate the contemporary relevance of
these comments. Debord argues that in berating spectators for their

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