Page 142 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle 127
fictive survivors, whose return can always be evoked … and proved by
the mere say-so of specialists’ (1991: s. N18; original emphasis).

Conclusion

The relevance of Debord’s analysis to today’s mediscape is obvious
from the immediately preceding comments and the ease with which
they can be applied to the ongoing War on Terror and various
aspects of the media’s coverage of world events, and this is explored
in more detail in Chapter 8. The various forms of contemporary
celebrity also demonstrate the continued pertinence of Debord’s
work. Celebrities now incarnate the very ideas of integration,
autonomy, self-confidence and fulfilment whose force and appeal
resides precisely in the glaring absence of these qualities in the lives
of most consumers. Celebrities as ‘the spectacular representation of
a living human being’ promote the illusion of ‘equal access to the
totality of consumption’ and serve as ‘the object of identification
with the shallow seeming life that has to compensate for the
fragmented productive specializations which are actually lived …
They embody the inaccessible result of social labour by dramatizing
its by-products magically projected above it as its goal’ (1977: s.
N60). Through the cult of celebrity the spectacle ensures that the
desire for the false totality of the spectacle remains both constant
and unsatisfied. Debord asserts a fundamental polarity between the
celebrity and the individual, in which the former is the enemy of the
latter, sustained by the power it has expropriated. Moreover, entry
into the charmed circle of celebrity involves the systematic suppres-
sion of spontaneous individuality ‘passing into the spectacle as a
model for identification, the agent renounces all autonomous quali-
ties in order to identify himself with the general law of obedience to
the course of things’ (1977: s. N61). This ‘general law of obedience’
has evolved from the cult of beauty Benjamin identified then as a
residual ritualistic element of the Hollywood star system, to the
contemporary cult of celebrity that now appears in the democratized
form of Banality TV, and it is this to which we turn now.

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