Spectacles

The concept of spectacle, conceived as “not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images” (Debord 1994, Thesis 2), was popularized (and politicized) through Guy Debord's work and the publication of his book, Society of the Spectacle. Debord's theory of spectacle challenges Marxism to go beyond a focus on production to the ways in which people become disconnected objects that are identified through commodified images of self and others.

Debord was not the first to describe the politics of spectacle. Mikhail Bakhtin developed the notion of carnivalseque as a spectacle of temporary disruption of the social order. But unlike Debord, he saw that spectacle could create room for social change. Associates of the famed Frankfurt school, such as Walter Benjamin and Henri Lefebvre, analyzed how society was moving from the consumption of material goods to the consumption of fantasies and the production of desires. Jean Baudrillard's work in the area of hyperreality, in which the image becomes the reality, was produced at the same time as Debord's work but the political points each made with their theories of hyperreality or spectacle were different.

It is important to analyze Debord's work on the spectacle within the context of his involvement with the Situationalists International (SI) and the discontent in France that led to the Paris Uprising in 1968. The SI used strategies of détournement—similar to culture jamming—in an attempt to subvert the spectacle, if only for a moment. Détournement was a deliberate action of disruption, such as rewriting a speech or an advertisement to show the absurdity of the “real” thing. The SI was credited by some with being instrumental in the Paris Uprising. Graffiti of SI slogans appeared all over the streets of Paris. However, Debord never saw these disruptions as eliminating the spectacle.

Debord pinpointed the beginning of the society of spectacle to the 1920s. In Society of the Spectacle, he argued that spectacle emerged in two main forms: The concentrated spectacle refers to regimes, including the Nazis that engineered group viewings of Nazi propaganda films. The concentrated spectacle is based on a unitary vision and control center aimed at manufacturing group identity, aspirations, and fear. The diffuse spectacle is associated with “commodity abundance” (Thesis 65), in which consumption becomes identity through the illusion of autonomy. One buys goods (and services) that connect with one's identity, and this identity is constructed through consumption.

Debord's concentrated spectacle relied on a controlling center; however, there were aspects of life and social relations that could not be controlled by the spectacle. In 1994, he updated Society of the Spectacle to encompass an even more dystopian understanding of society, where there is no escape from the integrated society of spectacle that combines elements of concentrated and diffuse spectacles. But his new integrated spectacle relies on the occult, which has no central leader or ideology.

Debord's 1967 version of the diffuse spectacle allowed for cracks in which one could momentarily [Page 1366]escape the society of spectacle, but in 1988 he argued that the diffuse spectacle controls every aspect of social behavior. The integrated spectacle does everything. A person's identity, social relations, and understandings of the world all happen within an integrated spectacle that connects media and economic, political, and emotional industries to create reality through scripted images. The spectacle is not a carnival that takes us out of reality. It is reality because it is through the spectacle that memories are created. Our memories are not separate from the images we see on television or YouTube, for example. Government and media have a great deal of control in framing what we see as problems, whom we see as problems, and what the solutions are.

...