Lesly's Short Essay

What is a Spectacle?      

Guy Debord’s book “The Society of the Spectacle”, the term for spectacle refers to advertising, television, film, and celebrity. Debord defines the spectacle as the “autocratic reign of the market economy”. Debord describes the spectacle as “capitalism’s instrument for distracting and pacifying the masses”. The spectacle can be in many more forms in this day and age than it did during Debord’s age and time. For example, it can be seen on the technology that we have today and the advertisements that are seen throughout your daily travels around the city you live on billboards, subways, and pop-up ads on your cell phone. For Debord, this had created an unacceptable time in our lives. In the book, he informs the readers how humans have become so co-dependent on technology that they have forgotten to do other things with their lives and enjoy their experiences. Debord continues his revelation on how the media and technology have claimed humans and not giving any clear suggestions on how to deal with this influence in our daily lives. Debord insists that action is needed to be taken if we are to return back to our lives before technology. In a world that has really been turned upside down, the truth is a moment of the false. (Chapter 1) Both ways of understanding it produces a similar interpretation. What Debord is saying, to my mind, is that what appears to be most true about the world is considered false.“The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (Chapter 1). The spectacle is significant because it changes social relations. The spectacle serves to distract us from society. The spectacle keeps us from even thinking about this relation. It affects and influences all of our relations with one another. All of our relationship ideals are shaped by the spectacle. “Economic growth has liberated societies from the natural pressures that forced them into an immediate struggle for survival, but they have not yet been liberated from their liberator (Chapter 2). The focus of the dynamic between the economy and media during the transition in society. It creates an appearance to generate a false sense of connectedness.“The spectacle is a permanent opium war designed to force people to equate goods with commodities and to equate satisfaction with a survival that expands according to its own laws. Consumable survival must constantly expand because it never ceases to include privation. If augmented survival never comes to a resolution, if there is no point where it might stop expanding, this is because it is itself stuck in the realm of privation. It may gild poverty, but it cannot transcend it.”(Chapter 2) Debord argues, our sense of reality is nothing more than an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that was once lived become mere representation. He considered a photograph to be a replacement for the real object. The lines of reality and non-reality have become so blurred in our society that a photograph can replace the real.

Berger Ch. 7 

1. 

Publicity is about social relations, not objects. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness: happiness as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamour.

2.

Any work of art 'quoted' by publicity serves two purposes. Art is a sign of affluence; it belongs to the good life; it is part of the furnishing which the world gives to the rich and the beautiful.