Short Essay #2 - Fransheska Larios

The spectacle, a term to refer to society’s dependence on an image has been more prominent with today’s use of technology. Society has fallen victim to being controlled by the likes of what the spectacle consists of. Our reliance on the spectacle has become as true as Guy Debord suggested within his work “The Society Of The Spectacle”, a speculation that society would-be victim of the spectacle invading everyday lives through the use of image, advertising, and in our current case, technology. 

We are no longer independent when it comes to choosing what to wear, or even what to buy. The spectacle has become our source to rely on as we make decisions. Through advertisement, social media, and other sources of images the spectacle comes into play as it shows us a desirable path for us to take. As Guy Debord suggests within his first chapter is the idea that images don’t just control one group of individuals but all of society. “The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images”(4). As suggested the spectacles aren’t just advertisements that are aired for the main source of entertainment, or Instagram photos that are posted for the sake of memory keeping. Every form of an image is stringed together in a way that provides movement in society. Individuals are the ones to provide more life to these images and as so we as a society become obsessed with the idea of living these fantasies we come up with. “Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the project of the present mode of production. It is not a mere supplement or decoration added to the real world, it is the heart of this real society’s unreality...the spectacle is the cause from our dreams”(6). Guy Debord blames society as the culprit for creating the spectacle and then becoming a victim of its distractions and illusions. The spectacle, in the end, is the creation of our desired lives. When an advertisement is displayed the viewers do not get a glimpse of life like theirs but a luxurious one that they desire to be in. An Instagram post is an image of what individuals desire others to see but not an honest depiction of their lives. 

The spectacle is not only made up of different forms of materialistic images but we are also at fault for further fueling it. Not only do individuals continue to fall in the hands of the spectacle but groups of individuals also take part in being the spectacle. The most evident group is that of those with fame. Celebrities are mentioned within the later chapters of Guy Debord’s work,

“Stars — spectacular representations of living human beings — project this general banality into images of permitted roles. As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations that they actually live. The function of these celebrities is to act out various lifestyles or sociopolitical viewpoints in a full, totally free manner...Celebrities serve as a source of hope, that one day our desired lives will come to life because these famous people have what we want”(60).

Celebrities further enhance the work of the spectacle in a variety of ways. Beginning with films, which often narrate adventurous, romantic, and in general different forms of the desired lifestyles that many wish to be a part of. Films are just a part of a celebrity’s work with the spectacle, another form is the celebrity’s life in general. Someone with fame is typically seen with wealth and admired by many for their work and or looks. In this case, individuals who are not within the category of “famous” look up to these individuals and see fame as a gateway to their desired lives. Fame ends up being the hope that this imagined world we live in is in fact real. The problem derives from acknowledging that fame is not the key to “happiness” and in most cases the public is only given glimpses of these individuals’ lives. We see what we want to see and tend to want to recreate the lives of others into ours. Joanne Finkelstein within her text The Art of Self Invention provides insight on the dilemma of identity, “Individual identity can be constituted through such associations, as the fleeting parade of fashioned images provides us with a ‘look’ we can adopt. The image, however, is not always obedient and cannot be relied upon to sustain the encoded messages.” As individuals, we rely on the spectacle to feed us with more insight into what we want to see, an aspect that will validate the imagined world we have come up with. We take anything we see that looks “great” in our eyes and turn to recreate it in any form to follow this imaginary path that we have set up. In summary, we are idolizing lifestyles and craving something unrealistic in the world we live in. 

If we created the spectacle how is it that the spectacle applies to all individuals? Although the spectacle can vary within views depending on the individual the bottom line is that a spectacle is a form depicted through images that all see and were created with the base of attraction and desire. John Berger within his text Ways of Seeing further explains this, “Yet although every image embodies a way of seeing, our perception or appreciation of an image depends also upon our own way of seeing.” All individuals have a desired form of life, and while it started as perhaps a goal to reach in the future the spectacle created by that ignition has collided with society to further nourish our fantasies about life through the use of the image. However, Guy Debord is clear when he points out that this spectacle no matter how pleasing it looks is a fiction of our imagination and essentially false. 

“...At the same time, all individual reality has become social, in the sense that it is shaped by social forces and is directly dependent on them. Individual reality is allowed to appear only insofar as it is not actually real.” - Society has created a make-believe world, we are so into the idea of recreating our dream world that we often forget what reality is really like”(17).

It is a must to remember that all that we perceive through the media is fantasy, and not in any way close to the likes of reality. Society does not seem close to waking up from this illusion until the spectacle comes to an end. But how do we end something that we created? Do we as individuals turn to the media and reject their ideologies? Do we have to grow more confident in the circumstances we live in and quit comparing our lives to others? In my opinion, for the spectacle to end society needs to quit molding us into what the norm is, and should adopt a more accepting culture. However, we as people will also need to go through a change to accept these terms by first leaving behind this ‘dream world’ we have created.

Despite Guy Debord basing his text within a society, he lived in several years from where we stand now, there is no change in the way society functions. Technology has come to enhance the ways of the spectacle and in a way stray us further away from an honest lifestyle. While analyzing the work of Guy Debord the first artist that comes to mind is Cindy Sherman, an artist who experimented with identity within her work (See Figure 1).  She uses herself to depict different personas other than herself. When looking at her work beside the ideas of Guy Debord we can see how easy it is to take the form of someone else in a society where a mold for everyone exists. Most importantly how does this ideology of the spectacle affect us during the time of a pandemic? The spectacle is a source of images through different sorts of media that encourage us to follow a trend or anything that we find attractive. With a pandemic in the picture, the spectacle becomes insufficient to move us to rely on it during this time. I believe that while being quarantined we are situated in a position where we are away from others and as so there is no need to impress them and create a false facade if there is no one else around us but ourselves and the people we are living with. While we do have technology to fuse us with ideas, they become irrelevant when health is an issue that stands with more importance at the moment than anything else. 

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Selfie