The Commodity as Spectacle

Occupy Wall Street, top, and a fifth anniversary event, bottom. Photographer: Mary Altaffer/AP via The Guardian

It’s hard to imagine Guy Debord sitting down to write The Society of the Spectacle in 1967, a work that speaks so eloquently to the state of media today. How could he foresee the interactivity and omnipresence of “mass media” in 2016? Years before the digital revolution, Debord recognized relationships between people and the “the spectacle” that have only strengthened in our interconnected world.

In Chapter 2, Debord comments on “The Commodity as Spectacle.” Money is the driving force of the spectacle- something with no intrinsic value that, he argues, enslaves men to a meaningless chase of the qualitative and pits them against one another. The world is “at once present and absent” as commodity dominates “all living experience” (Debord, Thesis 37). The spectacle so engrosses every aspect of our lives that “Everything that was once directly lived has moved away into a representation,” (Debord, Thesis 1). The controlling and sinister influence of money on media, and therefore our lives, falls in with the driving Marxist tenet that capitalism enslaves men to the very thing they believe sets them free. We no longer work directly for the goods that keep us alive.

Reading Debord in the context of a class on modern media, the effects of the heightened interconnectedness of the people and possible democratization of “the spectacle” should be considered. It is true that the media is a consuming force in our lives, and it is true, as Debord writes in Thesis 36, “...the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible par excellence.”

We have the ability to be very much a part of our mass media and contribute to the spectacle. As one example, in the world of fashion and beauty, bloggers and Youtubers- regular folks- interact with the brands they love and sometimes work together. Entrepreneurs and creatives in every field can build their businesses around their social media, or even from it. While everyone in the “first world” has the potential to be a media outlet, Debord’s words still hold- these images still decide an unattainable ideal. He would argue that it’s foolish to say our media has been democratized when it exists under capitalism and “The world we see is the world of the commodity” (Debord, Thesis 42).

The interactivity of our media now works to feed our individual material desires as well. Searching online for a new video game system? The following week your Facebook and other frequently visited sites will have targeted ads. Shopping on Amazon? They’re posturing to you with whatever random items you might have been checking out at 2 a.m. three days ago. Targeted ads and the convenience of online shopping can certainly be beneficial and fun, and the spending patterns of Americans reflect that. Consumer spending continues to grow, exponentially faster than wages. It’s a race to the bottom for Debord-”The real consumer has become a consumer of illusions” (Thesis 47). Quality of our consumption is irrelevant when quantity has a better bottom line.

The potential for interactions among people all over the world grows every second in this media landscape. That's something that Debord perhaps couldn't foresee, but his money talk still stands.

Works Cited:

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle, Chapter 2: The Commodity as a Spectacle.