"The Daily Spectacle" - From Don Imus to Virginia Tech

by jo swift
The Society of the Spectacle is a dense, polemical, and poetic work of philosophy first published in 1967 by the Situationist and Marxist theorist, Guy Debord.

In advanced capitalist countries, mass produced commodities are marketed for their singularity, as if individuality could be achieved by millions of people buying the same useless product.

In both instances, the spectacle inverts reality in order to pacify potential opposition. It is an inverted image of the real that nonetheless has real effects.

Debord gives us a radical critique of late capitalism; A system in which all of us are coerced into being mere spectators of the system, rather than active participants in it. Watching TV is the perfect metaphor.

Images flicker before us on the TV, just as reality passes us by, and most of us feel alienated from it and we certainly don't do much to change it.

And because most of us are passive spectators, we unwittingly reproduce the system and the dominant subjectivity which sustains it. Everyday life becomes a factory of seriality.

But what Debord and the Situationists were about was totally fucking with everyday life: turning it into a cultural battleground where we might be able to reclaim reality; that is, where we might be able to resist seriality, refuse complicity in the system, and reclaim control over our own lives. LINK