The Society of the Spectacle (Société du spectacle) by Buy Debord is essentially a radical critique of the commodity and its domination over life, which the author sees in the particular form of the “alienation” of the consumer society . The concept of spectacle refers to a mode of reproduction of society based on the reproduction of commodities , ever more numerous and ever more similar in their variety. Debord advocates an enactment of the consciousness that we have of our own life, towards an illusory pseudo-life imposed on us by capitalist society, particularly since the post-war period .
The Society of the Spectacle dissects the individuation processes in the then nascent post-industrial society. It describes the evolution of the practice of "separation" as a capitalist economic device. How since the introduction of assembly lines where the worker is separated from what he produces, the liberal-merchant society since the 1950s has produced the subject / consumer as a being separated from his true desires by various socio-industrial industries? cultural (cinema, television, etc.): for example, how do stereotypes trendy young people or rebels become models of behavior to follow, making our desire to show ourselves to others, a pastiche of a consumable, interchangeable reproduction ("The show is not a set of images, but a social relationship between people, mediated by images. ”Thesis 4 of chapter one,“ The true is a moment of the false ”; thesis 9 of the first chapter).
Debord argues, in the first chapter essentially, that the immanent direction of the spectacle is also its goal and that thus, as it is applied, it justifies itself exponentially.
According to Debord, the spectacle is the completed stage of capitalism, it is a concrete counterpart to the organization of the commodity. The spectacle is an economic ideology , in the sense that contemporary society legitimizes the universality of a single vision of life, by imposing it on the senses and the conscience of all, via a sphere of audio-visual, bureaucratic manifestations. , political and economic, all in solidarity with each other. This, in order to maintain the reproduction of power and alienation : the loss of the living of life.
Also the concept takes on several meanings. The "spectacle" is at the same time the apparatus of propaganda of the hold of the capital on the lives, as well as a "social relation between people mediated by images".
the management of goods and their productions are centralized by the bureaucratic structures managing all of these States. Debord describes it using the term “concentrated spectacular” (thesis 64).
In 1988, in Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle , Debord describes the evolution of the spectacular society in that these market relations have completely melted into society to such an extent that they have become systemic. He describes it as a combination of the two preceding forms according to the term “integrated spectacular” (commentary IV). Debord sums up the thesis of his book in one sentence, for him the "modern spectacle" is "the autocratic reign of the market economy having acceded to a statute of irresponsible sovereignty, and all the new techniques of government which accompany this reign. "
