Spectacle (critical theory)
"[2] The critique of the spectacle is a development and application of Karl Marx's concept of fetishism of commodities, reification and alienation,[3] and the way it was reprised by György Lukács in 1923.
Debord also associates this form of spectacle with mixed backward economies and advanced capitalist countries in times of crisis.
Irreconcilable claims jockey for position on the stage of the affluent economy's unified spectacle, and different star commodities simultaneously promote conflicting social policies.
Debord argues that without terrorism, the integrated spectacle wouldn't survive, for it needs to be compared to something in order to show its "obvious" perfection and superiority.
"[11] Debord saw the creation of the proletariat, collectively disempowered but brought together into the same urban spaces by the same capitalist system as one of capitalism's contradictions that threatened to negate it from within.
As early as 1958, in the situationist manifesto, Debord described official culture as a "rigged game", where conservative powers forbid subversive ideas to have direct access to the public discourse.
Recuperation, a concept first proposed by Guy Debord,[14] is the process by which the spectacle intercepts socially and politically radical ideas and images, commodifies them, and safely incorporates them back within mainstream society.
[8][1] This is the period in which modern advertising and public relations were introduced, most significantly with the innovative techniques developed by Edward Bernays in his campaigns for the tobacco industry.
In a spectacular society, the system of commodity production generates a continual stream of images, for consumption by people who lack the experiences represented therein.
The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.In the opening of Das Kapital, Marx makes the observation that within the capitalist mode of production we evaluate materials not by what purpose they serve or what they're actually useful for, but we instead recognize them based on their value in the market.
According to anthropologist Meg McLagan, "Debord analyzes the penetration of the commodity form into mass communication, which he argues results in the spectacle".
[26] Andrew Hussey claims in his biography of Debord that the term spectacle began life not in a Marxist context, but was first borrowed from Nietzsche and his concept of the mass secret.
[citation needed] In Green Illusions, Ozzie Zehner draws largely on Debord to argue that the spectacles of solar cells, wind turbines, and other technologies have organized environmental thinking around energy-production at the expense of energy-reduction strategies.
The man who is sometimes considered the founder of modern advertising and Madison Avenue, Edward Bernays, created many of the major cigarette campaigns of the 1920s, including having women march down the street demanding the right to smoke.
