it has become a constituting activity that refigures the very nature of common sense and social relations.
According to Debord, the “whole of life [now] presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.”48 The educational force of the culture, whether it be “news or propaganda, advertising or the actual consumption of entertainment” has been transformed into a spectacle, which “epitomizes the prevailing model of social life.”49 Debord rightly recognizes that the dynamics of domination under late capitalism can no longer be explained exclusively within the primacy of the economic sphere and its exploitative mode and relations of production. Rejecting conventional Marxist notions of social reproduction, Debord follows the lead of Antonio Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, and other neo-Marxist theorists arguing that domination is secured increasingly through “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images,”50 and that capitalism has successfully employed an image industry to transform commodities into appearances and history into staged events. Under such circumstances, the “society of the spectacle” “proclaims the predominance of appearances and asserts that all human life, which is to say all social life, is mere appearance.”51 The degree to which society permits visual mediation—screen culture—to become its primary mode of education, self-understanding, and socializing is the degree to which it opens the door for spectacle to dominate as a depoliticizing substitute for unmediated social formations, thinking, and creativity. Thus, according to Debord, “any critique capable of apprehending the spectacle’s essential character must expose it as a visible negation of life—and as a negation of life that has invented a visual form for itself.”
In Debord’s theory, media have become the quintessential tool of contemporary capitalism, and consumerism is its legitimating ideology. Or, to cite Debord’s famous quip, “the spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.”52 What is crucial about Debord’s theory is that it connects the state’s investment in social reproduction to its commitment to, “and control of, the field of images—the alternative world conjured up by the new battery of ‘perpetual emotion machines’ of which TV was the dim pioneer and which now beckons the citizen every waking minute.”53 Not only is the world of images a structural necessity for capitalism, it affirms the primacy of the pedagogical as a crucial element of the political. It enforces “the submission of more and more facets of human sociability—areas of everyday life, forms of recreation, patterns of speech, idioms of local solidarity . . . to the deadly solicitation (the lifeless bright sameness) of the market.”54
By exposing how the spectacle colonizes everyday life, Debord shows how power operates through a merger of state and corporate forces that seek both to control the media through which society experiences itself and to completely depoliticize and redefine the agency of citizenry in terms of prefabricated choices of consumerism and the status of ownership. Under contemporary capitalism, state-sanctioned violence makes its mark through the prisons, courts, police surveillance, and other criminalizing forces; it also wages a form of symbolic warfare mediated by a regime of consumer-based images and staged events that narrow individual and social agency to the dictates of the marketplace, reducing the capacity for human aspirations and desires to needs embodied in the appearance of the commodity. In Debord’s terms, “the spectacle is the bad dream of modern society in chains, expressing nothing more than its wish for sleep.”55
Contemporary culture has long become a society organized around a vast array of commodities, various image-making technologies used to promote them, and numerous sites from which to circulate them that leaves no spaces for contemplating that other worlds are possible. For Debord, our “society of the spectacle” is a form of soft violence that perpetually cultures the conformity, inactivism, and passivity necessary to repress critical engagement and resistance by relentlessly privatizing, marginalizing, or openly criminalizing educational and liberatory forces.
Debord’s notion of the spectacle makes a significant contribution in mapping a new form of social control associated with the accumulation of capital. He makes clear that the whole industry of leisure, consumption, entertainment, advertising, fantasy, and other pedagogical apparatuses of media culture has become a crucial element of life, and thus a primary condition of politics. Debord does not argue that commodities were the source of domination. As Eugene L. Arva points out, Debord insists that “the system of mediation by representation (the world of the spectacle, if you wish) has come to bear more relevance than commodities themselves.”56 Participation in commodity culture and its symbolic networks, rather than simple ownership of commodities, has become an essential feature of social status and belonging. Debord thus furthers our understanding that domination has to be analyzed as part of a politics of consent in which all aspects of social life are increasingly shaped by the communication technologies under the control of corporate forces.
Although Debord has been accused of overestimating the all-encompassing power of the spectacle, media, and other control mechanisms of late capitalism (“a permanent opium war”),57 he never harbors the often politically crippling pessimism of the Frankfurt School. His Society of the Spectacle “reads, rather, as a warning against the paralysis of the senses, the lethargy of the mind, and the political inertia with which a primarily visually determined, visually accessible, and most visually livable reality threatens” any viable notion of the autonomous subject.58 He militates against the dystopian notion of the totally administered society and begins advancing forms of political rupture and cultural insurgency that connect individual and collective agency to historical critique and creative social transformation. For Debord, the struggle for collective freedom was impossible without self-emancipation.
Yet the enormous analytic challenge facing Debord reveals itself in precisely that which, in a globalizing post-9/11 world, his theory cannot sufficiently explain. As Lutz Koepnick points out, we now live in a culture “characterized by hybrid multimedia aggregates and diversified strategies of consumption.”59 Within this new era, technology and media merge, resulting in a massive cultural reorganization involving the production, distribution, and consumption of information and images. Not only has the old model of a monolithic system of media control and cultural reproduction been undermined by Internet-driven media and technologies, but entirely new configurations of communication relations have emerged and continue to evolve. Although dependent on corporate infrastructure and software and wide open to state surveillance and tracking, the production and dissemination of content have become radically more accessible to massive non-market sectors of society—the public—with enormous consequences on business, law enforcement, politics, education, and culture.60 At the same time, Internet-driven media are shaping new types of individual agency and social formations that are actively co-evolving with the unprecedented speed, immediacy, and global reach of increasingly accessible personal communication technology.
Past assumptions about time and space being homogeneous and fixed are no longer applicable. Digital networks have stretched and compressed the relationships among time, space, and place. Technology is constantly accelerating the speed with which we can publish information, disseminate images, and communicate with large networks of people around the planet. Just as new forms of social media and cultural representation make possible highly individualized modes of symbolic expression, the undiversified masses have given way to a diverse globalized public far removed from the homogeneous community of viewers and producers that was characteristic of the older broadcasting age of media.
Of course, we are not suggesting here that new media and technological developments have ushered in structural changes amounting to a more democratic society. This perspective is as inaccurate as it is overly romantic, especially in light of the way in which the Internet and social media are exploited for government surveillance and corporate data collection and marketing. At the same time, any analysis of the reconfiguration of public culture by neoliberal forces must take into account the unprecedented effects of evolving media technologies—including the speed, distances, rhythms of information and communication, real-time images, and differential modes of control associated with consumption. Stuart Hall understood this better than most:
Neoliberalism’s victory has depended on the boldness and ambition of global capital,