The
Society of the Spectacle is a society that is obsessed with commodity. Debord
describes the spectacle as “the stage at which
the commodity has succeeded in totally
colonizing social life” (Debord). He describes the world we see as a world of
commodity. It impacts us to where we no longer see anything else but commodity.
We receive these images dictating how we are supposed to live and what we
should live for. In that moment we forget about the basic needs of survival and
adopt a different set of requirements to survive in this society of the
spectacle.
Debord states
in The Commodity as Spectacle, “The spectacle is a permanent opium war designed
to force people to equate goods with commodities and to equate satisfaction
with a survival that expands according to its own laws. Consumable survival
must constantly expand because it never ceases to include privation. If augmented survival never comes to a
resolution, if there is no point where it might stop expanding, this is because
it is itself stuck in the realm of privation. It may gild poverty, but it
cannot transcend it.” (Debord) The Spectacle has conditioned our society to
want things that they don’t necessarily need. Instead of trading goods for
other goods that are necessary for survival the society has evolved into
trading goods for the commodity. People no longer work to survive but to have
the money to buy the commodity being pitched to us in the barrage of ads.
The commodity
has changed the society into revolving around having rather than living. People
want to have the commodity and then show off that they have it as an expression
of status. The society is in a way brainwashed by the images delivered in the
media to want to look like what they see on the tube. The media regulates what
is normal and what is good and bad. It delivers the commodity and to fit in,
people trade goods to obtain this commodity they have grown to be obsessed
with.
Debord
explains that the society has gotten to this stage from the attainment of an
abundant economy. He states, “With the achievement
of economic abundance, the
concentrated result of social labor becomes visible, subjecting all reality to
the appearances that are now that labor’s primary product. Capital is no longer
the invisible center governing the production process; as it accumulates, it
spreads to the ends of the earth in the form of tangible objects. The entire
expanse of society is its portrait.”
(Debord) Once they had a surplus in money, which represents the goods necessary
for survival, they begin to want to obtain something tangible. Once they have
gotten all the goods needed to survive and still have money left over, the
question of what else is there to do with the surplus money surfaces. The
capitalists take advantage of this using the media to send propaganda to the
consumers and convince them to think they need their products as well to
survive. When everyone begins to have these products and a commodity is formed,
people begin to feel left out and that they need to obtain this commodity. They
feel they need to prove they are equal to the rest of the society and begin to
want to have the ideal image being televised by the media in mass amounts of
images.
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To
serve this mass population obsessed with the commodity deficiencies in quality
are formed in the creation of mass quantity. Other consequences, like a stupefied
society no longer awake enough to deal with real issues in the world, arise
from this addiction to commodity. People brush off the problems going on
globally and focus on reality television and celebrity news. The society is hypnotized
to serve its economy by feeding into the commodity not realizing how well off
they already are and how chaotic life can be in other places around the world.
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