Living in a Spectacle: A Day in the Life
Guy Debord, a philosopher and critic of Marxist theory, despite having written “Society of the Spectacle” almost half a century ago, eerily predicted the way of life that supposedly advanced societies were to be comprised of. In his book developed for the Situationist movement, he discusses the image-obsessed, mediated way of the life relevant today to the 21st century, where celebrity culture and Internet fame spawn as mass consumed, superficial ways of life that the masses relate to in order to cope with the fake reality of their lives. The book takes a close look at the “Spectacle”, Debord’s term for the manifestation of a capitalism-obsessed, consumerist culture that saturates our everyday lives.
Debord discusses the spectacle and its relation to mass media today. When he writes about how “behind the masks of total choice, different forms of the same alienation confront each other”, it reminds me of social media in today’s world, and the repetitiveness of each person’s so-called individual “online life”. In order to cope with the mediocrity of our everyday lives, we look to the top one percent of society who managed to chase and fulfill their dreams and grab their fortunes and are now living life out for the rest of the world to both envy and admire. Today, every person wants to have a thousand Instagram followers to make himself/herself feel special or worth having their life taken noticed by strangers. In addition, every person wants to have as many friends as possible on Facebook to view the documentation of his/her life; and last but not least, every person wants friends on Snapchat to view real time updates of one’s life as one wishes to post about. But the central question is: why? Why are we so obsessed with putting on an image for the rest of the world to devour? Guy Debord describes it so simply but profoundly — it’s because everything we consume embodies a perfect solution of distraction and reinforcement that reproduces the image of society and economy that has taken the idea of a “spectacle” to the almost unimaginable extreme.
Essentially, the spectacle reduces reality to a series of commodifiable fragments of experiences available for purchase in order to augment our appearance in an image-obsessed world. For Debord, this was an unacceptable “degradation” of his life. In a world of obsessive celebrity culture, product placement and fervent social media, it’s easy to see how accurately Guy Debord described our lives today. As he describes it, the spectacle is “not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images”. My take on what he means by this is that our relationship with other people is now so defined by the image we put on in front of others, that it outlines how we act around other people and possibly even our own families and loved ones, that are supposed to be able to see through the spectacle — or is that the beauty of the mechanism of the spectacle? Where it fools even the closest and most dearest to someone?
There is no doubt that if Debord were alive today, the level of dominance advertising and social media exudes over our lives would horrify him. Essentially, the Internet and social media monetize our friendships, our opinions, and our emotions. We’ve all heard our friends say things like, “Have you seen the new iPhone?”, or have personally fallen victim to Facebook advertising. Technology, in the eyes of Debord, isn’t necessarily bad, but when it replaces being with having, and having with appearing, that is the fundamental problem. Our internal thoughts and experiences are now commodities up for sale for big companies to collect and profit from. When we no longer have control over those, what are we even left with?
As Guy Debord says in Thesis 219, ‘…the need to imitate which is felt by the consumer is precisely the infantile need conditioned by all the aspects of his fundamental dispossession. In the terms applied by Gabel to a completely different pathological level, “the abnormal need for representation here compensates for a tortuous feeling of being on the margin of existence.”’ The central words here are “need” and “representation”. If Society of the Spectacle could be summed up in a few key terms, it would be with these two. Why else do we spill our private feelings on Facebook? Why do we incessantly take selfies to post on Snapchat, or record every moment for Instagram? At this point, what is more important: the expression of the feeling itself, or the acknowledgement of our feelings by others? We are so terrified of being invisible — of actually “being on the margin of existence” — that we live our lives in accordance with how we want to appear. So then, if we are living to be looked at, are we really living?
As these questions don’t have any simple, concrete answer, I leave them up in the air to be answered. But one thing is for certain — Debord’s ideas certainly describe our way of life right now, whether we like them to or admit to it otherwise. The paparazzi pictures of celebrities and the unnaturally skinny models that stare at us from the magazine racks prove his point.
