The Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord, theorizes what McLuhan in The Mechanical Bride animated – the way our society is dominated by spectacle and representation. The media is the message, and viewing the screen is the paradigmatic spectacular activity. Computer games, I would add, are way our culture has adapted to the 60s critique of media and spectacle by the likes of McLuhan and Debord. Games have sold us on manipulation.
In Debord we see an answer to my questions after McLuhan, see Used Mechanical Bride.
The spectacle is heir to all the weakness of the project of Western philosophy, which was an attempt to understand activity by means of the categories of vision. Indeed the spectacle reposes on an incessant deployment of the very technical rationality to which that philosophical tradition gave rise. So far from realizing philosophy, the spectacle philosophizes reality, and turns the material life of everyone into a universe of speculation. (p. 17, section 19)
Debord sees philosophy – or at least the move to theory (gaze upon from detachment) – as the ideology of spectacle. The call for detached contemplation ends up manifesting itself in the folklore of media spectacle which gives us the “freedom to look” of television.
McLuhan, despite his similarity, believes that one can detach and see the spectacular relationship (see the seeing) and at that moment be amused. Debord, I suspect, would just see this as a further form of addictive spectacle justified by a philosophy of vision and light.
I am suspicious of any theory (is The Society of Spectacle theory?) that argues that all is X as in all is spectacle. Just what is not spectacle? Would we know the difference without reviewing it?
Separation is the alpha and the omega of the spectacle.” (p. 20, section 25)
The spectacle thus unites what is separate, but it unites it only in its separateness. (p. 22, sect. 29)
The spectacle’s externality with respect to the acting subject is demonstrated by the fact that the individual’s own gestures are no longer his own, but rather those of someone else who represents them to him. The spectator feels at home nowhere, for the spectacle is everywhere. (p. 23, sect. 30)
Where Debord is interesting is on the separation and unity of spectacle. What he describes is paradigmatic of computer games where one watches ones avatar on the screen – you watch your gestures being represented back to you as your avatar moves around the game. Games are thus the perfect metamedia – a media for the postmodern boy who has been taught to beware media as all is spectacle. In games the representation of identity is made the point, making it hard to critique games as manipulative like other media. It is the player who appears to do the manipulation, thus the game pretends to transfer manipulation to the user (for a fee) escaping the rhetorical limits of reception media. In the game we find capitalist culture adapting to its critique, making manipulation and gesture another product.
The spectacle is by definition immune from human activity, inaccessible to any projected review or correction. It is opposite of dialogue. (p. 17, section 18)
It (self-emancipation) cannot be carried out, in other words, until individuals are ‘directly bound to universal history’; until dialogue has taken up arms to impose its own conditions upon the world. (p. 154, section 221, final sentence)
Debord sets some form of direct living and dialogue off against the life of representation. One can imagine Heidegger reading Debord as falling for a metaphysics of presence. My problem is that dialogue, despite what we hope it is, manifests itself as the first form of theoretical spectacle. Dialogue is the spectacle of philosophy and Plato its greatest script writer (and Socrates its hero.) Dialogue, which, unlike gossip, is staged for an eavesdropper, is the first game.
Guy Debord The Society of Spectacle New York: Zone Books, 1995. Originally published in 1967.