Debord suggests that modern society has undergone a significant and unique development since around the time of mass industrialization. People have moved away from the existence of necessity and toward an existence of surplus. As modern production has enabled the mass accumulation of capital, so it has changed the fundamental nature of the experience of living.
The result is Debord's society of the spectacle where, first, the condition of being is replaced by the condition of having; and, second, the condition of having is replaced by the appearance of having. In other words, modern production has enabled a surplus of the necessities of life so great that most people never face the reality of, e.g., starvation. In the early stages of the spectacle, massive amounts of capital are stockpiled—being is replaced by having. In the later stages of the spectacle, amassed capital becomes so immense that it is valueless within the system—having is replaced by the appearance of having.
Chapter one of Guy Debord's "Society of the Spectacle" deals with the changing relation between direct experience and mediated representation in modern times, and it opens with the assertion that"Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation". For Debord the spectacle is not a collection of images, "but a social relation among people, mediated by images" (4) and he assigns the spectacle with reifying capacities, justifying society as it is. However, for Debord there is no separation between material "real life" and the false represented one, the spectacle. They are intertwined to such a degree that "the true is a moment of the false" (9), by displaying life, the spectacle negates them by reducing them to mere appearance.
The Society of the Spectacle is a critique of contemporary consumer culture and commodity fetishism, dealing with issues such as class alienation, cultural homogenization, and the mass media. In a consumer society, social life is not about living, but about having; the spectacle uses the image to convey what people need and must have. Consequently, social life moves further, leaving a state of "having" and proceeding into a state of "appearing"; namely the appearance of the image.
*incomplete review*
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