Debord-Spectacle
For this analysis of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle I will try to explain as simply as possible the sections that pertain to visual culture and the role of images. Society of the Spectacle is a very complex text that rises from a platform based heavily on the thoughts of Karl Marx. Again, for this summary I will leave out a lot of the material that builds on Marx's ideas of labour and instead will focus on Debord's concept of the Spectacle and what this may refer to. For Debord, the Spectacle refers to a structure built by capitalism to replace needs with wants, to replace reality with an appearance of a reality that does not exist and to create an existence that is not based on nature and the relationship of human beings with nature but a relationship built on commodities. The relationship is one of using commodities to create and foster consumption, and production, of desires and wants that need to be fulfilled. The role of images in the Spectacle is one that perpetuates these false desires as well as promoting the dominant method of production. The mediated world of images that we live in, for Debord, is meant to obscure the true nature of reality and to create the false sense that everything is the way it ought to be. The Spectacle increases the alienation of the worker from the commodities produced as well as striving to alienate the consumer from fulfilling wants and desires. As soon as one desire is satisfied by a commodity, a new desire is initiated by the Spectacle creating a never ending process. As the acquisition of a commodity to fulfil a falsely created desire can never give true satisfaction, the feelings of satisfaction and connection are hollow and short lived followed quickly by a return to a state of empty desire. The Spectacle is an apparatus used to distract from the effects of capitalism and how it subjugates the working and lower classes. The constant production of, pursuit of, and acquisition of, commodities perpetuates a state of false consciousness for most people.
A world mediated by images allows current reality and all of history to be defined and repurposed by dominant hegemonies and ideologies as they can more easily create and control images by virtue of owning and controlling the means of producing and disseminating these images. The Spectacle is a social relation of false consciousness mediated by images as well as being an objective material relation resulting from the dominant mode of production. The Spectacle works to conceal the antagonistic ground of class struggle and exploitation.
Debord suggests that modern society has undergone a significant and unique development since around the time of mass industrialisation. 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 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 (17).
Chapter one, especially theses 1-6 as well as 10 and 14, 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" (1). Debord has a very negative and critical stance towards these developments which for him serve for the individualisation and separation of human beings and the reinforcement of exploitative class society under advanced capitalism.
For Debord the Spectacle is not just a collection of images, "but a social relation among people, mediated by images" (4) and he attributes to the Spectacle signifying capacities justifying society as it is. For Debord there is no separation between material "real life" and the false represented one which of course is the Spectacle. They are intertwined to such a degree that "the true is a moment of the false" (9), by displaying life and mediating reality and experience, the spectacle negates them by reducing them to mere appearance.
As humans are alienated from, and increasingly separated from, nature and the natural world, our connections and understandings also change. We no longer have any direct experiences, only those mediated through images. Images now define our reality and frame our experiences as well as functioning to reinterpret our past and our histories. As images can be controlled by the dominant ideology, their truth and integrity are unstable. This is obviously problematic. This concept is the one that I would like to apply to Abbott & Cordova. How does Abbott & Cordova (the image) work to mediate our relationship to the truth of the reality of the DTES and how does it re-interpret and re-position our understanding of the history of the neighbourhood? Does the image work to uncover truth and bring us closer to reality and history, the history of class struggle and marginalisation and displacement of the neighbourhood's traditional residents, or does it work to suggest that the reality of the DTES, and its recent history re-interpreted to support this idea, is fine the way it is? Can it be argued that Abbott & Cordova re-interprets the past history of the neighbourhood's class struggle and activism and uses the resulting image to suggest that "things are fine now because we have addressed this issue" all the while working to obscure the current reality of continuing oppression, marginalisation and displacement of the area's poorer residents? How is our relationship to reality, experience and history affected by being exposed to Abbott & Cordova? As I discussed in my analysis of Baudrillard, the simulation acts to obscure reality. Like the simulation, the Spectacle also functions in this way. These two concepts seem to be similar apparatus meant to obscure reality and promote an ideology that places the production and acquisition of commodities above an actual relationship between people and the natural world. Does a relationship between residents of the DTES and a "natural world" based on nature exist? How could this world be represented through images in a way that would show a true reality? Is this possible, or even useful?