Society of the Spectacle

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1994. Print.

In this critique, Debord delineates the effect of commoditized culture has on human beings and how it perpetuates itself through modern society by implicit, hidden means. He places us at a time where relationships between people have diminished to the point where consumption is what drives life rather than interpersonal connection or the motivation to understand anything outside the given viewpoint. The Spectacle represents peoples’ experience as mediated through images rather than lived first-hand. Marketing, and today more specifically, branding, attempts to formulate human identity, to distill the variety of possible experiences into certain predestined archetypes. This is a function of power and control at the expense of the whole society, who view appearance, manufactured need, and external adherence to mass culture as superior to the dangerous and unpredictable (as well as genuine and original) possibilities of life outside the norm.