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Society of the Spectacle is where two women in Los Angeles, CA sell eye wear seven days a week, according to the homepage they made for their website aptly called, Society of the Spectacle . Talk about irony. I'm not sure Guy Debord would approve of this use for Society of the Spectacle, then again the fact that they're selling glasses and how they spend the money they make would influence his decision.
"Exchange value is the condottiere of use value who ends up waging the war for himself." (Debord 46) These two women as business owners are wagging a war of their own for their own survival:
The tendency of use value to fall, this constant of capitalist economy, develops a new form of privation within increased survival: the new privation is not far removed from the old penury since it requires most men to participate as wage workers in the endless pursuit of its attainment, and since everyone knows he must submit or die.Debord might even be proud and buy a new set of glasses.
Chuck Palahniuk put it another way via the character Tyler Durden from the film Fight Club, "Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need."
We all (hopefully) live under a roof and eat at least three meals everyday and in our daily lives we are constantly bombarded by advertising, making choices of what to buy and where to buy it. We are coaxed into making those decisions by the advertising media provides.
Where we get our media makes all the difference. This week I've been watching a lot of television and that means a lot of commercials which is something that I'm not really used to. I stick to Netflix and Interneting for my daily digest of media consumption. I don't like commercials and I avoid any form of advertising when I can.
Watching tv with my dad who is a regular watcher he even commented saying, "What's with the damn commercials? I've been watching twenty minutes of commercials." It's a strange feeling too, when a certain commercial comes on the screen and just seems to grab the attention of the entire room. I found that to be true with the new iPhone commercials but not so much with commercials for dish detergent. Probably because I'm not a dish detergents target demographic.
Media supports advertising and consumerism drives media. Depending on what your daily routine is you may ingest more advertising than others. "All that is conscious wears out. What is unconscious remains unalterable. But once freed, does it not fall to ruins in turn?" (Freud)
The consciousness of desire and the desire for consciousness are identically the project which, in its negative form, seeks the abolition of classes, the workers' direct possession of every aspect of their activity. Its opposite is the society of the spectacle, where the commodity contemplates itself in a world it has created.
Propaganda in and of itself.
Matthew Cole
Professor Caçoilo
Convergence - Blog Post 1
24 - 9 - 2014
Guy-Ernest Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Chapter 2
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