The Society of the Spectacle and the Society of Control (original) (raw)

In the work The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord writes an essay-manifest critic-of a philosophical and literary nature-in which he directs his criticism, above all, at the way in which contemporary social life is gradually transformed into a mediated experience by the spectacle, in which it pretends to represent life and its social relations, starting, above all, the apparatus of images. From the constitution of the spectacle society, for Debord-as a global domain over the totality of society-we aim to understand the development of this concept and two possible relationships with the concepts of Control Society (Foucault/Deleuze/Guattari) and, finally, from Empire (Hardt/Negri). KEYWORDS Spectacle. Image. Control. Biopower. Empire. I. DEBORD AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE SPECTACLE SOCIETY CONCEPT. The society of the spectacle-Guy Debord's manifesto book was one of the most influential works of the so-called situationists 1 in the events of May 68 in France. The work presents us with a strong criticism to the form of the spectacle and its supposed possibility of approaching society as a whole, its social strata and its relations. For Debord, it would express a form of reality manufactured by a type of society that arose from the evolution of the forms of production of contemporary capitalism and that radically affected social relations, in the last case, in the totality of relations, consumption, culture, work and leisure. The spectacle emerges as an image creator in the human imagination and as a constituent of a form of merchandise 2 .Now, it is necessary to be aware of how this concept 3 is presented. In order to reach it, Debord looks at its 1 Debord himself wrote a situationist manifesto and was one of its main articulators, this movement of a political to artistic nature had as its purpose the debate of an art linked to life and revolutionary action, dialoguing, above all, with the aesthetic advances of the Surrealists and Dadaists. 2 And therefore, because of this development of forms of production, which cannot speak of something totally unreal or false, it is an effective and self-manufacturing reality, as Debord himself will point out below; the reality of the show. 3 To help in the understanding of his criticism, it is necessary to pay attention to his method, which is absolutely distinct from a thesis, whose characteristics are defined by a prose that is expressed in a narrative chain of arguments, in Debord, differently, his style is closer to a manifest, in the form of short excerpts and aphorisms. Such a model is driven by a method that does not promote syntheses of thought, but that follows the exercise of negative dialectics. His style is presented in a tone of messianic pessimism in which it is added to an irony that the only thing that will succeed is the fall of this model of society. The great job for understanding your text is to sew the concept of spectacle that appears in formulations that break in its deviant narrative.