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MEDIA & SPECTACLE. COM 316 Week 3. Guy Debord. Guy Debord was a writer, filmmaker , hypergraphist and founding member of the groups Lettrist International and Situationist International (SI) in the 1960s.
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MEDIA & SPECTACLE COM 316 Week 3
Guy Debord • Guy Debord was a writer, filmmaker, hypergraphist and founding member of the groups Lettrist International and Situationist International (SI) in the 1960s. • These groups influenced the French uprising in 1968, particularly the student movements.
Decoding Debord • Debord uses very complex, poetic and often confusing language to make some very crucial points that have become increasingly relevant today. • His ideas were very influential on how media scholars, critics and activists think about culture.
Important Marxist Terms in Debord • use value • exchange value • commodity • commodity fetishism • spectacle (Debord)
Use-value is the qualitative aspect of value. It is, the material uses to which the object can actually be put, the human needs it fulfills.
The quantitative amount that an object is worth in exchange for other objects constitutes its exchange-value.
Debord writes: (40)“In a primitive economy, the commodity sector represented a surplus of survival.”
Money has come to stand in as a ‘universal equivalent.’ Here, exchange-value dominates use-value and use-value becomes abstracted.
In other words, we think more in terms of what things are ‘worth’ or cost on the market, than what they can do to fulfill our material needs.
From Craft to Commodity • Economic growth and technological reproduction led to the large scale production of cultural goods. Mass produced pots in the United Arab Emirates
And while some goods are still locally produced to meet everyday needs, most are imported from other countries where costs (labor and materials) are cheaper.
Wage Labour & Profit • At the same time, people who used to labor for survival, now engage in wage labor. They sold their labor-power to producers in exchange for wages. However, the wage they receive does not ‘match’ the price at which goods are sold. This leads to an accumulation of profit.
Wage Labour & Profit • The connection to the actual hands of human laborers as craftspeople is severed and we become disconnected from the production process of the goods we use. Pottery is a major export of Sri Lanka.
In a capitalist society, the real producers of commodities remain largely invisible. We only approach their products "through the relations which the act of exchange establishes between the products"
Debord writes: (35)“We recognize our old enemy, the commodity, who knows so well how to seem at first glance something trivial and obvious, while on the contrary it is so complex and so full of metaphysical subtleties.”
Commodities can seem simple because their function is not necessarily complicated. • We store things in a pot, we drink from a glass, we wear a pair of jeans. • Yet these goods are actually complex. When we think about the layers of meanings, significance and values they are attributed.
This occurs primarily through advertising and branding. When goods take meanings that go far beyond their use, we can say they are ‘fetishized’.
Commodity Fetishism • Fetishism in anthropology refers to the belief that godly powers can inhere in inanimate things • Commodity fetishism is the magical quality of the commodity http://www.cla.purdue.edu/English/theory/marxism/modules/marxfetishism.html
Society of the Spectacle • When commodities are everywhere and are everywhere full of a myriad of meanings exceeding their use, when workers are alienated from their labor and leisure time is spent consuming goods, when we can no longer discern the material world from the world of prime time news media, fashion magazines, game shows and the World Cup finals—we are amidst what Debord calls, “The Society of the Spectacle.”
(42) “The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the totaloccupation of social life.”
“It is sometimes not clear when the narrative segment has ended and the commercial has begun.” (Jameson, 74)
“The contents of the media itself have now become commodities.” (Jameson, 75)
Can we distinguish between image and reality?Does it matter?Is this the best question to ask?
