SM5325 Chap.6 Spectacle, Consumer Society and Capitalist Realism
Spectacle, Consumer Society and Capitalist Realism
Two diagnoses of consumer capitalism
Week 7 closes the section on the classics of cultural studies with two critiques written about four decades apart.
The lecture introduces Guy Debord as a French Marxist theorist, philosopher and filmmaker, a founder and central figure of the Situationist International, and Mark Fisher as a British writer, critic and cultural theorist at Goldsmiths who first became known through his k-punk blog.
The week's guiding questions ask how Debord's spectacle has turned into a culture of self-monitoring and performance on social media, and whether capitalist realism narrows the futures beyond digital consumption that we can picture.
Debord: the commodity become image
The assigned chapter of Society of the Spectacle is written as numbered theses on the commodity.
Its central claim is that the spectacle marks the point where the commodity has taken over social life entirely, so that everything we see belongs to the commodity world. Exchange value has conquered use value, which must now be proclaimed because it has been lost.
Abundance produces augmented survival rather than freedom from need, the consumer becomes a consumer of illusions, and the spectacle works like money one can only look at, a general equivalent that cannot be spent.
Fisher: bureaucracy, audit and self-assessment
Fisher's chapter begins with a film about office life, where identical memos multiply and a café worker is told to wear badges of flair to express her individuality.
He asks why neoliberalism, which promised to sweep away bureaucracy, produced more of it. His answer is that services resistant to markets are governed by targets that soon become ends in themselves, a valuing of symbols of achievement over achievement that he calls market Stalinism. Auditing fuses public relations with bureaucracy, performed for an imagined big Other, and it spreads until workers become their own auditors.
The chapter ends on the fatalism of there is no alternative and on the need for people to find a new way of acting together politically.
Why the pairing works
Debord supplies a subject who looks at a world turned into images. Fisher supplies a subject who is measured by images of her own performance and checks them herself.
The week's question about social media performance is best answered by showing how a single practice asks for both roles, spectator and self-auditor.
How the chapter is built
The chapter reads each diagnosis through its own case, draws them as two panels that meet at the image, and applies them together to a profile feed.
What this chapter covers
- 01
The spectacle as the commodity's colonisation of social life
- 02
Use value against exchange value
- 03
Augmented survival and the consumer of illusions
- 04
The spectacle as money one can only look at
- 05
Bureaucracy under neoliberalism
- 06
Targets, audit and market Stalinism
- 07
The big Other and public relations
- 08
Workers as their own auditors
Worked example · free
Apply spectacle and audit to a campus event
- 3Apply Debord's claim about images displacing the event.
- 3Apply Fisher's claim about targets and self-assessment.
- 3State the difference between spectator and self-auditor.
Key terms
- Spectacle
- The stage at which the commodity has colonised social life so completely that what we see is the commodity world.
- Exchange Value
- The value of a thing as something to be traded, which Debord argues has conquered its use.
- Augmented Survival
- Debord's term for abundance that regenerates the problem of survival at a higher level instead of ending need.
- Market Stalinism
- Fisher's term for valuing symbols of achievement over actual achievement under neoliberal audit.
- Big Other
- The imagined collective observer for whom appearances are produced, a term Fisher takes from Lacan and Zizek.
- Capitalist Realism
- The widespread sense that there is no alternative to capitalism, which Fisher ties to audit and bureaucracy.
Spectacle, Consumer Society and Capitalist Realism FAQ
What does Debord mean by the spectacle?
The point at which the commodity has taken over social life so thoroughly that commodification is all we see. It is not simply lots of images or advertising. It is a social relation in which exchange has displaced use and appearance has displaced lived activity, so that the spectacle functions like money that can only be looked at.
Why does Fisher say neoliberalism created more bureaucracy?
Because many services resist being turned into markets, so their performance is governed through targets and audits. Targets soon stop measuring the work and become goals in themselves, and institutions learn to produce the right figures. Fisher calls this market Stalinism, and he argues that audit culture spreads until workers assess their own performance on behalf of an imagined inspector.
How do these readings help with social media?
They describe two roles that platforms ask users to play at once. Debord describes the spectator of a world arranged as images, and Fisher describes the self-auditor who checks her own numbers and adjusts her behaviour. The week's question about self-surveillance and performance is answered well by showing where a practice asks for each role and where they merge.
Assessment move
List three numbers you check about yourself each week, such as views, steps or grades, and for each write what activity it stands for and whether you now aim at the number or the activity. That short list is the personal entry point for a presentation on Fisher and a reflexive review of Capitalist Realism.
