Guy Debord, ‘The commodity as spectacle’, paras. 1–18 and 42, from Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red Books, 1977 revised edition) in Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham & Douglas Kellner (Malden, Mass. ; Oxford : Blackwell, 2006), pp.117-121

 “The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life.”(1)

I think this quite a good quote to start off from as it outlines what the spectacle is. I think Debord is trying to say when a commodity, weather that be through a social media in modern times or maybe in 1977 this was through television, magazines and news papers. These commodities are attaining the so-called occupation of social life by being the only thing people talk about or are involved in outside of their own life or even including things that are going on in their life too. They are more interested in the life of celebrities or figures of higher power, relating to Marx’s theory.

The Situationists didn’t agree with this culture of media in the every day life.

The Situationists created a number of methods to subvert the ‘spectacularization’ of everyday life. They were interested (especially during the earlier period of the early 1960s) in very visual creative strategies such as the dérive (and the study of psychogeography) and a method called détournement, which can be translated to the word ‘detour’ but also meaning to ‘hijack’. The Situationists battled saying that in order to combat this mass media society (the Society of the Spectacle), people needed to hijack and divert advertising imagery, film and anything produced by the ‘spectacle’ in order to show how false and misleading these images were to the public eye.

Later on the Situationists realised that the capitalist society had gotten to a stage where the act of rebellion and battle against the cause could be ‘sold’ back to the masses and used as fashion statements.

“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”(2)

This quote explains how the spectacle isn’t the media that is produced that the Situationists don’t like, however it is the connotations that these media images have and how they effects the publics perception of social life and the way they go about living their social lives because of this media that the Situationists strongly disagree with.

1.     Guy Debord, ‘The commodity as spectacle’, para. 42 from The Society of the Spectacle

2.     Guy Debord, ‘The commodity as spectacle’, para. 4 from The Society of the Spectacle