The iPhone Foreseen
Debord seems to peer several decades into the future when writing about consumer capitalism. Keep in mind that he was writing in 1967 when the when the single television in a house had almost certainly been bought five to ten years earlier and would almost certainly not be replaced for another five to ten years:
“Every single product represents the hope for a dazzling shortcut to the promised land of total consumption…the objects which promise unique powers can be recommended to the devotion of the masses only if they’re produced in quantities large enough for mass consumption. A product acquires prestige when it is placed at the center of social life as the revealed mystery...But the object which was prestigious in the spectacle becomes vulgar as soon as it is taken home by its consumer–and by all its other consumers.”
The Cult of Personality
Spectacle arrives in two forms, one of which is “concentrated.” Concentrated spectacle is associated with authoritarian regimes where force is required and coercive tactics rely upon the cult of personality.
“The imposed image of the good...is usually concentrated in one man, who is the guarantee of totalitarian cohesion. Everyone must magically identify with this absolute celebrity or disappear. This celebrity is master of non-consumption, and the heroic image which gives an acceptable meaning to the absolute exploitation that primitive accumulation accelerated by terror really is. If every Chinese must learn Mao, and thus be Mao, it is because he can be nothing else."
The Spectacle is
What is the spectacle, exactly? It is a question that is not answered singularly, but through the imagery of repetition. At different points, the spectacle is even defined as an image.
“The spectacle is a permanent opium war”
“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”
“The spectacle is the guardian of sleep.”
“The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image.”
Epigraphs
Each new chapter begins with a short quotation. The content of each of those different quotations are clues to the readers. The content that is quoted will become the theme for that chapter. Thus, the quotes become imagery which leads the reader to some of the original material which is referenced in the unique literary device the author terms detournement:
"Chapter 5 “Time and History”
O, gentlemen, the time of life is short!... And if we live, we live to tread on kings.
Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I"
