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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Debord, exchange value, spectacle « Previous | |Next »
March 6, 2011

Mark P. Worrell in The Cult of Exchange Value and the Critical Theory of Spectacle Fast Capitalism 5.2 says that what Guy Debord:

conveys with the idea of spectacle is the extent to which the logic of exchange has penetrated into everyday consciousness at precisely the point where the equivalent value form (money) itself dissolves into abstraction; the extent to which exchange value has become literally disembodied or spectral. As money becomes increasingly abstract its fetish power is magnified... Pushed to extremes spectacle is the belief in value disembodied, resistant to stable forms, free from earthy bonds, colonizing the totality of the social universe; every word spoken through us is the voice of commerce and exchange, warped by the distortion field of omnipresent and omnipotent exchange value; every visual or acoustic image we see or hear (the whole signifying chain in which we are submerged) is dictated by the logic of alienation and exchange; there are no longer relations or thoughts not colored by the dictates of value; spectacle society is the absolute realization of not just commodity relations but the deification of value; people now have prices in their eyes, money on their minds, commodities in their dreams, and, in the case of the lucky few, capital in their veins.

Worrell adds that in societies that have reached the stage of the integrated spectacle, history, criticism, direct experience, truth, real facts, and substance have been extinguished. The integrated spectacle is an extreme idea (that we are now incapable of existence outside the cage of value) but it is empirically true that people living in capitalist societies act, think, and feel to a very great extent as if they were essentially members of a cult – the cult of exchange value.

Debord was definitely on to something.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:24 PM |