The Spectacle 2.0: Reading Debord in the Context of Digital Capitalism
The Spectacle 2.0: Reading Debord in the Context of Digital Capitalism
Author: Marco Briziarelli & Emiliana Armano (eds.), with Douglas Kellner and others
Year: 2017 (University of Westminster Press)
Source type: book (edited volume)
Raw file: raw/books/briziarelli-arman-2017-spectacle-2.0.md
Summary
An edited volume updating Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle for digital capitalism, proposing a "Spectacle 2.0" as a totalizing framework for understanding late capitalism, subjectivity, and digital/immaterial labour. The editors reframe the spectacle from a question of spectacular media content to an ontological question about the "mediation logic" of the sphere of production of value — especially its informational, cognitive, and digital forms. The preface (Douglas Kellner) locates the 2016 Trump presidency as the culminating "politics of the spectacle."
Key Claims
- From spectacle as content to spectacle as mediation: the Debordian notion is often popularized as spectacular images/events; the editors instead treat the Spectacle as "the general process of mediation that for Debord propels the Spectacle" — the fundamental intersection of transformative social relations in their informational, cognitive, and digital forms.
- Spectacle 2.0 as a heuristic: the intersection of ICT and work/labour is "one powerful productive and reproductive factor of current capitalism" — a holistic mediator linking logistics, finance, new media, and urbanism, which "colonizes most spheres of social life" through commodification, exploitation, and reification.
- Continuity with the classical spectacle: despite historical differences, the "2.0" modality is in dialectical continuum with the original and integrated spectacles, marked by commodity fetishism, exploitation of labour, and capital's tendency to subsume social life; configurations appear as "determinate negations."
- Digital/immaterial labour and subjectivation: knowledge workers "produce, consume and reproduce value" through precarious (digital) labour — processes of subjectification and valorization in the attention/cognitive economy (cf. semiocapitalism).
- Kellner's preface — media spectacle and Trump: media spectacles disrupt habitual information flows and circulate virally; Donald Trump is "a master of media spectacle" whose election marks the collapse of politics into entertainment and the hyperspectacle — a stage "beyond Debord's model of spectacle and consumer capitalism in which spectacle has come to colonize politics, culture, and everyday life."
Connections
Concepts: Spectacle · Semiocapitalism · Noopolitics Authors: Guy Debord · Douglas Kellner Debates: (new-modes-of-spectacle) Related source notes: Semiocapitalism, Spectacle, Eikonomia (Bahtsetzis)
Direct Quotes
"[W]e would like to show how the Spectacle vastly exceeds its superficial theatrical stage … the mediation logic of the sphere of production of value … translates into labour in its informational guise." (Editors' Introduction)
"The spectacle thus unites what is separate, but it unites it only in its separateness." (Debord, Thesis 29, epigraph)
"[T]he spectacle has come to colonize politics, culture, and everyday life … collapsing politics into entertainment and spectacle." (Kellner, on Trump)
Open Questions
- Is "Spectacle 2.0" a substantive extension of Debord or a re-description of semiocapitalism/attention economy under a new name?
- Can a "counter-spectacle" (e.g. guerilla media during the Gezi uprising) escape the totalizing spectacle, as the volume's resistance chapters ask?
