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?