Eleutherianism

Spectacle, Suicide Man et Marxism-Leninism

This will be expanded and rephrased later.
The spectacle is a social relation mediated by images, and it is most notably alienation (estrangement) present within the capitalist mode of production in an advanced form. Let me reiterate; the spectacle must not be reduced to simply a collection of images or the general concept of media - the idea of the spectacle is rather social relations mediated by images. With this mediation, social life has been reduced. Reduced to continuous cycles of passive consumption, and passive observation, rather than active cosumption/observation we religiously worship capitalism for providing. Why is the spectacle an advanced form of alienation? It is because of its abstraction of social relations into representations which mediate lived experience, through the commodity; the production of goods for exchange rather than for consumption, which is eternally present throughout capitalist societies transforms social relations into alienated relations between things. Through the spectacle, not only labour is alienated - human interaction itself has too suffered this alienation at the terror of the commodity. So, in summary, I think we can best describe the society of the spectacle as a society in which all social relations are mediated through images and, of course, the commodity. The consequence of the society of the spectacle is the detachment of ourselves from our direct experiences, presenting us with a life of passivity. The spectacle is special in that sense that it doesn't just alienate labor, but alienates life itself. (Yes I know that was a lot of repetition, fuck you and whatever football team you support..)

The concept of the spectacle can be drawn back to Marx's idea of commodity fetishism, as part of his social analysis of the capitalist mode of production. You probably already know this but commodity fetishism is that way in which the social relations within production appear as relations between commodities rather than between people, alienating labourer from their labour. Commodity fetishism obscures the social relations which produce the commodity, giving the commodities an appearingly independent, intrinsic value independent of the socially necessary labour time for their production. The spectacle is rampant and mad fetishism, fetishism to the extreme, whatever you may title it - it is commodity fetishism applied to an expanded idea of the commodity - social life is a commodity, experience is a commodity. The spectacle turns all aspects of our existence into something to be exchanged, or represented through imagery. In this fashion, the alienation of the worker from the product of their labor in capitalist society has evolved into the alienation of the individual from their own life under the society of the spectacle. Alienation has escaped the workplace.