Positing his belief that the integrated spectacle — his IS writ large — comprises the material reconstruction of "the religious illusion," Debord condemned its dictatorial freedom to proclaim "the predominance of appearances" while concealing its essential character "as a visible negation of life – and as a negation of life that has invented a visual form of itself . . . For what the spectacle expresses is the total practice of one particular economic and social formation; it is, so to speak, the formation's agenda. It is also the historical moment by which we happen to be governed . . . The spectacle is self-generated, and it makes up its own rules: It is a specious form of the sacred... . The spectator feels at home nowhere, for the spectacle is everywhere . . . The spectacle's function in society is the concrete manufacture of alienation . . . The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image."
Look no further than the ostentatious whoopla surrounding the AOL-Time-Warner megadeal last week, a nice bit of bizthness pundits predict will engender copy-cat conglomerates greedy for the greatest gains at the expense of the greatest good. Merger-mania is afoot; God is dead; no doubt, with the Western world's accelerated state of disgrace, what can only be described as cultureless utilitarianism (CU) will — IS willing — outlast us all.
Everybody knows we've been universally flattened by the commodification of absolutely everything; nobody quite recalls when the remote took control of our lives. But, like it or not, we've all become the contemporary anybody, the chronically frustrated voyeur of the ubiquitously visible, the itsy-bitsy teenie-weenie chip off the ol' integrated block.
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