Ouphilpo

The immediate effect of the Spectacle on institutions and society is a congealment into static human activity through the arrogation of all human activity in the world. This cessation is due to the universalization of spectacular media and the growing separation between the producer and the product. Such is the basis for commodity fetishism, the domination of the qualities that are both perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. In the way the spectacle is seen and not touched, apprehended but not comprehended, the sum total of the product is estranged from the producers and the means of production. The spectacle excludes quality, and is exclusively quantitative in nature: “the quantitative is what it develops, and it can only develop within the quantitative” (Debord §38). In the way the commodity is characterized exclusively by self-equivalence, the spectacle is only concerned with the repetition of reproduction and “turning the whole planet into a single world market” where everything has been bought, sold, or is owned by someone (Debord §38). This development remains the basis for all human existence, and is not only the conditions of existence, but also the conditions for survival. Life itself has become commodified, with workers selling their time (lives) in order to consume commodities in order to live. “The economy transforms the world, but it transforms it into a world of the economy” (Debord §40). An economy can bring jobs and income to people who need it, but by doing so, transforms existence into the consumption of commodities. The economy can provide necessities for life, but these necessities become commodities if one must sell their life in order to eat. “In these circumstances an abundance of commodities, which is to say an abundance of commodity relations, can be no more than an augmented survival” (Debord §40). One must sell their lives in order to eat. “Once work is over, they are treated like grown-ups, with a great show of solicitude and politeness, in their new role as consumers. The humanity of the commodity finally attends to the workers’ ‘leisure and humanity’ for the simple reason that political economy as such can — and must — bring these spheres under its sway. Thus it is that the totality of human existence falls under the regime of the ‘perfected denial of man’” (Debord §43). It is “impossible to distinguish goods from commodities, or true satisfaction from a survival that increases according to its own logic” (Debord §44). Survival is not mere sustainability, rather, is an augmenting production of humans and items, to the point where someone owns or has bought every fathomable object in our world, from the electricity paid for as a result of the electric bill, to the grass in the front yard of someone’s “property,” to the purchased paint and canvas priceless works of art, every object, every perceivable experience is a result of something bought or owned — commodified. “Survival itself belongs to the realm of dispossession,” and dispossessions of the lives of the workers from the means of production result in automatons, or smaller commodities (screws, paint, electricity, metal) are combined into a more abstract commodity (a worker) producing larger commodities (a car) — the “generator of commodities” (Debord §45). Even the service industry is “reintegrating newly redundant labor…the very factitiousness of the needs associated with the commodities on offer calls out a whole battery of reserve forces,” and the reserve forces act as commodities to other commodities who commodify at a higher income. This sense of investment, or improved quality of the higher income commodities serves as a bolster to the dedication to the spectacle. This income is the amount at which someone can procure use value items, ultimately more useful than items solely exchange value, “even in its most impoverished form (food, shelter), use value has no existence outside the illusory riches of augmented survival,” and this is the foundation installed in order to have faith in modern commodity’s consumption (Debord §47). “The real consumer thus becomes a consumer of illusion” (ibid). Capital is no longer produced by society, rather, society is produced by capital. The perpetuation of these pseudo-needs comes through the ability to suffice one’s needs through consuming, resulting in a “social unconscious that was dependent on it without knowing it” (Debord §51). You have always already bought in.