The Society of the Spectacle

What is at stake in this first chapter is the question of the alienated existence of human beings under the capitalist mode of production. For Debord, the separation that is perfected and referenced in this chapter’s title is a separation between the representation of the concrete lives of individuals and the actuality of those very same lives. Additionally, says Debord, this separation is termed as “the Spectacle” not because oppression today operates by way of images. Rather, the fact that individuals are exploited under capitalism is exacerbated by the fact that the very same individuals think themselves to be free. It is this doubling of the primary economic alienation at the social and political level that leads Debord to diagnose the quality of life as it’s lived in the era after World War II as being perfectly separated.

For Debord, this contemporary form of alienation that characterizes life in postwar capitalist economies is alienated from itself to the extent that all aspects of an individual’s life are structured according to the socially necessary labor time required for the production of commodities: “[…] the spectacle is nothing other than the sense of the total practice of a social-economic formation, its use of time” (Section 11).