Gazing at “Fetishes” 2.0: Using the Spectacle Concept to Understand Consumer Cultures in the Age of Digital Capitalism

Abstract

This paper argues that Debord’s La Société du Spectacle was a syncretism of contemporary US criticism of the consumer society and the power of the image and of the Marxist tradition. First it elucidates the notion of commodity fetishism for Marx and Debord’s détournement of it. It then establishes the connection between the history of consumer cultures, in terms of their visual dimension, with that of production systems. Then Debord’s development of the notion of spectacle is analyzed as a typical critique of Fordism. Finally, the paper addresses the relevance of the concept of spectacle in the post-Fordist digital era.