Spectacle and Society
Within industrial and post-industrial cultural and state formations, Spectacle implies an organization of appearances that are simultaneously enticing, deceptive, distracting and superficial. Jonathan Crary: 2005
Spectacle can also refer to a society dominated by electronic media, consumption, and surveillance, reducing citizens to spectators by political neutralization. Recently the word is associated with the many ways in which a capitalist structure creates play-like celebrations of its products and leisure time consumption. Guy Debord's philosophical critique and documentary The Society of the Spectacle explores the concept.
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Famous quotes containing the words spectacle and/or society:
“The spectacle of misery grew in its crushing volume. There seemed to be no end to the houses full of hunted starved children. Children with dysentery, children with scurvy, children at every stage of starvation.... We learned to know that the barometer of starvation was the number of children deserted in any community.”
—Mary Heaton Vorse (1874–1966)
“Great ladies are no more spiteful than the average rich woman; but one acquires in their society a greater susceptibility, and feels more profoundly and ... more irremediably, their unpleasant remarks.”
—Stendhal [Marie Henri Beyle] (1783–1842)