Spectacle - Spectacle and Society

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:

    What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of Liberty and Learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual and surest support?
    James Madison (1751–1836)

    Nobody thanks a witty man for politeness when he accommodates himself to a society in which it is not polite to display wit.
    Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)