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:
“My curiosity to see the melancholy spectacle of the executions was so strong that I could not resist it, although I was sensible that I would suffer much from it.... I got upon a scaffold near the fatal tree so that I could clearly see all the dismal scene.... I was most terribly shocked, and thrown into a very deep melancholy.”
—James Boswell (1740–1795)
“The most sensible people to be met with in society are men of business and of the world, who argue from what they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions of what things ought to be.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)