Go on, get out of here. You're Free Now. Go on, GO...

Preface: You know in kids' movies when the kid has to let the animal go back into the wild?
The Text:
The salient point within chapter two of Guy Debord's 1967 Society of the Spectacle can be read within the subtext of aphorism number fifty-three, in which Debord states, "...this project is the society of the spectacle, where the commodity contemplates itself in a world of its own making." What Debord calls into question here is the value of a human life.
Debord establishes earlier in chapter two that within the discourse of the society of the spectacle, the usefulness of a given quantity is explicitly proportional to that quantity's ability to participate within, and thereby perpetuate the discourse of the spectacle. He also establishes that for any "thing" - be it an idea or a solid object - to be of use to the machinations of the spectacle, the qualities of a substance must first be quantified. This quantification serves to transmute the essence of an idea or object into a product: a commodity that fits within the spectacle's discursive specifications. The quantification that Debord concerns himself with throughout Society of the Spectacle, and is specifically addressing in aphorism fifty-three is that of the human as commodity.
The scene is set for the fruition of human reification by the actualizing of Michel Foucault's concept of biopower. When he (Foucault) describes "...an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations..." (Foucault, 140) Foucault is describing a tactic of power that politically quantifies the human body. This alchemy of discourse is a method employed by the society of the spectacle which Debord specifically names in aphorism forty-two when he says, "...domination is broken down into further specialties such as sociology, applied psychology, cybernetics, and semiology..."
These institutions, like the people that fill them, are products of the culture that produced them. Debord identifies these quantifiers of human life and consciousness as the internal way in which the society of the spectacle regulates its participants á la biopolitics.
The total commodification of human life that Debord identifies as the final expression of the spectacle is taken one step further by Jonathan Crarcy within his text Techniques of the Observer. Cracry first identifies that despite culture producing the way which one experiences the world, as human beings our primary form for perceiving objective reality is through sight. Historically, Crarcy argues, seeing has been believing. Humanity has evolved with the implicit constant that to see something - an object or an event - is to experience the fact of that things existence objectively.
Crarcy believes that this ability to implicitly trust the world we see in everyday life will soon be a thing of the past. When he states that, "... the historically important functions of the human eye are being supplanted by practices in which visual images no longer have any reference to the position of an observer in a 'real,' optically perceived world..." (Crarcy, 2) he is not alluding to the suspension of disbelief that one engages in when reading a novel, or the consensual illusion entered within the walls of a movie theatre. Instead Crarcy refers to the creation of an environment that we interpret as reality, but has never, and could never exist in any physical form: cyberspace. The acceptance of imagery that only exists in a digital, non-real space is a concern for Crarcy because it effectively quantifies reality.
The codification of experienced reality into "... millions of bits of electronic mathematical data..." that Crarcy is describing seems to breach the last bastion of human experience that until the "digital revolution" had been out of reach for assimilation into the discourse of the spectacle. To appreciate the potentiality that Crarcy envisions for cyberspace, first imagine an Appalachian coal-mining town at the turn of the twentieth century.
Commonly referred to as "company towns", these communities were owned in totality by a given coal company. Employees labored in the company mine, bought company food from the company store with company money that they also used to pay for their company house situated on company land. Children went to company schools and parents filled their company cars at the company service-station.
Company Towns were in effect a precursory microcosm of what Guy Debord would later describe as the society of the spectacle. The spectacle being the coal company and the society - the coal miners - being the entire world. Debord's vision of a global economy beholden to the doctrines of reification and total commodity that extends into all aspects of human life in the same way that coal companies dominated the lives of their employees. However, the spectacle as described by Debord was not yet a closed system. The global commodification of resources - vegetable, animal, mineral, and ontological - into the cultural product of the spectacle still had gaps and inconsistencies in 1967.
What Crarcy is describing "... [an] equivalent sensation and stimuli that have no reference to a spatial location..." (Crarcy, 24) is the effort of the system to close itself. Debord related a future history that warned where we were headed, Crarcy is describing the way in which we have gotten there.
The value of human life that Guy Debord is concerned with within Society of the Spectacle focuses on the quantitative - or monetary - value of a person's labor within a system that equates value with the perpetuation of the system. The quantitative ubiquity of the cultural object designated as "money" confers power through perceived value into a system that, once adopted, required its participants to perpetuate.
However, not all action in the system described by Debord engage - and by definition - perpetuated the system. An individual may have been produced by and exist in relation to the spectacle, but the singular act of existence does not implicitly engage with the spectacle directly. This is where Crarcy's admonition of the quantification of reality reminds one that the spectacle, as an expression of power, has only grown more complex since Debord gave it a name in 1967.
Crarcy's premonition of an augmented, codified, and quantified reality turns the very act of existing into a commodity. This closing of the system makes the participants completely beholden to the discourse of power and effectively neuters any potential for true resistance. If the spectacle can produce a closed system in which the world we experience in real time is totally physically constructed by the discourse of power, the resultant commodity will be denied even self-contemplation.


1. Crarcy, Jonathan (1990) "Techniques of the Observer." MIT Press: Boston, MA, 1992.
2. Debord, Guy (1967) "The Society of the Spectacle." Rebel Press: London, 2004.
3. Foucault, Michel (1984) "The History of Sexuality Vol.1: The Will to Knowledge." Penguin Books: London, 1998.