La società dello spettacolo di Debord: verso lo Spettacolare Integrato

Published in 1967, the Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord continues to be a very important tool to observe our reality. Starting from the analysis of commodity fetishism in Marx, which Debord draws on, and the vision of Benjamin about the fundamental role of the magic aspects of the commodity, the paper wondering how human life is changing when, according to Debord, commodity completely involves the social life. By analyzing the various socio-historical phases in which goods have been turned into a spectacle (from les passages to the World Expositions), adopting the principle of visibility – produced by the culture of bourgeois democracy – we reach the current situation, characterized by rhythms and stimuli that saturate the communicative and social spaces. Nowadays, a relationship of mutual complementarity is established between flow of communication and spectacle. It can be said that the “Integrated Spectacle”, mentioned by Debord in the “Comments on the society of the Spectacle” (1988) has come true: a model dominated by representations in which the spectacle is totally merged with the social culture, and the experience of reality is filtered by media. In order to emerge from the communication flow of contemporary society, spectacular events of great impact are increasingly necessary. In the era of the “attention economy”, where the scarce resource is the attention ability of consumers, daily bombed by myriads of stimuli and information, spectacle seems to be the predominantly model even used.