Commodity -> Spectacle -> Simulacrum

Commodity

In a capitalist society commodity production is the purpose of society and maximization of profit is the purpose of commodity production. - Marx

Spectacle

The spectacle is a tool of pacifization and depolitization. Comparable to a "permanent opium war". The spectacle spreads itself through leisure and consumption, services and entertainment. It distracts the subject from the most urgent task of real life: recovering the concrete totality of human activity through social transformation. - Debord

"The commodity has attained the total occupation of social life."
p47 Baudrillard, a critical reader

Where the image determines and overtakes reality, life is no longer lived directly and actively. The spectacle escalates abstraction to the point where we no longer live in the world per se - "inhaling and exhaling all the powers of nature" (Marx) - but in an abstract image of the world. "Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation" (Debord), one which secures the false consciousness of enriched alienation. p47

Simulacrum

Political economy is no longer the foundation. Instead we live in a "hyperreality" of simulations in which images, spectacles, and the play of signs replace the logic of production and class conflict as key constituents of contemporary societies. p7

The proliferation of images, information, signs, overshadows production. -Baudrillard

Modern vs Postmodern

- Modern societies are organized around production and the consumption of commodities.
- Postmodern societies are organized around simulation and the play of images and signs.

- Modernity operates with logic of representation in which ideas represent reality and truth, concepts that are key postulates of modern theory.
- Postmodern society explodes this epistemology by creating a situation in which subjects lose contact with the real and themselves and fragment and dissolve.

Consequences

Individuals are confronted with an overwhelming flux of images, codes and models, any of which may shape an individual's thought or behavior. p8

Debord emphasizes the super reification of image objects as a massive unreality, an inversion of reality and illusion.

The fundamental goal of the Situationist praxis was to reconstruct society and everyday life to overcome division and fragmentation in the spectacle. p60