spectacle anxiety
Debord and de Botton
spectacle anxiety
“It is the feeling that we might, under different circumstances, be something other than what we are—a feeling inspired by exposure to the superior achievements of those whom we take to be our equals—that generates anxiety and resentment” (29).
Status Anxiety
Alain de Botton
The consciousness of desire and the desire for consciousness are identically the project which, in its negative form, seeks the abolition of classes, the workers’ direct possession of every aspect of their activity. Its opposite is the society of the spectacle, where the commodity contemplates itself in a world it has created.
Society of the Spectacle
Nicolas Chamfort—”Public opinion is the worst of all opinions” … “One can be certain that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be an idiocy, because it has been able to appeal to a majority” (90).
from Chamfort’s Maxims, 1795
Status Anxiety
Alain de Botton
the objects which promise unique powers can be recommended to the devotion of the masses only if they’re produced in quantities large enough for mass consumption. A product acquires prestige when it is placed at the center of social life as the revealed mystery of the ultimate goal of production. But the object which was prestigious in the... See more
Society of the Spectacle
“We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like—we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our ostensible equals” (30).
Status Anxiety
Alain de Botton
“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”
Society of the Spectacle
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm
via Instapaper
“The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification.”
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm
alienated consumption becomes for the masses a duty supplementary to alienated production
Society of the Spectacle
The spectacle subjugates living men to itself to the extent that the economy has totally subjugated them. It is no more than the economy developing for itself. It is the true reflection of the production of things, and the false objectification of the producers.