spectacle anxiety
Debord and de Botton
spectacle anxiety
In a primitive economy, the commodity sector represented a surplus of survival. The production of commodities, which implies the exchange of varied products among independent producers, could for a long time remain craft production, contained within a marginal economic function where its quantitative truth was still masked. However, where commodity... See more
Society of the Spectacle
When economic necessity is replaced by the necessity for boundless economic development, the satisfaction of primary human needs is replaced by an uninterrupted fabrication of pseudo-needs which are reduced to the single pseudo-need of maintaining the reign of the autonomous economy.
Society of the Spectacle
alienated consumption becomes for the masses a duty supplementary to alienated production
Society of the Spectacle
“The society which rests on modern industry is not accidentally or superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally spectaclist. In the spectacle, which is the image of the ruling economy, the goal is nothing, development everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself.”
Society of the Spectacle
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/de
... See more“Rousseau’s Discourse goes on to sketch the history of the world not as a story of progress from barbarism to the great workshops and cities of Europe, but as one of regress, from a privileged state in which we humans lived simply but were aware of our own needs to a state in which we are apt to feel envy for ways of life that can claim little conn
... See moreNicolas 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 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.
Society of the Spectacle
Separated from his product, man himself produces all the details of his world with ever increasing power, and thus finds himself ever more separated from his world. The more his life is now his product, the more he is separated from his life.
Society of the Spectacle
“Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, “Why the Americans Are Often So Restless in the Midst of their Prosperity” (1835)
“When all prerogatives of birth and fortune have been abolished, when every profession is open to everyone …an ambitious man may think it is easy to launch himself on a great career and feel that he has been called to no co
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