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  • Essay / The Society of the Spectacle of Guy Ernest Debord - 713

    In 1957, a movement had begun composed of avant-garde artists, intellectuals and political theorists. Their main goal was to attempt to merge the fields of theoretical disciplines into a modern and in-depth critique of advanced capitalism of the mid-20th century. This movement was named “Situationist International”. One of the main founders of this movement was Guy Ernest Debord, a writer, Marxist theorist and filmmaker. Debord was responsible for writing what was considered the handbook of the Situationist movement, it was called Société du spectacle. The Society of the Spectacle was written and published in France in 1967. Debord intended with this book to bring out the ideologies and mannerism of neoliberal capitalism that exists in Westernized societies. The book was written so that the Situationist International would have a theory book. The Society of the Spectacle consists of 221 short theses, each covering one paragraph and all divided into 9 chapters. The book attempts to deal with the progression and increase of capitalist societies, which Debord and his accomplices called the spectacle. One of the main aims of the book was to give a broader perspective on how spectacle affects our daily lives from our perception of time and history, our location in the built environment, the force of the media, of our social relationships and of the subjective experiences that the spectacle has created. the main theme of the book is the concept of representation as a philosophical dilemma. Debord describes how the spectacle accumulates until it becomes an image. He goes on to say: “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything in the middle of paper......Italian development in which "everything that was once experienced has passed into representation and the concept of what we want to see goes ahead of what we see." Debord wrote The Society of the Spectacle in 1967 with the intention of raising awareness of the ideologies of the emerging capitalist movement. Forty-seven years later, the book says a lot about modern neoliberalism and capitalism. This book provides crucial insight into the show and how it thrives in the modern world. But it should be noted that this book was not written with the aim of ending the current perception of the world but rather to undo the suppression that the show has created. If representations are coded in mass media to reinforce dominant ideologies in society, then it is crucial that as designers we are aware of the responsibility we take in translating our ideas into images..