It then establishes the connection between the history of consumer cultures, in terms of their visual dimension, with that of production systems. Finally, the paper addresses the relevance of the concept of spectacle in the post-Fordist digital era.
Both the press and academic publications have emphasized the relevance of Debordian ideas to take stock of current developments in our societies in which the visual has colonized our lives to an unprecedented extent. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
This syncretism took place at a precise moment in history, when Fordism and the consumer society submerged Europe after World War II. The research question becomes: what is the relevance of the spectacle concept in a post-Fordist world? The original Marxian concept established production and consumption as two sides of the same coin, one of which only was circulating and taken at face value. Clarification is therefore needed. Reified man proudly displays the proof of his intimacy with the commodity.
Like the old religious fetishism, with its convulsionary raptures and miraculous cures, commodity fetishism generates its own moments of fervent exaltation. What exactly are the labor processes and exploitation mechanisms that need to be obscured by ideology, of which commodity fetishism is a component? And, by focusing on that side of the coin, he makes room for an understanding of commodity fetishism that twists the original concept and leads to confusion.
We, instead, see that exchange value in the material properties of the things themselves, we believe that a diamond is more valuable than a chunk of coal because it is a diamond and not a chunk of coal. The nature of these needs, whether they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination, makes no difference. It springs from a normative vision of what real life should be, of what constitutes authentic desires, making Debord a moralist.
