Image, Spectacle, Everyday Life

In 1967, Guy Debord famously declared that we inhabit a “society of the spectacle,” a society in which images dominate everyday life. In the decades since, this state of affairs seems only to have intensified. Yet how exactly might we understand spectacle today? How, given our current social and political climate, might we conceive spectacle’s role in shaping our ideas and perceptions? Foregrounding cinema but also examining television and new media, we will consider these questions in broad historical perspective, emphasizing in turn both the wide-ranging political implications of spectacle and the critical counter-practices that have arisen to contest it.