"Society of the spectacle"

While reading “Society of the Spectacle” So I had a hard time with this text, but there were a few paragraphs that made me think. One in particular was paragraph 47. It ended by saysing: “it is the reality of this situation- the fact that, even in its most impoverished form (food, shelter), use value has no existence in the consumption of modern commodities. The real consumer thus becomes a consumer of illusion. The commodity is this illusion, which is in fact real, and the spectacle is its most general form.” I took this to mean that what we consume and live our lives in is in fact nothing. The stuff it is made up of is real, but the fact that we need it and survive on it is the illusion. The commodity has gone from something we want to enrich better our lives, to something we feel we need (which we don’t).

Debord also discussed that the commodity is something that society can no longer exist without. We could never get rid of it. The commodity is what keeps our society functioning, and our society is what keeps the commodity functioning. I found this interesting because it is something that we created, but cannot live without. We are a consuming society, and without the commodity what would we then consume?

This makes me this that we are a society of zombies. We mindlessly consume what is around us, buying and eating and taking over the land around us until eventually there will be no more left. We all live on fossil fuels like zombies do living flesh, and someday soon it will all be gone. The tricky thing is that we are so used to there just being things at fingertips that everything would just fall apart. This all seems like a pretty negative outlook on our society, but like Debord talks about, there is no way around the commodity. It is a part of our lives and has been for a long time. Where there is mass consumption there is the commodity. I think our society and used it and turned us into over consumers, which might be the problem. I think it’s more about being like the zombies from “I am legend” and living with what you are and hoping for the best.