But the term need not be reduced to these pejorative or critical uses. More generally speaking, the term spectacle is often employed in a pejorative manner to criticize public entertainments for manipulating the public or distracting it from more-important social and political issues. This is why modern conceptions of the spectacle tend to be associated with a very passive notion of spectatorship. But the difference between a and the spectacle is not a trivial one, as the idea of one system of images implies that individuals have little power to contest dominant constructions. There are debates as to when the era of the spectacle begins, with Debord’s account dating it to the 1920s. As noted in Crary 1989 (cited under General Overviews), however, perhaps Debord’s most significant contribution is to attach the definite article to spectacle, making it appear as an ideologically unified system of images. The concept of the spectacle is most closely associated with the work of French Marxist Guy Debord, who in 1967 characterized postwar consumer capitalism as the “society of the spectacle.” While it is now common to use the term loosely to dismiss visually distracting entertainments, Debord had a very specific definition of the spectacle as a social relationship mediated by advertising and other mass media images.
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