Jonathan Crary, Eclipse of the Spectacle in Art after Modernism

However, Baudrillard is not wrong to proclaim the end of what Guy Debord called "the society of the spectacle." Clearly, a certain period in the initial deployment of television is over, a phase roughly coinciding with post-world war II U.S. hegemony. It is in the mid-1970s that the transformation of television and its insertion into a wholly different set of structures begins, alongside the reorganization of world markets on a non-bipolar model. The convergence of home computer, television and telephone lines as the nexus of a new social machinery testifies to an undoing of the spectacular consumption of the commodity. And paradoxically, television, which had elevated the commodity to the height of spectacular space, is now implicated in the collapse of that space and the consequent evaporation of aura around the body of the commodity.

For Debord, writing in 1967, at the last high tide of the "'Pax Americana," the auratic presence of the commodity was bound up with the illusion of its utter tangibility. But since that time, we have witnessed the gradual displacement of aura from images of possessible objects to digitized flows of data, to the glow of the VDT and the promise of access embodied there. It is a reversal of the process indicated by Debord, in which the seeming self­ sufficiency of the commodity was a "congealment" of forces that were essentially mobile and dynamic. Now, however, with pure flux itself a commodity, a spectacular and "contemplative" relation to objects is undermined and supplanted by new kinds of investments. There is no more opposition between the abstraction of money and the apparent materiality of commodities; money and what it can buy are now fundamentally of the same substance. And it is the potential dissolution of any language of the market or of desire into binarized pulses of light or electricity that unhinges the fictive unity of spectacular representation. Figurative images lose their transparence and are consumed as simply one more code.