In this brief article in New Left Review T.J. Clarke reminds us that Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle:

was not a book that proposed a periodization of capitalism. It deliberately did not say when ‘the spectacle’ arrived. The spectacle was a logic and an instrumentation inherent in the commodity economy, and in certain of its social accompaniments, from the very beginning. No doubt that logic became clearer as the instrumentation became more efficient and widespread—why else the peculiar mixture of lucidity and desperation to Debord’s very tone? But the logic had always been relatively clear, and the instrumentation notable—in a sense, pervasive.

Clarke adds that:

‘Image’, ‘body’, ‘landscape’, ‘machine’—these (and other) key terms of modernism’s opposing language are robbed of their criticality by the sheer rapidity of their circulation in the new image-circuits, and the ability of those circuits to blur distinctions, to flatten and derealize, to turn every idea or delight or horror into a fifteen-second vignette.

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