He also remarks that ‘the spectacle today is certainly more powerful than it was before’ (1990: 4). Debord suggests that since ‘he disturbances of 1968’, which failed to overturn modern capitalist society, ‘the spectacle has thus continued to gather strength’ (1990: 2-3). The concentrated spectacle, Debord claims, preferred ‘the ideology condensed around a dictatorial personality’, whilst the diffuse spectacle, which ‘represented the Americanisation of the world’, required ‘wage-earners to apply their freedom of choice to the vast range of new commodities now on offer’ (1990: 8). This ‘rational combination’ took place ‘on the basis of a general victory of the…diffuse ’ (Debord 1990: 8). Towards the end of the 1980s – in a context in which the ‘cold war’ had entered its final phase – Debord argued that the two forms of spectacle he had previously formulated, the diffuse and the concentrated, had combined into an ‘integrated spectacle’.

In the third section, I discuss the issue of resistance to the integrated spectacle. In the second section, I examine how the integrated spectacular society functions. In the first section, I make an assessment of the integrated spectacle as a global concept. The article is divided into three sections. In the article I examine the concept of the integrated spectacle -as best I can, bearing in mind Debord’s remarks cited above- by undertaking an ‘immanent critique’. Readers will encounter certain decoys, like the very hallmark of the era ( 1990: 1-2). Having, then, to take account of readers who are both attentive and diversely influential, I obviously cannot speak with complete freedom… Some elements will be intentionally omitted and the plan will have to remain rather unclear. In his book Comments on the Society of the Spectacle Debord suggests that: These Comments are sure to be welcomed by fifty or sixty people… It must also be borne in mind that a good half of this interested elite will consist of people who devote themselves to maintaining the spectacular system of domination, and the other half of people who persist in doing quite the opposite. In this article, therefore, I make the integrated spectacle my central focus of attention.

This notion of an integrated spectacle, developed in Debord’s later oeuvre, has often received less attention than the concept of spectacle outlined in his earlier writings. In the 1980s Debord put forward the idea that modern capitalist society had now become an ‘integrated spectacle’. Debord divided the spectacle into two forms, the diffuse and the concentrated.

In the 1960s Guy Debord argued that modern capitalism had become a society of the spectacle. The emergence of the so-called ‘anti-globalization’ movement saw a renewed interest, amongst some associated with this movement, in the thought of the Situationists.

Ken knabb society of the spectacle