In the former case, government power assumes the personified form of the pseudostar in the second, stars of consumption canvas for votes as pseudopower over life lived. The byproducts in question are power and leisure – the power to decide and the leisure to consume which are the alpha and the omega of a process that is never questioned. Themselves incarnations of the inaccessible results of social labor, they mimic byproducts of that labor, and project these above labor so that they appear as its goal.
SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE FREE
Celebrities figure various styles of life and various views of society which anyone is supposedly free to embrace and pursue in a global manner. Stardom is a diversification in the semblance of life – the object of an identification with mere appearance which is intended to compensate for the crumbling of directly experienced diversifications of productive activity.
Media stars are spectacular representations of living human beings, distilling the essence of the spectacle’s banality into images of possible roles. A smug acceptance of what exists is likewise quite compatible with a purely spectacular rebelliousness, for the simple reason that dissatisfaction itself becomes a commodity as soon as the economics of affluence finds a way of applying its production methods to this particular raw material.
The life in question is after all produced solely as a form of pseudogratification which still embodies repression. The vestiges of religion and of the family (still the chief mechanism for the passing on of class power), and thus too the vestiges of the moral repression that these institutions ensure, can now be seamlessly combined with the rhetorical advocacy of pleasure in this life. Behind the glitter of the spectacle’s distractions, modern society lies in thrall to the global domination of a banalizing trend that also dominates it at each point where the most advanced forms of commodity consumption have seemingly broadened the panoply of roles and objects available to choose from.
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