Image consciousness is what we are condemned to in a society which has substituted the spectacle for God. Importantly, for Debord, this is not a simple case of vanity. In other words, it is not producing things, or even owning things, that drives society forward in the era of late capitalism it is, rather, how things appear, or more precisely, how they make us appear to ourselves, that matters. The image, Debord famously proposed in La société du spectacle (1967), translated as Society of the Spectacle (1970), is the final form of the commodity. What is at stake here is of a higher order than the problem of image saturation which Susan Sontag thought might be curable by going on an image diet. Whereas earlier Marxists had been concerned that the process of commodification had brought about a generalized shift in social ontology away from being towards having, Debord argues that things had in fact gone still further, so that having has been replaced by appearing. A zeitgeist or periodizing term proposed by French Marxist critic and activist Guy Debord as the appropriate designation for the latter half of the 20th century in which the process of alienation had achieved its nadir.
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