The ‘Integrated Spectacle’

As Cang Lang's fury mounts, he creates a spectacle. Readers cannot but be entertained by the critic's breathless litany of the titillating events he lambasts in Yu Hua's bestselling novel, Brothers (兄弟, 2005a: 2005b). Funnier still is his frustrated attempt to extricate himself from the voyeuristic practices of spectacular society. As Guy Debord remarked in 1988, reflecting back on his 1967 opus, The Society of the Spectacle, ‘That modern society is a society of spectacle now goes without saying […] What is so droll, however, is that all the books which do analyze this phenomenon, usually to deplore it, must sacrifice themselves to the spectacle if they’re to become known’ (Debord 1998: 5).

In The Society of the Spectacle Debord analysed the transformation of societies organised around production into those organised by the late capitalist consumption of ‘an immense accumulation of spectacles’. ‘Spectacle’ for Debord was a complex term that referred to a media society organised around the consumption of images, commodities, and staged events and to the vast institutional and technical apparatus that relegates subjects to passivity. Debord's basic claim is that what we see in the world – how the world is architected – is a reflection of triumphant ideologies (Gilman-Opalsky 2010: 120).