consumerism: 2010

The Society of the Spectacle

The current work was made for the Collective Body Program. This proposal was made by Soumyadip Ghosh, who said the following: “I consider retail built environment as a system of signification that gives symbolic expression to the cultural values of consumers. My effort is to look into the root causes of the changing culture and find out relations that how the retail and the real estate is taking a country forward economically or whether this growth is very superficial and not affecting the masses, to the present generation, shopping means much more than a mere necessity and malls are now fast becoming image benchmarks for communities”.
Through this idea, I thought to make a dialogue between the book “The Society of the Spectacle”, by Guy Debord, and the images that we produced. All quotes reproduced here were taken from the first and second chapters of this book.
The pictures black and white by Soumyadip Ghosh and color images by Filipe Chaves.

Quote 10

(...) the spectacle is an affirmation of appearances and an identification of all human social life with appearances. (The) critique that grasps the spectacle’s essential character reveals it to be a visible negation of life — a negation that has taken on a visible form.

Quote 26

(...) With the increasing accumulation of separate products and the increasing concentration of the productive process, communication and comprehension are monopolized by the managers of the system. The triumph of this separation-based economic system proletarianizes the whole world.

Quote 44

The spectacle is a permanent opium war designed to force people to equate goods with commodities and to equate satisfaction with a survival (...). Consumable survival must constantly expand because it never ceases to include privation.

Quote 21

As long as necessity is socially dreamed, dreaming will remain a social necessity. The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep.