Chapter 5 Narcissism and the fractionalization of the individual

This chapter discusses the extent to which the absorptive class has been created as essentially narcissistic in character by the system of capitalist production. Guy Debord, an early critic of a post modern capitalism, argued that capitalism had gone so far in the production of the commodity that society is turned into a mirror or spectacle that represents the kind of void in existence felt at the core of the individuals within it. He also laments the way in which the economy exists for its own sake, rather than for those that live within it and as part of it. In his somewhat incoherent work,The Society of the Spectacle, he writes of the commodity as spectacle, and we find such assertions as (Debord, 1983):“The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself.”“The spectacle subjugates living men to itself to the extent that the economy has totally subjugated them. It is not more than the economy developing for itself.”“The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image.”