NO ONE SEES THE SPECTACLE: A DEBORDIAN RE-READING OF MARTIN CRIMP'S NO ONE SEES THE VIDEO

Abstract

In the second half of the 20th century, a relatively small group of influential Paris-based intellectuals led by Guy Debord whose origin had an avant-garde artistic tradition started a new revolt against the established vision of reality in the world: they were called Situationists (1957–1972). All through the 1950s and 1960s, the situationists claimed that the alienation of the people to both themselves and the society, accompanied by the alienation of labour in the 19th century, was due to production, but in the 20th century, it changed form and became rooted in consumption. To them, consumption is the force to define happiness and to conceal all other opportunities for freedom and selfhood. The concepts behind ‘culture’ were as much dangerous as those behind the industry. Guy Debord has named this new dominant social order, where all realities have turned into abstract images, ‘the Society of Spectacle’. Martin Crimp deals with the similar problems in his plays and focuses on the influence of addiction to consumerism on human beings and thus we will examine in this study if Crimp’s No one Sees the Video can be reread under the light of Debord’s book The Society of Spectacle and the concepts he offered in this book such as recuperation and ‘détournement’, and ‘Spectacle.