The Immense Accumulation of Spectacles: Crisis Capitalism or Crisis Exceptionalism

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Abstract

Drawing on Debord’s Society of Spectacle, this paper explores the relationship between the broad neoliberal capitalism spectacle and the specific representations of the economic crisis mediated by an Italian newspaper, Il Sole 24 Ore. In the contest of informational capitalism and based on a theme analysis of the newspaper front-page articles in the period of 2010-11, the paper maintains that the crisis should be understood as a contradictory enactment: being in between a necessary and functional aspect of neoliberal capitalism as well as a genuine, potentially subversive, exception from it.