IVIV "Under the paving stones, the beach", Debord

[Doug Millison]

Guy Debord's book Society of the Spectacle is worth reading. I had  
some neighbors in Berkeley who were big into it, mid-70s, and  
discussed it with them in some detail. I read it in French back in  
that day, followed up on some of it in Paris, '78.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_the_Spectacle
The Society of the Spectacle (La Société du spectacle) is a work of  
philosophy and critical theory by Situationist and Marxist theorist,  
Guy Debord. It was first published in 1967 in France.

The concept of a Society of the Spectacle may refer in a narrow sense  
to the people who appear in television, particularly the hosts of  
television shows and news. A broader meaning refers to all the people  
living in a society, and whose behavior and lives are heavily  
conditioned by the behavior of tv presenters. The impact of the medium  
of television, labeled by Marshall McLuhan as the timid giant, is such  
that even the small minority of people that don't watch it at all, are  
indirectly influenced by their relationship with those who do.

Historically in the capitalist societies, television outlets have not  
been public places where talented and skilled individuals can make a  
career and express their ideas without censorship. Instead, they have  
been owned by powerful corporations or controlled by directors  
appointed by political officials.

The flow of ideas that go through a society come from, or are  
edulcorated by, the television. This is in fact a totalitarian control  
of the public discourse, resulting in the pollution of ideas, tastes,  
behaviors, life styles, and political choices.


[edit]Book structure, influences and translations
The work is a series of two hundred and twenty-one short theses (about  
a paragraph each), divided into nine chapters.

The Society of the Spectacle provides an extensive reinterpretation of  
Marx’s work, most notably in its application of commodity fetishism to  
contemporary mass media. It also expands the concept of Marx's theory  
of alienation to include far more than labor activity, and exposes the  
common spectacular politics of Soviet and American regimes.[citation  
needed] Debord also builds significantly on the work of György Lukács.

[…]


[edit]Degradation of human life
Debord traces the development of a modern society in which authentic  
social life has been replaced with its representation: "All that was  
once directly lived has become mere representation."[7] Debord argues  
that the history of social life can be understood as "the decline of  
being into having, and having into merely appearing."[8] This  
condition, according to Debord, is the "historical moment at which the  
commodity completes its colonization of social life."[9]

With the term spectacle, Debord defines the system that is a  
confluence of advanced capitalism, the mass media, and the types of  
governments who favor those phenomena. "... the spectacle, taken in  
the limited sense of "mass media" which are its most glaring  
superficial manifestation...".[10] The spectacle is the inverted image  
of society in which relations between commodities have supplanted  
relations between people, in which passive identification with the  
spectacle supplants genuine activity. "The spectacle is not a  
collection of images," Debord writes. "rather, it is a social  
relationship between people that is mediated by images."[11]

In his analysis of the spectacular society, Debord notes that quality  
of life is impoverished,[12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22] 
[23][24] with such lack of authenticity, human perceptions are  
affected, and there's also a degradation of knowledge, with the  
hindering of critical thought.[25] Debord analyzes the use of  
knowledge to assuage reality: the spectacle obfuscates the past,  
imploding it with the future into an undifferentiated mass, a type of  
never ending present; in this way the spectacle prevents individuals  
from realizing that the society of spectacle is only a moment in  
history (time), one that can be overturned through revolution.[26][27]

Debord's aim and proposal, is "to wake up the spectator who has been  
drugged by spectacular images," "through radical action in the form of  
the construction of situations," "situations that bring a  
revolutionary reordering of life, politics, and art". In the  
situationist view, situations are actively created moments  
characterized by "a sense of self-consciousness of existence within a  
particular environment or ambience".[28]

Debord encouraged the use of détournement, "which involves using  
spectacular images and language to disrupt the flow of the spectacle."


[edit]Mass media and commodity fetishism
The Society of the Spectacle is a critique of contemporary consumer  
culture and commodity fetishism. Before the term ‘globalization’ was  
popularized, Debord was arguing about issues such as class alienation,  
cultural homogenization, and the mass media.

When Debord says that, “All that was once directly lived has become  
mere representation,” he is referring to central importance of the  
image in contemporary society. Images, Debord says, have supplanted  
genuine human interaction.[7]

Thus, Debord’s fourth thesis is "The spectacle is not a collection of  
images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is  
mediated by images."[29]

In a consumer society, social life is not about living but about  
having; the spectacle uses the image to convey what people need and  
must have. Consequently, social life moves further, leaving a state of  
'having' and proceeding into a state of 'appearing;' namely the  
appearance of the image.[30]

"In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the  
false." Thesis 9.


[edit]Comparison between religion and marketing
Debord also draws an equivalence between the role of mass media  
marketing in the present and the role of religions in the past.[31] 
[32] The spread of Commodity-images by the mass media, produces "waves  
of enthusiasm for a given product" resulting in "moments of fervent  
exaltation similar to the ecstasies of the convulsions and miracles of  
the old religious fetishism".[33][34]

Other observations Debord makes on religion: "The remains of religion  
and of the family (the principal relic of the heritage of class power)  
and the moral repression they assure, merge whenever the enjoyment of  
this world is affirmed–this world being nothing other than repressive  
pseudo-enjoyment."[35] "The monotheistic religions were a compromise  
between myth and history, ... These religions arose on the soil of  
history, and established themselves there. But there they still  
preserve themselves in radical opposition to history." Debord defines  
them as Semi-historical religion.[36] "The growth of knowledge about  
society, which includes the understanding of history as the heart of  
culture, derives from itself an irreversible knowledge, which is  
expressed by the destruction of God."[37]


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