The Society of the Spectacle
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Contents:
You only have to consider who is using this term to understand. Since when does intellectual submission speak the truth? Or if you prefer, if intellectual submission says so, it's a lie. By using the term spectacle as if it were common knowledge and an accepted fact, M-E Nabe participates in this process of deceit.
In spite of his denials and insults, he is a sycophant and a victim of Debord. He authenticates Debord's deception by affirming the existence of a society of the spectacle. Actually, the spectacle in its ordinary sense doesn't bother me at all. Who does it bother, really? I don't watch television or read the newspapers. I don't read inept books published by imbeciles.
It is a pleasure for me to insult Mr.
See a Problem?
Meanwhile, nobody can escape the stubborn mutism of this world, not even the rich and powerful. I knew this world well in , a time when television was barely around and only a few years before the Situationists put forth the term "commodity spectacle" , and I see no change since then, except for the development of television, which is a phenomenon of no particular importance.
Actually, Debord liked referring to film as "this little industry. Freud's clients have become more numerous. And this world's stubborn mutism keeps growing. Already before Musil and Broch meticulously documented the relationship between commerce and mutism. Mutism weighs down more heavily in a society filled mainly with office workers than when it was populated mostly by blue-collar workers, who were more "outspoken" as they used to say.
Office workers are a particularly disgusting species of slaves. At night, as we all know, they metamorphose into beetles, and their first thought in the morning is to figure out how to get back to the office. It appears that the problem will soon be solved and that the beetles will be able to stay home all day. The Internet is truly an information highway, which is to say stay-at-home traffic jams. ATM [16] and fiber optics won't change a thing.
Despite ever longer and wider freeways, traffic jams continue unabated.
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Telecommunication can never hope to replace communication. More generally, I think that this world has been completely immobile for the last two centuries. In his amusing dictionary of literature, Edern Hallier [17] says that this world was created by Balzac, who thus is God. Indeed, nothing has changed since Balzac's time, except for the fact that in France the struggle for political power has become pointless since the fall of Napoleon III, given that this power is definitively under the control of business if not directly in its hands so business has hands, invisible ones at that!
Guy Debord | Comments on the Society of the Spectacle
It was not Baudrillard who said that nowadays we no longer have craftsmanship, just products. It was Balzac in For the last two centuries slaves have gone more or less docilely to their factories and offices, and it isn't the media or television that has pushed them there. The difference today is that slaves are motorized. And the journalists that Balzac depicted are the same as can be seen today. He even noted their passion for making puns. Today all they have left are puns. The brilliant Parisian life of is gone. Mutism has spread ever since.
Just as the circus occupied the idle plebian, automobiles and television occupy the needy slave during the six hours per day fallaciously known as free time. It is entirely possible that the effect of television on slaves is not exclusively harmful. Marx said that " city air " was liberating. I would be tempted to say that television is liberating: it replaces the local form of degradation with a universal one, so that modern slaves are as degraded in Charente as they are in Texas.
The Society of the Spectacle
Clearly, that's progress. Even the universal must progress through its bad side, as must everything, if Hegel is right. Elsewhere I wrote that the role of thought was not to say what should be, but more modestly to say what is. I now realize that even that was enormously presumptuous.
Breadcrumb
The role of thought is not to say what is, but what is not. And this task is immense, so numerous are the things that do not exist but which nevertheless are talked about, in total mutism, day in and day out. Thus "the population," "all the inhabitants," "all the animals," "the economy. The economy isn't even that, it's just a word devoid of meaning. Debord explicitly claimed to make a critique of the economy. But given that his aim was to make a critique of something that does not exist, it is hardly surprising that his critique did not exist either.
That's the very least one could expect. The society of the spectacle doesn't exist any more than does the economy. And it is just as impossible to make a critique of the society of the spectacle as it is of the economy. I already wrote elsewhere that the critique of phlogistics is the discovery of oxygen and napalm. As Engels was fond of saying, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
In a famous passage of the Grundrisse, Marx says that at first sight it seems that the study of reality should start with the population. The population seems to be the immediate actuality that one encounters at first. But he shows that it is nothing like that. The population does not exist, or when it does, it is only as a mathematical entity. One is tempted to say that it is very simple, that "the population" is a set of all the inhabitants of a city, region or country. But a set of inhabitants is a mathematical entity that only exists in thought.
It is only an idea, and if such a set exists, it exists only as an idea. Something exists, however, notably the city, but not the population or all the inhabitants. Similarly, "all the animals" doesn't exist.
It exists only as an idea. One can legitimately say that "animals exist," but not "all the animals. When Hitler or Himmler stated "All the Jews must be gassed," though "all the Jews" doesn't exist, "Jews" were gassed nonetheless. This example gives us a sense of the fearsome power of ideas. In contrast, the Alps exist, Hegel himself was forced to admit it, or so they say.
But apart from burying a few ski bums under an avalanche or two, they never harm anyone. In general, the power of ideas is bad; it's probably the famous "negative" that Hegel constantly discusses. Socrates' fellow citizens got it right.
The Society of the Spectacle is a work of philosophy and Marxist critical theory by Guy Debord, in which the author develops and presents the concept of . The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector.
This is why thought worthy of its name is bad negative , and it is almost a pleonasm to say a "bad thought" and an oxymoron to say a "good thought. In this orgy of things that don't exist, it seems to me that it would be comforting if I could cite something that does exist and that can be named. Even if the population doesn't exist, the nation does. It manifests itself in each of us at every moment whether we are thinking of it or not.
And it crops up as well in those reality shows where some specimen of Frenchman, usually the "hunting and fishing" type, acts out for the television cameras a modestly heroic episode of his life. Certainly, it is not Valmy, [18] yet the nation is tangible. Thanks to the history of mathematics, we know what troubles the sets approach led to. As for Turing, you can choose: either he was assassinated by the English secret service, or he committed suicide, or he accidentally poisoned himself with cyanide. All classical thought strives to eliminate the observer. But experience constantly and unceasingly reintroduces the need for the observer.
In a way, experience is opposed to "the final solution" for the observer. OBserver: an observer with a large ZOB. Isn't the literary ideal that of the observer? Wasn't Proust the prince of observers? Arithmetic is not complete, it needs an observer. So arithmetic is an experimental science! Neils Bohr commanded: "Thou shalt not speak of the atomic world in-itself, in classical terms thou shalt describe reality.
In classical terms?
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