Society of the Spectacle

So was Guy Debord right?

youtube.com/watch?v=MMKFIHRpe7I

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youtube.com/watch?v=0Ju5HFoD20U
youtube.com/watch?v=pGUxQmRNhtk
cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/is1.html
cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/report.html
cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/poverty.html
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if he knew that sofs would produce Veeky Forums he would have been for it

Pardon my ignorance, what is "sofs"?

Society of the Spectacle

I abbreviated it that way because of my brain retardation.

Did it? I know the buzzfeed guy used SOFS as his thesis, but never looked into what moot studied.

moot creates Veeky Forums before he ever went to college. He studied something awful and 2chan.

fucking wrestling lmao

if he was right, then why did SI officially disband in 1972?

to prove its point

yes

Yes. He was a woke thinker along with Spengler. Baudrillard, and really the other post-modernists, are second-rate Debord.

Yup. Agamben is the woke homie of these times though (check his stuff on Debord out as well).

Yeah he was pretty woke lmao

Just look at the inauguration. The whole electoral cycle is the most obvious example

Currently reading Homo Sacer, Agamben is WOKE to unnerving points, how can someone be this well read while also avoiding the pitfalls of the canon / academy / status quo?

Remnants of Auschwitz especially is chilling to the bone

>woke
C'mon guys. We're left-leaning, but don't make us buzzfeed.

we're appropriating their lingo

fuck agamben
>body body body reeee

Yes it does.

dude sofs lmao

>We're left-leaning

Speak for yourself.

Make me punk

Please, I've always wanted to meet a right winger fan of Debord. Explain me your outlook on politics.

Agamben is based as fuck. Schmitt + Foucault + Benjamin. Damn.

Plus he hates the EU.

The alternative to not being left-wing is not always being right-wing. Both concepts are ridiculous and empty nowadays. French communists of the 60s would be considered far-right nowadays.

>French communists of the 60s would be considered far-right nowadays.

No they would be rightly considered immature retards.

> de Gaulle fought the fascists
> de Gaulle ended colonialism
> A BLOO BLOO BLOO HE FASCIST PIG DADDY

mai 68 was an embarrassing mistake, fucking bobos

Can any of you guys give me some Negri recommendations? He's buds with Agamben

I've always felt that Debord's views on capitalism and its evolution are extremely compatible with the views of the non-capitalist strains of the right, such as traditionalists and the likes.

oh, like the Heaven's Gate guys who cut their own balls off and died, to prove that aliens were coming to take them away from Earth? seems legit.

hes shit

Me too, this is why I've asked.

More like sports entertainment.

This. Soixantehuitards de merde.

>I've always wanted to meet a right winger fan of Debord
It me hello
>Explain me your outlook on politics
The tl;dr version is the every day life is becoming more inhuman, deracinated and economised. These things are corrosive to the spirit and lets face it everything from mental health to the family. You can't turn people who are fundamentally animals into machines. The appeal of Debord is that he recognises the trend of "the spectacle" coming to dominate all life, including "inner life". Losing the ability to have meaningful introspection without it being through the lens of or in reference to "the spectacle" has been disastrous. Other influences have been Kaczynski, Baudrillard, Spengler, Dominique Venner, Yukio Mishima and Ernst Junger

As a side note I mostly agree with Marxist critiques but very rarely with their proposed solutions.

From your influences, I'm only aquainted with Mishima, Kaczynski and Baudrillard, they're all very good (Baudrillard not really, he's too defeatist for me, but I still value his insights).

Ever read any post-left stuff? Hakim Bey, Bob Black, etc.

Very unacquainted with anything like that, Just looked up Hakim Bey and he seems like my kinda guy. Do you recommend anything in particular from him to start with?

Of my influences Ernst Junger has consistently been the strongest. This is a fantastic interview/documentary from when he was 101 years old. youtube.com/watch?v=0Ju5HFoD20U

The Glass Bees and Eumeswil are essential to understanding him. His Great War memoir Storm of Steel is brilliant, On Pain was a big influence personally too. He post-war cultivated a reclusive 18th century man of letters image which was heightened when he was hailed as the best German writer since Goethe. Everything about the man is endlessly fascinating with time you come to feel you know him personally.

thanks for the recs bois.

And I supposed I meant to say "leftist" as opposed to "liberal" on this board.

The interesting part of our present day is that the Spectacle is getting better and better at including more people. The marxist critic would say that it's a capitalistic imperative to do so - the Spectacle (and thereby the market that the Spectacle shapes) works better the more inclusive it is. It's why something like the "Shakespeare for rednecks" production in OP's vid is produced and disseminated by the highest elites of our culture (i.e .Trump). Of course the reality is that the power and wealth is still controlled (even more so now) by those same elites, but the Spectacle of it (that is, the _representation_ of reality) is a neoliberal heyday.

nice thread, lads

Have you read this? I highly recommend it.

>open thread with dread and low expectations after not browsing lit for a while
>its actually pleasant and interesting
i love u :}

Interesting thread, just ordered Society of the Spectacle and Homo Sacer as they sound very fascinating. What am I in for?

Thorough red-pilling. Homo Sacer is very, very good. Agamben is a perfect extension of Foucault. SofS will make you wiser and sadder in equal parts.

Homo Sacer is a very strong critique of liberalism.

>defends a type of marxism so bad, that the USSR didn't want to fun the terrorist movement he inspired

Also Zizek takes bites at him, I wouldn't take my chances.

Try pointing that out to 80% of "leftists" (aka socdems) and they'll throw so many names at you, you'll feel dizzy, daddy-o!

Junger is definitely on my list, will watch it later.

As for Bey, he's a pretty easy writer, anywhere is a good entry point, but I suppose Chaos - The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism is a good place, since it's almost like a resume of his ideas.

Also, his book on Pirate Utopias (don't remember if he published it as Hakim Bey or Peter Lamborn Wilson though) is also good

Currently reading Homo Sacer, this shit is heavy. It looks like his main movement thorought the book is applying a sort of debordian critique to biopolitics, with some Heidegger thrown in.Writing this made me want to both drop it and try to finish it. Can someone give me a good Agamben companion?

He's shit and his work with Hardt is not strong.

>Currently reading Homo Sacer, this shit is heavy.

Watch this a couple of times. Really makes you think.

youtube.com/watch?v=pGUxQmRNhtk

I've heard people say his war memoirs are his best.

He was a fucking hack and anybody who says otherwise has been memed by the smartypants language he uses.

>The book reworks sentences and phrases from other authors.
Why you may ask?
???????????

>the division keeps the unity and the unity keeps us divided
Oh wow, that actually sounds like something, until you realize that this moron ends half of his theses like that. For some reason Debord thinks it's the pinnacle of intelligence to say that p is non-p, but since it usually doesn't make sense, he'll obfuscate the meaning as much as possible.

>Degradation of life
Interesting Debord, what do you mean?
Well he never explains it or argues for it, it's just a fact of life.

>Here's a hundred pages of my opinions on Marxism instead
I don't give a shit. Nowhere on the cover or the review or even on its Wikipedia page did it say that most of this book will be political theory. It was willingly branded as a book on semiotics cause otherwise nobody would pick it up. Props to the Guy though, he managed to trick me.

Missing the point this much

Sounds neat. I am familiar with Foucalt, but not extensively so. Should I go deeper into his thoughts before starting Agamben? Currently reading Girard, the Frenchies are taking over my shelves.

youre shit

just look at Beyonce's 'feminism' and her appropriation of the Black Panther aesthetic. the spectacle defusing the revolutionary edge of an ideology and incorporating it into the commodity form in front of our eyes.

I am a marxist but i firmly believe the spectacular society is so powerful it can never be overcome. the chance for any sort of socialist society has passed

No one in the history of ever thought SotS was a semiotics book, at most people will tell you it's art-related, but that's all.

If you want some preparatory situationist theory, here's a quick list:
cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/is1.html
(Read at least until the "Definitions" part)

cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/report.html
(This one is from a more artistically-minded period of the IS, but still very important)

cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/poverty.html
This is pretty much their easiest and most clear text. It's a bit too focused on the student / youth question, but it's excellent to get you into the IS gear.

Not familiar at all with Foucault, only having a surface understanding of his ideas and managing to go through Agamben, albeit with a bit of difficulty.

I used this very same example once to friends at a party once and then this flaming homosexual guy went full drag queen short only of threatening me physically (which he wouldn't do because I'm bigger than him tbqh).

Which is funny, since Vaneigem discusses at lenght the false dichotomies and political choices the spectacle sells you as vain pop culture.

watch agamben's lecture on biopolitics that's on youtube

you don't really need to know that much foucault because I think Agamben makes Foucault make even more sense. But basically, Foucault's concept of biopolitics is useful.

> I am a marxist but i firmly believe the spectacular society is so powerful it can never be overcome. the chance for any sort of socialist society has passed

Then why are you still Marxist? Do you mean "I'm pro-worker, and anti-capitalist, in general."