Is all art spectacle? is getting pleasure from reading a bad thing?

lol

Wouldn't interpret his theses as a strong dogma with ethical undertones. Debord is making a positive claim about the world. As far as the society of the spectacle is concerned, everything that exists is good -- and everything that is good exists. Enjoy your blue pilled wonderland.

"in an era when contemporary art can no longer exist, it becomes difficult to judge classical art. Here as elsewhere, ignorance is only created in order to be exploited. &3 the meanings of history and taste are lost, networks of falsification are organised. It is only necessary to control the experts and auctioneers, which is easy enough, to arrange everything, since in this kind of business - and at the end of the day in every other kind - it is the sale which authenticates the value. Afterwards it is the collectors and museums, particularly in America, who, gorged on falsehood, will have an interest in upholding its good reputation, just as the International Monetary Fund maintains the fiction of a positive value in the huge debts of dozens of countries. "

>There is no Situationist art

I'm just going by that quote on the Wiki page for detournement:
> In this sense there can be no situationist painting or music, but only a situationist use of those means.

Debord would probably kill himself even faster if he was alive in this day and age

whats the difference between the spectacle and the normal distinction of phenomena and noumena?

is it a matter of degree?

t. only read first chapter

The commentary on society of spectacle are better than the society of spectacle itself

Please suggest one.

>is all art spectacle?
How about you read that book, and some pre-Spectacle books for good measure?

Indeed the Spectacle wants you to believe nothing exists outside its show.

You can experience phenomena while being the last man alive because they aren't a bunch of means of communication.

It completes it and updates it, so it became better.

It's not a suggestion of one, it's the title of a 1988 Debord book.

>is getting pleasure from reading a bad thing?
yes
the world as a whole is not pleasure inducing, whenever you're feeling pleasure you are wearing blinders

I read
>mediated by niggers

>is all art spectacle?

Obviously not.

>this purple prose, no argument on sight
are all marxists hacks?

are they?

"If I cannot succeed in completing a piece of work, I am working vainly; I am uselessly wasting my time and effort. If the work I have done does not have the result I was expecting, if I have not attained my goal, I have worked in vain; that is to say, I have done something useless..."

Society of the Spectacle inspired the 1968 debacle. Comments inspired pic related.

He was bound to kill himself, same way his work was bound to be subsumed by the very thing it set out to destroy.

I don't know exactly where, in the chapter about culture I think, but as he wrote SotS he already claimed it was a matter of time before situationist theory was recuperated.

Are dreams spectacle?

if you mean dreams as in aspirations, they (yours) probably are
if you mean dreams as in rem sleep hallucinations, they are not, but could very well be driven by spectacle dependent on the severity of your ideological cuckoldry

Debord is literally the banksy of philosophy. muh corporations don't be a square, man! He has nothing to offer but the usual progressive drivel and muh soaixante huit boomer individualist hedonism. That's exactly what got us in this mess. If Debord was alive today, he would be writing for vice magazine

I would argue that, because of our exaggerated visual cortex, we think using storylike elements. That's why dreams are like that.
Then the idea of spectacle is simply parasitizing the innate biological tendency.

not really. i think his most profound insights relate to the realm of the spiritual, and how we have replaced god with a unified world of the fantastical which acts out human energies and anxieties for us.
his society of the spectacle is also very clear headed and critical of counterculture movements which are just more noise from the establishment providing us with an illusion of alternative options.

those gelcaps always trigger my gag reflex now because I robotripped using them

>how we have replaced god with a unified world of the fantastical which acts out human energies and anxieties for us.
This world has always existed, with or without God, it's just become much more evident with the constant stimulus enabled by technology. There's no use getting rid of it, humans relate to the world primarily by narratives.

>it's just become much more evident with the constant stimulus enabled by technology

are you pretending to be stupid?

> not really. i think his most profound insights relate to the realm of the spiritual, and how we have replaced god with a unified world of the fantastical which acts out human energies and anxieties for us.

How is this any different than various writings by Rousseau, such as the Letter to D'Alembert on Spectacles, just dressed up with Marxist theory?

Previously, the mediated world was transmitted by fairy tales or folk knowledge, nowadays we have mass entertainment and propaganda. It's not really anything mysterious - the spectacle has always existed, but if you pull back the curtain you'll just see a black void. The search for an "authentic" social life is doomed from the start, though he is right in stating that we've lost perspective of the past.

the spectacle existed insofar as it could mould itself to the reality like a shape into a container, and fairy tales existed to give narrative to phenomena just like today's Science gives cause-and-effect accounts of things after the fact. In method, technology and myth share many features -- but the previous attachment to reality required by myth was permanently severed. Myth also situated societies in a timeline, especially with the pilgrimages of Christianity. Technology under the spectacle dictates a never ending present.

>search for an "authentic" social life
If we are capable of observing social life becoming increasingly dominated by artificial forces, how can the reverse (social life liberated and moving toward authenticity) not be true?

>social life becoming increasingly dominated by artificial forces
Define what an artificial force is, first. If you mean social institutions like marriage and church, those are in serious decline. If you mean technology, I am inclined to agree, but technology must satisfy a previous human need first before it creates new ones.

Those Debord mostly focuses on. Namely technology and the images they produce. I'd especially include language which is being quickly replaced by [dis]information and programming langs

So you'd have us all become hunter-gatherers, I guess? That'd be the most authentic lifestyle. You might as well include language as a kind of technology (since it's artificial, and virtual too, as it only exists in the mind), too, and a method of exchange as well (for the exchange of feelings).

No, and juxtaposing today's "progress" with primeval humanity is Jordan Peterson tier. Personally I think the situationists' solution (workers councils, moments of self-awareness in spectacle, etc.) aren't effective, but I know we first and foremost need to understand how we are dominated before we even think about solutions. This thread demonstrates that if anything.

That's the problem. We are dominated and regimented by technology and culture, but there is no solution, no impartial Outside. The best we can do is to counterbalance the worst effects of one with the other in order to extract the best benefits.

>We are dominated and regimented by technology and culture, but there is no solution, no impartial Outside.

There is, user

garbage

Heh, that is one of the old hat tricks of Christianity, yes. By holding Reason as divine, it was only really a matter of time before it mutated into secular humanism.

Perhaps, but we are far from helpless. As long as we can know history has been oppressed we can dream of it's redemption. Inb4 messiah

I suggest you read more Benjamin if you believe that he advises us to 'dream' of the redemption of the opressed. These dreams are phantasmagoria of commodity character, he says so explicitly in the arcades project. The historical materialist works at a present that has come to a standstill, a time that is pregnant for break.

youre an idiot

obviously its only a spectacle if its produced via the capitalist mode of production (major film studios, crowdfunding)

>obviously its only a spectacle if its produced via the capitalist mode of production (major film studios, crowdfunding)
wrong. the spectacle reproduces itself because it has reprogrammed our way of thought. whether someone is working for a studio or independently producing art if they have been raised in a society of the spectacle (and we will assume they have) their relationship to reality is going to be reproduced in their art.

>The historical materialist works at a present that has come to a standstill, a time that is pregnant for break.
do you have a reference in AP for this? The claim is obvious but poorly supported in theses on history

That particular one was with reference to the theses.
But read his critique of Blanqui in the arcades project for one - It is quite clear that wish images of a future redemption hold commodity character and are an expression of the phantasmagoric, false consciousness. The revolutionary moment is to be grasped NOW.

>The revolutionary moment is to be grasped NOW.
oy vey

I don't even know how someone has an inauthentic life. It's just a sum of things you choose to experience. Do what you want. Or is deriving yourself of pleasure inauthentic? I guess it could 've but only if your using it as a crutch to escape suffering rather than confronting it or overcoming it. But suffering is only part of the expression too so it's hard to say.

This is a very bad post.

It's got good quads though.

I am not completely sure about the meaning of «authentic» in OP's post, but one can live unauthenticly by dissolving his thoughts in collective anonymous being, das Man. In fact, «being authentic» truly means just «being able to decide by yourself». Aplied to reading we get a simple formula: you should read only those books you can sincerely enjoy and ignore others even if guys from Veeky Forums won't consider you edgy. Hence, if you are reading «Infinite Jest» only because it's kinda trendy and simultaneously you can confess that you don't like the — you live unauthentically.

>just be yourself: the philosophy
Not everything enjoyable is good for you, and not everything good is enjoyable.
Also, how exactly do you verify that you're "choosing for yourself" something at all? It might be just a desire conditioned by propaganda or culture, and if so, what desires aren't?

Why do we even need to speak about these good-bad things? As I see it, they don't matter. At least they don't matter in our conversation about authenticity, since Heidegger has never written something about good-bad in his «Being and Time», there he introduced authenticity. And I am referring to him and this his work in particulary.

Will you be satisfied by an example of «choosing by yourself» or do you need a very scientific explanation?

true, good clarification--which you admit doesnt invalidate the main point of my post which is that eg ancient greek art is not a "spectacle"

I'd need a formula, method or heuristic for revising my actions and understanding whether that action is authentic or not, but good point.

"stay with the greeks" - guy debord

Well, you definitely have to see «Being and Time» with your own eyes then. Hope you know German — English translation is a piece of garbage.

goy debord more like

It's a really fun book, and I like to go back and read certain theses' from it.

is the near worship of writers, philosophers, and public intellectuals we see in circles like Veeky Forums any different from celebrity culture as outlined in society of the spectacle? of course there are lofty ideas tied to these "celebrities" but are we simply buying into the hype when we focus on the figures as much as the texts?

>promulgates revolutionary, anti-capitalist ideology at Google and Facebook events

if you mean zizek, this is and always will be a stupid strawman.

>Quietly whispers his manifesto into a sleeping cats ear only
So authentico cabron!

Read Plato's Philebus on the relation between goodness and pleasure.

Imagine being a French communist in the 1960s.

Your butthurt was so great that were it turned in electricity it wouldn't power a developed country for decades. After all, you've spent the last decades building the reputation of your political movement as the venue of intellectualism in politics. Yes, I know the French Communist Party had a strong working-class basis, but the real appeal of communism in countries like France (and Italy, and Greece etc) was its popularity among the intelligentsia. When you go out and see that all artists and intellectuals are communist, you start wondering if communism is not really the best thing around.

Now the imagine the impact that would be done upon the political, cultural, social, even economical power of the intelligentsia as a caste if communism were discredited? That's exactly what happened in the late 1950s, even worse than that, Charles de Gaulle assumed power and began the best government that France had in centuries. Charles de Gaulle, the guy who the communists had more hate for in France, made the country great again.

Imagine the despair you would feel as a communist intellectual in this situation. Your ideology is discredited, your enemies are in power and they are doing well, your influence is in peril, what would you do? Well, French communist intellectuals decided to autistically lash out against the entire society in a pathetic attempt to deny the undeniable reality that the communism they supported for decades was shit.

This is what Debord is doing, and not only him. Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Baudrillard, every single one of them was reacting in butthurt against the destruction of the communist intellectual project. In the end, they "won" in 1968, which just makes everything more hilarious, since their entire philosophy was made to destroy the establishment they hated, but now the establishment are their intellectual pupils.

this is all kinds of wrong

gay debord more like

>using the word "butthurt"

its not 2012 anymore

Hush, it is part of channer hochkultur.

valuable subversion of mini-spectacle established by parisian intellectuals

>>Not everything enjoyable is good for you, and not everything good is enjoyable.
what you call ''good'' is just ''things enjoyable not now but soon''. ie escapism

>since their entire philosophy was made to destroy the establishment they hated, but now the establishment are their intellectual pupils.

I believe this is why Debord killed himself.

PROFOUND INSIGHT ALERT

Not really, it's a widely held interpretation of his suicide. Just emphasized 'I believe' because the circumstances around his death are not entirely agreed upon.

this

not really. One of Debord's biggest insights was how the spectacle was able to incorporate and neutralize ideologies in a river of diversity. Even Zizek understands the role he plays in these travesties, difference is he goes for the meme shit

>out with my tinder date
>we eat Mcdonalds and afterwards join a few friends in a small celebration
>we cuddle
>"I Gotta Feeling" by The Black Eyed Peas starts playing
>she caress my head and we kiss
>midway through it, I spot a Heineken can with my peripheral vision and realize what's really going on
>that whole day has been a lie mediated by commodity fetishism and late capitalism
>tfw not really living my life, but merely an spectator in the society of spectacle
>I panic, throw her to the ground and leave the room as fast as I can
>go back to my apartment and start playing Tuvaluan folk music
>it's useless
>couldn't shake that feeling for days

>the establishment are their intellectual pupils.
>le gommunists subverted the government meme

I won't even begin to try and refute all your other bullshit claims.

Of course you won't. That's because you can't. He's right

If you do say so.

Prove me wrong then.

Veeky Forums is such a pseud board. I've seen this happening time and time again: everytime someone comes with an opinion that contradicts the circlejerk (in this case the French 60s intelligentsia circlejerk), you just quote the post and start being passive-agressive. "ugh not even gonna bother refuting this"; "you're so retarded". Pathetic

Not him but the burden of proof is on the person who made the claim.

Interested to hear your theory on how the capitalist establishment is actually ruled by Communists.

Communism hasn't failed though. It's simply transformed into contemporary CTRL-leftism. And it became that way not because those philosophers you cite failed but because they succeeded.

Baudrillard is imho mos def a reactionary thinker who in his own way pulled a kind of a Nick Land moment of his own, switching his intellectual foundations from Marx to Nietzsche. Deleuze can be wielded both by the left and by the right. And perhaps the time will come when even Foucault's critique of power can be used against the same hegemons who are presently helping the lunatics to take over the asylum in liberal arts colleges like Evergreen.

Capitalism is an accelerator of cultural processes. Those intellectuals you are citing weren't "butthurt" because communism failed. If anything their thought helped to accelerate its victory - but look at the world that victory subsequently produces. Nobody with more than a half a brain would be celebrating the fact that culture becomes atomized, transparent, digital, and completely indistinguishable from simulacra.

Communism is alive and well today. It's just divorced from its actual armed-cells form. Which nobody actually wants anyways: it's why Zizek still champions the idea of democracy. A democracy which is rapidly fading from view.
twitter.com/EricRWeinstein/status/868116763682025472

Debord knew that beyond a certain horizon there was no difference between an image and the real. Baudrillard even more clearly. Foucault only saw power: is this somehow misguided today? D&G wanted you to break free and celebrate actual difference (rather than the idpol horseshit you see today) - does this seem like such a bad idea?

The reason why things are the way they are today is not because those intellectual were wrong but because they were right. Really right. So right in fact that people who don't even understand or read them can absorb the whole message as a gospel of progressivism. Which is what is presently happening. They were so right that besides Nick Land you almost can't name intellectuals on the right that compare - and even Land draws on Deleuze and the rest.

Sorry user. Your post is all kinds of wrong. For better or for worse we're all in this thing together now.

>user makes well developed, substantiated posted
>all replies are dismissive one-liners
>"well the burden of proof is on you"
fuck you

>Communism hasn't failed though
just lol @ your low IQ
you actually think the several strands of "progressive" thought are anything but neoliberal co-opting
It's over. There's no communism without the proletariat

>Capitalism is an accelerator of cultural processes. Those intellectuals you are citing weren't "butthurt" because communism failed. If anything their thought helped to accelerate its victory - but look at the world that victory subsequently produces. Nobody with more than a half a brain would be celebrating the fact that culture becomes atomized, transparent, digital, and completely indistinguishable from simulacra.

What the fuck are you even saying? People like Debord precisely criticised this development because it as a product of capitalism.

If what they were claiming was or became true it's a victory for capitalism if anything. And in case you haven't noticed, capitalism is still the absolutely predominant economic system in the world today.

>well developed, substantiated post
>lol de gaulle best president islamig gommie intelligentsia butthurt make france great again

People didn't strike for no reason in 68 my man.

you mean the guy that lead france into thirty years of unprecedented growth?

>People didn't strike for no reason in 68 my man.
you mean the riots that still didn't manage to prevent him from winning another election and stay in power until HE decided to retire? just lol

and if that user's argument were so unsubstantiated you would be able to easily dismantle. what we have instead is dudes like spewing borderline psychotic drivel about how it's actually the communists that have won, even when all real world evidence points to an even more prevalent, all-emcompassing, solidified capitalism. just lol

>if that user's argument were so unsubstantiated you would be able to easily dismantle

Back to my first post.

>you actually think the several strands of "progressive" thought are anything but neoliberal co-opting
That's exactly what I am *not* saying. Neoliberal co-opting is what is happening.
>it's over. There's no communism without the proletariat
That's right. And the proletariat has disappeared. Why? For lots of reasons. But one of the most interesting reasons for this is the eclipse of the real by the image, the gesture, the sign, and the simulation. Debord. Baudrillard. And a classical Marxist economy of labor theory with a libidinal one: Deleuze. And a classical political theory based on objective ideas of reality and truth being replaced by power. Foucault. Lacan.

I will repeat: actual communism fails and is replaced by postmodernism/cultural Marxism/ctrl-leftism. Not by accident. But because those intellectuals were correct. Were they "happy" with the world subsequently produced? Of course not. But that's thought and theory for you. People go looking for The Truth and weird shit happens.

Peterson is right about some of this stuff. Not all of it. He picks on 60s/left intellectuals that are now ruining his life. But it wasn't a sinister hands-wringing plot. Those guys looked into the void and wrote about what they saw there.

Of course I've noticed capitalism is the predominant economic system. No denying that. I also think it got to be that way because, paradoxically, its intellectual foundations have been more thoroughly articulated by its critics and commentators than by actual devotees - kind of a mystery of theory like that. Progressive intellectuals have always understood capital better than actual capitalists themselves, or at least in an intellectual sense: witness Marx himself.

So yes. Capitalism wins. But - and here is where to my mind those French theorists come in handy - it's via the *consumer society,* the libidinal economy and so on. All of the crazy shit that goes on in our minds, consciously or otherwise. And for the articulation of those processes it's the French and German guys who have to be read. That's all I'm saying.

I'm not a progressive myself, for what it's worth. I'm not really a reactionary either. But capitalism as planetary cultural phenomenon is best articulated (and, sadly, thrives and grows through being articulated, much like the Lovecraftian horror Land says it is) by social theory. Where things inevitably go astray is when that theory tries to transform itself into public-sphere action.

whatever helps you sleep at night

>spewing borderline psychotic drivel about how it's actually the communists that have won, even when all real world evidence points to an even more prevalent, all-emcompassing, solidified capitalism. just lol

Social Justice is what contemporary neoliberal communism looks like. It's not a reach. Once again: yes, Capital is in. No, there will not be a Revolution in the way people used to think there was.

The anxiety about the historical victory of capital and the absence of any end to the madness is what fosters the desire for utopia here and now. That utopia always requires greater and more concentrated and more angry oaths of fealty. It's an ugly situation. You can see the results in the news. Then a guy like Trump gets elected.

>all-encompassing, solidified capitalism
We've all read Nick Land here user. And other guys. The process is solidified and yet at the same time a total vortex.

>There's no communism without the proletariat
>And the proletariat has disappeared.

Proletarian doesn't mean dude who works in a factory. Even if it did, there are plenty of those left in the third world.

how can you hold that interpretation of our political/economic outlook (that I basically agree, btw) and still assert that communism hasn't failed?
even when after a massive socioeconomic upheaval worldwide, the best demonstration of class consciousness we got was OWS, a castrated, self-defeating movement made mostly of upper-middle class urbanites?
even if the analytical/theoretical facet of marxism was right to a certain extent, it's undeniable that it's praxis has been an utter failure so far

>neoliberal communism

I see where you are coming from but I don't think I'm wrong for one reason, I don't see intellectual history as a conflict of ideas, but as a conflict of people, who use ideas as weapons.

These French intellectuals also understood it that way, they had read Carl Schmitt, after all, and acted accordingly. The specific content of their writings is, therefore, irrelevant, what is important is what they tried to achieve politically, because this is also what they understood as important in their work.

Their desire was to salvage the prestige of the French intelligentsia after the failure of Soviet communism, which was unanimously praised and defended by the previous generation of the French intelligentsia. Sartre wasn't some accelerationist who defended capitalism's role in destroying traditional structures and hastening the way of global communist revolution, he was a Stalinist who praised Third World socialism, who wrote a preface to Fanon saying that killing Europeans was the right thing to do.

If they succeded, it was a phyrric victory. The prestige of the left-wing French intelligentsia has declined. Where once they had Sartre or Bourdieu, now they have Bernard-Henri Lévy and Jacques Attali as high priests of the French clerisy. If this is what you interpret as their victory, because they "accelerated" the progress of capitalism towards its dissolution, it wouldn't even matter, because they aren't the ones benefitting from it anymore, and whatever happens in this future where capitalism collapses under its own weight, it certainly won't be the liberating revolutionary apotheosis that Sartre and Foucault both dreamed about.

>Debord is literally the banksy of philosophy
I thought you were going to compliment him afterward, it's pretty weird you use Banksy as an offense.

>Proletarian doesn't mean dude who works in a factory.
I couldn't agree more. To my mind however once this foundation is undermined, together with whatever else you want to throw into the mix to complicate things - you enter into all things postmodern. Marxist theory which exists as theory but continues to exert its influence, in some ways even more powerfully so thanks to the age of memes, idpol, the internet, etc.

Does the proletariat exist? Baudrillard didn't think so. And I agree. And I would say that the "bourgeoisie" doesn't really exist either. What remains in its place is - depending on how you look at it - either only Capital, or only Oppression, or only [insert concept here].

What the fuck is "labor" anyways? Is it just what pays? Is it what feels good? Is it what feels bad? Is it just what the blockchain registers? The game is wide open in that sense.

Personally I find the concept of the meme more interesting. But as Marxism increasingly fritters itself away into incoherency I find myself moving on to other sources.

>how can you hold that interpretation of our political/economic outlook (that I basically agree, btw) and still assert that communism hasn't failed?
First, let's distinguish between armed-cells/Maoist "hard" communism and soft-power cultural "soft" communism. The former is not happening. The latter is fully in effect. I'm with you. OWS was a monument to futility. Not only because of the protestors but also because of two different modes of thinking that couldn't align.

>even if the analytical/theoretical facet of marxism was right to a certain extent, it's undeniable that it's praxis has been an utter failure so far
I would agree, except in one case: universities. The praxis works there very well. And from the soft cultural power of the universities flows power to the state, the media, and elsewhere.

Social justice user. That's what it looks like. That's all it is. Neoliberal communism means social justice.

Good post and I agree with pretty much all of it. I wouldn't say you're wrong at all. Especially the last paragraph. One thing though:

>in this future where capitalism collapses under its own weight
Sadly I think it's a lot of postwar civilization that collapses before capitalism does. Capitalism to me is the planetary unconscious - basically, as Deleuze (or Lacan) says, it can be summed up as "and and and and and" - and as historical process will outlast everything. This is what we are waking up to and learning. It can't be controlled, it repels all ethics, it atomizes, we atomize with it. Fascinating stuff. Terrible. But fascinating.