Thoughts on Debord?

Thoughts on Debord?
Specifically Society of the Spectacle.

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youtube.com/watch?v=IoUIHBSiVAY
youtube.com/watch?v=mjUNY0433Do
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_(politics)
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He inspired a lot of great new techniques in advertising, ironically. (guerilla marketing, detournement)
I like his concepts on psychogeography. Lifestlyist radicalism is in my opinion a function of spectacle too. Read Franz Fanon instead. That dude was the best of the existentialist Marxists.

accurate

"The spectacle is not a collection of images, rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images."

I think this is the most succinct description of our world. I won't go as far as to say that all philosophy afterwards is irrelevant, but I think this is the fundamental starting position for all thinking since.

to add, I think any attempt to think 'beyond post-modernism' has to essentially prove why this statement isn't still true.

It's not even images, though. It's a relationship that is mediated by narratives.

Yeah, I don't think that fundamentally changes anything. By image, we can generally speak about 'representation', re-presentation. The situation is just more extreme because of how easy it is to create a representation and distribute it on a massive scale.

Even if it is still fundamentally the same situation, the same 'problem', its not like debord had an ironclad 'solution'. Psychogeography, detournement, radical subjectivity, dropping out. These are only solutions on a personal, subjective level. There is still plenty of room to find new answers and expand his problem.

Debord it seems is almost unanimously liked by Veeky Forums except for one guy I remember who thought his view was too simplistic and bourgeois but he didn't really demonstrate that he understood the Situationists as the thread developed.

>tfw to dumb too have a solid idea of what he's saying or put it into my own words

youtube.com/watch?v=IoUIHBSiVAY
watch the film senpai

In a capitalistic state, especially the contemporary, images is much more accurate.

This.

No juice in the capital without the sign, no juice in the sign without capital.

Which translation of Society of the Spectacle is the preferred one?

>Debord directed his first film, Hurlements en faveur de Sade in 1952 with the voices of Michèle Bernstein and Gil Wolman. The film has no images represented; instead, it shows bright white when there is speaking and black when there is not. Long silences separate speaking parts. The film ends with 24 minutes of black silence. People were reported to have become angry and left screenings of this film. The script is composed of quotes appropriated from various sources and made into a montage with a sort of non-linear narrative.

The absolute madman.

wanna see some sick situationist shiz, peep this:

youtube.com/watch?v=mjUNY0433Do

Add "chainsmoker" after "alcoholic."

Read his Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, too, where he revisits SoS in '88

i can't take the philosophy of people who kill themselves seriously, since they are obviously mentally ill

I can't take the philosophy of people who don't kill themselves seriously, since they are obviously stunted thinkers.

The commentary are great, if not better

This.

Commentary on the Society of Spectacle > Society of Spectacle

he faked his death and is currently living a cozy life outside the spectacle reading Shakespeare and shiet

Does he propose any solutions?

It's too late humans know too much it's what is not what should.

If he would be alive now he would kill himself even faster
Pic related : never work

>All that was once directly lived has become mere representation

Imagine getting together with a few like-minded people and going on a psychogeographical journey through you shitty city. Too bad no one even knows about him besides a few nerds on the internet.

I've actually done this and it sucks. It's much less romantic than you'd think and there will be pretentious idiots who think it's really profound.

Yes, something about councils.

Société du Spectacle is a wonderful and profoundly radical work. However, the whole situationnist movement is ridiculous and too juvenile to be taken seriously

>movements have to be gravely serious

I'm not against some humor though.
My point is that his movement was trying too hard to be edgy for the sake of it.

I live in France, and maybe it's a french thing, but there's people who think they know Debord, and yeah pretentious is the word

But hey, I don't mind pretentious if you actually understood the thing

Maybe you should come, I'd be happy to take a "psychogeographical journey" with you lmao

Chainsmokers are like death gourmets, nothing wrong with that

Real life is never as "romantic" or really, anything like representations of it are. It's a bit ironic.

Care to tell me a bit more though?

>Care to tell me a bit more though?

I've seen it in a few contexts here in kansas city. Artists walks, derives, psychogeography. Generally it amounts to aimless wandering across town. One walk I did was silent. Others involved dada-esque found poetry and field recordings. There was a group of artists who spent a month walking the circumference of the city.

It's all about action, with no results. Typical of a lot of misguided performance art.

What is an example of a social relationship mediated by images.

>It's all about action, with no results. Typical of a lot of misguided performance art.
That's funny. The "left" (whatever the fuck that is) often gets criticized for being all theory and no action, I guess that's an inversion of that.

Anyway. That still seems to me better than just cooping up inside and never coming out. That way, you can at least interact with other people.

making small talk about television shows, current events, and other representations you never personally witnessed, but nonetheless share with countless other strangers.

Was your first kiss in person or did you see it on a television screen first? I'm guessing you first saw sex on a screen instead of in person as well.

Do you judge people based on the media they consume? If someone tells you they watch reality tv how do you see that differently than learning they watch chess championships?

Sports are perhaps the ultimate form of mass religion today. Soccer especially, I don't even watch soccer, but having learned a few names of players and clubs I can often strike up conversations with complete strangers and foreigners extremely easy.

"ll that was once directly lived has become mere representation"

So in essence there are no novel experiences anymore because of how huge things like sports, entertainment, music etc. more or less consumer everyone's attention? People interact with each other through the images provided by these huge industries and nothing of their own accord?

Why are Marxist's always so fucking gay and stupid.

This just sounds like bitching, am i just looking at this wrong?

I think talking about a personal experience with other people, an experience they haven't themselves had, is a sort of "image" as well, isn't it? There should be a more fitting word for this thing. (Simulacrum is probably not it, since there is an original here)

I'm just trying to give concrete examples of the Spectacle. Maybe my examples are best.

Think of the Spectacle like an ether, a gas that surrounds us. As you move through your life today, tomorrow, unless you're some kind of frontiersman or hermit, you will walk through a soup a representations. Images, narratives, stories, brands, celebrities, and enormous media environment that fills your field of view.

You've never met Trump of Miley Cyrus, but you know them and everyone you will meet also knows them. We share Spectacle, a giant conglomerate of images and representations that determine our reality.

Haven't we always lived as through a glass, darkly? - just by the nature of sense and phenomena. Or is Debord's thesis that what exists now is so quantitatively different it is essentially qualitatively different; that we are separated even further on some other level than just the normal baseline distinction between phenomena and noumena.

everything has been representation since humans started using language, this people who think that this is something new are retards who can't think...

was the first time you saw alexander during his campaign in asia? or was is it on a drachma back in athens? was the first time you saw jesus crucified at golgotha? or was it in a mural in the vatican?

>He inspired a lot of great new techniques in advertising

So is Zizek right? Does capitalism thrives during shitstorms?

this

Was going to say mediated by narrative, but "narrative" puts too much emphasis on rational deliberation. Making choices in social relations can only be understood through some sort of history of consciousness which accounts for more than language in mediating reality and our relations with others. Baby's recognise faces while in the mother's womb. The spectacle is not spectacular.

"...mediated by images." This is just image-hate during a time when it was popular from someone other then the academe. He's only liked more because he's still seen to be edgy.

I don't understand what you dismissal means. Maybe we're arguing the same thing about narrative here. But I think Debored failed to grasp that images were one aspect of a total re-presentation of reality that goes much deeper than capital.

I preferred Daniel Boorstin "The Image"
And Marshall Mcluhan on Poe's "The Descent into the Maelström"
Also reminded me of Lewis Mumford's "The myth of the machine"

Here's the wiki on mirror neurons: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron

Have yourself a nervous breakdown on me.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_(politics)

History is bourgeois.

This is such a ludicrous thing, but no surprise it is from a Marxist.

Why does this have to be a depressing fact? If we didn't have symbols to convey our thoughts we would be no better than fucking animals. The illusion that people have novel ideas has already been explained by far less deranged people already like Jung and Solzhenitsyn

I just really don't get why this notion of The Spectacle is so pessimistic, I realise what Debord is getting at but I don't see anything depressing or ground-breaking with it. I think you have to be nihilistic to buy into this shit and get depressed about it.

Have you actually read the book?

No, just going off of a synopsis 2bh

Being depressed about it is optional.

Ask yourself this, 'what best describes contemporary reality?'

If the answer isn't a spectacle of media images that structure our relationships with each other, then you I'd say you're either an isolated hermit frontiersman (which is neat) or you're not being honest.

Read Society of the Spectacle or watch the film version. The idea of alienation through mass media is a pretty common place one today, so don't be surprised if it seems 'obvious'.

For people who are slightly less depressed about the situation, McLuhan's 'Global Village' hypothesis is similar.

You're missing the point. It's not just about contemporary reality, reality has always been mediated by symbols ever since we started using language, or even since phenomena and noumena became separated by the senses. In a sense, we've always been "alienated", but the concept of alienation itself is pure ideology, there's nothing particularly horrible about it.

Also, there's nothing particulary neat about being an isolated hermit with no access to medicine or sanitation. Brave, maybe, but your average hipster wouldn't last a week.

Debord wasent a leftist

>That's funny. The "left" (whatever the fuck that is) often gets criticized for being all theory and no action, I guess that's an inversion of that.
>Anyway. That still seems to me better than just cooping up inside and never coming out. That way, you can at least interact with other people.

The left does get accused of that. But in my city, within the visual/performing art community, there is maybe an overabundance of action, the vast majority of it meaningless.

Maybe that's how it has to be. You can't know if something works until you try it. Perhaps there should be lots and lots of misteps and false starts, projects that go nowhere interesting.

It's just frustrating that for the most part, people can't admit the pointlessness of this 'art activity'.

Oh man, the media control everything. I knew it. Good thing I control the media, and that the environment and my biology controls my ability to control the Thing that's controlling me. Kind of like McLuhan was wrong about pattern recognition.

Maybe Harold Innis would have something to say about this.

Hence why I put that into quotes. "left" and "right" are reductive terms that do more harm than good to nuanced things such as this one.

The way some people want to hastily label everything betrays a disregard for true understanding of things. By slapping a label on everything and categorizing using existing categories disarms the idea of any revolutionary potential it might have had.