If I might master one new sector of living in philosophy or more realistically of living philosophy within the institution of the academy, it is to learn to learn with grace. Often times when I reach out to others who could teach me so much if they liked, and whose blindspots I might also catch, the asked puts on an arrogant mask of erudition. No one wants to use simple terms (even me and this must also change) and few are willing to condescend to the real level of the conversation. What I mean is, in most peer academic situations, all participants are hell-bent on making the *most* obtuse and tangential references, whether or not they orbit the topic at hand. And I continue to wonder why the “left” is so far in its pathetic little corner! Learning not to know all things (and accepting that my pretensions only fragment any real possibility even more) and learning how to listen might actually change the everyday life of more than one pseudo-educated state college student.
Tag Archives: Guy Debord
I get like this.
It’s so stupid. Even the people who are on the “left” — the shriveling sacks full of old pus who tell us (and themselves, myself) that they are here to change things. But really, what are we here for aside from writing books, printing paper, and keeping the industry churning. Or the blog-rolls rolling. Or futilely writing into space-perhaps this is the post-adolescent Angst-blog for 2010. For all of my feelings-better on philosophy and what it means (and it means a lot)–
I yet to break out of this (what seems to be existentially locked, negotiated) shell of writing, ultimately *staying* in school, abiding by the system.
I preach change but I’m just sitting on my bed.
But, what exactly is there to do? Shall I a. make up interesting words that seem unique, brilliant, and a little shimmery on the page (my excessive use of commas is this phenomenon in grammatical formation…) or,
b. negate this process and attempt to live authentically without confronting the reality of this situation in some other capacity. ie. “I want to drop out of college.”
What a romanticized, assinine thing to say. What the hell else would I do? Who/what else has furnished my education?
And I know that this is limiting what is viable via what I have experienced… but this is the lifestyle we live in. To break out of the “me” in concrete is something that the left hasn’t been able to do.
In our understanding of history, Communism stamp on society was an inversion of capitalism. And while the real intellectuals are busy theorizing over what life could be, might be, in spite of this fact, in spite of the trauma. The name was burned and buried. And I’m sure there are a bunch of arrogant bloggers, or extremely educated doctors, or “artists” who would really take issue with what I’m saying (that it’s a toxic subject, to borrow from Z). So why don’t you try having a conversation with the average American. With more than the average American, with the brilliantly-talented musician. Or every single one of your neighbors, peers, and friends. The left must be pretty fucking tiny, over in that flat they’re rented out, because no one else knows what we’re talking about.
Everyone’s a cultural critic, even me. But when it comes to living, just get in the fucking car and go to work. Forgive me that I’m still utterly confounded at my inability to write, my not so charismatic way of speaking, my utterly buorgie panic against time, against prestige.
I just really thought I was smart enough to confront the crushing reality of reality.
Guy Debord
Reminds me that I’m a neophyte and that I’m not living and that I don’t know how to write.
History marked by Events vs. History Marked by Images…
It’s tempting to say that we live in one history–that all images, events, and documents somehow merge together in a tightly and accurately constructed organ. A history like this might look something like a house, to borrow Roy’s concept. It would be full of dark rooms (but with some half-lit); it would always be the subject of superficial renovation. But of course, I can’t seem to find this model of history manifested anywhere remotely near the present moment.
The history of images (I will limit my discussion to the last 64 years) is more ‘real’ to us than a concurrent history marked by events. History constructed through images changes their status as something that is subordinate or “false” to history as event; the image maps the history of capital (to state it in a more totalizing, culture-oriented way, I should use the term spectacle.) The spectacle does two things in one motion: it creates itself as the real necessity of culture and society while driving out non-imaged events from that cultural locus. If an historical *event* occurs and is also recreated/rendered as an image, its commonly understood life as an image trumps any original or organic meaning within the spectacle.
This type of historical clash is the best way to view the differences between the image and the event: the most obvious example is 9/11. September 11th does exist in both of these categories but the history of the image is remembered. Image history of the spectacle is the history remembered and created by capital–the effectiveness of an event dwindles as culture winds itself into the spectacle.
Simply, within the American context, the real event of September 11th is not remembered or understood because its history as an image steers away from any non-spectacular content. History as an image, then, is only history of a spectacular ideology.
But, the image also dispels the real event (if there is one) behind it (and masks real events if they cannot be reimagined within the spectacle). History of events is cast off and polarized against the history of images. I don’t want to sweep across the spectacular image and bluntly rename it a certain type of ideology; perhaps it is better to say that the image does the grunt work of the ideology (proving it right, etc.).
History through an image provides the stability of an ideology while the spectacle shifts its power and mobilizes for its very real event-making of the spectacle.In this capacity, the image anchors history to ideology, and ideology to the spectacle.
If we think, even for a moment, of the mobilization efforts that were a product of the singular image “9/11″, aren’t the options boundless? Well, yes… they really are so long as we do not stray from the closed circuit of Terrorism. (As if we could.)
The image of 9/11 and its predecessors refer back to themselves–and to use a very familiar approach–so that when we feel (however slightly) the dis-juncture between the history of images as it unfolds and an alternate history of which we are only vaguely aware, we are always brought back to the image. We watch David Bloom in the desert and ask “how did we get here? how did we get here?”.
—- I will write more on this later. My thoughts are beginning to jumble up on me.
On “Afflicted Powers”
The image as the primary event of the twenty-first century: the spectacle has displaced the history of the event, swept it away under a scattered string of isolated reference points. To follow this line crudely, one might first think of the atomic bomb (which “Afflicted Powers” describes as a retro-fitted image into the spectacular society of post-war America) and proceed logically with the Fall of the Wall, followed up by the Fall of the Towers. Without butchering the specific content of the article, it is useful to leave aside the specific political blunderings associated with the post 9/11 world and use “Afflicted Powers” as a means to refocus the current culture of the macro-image as historical scope-shifter. But these image-event timelines map onto a very specific kind of imaginary narrative. There are similar, lesser narratives of American political history—FDR in the backseat, Kennedy’s assassination, Nixon’s resignation speech, Reagan’s cry against USSR, etc—that embroider these macro-images; they follow the macro-event and carry out its work. But these major events assign the trajectory for the minor ones, and reproduce themselves as history.
The Terrorist Attacks of September 11th is the event that most obviously defines today’s historical epoch. (As an aside, 2009 is just as obviously the downward arch to that historical trajectory; a mixed bag of political and economic ghosts.) The last major image-event was that of September 11th: as a spectacular element it contained all of the ammunition for a decade (perhaps longer) of simulated terror, cynicism, capital economy, and neo-imperialism. But the most profound quality of the September 11th image is that it is not a capsule for these things; it is their essence. Its aftermath never left the realm of the image—following Debord’s concept of the Spectacle, this is impossible; these simulations have no physical reality in the First World. Any real consequence that they might have in those other places signify the degree to which those spaces do not really exist in the spectacle’s deformed economic eyes. The connective tissue in American history since 2001 extends from the foundations of September’s images. Take for instance, the Iraq War as a media function. The real losses and victories remained cloudy, but the real events were the 24-hour coverage. David Bloom, dust-covered and camouflage-clad at three AM created the heart of the conflict—a nostalgic dream to “support the troops” in a strange Vietnamese register of resentment and complacence. Saddam Hussein did not have to die, so long as the micro-clip of his fallen statue played over and over again. Progress had everything to do with the dissemination of images and this is acceptable when citizenship constructs itself as a public mirage.
Weak citizenship centers “Afflicted Powers’” discussion of an essentially Debordian world; it is comprised of “idiot fashions and panic and image-motifs” (9). But is this different from The Society of the Spectacle described forty years ago? Today’s reality of the spectacle is closely related; but what sets our post 9/11 world apart from that earlier one is the degree to which society has revealed itself as an image. Intelligence, whether it is faulty or not, is no longer the supposed motor of political movement. Whether or not it ever really was in the post-war world, is arguable. What is at stake in this decade is the cynical turn towards the image in spite of intelligence. Weak citizenship, then, means that the image does not have to represent any real intelligence; it must only be believed as an image. Over and over again, the spectacle of the media depends on the hackneyed snap-shots of fallen statues in Iraq, of toy-box governments in Afghanistan, why should we laugh at mission accomplished banners and an American president in military garb? Cynical laughter is the ultimate sign of weak citizenship—this laughter accepts the image and recreates it, strips it of its pretended signification without exposing the spectacular condition of the world. This is precisely because cynicism relies on the spectacle, and we on cynicism of the spectacle.
The destruction of the spectacle is not arrived at easily. “We de not believe that one can destroy the society of the spectacle by producing the spectacle of its destruction” (20). But the dramatically falling arch of 9/11 has exposed nothing but its own defeat and hollow re-production. There are two fundamentally different parts at work in the late-failing stages of macro-imagery: the cynical population and the unreal horizons beyond the First World. On the one hand, cynicism puts no end (nor does it want to) the suspension of the image as history. It nests itself in the society of the spectacle because it too is an image—an image of knowledge. So long as this kind of response arrests what used to be the citizenry, the society of the spectacle will continue to spiral out and back in again to the image-locus of twenty-first century history. And then there are the unreal worlds. The society of the spectacle absolutely excludes those regions that are not privy to interpellation and re-interpellation via the image; this is Debord’s greatest oversight. In the insistence that nothing is ever out of the spectacle’s reach, he falls prey to the snarling limits of the First World. The failure of the spectacle to imagine anything outside of itself determines its own eventual destruction.
On Separation Perfected
In the final lines of Separation Perfected, Guy Debord delivers the most direct form of the spectacle: “the spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.” It is localized in the capitalist mode of production—but it reaches everywhere and touches everything. Not only does it touch, it becomes the image of everywhere and everything, destroying the originals. The one-way relationship that Debord mentions is the primary unit of isolation, the spectator’s mediation through the commodity as direct link to and reproduction of the spectacle. This one-way relationship that walls him off from all else is the means by which he “makes his own life” that he can never inhabit. The one-way disjunction of the spectacle does not define him because the spectator is not himself—he does not have a self—he is only a producer operating within the limits of the spectacle. The world’s loss of unity and the essential isolation are the foundations of the fragmented visual forms of simulated life. The spectacle is a dense and amorphous contortion of means and ends—it is the dream that supports the insupportable reality; it is the unsupportable reality that supports itself. The title of Guy Debord’s first chapter is the heart of the spectacle: separation. The spectacle is not a thing, but a way of social mediation through images. The image is the central phenomena between people, power and the population that cannot usurp it, reality and unreality.
The spectator’s one-way relationship to the center of the spectacle is its primary action. It is at once his only connection to other spectators as well as the core reinforcement of isolation. This is understood concretely as the phenomenon of the commodity fetish. The spectator produces his labor force, his thoughts, and his environment that are completely mediated through objects. The fetish of his mis-reality is an exclusionary device that alienates him further with every movement: “[t]he spectacle subjects living human beings to its will… For the spectacle is simply the economic realm developing for itself” (3). Human life is morphed into an economic function that alienates the producer from himself. The producer does not produce himself, only his labor force. Through his labor force, he produces—or is produced through the economic realm—a commodified value of life; purchasing power. To the extent that he cannot connect to his own life, the spectacle is the apparatus that monitors his relation to it. The spectator circulates indirectly via the spectacle in the commodity market. This pervasive relationship is not reversible: man will never live in it.
The spectacle is not power, rather the simulation of power against the simulation of society. Power, something long since dead, long since needed, must only shimmer on the distant horizon as a ghost. The most archaic and modern quality of power resides in social cleavage; power exploits itself for an image of reproduction. But this specialization and reproduction is not power at all, but the tautological image of it. “The spectacle is the self-portrait of power in the age of power’s totalitarian rule over the conditions of existence” (5). At once, the spectacle exercises complete rule over human and material existence and yet it continually reasserts an image of its utilitarian necessity, benevolence, and dominance. The spectacle chooses its own mode of discourse and locks the spectator in all of its recreations. Here again, the one-way communication from spectator to spectacle emerges: there is not any discourse outside of the spectacle, the spectacle is the discourse of social cleavage, of power. Its own laudatory praises are not separate from the spectacle, which highlights the primary paradox: the spectacle’s power is rooted in nothing more than the appearance of it.
Imaginary power constitutes the spectacle—and this power is localized in the bad dream of unreality. “The spectacle is the bad dream of modern society in chains, expressing nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep” (4). The image of discourse, when the spectacle has limited that discourse to the specific signs and shadows of its own portrait extends the real means and ends of capitalist production through its accumulated ideology of the commodity. Applying Lacan’s interpretation of Freud’s example from The Interpretation of Dreams, the anonymous father and candle dream, the notion of the spectacle’s unreality is supported. The dream (as it is used in Freud’s analysis) is not the construction that extends the father’s rest but one that recognizes the terror of his real desire. The father awakens and masks the real of his desire through reality—the spectacle is that unreal reality that transfixes the “impossible kernel” (Zizek 45). Debord portrays the spectacle as the ideology of capital.
Separation Perfected traces the fragmented artificial life of the spectacle. This movement seems to circulate and slide over itself, spinning out further and further into the outer-reaches of simulated space. The structure of Debord’s writing reflects the spectacle: multi-faceted, unified, isolated. The image of reality mediates all human relations, since all human relations are really commodity relations. The spectacle is the accumulation of capital to the point that it creates an image, which signifies the origin or subordination of the spectacle to one thing, and one thing only, the capitalist mode of production; the needs of capital dictate the simulations of the spectacle.
