Society of the Spectacle

Reply to fdrake

Great stuff. Incidentally, these podcasts, which I listened to recently, introduced me to Debord and might be a helpful for others too:

https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2017/08/14/ep170-1-debord/
https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2017/08/21/ep170-2-debord/

1: In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

2. The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.

(1,2) This unification takes an extreme form within the social practice/construct of 'Netflix and chill', in which the most intimate union of a couple is identified with the passive reception of images. What is intimate in such an endeavour is the privation of these public images to a shared narrative of love and sex. {the way this privation eroticises/libidinally invests the joint consumption of images and produces a withdrawal of the sense of touch from public life is a theme elaborated upon later}

The sense of representation engendered by the spectacle produces a logical space in which the edifice of cultural criticism - trope theory, implicit biases, heteronormativity etc - is constructed. The mythology present in televised stories and its presuppositions take the place of analysing lived experience; in a sense we all partake in this universal history of images as instances of subtext. Each sensory modality becomes mapped to its audio/visual digitisation as its predominant means of expression. The tapestry of man becomes a jigsaw of missing pieces.

3. 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 which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation.

4.The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.

5. The spectacle cannot be understood as an abuse of the world of vision, as a product of the techniques of mass dissemination of images. It is, rather, a Weltanschauung which has become actual, materially translated. It is a world vision which has become objectified.

6. The spectacle grasped in its totality is both the result and the project of the existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corollary consumption. The spectacle’s form and content are identically the total justification of the existing system’s conditions and goals. The spectacle is also the permanent presence of this justification, since it occupies the main part of the time lived outside of modern production.

(3->6) "appears as a model" of the world for the generalised subject of the spectacle. Model might be worthwhile to interpret in something similar to its mathematical sense {a mapping from objects to their truth values, 'conditions of satisfaction' being, an evaluation of what is true (real) and false (unreal)}. The mediation of life by images tells life what it is. It's similar to Azrael's clock in the Discworld books; a clock that tells time what it is. The subject analysed here is rather artificial - suspect some of its features are phenomenologically derived from the constraints placed upon them through the stance of critical theory. Is the mediation by images total? Is there no escape? The condition of possibility for criticism here is also proof of a fundamental incompletion of the described totality. This gives the interpretive task of finding sites of resistance - remainders slowly being made invisible...

7. Separation is itself part of the unity of the world, of the global social praxis split up into reality and image. The social practice which the autonomous spectacle confronts is also the real totality which contains the spectacle. But the split within this totality mutilates it to the point of making the spectacle appear as its goal. The language of the spectacle consists of signs of the ruling production, which at the same time are the ultimate goal of this production.

8. One cannot abstractly contrast the spectacle to actual social activity: such a division is itself divided. The spectacle which inverts the real is in fact produced. Lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle while simultaneously absorbing the spectacular order, giving it positive cohesiveness. Objective reality is present on both sides. Every notion fixed this way has no other basis than its passage into the opposite: reality rises up within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real. This reciprocal alienation is the essence and the support of the existing society.

9. In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false.

(7) This insight finds an extreme example in the passive regurgitation of memes. Consider the subject 'conjured' by this identification; to ensure they remain nothing but a receptacle and editor of their 'model of the world' in the sense of (6) they become entangled in a generalised destruction of inner life. Such an analysis finds, unsurprised, man as split through a prism; unable to trace any ray of life to its source.

(8) In light of (8), authenticity too is bought and sold. To act authentically is to represent oneself as a self-determined series of images with the mere identification that they are 'yours' to begin with; rather each life project becomes a function of the public domain and a personalised story of success or failure attached to it. (see Kickstarter)

Mythology becomes what is universally represented, and thus the 'subtext of the spectacle' is generated by, and amenable to, critical theory. There is a strange alliance here between the generating categories of the spectacle and their faithful representation in their critique; we envision passive non-relational subjects inextricably subsumed in imagistic false consciousness; this is likely to be an exaggeration for effect. The true is a moment of the false, after all.

10.The concept of spectacle unifies and explains a great diversity of apparent phenomena. The diversity and the contrasts are appearances of a socially organized appearance, the general truth of which must itself be recognized. Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is affirmation of appearance and affirmation of all human life, namely social life, as mere appearance. But the critique which reaches the truth of the spectacle exposes it as the visible negation of life, as a negation of life which has become visible.

11.To describe the spectacle, its formation, its functions and the forces which tend to dissolve it, one must artificially distinguish certain inseparable elements. When analyzing the spectacle one speaks, to some extent, the language of the spectacular itself in the sense that one moves through the methodological terrain of the very society which expresses itself in the spectacle. But the spectacle is nothing other than the sense of the total practice of a social-economic formation, its use of time. It is the historical movement in which we are caught.

12.The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than “that which appears is good, that which is good appears. The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance.

(10->12) It seems appropriate to locate 'the spectacle' as a social mechanism, at least insofar as its surface appearance. In a sense the spectacle is the means by which anything social can become expressed in the public domain - it is the reflexivity of the social as a unified process. The givenness of the spectacle as 'socially organised appearance' renders the spectacle as socialised conceptual scheme. Greedy and tyrannical, this scheme unifies all social practice by means of common mediation; the means of expression of sense in general has become directed to an invisible audience of the agent's imagination. It imbues all use of language with narcissistic overtones, since the mediation of such spans the public and the private - rendering the public as the private sui generis and the private as the public in particular. A certain schizophrenia of perspective is required; painting the spectacle as a ghostly voyeur.

Reply to Baden :up:

13. The basically tautological character of the spectacle flows from the simple fact that its means are simultaneously its ends. It is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory.

(13) The idea of the spectacle as a representational model of social processes; simultaneously their reflection and determination is present here again. As the sole means of generating expressions it reflects itself and thus is 'tautological' by its own ruling. The spectacle is functioning as simultaneously a constraint upon intelligible forms of expression and their means of expression; so its character becomes implicit in every moment of itself as a process; and thus guarantees its continued expression. The spectacle is a self evaluation in precisely the same way it is a generator of representations.

A physical analogy could be the means by which a photon expresses its diffraction pattern through slits as the Fourier transform of those slits; a translation of itself into a different register which maintains all the same information; a repetition of itself in a different modality. Common to both is the idea of a projection (to a screen, to the frequency space...) as a conditioning of what is projected.

14. The society which rests on modern industry is not accidentally or superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally spectaclist. In the spectacle, which is the image of the ruling economy, the goal is nothing, development everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself.

15. As the indispensable decoration of the objects produced today, as the general expose of the rationality of the system, as the advanced economic sector which directly shapes a growing multitude of image-objects, the spectacle is the main production of present-day society.

(14,15) This is more likely to appear true than to actually be true. The spectacle, as a form and generator of false consciousness, must be contrasted to the reality it is embedded in which remains indifferent to its procedures. There are things which are invariant to their interminable and repetitious display. We need not give the spectacle our eyes and tongues to provide immanent critique of its schema, even if we have to borrow the voice of its generalised subject.

The spectacle, so far portrayed, is a closed circuit of affectation, monopolising expression in forms it has already digested. One casualty of this is the disappearance of touch from public life and the a priori obscenity/privation of smells; little is more intimate than a hosted dinner, or more terrifying than work's morning elevator.

16. The spectacle subjugates living men to itself to the extent that the economy has totally subjugated them. It is no more than the economy developing for itself. It is the true reflection of the production of things, and the false objectification of the producers.

17. The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life brought into the definition of all human realization the obvious degradation of being into having. The present phase of total occupation of social life by the accumulated results of the economy leads to a generalized sliding of having into appearing, from which all actual “having” must draw its immediate prestige and its ultimate function. At the same time all individual reality has become social reality directly dependent on social power and shaped by it. It is allowed to appear only to the extent that it is not.

While this may have been true at publication, the present is a little different. What now is more valued than a close friend or life partner? An inversion (which remains the same as always) of the generalised mediation of social life through images can be found in the true and trusted friend; a friend is someone in a similarly demarcated zone of the spectacle with a similar resistance to the generalised subject present in the spectacle; a partner, a soulmate, is someone to watch Game of Thrones with. The spectacle penetrates private life by diminishing its bearers to passive receptacles; enjoying each other perhaps by sitting closer than norms (for others) allow. It produces a blind form of resistance in terms of the elevation of friendship and affectionate solidarity to the highest ideal; a simple restatement of 'let us enjoy things together'.

Reply to fdrake I listened to the podcasts that @Baden referenced and I could not help but to think of Thomas Kuhn's notion of Paradigm in which scientists

... agree in their identification of a paradigm without agreeing on, or even attempting to produce, a full interpretation or rationalization of it. Lack of a standard interpretation or of an agreed reduction to rules will not prevent a paradigm from guiding research

Kuhn thought that scientists have always worked under dominant Paradigms and it seemed to me that Kuhn's notion of a Paradigm is very similar to Debord's notion Spectacle.

We like scientists don't question the Spectacle that that we live in, work in...unless a critical mass of anomalies threaten our understanding of being in the world. The progression is from being, to having to appearing remains, but if there is a Spectacle or a Paradigm shift then what was apparent now becomes a new way of being, leading to a new progression.

18. Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior. The spectacle, as a tendency to make one see the world by means of various specialized mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly), naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs; the most abstract, the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present-day society. But the spectacle is not identifiable with mere gazing, even combined with hearing. It is that which escapes the activity of men, that which escapes reconsideration and correction by their work. It is the opposite of dialogue. Wherever there is independent representation, the spectacle reconstitutes itself.

19. The spectacle inherits all the weaknesses of the Western philosophical project which undertook to comprehend activity in terms of the categories of seeing; furthermore, it is based on the incessant spread of the precise technical rationality which grew out of this thought. The spectacle does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality. The concrete life of everyone has been degraded into a speculative universe.

A fictitious world with present day journalism and its news cycles alone would recede in much the same way. By isolating a point of our social fabric and imagining the features of the world necessary to support it the logical-historical structure of that point can be obtained. The generalised suspicion towards journalism and news perhaps can be interpreted as an explicit expansion of the spectacle (as conceptual scheme) to facticity itself. What is true in the news is what is omitted from its broadcasts (consider alt left/right narratives on the news and their selection of sources).

Further, the preponderance of 'fake news' as an ideological category indicates that the spectacle has evolved, since writing, to encompass critical reflection. Another way of saying the domination of facticity was always within the spectacle's grasp. The kind of critical reflection embodied in this is a reflexive gainsaying of all representations; we have become so embroiled in the shifting mirage of appearance the belief that there is an underlying, shared reality has began to recede.

This presents us with an interpretive challenge: where is it still possible to hear echoes of this ever receding real? What remains universal for us? How can we revivify -or even reimagine- what is always already destroyed?

The ensnarement of facticity through the demolition of public life produces an archipelago of subjects. To be a subject in the modern day spectacle is now to take facticity as an indexical of personhood rather than as one of its constitutive elements and marker of a common real. The unimaginable vastness that can be obtained from 'looking from the shore of one's island' quickly takes on the real character of depth; we swim in complexity, kept afloat by the fractionalisation of our social fabric; together perhaps we would drown.

Reply to Cavacava

I think that generating shared, factual narratives is rendered very difficult by 'the spectacle'. It isn't so much that the science has stopped working or needs a new paradigm to deal with life as it is now; the spectacle modifies how scientists communicate their work, grant applications etc, but doesn't change whether what they're saying is true or false. I think the reality dealt with in most scientific thought doesn't care whether communications about it are mediated by imagistic false consciousness.

Which isn't to say that fact-hood and the 'playing field of intellectual life' aren't perturbed by the spectacle.

I had more notes on 18 and 19 I forgot to put down.

The fractionalisation of social life inherent in the spectacle produces strangers and intimacy much differently than Levinisian phenomenology. Face to face social interactions are no longer the most common form of interpersonal engagement; people are engaged with as a cavalcade of images, words, sounds; a series of decontextualised and otherworldly aberrations. The assault on the senses obtained from walking down a high street invites us to avoid eye contact, handshakes; the other no longer is a lossy presentation of transcendent depth, the other is a blur of static in a transparent, almost self sufficient narrative.

The gentleness of the other and their touch recede from the world, dragging intimacy with it. Love suffers a transformation under the spectacle; it becomes a refuge that removes restrictions on our sensory modalities; a life partner is someone to watch with. A life partner is the one I can touch... Touch takes on the character of privation just as Netflix and chill becomes the very name of sex.

We'll do it all
Everything
On our own
We don't need
Anything
Or anyone
If I lay here
If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?
I don't quite know
How to say
How I feel
Those three words
Are said too much
They're not enough

Quoting fdrake

The spectacle penetrates private life by diminishing its bearers to passive receptacles; enjoying each other perhaps by sitting closer than norms (for others) allow. It produces a blind form of resistance in terms of the elevation of friendship and affectionate solidarity to the highest ideal; a simple restatement of 'let us enjoy things together'.

This is very Frommian, whereby this commodification driven by modern culture coverts this feeling of alienation through the unconscious desire that relatedness to others is a type of commodification itself, forming an almost pathological or faux unity to others where friendship and love adheres to inauthentic expressions, detached by this vacuum of abstraction. Feelings are no longer real but aligned to this fear and doubt - the condition of modern culture - to what is socially expected. Routine, copying, approval, doing what everyone else is doing saves us from that feeling, it makes reality appear concrete.

This disillusionment is filled with abstract concepts or spectacles that are no longer direct but almost sentimental in nature that enables this concrete albeit false reality, where stimuli to any feelings we have or relatedness within ourselves to the world around us is provoked by concepts we think we are supposed to have (Camus, in a way) and not because we actually have those feelings. If I go to Paris and see the Mona Lisa, do I really feel emotional and is there some sort of aesthetic relatedness, or am I emotional only because I am told that seeing the Mona Lisa would do that to me when really, I feel nothing.

This is the same with morality and love. Our relatedness is only formed because we are told that is the way that it is supposed to be, but we really do not feel anything.

Reply to TimeLine

This is very Frommian, whereby this commodification driven by modern culture coverts this feeling of alienation through the unconscious desire that relatedness to others is a type of commodification itself, forming an almost pathological or faux unity to others where friendship and love adheres to inauthentic expressions, detached by this vacuum of abstraction where feelings are no longer rea,l but aligned to this fear and doubt - the condition of modern culture - to what is socially expected. Routine, copying, approval, doing what everyone else is doing saves us from that feeling, it makes reality appear concrete.

I'm not sure the unconscious makes much sense as a critical category when the private/public distinction is being undermined. I think about this in terms of the two systems approach, one of which consists of quickly executed prejudicial habit (mental reflex), the other consists of slow and resistive deliberation (cogitation) - the two are parametrised in terms of effort, and the antipodes of mental reflex and cogitation correspond to the minimum and maximum on the scale.

In terms of mental reflex, we have whatever the fuck advertising is doing to us - a prismatic spray of affectation, presumed general desire. In terms of cogitation, we have the impossible complexity (and generated separation) underlying all aspects of life.

Authenticity is something which can be bought and sold at this point, I don't think it's a useful category of concrete social activity except through its negative - how existential authenticity is subverted and harnessed by the spectacle at every turn.

This disillusionment is filled with abstract concepts or spectacles that are no longer direct but almost sentimental in nature that enables this concrete albeit false reality, where stimuli to any feelings we have or relatedness within ourselves to the world around us is provoked by concepts we think we are supposed to have (Camus, in a way) and not because we actually have those feelings. If I go to Paris and see the Mona Lisa, do I really feel emotional and is there some sort of aesthetic relatedness, or am I emotional only because I am told that seeing the Mona Lisa would do that to me when really, I feel nothing.

This indeterminacy of motive is one of the reasons authenticity is no longer analytically useful for descriptions of social life (in this context anyway), our 'true selves' are analytically indistinguishable from the bricolage of subtext that has built up as detritus on our retinas. Babies know Coke about the same time as they know Home.

Quoting fdrake

I'm not sure the unconscious makes much sense as a critical category when the private/public distinction is being undermined. I think about this in terms of the two systems approach, one of which consists of quickly executed prejudicial habit (mental reflex), the other consists of slow and resistive deliberation (cogitation) - the two are parametrised in terms of effort, and the antipodes of mental reflex and cogitation correspond to the minimum and maximum on the scale.

Mental reflex driven by this automaton cognitive process lacks the consciousness that you have nevertheless categorised, but it is necessary because the unconscious mind is still a form of consciousness that contains mental activity - such as the way we automatically coordinate people and objects into categories - but accessibility or awareness of that activity is far from one would call qualia. Our will or motivation appears to exist somewhere in between and while this habitus is socially formed and the very impetus that alienates us from ourselves, at the same time we can feel or implicitly intuit non-verbal communication that we are unable to articulate. A man could have a trophy wife and live without ever feeling, but it does not mean he cannot experience the feeling of falling in love, that emotion that can drive a person' will emotionally. If we were to model psychological data, you could focal on mental health such as depression or anxiety, which is a byproduct of this intuitive 'I' that is seemingly breaking away from unconscious or automaton cognition, something living beyond the effect of class relations that has become aware of its own alienation, the deceit of advertising that we need things we really don't need, or that the more friends you have on Facebook or Instagram does not make your existence meaningful.

Quoting fdrake

In terms of mental reflex, we have whatever the fuck advertising is doing to us - a prismatic spray of affectation, presumed general desire.

Quite literally the best thing I have read in ages.

Quoting fdrake

Authenticity is something which can be bought and sold at this point, I don't think it's a useful category of concrete social activity except through its negative - how existential authenticity is subverted and harnessed by the spectacle at every turn.

I am not sure what you mean by this, can you further explain?

Quoting fdrake

This indeterminacy of motive is one of the reasons authenticity is no longer analytically useful for descriptions of social life (in this context anyway), our 'true selves' are analytically indistinguishable from the bricolage of subtext that has built up as detritus on our retinas. Babies know Coke about the same time as they know Home.

That is the reason why your two systems approach itself will fail to really articulate the dynamism of human agency, which requires a more substantial effort evaluating the authenticity of our will. Perhaps Kant would be a nice addition to the algorithm.

Reply to TimeLine

That is the reason why your two systems approach itself will fail to really articulate the dynamism of human agency, which requires a more substantial effort evaluating the authenticity of our will. Perhaps Kant would be a nice addition to the algorithm.

It isn't really my two system approach, it's Daniel Kahnneman's . I prefer it a lot to any analysis of the unconscious for a few reasons:

(1) The unconscious is a permanent, unfalsifiable hard-core of psycboanalytic practice. If it were undermined psychoanalysis would become a degenerate research program - despite that its existence acts as a pivot there is no more evidence for the existence of the unconscious than the idea that the mind 'runs things in the background' with little effort.
(2) Since the mind 'runs things in the background', low effort/high effort allows you to form two categories which would have the same, or almost the same, exemplifying phenomena as 'the unconscious and the conscious' anyway, only now what makes the unconscious unconscious is given a name; the thoughts and actions are well rehearsed or stereotyped.
(3) There's plenty of evidence that Kahnneman's 2 systems approach is accurate in lots of regards. Save for falling prey to the replication crisis a few times (or so I hear).

I am not sure what you mean by this, can you further explain?

Authenticity makes a lot less sense as a concept - or as a possibility of action - in an age where desire itself is created through consumption.

Time for more schizoid ranting. Word of warning, those who don't already speak Marxist will find these notes more difficult.

20. Philosophy, the power of separate thought and the thought of separate power, could never by itself supersede theology. The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion. Spectacular technology has not dispelled the religious clouds where men had placed their own powers detached from themselves; it has only tied them to an earthly base. The most earthly life thus becomes opaque and unbreathable. It no longer projects into the sky but shelters within itself its absolute denial, its fallacious paradise. The spectacle is the technical realization of the exile of human powers into a beyond; it is separation perfected within the interior of man.

The theological overtones of the spectacle were not lost on the cybernetic utopians of the 1960s->1980s. Cyberspace, as a renderer of all bodies and distinguishing principles as moot; which was interpreted by the cybernetic utopians as a radical generator of equality and freedom; instead obtained sepulchral character; simultaneously a "black hole of affectation" (Carmen Hermosillo) and a timeless yet synchronic expanse of free expression.

It is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some kind of _island of the blessed_ where people are free to indulge and express their Individuality...this is not true....i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until...i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories...by workers who were mostly exploited....i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to...and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment... [Cyberspace] is a black hole. It absorbs energy and personality and then re-presents it as an emotional spectacle.

The redemptive character of the internet; a deletion of most prejudicial categories from ready availability; produces a hyper commodification of human expression. Today, the commodification of all internet content can be achieved through marking the page with an advert. In this sense engaging in communities such as this can take the formal character of social labour. IE, human labour in the abstract accrues through engagement on sites which support themselves through advertising but consist entirely of user content. And it does so in a bizarre fashion where the produced 'goods', like posts, are valuable by their mere presence and not through the effort to make them or their quality. This is extremely perverse, as what is valued in that endeavour is the monitoring and creation of nascent desire. When data is collected from those who engage with adverts on sites run as such, the fact that people use the site transforms it and them (as internet personas) into a commodity.

In this regard, use value and exchange value permeate each other in a new way; advertising commodifies the very potential of obtaining the general equivalent - which is a transformation already achieved when installing an advert. I think Marx himself realised that money had this potential:

[quote=Capital Volume 1]Since gold does not disclose what has been transformed into it, everything, commodity or not, is convertible into gold. Everything becomes saleable and buyable. The circulation becomes the great social retort into which everything is thrown, to come out again as a gold-crystal. Not even are the bones of saints, and still less are more delicate res sacrosanctae, extra commercium hominum able to withstand this alchemy.[/quote]

all the while advertising makes a problem for socially necessary labour time - the commodification of the commons, formally speaking 0 socially necessary labour time and no saleable product. I think it requires the interpretation of anything in the commons as already sold when social relation alone suffices for value investment (and reduction in opportunity cost, as per the commodification of potential).

Thanks for keeping this place ad free, @jamalrob.

Damn you. I've had Spectacle sitting under my bed for a few years now and now you're going to make me read it along with you :<

Reply to StreetlightX

I'm glad it seems I've generated some interest in it. :)

21. To the extent that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessary. The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of sleep.

My book's translation of 21 is a little different in the first sentence, and I believe a good bit clearer:

As long as necessity is socially dreamed, dreaming will remain a social necessity

I think this is a poetic description of false consciousness, but I think you can get some mileage out of approximating the spectacle as as model and as a conceptual scheme. Recall (13)

13. The basically tautological character of the spectacle flows from the simple fact that its means are simultaneously its ends. It is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory.

and note that the spectacle is simultaneously an organising principle of, and constituted by, the social activity of people. Dreaming connotes thinking through the operations of the spectacle (using its conceptual scheme), but since the spectacle is also a reifying process of its generated representations it produces a bait-and-switch between the real and an interminable sequence of mediating images.

Perhaps contrary to the PEL podcast I think it's quite difficult to transcribe the spectacle into the Zizekian (doubled) triad of symbolic/real/imaginary. The spectacle is simultaneously an abstract generator of social order (a symbolic category), a excessive nihilation of our thoughts and feelings (a real category) and an endless series of adequations (an imaginary category). But it may have been they were saying that the imaginary in Zizek functions like the spectacle in Debord.

22. The fact that the practical power of modern society detached itself and built an independent empire in the spectacle can be explained only by the fact that this practical power continued to lack cohesion and remained in contradiction with itself.

23.The oldest social specialization, the specialization of power, is at the root of the spectacle. The spectacle is thus a specialized activity which speaks for all the others. It is the diplomatic representation of hierarchic society to itself, where all other expression is banned. Here the most modern is also the most archaic.

(22,23) My bolding. I bolded it because I think this is a statement of the nihilating power of the spectacle - that it produces holes in our social fabric and sews them shut with representational echoes of what was lost. It's also a further statement of the spectacle as conceptual scheme; an organiser and predigestion of experience; an interpretive amylase. That it remains in contradiction with itself is a condition of possibility for critique, the spectacle cannot yet be a capitalist totality despite its unifying operation.

24. The spectacle is the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue. It is the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence. The fetishistic, purely objective appearance of spectacular relations conceals the fact that they are relations among men and classes: a second nature with its fatal laws seems to dominate our environment. But the spectacle is not the necessary product of technical development seen as a natural development. The society of the spectacle is on the contrary the form which chooses its own technical content. If the spectacle, taken in the limited sense of “mass media” which are its most glaring superficial manifestation, seems to invade society as mere equipment, this equipment is in no way neutral but is the very means suited to its total self-movement. If the social needs of the epoch in which such techniques are developed can only be satisfied through their mediation, if the administration of this society and all contact among men can no longer take place except through the intermediary of this power of instantaneous communication, it is because this “communication” is essentially unilateral. The concentration of “communication” is thus an accumulation, in the hands of the existing system’s administration, of the means which allow it to carry on this particular administration. The generalized cleavage of the spectacle is inseparable from the modern State, namely from the general form of cleavage within society, the product of the division of social labor and the organ of class domination.

This contradiction is concentrated through the decontextualisation inherent in the spectacle, as that decontextualisation is also the guarantor of the possibility of immanent critique. The inner separation produced by the spectacle is a mirror of its function in general and allows epistemic access to its action. Thus, critique of it is a social phenomenology - oscillating between how it subjectivises and the material conditions which produce this subjectivisation.

Recall (8)

8. One cannot abstractly contrast the spectacle to actual social activity: such a division is itself divided. The spectacle which inverts the real is in fact produced. Lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle while simultaneously absorbing the spectacular order, giving it positive cohesiveness. Objective reality is present on both sides. Every notion fixed this way has no other basis than its passage into the opposite: reality rises up within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real. This reciprocal alienation is the essence and the support of the existing society.

and from (18)

where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings

A further reference to the reifying function the spectacle has on its mediating images. A familiar Marxist theme where relations become embodied in objects and their objectivity hides the flux of relations underpinning/behind them. The objects here are image objects; social practice is remembered as a show-reel.

The negative character of the spectacle is transformed into the negativity of critique by following the transformations/actions inherent in the concept; the spectacle is treated as a real abstraction. However, the mediation of social practices through images also casts a shadow on critique - to whom is the critique addressed if not the image of man? And images are always just another of their kind; our replaceability is at work in the transformative character of specular representation/negation. How can freedom be conceptualised when even the means of critique is subordinated to the mechanisms of the criticised process? We must take care that critique of the spectacle is not a repetition of its inner workings; that what is said is not another vector of man to his specular image. That we are looking at ourselves in the mirror of the spectacle but not simply reproducing its reflection.

The theological character of the spectacle is present here again, as it transforms the vector of transcendence-towards the other to a generation of mirror images, imaginings and conceptual subtext; a synchronic repetition of the unfolded spectacle - a subtext of constraints in all the varieties of social life.

Hello me.

25.
Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle. The institutionalization of the social division of labor, the formation of classes, had given rise to a first sacred contemplation, the mythical order with which every power shrouds itself from the beginning. The sacred has justified the cosmic and ontological order which corresponded to the interests of the masters; it has explained and embellished that which society could not do. Thus all separate power has been spectacular, but the adherence of all to an immobile image only signified the common acceptance of an imaginary prolongation of the poverty of real social activity, still largely felt as a unitary condition. The modern spectacle, on the contrary, expresses what society can do, but in this expression the permitted is absolutely opposed to the possible. The spectacle is the preservation of unconsciousness within the practical change of the conditions of existence. It is its own product, and it has made its own rules: it is a pseudo-sacred entity. It shows what it is: separate power developing in itself, in the growth of productivity by means of the incessant refinement of the division of labor into a parcellization of gestures which are then dominated by the independent movement of machines; and working for an ever-expanding market. All community and all critical sense are dissolved during this movement in which the forces that could grow by separating are not yet reunited.

There's some prescient news relating to this, the Cambridge Analytics + Facebook thing. Surprising no one, Facebook's data on people was sold and passed around a lot illegally. What is surprising is that the public reaction isn't exactly one of surprise, or rather maybe a moment of surprise then resentful acceptance. To a first approximation, Facebook is the medium of the social, the principle of translation between the internet of things and the relationships between people. Most social relations have become modelled through Facebook, and how you relate to others in general (personality) is quite well modelled by how you move about on Facebook - assuming you use it to socialise. The data about your engagement is regurgitated back at you by tailoring advertisements and what facets of people you can see. In a very real sense Facebook is a highly concentrated form of the spectacle and its dominating powers. Using it allows you to see the discretisation of all social processes into images. At every social gathering there's at least one person engaging in this translation exercise from our analogue sociality to the series of images; taking photos, making you pose, etc; and this is part of what it means to socialise now.

I quit Facebook 3 years ago, the vast majority of my IRL friends/acquaintances have stopped speaking to me since, despite giving them my email and trying to contact some of them. The only ones that still do regularly are, surprising no one, the ones that didn't heavily invest their time and energy in Facebook. By withdrawing from Facebook, I withdrew from the conditions of possibility it placed on my social life; a reflection of how Facebook expresses what society (in terms of its users' sociality) can do, but is opposed to the possibility of circumventing it.

One of the major reasons I quit it was because my sister died and her Facebook page became a digital epitaph. It was constantly updated 2 years after her death; so of course I checked it, and after prolonged exposure I found my memories vandalised. I can't remember her face, I only remember pictures of her taken by people I never met, in places I've never been. It's still there, and people still write on it. There is even an emergent regulation of user content on it; old photos and "I miss you"s-yes, genuine expressions of feeling - any resistance to the ascension of my sister to a series of images (which other friends also protested)-no. How? Upvotes/downvotes as communal consensus representation. No one dared take pictures at the funeral, on some level people understood this would be a gross perversion of something sacred; but there were photos for other social networks subject to the same thing, having a loved one die. Their epitaphs were less epitaphs and more the promise of resurrection; years after the death siblings and friends still pleading for their return - on a yearly deadline of course. A medium of grief in which no tears are seen or shed.

the incessant refinement of the division of labor into a parcellization of gestures which are then dominated by the independent movement of machines;

this is also relevant to the commodification of the commons, people act as Facebook's eyes and ears into the social reality it subsumes and reflects. The 'refinement' occurring manifests in the function of adverts and the commodification of your nascent desires. 'family bereavement' becomes sponsored by the ads in the side reel, suggesting a little retail therapy to fill the hole in your heart; sometimes even of funeral clothing, maybe a new suit to show you loved her.

I say no tears seen or shed, I remember seeing a grief selfie uploaded to a friend's Facebook tombstone. Because taking a picture of her tears and showing everyone added some reality to it.

26. With the generalized separation of the worker and his products, every unitary view of accomplished activity and all direct personal communication among producers are lost. Accompanying the progress of accumulation of separate products and the concentration of the productive process, unity and communication become the exclusive attribute of the system’s management. The success of the economic system of separation is the proletarianization of the world.

Social media and internet shopping have created some progress in this regard too. Amazon, Tesco Online etc, you don't have to even see the custodians of the fetishised commodities any more, you can get them delivered directly to your door. The proletarianization of the world I think is best seen through the combination of social media and advertising revenue.

The proletariat in Marx is characterised by a formal relationship to production/circulation and the role money plays in it. Proletariat - C-M-C', where C is the commodity they provide and M is money. Non-proletariat: M-C-M'. I don't think we have much choice but to model engagement with social media on this picture, a user generates content, C, but they don't even receive the goddamn M, that goes to the people who own the site. So, since we don't progress from C-M this probably means that we can't be thought of as owning C, and C should be seen as an emergent property of our actions; a kind of codification characterised by public expression in a pre-owned medium. The site also owns the data we generate by using the site, which can be transformed into a commodity in various ways. It suffers a nascent transformation into a commodity in terms of the commodification of potential discussed above, the data has use-value for marketing, and those who have it are also those that control the functioning of the site (and thus some conditions for possibility of expression)... This is a horrific symbiosis.

27. Due to the success of separate production as production of the separate, the fundamental experience which in primitive societies is attached to a central task is in the process of being displaced, at the crest of the system’s development. by non-work, by inactivity. But this inactivity is in no way liberated from productive activity: it depends on productive activity and is an uneasy and admiring submission to the necessities and results of production; it is itself a product of its rationality. There can be no freedom outside of activity, and in the context of the spectacle all activity is negated. just as real activity has been captured in its entirety for the global construction of this result. Thus the present “liberation from labor,” the increase of leisure, is in no way a liberation within labor, nor a liberation from the world shaped by this labor. None of the activity lost in labor can be regained in the submission to its result.

'central task' in mine is translated as 'primary work' - less ambiguous, makes it talking about the job that we have. This seems to be suggesting that the answer to 'what are you?' which came before our current climate is 'X is my job', and that 'X is my job' is no longer seen as an answer. More is demanded of our identity than what do with most of our time, and this brings focus on what we do out with our jobs. "Who am I?" can no longer be answered solely with 'what I do for a living" it's also equipped with a negative sense, that a person must be more than this. But I think the suggestion here is that it's a purely negative sense, consider this pair of dialogues:


Mary: "Hey, I'm Mary"
Jane: "What do you do Mary?"
Mary: "I'm a horticulturalist and I like cats"
_____

Mary: "Hey, I'm Mary"
Jane: "What do you do Mary?"
Mary: "I'm a horticulturalist"


"and I like cats" feels like a joke, but ending the conversation about Mary with "I'm a horticulturalist" also seems artificial. Even if "and I volunteer at a homeless shelter" was substituted in for " andI like cats" there's still something missing. I wouldn't feel like I knew much about Mary even if I knew what she did with her work time and her off time. I don't feel like I know much about a friend if I restricted knowledge of them to their job and their major hobby - we're more than that, but I'm not sure that any description would suffice. What about if Mary didn't communicate that she was a horticulturalist...

Mary: "Hey, I'm Mary"
Jane: "What do you do Mary?"
Mary: "I like cats"

Poor Mary, she only likes cats. There's a simultaneous demand for more and a denigration of anything that could be provided. I think "activity lost in labour" is referring to interpenetration of leisure time and work, and also some suggestion that only work could suffice, but it doesn't.

28. The economic system founded on isolation is a circular production of isolation. The technology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn. From the automobile to television, all the goods selected by the spectacular system are also its weapons for a constant reinforcement of the conditions of isolation of “lonely crowds.” The spectacle constantly rediscovers its own assumptions more concretely.

I like to think that Debord would've agreed that social media is a huge concretisation of the spectacle, this makes me think I'm actually understanding it. That social media can be understood as an architecture of persuasion also fits in well with this.

29.
The spectacle originates in the loss of the unity of the world, and the gigantic expansion of the modern spectacle expresses the totality of this loss: the abstraction of all specific labor and the general abstraction of the entirety of production are perfectly rendered in the spectacle, whose mode of being concrete is precisely abstraction. In the spectacle, one part of the world represents itself to the world and is superior to it. The spectacle is nothing more than the common language of this separation. What binds the spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation at the very center which maintains their isolation. The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate.

The spectacle is a process of abstraction, it can be seen in its ur-form with the fetishism of commodities understood in the precise sense of objects standing in for relations between people. There's probably something in the idea of discretisation as a mode of being of capital, as soon as something is individuated or torn from its context it can be gift-wrapped.

In terms of social media, pictures stand in for the photographer's engagement in a social situation, something interesting happens in the street and someone starts filming it; this re-presentation as discretised representation was made possible by recording technology of all sorts. The spectacle as a motivation towards abstraction, committing life to an invisible social memory, permeates social milieux in a manner similar to the general equivalent becomes embodied in the money commodity - it is as if 'the animal' as a type walked among its brethren (paraphrased from Marx).

Some notes on how I think about the general equivalent: chapter 2 of Capital is a logico-historical progression from simple exchange to money commodities and can be read as adding logical texture to the notion of exchange. Exchange as this for that contains within it the possibility of exchange networks this 1 for this 2 for this 3 for this 4... then these networks of equivalent values become represented in a single commodity - money. Money is then the representative of the equivalence classes of exchange, as well as a commodity within each equivalence class; it has this self reifying character. I think Debord sets up the spectacle in a similar way, it is 'capital accumulated until it becomes images' - the images have a landscape of potential commodifications and are thus always-already commodified through their means of expression; the means of expression being the self reification of the spectacle, as it displaces (abstracts) representations from more analogue contexts to discretised ones (images, sound bites, Tweets etc). The total production of these images is the result and enabling condition of the spectacle.

Should be noted that the Marx also relies on the myth of barter to provide the historical analysis of the value form, but I think the final stage - where money works in the sense of valuation through representation of an equivalence class of commodities of equal worth- is still an ok way of thinking about it.

The spectacle reunites the separate - again eerily true of social media, producing zombie friendships from mere acquaintance -, but it only functions so long as people feed into it and allow it to structure relationships. Also reminiscent of the social unity present in viral retweeting.

30.
The alienation of the spectator to the profit of the contemplated object (which is the result of his own unconscious activity) is expressed in the following way: the more he contemplates the less he lives; the more he accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires. The externality of the spectacle in relation to the active man appears in the fact that his own gestures are no longer his but those of another who represents them to him. This is why the spectator feels at home nowhere, because the spectacle is everywhere.

Social media again. People put in effort to make stuff on it, but then it becomes owned upon upload (a precondition for public expression) and commodified through advertising, and makes another commodity of the constitutive data. Another resonance here is spending far too much time watching TV, at the movies, on the internet - a means of expression 'submissive to work' (in the sense that we're usually making money for the owner of the site/theatre etc). Another way of saying 'what we do with our time is no longer commodified just as work'. Everyone's an alien in a society of constant, mutual, surveillance where the means of social expression is labour in another form, and even desires are bought and sold. Even the malaise it produces is commodified as potential; for medical treatment.

31.
The worker does not produce himself; he produces an independent power. The success of this production, its abundance, returns to the producer as an abundance of dispossession. All the time and space of his world become foreign to him with the accumulation of his alienated products. The spectacle is the map of this new world, a map which exactly covers its territory. The very powers which escaped us show themselves to us in all their force.

32.
The spectacle within society corresponds to a concrete manufacture of alienation. Economic expansion is mainly the expansion of this specific industrial production. What grows with the economy in motion for itself can only be the very alienation which was at its origin.

33.
Separated from his product, man himself produces all the details of his world with ever increasing power, and thus finds himself ever more separated from his world. The more his life is now his product, the more he is separated from his life.

34.
The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image

(31->34) part of the negation of 'who am i? i work as x' is done through demanding 'what do i own?' as a response. Consumers as a name of humankind. The 'very alienation' is probably referring to the original Marxist sense of alienation from the products of labour, then that applied to 'social life' (or many facets of it) being transformed into new avenues for the valorisation of capital. More resonances of people as personal brands.

I think these passages are supposed to link more to Marxian categories than the preceding aphorisms. That's the end of chapter 1.

Chapter 1 Summary.


What is the spectacle? The spectacle is a name of various moments of social processes aggregated into one self sustaining dynamic. It, to a first approximation, has the following features:

(1) The commodification of the commons and of social life.
(2) The discretisation of social life into exchangeable representations.
(3) The replacement of social engagement with the generation of the things.
(4) The structuring of our perceptions and desires in terms of image commodities.
(5) A conceptual scheme defining the limits of social life in terms of its representational commodity-images.

Fundamentally, it is the name for the mediation and structuration of life by commodity-images and the alienation this requires and produces.

In case anyone's been reading along and has questions, is there anything any of you would like to talk about?

Finished chapter 1 as well. An interesting read so far. The two most immidiate points of reference that come to mind are Zizek and Agamben. (1) Re: Zizek, I haven't listened the the podcast yet, but one of the concepts that Zizek makes use of is Robert Pfaller's notion of interpassivity: interpassivity is the phenomenon of letting other things do our work or even our feelings for us. Zizek uses the example of both canned laughter and the Greek chorus to make the point:

"Let us remind ourselves of a phenomenon quite usual in popular television shows or serials: 'canned laughter'. After some supposedly funny or witty remark, you can hear the laughter and applause included in the soundtrack of the show itself - here we have the exact counterpart of the chorus in classical tragedy; it is here that we have to look for 'living Antiquity'. That is to say, why this laughter? The first possible answer - that it serves to remind us when to laugh - is interesting enough, because it implies the paradox that laughter is a matter of duty and not of some spontaneous feeling; but this answer is not sufficient because we do not usually laugh.

The only correct answer would be that the other - embodied in the television set - is relieving us even of our duty to laugh - is laughing instead of us. So even if, tired from a hard day's stupid work, all evening we did nothing but gaze drowsily into the television screen, we can say afterwards that objectively, through the medium of the other,· we had a really good time." (Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology). While not exactly congruent, the 'other' here that Zizek speaks of very much functions in the way that I think the spectacle does in Debord: it appropriates 'activity' to itself, even as it renders passive the entire social order. The distinction Zizek draws between the psychoanalytic conceptions of the ideal-ego and ego-ideal (also in the Sublime Object) also seem relevant here, but I only mention these as bookmarks for future engagement.

(2) Agamben is my other resonance here, and while I can't really summerize Agamben's position, his entire philosophical oeuvre is centred around the theme - developed by Debord - of transposing what was once a separation between the worldly and the divine into a separation 'within human beings'. In one of my favourite books by Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, Agamben's devotes a whole analysis to how 'glory' - the glory sung of God by the angels - serves to cover up the 'emptiness' of the articulation between the divine and the earthly. He then transposes his theological analysis back onto the role of media which serves the role of 'glory', and, one is tempted to say, spectacle. I didn't recognise the Debordian resonance of this analysis when I first read it, but it's cool to see it in retrospect (Agamben has written about Debord explicitly elsewhere, and you can find letters that Debord wrote to Agamben, online, regarding some of that writing).

So the highlights so far are the elaboration of the themes of passivity and (immanent) separation, which strike me as key terms when coming to grips with the elaboration of the society of spectacle. There's also a strong resonance with Jodi Dean's notion of communicative capitalism (a gloss: "a constitutive feature of communicative capitalism is precisely the morphing of message into contribution…The message is simply part of a circulating data stream. Its particular content is irrelevant. Who sent it is irrelevant. Who receives it is irrelevant. That it need be responded to is irrelevant. The only thing that is relevant is circulation, the addition to the pool. Any particular contribution remains secondary to the fact of circulation”...), but I might develop that in another place.

Also, I very much appreciate your reading of social media in Debord's terms - obviously something he couldn't have anticipated - and I think your rereading of Marx's M-C-M' relation and what happens when potential itself is commodified is awesome. Very cool.

There’s this politician, see.......

OK I should enlarge on that. I ran into Guy DeBord on the web about 10 years ago, and it’s veracity seemed entirely obvious to me the moment I read it. It explains so much about the time we live in. And The Donald is such an obvious manifestation of the whole ‘spectacle’ mentality. It’s what got him elected. I don’t want to divert the thread by attracting the inevitable rejoinders from the resident Trumpets, but still, seems obvious to me.

Next chapter, I think I won't just restrict myself to schizophrenic ranting, there'll also be some good old fashioned philosophical buggery. I really dislike the Freudian typology of the mind, so as much as I can I'll try and interpret the unconscious as the habituated and reflexive, and the conscious as effortful comportment and cogitation. In this framework, the Id resembles reflexive comportment manifesting a collection of inter-related desires, the Ego resembles the differential weighting of the field of potentials characteristic of this manifestation, and the Superego resembles the historical aggregation-through-distribution of these differential weighting schemes.

35.
In the essential movement of the spectacle, which consists of taking up all that existed in human activity in a fluid state so as to possess it in a congealed state as things which have become the exclusive value by their formulation in negative of lived value, we recognize our old enemy, the commodity, who knows so well how to seem at first glance something trivial and obvious, while on the contrary it is so complex and so full of metaphysical subtleties.

I think this is reasonably transparent, the spectacle is structured like a network of commodities, and we can expect the play of equivalences which expresses the character of the commodity-form to have a strong analogy to the spectacle. I have in mind the good regulator principle, every efficient regulator of a system is also a model of that system. Debord sets the spectacle up as a model of sorts earlier:

Remember 6:

6. The spectacle grasped in its totality is both the result and the project of the existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corollary consumption. The spectacle’s form and content are identically the total justification of the existing system’s conditions and goals. The spectacle is also the permanent presence of this justification, since it occupies the main part of the time lived outside of modern production.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

36. This is the principle of commodity fetishism, the domination of society by “intangible as well as tangible things,” which reaches its absolute fulfillment in the spectacle, where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible par excellence.

A reference to the generalisation of commodity fetishism to the constitutive components/processes of culture: {Spectacle <-regulation-> Economy}. We can expect the regulator to be projective in the sense that the spectacle isn't a transliteration (substitution of components) of all economic processes, but I think we can say that the spectacle is a subprocess of the economy. In systems-theoretic terms (not like Debord likes cybernetics), the spectacle is an economic process generated by a novel filtration and representation of the economy as well as an increase in its scope. Note 'selection' of images, not automatic inclusion and representation. In category theoretic terms, the spectacle can probably be thought of as the image of a forgetful functor from the material conditions of the economy to a space of inter-related images with its own governing dynamics.

An exposition of the way these images have come to impose themselves on us can be found in Rick Roderick's lecture series 'The Self Under Seige'. Paraphrased, "what happens if you stop watching TV for a week? You don't know anything! Is the war still on? What the hell happened?'. The same thing can be said if you avoid social media - you lose out on a major region of how sense is negotiated and must wait until its most major events become excessively spectacular to become represented on older forms of media (like the news). The hyper-commodification of engagement (through advertising and data) in social media probably sets up a supervenience relation (at minimum) between the spectacle and its economic base, no S changes without E changes, however minor they may be.

37.
The world at once present and absent which the spectacle makes visible is the world of the commodity dominating all that is lived. The world of the commodity is thus shown for what it is, because its movement is identical to the estrangement of men among themselves and in relation to their global product.

How does the spectacle render the world absent? The world in terms of its social practices doesn't 'naturally' have to consist predominantly of a discretised tableaux of image objects. I think it might be worthwhile updating this discrete character of the spectacle - probably inspired by the growth of television, popular music and consumer culture more generally consisting of distinct concreta always-already gift-wrapped - to include a continuous element which remains unsuppressed. People can become brands, everyone has a minimal form of self-branding through the generation of credit histories ,work references and the dizzying stream of meta-data generated about us every day. Work references and examination reckon your capacity as a worker and can consist in an extensive psychometric evaluation; not just your capacity for the job but your whole being is probed. The sheer ridiculousness of it produces laughter and tears on a daily basis - eg refusing someone a job as a cleaner because they couldn't complete a fucking magic square.

We have moved on from that point too, the data stream leaves ghostly traces of our soul behind, and the administrators of these technologies can turn this into a modelling of consumer behaviour in general; and thus is a further form of commodification. The consumer as a consumer is also commodified through exchange value of the mathematised propensities of their desires and habits. Significance suffers a constant effacement in its quantification as a set of repeating propensities; every human becomes easily summarised and thus easily encoded. The results of this surface coding (discretisation into commodity-images) and deep-coding (the hidden activity you leave behind through technology like social media) is a transposition of life to what was unlived within it.

38.
The loss of quality so evident at all levels of spectacular language, from the objects it praises to the behavior it regulates, merely translates the fundamental traits of the real production which brushes reality aside: the commodity-form is through and through equal to itself, the category of the quantitative. The quantitative is what the commodity-form develops, and it can develop only within the quantitative.

The explosive growth of mathematical and computer science in the broad sense goes along with this, and the expansive data gathering and analysis that occurs as a result of the developed technologies from these fields. Perhaps this can be stated as a mathematisation of capital. Debord seems to want to say that there's a profound lack in the social life consisting in the spectacle, but he's not advanced what is lacking as a positive thesis yet. The Partially Examined Life podcast's (@Baden) comment on this was very prescient (paraphrased): "as usual with Marxist critique, the critique is devastating but the positive project sorely lacking".

39.
This development which excludes the qualitative is itself, as development, subject to qualitative change: the spectacle indicates that it has crossed the threshold of its own abundance; this is as yet true only locally at some points, but is already true on the universal scale which is the original context of the commodity, a context which its practical movement, encompassing the Earth as a world market, has verified.

The dialectical contrast of qualitative and quantitative is bollocks of the first degree in my book. Change of forms of energy are far more complicated than can be spanned by these quantities when interpreted as laws of nature as in diamat. Generalising this from nature to society and to the individual is intellectual self flagellation and loses both the specificity of each category and the possibility of novel relational dynamics between them. IE, seeing the qualitative and quantitative as antipodes in an alternating sequence of dynamics doesn't let you see how they smoothly interpenetrate (no diamat leaps with metaphysical necessity here); people leave a surprising amount of themselves on sites through their meta-data and mathematical modelling of what they do on the site, the lossy mapping from expressive activity to database content is an occlusive augmentation of the qualitative aspects of experience that facilitates its control. Similarly motivating differentials of intensity are a mirror of the quantitative in the qualitative. To the extent I can, I'll try to translate things out of diamat categories.

Reply to fdrake

I was going to raise that at some point actually, but I think it's worthwhile to continue to explicate the issue (and critique at that level) before moving on to solutions or lack thereof. Anyway, I personally think the picture is bleak almost beyond hope and the problem is accelerating. The spectacle involves commodification right down to the level of identity itself. We're communicably ourselves only insofar as we're social selves, and we're connected socially only insofar as we integrate ourselves into the process of the spectacle, which delimits the logic of personal exchange. Worse, the isolation caused by this process of self-commodification and self-abstraction throws us into further need of the salve the spectacle offers us. Of course, it's not a hole we can dig ourselves out of. "Success" then becomes the exclusive domain of the spectacle, and self-development, except in its terms, the mark of failure, isolation and ridicule.

Quoting fdrake

To the extent I can, I'll try to translate things out of diamat categories.

Yes, it would be helpful if you could rephrase this criticism.

Reply to Baden

Succinctly put. I appreciated how neatly condensed this is:

Worse, the isolation caused by this process of self-commodification and self-abstraction throws us into further need of the salve the spectacle offers us. Of course, it's not a hole we can dig ourselves out of. "Success" then becomes the exclusive domain of the spectacle, and self-development, except in its terms, the mark of failure, isolation and ridicule.

Just in case, diamat=dialectical materialism or 'materialist dialectics', in my view it's a confused pile of bookum, and the only insights that you get from considering it are much neater to think of in systems theoretic terms. At least, that's how I'm going to interpret them, or try to. Similarly with any Freudianism, I'll do what I can to translate the statements into dual process theory, which I mentioned earlier to @TimeLine.

Reply to Baden

Forgot to say, if you're actually reading my notes, was there anything you want me to throw more words at?

Reply to fdrake

You're doing plenty of work already. :) It's me who should be throwing more words at the discussion. I'm just not grasping 39 and your critique thereof. Any further explanation of that would be appreciated.

Reply to Baden

Oh. There's this thing in dialectical materialism called the dialectic of quality and quantity. It's in Engels and those in Lenin's heritage. Anti-dialectics has a good summary of the dialectic and highlights a lot of problems with it. The entire site is gold, it's written by an incredibly grumpy English analytical marxist postman.

Reply to fdrake

Cheers. I'll motor over there.

40.
The development of productive forces has been the real unconscious history which built and modified the conditions of existence of human groups as conditions of survival, and extended those conditions: the economic basis of all their undertakings. In a primitive economy, the commodity sector represented a surplus of survival. The production of commodities, which implies the exchange of varied products among independent producers, could for a long time remain craft production, contained within a marginal economic function where its quantitative truth was still masked. However, where commodity production met the social conditions of large scale commerce and of the accumulation of capitals, it seized total domination over the economy. The entire economy then became what the commodity had shown itself to be in the course of this conquest: a process of quantitative development. This incessant expansion of economic power in the form of the commodity, which transformed human labor into commodity-labor, into wage-labor, cumulatively led to an abundance in which the primary question of survival is undoubtedly resolved, but in such a way that it is constantly rediscovered; it is continually posed again each time at a higher level. Economic growth frees societies from the natural pressure which required their direct struggle for survival, but at that point it is from their liberator that they are not liberated. The independence of the commodity is extended to the entire economy over which it rules. The economy transforms the world, but transforms it only into a world of economy. The pseudo-nature within which human labor is alienated demands that it be served ad infinitum, and this service, being judged and absolved only by itself, in fact acquires the totality of socially permissible efforts and projects as its servants. The abundance of commodities, namely, of commodity relations, can be nothing more than increased survival.

I think 'unconscious' there is figurative rather than Freudian, so I'm saved some effort. I think this is just noting the historical progression from commodity capitalism to financial capitalism while noting that the latter was always a real possibility of the former. But the process of transformation from commodity centric to financial centric is irreversible since the economy now is 'a process of quantitative development' - the incessant changes of numbers on screens. But it makes enough food to bring more people as a % out of starvation every year, so there's that. So it'll keep going; and Debord says that since this keeps happening, the accumulation of capital obtains a sufficient rate to vaporise social life into images. So it's characterised as a highly likely development once a capitalist gets going because money makes money. M-C-M' again, but it's decontextualised in the sense that going from M to M' transverses national boundaries. Such boundaries are formally traversed millions of times a second - a long way from merchant caravans and the town market.

I think 'the pseudo-nature' is referring to some conceptual composite of economic relations, the cities which built up around them, and the replacement of nature through grid iron. EG Inner city kids in London need to be told light doesn't come from their eyes, part of introductory science class can be turning the lights off, closing the shutters and allowing them to see darkness for the first time.

Another reference to the commodification of everything in "acquires the totality of socially permissible efforts'. Coding/decoding things from economic analysis to the analysis of corresponding social processes then back again is a usual bit of Marxist methodology.

More negative connotations, the spectacle producing forms of life which are 'nothing more than increased survival'.

This one's big, I probably missed a few things in it.

41. The commodity’s domination was at first exerted over the economy in an occult manner; the economy itself, the material basis of social life, remained unperceived and not understood, like the familiar which is not necessarily known. In a society where the concrete commodity is rare or unusual, money, apparently dominant, presents itself as an emissary armed with full powers who speaks in the name of an unknown force. With the industrial revolution, the division of labor in manufactures, and mass production for the world market, the commodity appears in fact as a power which comes to occupy social life. It is then that political economy takes shape, as the dominant science and the science of domination.

This is picking up on the financialization of capital as prefigured in 40. There's a sketch from one of the episodes of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle (which I looked for and couldn't find) which manages to get a huge laugh from saying: "remember... things? stuff that actually has a material existence" during one of his many satirical observational comedy routines. I think there's a general sense of 'how abstract things are' which this highlights and plays on, which is interpreted by Debord as being produced from/indicative of the operation of the spectacle.

I think this is another time to appeal to the good regulator principle. Political economy as a subject is producing economic models which, irrelevant of their veracity, are used to shape economic doctrine. Usually through think-tanks, rather than having politician-economist-philosophers. Those who influence politics through it are rarely in the news for people who're so influential; it's probably quite accurate to say political economy as practiced in think-tanks is the hidden dialogue of the ruling class, a 'science of domination and the dominant science'. I have a personal frustration here since even when the UK government produces an economic manuscript they don't provide anonymised or summary forms of the data for independent verification and analysis. It's pretty undemocratic, as the think tanks almost certainly have access to the data and thus can paint us reasonably informed citizens as unqualified to comment by fiat. Despite it being very likely that there would be considerable demand for productions dealing with the data in a government independent, scientific way.

@StreetlightX

Do you have any opinions on dialectical materialism? I'm not particularly keen on it and shunted @Baden the way of an analytical Marxist eviscerating the quality/quantity dialectic. Do you have any suggestions for a less critical introduction?

A friend of mine pointed out something pretty cool. It might be possible to take the commodification of everything as a methodological posit and look at spectacular commodities (image objects) in economic terms. He then applied this to Jordan Peterson's explosive growth, searching for analogies to Amazon, and looked at it in terms of supply and demand. I have cool friends.

Reply to fdrake 'Dialectical Materialism' is one of those phrases that has always struck me as meaning whatever one wanted it to - an empty signifier, as it were, open to accepting whatever meanings one were to foist on it. It hasn't been very relavent to my own interests so far, so I'm relatively indifferent to it.

Reply to StreetlightX

It's one of the Marxian left's chief causes of circular firing lines. Rather, it names the space for unsubstantiated and endless theoretical disagreement. Depending on your organisation, you can be publicly shamed for being 'undialectical' or having 'one-sided materialism'. It's a stupid heritage to deal with.

Reply to fdrake

I have always understood the term to be a polemic against the notion that it is the dialectical logic of consciousness which determines the unfolding of history, rather it posits the economic means of production and the nature of humanity as the interacting factors which drive the dialectical logic of historical unfoldment. The truth probably lies somewhere in between.

Reply to Janus

That's certainly an element of it. If it was constrained to social forces - a statement of some genealogical-historical method - the ideas that 'conceptually contrary ideas give rise to oppositional social forces' and 'conflicts in the sphere of the economy give rise to oppositional social forces and conceptually contrary concepts' seem reasonably close to capturing its use with less jargon. But then you have diamat people ranting about dialectics like Hegelian ideals and about melting wax/boiling water.

I'd like to interpret it as a kind of proxy language for discussing social change, and hopefully there won't be too much that I miss.

@Baden

Have you had time to study 'dialectical materialism'? If so - what did you find out about it?

42. The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life. Not only is the relation to the commodity visible but it is all one sees: the world one sees is its world. Modern economic production extends its dictatorship extensively and intensively. In the least industrialized places, its reign is already attested by a few star commodities and by the imperialist domination imposed by regions which are ahead in the development of productivity. In the advanced regions, social space is invaded by a continuous superimposition of geological layers of commodities. At this point in the “second industrial revolution,” alienated consumption becomes for the masses a duty supplementary to alienated production. It is all the sold labor of a society which globally becomes the total commodity for which the cycle must be continued. For this to be done, the total commodity has to return as a fragment to the fragmented individual, absolutely separated from the productive forces operating as a whole. Thus it is here that the specialized science of domination must in turn specialize: it fragments itself into sociology, psychotechnics, cybernetics, semiology, etc., watching over the self-regulation of every level of the process.

I don't think this is saying much new, other than giving a preliminary account of the qualitative nature of commodities. They're 'everywhere' and 'deep structured' in the sense that commodity requirements are a turtles all the way down kind of thing. When all is commodified, each social need no matter how obscure must be addressed with (and constituted by) a regime of commodities. There's a strengthening of the 'relations between people become relations between things' you find in the fetishism of commodities in Marx to 'relations between all things (in a broad sense) become relations between commodities' - an intensification identified with the building of capital. The 'geological layers of commodities' is interesting, I'd like to call it something like the 'fractalization of desire and production', in which commodities take on the character of a corpuscle of embodied desires, layers of advertising and identity-signalling at the same time as the real production of commodities becomes spatially dispersed. And of course these new layers of commodities need their own characteristic science - but I don't really think it's fair to dismiss entire disciplines as sciences of domination. Unless it's meant in something close to the formal sense of techne in Heidegger.

43. Whereas in the primitive phase of capitalist accumulation, “political economy sees in the proletarian only the worker” who must receive the minimum indispensable for the conservation of his labor power, without ever seeing him “in his leisure and humanity,” these ideas of the ruling class are reversed as soon as the production of commodities reaches a level of abundance which requires a surplus of collaboration from the worker. This worker, suddenly redeemed from the total contempt which is clearly shown him by all the varieties of organization and supervision of production, finds himself every day, outside of production and in the guise of a consumer, seemingly treated as an adult, with zealous politeness. At this point the humanism of the commodity takes charge of the worker’s “leisure and humanity,” simply because now political economy can and must dominate these spheres as political economy. Thus the “perfected denial of man” has taken charge of the totality of human existence.

Debord's fleshing out this generalised commodification again - tracing out the transformation of the proletarian into the consumer. I think it's worth pausing here and reflecting on what extra is added by thinking of a proletarian as a consumer rather than as a proletarian tout court.

First, C-M-C' doesn't change insofar as the proletarians will still have to sell their wage labour to partake in the expanded sphere of commodities. But someone whose typical 'moment' in the circulation of capital is M-C-M' is still a consumer 'in his leisure and humanity'. On the level of ideology, there is a lessened distinction between the proletarian and the bourgeoise. The 'humanism of the commodity' is probably referring to the commodities (and the subdomain of image objects with its privileged status) and their relations mediating all of social life.

I don't think this is too much of an exaggeration, and there's certainly a sense in which it's true. Socialising where I live is almost always organised around an activity requiring money expenditure - movies, potlucks, smoking etc for raw consumption, skiing and other activities for closer personal bonds -. There are not that many opportunities to socialise if you're bookish even working at a university. My friends in Britain report similar things, socialising is mediated by the 'social event' - which typically also generates hyper-commodified image objects (on social media) and subjectivises people to make these objects 'in their leisure and humanity'. While it is socially necessary to organise around commodities in the broad sense - this is the kernel of commodity fetishism in the old sense -, we voluntarily - in most senses - organise ourselves on social media and live a kind of 'shadow life' therein. Without this 'shadow life' we are reclusive social subjects, despite social media offering new forms of isolation and widespread commodification in the previously discussed senses.

The humanism of the commodity also has a vacuous sense as a personal brand, in which a person's personality itself is transformed into a use value and its dark mirror, exchange value.

Reply to fdrake

Haven't had a lot of time this weekend for this, but I did read a decent amount of the article, which is a fairly comprehensive critique of the aspect of the theory it deals with, which I hadn't been aware of. And I read a few other bits and pieces too. So, looks like they took philosophy, tried to make it science and ended up with—largely—pseudoscience. There's political wish fulfilment written all over the quality/quantity notion, for example. Oh, "leaps!". How convenient. Just what we need. And Stalin's diamat seems to mix in some self-serving political elements with quantity and quality relations becoming a metaphor and justification for (although maybe I'm reading too much into it) the fierce social stratification he imposed (the nomanklatura represent a leap in quality, so it's only natural they should get all the good stuff, and so on—came across a quote for that, but can't find it at the minute). Anyway, as a theory, it falls down on testability, precision, logical consistency, and parsimony at least. I don't know though from what I've read if Debord was mostly just paying lip service to it.

44. The spectacle is a permanent opium war which aims to make people identify goods with commodities and satisfaction with survival that increases according to its own laws. But if consumable survival is something which must always increase, this is because it continues to contain privation. If there is nothing beyond increasing survival, if there is no point where it might stop growing, this is not because it is beyond privation, but because it is enriched privation.

Difficult to interpret without an appeal to the logic of dialectic. We have growth internalising its own negation (privation) and expanding while/due to manifesting the negation with transformed character. Maybe an undialectical heresy of interpretation could be:

"Economic growth sustains itself to the extent that it incorporates the creation of new desires and needs", run away positive feedback. It's usually possible to transpose the description of dialectical transformations into cybernetic ones by attempting to characterise the material factors the internalised negation/opposition expands over and how they function as a dual condition of possibility and continual source of actualisation. In this case, economic growth is coupled with the commodification of everything. We have the commodification of social potentials through advertising and the opportunity costs of omitted adverts; and thus growth is efficiently coupled to the generation of advertising marks.

Wars are usually voluntary in some sense too, they're chosen. The spectacle isn't volitional though. Reading war figuratively to give something superlative to the description.

Reply to Baden

Haven't had a lot of time this weekend for this, but I did read a decent amount of the article, which is a fairly comprehensive critique of the aspect of the theory it deals with, which I hadn't been aware of. And I read a few other bits and pieces too. So, looks like they took philosophy, tried to make it science and ended up with—largely—pseudoscience. There's political wish fulfilment written all over the quality/quantity notion, for example. Oh, "leaps!". How convenient. Just what we need. And Stalin's diamat seems to mix in some self-serving political elements with quantity and quality relations becoming a metaphor and justification for (although maybe I'm reading too much into it) the fierce social stratification he imposed (the nomanklatura represent a leap in quality, so it's only natural they should get all the good stuff, and so on—came across a quote for that, but can't find it at the minute). Anyway, as a theory, it falls down on testability, precision, logical consistency, and parsimony at least. I don't know though from what I've read if Debord was mostly just paying lip service to it or what?

I don't know Debord's position on it. My intuition is similar to yours - it's pseudoscientific claptrap at best, authoritarian newspeak at worst. If the typologies of Marxism on wiki are reliable in providing broad strokes distinctions, the Marxism of the Situationist movement was very critical of Mao and Stalin and considered itself even more left! I'm just hoping that there's nothing which can't be translated out of the diamat accent...

Been busy with other abstract things competing for my attention. I wanted to leave this here for future comment. What would Debord think of messages like this?

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Well I finished the book today. Breaking it down point by point and then expanding on each of them on here was very time consuming. I'll write up chapter summaries and criticisms over the next while, and try to ape the style because Debord absolutely encourages (not figuratively, he literally asks for it) damning critique while borrowing his voice.

Very condensed summaries for the first few chapters are as follows.

Chapter 1 - essentially a phenomenology of the spectacle, looking at how it structures experiences and how that enstructurating is related to a Marxian conception of the economy. The major theoretical highlight, in my view, is some notion of equivalence between:

(1) the passivity of consumption
(2) the alienation of people from each-other
(3) the alienation of people from themselves
(4) the coupling of 1,2,3 reproducing 1,2,3
(5) the equivalence of (4) with the valorisation -the generation of social necessity- of passive consumption.

It's kind of a knot, the spectacle as a social process which delimits the social and then projects that delimitation to people in general. The equivalence being a kind of coimplication - if (1) is occuring it requires and induces (2) etc. That the spectacle as a process does something very strange to all the different ways time is measured when considering 1->3 as ways people spend time (time as a commodity) comes back in chapter 5 and 6.

Chapter 2 - looking at how the spectacle is implicit in the commodity form, it's a Marx reference heavy chapter. Debord is drawing out the social and economic implications of the commodification of everything. To reference a recent discussion with @StreetlightX, it's an interpretation of commodification as substrate independent. Debord doesn't put it this way, but a central point is that space of possibilities for being an entrepreneur is essentially limitless, since commodity production also contains the production of desire for those commodities. Separation of commodities into discretized units within production (congealed lumps of human labour) induces the 'successive' character of the spectacle.

It is a series of events which has forgotten their generating time expenditures (actions). This discretisation - the simplification of time as time expenditure within a work day links back to chapter 1 and creates a space for the analysis of social and spectacular time in chapters 5 and 6 respectively.e substrate independence of commodification also plays a role in chapter 7, in which substrate independence is generalized to production process independence - providing a partial account of why it was so easy for capitalism to flourish in countries that sustained powerful workers movements after the movements died.

Chapter 3 -
is largely a tirade on the spectacle as a primary generator of false consciousness. In delimiting what is socially permitted, it simultaneously monopolizes the conceptual scheme for public expression. There is a kind of 'social democracy of images' which comes to dominate every aspect of our social lives. This is quite neatly expressed, IMO, through these lyrics from Bomb the Music Industry's 'All Ages Shows', which I'll reference again later:

All of my work was done
I turned the TV on and I forgot that I can turn it off

We live up on the top
They leave the door unlocked
So just come in
I don't need to buzz you up
And I never go anywhere

as a primary generator of false consciousness, it also structures how opinions change over time - the analogy of an externally generated conceptual scheme for social life is useful again here. This structuring of opinions over time is also an annihilation of history, in the sense that the spectacle delimits what is and is not part of the current narrative; modes of expression have their conditions of possibility in the conceptual scheme of their presentation. Thus, the spectacle is a 'chatter of the ruling class to itself'.

Chapters 4 to the end resist condensed summary, they're concerned with the transformation of 'the historical subject of revolution' and how it relates to the prefigured 'temporality of the spectacle' and the spatiality of global commodity production. Debord takes Soviet Russia's political climate as an early model of spectacular production (brief analogy - think of the show trials as a series of images imposed on the Russian proletariat delimiting the sphere of legitimate political activity), then looks at the distinctions between Marxian 'linear time of revolutions' - in which history culminates deterministically, the 'linear time' of the ruling class and how it constrains and develops the spectacle and concept of history at work in a populace.

A suggestive hyper-condensed summary might be: we react to the 'generators' of social life and history is indexed to the salient events which are presented, which has a useful resonance ideological state apparatuses; only the spectacle is not spatiotemporally localised, it is a generator of social temporality and a reflection of the disgust capitalist production has to geographical boundaries. The subject of history, in terms of how it is refracted by and projected into the spectacle, becomes the satiated consumer, abstracted from all of their history. From my notes:

The historical subject of bureaucracy underwent a transformation to the corporation. Thus the geographic limits placed on the domain of any specific ideology was gently destroyed through the universality of international market competition and its corresponding laws. The working class, those subordinated to this now delocalized corporate power, was thus abstracted away from its geographic localisations and is now a silent witness to its determinations in the distributed network of negotiations and trade constituting global markets.

Then, the phenomenology in chapters 1->4 of the worker's time expenditure culminates in a description of the conditioned 'cyclical' (really cylindrical) time of the work action/day/month/year. Lastly how the spectacle penetrates and structures the remaining time (helpful analogy - TV schedules as organizers of proletarian leisure time relativizing its expenditure to the continuous time of image production). Then there's a big but sympathetic fuck you to art which I don't understand as anything but a leftist intellectual insistence on the transformative nature of 'real revolutionary art' on populaces.

The final chapter invites the reader to produce a critical conception of what is universal in humankind, what new organisations will facilitate resistance to the terrifying power in coupled imperialism and global markets? What remains of humanity when the historical subject is a legal person rather than a person? Debord invites us to think carefully - what new practices can return humanity to humanity? How do we act politically in an age where politics has been separated from its people? Where 'what is to be done' is a maxim to make the headlines...

Edit: I forgot to include the second set of lyrics from the song. They're apposite in describing the temporality induced by working life under the spectacle:

In a trashed room in 1996
A fourteen year old punk and in a flash I'm my parents
And we'll never know love, 'cause I was too busy talking to my Green Day posters
They never said nothing to me...

Can you stay here?
Can we blast the Descendents?
Can we turn our phones off and get lost in The Simpsons?
I feel inches away from getting swallowed by darkness
And I know that you're tired, but can you draw back the curtains for me?