Re: Facebook
Shard
Best e-mail I've had in over a year ;-)
I feel that if we examine and comment on _Spectacle_ we can close the gap beetween as regards Trump "my buddy" Putin, etc. By the way (can't resist this) the comments I cited were both on Raw Story or Kos or the WaPo, and they popped up pretty quick as I was reading the comments on the article. The person who denounced Kelly as a racist/white supremacist ventured that it was understandable since he was from a racist town (Boston) and a Catholic. When I went back, the "Catholic" part had been edited out. As for the "FEMA camps" reference, that was on Raw Story - I know because I commented and received a reaction to my comment:
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Snake Arbusto | Friday, Nov. 3rd | View on Raw Story The FEMA Archipelago, they'll call it. But who's our Solzhenitsyn? |
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medcannabis1 replied | Friday, Nov. 3rd | View on Raw Story Bannon can be the scribe! |
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(1) In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.
We have to keep in mind that this was written in France circa 1967. By then France had started to catch up with the US's postwar prosperity and burgeoning middle class, and in particular, TV had taken its place as the dominant medium. What I think he means by
"modern conditions of production" is not just the Marxian notion of alienation of labor from the production of socially necessary goods, but also the development of the role of the consumer as indissociable from that of the worker. Alienated goods are produced by alienated workers, and must be consumed by alienated consumers. The media - and I suspect that at times "media" and "spectacle" can be considered synonymous - play the role of conditioning consumers to consume products and creating needs for those products. Basic socially necessary goods and services - food and shelter and education and medical care, for example - have also become alienated due to the mode in which they are produced, so they too become... well, goods and services - commodities that are alienated by the very fact of their being produced within the market economy. But beyond that are commodities like - in France in 1968 anyway - the telephone, refrigerators, cars, etc. For these in particular, a need has to be created, and that is done by presenting representations, in the media (in the broad sense), of a lifestyle that is not native ot the consumer but is presented in such a way that they mistake their perception of their own lives, or replace their existing lives, with the representation. It might be good to point out that the primary sense of _spectacle_ in French is simply a stage show - a representation (indeed, _représentation_ is simply the word for a performance of, say, a play). So, the Spectacle is indissociable from life in modern developed societies.
But, he's going beyond simply saying that the media have great power over consumers... of media, since media are commodities, over and everything else. What I get from it is that it's not so much a question of being deceived by "deceivers" (this is from Thesis 2) as of the commodities themselves - the media among them - reaching out to the consumer, or rather to the human being-become-consumer, while the consumer gravitates toward the commodity. It's interesting to note that Debord writes (in 2) not "where even the deceivers are deceived," but "où le mensonger s'est menti à lui même" - where mendacity has lied to mendacity (I can hear old Burl Ives intoning "Mendacity! Mendacity!"); he depersonalizes. So by extension, and in connection with the later (2) "an autonomous movement of the nonliving", I see the commodity itself as autonomously seeking out the consumer on the market. Or, better, the commodity, which is nothing more or less than capital itself, reified, frozen in the commodity, seeks to encounter the consumer's ability to purchase, which is nothing other than the worker's capacity to create value, also reified in the act of purchase, and at that meeting point re-liquidifies the capital frozen in the commodity. So what I'm saying is that capital itself seeks out the consumer's purchasing power - both of them "unliving" and frozen - autonomously. The Spectacle is capital speaking directly not to the individual consumer, but to the consumer's capacity to surrender his vital (working, creative) power to the spectacular representation of what the consumer's life/lifestyle is. In other words, it's not so much a conspiracy to dupe us worker/consumers as capital itself generating the image of itself AND the image of the consumer's role. In (6) he says:
"In all of its particular manifestations — news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment — the spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation *of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production* and in the consumption implied by that production."
How does that tie in with Trump's voters and (seemingly inalienable) supporters? Well, The Republican masterminds were dead set against Trump and his satanic smirk and smell. But they came around to realizing that, independently of their crafting of candidates capable of winning over the voter as they perceive him/her, autonomously as it were, this candidate was encountering voter intentions on the market; voters' perception of the spectacular representation of who they are was encountering this commodity which managed to present itself as being outside that representation. But they were voting for a putative human, living (as opposed to unliving) individual as opposed to what his was - namely just another spectacular representation. I realize that this once again exposes me to the charge that I'm defending Trump's racist, xenophobe, pseudoreligious, gun-crazy, machistic, paternalistic... voter base. But I'd defend myself by saying that all that (racist, xenophobe, pseudoreligious, gun-crazy, machistic, paternalistic... and I left out white supremacist) is itself a spectacular representation, and that it's a fallacy that Democrat voters are somehow in touch with the reality behind the Spectacle in ways that the other side is not. If I read Debord right, you can't be outside the Spectacle while at the same time being part of it, and perticipating in elections in the USA today is being part of it.
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Anyway that's a start. Have at it.
On 03/11/2017 18:39, Michael Presti wrote:
and yes to Debord by email. I ordered a hard copy of the translation so I can flip back and forth.
On Fri, Nov 3, 2017 at 12:35 PM, Michael Presti <mpb...@gmail.com> wrote:
PLUS, my humor tends to be a bit dry and goes overlooked too.
On Fri, Nov 3, 2017 at 12:34 PM, Michael Presti <mpb...@gmail.com> wrote:
that's a problem I've had since the beginning of my online life, that of discovering tone. so hear ya and if it wasn't for this fucking group I've started.... I'm a bit sick at heart over all of this shit myself and promise myself every week I'm gonna quit the field. when are you coming to visit?
On Fri, Nov 3, 2017 at 11:03 AM, Jos. LaCour <jos.l...@free.fr> wrote:
I'm sorry, Mike, but I've pulled the plug on Facebook. I didn't want to pull my posts without acknowledging it. We can discuss this stuff and/or Debord by e-mail if you want.
Why? Well, my naturally Balanced nature (Oct 21, 1946, 6:30 AM, Hotel Dew) enables me to see all sides of things, and everything I write on Facebook now looks like an apology for what the great tide of public opinion anathematizes. And if I'm accusing myself, God knows what all the good folks out there must think. Or, to look at it another way, I can't be funny anymore, and - to quote Salvatore Kerlérec Hallini - if we can't kid each other, who can we kid? I don't mind living in the digital world, but it's gotten a little too binary for me.
-- What would your mother say if she knew you were reading other people’s mail?