TLN of Errors studyparty guide
The Society of the Spectacle
La Société du spectacle (1967) is a critique of contemporary consumer culture and commodity fetishism by Guy Debord, theorist, writer, filmmaker, and founding member of the Situationist International.
» full text translated by Ken Knabb (2014)
» full text translated by Greg Adargo (1977)
The book deals with issues such as class alienation, cultural homogenization, and the mass media. In it Debord traces the development of a modern society in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation. "All that once was directly lived has become mere representation,” he writes, referring to the central importance of the image in contemporary society. Images, he says, have supplanted genuine human interaction.
The spectacle
This topsy-turvy condition is called the spectacle. Crucially, Debord observes, "The spectacle is not a collection of images. Rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.” (And this, four decades before Facebook!)
Debord's aim and proposal is "to wake up the spectator who has been drugged by spectacular images," "through radical action in the form of the construction of situations" "that bring a revolutionary reordering of life, politics, and art". In the situationist view, situations are actively created moments, characterized by "a sense of self-consciousness of existence within a particular environment or ambience".
Détournement
Debord encouraged the use of détournement, French for "rerouting" or "hijacking", "which involves using spectacular images and language to disrupt the flow of the spectacle.” It has been defined elsewhere as "turning expressions of the capitalist system and its media culture against itself"—as when slogans and logos are turned against their advertisers or the political status quo.
Recuperation
The opposite of détournement is recuperation, in which radical or subversive ideas are twisted, commodified, appropriated by mainstream media, and absorbed in a more socially acceptable context.
Commodity fetishism
In Karl Marx's critique of political economy , commodity fetishism is the perception of the social relationships involved in production, not as relationships among people, but as economic relationships among the money and commodities exchanged in market trade. As such, commodity fetishism transforms the subjective, abstract aspects of economic value into objective, real things that people believe have intrinsic value.
Commodity fetishism is a specific form of reification, while reification is a specific form of alienation.
Reification
In Marxism, reification (German: Verdinglichung, literally: "making into a thing" or Versachlichung, literally "objectification": regarding something impersonally) is the thingification of social relations or of those involved in them, to the extent that the nature of social relationships is expressed by the relationships between traded objects.
Alienation
Marx's theory of alienation describes the estrangement (German: Entfremdung) of people from aspects of their human nature (Gattungswesen, “species-essence”) as a consequence of living in a society stratified into social classes. The alienation from the self is a consequence of being a mechanistic part of a social class, which condition estranges a person from his or her humanity.
The theoretic basis of alienation, within the capitalist mode of production, is that the worker invariably loses the ability to determine his or her life and destiny, when deprived of the right to think (conceive) of herself as the director of her actions; to determine the character of said actions; to define relationships with other people; and to own the things and use the value of the goods and services, produced with her labour. Although the worker is an autonomous, self-realised human being, as an economic entity she is directed to goals and diverted to activities that are dictated by the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production, in order to extract from the worker the maximum amount of surplus value, in the course of business competition among industrialists.
Trick roping
Trick roping is an entertainment or competitive art involving the spinning of a lasso or lariat, a tool of American cowboys, who developed rope spinning and throwing skills in catching animals.
There is a well-established repertoire of tricks that can be divided into three fundamental categories: "flat loop", "vertical loop" and "butterfly". In addition there are thrown loop tricks and tricks that involve the use of two ropes. Among the vertical loop tricks is the "Texas Skip", which involves the performer spinning the lasso in a wide loop in a vertical plane and jumping through the loop from one side to the other on each rotation.
It all comes together on The Late Now, somehow.
(Image, top: Karl Marx vs. Leapin’ Louie)