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.

: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'.

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.

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

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'. — fdrake

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.

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.

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. — fdrake

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.

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

Quite literally the best thing I have read in ages.

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. — fdrake

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

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. — fdrake

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.

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:

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. — Capital Volume 1

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 :<

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.