Debord.
From Society of the Spectacle (1967), as well as the essays “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography” (1955) and “Theory of the Derive” (1958).
From separation to spectacle. There has been a fundamental separation of humanity from “reality”, replacing the real with an “official” unity. But this is really an illusion or image, strengthened by our isolation (as totalitarian structures often are). This is the world-as-grid, a Cartesian res extensa. We are given an anesthetized noosphere of things, a technologically s(t)imulated intimacy (Bataille, Baudrillard, Teilhard; Arendt’s instrumentality, Nietzsche’s world denial: a peep show, odorless sex through a screen…). The apotheosis of this machine of separation is spectacle, which — again, due to our ecological nature — extends to inter- and intrapersonal relations. Separation erodes community, spectacle neutralizes critique (Polanyi’s market society, Marcuse’s one-dimensionality). We are united in being separate: empowered to produce our world (and it is reified through production, both in the sense of a factory and a theater), we are ever more cut off from it, instead only reproducing the spectacle.
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Spectacular logic is market logic. The commodity is the ontological unit of the spectacle’s grid, signaling the colonization of worlds by the World of Stuff (the “everything store”). Through a logic of quantitative exchange and self-equivalence, we lose sense of craft and aura, of the shadowy qualia of being, and are so estranged from beings (Benjamin, and more Polanyi: market logic leads to alienation and “dis-embeddedness” from the oikos). All we can see is the enframed and overcoded space, a process of quantizing (e.g. money; think of analog-to-digital conversion, of estimating curves with Riemannian sums, modeling fabrics with wire meshwork, the fragmentation of analysis without synthesis…in the most mathematical sense, the matrix has us. Cf. Lefebvre, Deleuze). This process succeeded in generating surplus, but ultimately for a select few, and at the cost of ecological feeling. It is a world of choked abundance, propped up not only by unceasing labor but the leisure consumption it creates. The importance of leisure consumption increases with the drive towards automation, which abolishes the labor it must preserve. Hence, the concomitant increase in the importance of marketing (advertising and creating false needs, but also in the sense of furthering the transformation of all into market). All of this is in service of the spectacle cult, with the consumption of commodity serving as the Communion rite: we take a bite-size offering — tasting like nothing, no value-content — and collectively act as if it is the most divine intimacy. And, like any cult, the society of the spectacle is a pseudo-society rife with Orwellian moves: ordered division conceals the unifying condition of poverty, while the false unity of a consumer class masks class division.
The space-time-meaning fabric of the spectacle. The spectacle has colonized space: abstract homogeneity is both a design principle and a method of asserting cybernetic control on society-as-system. We are habituated to spectacle: attention is directed, routines of motion and action formed and surveilled, again in cult-like fashion. Time has similarly undergone a process of humanization towards spectacular time. From an unconscious Bergsonian swirl, it was first thought of as merely a container for the natural cycles confronted by nomadic and agrarian cultures (Aion, with any real change being illusory; related to “eternity”, that which is without termina/ends). Production soon created surplus time — leisure time — which was irreversible in its relative freedom. This “waste” needed rerouting and control, too: a power again mostly reserved for the ruling class alone. They were the ones who fought wars, expending “surplus life”, attempting dynastic rule against the collapse back into the droning equilibrium of Aion, chronicling themselves into history for posterity (chronicle/historical time is the time of chronos: “Ozymandias, king of kings…”). As social formations are tied to story and memory, not only were the powerful the masters of History, but mastery of historical time led to power. Religion emerged both as an expression of and a vehicle for temporal power (cf. Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution): the “kingdom of God” that was both the goal of history and its destruction, the “pilgrimage” as the image of a democratic and personal history (where work was something that actively changed the world). By the age of spectacle, any real transformation is swallowed in a paralytic experience of time. By universalizing chronos as commodified time for the sake of the market, the spectacle refuses real history, preserving the pure speed of consumption and accumulation atop the garbage heap of haunted pasts and apocalyptic futures (re: Snyder, fascism also works by replacing history with a pseudo-eternity, a pseudo-inevitability… or, re: Byrne, “heaven is a place where nothing ever happens”). Homo economicus or else. This also refuses the consciousness of death: of irreversible time passing, decaying (as always, Becker feels relevant here, but also Heidegger re: the spectacle’s artifice as inauthenticity). Ultimately, it is a virtual ideology that causes concrete toplogical distortions (a la Lacan/Zizek), a semiotic-material schizoid virus that both estranges and smashes into fragments.
The way out. In a contradictory way, the spectacle asserts our ecological nature: environments influence our psyche, unconsciously and consciously. But this is recursive — we can intervene, disrupt, violate the automatic loop. We can induce turbulence and friction, a gadfly, a rock in the stream. Wield negation and transgression, releasing cultural consciousness through a kind of nuclear fission, graffiti the sterility of the built Order with a rupture of the Real. We can make a mess of the imposed order: Vandal hordes against the imperious. This thinking must become organized and applied strategically: we are captured, and there is no guarantee the spell will break on its own accord. To get anywhere, we must realize that our position as a class has revolutionary potential, especially if we coalesce beyond partial ideologies and refuse to give in to authoritarian tendencies (which would maintain a spectator class), pursuing true emancipation (neither Marx nor Bakunin nor Lenin…) versus shifting forms of impotent dependence: State and Capital, as symptoms and agents of the hierarchy of separation, are both targets of this universal rebellion (Alinsky, Frankfurt school). In contrast to the false unity offered by the spectacle, the ideal political organization here would look something like workers’ councils (a la Pannekoek’s libertarian socialism; perhaps the Spanish revolution of the 1930s came closest…). Tactically, rebellion can also come through surrender. Gathering in novel formations, letting the existing terrain drive our actions against the routine, towards new possibilities (Althusser’s aleatoric Marx: politicizing the drift/clinamen to carve out material tributaries… also like an Oblique Strategies deck, or chaos magic…). Experiment, carve new trails, share your findings, recreate the environment around other needs: politics is a collective art, a living science. Ultimately, this is a method of activated sur-realism (or a “Bauhaus for imaginists”…): recognizing that a mediating grid has been imposed, puncture it infinitely (infinite differentiation, infinite paths, infinite interpretation…).
