turning the paige

Guy Debord says “ooh la la, je pense, donc je suis un baguette”

we live in a the society of the spectacle…

I am just poking fun; I think there is so much to admire and take away from Debord’s work and I would like to focus on a few chapters in particular.

I do have one central question, though: do you think Debord was so critical of modern society because he lived in Paris? I’d write a manifesto if I lived in that shithole too! No but seriously, I was considering writing a post only on subchapters 67 and 69 (which unironically are really insightful and interesting in the chapter Unity and Division Within Appearances) but I won’t put either of us through that.

Ok now I can prove I’m not a total goober and actually discuss some of the subchapters I really enjoyed. I’ll start off with #43, from The Commodity as Spectacle.

To summarize, Debord writes about the difference between the primary, or “primitive” accumulation of capitalism and the change that takes place when the ruling class begins to understand that the worker does not have value as only a laborer, but also as a consumer. This takes place once “commodity abundance reaches a level that requires an additional collaboration from him,” (pg 16). I understand this as the spectacle itself reaching a point in its cyclical nature forcing the bourgeoisie to be made aware that the worker’s value as a laborer is no longer enough. Their leisure time is something to be exploited, as much or even more than that of their labor.

The line that really made me want to throw up is:

“Once his workday is over, the worker is suddenly redeemed from the total contempt toward him that is so clearly implied by every aspect of the organization and surveillance of production, and finds himself seemingly treated like a grown-up, with a great show of politeness, in his new role as a consumer.”

I love the language used here. Themes of the family unit are scattered throughout Debord’s work, but seem particularly apparent here. Language of being saved and language of being raised by someone (or something) enough so that you are now self-sufficient, only to be sawed off at the knees when you grow up so much that you become an inconvenience. There is no place for family (except as a conglomerate consumer-blob) within the spectacle, in my mind. But that’s beside the point. Anyway…

The imagery that plays in my head is a man plucked from his workstation and plopped down in Time’s Square, stack of cash in hand, dumbfounded by the sounds, the smells of production and plastics. His eyes adjust to the florescent billboards and screens and he stumbles into a man dressed as the Statue of Liberty trying to sell his mixtape. He wanders about, unsure of how or where or on what to spend his $6.50/hr, but he knows that it is his duty. Through the streets he creeps, past yellow cabs and bustling business men with flip-phone-eyebrow-furrowing-spitting-while-you-talk business to attend to. And, most unfortunately, he sees laborers sitting at their station, sewing, mending, bending, drilling, screwing through a window.

‘How vile!’ he thinks. ‘Look at their cracked knuckles, their ragged pants and ill-fitting shoes.’

‘I’ll try these on in a size 11,’ he says. They slide on like a glass slipper. Let’s take them to the register.

‘$56.09,’ the cashier says with a grin.

‘Oh, I only have $24,’

And then the cashier says ‘why so serious’ and cuts him across the face to give him a permanent smile, or something crazy like that.

But we know that’s not how it happens. The reality is much more banal than that. The reality is that he is not a person. The reality is that he, me, you, have all been stripped of our humanity. The value of the man who is now dancing around in clown makeup has been lost, because even though through appearances, he fit in waltzing around Times Square, he will never be important, valuable, or autonomous in the way he desires, from time to time.

And if I may circle back to my earlier point about the language used in this quote, I have really been trying to make notes about the infantilization of the proletariat. The constant supervision, the policing of behavior, clocking in, clocking out. I know none of this is particularly profound, but I just find this section so fascinating.

I mean, he’s right. We do not get a moment’s rest from being advertised to, being sold something. We don’t even get to have our own problems anymore, as they are manufactured for us and then we are sold a solution to whatever problem we are told we have. We are lonely but we have things. We are sad but we have things. We are isolated and sedated and worked to the bone but we have things. And if we do not have things, we do not exist.

I am reading through the Society of the Spectacle in conjunction with Erich Fromm’s To Have or to Be. Even though these two were different in their methodological approaches, they shared significant theoretical ground and I believe it is helpful to compare the two. I’ll start off by saying that the main similarity between the two is that they both take a Hegelian (please, ladies, control yourselves) approach in their respective theories. Now, I’m no connoisseur of the dialectic, but I do think I have suffered through enough to make the claim that both Society of the Spectacle and To Have or to Be reek of Hegel… Both theories are both historical and cyclical. There is a central disconnect that both discuss thoroughly: the disconnect of man and himself, the unwillingness and lack of motivation to create and manipulate one’s actuality. Debord touches on this point when he discusses appearances and the liquidation of social life.

“The pseudo-needs imposed by modern consumerism cannot be contrasted with any genuine needs or desires that are not themselves also shaped by this society and its history. Commodity abundance represents a total break in the organic development of social needs. Its mechanical accumulation unleashes an unlimited artificiality which overpowers any living desires. The cumulative power of this autonomous artificiality ends up by falsifying all social life.” p29

Yet one word sticks out to me here: “represents”. Which, yes, I know is like the main point of the entire theory of Debord. But in the representation, the optimist in me sees hope. Although the spectacle is ruthless, is all-consuming, is so inescapable, it is yet a collection of images. It is unreal. It is ceremony, it is newness, it is artificial, it is falseness, it is manufactured. And I have to believe that there is some escape from the cyclical hellscape.

There must be some escape from ‘thesis, antithesis’… But that is just a theory of how history is created and perpetuated, you may say (now I’m really hitting my Joker stride). And I retort “do you want to know how I got these [syntheses]?”

I crack myself up. I’m not even reviewing this before I post it. This one’s going up raw. Read Debord, he’s awesome. Read Fromm, he rocks. Don’t read this blog, it sucks.

See you next time 🙂