6 ms·

So, I got into hot debate about this book. I read it, or attempted to do so in French, my native language. Thing is, while I do have some philosophical culture,

by Iv 7y ago

So, I got into hot debate about this book. I read it, or attempted to do so in French, my native language. Thing is, while I do have some philosophical culture, I do not have a degree in philosophy, and people told me that my opinion is therefore irrelevant. Debord in this book insists on being obtuse and obfuscates relatively simple ideas. Worse, he would masquerade opinions as reasoning and loves using vague words without defining them, jumping from one possible meaning to the other the next sentence. The thing is unreadable and the ideas it contains (I read some explanations of the books by other "lesser" philosophers) pretty basic. Better read Manufacturing Content by Chomsky. I don't know why Americans are so enamored with French philosophers while they have decent ones at home. I am a bit ashamed that the aura our culture has is used to promote such hacks as the situationists.

AlecSchueler 7y ago
It's interesting because I can entirely see where you're coming from because Debord really does have those tendancies in his writing, but if you consider his background with the Lettrist movement and all of the avant garde artistic techqniues that they were experimenting with in the 50s (Check out some films by Isidore Isou) then you can see his later obscurantism as a development of those techniques and as an attempt to imbue those techniques with the same philisophical and political impact as his core message. The book is really very tightly packed with ideas, working as it does.
- Iv 7y ago
  Oh, sure, Debord had his context and was experimenting. However if you consider that philosophy is a useful field, full of serious questions that one ought to seriously try to answer, I think you have to dismiss the Lettrist movement as unhelpful at best, as a failed experience or a dead end of modern philosophy, if you are as disappointed in it as I am. They may be an interesting literature movement, but they are as helpful to philosophy as would be people who would proclaim that all quantum theory makes more sense when expressed in Sumerian.
- christopherbalz 7y ago
  Well-said.
chongli 7y ago
Manufacturing Content by Chomsky. I don't know why Americans are so enamored with French philosophers while they have decent ones at home Because we’re talking about the academy of the humanities. This is an institution built on obscuring and gatekeeping ideas rather than sharing them. Why do they do this when their mandate is to create and share knowledge? These scholars are in a constant struggle to remain relevant, both individually and as departments in their schools. Fortunately (or unfortunately) these scholars collectively decide what is and isn’t relevant. This process takes the form of fashion trends, because there are no objective measures of validity the way there are in math and science. Fashion itself is a never-ending ladder climb.
- Iv 7y ago
  The collateral damage in this is the domain of actual philosophy, which is a very important intellectual domain. It is now done by scientists, politicians, economists, who have insights that can really help the field, but they are dismissed as intruders by this academic field.
  - chongli 7y ago
    I should add that not all scholars of the humanities operate this way but that these individuals are becoming increasingly rare. The problem is ultimately economic and external. For a long time, the academy used tenure as a means of shielding scholars from external economic pressure. Now, as the education arms race accelerates, more and more people are attempting to crowd their way into the academy. The epithet of “publish or perish” has become a mantra among the aspirants. Obscurantism is only one of many tools for separating the grain from the chaff.
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    I'm hearing an echo of Francis Schaeffer here. He said (circa 1980) that we didn't really have philosophy anymore, we only had antiphilosophy. We had existentialism, which dealt with the big questions but was an antiphilosophy because it did so in an irrational way. And we had linguistic philosophy, which was rational but was an antiphilosophy because it didn't deal with the big questions. In effect, Schaeffer said, our chairs of philosophy (at universities) are largely vacant. The real philosophy is being done by people outside of academic settings.
ianleeclark 7y ago
> The thing is unreadable and the ideas it contains (I read some explanations of the books by other "lesser" philosophers) pretty basic. Why are you taking the opinion of someone concerning what a book says if that book is unreadable? Clearly there must be something must be wrong either in your ability or in their confidence. > Better read Manufacturing Content by Chomsky. Society of the Spectacle and Manufacturing Consent don't cover the same material. It's a good book recommendation, but Society of the Spectacle is effectively a dissection of a heavily commoditized society, whereas Manufacturing Consent concerns dissecting the current state of media.
- Iv 7y ago
  I consider the book unreadable, as I don't think the goal of the textual medium should be to disorient the reader. I was pointed out, by people more versed in academic philosophy then I, that Debord actually designed his book like a puzzle, full of hidden references to other texts from other obscure philosophers and that it takes a lot of notes and an almost perfect memory of other books to reassemble what he means. I trusted that account and once deciphered, the book is just a re-hash of some marxism and some vague criticism of the dynamics of mass-media and consumerism of leisure time. Realize that his book is about the "society of spectacle" and he dives in, never explaining first what he means by "spectacle" (which mostly means "a show" in French but can be used by analogy to any performative action), letting you guess, and sliding from one meaning to the other all the time. This book is probably a nice literature puzzle that I can not fully appreciate, but it is as much philosophy as Lady Gaga's meat dress is haute cuisine.
  - claudiawerner 7y ago
    >I don't think the goal of the textual medium should be to disorient the reader "Now, from what you write about my language, to be honest, I find it very difficult to imagine that you mean it seriously. Your argumentation shows a true obsession with the thought of the reader. With my stuff you obviously didn't even come up with the idea that I'm not interested in him, neither in catching him, nor in snubbing him, but only in the most adequate and rigorous presentation of the matter possible. That is probably the only linguistic thing that can be done seriously against the cultural industry." -- Adorno >I trusted that account and once deciphered, the book is just a re-hash of some marxism and some vague criticism of the dynamics of mass-media and consumerism of leisure time. This is awfully reductionist; it is as ridiculous as saying that after Capital has been deciphered it's just a re-hash of some socialism. Not to mention, the book isn't really about mass-media and consumerism (though those do factor into it); you only have to read the quote at the beginning from Feuerbach in 1841 to know there's more to it than that. Yes, you can express any complex idea as a "re-hash" of something. Yes, you need to do background reading to understand literature that builds upon two centuries of philosophy. >and he dives in, never explaining first what he means by "spectacle" The endless quest for definitions laid out clear as day is fruitless, and not a mark of good philosophy. Marx never laid out all the dimensions of what he means by "capital", he never even defined "class". I don't consider that to be a fault of the work. > but it is as much philosophy as Lady Gaga's meat dress is haute cuisine. It should be first considered a work of critical theory before philosophy. Besides that, professional philosophers of all stripes would disagree - after all, philosophers study Debord, not Lady Gaga's meat dress. A great many works have been inspired and built on top of Debord's larger project, and Society of the Spectacle in particular.
nerdponx 7y ago
Debord in this book insists on being obtuse and obfuscates relatively simple ideas. Worse, he would masquerade opinions as reasoning and loves using vague words without defining them, jumping from one possible meaning to the other the next sentence. This has been my experience with a lot of academic humanities writing in English. I can't take anything written like this seriously. I shouldn't be surprised that other languages would have the same problem.
- icebraining 7y ago
  But Debord's work is not an academic dissertation, nor should it be taken as such. It doesn't present new evidence or advance a logical hypothesis, it merely shows another way of thinking about the things we all know and see; much like so many works of art. In any case, I think the criticism is much overstated. A lot of the book is quite plain to read.
Kototama 7y ago
It's unreadable to you. The whole book is a play with other philophical concepts (from Marx and Hegel among others) which are most of the time not explicitly quoted, with a lot of détournements on top of it. As for the importance (or not) of the situationist movement (their members refuted the term situationist) it needs to be recontextualized with its time and the place it took in the art and politic to judge if it is just a hack, as you assume.
Der_Einzige 7y ago
Because state sanctioned sources with an incentive for American discord have used it to subvert the educational system. If you don't believe me, take a look at what a competitive high school or college policy debate looks like today. It's literally 4 kids speed reading (as fast as they can!!! Seriously auctioneers would be proud!) Obscure French post-modernist philosophy. They avoid any discussion that might be about a policy implementation of the topic being debated (it's not strategic to use regular language or arguments anymore due to the judges) As a result, I routinely speak with wealthy 15 year olds who insist on calling themselves "maoists". Don't believe me? Look up "TOC semi final policy round" or "Harvard vs Berkely finals policy debate" on YouTube. anything even kind of like that. There's no way that this happened without the intervention of either spooks or worse, foreign spooks Books like this, or the works of other terrible French scholars, are the bread and butter of this fashionable nonsense
- pmoriarty 7y ago
  "take a look at what a competitive high school or college policy debate looks like today. It's literally 4 kids speed reading..." There was a great radiolab episode about this.[1] "There's no way that this happened without the intervention of either spooks or worse, foreign spooks" Apparently, the trend towards that sort of debate is student initiated. Students want this. Though at the same time, students aren't unanimous in wanting this style of debate. The radiolab episode goes in to detail about the controversy. [1] - https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/debatable https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/debat...
  - Der_Einzige 7y ago
    It's very easy for an intelligence agency to make it look like this was a Grass Roots movement. I am a member of this community (debate community) and I believe that it was anything but grassroots. Also, the students have to adapt to the judges, not the other way around. I'm sure that judges are more to blame for this than anything else. If this post becomes greyed out than it's obvious that I've hit a nerve
    - 7y ago
icebraining 7y ago
> hacks as the situationists. Did you read more than Debord? I find Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life easier to grasp than The Society.
artfulhippo 7y ago
I don’t totally disagree with your criticism of Debord or other French pomo obscurantists. But there is some irony to complain on a coding forum that someone used language in a way that’s hard to appreciate without extensive experience in the field. On the point of ambiguity in words, while the approach of STEM is to minimize it, in the messy world of liberal arts, ambiguity must be accepted; this is a significant message in postmodern thought, anyway.
- kiliantics 7y ago
  Even in STEM, there is tonnes of obscure jargon. Much of it also sounds like it could mean something you are familiar with. Think of all the words in theoretical physics: strings, worldsheets, bubble nucleation, or just plain energy and action. Yet no lay person could hope to follow along if reading one of the "seminal works". That is just the nature of specialisation. And there is often plenty of ambiguity in there too, despite the efforts to avoid it.
- Iv 7y ago
  I do appreciate art and ambiguity in literature or many culture endeavor. I'd have no qualm in Debord if he was saying he wrote a literary experiment. However, it claims to be philosophy, not an art performance. I am of the position that while you can (and should!) imbue philosophy into your art, you should not present ambiguous and undecipherable art as a piece of philosophy. I can make a sculpture that use integral calculus in the way it forms shape, but that would not be an appropriate way to present a theorem at a mathematics conference.

by Iv 7y ago

AlecSchueler 7y ago

It's interesting because I can entirely see where you're coming from because Debord really does have those tendancies in his writing, but if you consider his background with the Lettrist movement and all of the avant garde artistic techqniues that they were experimenting with in the 50s (Check out some films by Isidore Isou) then you can see his later obscurantism as a development of those techniques and as an attempt to imbue those techniques with the same philisophical and political impact as his core message. The book is really very tightly packed with ideas, working as it does.

Iv 7y ago
Oh, sure, Debord had his context and was experimenting. However if you consider that philosophy is a useful field, full of serious questions that one ought to seriously try to answer, I think you have to dismiss the Lettrist movement as unhelpful at best, as a failed experience or a dead end of modern philosophy, if you are as disappointed in it as I am. They may be an interesting literature movement, but they are as helpful to philosophy as would be people who would proclaim that all quantum theory makes more sense when expressed in Sumerian.
christopherbalz 7y ago
Well-said.

chongli 7y ago

Manufacturing Content by Chomsky. I don't know why Americans are so enamored with French philosophers while they have decent ones at home Because we’re talking about the academy of the humanities. This is an institution built on obscuring and gatekeeping ideas rather than sharing them. Why do they do this when their mandate is to create and share knowledge? These scholars are in a constant struggle to remain relevant, both individually and as departments in their schools. Fortunately (or unfortunately) these scholars collectively decide what is and isn’t relevant. This process takes the form of fashion trends, because there are no objective measures of validity the way there are in math and science. Fashion itself is a never-ending ladder climb.

Iv 7y ago
The collateral damage in this is the domain of actual philosophy, which is a very important intellectual domain. It is now done by scientists, politicians, economists, who have insights that can really help the field, but they are dismissed as intruders by this academic field.
- chongli 7y ago
  I should add that not all scholars of the humanities operate this way but that these individuals are becoming increasingly rare. The problem is ultimately economic and external. For a long time, the academy used tenure as a means of shielding scholars from external economic pressure. Now, as the education arms race accelerates, more and more people are attempting to crowd their way into the academy. The epithet of “publish or perish” has become a mantra among the aspirants. Obscurantism is only one of many tools for separating the grain from the chaff.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  I'm hearing an echo of Francis Schaeffer here. He said (circa 1980) that we didn't really have philosophy anymore, we only had antiphilosophy. We had existentialism, which dealt with the big questions but was an antiphilosophy because it did so in an irrational way. And we had linguistic philosophy, which was rational but was an antiphilosophy because it didn't deal with the big questions. In effect, Schaeffer said, our chairs of philosophy (at universities) are largely vacant. The real philosophy is being done by people outside of academic settings.

ianleeclark 7y ago

> The thing is unreadable and the ideas it contains (I read some explanations of the books by other "lesser" philosophers) pretty basic. Why are you taking the opinion of someone concerning what a book says if that book is unreadable? Clearly there must be something must be wrong either in your ability or in their confidence. > Better read Manufacturing Content by Chomsky. Society of the Spectacle and Manufacturing Consent don't cover the same material. It's a good book recommendation, but Society of the Spectacle is effectively a dissection of a heavily commoditized society, whereas Manufacturing Consent concerns dissecting the current state of media.

Iv 7y ago
I consider the book unreadable, as I don't think the goal of the textual medium should be to disorient the reader. I was pointed out, by people more versed in academic philosophy then I, that Debord actually designed his book like a puzzle, full of hidden references to other texts from other obscure philosophers and that it takes a lot of notes and an almost perfect memory of other books to reassemble what he means. I trusted that account and once deciphered, the book is just a re-hash of some marxism and some vague criticism of the dynamics of mass-media and consumerism of leisure time. Realize that his book is about the "society of spectacle" and he dives in, never explaining first what he means by "spectacle" (which mostly means "a show" in French but can be used by analogy to any performative action), letting you guess, and sliding from one meaning to the other all the time. This book is probably a nice literature puzzle that I can not fully appreciate, but it is as much philosophy as Lady Gaga's meat dress is haute cuisine.
- claudiawerner 7y ago
  >I don't think the goal of the textual medium should be to disorient the reader "Now, from what you write about my language, to be honest, I find it very difficult to imagine that you mean it seriously. Your argumentation shows a true obsession with the thought of the reader. With my stuff you obviously didn't even come up with the idea that I'm not interested in him, neither in catching him, nor in snubbing him, but only in the most adequate and rigorous presentation of the matter possible. That is probably the only linguistic thing that can be done seriously against the cultural industry." -- Adorno >I trusted that account and once deciphered, the book is just a re-hash of some marxism and some vague criticism of the dynamics of mass-media and consumerism of leisure time. This is awfully reductionist; it is as ridiculous as saying that after Capital has been deciphered it's just a re-hash of some socialism. Not to mention, the book isn't really about mass-media and consumerism (though those do factor into it); you only have to read the quote at the beginning from Feuerbach in 1841 to know there's more to it than that. Yes, you can express any complex idea as a "re-hash" of something. Yes, you need to do background reading to understand literature that builds upon two centuries of philosophy. >and he dives in, never explaining first what he means by "spectacle" The endless quest for definitions laid out clear as day is fruitless, and not a mark of good philosophy. Marx never laid out all the dimensions of what he means by "capital", he never even defined "class". I don't consider that to be a fault of the work. > but it is as much philosophy as Lady Gaga's meat dress is haute cuisine. It should be first considered a work of critical theory before philosophy. Besides that, professional philosophers of all stripes would disagree - after all, philosophers study Debord, not Lady Gaga's meat dress. A great many works have been inspired and built on top of Debord's larger project, and Society of the Spectacle in particular.

nerdponx 7y ago

Debord in this book insists on being obtuse and obfuscates relatively simple ideas. Worse, he would masquerade opinions as reasoning and loves using vague words without defining them, jumping from one possible meaning to the other the next sentence. This has been my experience with a lot of academic humanities writing in English. I can't take anything written like this seriously. I shouldn't be surprised that other languages would have the same problem.

icebraining 7y ago
But Debord's work is not an academic dissertation, nor should it be taken as such. It doesn't present new evidence or advance a logical hypothesis, it merely shows another way of thinking about the things we all know and see; much like so many works of art. In any case, I think the criticism is much overstated. A lot of the book is quite plain to read.

Kototama 7y ago

It's unreadable to you. The whole book is a play with other philophical concepts (from Marx and Hegel among others) which are most of the time not explicitly quoted, with a lot of détournements on top of it. As for the importance (or not) of the situationist movement (their members refuted the term situationist) it needs to be recontextualized with its time and the place it took in the art and politic to judge if it is just a hack, as you assume.

Der_Einzige 7y ago

Because state sanctioned sources with an incentive for American discord have used it to subvert the educational system. If you don't believe me, take a look at what a competitive high school or college policy debate looks like today. It's literally 4 kids speed reading (as fast as they can!!! Seriously auctioneers would be proud!) Obscure French post-modernist philosophy. They avoid any discussion that might be about a policy implementation of the topic being debated (it's not strategic to use regular language or arguments anymore due to the judges) As a result, I routinely speak with wealthy 15 year olds who insist on calling themselves "maoists". Don't believe me? Look up "TOC semi final policy round" or "Harvard vs Berkely finals policy debate" on YouTube. anything even kind of like that. There's no way that this happened without the intervention of either spooks or worse, foreign spooks Books like this, or the works of other terrible French scholars, are the bread and butter of this fashionable nonsense

pmoriarty 7y ago
"take a look at what a competitive high school or college policy debate looks like today. It's literally 4 kids speed reading..." There was a great radiolab episode about this.[1] "There's no way that this happened without the intervention of either spooks or worse, foreign spooks" Apparently, the trend towards that sort of debate is student initiated. Students want this. Though at the same time, students aren't unanimous in wanting this style of debate. The radiolab episode goes in to detail about the controversy. [1] - https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/debatable https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/debat...
- Der_Einzige 7y ago
  It's very easy for an intelligence agency to make it look like this was a Grass Roots movement. I am a member of this community (debate community) and I believe that it was anything but grassroots. Also, the students have to adapt to the judges, not the other way around. I'm sure that judges are more to blame for this than anything else. If this post becomes greyed out than it's obvious that I've hit a nerve
  - 7y ago

icebraining 7y ago

> hacks as the situationists. Did you read more than Debord? I find Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life easier to grasp than The Society.

artfulhippo 7y ago

I don’t totally disagree with your criticism of Debord or other French pomo obscurantists. But there is some irony to complain on a coding forum that someone used language in a way that’s hard to appreciate without extensive experience in the field. On the point of ambiguity in words, while the approach of STEM is to minimize it, in the messy world of liberal arts, ambiguity must be accepted; this is a significant message in postmodern thought, anyway.

kiliantics 7y ago
Even in STEM, there is tonnes of obscure jargon. Much of it also sounds like it could mean something you are familiar with. Think of all the words in theoretical physics: strings, worldsheets, bubble nucleation, or just plain energy and action. Yet no lay person could hope to follow along if reading one of the "seminal works". That is just the nature of specialisation. And there is often plenty of ambiguity in there too, despite the efforts to avoid it.
Iv 7y ago
I do appreciate art and ambiguity in literature or many culture endeavor. I'd have no qualm in Debord if he was saying he wrote a literary experiment. However, it claims to be philosophy, not an art performance. I am of the position that while you can (and should!) imbue philosophy into your art, you should not present ambiguous and undecipherable art as a piece of philosophy. I can make a sculpture that use integral calculus in the way it forms shape, but that would not be an appropriate way to present a theorem at a mathematics conference.