9 ms·

The Society of the Spectacle

101 points by raldu 5y ago

pkdpic 5y ago
Really happy to see this thread. Its pretty impressive and inspiring that these kinds of conversations happen at all in a community where it's not considered that big of a deal to make over 200k a year. Especially inspiring given how influential the developer community seems to be.
dredmorbius 5y ago
https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=6A311EA9685F74E3EEC17E98EA9A9256 https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=6A311EA9685F74E3EEC17E9...
_Nat_ 5y ago
Aggressively anti-intellectual. And.. tortured? It reads like a literary version of [The Scream](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scream ), where it aggressively rejects reality as a monster, grasping at straws in the process in a manner that suggests severe psychological disturbance. The author seems to be begging for a simpler world -- to go back to an ancient golden age, before things got so complex (before "The Spectacle"). Before science, before economics, before industrialization, before mass-education, before the human knowledge-pool got bigger, and even before people recorded years (the author makes a big point of how only seasons, and not years, should be observed).
- 0xADADA 5y ago
  Debord was vehemently against a return to some mythical "Golden Age" and explicitly criticizes Fascism as such a return: > Its [fascisms] strength is how it presents itself truthfully as a violent resurrection of mythic origins—to claim the past as a “Golden Age” and a return to the successes of this golden past. It demands participation in a community held together by mythical archaic pseudo-values: race, blood, and the leader. Fascism is a cult of the archaic fitted out by modern technology https://unredacted-word.pub/spectacle/#section-103 https://unredacted-word.pub/spectacle/#section-103 Debord wants to move beyond a period where time is made up of clock-segmented moments of equally valuable commodities to a time determined by the creation of events and situations of our own making, with our own values and meanings inscribed into those successive moments.
  - _Nat_ 5y ago
    The author very much wanted to go back in time, to enjoy how things used to be (before "The Spectacle") -- at least, in the sense that they want to restore human-experience to what they perceive its historical condition to have been. When the author critiques a mythical "Golden Age" in the part you quoted, they were critiquing a specific mythical "Golden Age" that they attributed to Fascism. Overall, the author's basically describing how a memetic-monster, "The Spectacle", emerged and sustains itself as a parasite on humanity. The author wants to go back to how things were before the parasite started taking over. The author really spreads things out, but for some quick quotes to highlight their position... 1. The author argues that "The Spectacle" had a beginning: > [73:] The spectacle began when the bourgeoisie won the economy, and became visible when the bourgeois politicians put their interests into action within politics. ...which subsumed humanity's ability to live directly once it began: > [73:] [...] Everything that had been directly lived has been relegated to history. 2. After it emerged, "The Spectacle" then went through a growing process: > [39:] The contemporary inability of the language to adequately describe the spectacle is itself evidence of the enormous development of the spectacle. While this development may not yet be evenly distributed across all localities, this change has progressed to such an extent that it is verified by the existence of a globalized marketplace. 3. "The Spectacle"'s development gradually eroded humanity's connection to reality itself: > [48:] Exchange value was previously understood as derived from use value. Now, however, within the inverted reality of the spectacle, [...] the actual use value of the commodity has been diminished as its connection to directly lived reality has been gradually eroded. 4. The author advocates a return to prior existence, before all of this stuff ("The Spectacle") started happening: > [178:] A consciousness of history that threatens the spectacle is to discover the force potentially capable of reappropriating space for lived time. 5. In the final paragraph of the book (Paragraph 221), the author sums up their position on returning humanity to (the author's perception of) historical-existence: > [221:] Self-emancipation in the contemporary period is emancipation from our material basis within falsified reality. This “historic mission of establishing truth in the world” [...] by returning power [...]. [...] This can only be made possible when individuals are “directly linked to world history”—where dialog within the council arms itself to defeat its own conditions. --- To note it, the terminology of a mythical-"Golden Age" tends to be derisive; even those who believe in mythical-golden-ages wouldn't tend to use such terminology. So, I'm not claiming that the author uses those words or explicitly describes their position as such. Rather, my point's that the author is using that basic pattern: stuff used to be better in the past (humans lived "directly experienced" life, things were more "authentic", etc.), then bad things emerged ("The Spectacle" emerged and started subsuming human-experience, made things inauthentic, etc.), and now people should try to get back to how things used to be ("emancipation from our material basis within falsified reality", "returning power", accomplish "“historic mission of establishing truth in the world”", "reappropriating space for lived time", etc.). That said, the author does seem rather bleak about being able to return things to how they were before; it comes off as quite defeatist and morbid. Unfortunately, the author may not have been particularly mentally well.. their way of thinking appears to have been diseased.
antihero 5y ago
I've read quite a bit of this book, and situationalism is awesome - though I do find this writing style quite...fatiguing. Part of me can't work out whether it's written like this to fit a huge amount of meaning into one paragraph or whether it's just being flash or whether it's also a postmodernist nod to postmodernism itself (which...isn't all postmodernism?).
- Hermitian909 5y ago
  While Philosophy is often split along analytic/continental lines, another way to split it is along the lines of whether the philosophers feel it is important to use precise language that tries to improve mental clarity and shared understanding and those who feel that there are certain ineffable qualities to ideas that are lost when you attempt to make that level of precision, both because of laziness in readers and because of inherent qualities to the ideas. Situationalists are very much in the latter camp and have said that at times they were deliberately obtuse so as to avoid being misunderstood.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    Wait, they thought that being obtuse would reduce misunderstandings? That seems... unlikely to work as intended.
- 0xADADA 5y ago
  > it's just being flash or whether it's also a postmodernist nod to postmodernism itself (which...isn't all postmodernism?). Keep in mind that Debord was familiar with Lyotard, but postmodernism had only just recently started when this book was written. That said, Debord specifically refutes postmodernist tendencies in [thesis 179](https://unredacted-word.pub/spectacle/#section-179 https://unredacted-word.pub/spectacle/#section-179) Note that Debords concept of Spectacle had *Three Degrees* the concrete reality of the spectacle, as opposed to its relatively superficial existence as a set of mediatic and ideological practices, ‘can only be justified by reference to these ^^three degrees: simple technico-ideological appearances / the reality of the social organisation of appearances / historical reality^^’ On the first of these three ‘degrees’, or levels – that of ‘simple technico-ideological appearances’ – the spectacle is simply an ideological and media-driven ‘part of society’: something very much akin to Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘culture industry’. Seen in these terms, the spectacle is the sector of society ‘where all attention, all consciousness, converges’. This is the level of Debord’s analysis upon which much of the academic work referred to earlier has tended to focus. Social media, TikTok, Facebook and the issues you discuss concern this level. On the *second level* of this schema, however, and thus ‘behind the phenomenal appearances of the spectacle’, such as ‘television, advertising, the discourse of the State, etc.,’ we find what Debord refers to as ‘the general __reality __of the spectacle itself’, understood as ‘a moment in the mode of production.’ The concept of spectacle, addressed on this second, deeper level, pertains to the social operation of capitalist value, and to the manner in which society has been ordered to suit capital’s continued operation. On the first, more ‘superficial’ level of this schema, spectators contemplate the fads, fashions, adverts and trinkets that celebrate this social order; on this second, more profound level, they become contemplative observers of their own lives, because their social activity has become so thoroughly governed and shaped by that same order. This is the dimension of Debord’s theory that has been addressed by the best studies of his work. Anselm Jappe’s excellent __Guy Debord __(1993, in Italian; 1999 in English) is of particular significance here, as it deals with this theme in detail. The second level entails that the concept of spectacle also operates on a *third level*: that of ‘historical reality’. In this regard, spectacle needs to be understood as __a relation to historical time__. For Debord, the articulation of all social existence via capitalist social relations involves the separation of human subjects from their own lived activity. The result is a historical moment characterized by a loss of historical agency; or, as Debord puts it in another letter: modern capitalism has produced the paradox of a ‘historical society that refuses history’. Thus, this third and deepest level of Debord’s tripartite schema concerns a state of separation from history itself. Although we will touch on the first level of Debord’s theory in later chapters, and although we will also discuss the technicalities of its second level at some length, this book will focus primarily on its third, ‘historical’ level.
beckman466 5y ago
i'm a fan of these introduction videos by Tom Nicholas: Society of the Spectacle: WTF? Guy Debord, Situationism and the Spectacle Explained - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGJr08N-auM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGJr08N-auM Donald Trump and the Society of the Spectacle - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HAII7QWr_c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HAII7QWr_c
- papito 5y ago
  For a second there I thought you said "Tom Nichols", who wrote multiple books on the un-seriousness of our modern society (such as The Death of Expertise), which is so fat and happy that it looks to government itself to entertain it. This ultimately leads to backsliding of democracies that we observe today.
  - einpoklum 5y ago
    > our modern society ... which is so fat and happy We are talking about a society where, still, you have to struggle constantly to secure the most basic of needs. In most countries, anyway. So, ignoring the issue of mass obesity, I disagree.
eternalban 5y ago
discussed earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21800216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21800216
- dang 5y ago
  Thanks! Macroexpanded: The Society of the Spectacle - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30083411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30083411 - Jan 2022 (1 comment) The Society of the Spectacle - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21800216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21800216 - Dec 2019 (69 comments) An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord’s ‘The Society of the Spectacle’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311770 - Aug 2016 (20 comments)
lil_dispaches 5y ago
This is the actual text of most EULA.
- ruined 5y ago
  i agree
beepbooptheory 5y ago
If you are in interested in this stuff at all, can't recommend enough McKenzie Wark's books on the subject, both The Spectacle of Disintegration and The Beach Beneath Street. They had a profound effect upon me. Wark also, fwiw, wrote the Hacker Manifesto [1]. Although, ironically, I can't imagine her views there would be that well received on HN. 1. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674015432 https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674015432
- uoaei 5y ago
  > Although, ironically, I can't imagine her views there would be that well received on HN. It is fascinating that hacker and open source culture doesn't necessarily lead to materialist analyses of ownership and production. Makes me wonder, though, what other philosophies would such behavior prescribe?
  - beepbooptheory 5y ago
    Well, if you read something like the The Californian Ideology now, with our current ability at retrospection, you can pose that in the 90s and aughts, there was a widescale capture of the "hippie" hacker class (as the essay puts it) by capital, where businesses had to adjust there strategies to properly utilize the then desperately needed class of artisans. Silicon valley culture is the dialectical result of this endeavor. Combine that with the simple (and I think understandable at the time) belief in a cyber-tinted technological determinism, along with billions of dollars worth of investors, and its easy to see what we have now: at best, full-tilt neoliberal rationalism, and at worst, libertarianism.
    - 0xADADA 5y ago
      > Well, if you read something like the The Californian Ideology The Californian Ideology was written by Richard Barbrook, who subsequently wrote a book on Debords tabletop game _The Game of War_.
      - beepbooptheory 5y ago
obiefernandez 5y ago
I don’t think the author is surprised about the success of NFTs
- ruined 5y ago
  debord committed suicide in 1994
  - Der_Einzige 5y ago
    Wow! Suicide is really common among french postmodernist writers. Althusaar (I guess he technically murdered his wife), Deleuze (threw himself out of a window), Debord. Am I forgetting anyone?
blacksqr 5y ago
A key text that helped lay the foundations for the social changes of the 1960s and 70s. See _Lipstick Traces_ by Greil Marcus for an introduction to Debord and Situationism.
- screenbreakout 5y ago
  I second this recommendation, I remember finding the book very readable and imo cogent, the author is afaik a specialist in Bob Dylan and music theory... I'd recommend https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_Dialectics_Break_Bricks%3F https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_Dialectics_Break_Bricks%... watching it in french(I'm fluent), while stoned I found it extremely funny

101 points by raldu 5y ago

Really happy to see this thread. Its pretty impressive and inspiring that these kinds of conversations happen at all in a community where it's not considered that big of a deal to make over 200k a year. Especially inspiring given how influential the developer community seems to be.

dredmorbius 5y ago

https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=6A311EA9685F74E3EEC17E98EA9A9256 https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=6A311EA9685F74E3EEC17E9...

_Nat_ 5y ago

Aggressively anti-intellectual. And.. tortured? It reads like a literary version of [The Scream](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scream https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scream ), where it aggressively rejects reality as a monster, grasping at straws in the process in a manner that suggests severe psychological disturbance. The author seems to be begging for a simpler world -- to go back to an ancient golden age, before things got so complex (before "The Spectacle"). Before science, before economics, before industrialization, before mass-education, before the human knowledge-pool got bigger, and even before people recorded years (the author makes a big point of how only seasons, and not years, should be observed).

0xADADA 5y ago
Debord was vehemently against a return to some mythical "Golden Age" and explicitly criticizes Fascism as such a return: > Its [fascisms] strength is how it presents itself truthfully as a violent resurrection of mythic origins—to claim the past as a “Golden Age” and a return to the successes of this golden past. It demands participation in a community held together by mythical archaic pseudo-values: race, blood, and the leader. Fascism is a cult of the archaic fitted out by modern technology https://unredacted-word.pub/spectacle/#section-103 https://unredacted-word.pub/spectacle/#section-103 Debord wants to move beyond a period where time is made up of clock-segmented moments of equally valuable commodities to a time determined by the creation of events and situations of our own making, with our own values and meanings inscribed into those successive moments.
- _Nat_ 5y ago
  The author very much wanted to go back in time, to enjoy how things used to be (before "The Spectacle") -- at least, in the sense that they want to restore human-experience to what they perceive its historical condition to have been. When the author critiques a mythical "Golden Age" in the part you quoted, they were critiquing a specific mythical "Golden Age" that they attributed to Fascism. Overall, the author's basically describing how a memetic-monster, "The Spectacle", emerged and sustains itself as a parasite on humanity. The author wants to go back to how things were before the parasite started taking over. The author really spreads things out, but for some quick quotes to highlight their position... 1. The author argues that "The Spectacle" had a beginning: > [73:] The spectacle began when the bourgeoisie won the economy, and became visible when the bourgeois politicians put their interests into action within politics. ...which subsumed humanity's ability to live directly once it began: > [73:] [...] Everything that had been directly lived has been relegated to history. 2. After it emerged, "The Spectacle" then went through a growing process: > [39:] The contemporary inability of the language to adequately describe the spectacle is itself evidence of the enormous development of the spectacle. While this development may not yet be evenly distributed across all localities, this change has progressed to such an extent that it is verified by the existence of a globalized marketplace. 3. "The Spectacle"'s development gradually eroded humanity's connection to reality itself: > [48:] Exchange value was previously understood as derived from use value. Now, however, within the inverted reality of the spectacle, [...] the actual use value of the commodity has been diminished as its connection to directly lived reality has been gradually eroded. 4. The author advocates a return to prior existence, before all of this stuff ("The Spectacle") started happening: > [178:] A consciousness of history that threatens the spectacle is to discover the force potentially capable of reappropriating space for lived time. 5. In the final paragraph of the book (Paragraph 221), the author sums up their position on returning humanity to (the author's perception of) historical-existence: > [221:] Self-emancipation in the contemporary period is emancipation from our material basis within falsified reality. This “historic mission of establishing truth in the world” [...] by returning power [...]. [...] This can only be made possible when individuals are “directly linked to world history”—where dialog within the council arms itself to defeat its own conditions. --- To note it, the terminology of a mythical-"Golden Age" tends to be derisive; even those who believe in mythical-golden-ages wouldn't tend to use such terminology. So, I'm not claiming that the author uses those words or explicitly describes their position as such. Rather, my point's that the author is using that basic pattern: stuff used to be better in the past (humans lived "directly experienced" life, things were more "authentic", etc.), then bad things emerged ("The Spectacle" emerged and started subsuming human-experience, made things inauthentic, etc.), and now people should try to get back to how things used to be ("emancipation from our material basis within falsified reality", "returning power", accomplish "“historic mission of establishing truth in the world”", "reappropriating space for lived time", etc.). That said, the author does seem rather bleak about being able to return things to how they were before; it comes off as quite defeatist and morbid. Unfortunately, the author may not have been particularly mentally well.. their way of thinking appears to have been diseased.

antihero 5y ago

I've read quite a bit of this book, and situationalism is awesome - though I do find this writing style quite...fatiguing. Part of me can't work out whether it's written like this to fit a huge amount of meaning into one paragraph or whether it's just being flash or whether it's also a postmodernist nod to postmodernism itself (which...isn't all postmodernism?).

Hermitian909 5y ago
While Philosophy is often split along analytic/continental lines, another way to split it is along the lines of whether the philosophers feel it is important to use precise language that tries to improve mental clarity and shared understanding and those who feel that there are certain ineffable qualities to ideas that are lost when you attempt to make that level of precision, both because of laziness in readers and because of inherent qualities to the ideas. Situationalists are very much in the latter camp and have said that at times they were deliberately obtuse so as to avoid being misunderstood.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  Wait, they thought that being obtuse would reduce misunderstandings? That seems... unlikely to work as intended.
0xADADA 5y ago
> it's just being flash or whether it's also a postmodernist nod to postmodernism itself (which...isn't all postmodernism?). Keep in mind that Debord was familiar with Lyotard, but postmodernism had only just recently started when this book was written. That said, Debord specifically refutes postmodernist tendencies in [thesis 179](https://unredacted-word.pub/spectacle/#section-179 https://unredacted-word.pub/spectacle/#section-179) Note that Debords concept of Spectacle had *Three Degrees* the concrete reality of the spectacle, as opposed to its relatively superficial existence as a set of mediatic and ideological practices, ‘can only be justified by reference to these ^^three degrees: simple technico-ideological appearances / the reality of the social organisation of appearances / historical reality^^’ On the first of these three ‘degrees’, or levels – that of ‘simple technico-ideological appearances’ – the spectacle is simply an ideological and media-driven ‘part of society’: something very much akin to Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘culture industry’. Seen in these terms, the spectacle is the sector of society ‘where all attention, all consciousness, converges’. This is the level of Debord’s analysis upon which much of the academic work referred to earlier has tended to focus. Social media, TikTok, Facebook and the issues you discuss concern this level. On the *second level* of this schema, however, and thus ‘behind the phenomenal appearances of the spectacle’, such as ‘television, advertising, the discourse of the State, etc.,’ we find what Debord refers to as ‘the general __reality __of the spectacle itself’, understood as ‘a moment in the mode of production.’ The concept of spectacle, addressed on this second, deeper level, pertains to the social operation of capitalist value, and to the manner in which society has been ordered to suit capital’s continued operation. On the first, more ‘superficial’ level of this schema, spectators contemplate the fads, fashions, adverts and trinkets that celebrate this social order; on this second, more profound level, they become contemplative observers of their own lives, because their social activity has become so thoroughly governed and shaped by that same order. This is the dimension of Debord’s theory that has been addressed by the best studies of his work. Anselm Jappe’s excellent __Guy Debord __(1993, in Italian; 1999 in English) is of particular significance here, as it deals with this theme in detail. The second level entails that the concept of spectacle also operates on a *third level*: that of ‘historical reality’. In this regard, spectacle needs to be understood as __a relation to historical time__. For Debord, the articulation of all social existence via capitalist social relations involves the separation of human subjects from their own lived activity. The result is a historical moment characterized by a loss of historical agency; or, as Debord puts it in another letter: modern capitalism has produced the paradox of a ‘historical society that refuses history’. Thus, this third and deepest level of Debord’s tripartite schema concerns a state of separation from history itself. Although we will touch on the first level of Debord’s theory in later chapters, and although we will also discuss the technicalities of its second level at some length, this book will focus primarily on its third, ‘historical’ level.

beckman466 5y ago

i'm a fan of these introduction videos by Tom Nicholas: Society of the Spectacle: WTF? Guy Debord, Situationism and the Spectacle Explained - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGJr08N-auM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGJr08N-auM Donald Trump and the Society of the Spectacle - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HAII7QWr_c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HAII7QWr_c

papito 5y ago
For a second there I thought you said "Tom Nichols", who wrote multiple books on the un-seriousness of our modern society (such as The Death of Expertise), which is so fat and happy that it looks to government itself to entertain it. This ultimately leads to backsliding of democracies that we observe today.
- einpoklum 5y ago
  > our modern society ... which is so fat and happy We are talking about a society where, still, you have to struggle constantly to secure the most basic of needs. In most countries, anyway. So, ignoring the issue of mass obesity, I disagree.

eternalban 5y ago

discussed earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21800216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21800216

dang 5y ago
Thanks! Macroexpanded: The Society of the Spectacle - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30083411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30083411 - Jan 2022 (1 comment) The Society of the Spectacle - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21800216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21800216 - Dec 2019 (69 comments) An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord’s ‘The Society of the Spectacle’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311770 - Aug 2016 (20 comments)

lil_dispaches 5y ago

This is the actual text of most EULA.

ruined 5y ago
i agree

beepbooptheory 5y ago

If you are in interested in this stuff at all, can't recommend enough McKenzie Wark's books on the subject, both The Spectacle of Disintegration and The Beach Beneath Street. They had a profound effect upon me. Wark also, fwiw, wrote the Hacker Manifesto [1]. Although, ironically, I can't imagine her views there would be that well received on HN. 1. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674015432 https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674015432

uoaei 5y ago
> Although, ironically, I can't imagine her views there would be that well received on HN. It is fascinating that hacker and open source culture doesn't necessarily lead to materialist analyses of ownership and production. Makes me wonder, though, what other philosophies would such behavior prescribe?
- beepbooptheory 5y ago
  Well, if you read something like the The Californian Ideology now, with our current ability at retrospection, you can pose that in the 90s and aughts, there was a widescale capture of the "hippie" hacker class (as the essay puts it) by capital, where businesses had to adjust there strategies to properly utilize the then desperately needed class of artisans. Silicon valley culture is the dialectical result of this endeavor. Combine that with the simple (and I think understandable at the time) belief in a cyber-tinted technological determinism, along with billions of dollars worth of investors, and its easy to see what we have now: at best, full-tilt neoliberal rationalism, and at worst, libertarianism.
  - 0xADADA 5y ago
    > Well, if you read something like the The Californian Ideology The Californian Ideology was written by Richard Barbrook, who subsequently wrote a book on Debords tabletop game _The Game of War_.
    - beepbooptheory 5y ago

obiefernandez 5y ago

I don’t think the author is surprised about the success of NFTs

ruined 5y ago
debord committed suicide in 1994
- Der_Einzige 5y ago
  Wow! Suicide is really common among french postmodernist writers. Althusaar (I guess he technically murdered his wife), Deleuze (threw himself out of a window), Debord. Am I forgetting anyone?

blacksqr 5y ago

A key text that helped lay the foundations for the social changes of the 1960s and 70s. See _Lipstick Traces_ by Greil Marcus for an introduction to Debord and Situationism.

screenbreakout 5y ago
I second this recommendation, I remember finding the book very readable and imo cogent, the author is afaik a specialist in Bob Dylan and music theory... I'd recommend https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_Dialectics_Break_Bricks%3F https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_Dialectics_Break_Bricks%... watching it in french(I'm fluent), while stoned I found it extremely funny