We are asked to reread the essay by Debord, read before as part of Chapter 2, Ways of Seeing. Whilst I recalled reading Debord, and finding difficulty with his concept of the spectacle, I did not realise until after re reading the essay that it was the same article as read a few months ago (I thought it was another excerpt from Society of the Spectacle that was included in the reader).
This was useful, as the temptation would be to revisit my previous notes before re reading, whereas this way I could read, then compare the thoughts afterwards.
The extract is brief; Debord has a way of writing that I can best describe as 'floating' above his subject. The essay is replete with unsubstantiated (and unsubstantiable) assertions, very much in the mould of Lacan, Althusser, Barthes, and Derrida. I have commented before on the tendency for the French philosophical school to almost to tease its audience, test its perseverance, defy it to retort that their writings are nothing more than fancy polemics. Take away the Emperor's contorted language and you see he has no clothes.
But, putting aside the generalities, Debord does recognize the importance of imagery for a contemporary Marxian analysis, noting that it is a relatively recent phenomenon:
Debord contends that the mass media - the 'most glaring superficial manifestation' of the spectacle - 'invades' society as its 'equipment'. This equipment is a tool of the society of the epoch. It represents an accumulation of information by the system's administration in order to preserve the system itself.
As we shall see (and have already seen in Assignment 3, an essay on Barthesian analysis that is equally relevant to Debord's thesis), contemporary advertising demonstrates very well the move from the tangible to the intangible, the said to the unsaid, but it represents only one facet on visual culture. The problem for Debord and others is that they could not foresee the democratizing impact of the internet and social media on contemporary society, acting almost as an antidote to the slick advertising message. A few duff posts on Trip Advisor will negate any amount of positive spin propagated by a tour company's advertising agency. People review products and services on Amazon and other sites. To a degree, these negate the imagery, they cut the provider down to size, and focus on the lowest common denominator: "does the product deliver". Paradoxically, this may have actually enhanced the status of luxury brands: who wants to buy a bag when they can afford a Louis Vuitton? Branded items are the new fetishes as the underlying products are common place.
Comparing the above with my previous notes on Debord , I can see that my second reading shows more empathy and understanding of his messages. But the quote from Hussey, repeated below, remains pertinent:
Reference:
Hussey (2001) Situation abnormal Available from http://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/jul/28/biography.artsandhumanities Accessed on 2 March 2014
"The spectacle, as a tendency to make one see the world........naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense, which the sense of touch was for other epochs;..."Debord thus not only acknowledges the importance of imagery, but also its transience. He makes a number of claims for the 'spectacle', defined as: "...a social relation among people, mediated by images." His allusion to advertising is clear when he adds that "....[the spectacle] says nothing more than that which appears is good, that which is good appears." He emphasises again towards the end of essay that the spectacle is about relations between men and classes; it is not merely purely fetishistic or objective. Here he extends the Marxian analysis to the intangible, thus extending Marx's commodity fetishism to incorporate the visual intangible world, the imaginary vs. the real.
Debord contends that the mass media - the 'most glaring superficial manifestation' of the spectacle - 'invades' society as its 'equipment'. This equipment is a tool of the society of the epoch. It represents an accumulation of information by the system's administration in order to preserve the system itself.
As we shall see (and have already seen in Assignment 3, an essay on Barthesian analysis that is equally relevant to Debord's thesis), contemporary advertising demonstrates very well the move from the tangible to the intangible, the said to the unsaid, but it represents only one facet on visual culture. The problem for Debord and others is that they could not foresee the democratizing impact of the internet and social media on contemporary society, acting almost as an antidote to the slick advertising message. A few duff posts on Trip Advisor will negate any amount of positive spin propagated by a tour company's advertising agency. People review products and services on Amazon and other sites. To a degree, these negate the imagery, they cut the provider down to size, and focus on the lowest common denominator: "does the product deliver". Paradoxically, this may have actually enhanced the status of luxury brands: who wants to buy a bag when they can afford a Louis Vuitton? Branded items are the new fetishes as the underlying products are common place.
Comparing the above with my previous notes on Debord , I can see that my second reading shows more empathy and understanding of his messages. But the quote from Hussey, repeated below, remains pertinent:
"It depressed [Debord] in his later years that [his] insight had long since ceased to be a revolutionary call to arms but the most accurate, if banal, description of modern life. The term "society of the spectacle" had itself become a cliché, entering the post-modern lexicon to describe any contemporary process....(Hussey, 2001)What seemed perspicacious at the time, was, in the end, mundane.
Reference:
Hussey (2001) Situation abnormal Available from http://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/jul/28/biography.artsandhumanities Accessed on 2 March 2014
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