December 14, 2004
appearances and representations
From 1968?
Situationist International, Abolition of alienated work.
The poster looks back to Marx.
Now a quote from a favorite underground text (1967) of our innercity, winebar media radicals:
"When the real world changes into simple images, simple images become real beings and effective motivations of a hypnotic behavior. The spectacle as a tendency to make one see the world by means of various specialized mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly), naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs; the most abstract, the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present day society." Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (#18)
The 1991 Gulf War was seen as one such spectacle. I would suggest the Melbourne Cup is another example. The culture industry another.
But Debord goes further. His main argument of his Society of the Spectacle is focused on consumer/media/information society. He argues:
"The whole of life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that was once directly lived has become mere representation."
This quote refers to our media and consumer society, organized around the consumption of images, commodities, and spectacles/
Does not the modern global economy the contemporary global economy maintain, perpetuate, and expand its influence through the production, presentation and manipulation of representations. Is not our lived world of daily life mediated by images? Has not capitalism invented a visual form for itself?
A review The reviewer remarks that it may be Greil Marcus, in his book, Lipstick Traces, who has done the most in recent times to promote the visibility of the Situationists.
"Lipstick Traces follows the history of punk rock back to the tradition of Dada and situationist theory. Both Jamie Reid (creator of much of the graphic "look" of punk) and Malcolm McClaren (self-styled "creator" of the Sex Pistols) acknowledge the influence of the SI on their own work, and the legacy of punk rock may well be the last great youth movement which involved not only a musical revolution, but total social critique (with a soundtrack)."
Alas, I have not read Lipstick Traces.
While Marx focused on the factory, the Situationists focused on the city and everyday life, supplementing the Marxian emphasis on class struggle with a project of cultural revolution and the transformation of everyday life.
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