Guy Debord: 'Separation Perfected'

This is my second (critical) response, this time to Guy Debord's 'Separation Perfected' in Society of the Spectacle (Paris 1967). I will begin again by putting the work in context: 1967, that odd decade of the 60's which heralded so much social change. Guy Debord's writings helped inflame the Paris revolts of 1968, particularly Society of the Spectacle, and although less prominent today, the most well known work of this film critic, philosopher, social commentator and poet is still in print. He was also the founder as we know, of Situationist International, a group which wished to provoke social change through a fusion of art ad politics. Needless to say it did not last.

As with most of the postmodern/post-structuralist thinkers, Debord's writing is sufficiently dense and it takes several readings to find his main point. That being said, my attention was drawn by peers to his phrase "Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation." (thesis 1) Although arguably this can be used as a summation of his line of thought in this work, I do not find it very clear, nor does Debord use 'representation' and its derivatives often throughout the chapter. I prefer the last aphorism; "The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image." (thesis 34) Here we can see his main topic of discussion, the 'spectacle', being equated with capital. Now we need to take capital in a rather broad, Marxist sense, referring to money, material goods and the transactions of these commodities. Debord then is saying that his notion of spectacle which he sees as permeating every facet of social existence is not only derived from but is the notion of capital accumulation and the capitalist system. Debord tends to repeated himself several times, since all the theses are interrelated. I wish to go through his main points.

His idea of the spectacle must be flushed out: that our social lives have become devoured by the notion of the spectacle to such an extent that it controls us and we live in a separated world never feeling at ease because we are isolated viewers of the world; life has become a representation, an image. Debord says that the spectacle isn't simply imagery or media, although these are aspects and instances of, the spectacle. Rather he says that the spectacle is a "relation among people, mediated by images" (thesis 4) It is therefore a world view (Weltanschauung) that has been realized by the mass distribution of the capitalist system and the inherent methodological production mechanisms that come with it. Separation is intrinsic in such a system as the means of production are alienating, those means which become widespread and the goal of the system (to produce); but the further it develops the more abstract and distorted the system becomes, so much so that "the goal is nothing, development everything." (thesis 14) Therefore with such a system in place, founded on an inherent isolationism, the more it expands themore isolated its members become. Likewise, since what is produced is material, or if not material based on the transactions of material things with a common medium, i.e. money, and materiality is best reached with the visual field then we have a permeation of our culture with the visual. Capitalism and the visual (the spectacle) therefore grow side-by-side.

Those are the more economic aspects of Debord's view. Resulting from those we have social consequences. The separation of the subject from life. Life itself becomes represented by the spectacle, that image of capital which is produced en masse by our economic and political system. The most glaring aspects of which are the mass media, which Debord claims are in no way neutral, but controlled by the administration (read bourgeoisie) to reinforce on one level, the current administration, and on another level the system itself. Furthermore, with the subject simultaneously being the producer he is ultimately removed from life as life has become constituted by the produced, the spectacle, isolating the subject. "This is why the spectator feels at home nowhere because the spectacle is everywhere." (thesis 30) Lastly before I go into some brief criticisms of Debord's view, he makes a brief attack on philosophy, sighting its apparent weakness in having a ingrained view of the visual in its analyses. The result of the spectacle on philosophy (and by extension the world) is that it has rendered everything speculative by its self-creation of reality. Philosophy is not the answer to religion, as the spectacle has given religion a tangible base. Neither can it solve the social problems arising form the spectacle for, to quote Marx, "the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it." Hence why Debord starts the Situationist International to effectuate social change via action.

Heretofore I have attempted to give a sympathetic synopsis of Debord's views as I have interpreted them.  However I do not agree with all that he postulates, albeit a lot of it is sensical and I am of the same opinion. I agree with our obvious isolation as individuals and our separation from the 'Other' even though our lives are occupied mainly by the social. Such isolation can be said to be anxiety causing, and reminds me of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Schizophrenia and Capitalism. Indeed many of Debord's ideas are reminiscent of other thinkers: obviously Marx and Lukacs, but in some ways Foucault and his notion of power relations: "When analyzing the spectacle one speaks, to some extent, the language of the spectacular itself in the sense that one moves through the methodological terrain of the very society which expresses itself in the spectacle" (thesis 11) Also one can see Nietzsche in there as well: "But the critique which reaches the truth of the spectacle exposes it as the visible negation of life, as a negation of life which has become visible." (thesis 10) The problem I do have with Debord though, is the completely abstract way he discusses his notion of the 'spectacle' for he uses it with numerous functions almost interchangeably and sometimes it is not clear what the spectacle is, for he seems to say it is everything. If that is indeed the case, then it would appear to be some form of idealism which for various reasons I do not agree with, although it is not necessary to go into detail now. It almost seems that his discussion of the spectacle is so abstract and so removed from the phenomenological reality of the subject that it may have no worth as a discourse. However I do realize that that is his point on philosophy's impotency, hence why Debord wished to usher in change with action. That is my other great point of contention, that philosophy appears to be useless in the way of religion and causing change. Due to philosophy many people become atheists, and while philosophy itself is not a substitute for religion (generally) it can arguably be said to lead the way away from religion. Secondly, while philosophy on its own has no power to effectuate change in a material sense, it can do so by manifesting its opinions in a subject and thereby inducing change by the proliferation of its views. However those are perhaps only pedantic points on an otherwise excellent piece of writing. As it is required, I will pose questions to my peers: What is the role of philosophy in the world, taken in a mass cultural sense? Particularly does it have any tangible effect on say the internet or other media systems, for example this very discussion via the internet? Or is it simply a dogmatic and archaic practice no longer useful in the resent historical moment?

I have a link to a page on Marx from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and another to a comment on Debord's film forays and supplementary material. I apologize but the second one is in French only.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/#2.2

http://www.larevuedesressources.org/spip.php?rubrique12

Tim

Mark Federman: 'What is the Meaning of The Medium is the Message?'

This post is a (critical) response to Mark Federman's 'What is the meaning of The Medium is the Message?', which can be found here:

http://individual.utoronto.ca/markfederman/article_mediumisthemessage.htm

Firstly, it is important to put the work in context. Federman's article has an explanatory purpose, aimed at explaining Marshal McLuhan's dogmatically famous quote, "the medium is the message". This particular phrase comes from McLuhan's 1964 work Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. It has long been debated what he meant by it, as McLuhan was notoriously well known for being obscure. The misunderstanding of this phrase is what Federman is addressing:

     Often people will triumphantly hail that the medium is "no longer the message," or flip it around to proclaim that the "message is the medium," or some other such nonsense. McLuhan meant what he said; unfortunately, his meaning is not at all obvious, and that is where we begin our journey to understanding.

Federman sympathetically explains McLuhan's famous phrase by breaking it down. For him, 'medium' is the extension of the human body which McLuhan discusses, that being virtually anything that we may use: a tool, a TV screen, a book, language, etc. It is a medium in the sense that it causes a 'message'. This message is similarly a broad category, being any change in in our environment (culture, society). However as Federman says, we often miss these changes by only regarding the superficial changes we see overtly. His example is of the news; most people would think that the message of the news (the medium) is the stories they are recounting but it is in fact the change reflected in the public/society induced by that story. In this sense then, the story itself is also a medium, another of Federman's points. On the whole we can see that McLuhan's messages are almost common sensical. Yes we ca see, if not instantaneously, then over a generation, our societies and cultures change. And yes, certainly the theatre is an extension of ourselves, a medium in a myriad of ways, the most obvious being an entity given to conveying a story in a visual and somewhat realistic manner. However it is the non-obvious that apparently McLuhan was after, thereby becoming 'McLuhan media' as Federman puts it. From The Medium is the Massage McLuhan gives television (coming to widespread predominance in mass culture in the 1960's) this attention as a medium, as it reshaped the participatory ability of the public in "...Freedom Marches, in war, revolution, pollution, and other events..." (page 22) Therefore the message was the change in public participation caused by the television medium and its effects on society.

Heretofore I have agreed with Federman's analysis, as what McLuhan meant is understandable if one takes the time to read through McLuhan's texts and consult secondary literature (like Federman's article). However, I wish to now point out some more negative aspects of this theory and explanation. Federman quotes McLuhan on the 'nature', 'essence' and 'character' of a medium as being that which is the most important aspect, rather then its content or form and that further the message derived from a particular medium is what reveals these. However both are ambiguous on what exactly the 'nature' of a medium is, how it is understood from the message it gives and why specifically such an 'essence' (substituting for nature or character) is so important. Take television as an example, what is the nature of television? It's ability to convey visual representations, auditory sense datum and information from around the globe? Or is it that it is available to everyone (questionably), or is it that television is different from prior types of information communication? It may all of these, or none of them. Also, it may be that none of these are important as regards the medium of television (although I think McLuhan would give an explanation containing some of these qualities). But take something not so obvious, such as one's wallet (a result of looking around the room) It is the product of a human mind, in concept and material composition, and since the above definition of medium includes all such things, what is the essence of a wallet? How has it changed the way our society operates or how culturally we think? Of course one can easily give a hatchet-job explanation, which is exactly the point. The category of medium is ridiculously broad (including almost everything) in turn reducing to the thought that McLuhan's work is common sensical. Therefore, I must content myself with McLuhan's goal being to only point out things that most people overlook.

Something I do not completely accept however, is Federman's brief discussion of language. He says that language is also a medium, one that we use to convey our thoughts to other people. However I agree with most analytic language philosophers of the twentieth century that we cannot have thoughts without language. Hence the typical inability of people to remember when they were very young. Federman continues saying that speech is a way to bring our "sensorially-shaped minds out to the world". I do not agree that they are sensorially shaped, but language shaped. However this slightly pedantic digression still assumes language as a medium, however perhaps the most complex one. Otherwise I agree with Federman's interpretation of McLuhan's phrase 'the medium is the message'. As it is required, a question for others to ponder: with Federman's explanations of 'the medium is the message', is the category of mediums so broad so as to render any analysis of McLuhan media meaningless since anything can be a medium? If so, do we have any predictive power over the messages (changes) that will come from these mediums?

A supplementary link to an essay buy a McLuhan scholar on the same subject, but I find her examples more lucid:

http://www.ccfi.educ.ubc.ca/publication/insights/v10n02/html/rideout/rideout.html

Tim

First Blog Post

Hello anyone who reads this,

This blog's purpose is to relay my opinions and comments on an online course, Philosophy and the Internet. All of my responses will be posted here. This Blogger thing is ridiculously complex to use.

Tim