AD603 Critical Theory

Whereas in previous readings I sometimes found my self searching for relevance to design, this was not the case with Guy Dobord’s The Society of the Spectacle. Designers are both facilitators and victims of the Spectacle. Designers are actively engaged in the Spectacle

Considering Degrees of Influence of the Spectacle and the Creation of Aesthetic Classes in Design

It may be somewhat antithetical to the concept of the pervasiveness or totality of what Dobord refers to as the Spectacle in the consumptive world of modern capitalism, but

In regards to the influence of the Spectacle on design, it may be valuable to consider degrees of influence.  As an industrial designer temporal aspects are considered when determining an appropriate approach to a particular design problem. For instance, an aesthetic appropriate for a consumer product with a relatively short product life cycle may be much more influenced by the Spectacle than would a piece of medical equipment, which may have an expected product life of ten years. Designers often refer to aspects of influence of the spectacle as trendiness.

Aesthetic categories relative to the Spectacle has been recognized by others (at least in concept but with different nomenclature).  For instance Tönis Käo in his contribution to Emerging Paradigm: Design and Culture (proceedings from Design Zentrum, Nordheim Westfalen, 2000).  In an essay entitled “Who is to Design the Globalization Machine?” Käo  claims that:

The aesthetic taste preferences of the masses are produced by the transformation of dreamworlds rather than through the communication systems of architecture, design or fine art.  The mass media play an important role …”

Regarding the effects of this dreamworld dynamic With respect to design Käo identified three form defining categories:

Category 1 Design following the Principle of technical/functional determinism (form is determined by function – technology dominating form)

Category 2 Design following the principle of ethical/functional determinism.  “Good form” stands at the center of this design approach whose exponents are convinced that “good form” is best not only in functional but also aesthetic terms.* (to achieve this balance, proponents believe functionless elements like ornamentation are to be avoided, a Modern approach)

*>Category 3 Design following the principle of stylish/aesthetical determinism.  Orientation and legitimation are no longer the content of design, but effect of form and appearance.   Of course the sought-after effects may change from day to day following the prevailing trends, looks or fashions. Design conforms to what is “in” at the actual moment.  Thus one might actually speak of “prevailing taste’s dictatorship” concerning this design approach. 

Käo goes on to provide some examples, including the Memphis design approach, which Käo claims was “a mere media success”.

Relationship to the Spectacle Creating Class Differentiation

The Spectacle defines the mass market aesthetic which connotes class delineation for the masses, whereas the aesthetics of bourgeois and higher class aesthetics tend to have a more historical basis.  Interestingly, as Käo hinted at regarding the mere media success of the Memphis movement, perhaps each class has its own Spectacle.

[*For a critique of “good design” read Veronique Vienne’s chapter entitled; “What’s Bad About Good Design?” in her book; Something to Desired: Essays on Design (Graphis Inc, New York, 2001)]

Regarding Broader Implications of Debord

For me Marx provides some tools for critical thought, like toothpicks used to prop open my eyelids assuring that my eyes remain open when living in our modern capitalist reality, but Marxist principles fall short.  The call to action may get you to revolution, but then what?

Revolution! O.K… Now what do we do?

“The proof of the pudding is in the eating” is how Merrifield begins his observations of the demonstrations in France in 1968, 6 months after the publication of Debord’s work.  The demostrations were obviously influenced by Debord’s writings, perhaps instigated by them.  Paris walls had passages from

The Society of Spectacle scrolled on them. Obviously, Debord’s insights had been a factor in this revolutionary act.

While Merrifield saw the demonstrations in France as validation of  Debord’s concepts, I perceived the results as a demonstration of limitations in the practical application of Marxist principles.

Merrifield recounted that students had taken over Paris streets, workers took over factories — spontaneous revolution just as Debord had advocated, but as Merrifield also points out, as quickly as things erupted, they were repressed – “There was apparently no other side to break through to.” The elation of revolution diminishes quickly when it hits the fan of practical viability.

Debord’s proclamation that “workers, students, activists and malcontents must somehow join hands, coordinate organization and unleash militant spontaneity …streets would become the stage and the stake …” to cause harm to the spectacle.  These proclamations not only foreshadowed the events in France in 1968, but also Seattle in November of 1999, in which students, Greens, Labor Unions, disenfranchised and a few anarchists, formed a coalition of revolutionaries, to collectively protest a gathering of the World Trade Organization (WTO)  (see links to video spectacle on YouTube below) 

WTO Demonstration in Seattle, 1999

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JXPIBsxdk0&feature=related

and

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CsDsFHDBPs&feature=related

At the same time, similar demonstrations were occurring in other cities across America and the world.  I lived in Madison, Wisconsin and participated in demonstrations regarding the activities of the WTO during this period.  Madison has always been a hotbed of activism, but the reaction to the WTO created solidarity among previously disparate groups that I hadn’t witnessed before – as in Seattle, student activists were joined by members of the Green party, labor unions and other concerned citizens. 

Many of us were creative entrepreneurs, designers, writers, artists, etc., some leaving jobs in which they were “making money for the corporations” to a much more satisfying and empowering means of benefitting from the rewards of their own skills and creativity. Of course creative entrepreneurship may not be a viable solution for the masses, but more entrepreneurism in general may provide a realistic alternative to modern hyper-capitalism.  Imagine a world with fewer franchised goods and services — seems like a good step to shattering a bit of the Spectacle.

Check out the Burning Man Festival as a demonstration of Debord’s concept of Counter- Spectacle  http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/about_burningman/mission.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoUqOnyS_L8&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u0FrJyDMfs&feature=related

Spectacle:

Clearly architecture has a new centrality in cultural discourse. Although this centrality stems from the initial debates about postmodernism in the 1970s, which were focused on architecture, it is clinched by the contemporary inflation of design and display in all sort of spheres-art, fashion, business, and so on. Moreover, to make a big splash in the global pond of spectacle today, one has to have a big rock to drop, maybe as big as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao; and here architects like Gehry have an obvious advantage over artists in other media. In The Society of Spectacle, Debord defines spectacle as “capital accumulated to the point where it becomes an image.” With Gehry and company the reverse is now true as well: spectacle is “an image accumulated to the point where it becomes capital.” Such is the logic of many cultural centers today, as they are designed, alongside theme parks and sports complexes, to assist in the corporate “revival” of the city –that is, in its being made safe for shopping, spectating, and spacing out. This is the “Bilbao-Effect”

-Hal Foster, The ABCs of Contemporary Design

Last Thursday it was still unclear if John McCain would go to the first presidential debate. The stage was set, the University of Mississippi had expended more than 5 million dollars into this set up, and America wanted their show. Some wondered what would happen if McCain didn’t show up, it really seemed like a spectacular move, so much that his rival didn’t hesitate to express his point of view on this dramatic decision. Later on the day it was settled, McCain was willing to “resume” his campaign and attend the debate.

Millions of Americans watched the show on Friday night. Like for a football game, parties were thrown and beers were drunk. The presentation of the debate also had nothing different from sports broadcasts: the sparkling colors, the dramatic lights and titles, every single detail was designed to enhance this idea of confrontation that, like with celebrity showdown, is what fuels modern spectacle. There is no room for a critical approach of the candidates’ proposals since the frame, visual codes and language are orchestraded only for the public to behave like cheerleaders in a match that is supposed to be deciding their future as a country, the most powerful and spectacular country in the world.

The media, as a reflection of the audience, asked the candidates for their take on the economy, but nothing more than urgency came out of them. In the Society of Spectacle, there is not a notion of “real economy” anymore; for the spectacle to be created there has to be a huge accumulation of capital, and when that amount of capital exceeds the understanding of those in “Main Street” it becomes an image, an illusion. That separation of economy in the news from economy at home is key to understand this election spectacle as a commodity. Were the people frustrated with mccain putting the campaign on hold because of how much they have invested into this (time, money, attention)? or was the media frustrated that all the capital behind the show was going to be lose meaning after all the media-circus around this campaign? In both cases, the the spectacle as a commodity and its acquisition were at risk. Are WE going to have OUR show or not?

What is the understanding of ‘Spectacle’ before I read Guy Debord’s Society of the spectacle? If I translate its meaning from Chinese, then it means vision. It is what we see from this world with and without any man—made decoration. Guy Debord tried to release what is concealed behind the spectacle, to tell us the world we live is an illusion created by abundant commodities while the society is capital’s portrait. My feeling after the reading is quite close as watching the MATRIX. He explained a lot of relationship among commodities and its value, people, consciousness of desire, technology, economy and society. He use spectacle to describe these disorder phenomena

I feel a little bit guilty after reading. Thinking about any industrial designers doing their best to design products and goods, we really did a lot of contribution to this commodity world by designing a beautiful illusion. We are educated to stress the true users’ needs through design, and industrial design students are also encouraged to focus on specific problems like environmental problems or to design for specific users like disabilities or children. The aims for doing these are to benefit the users, environment and society. And so course, as an applied discipline, we never forget to bring values to our users and clients. The difference from Guy Debord’s saying is, the concepts mentioned in his book, say, use value and exchange value are abstract descriptions while what we are doing has material contents.

Are we really the tools of creating this spectacle? Observation and other design research methods are taught to help understand users’ need and a lot of designers even don’t realize that they are helping make an illusion full of any kind of things they designed. Commodity has to have its use value and that’s the reason for its existence. The use value is the natural attribute of the commodity and also the material content of the social fortune. It’s designers’ responsibility to design for users and the society. However, when we think about whether our world really needs these commodities we produced, we will be likely to say we made t00 much. It might because the way we exchange of products, it might because the Industrial Revolution’s manufactural division and mass production for a global market, it might because the greed of capitalism and monopolization, and it might because we ourselves are labor commodities.

Perhaps no one can tell exactly how surplus comes out and give an efficient solution to it, but when we look over what we did, we will have sufficient reasons to critique ourselves. Within the field of industrial design, a lot of designers created something unnecessary which can not stress the real problems and users’ needs. With the development and popularization of design education in different countries, our life qualities improved. But do we really need that much design and commodities? May be the fate of the designer is controlled by a hand that can not be seen, but one thing is certain: designers are utilized to accelerate making more surplus. The word Design is also abused by commerce which makes the word more and more meaningless. Philippe Starck said:  Design is dead. The problem can not be solved by simply designing a sustainable or durable product to reduce the numbers of commodities.

Consumer of the spectacle

When I was asked to think of something related to ‘spectacle’, I thought of Mother Nature. For instance, the feeling when I am surrounded by great scenery at the top of a mountain. At the same time, the movie ‘Out of Africa’ by Sydney Pollack reminded me of the word.’ Yes, it is a movie with spectacular scenes of Africa that I could experience in my place . This movie was based on a real story of Danish noblewoman with her struggles in Kenya from 1913 to 1931. It was so impressive with great scenes and music. Furthermore, the fact that it had a sort of ‘reality’ in its background made me have a fantasy with life in Africa. It surely is tough to survive in Africa - wild nature but I wanted to travel around Africa no matter what actually it is like.

During reading Debord, the meaning of spectacle was almost manipulated ‘pseudo-something.’ This seems quite different from the word of reality. But what is reality in this society? Can I believe everything on TV news?

Nowadays many TV channels have ‘reality’ show, which means it shows a real life of someone. I think it is because people are bored with programs that seemed ‘made by script writers’ and it is far from the commons’ life and thought.  TV Producers moved its way from well-arranged show to reality show, a pseudo-reality. For example, celebrity A visits celebrity B’s house and have casual talk and ask questions about things around them. In this situation, A pretends to be a normal person in public and wants to know about B. Programs like this create certain characters with celebrities in a certain situation for reality and it is also made and arranged by someone for reality.

The spectacle is sold to the mass, which is re-named as precious ‘consumer’ of the commodity, under the name of leisure and entertainment for the rest of time after working. The mass spend their time and money to enjoy provided cultural contents just like spectators purchase tickets, popcorn, and other service in a movie theater. People feel isolated and retarded if they do not have today’s updated information to share with others. They get such a peer pressure, for face-saving ways.

TV dramas and shows contain everyday life of various characters. Starring celebrities show their clothes, handbags, and streamlined cars under the sponsorship of certain brands fit to their characters. This visual situation affects people to have desire to get the same things of a certain character, usually who in a nice and high society or peculiar or pretty and so on. By bearing resemblance to such characters with brand bags and clothes, the mass feel that they become the same character which they just watched. 

The same shoes and accessories… the day after the drama is broadcasted, the department store is busy with stocking this cash-cow goods. They struggles again to sponsor another productive dramas in a particular time.

Though it is rare and expensive, people want to achieve the goal of getting that bag and be proud of being the first to know how to get these products quickly. Through this, people on the street want to become the only one to have that special thing but soon almost everybody has that bag. 

“The spectacle is the modern complement of money: a representation o the commodity world as a whole which serves as a general equivalent for what the entire society can be and can do.” (p.24)

Street ads, department stores,cafes… all of these use visuals to make culture of consumers or festivals of consumption. People experience countless images and color on the street which all related to symbolic codes altogether. 

When one’s ostentation meets media that provides spectacles, it generates trend followed by consumers. Again, these media can be a weapon to control the mass which is unpleasant.

In my terms, a spectacle is some event that is meant to attract a large number of people and is often performance-based. Sometimes, these events can be good: a show at a theatre. Sometimes, these events can be bad: a scene at a strip club (well, I guess that’s just my opinion). Some common phrases that we can relate “spectacle”to: “spectacular, spectacular!” and “stop making a spectacle of yourself.” The former refers to the specific type of show, generally taking place at the turn on the 19^th Century in Europe, mainly France, involving dancing ladies, bright lights, bourgeoisie anxious for distractions, and lots and lots of absinthe. The later refers to a type of human flaw in which the person that is making a spectacle of him/herself considers him/herself to be “center stage” and his/her behavior a “performance” being observed by innocent bystanders who can’t help but watch—“the audience.”

With relationship to the Fine Arts, I have always considered exhibitions of art to be spectacles, or spectacular. Exhibitions produce a gathering of people who are interested in the commodity of art. It is just interesting how studios themselves, the birth places of art works, are not as magnetic or attractive as exhibitions. You don’t really see too many artists paying lots of money to get post cards done for their studios. You don’t see crackers with Perrier  on a cute table outside of studios, either. Lighting is not really adjusted to produce any sort of visual experience for visitors. You don’t slip into fits of social anxiety and worry about your networking skills (or is that just me?). And the works themselves are certainly not hung “at eye level” or in anyway that would enhance the viewer’s experience. If exhibitions are spectacles, then what do those spectacles reveal about us as participants?

Spectacles involve the presentation of commodities that can be both qualitative and/or quantitative. The presentation itself involves consideration of the commodified, the audience, the potential buyer, the potential employer, the potential critic, etc. We think about appropriate space: ambience, lighting, accents. We think about surplus when we decide to make a delicious sorbet punch for the viewers to consume happily as they observe works. Oh, also the work has to be “good.” My point: it’s all staged to produce a sensation. The spectacle’s main purpose is to supply in large quantities what there is a large demand for—but it is executed in a sensational way. If this is not true then let’s all try to hold exhibitions at Forest Products.

I really, really loved two things about this reading.

1. No. 50, which likens the spectacle to a mirror (this is my metaphor) in that the “entire expanse of society is a portrait.” Here, I go back to thinking about why we choose not to exhibit in an alley or in our messy (rightfully) studios. The community of consumers (sometimes us and sometimes them) have their desired commodities. They also have a list of criteria of how they want to be commodified. The producer, through spectacle, uses his/her magical powers of manipulation to fulfill the criteria of the consumer. This criteria, and more importantly, this spectacle in its totality, reflects both producer and consumer very clearly.

2. No.43, which presents the irony of double standards in production and consumption. Debord points out that the laborer/worker is treated like a mere peon, drone, or an extremely dispensible “thing.” Suddenly, though, when the same worker steps foot inside a spectacle (I picture a fully equipped new car sales lot complete with colorful flaggies), that peon now determines the success rate of the producer. The tables turn. I have a lot of personal experience with this one. I can tell lots of hilarious stories about how my father, a factory steel worker in Chicago, was naturally “peon-ized” at work but absolutely loved shopping for things. He loved milking “the customer is always right” and he always won.

I am really excited to show you this commercial for “Eagle Insurance.” If you are from Chicago or lived there in the 90s, you probably recognize this commercial. It’s extremely crappy but suits its audience well and is, therefore, a spectacle. My little brother and I used to look forward to it so much. A side note: the channels on which this commercial was aired on is indicative or which specific audience the commercial was aimed for. Needless to say, you could never find this on ABC/NBC/CBS but you could always find it on UPN or CIU “the U,” or any other channel that was playing reruns of Diffr’nt Strokes or People’s Court.

Commodity has a bad virus and has thrown up all over everyone and everything.  I feel that the commodity as spectacle is a way to show how commodity seems to play a role in everyone’s everyday life.  Today the influence of commodity is in everything we see and do, we cannot escape it!

Advertisements make everything desirable from completely unnecessary items to necessities like bread.  I know that we need food in order to survive, but we don’t need a million different verities of the same product.  Commodity is anything that has a demand for, yet bread is no longer bread, and bananas are no longer bananas.  I notice that this grocery store has organic bananas, yet the other doesn’t, and that the other has Aunt Millie’s 9 grain summer wheat, but this one doesn’t.  There is not only a desire for the commodity yet there is a desire to shop at a store that carries the products.  The point that I am trying to make here is that there is no longer any equivalent to each other; I predict that very soon gold will no longer be gold, and in a sense this is already true, a gold ring from Tiffany & Co. is ten times more than a comparable gold ring from Kay Jewelers.  The quality of the gold is exactly the same but the name is a more desirable commodity.

I would like to bring recognition to a quote from Debord’s Bible section 42 sentence 2 on page 21, “Commodification is not only visible, we no longer see anything else; the world we see is the world of commodity.”.  I respond to this with a slight disagreement (most likely due to the time I was born) I was born into this and only began to recognize this in high school, not the fact that there are necessities, but the way they are marketed to consumers.  I feel that we have been raised in a world that has taught us to present ourselves as a commodity, and if we don’t, we won’t make the team, get the job, or get anything.  As a society how would we survive without the desire of the commodity, could we?  The general population knows and understands that the desire to purchase an object may not truly be their desire, yet they don’t care, they still want to own it.  Possession is the true problem and we will never get past this need/desire to posses objects as long as the commodity is anything other than ordinary. 

The commodity only grows with the consumer.  The consumer typically is glad to ware a shirt that advertises the commodity’s source.  Clothing is the worst, it not only is the product of desire (commodity), but it typically states your status, advertising to the world where the product was from.  People feel good about spending more money if they advertise for the company; it shows that they can afford the product.  This is a win for the company, and a win for consumer, look at me I can afford to purchase a purse from Prada, jeans from Gap, a shirt from French Connection United Kingdom.  Thank you for throwing up your name on all the products we can purchase.

P.S. Thanks for letting me see Debord as a drunk John, I thought he was making a bible.  

When your day begins on a rough note, the rest seems to follow in that fashion. By the end of the day, when enough bad luck and frustration has rolled itself into a huge mass, anything with a hint of bitching seems like an appealing conversation. What a good day to read Debord! I started my day running a little late when my car key broke, leaving half of it in my hand and the other nestled comfortably in my car’s trunk lock. Well, at least I have my spare key… except for everything that’s in the trunk, STAYS in the trunk. At school, I settled myself next to the darkroom door to help my students with their prints. That’s when I realized why the lab tech always complains about the students: Is it just me, or are they not listening??  Plus, the ventilation system is too intense for the lab, and, after teaching for six hours, I swore at the Pao basement for being so cold and windowless. I then spent some time working in the darkroom, and, of course, didn’t make one decent print. That’s when I called it quits for the day, went home, and began to read Debord. By the time I was done, he had me convinced…

Before reading Society of the Spectacle, I journal-ed my definition of the word “spectacle”. I began with a word association, which then led to a memory. Two ideas came to mind: “voyeurism” and “fashion show”. But not in their literal sense. For voyeurism, I thought of the act of looking and the idea that people like to look. I then extended that to spectacle as: people like to see spectacles and like to participate in spectacles. As for the fashion show: that is the title of a memory of mine. I went through a phase where I would go to as many concerts as possible while spending lots of time getting to know the city of Detroit.  Thinking back to these shows, I remember seeing everyone dressing and behaving the same.  The fans were always pretending their best rock-n-roll attitudes: the men in their tightest girl jeans, dirty tees, and bed head hair; the girls wore their new pixie cut, cat-eye black frame glasses, and rockabilly dresses. This was the fashion show.  No one seemed to care so much about the entertainment, than they did about participating in a culture trend. I thought it was a good example of spectacle and capitalism: a mass group of people wearing the latest commodity trend.  It reminded me of an article that I recently read titled Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization from Adbusters

http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html

After reading Debord, I thought that my definitions were slightly relative to his definitions.  Debord used spectacle as the arena in which capitalism is expressed. It creates its own world while fitting seamlessly into society. I enjoyed reading his book because he wrote in a direct manner. There were lots of things that I found in each thesis that were interesting statements, but #52 was one that I found to be extremely relevant to our current events.  Debord stated that “Once society discovers that it depends on the economy, the economy in fact depends on the society.” What happens when the economy begins to crash, the government starts to intervene, and banks, mortgage companies, and other faulty corporations need money from the same people that they stole from? And without help from the taxpayers, the government threatens us with a future filled with a failing economy.  I think Debord is absolutely right.  I think people are starting to see the economy now in its decline, and are beginning to realize that without a sustainable economy there will not be a sustainable society (and vice-versa).  

‘ >\”The Economy and You, Daily Show\”

So, what did Debord have me convinced about? Paraphrasing #40 and #51: economic growth has freed societies from the need to survive, but replaces basics needs with pseudo needs in order to sustain its growth. It’s a capitalist cycle: one needs to work to buy basic needs (food and shelter) to survive; however, if one works more, then they will satisfy the pseudo needs (better food, better shelter). Therefore, the society of the spectacle may look like this: work < needs < more work < pseudo needs < more work < more pseudo needs… etc.

Guy Debord, in The Society of the Spectacle, takes the perils of mass culture and consumerism one step further than Adorno and Benjamin did.  Spectacle is taken to mean how mass culture and consumerism have created a false reality, where social life is defined by commodity.  This mode of living is cycled and promoted through mass media.  Lived experiences are transformed into spectacle.

Debord’s writings seem to have generated what became radical social anarchy against mass culture and consumerism.  Debord became the leading spokesperson for The Situationist International, an artistic and political movement that started in the late 1950s.  SI did not see themselves as a political movement, they sought to generate activity that created a situation, an epic or moment of life.  SI felt art was becoming to commercial and wasn’t serving their purpose of replacing passivity with playful affirmation.  SI initially focused on using art in their determination of subduing the spectacle.  They sought to work around the gallery system and predeterminded modes of art.  Early work included Asger Jorn’s modified paintings and metered industrial paintings of Pinot Gallizio.  The SI overall definition of art and artist helped form how the terms are defined in postmodernity.  SI members, when asked how art could be social replied:

“The time for art is over. The point now is to realize art, to really create on every level of life everything that hitherto could only be an artistic memory or an illusion, dreamed and preserved unilaterally. Art can be realized only by being suppressed. However, in contrast to the present society, which suppresses art by replacing it with the automatic functioning of an even more passive and hierarchical spectacle, we maintain that art can really be suppressed only by being realized.”

I think these ideas on art actually came to fruition shortly after when anarchy became a popular motif for art and music.  Eventually becoming part of the heirarchical spectacle itself: The Sex Pistols, Bansky, Paper Rad.

REFERENCES
Bureau of Public Secrets website, has translated some of the SI writings on art and art’s role in society.

Situationist International DOCUMENTARY FROM 1989

SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE FILM PART 1/9

Going into this weeks reading, my concept of the term spectacle had been that it was a thing or action that draws attention from others to itself either for the sake of attention alone, or by an unfortunate accident that would create embarrassment or ridicule. As we had been warned prior to reading, I had to somewhat stretch my idea of spectacle to absorb (or attempt to) Debord’s short, but loaded writing.

As I read it, Debord states that spectacle is like a film screen constantly in front of the masses displaying a false reality in which multiple layers of the commodity are portrayed as not just being a part of reality, but the reality (or at the least the desired reality). This spectacle, or smoke screen commodity based reality, is constructed and maintained to regulate the existence of “society’s entire sold labour (which) has become a total commodity” in itself. He goes further to describe spectacle as the expression of commodity as materialized illusion. Spectacle creates an upside-down world were money can only be looked at, instead of exchanged for needs-based commodities. Spectacle is a consciousness of desire and in such is “a pseudo use of life”.

So the proletariat, as working labor, is retained by being duped into the belief that exchange value commodity is a necessity (as opposed to use-value commodity) in the reality being falsely depicted. This then has the proletariat buying into the commodities that keep them under the thumb of the bourgeoisie and expanding their own poverty, of which is that much more difficult to then escape (since they are buying into this spectacle of desire).

After reading (and re-reading, if I am being completely honest) the text I have to say I may have taken more from this reading than the previous, so far. I found his bluntly (though not to say simply) composed statements to be failry direct and very easily applicable to my surrounding current “reality”. I found it therefore moving to hear this reality being claimed to be what it is and yet disheartening by how deeply intertwined our lives are within the spectacle of what many think is the necessary way to live.

I am, at times, guilty of a certain exhilaration at purchasing products and a feeling that I am lifted of restraints in some way when I am able to feel as though I can buy whatever I want (definitely want and not need… buying what you need is just boring right?), as though the ability to purchase useless but “valuable” things is the ultimate freedom. Just this past summer I went from having to pinch every penny just to eat decent food and pay the rent due to low summer funds and a near lack of income; but the moment I was comfortable again (definitely comfortable and not wealthy, so I could and will most likely return to the previous state again next summer) I found myself jumping at the chance to purchase entertainment and not so needs-based things even though I know I will most likely need those funds more desperately again. So even to a conscious extent I feed into this cycle.  Establishing that we live in a commodity driven reality is not a shocking statement, but the establishment of how such a reality is made and maintained was new to me and hopefully will help me (at least at an individual level) to further pull away from the draw of the spectacle that I had already suspected.

I hate to keep returning to youtube, but man are there some fascinating things to be found. The link I am posting is called “Poetry of the Spectacle” posted by user OttOmOlOtOv and it is a poem formed of the messages the spectacle is portraying to establish and maintain the commodity culture. (The poem actually ends at 1:47 and the rest is a visual representation of spectacle slowly dying “a dramatic death of Lettristic convulsions”, but I think the poem is point enough so feel free to stop at that point.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39D5ejn7C5w