Society of the Spectacle #2

@Exploring the Situationists is an ongoing series of Zoom sessions where I (Ken Knabb) comment on various situationist texts, followed by Q&A and discussion. The sessions are being recorded and posted on RUclips. From September 2023 to January 2024 we went through the "Situationist International Anthology: Revised and Expanded Edition" (10 sessions). Following a short break, we have resumed with Guy Debord's "The Society of the Spectacle." We are are doing a close reading of my annotated translation of the book, and it will probably take us around 12-15 sessions to get through it (after which we will view and discuss Debord's film of the same title).
Participation is free. If you're interested in joining the live sessions (which take place every other Sunday, 5:00-7:00pm Pacific Time) please contact me at knabb AT bopsecrets DOT org
During this session #2 (April 7, 2024) we read and discussed the remainder of Chapter 1.
The text of the book can also be found online at www.bopsecrets...

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Ken Knabb on RUclips. 🥵 Now we are cooking. 🔥

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"Philosophy - the power of separate thought and the thought of separate power - was never by itself able to supersede theology. The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion. Spectacular technology has not dispersed the religious mists into which human beings had projected their own alienated powers, it has merely brought those mists down to earth, to the point that even the most mundane aspects of life have become impenetrable and unbreathable. The illusory paradise representing a total denial of earthly life is no longer projected into the heavens, it is embedded in earthly life itself. The spectacle is the technological version of the exiling of human powers into a “world beyond”; the culmination of humanity’s internal separation."
Debord's thesis number 20
"The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man - state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion."
Marx
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm
Humans have the power to create and produce ideas and inanimate material objects. Humans may perceive that these ideas and objects have a life of their own, but that perception is fundamental to what both Debord and Marx critique, 'reification'. By consciously giving over their power of creation to the ideas and objects they create, humans unconsciously separate themselves from their own power. This is the key to unlocking the mental chains which both religion and Idealist philosophy stimulate and lead humans to perceiving reality camera-obscura, most especially the realities of power.
See y'all next time and remember:
"As against this, the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities."
- Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I

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sometimes i feel as though this book's prescience has come to work practically against it in a strange way
it's as though society has gone on to conform to many of its observations so *caricaturally* that in reading this book there is a risk of having one's interpretation only magnetize onto the most egregious correspondences between it & modern life, & miss the more essential things being observed: those most primordial contradictions & tendencies at the heart of things, which bleed out to produce the superficial effects
i once saw a picture likening the proliferation of Bored Ape Yacht Club directly to thesis 34 - [ "The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images." ] - & it bamboozles me to even try to articulate myself the way this feels like kind of a misapplication! i just feel like there's a lot of layers of abstraction being skipped over there!
(tangentially to all the above: Thesis 31 - "a map that is identical to the territory it represents." i think that's beautiful & perhaps quite useful. how many maps identical to the territory they represent might anyone be caught up in?)