[HN Gopher] The Society of the Spectacle
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The Society of the Spectacle
Author : raldu
Score : 92 points
Date : 2022-01-28 14:14 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (unredacted-word.pub)
(TXT) w3m dump (unredacted-word.pub)
| beckman466 wrote:
| i'm a fan of these introduction videos by Tom Nicholas:
|
| _Society of the Spectacle: WTF? Guy Debord, Situationism and the
| Spectacle Explained_ -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGJr08N-auM
|
| _Donald Trump and the Society of the Spectacle_ -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HAII7QWr_c
| papito wrote:
| For a second there I thought you said "Tom Nichols", who wrote
| multiple books on the un-seriousness of our modern society
| (such as The Death of Expertise), which is so fat and happy
| that it looks to government itself to entertain it. This
| ultimately leads to backsliding of democracies that we observe
| today.
| obiefernandez wrote:
| I don't think the author is surprised about the success of NFTs
| ruined wrote:
| debord committed suicide in 1994
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Wow! Suicide is really common among french postmodernist
| writers.
|
| Althusaar (I guess he technically murdered his wife), Deleuze
| (threw himself out of a window), Debord. Am I forgetting
| anyone?
| blacksqr wrote:
| A key text that helped lay the foundations for the social changes
| of the 1960s and 70s.
|
| See _Lipstick Traces_ by Greil Marcus for an introduction to
| Debord and Situationism.
| _Nat_ wrote:
| Aggressively anti-intellectual. And.. tortured? It reads like a
| literary version of [ _The Scream_
| ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scream ), where it
| aggressively rejects reality as a monster, grasping at straws in
| the process in a manner that suggests severe psychological
| disturbance.
|
| The author seems to be begging for a simpler world -- to go back
| to an ancient golden age, before things got so complex (before "
| _The Spectacle_ "). Before science, before economics, before
| industrialization, before mass-education, before the human
| knowledge-pool got bigger, and even before people recorded years
| (the author makes a big point of how only seasons, and not years,
| should be observed).
| eternalban wrote:
| discussed earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21800216
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _The Society of the Spectacle_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30083411 - Jan 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _The Society of the Spectacle_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21800216 - Dec 2019 (69
| comments)
|
| _An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord's 'The Society of the
| Spectacle'_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311770 -
| Aug 2016 (20 comments)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=6A311EA9685F74E3EEC17E9...
| lil_dispaches wrote:
| This is the actual text of most EULA.
| ruined wrote:
| i agree
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| If you are in interested in this stuff at all, can't recommend
| enough McKenzie Wark's books on the subject, both _The Spectacle
| of Disintegration_ and _The Beach Beneath Street_. They had a
| profound effect upon me.
|
| Wark also, fwiw, wrote _the_ Hacker Manifesto [1]. Although,
| ironically, I can 't imagine her views there would be that well
| received on HN.
|
| 1. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674015432
| uoaei wrote:
| > Although, ironically, I can't imagine her views there would
| be that well received on HN.
|
| It is fascinating that hacker and open source culture doesn't
| necessarily lead to materialist analyses of ownership and
| production. Makes me wonder, though, what other philosophies
| would such behavior prescribe?
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Well, if you read something like the _The Californian
| Ideology_ now, with our current ability at retrospection, you
| can pose that in the 90s and aughts, there was a widescale
| capture of the "hippie" hacker class (as the essay puts it)
| by capital, where businesses had to adjust there strategies
| to properly utilize the then desperately needed class of
| artisans. Silicon valley culture is the dialectical result of
| this endeavor.
|
| Combine that with the simple (and I think understandable at
| the time) belief in a cyber-tinted technological determinism,
| along with billions of dollars worth of investors, and its
| easy to see what we have now: at best, full-tilt neoliberal
| rationalism, and at worst, libertarianism.
| antihero wrote:
| I've read quite a bit of this book, and situationalism is awesome
| - though I do find this writing style quite...fatiguing. Part of
| me can't work out whether it's written like this to fit a huge
| amount of meaning into one paragraph or whether it's just being
| flash or whether it's also a postmodernist nod to postmodernism
| itself (which...isn't all postmodernism?).
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| While Philosophy is often split along analytic/continental
| lines, another way to split it is along the lines of whether
| the philosophers feel it is important to use precise language
| that tries to improve mental clarity and shared understanding
| and those who feel that there are certain ineffable qualities
| to ideas that are lost when you attempt to make that level of
| precision, both because of laziness in readers and because of
| inherent qualities to the ideas. Situationalists are very much
| in the latter camp and have said that at times they were
| deliberately obtuse so as to avoid being misunderstood.
| ttoinou wrote:
| I tend to agree, though it has the form of _detournements_ of
| Marxist writing and others stuff like Lautreamont, his pals
| like Raoul Vaneigem were also into _detournements_ I appreciate
| it a lot and there is still a big culture of it in France as of
| now
| ATsch wrote:
| It's important to note the target audience of these writings
| are usually academics who already familiar with the field. This
| means they get to use a lot of jargon and concepts established
| by their peers without having to explain them first.
|
| There are definitely other texts (such as the YouTube video
| linked in another thread) that are easier to understand as a
| casual observer.
|
| However the other aspect is that as you alluded to, a strong
| poststructuralist belief is that common language, by nature of
| being made to describe the current world, always makes it
| easiest to express ideas that are already commonplace. Thus to
| create new ideas one must also create new language.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Also apparently Foucault could explain his ideas much more
| clearly in person, and when asked why he didn't write the
| same way, said that to be taken seriously as a French
| continental philosopher at least 2/3 of what you write must
| be incomprehensible.
|
| Most of the semiotics and sociological content of
| postmodernism (ie the majority of it) is really simple and
| intuitive - it's just wrapped in layers of reference to
| obscure philosophy, invented terms, and overly complicated
| language.
| ATsch wrote:
| Just that it is _possible_ to explain something with
| simpler language doesn 't mean it is always desirable to.
| Somehow a standard of comprehensbility is leveled at
| philosophy that no other field is expected to meet. There
| are very few people complaining about the unreadability of
| quantum equations in fundamental physics or the jargon of
| theoretical mathematics. We appreciate why this is
| necessary for those fields, that there is a difference
| between science research and science communication. Yet for
| philosophy, especially that which criticises the current
| order, this is somehow seen as discrediting.
| lapinot wrote:
| > Just that it is possible to explain something with
| simpler language doesn't mean it is always desirable to.
|
| Why? As a scientist doing theoretical work, one of my
| main drives isn't always to discover new things, it's to
| explain known things "better", where better usually means
| in terms of simpler concepts or with more lightweight
| objects, with less accidental complexity. This goal of
| simplicity is very central in science, with concepts like
| occam's razor.
|
| > There are very few people complaining about the
| unreadability of quantum equations in fundamental physics
| or the jargon of theoretical mathematics.
|
| I can't speak for physics, but in mathematics _a lot_ of
| people (mathematicians, logicians) criticize the
| mathematical jargon of category theory. And in fact there
| are lots of people in the programming language community
| (around type theory) that imho is trying to make category
| theory more accessible by using it parcimonously,
| rewording stuff and making it shine in simple ways (by
| giving some short hints for categorists but otherwise
| explaining classic lemma instead of referencing them).
|
| > Yet for philosophy, especially that which criticises
| the current order, this is somehow seen as discrediting.
|
| There's critic and critic. Having a text full of
| unnecessary jargon does imho greatly reduces any
| subversive pretensions. Things will always have some
| intrinsic complexity, but adding additional complexity in
| the form of tons of implicit references (when the
| relevant part could have been explained succintly) or
| poetic writing style is an obstruction to the sharing of
| knowledge (which is the actual benchmark for
| subversivity: how much can it lead to actual actions).
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| donw wrote:
| Richard Feynman, the father of quantum physics, had a
| rule that, if you couldn't explain it to a five-year-old,
| then you didn't actually understand it.
| ATsch wrote:
| Yet he did not address his scientific papers to five-
| year-olds.
| bollu wrote:
| The original papers that introduced quantum mechanics
| might well be unreadable and mired in jargon. However,
| the community has come together, digested these ideas,
| and written textbooks that are accessible to anyone with
| a minimum of preparation. Furthermore, what preparation
| one is expected to know (some linear algebra, some
| calculus, some classical mechanics) is clearly laid out,
| and has textbooks one can use to study.
|
| No such path of learning is _ever_ presented for any of
| postmodernism. The twin obsessions of (a) treating only
| primary sources as authoritative , coupled with (b) the
| dense jargon of the primary sources that makes it
| unreadable to anyone but the experts is what makes
| postmodern philosophy unapproachable.
|
| This forces people to discredit much if postmodernism. It
| seems to be a community that refuses to expand and make
| approachable their work, while claiming that their work
| has important ramifications. That reeks of snake oil
| salesmanship to me.
| ATsch wrote:
| > A model is proposed for the evolution of the profile of
| a growing interface. The deterministic growth is solved
| exactly, and exhibits nontrivial relaxation patterns. The
| stochastic version is studied by dynamic renormalization-
| group techniques and by mappings to Burgers's equation
| and to a random directed-polymer problem. The exact
| dynamic scaling form obtained for a one-dimensional
| interface is in excellent agreement with previous
| numerical simulations. Predictions are made for more
| dimensions.
|
| This is who they gave the nobel prize to last year. I
| don't know how anyone can take these people seriously
| when this is supposed to be the definitive text on the
| Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation.
| [deleted]
| beaconstudios wrote:
| But philosophy doesn't tend to layer so deep as to
| require especially complex jargon. You need to know some
| of the field-specific ideas (signifier/signified for
| semiotics for example) but these are intuitive concepts
| that relate to daily life, not hyper-specialised concepts
| like what you'd find in chemistry or physics.
|
| Given how many people get upset by even the term
| "postmodernism", I think it's a worthy exercise to make
| the concepts more accessible so that less people think
| it's an exercise in trying to destroy the philosophical
| foundations of the West, and more an exercise in trying
| to understand the reality we live in.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I read part of SotS with my partner outloud. It became
| obvious, while apprehending the text's ideas, that internet
| denizens are already intimately familiar with them even to
| the point of DeBord's perspective as being a bit dated.
| Social media, and TikTok in particular, push the limits of
| SotS which is mainly mass media focused. The opportunity
| for a critical theory of social media is ripe. In this
| thread, I will 1/13738
| l-_l-_l-_lo_ol wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder if crit theory had a natural evolution
| to serve as a foundation for a million PhD theses. Really
| these people ever should have had this much to say. Also it
| seems like philosophy birthed via poetry. These people
| should have just written poetry.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Much of philosophy is poetic. That doesn't mean it isn't
| pointing at truth - much of classical fiction in general
| is about getting at the essence of certain aspects of
| reality.
| l-_l-_l-_lo_ol wrote:
| I think analytic departments would disagree with you.
| Also, what poetry does is defamiliarize language. It's
| impact is emotional. It isn't philosophy.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| They probably would because of the analytic/continental
| divide, but that's fine. That doesn't mean they're right.
|
| Thousand Plateaus was extremely poetic but its contents
| can be converted into more straightforward ideas like
| deterritorialisation and schizoanalysis. Poetry is just
| the delivery mechanism.
|
| Also Deleuze is an example of a philosopher who has both
| done poetic and analytic work (including metaphysics,
| which is a core analytic discipline) but is generally
| considered a continental philosopher. I don't think the
| distinction matters - both "sides" just explore different
| philosophical topics. I enjoy both of them and the divide
| seems petty.
| l-_l-_l-_lo_ol wrote:
| Well continental philosophy is currently turning the
| western world on its head so I don't think there will be
| reconciliation any time soon.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| The analytic/continental divide isn't a
| conservative/progressive thing.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| lil_dispaches wrote:
| "What is considered academic discourse within the spectacular
| society is nothing but false consciousness--spectacular
| thought, the official lies sponsored by the spectacle."
|
| https://unredacted-word.pub/spectacle/#section-210
| VictorPath wrote:
| The book opens
|
| > In post-industrial societies where mass production and
| media predominate, life is presented as an immense
| accumulation of spectacles.
|
| I don't know if the target of the text is only academics, but
| certainly it is at people who this opening sentence reminded
| them of another opening sentence -
|
| > The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode
| of production prevails, presents itself as "an immense
| accumulation of commodities," its unit being a single
| commodity.
|
| Which is the opening of Marx's Capital. Marx was talking
| about (in this and after) how there were not wealthy people
| who owned and had a relationship to an immense accumulation
| of things, nor working and poor people who owned and had a
| relationship to no or much less things, but workers and
| capitalists, who had a social relationship from one class to
| another as well as an internal class relationship. The ruling
| class expropriating surplus labor time from the working
| class, the fulcrum of the exploitative relationship, the
| resulting alienation of the worker etc.
|
| If this is the base of social relations in society, Debord
| was discussing the hegemonic superstructure, which became a
| more important topic than it was from World War I on, from
| Antonio Gramsci to his successors. Everything else in society
| aside from production - media, church, school - but
| especially media.
| [deleted]
| lbotos wrote:
| I always thought it was a stylistic aspect of "critical
| theory": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Critical theory is a subset of postmodernism (a form of
| sociological systems theory), and a lot of postmodern texts
| are written this way.
| pkdpic wrote:
| Really happy to see this thread. Its pretty impressive and
| inspiring that these kinds of conversations happen at all in a
| community where it's not considered that big of a deal to make
| over 200k a year. Especially inspiring given how influential the
| developer community seems to be.
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(page generated 2022-01-30 23:02 UTC)