some interesting situations...

Guy Debord, one of the 2 most influential people to shape the situationist movement

I've recently been reading a bit out the situationist movement and see a lot of alignment with activism through the media as well as the ideologies of the happenings and open source as we covered them in this course. Debord felt that that the Marxist ideas of capitalism developing a commodity culture were furthered by capitalism's development causing a spectacle society- a world where representations are as real as flesh and the spectacle of politics and public space is the driving economic force.



from the first pages of "The Society of the Spectacle" by Guy Debord:

"1
In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense
accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.
2
The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity
of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a
new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of
the world evolves into a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived.
The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.
3
The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society, and as a means
of unification. As a part of society, it is the focal point of all vision and all consciousness. But
due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false
consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal
separation.
4
The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated
by images.
5
The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual excess produced by mass-media
technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, a view of a world that has
become objective. "