New POBICS Seminary: Guy Debord and Society of the Spectacle

Our next and last seminary for this year will be about the most popular theory of Guy Debord: The Society of Spectacle.

We will close our cycle of seminaries with this lecture because we think it could be an important contribution for our recent image analysis. In this sense, we could compare and counterpouse our classical authors used to analyse images (Deleuze, Gillian Rose...) with an author with another interesting and important theory related with images and society in general.

For everyone who don't know Debord's work, we will post the report about our seminary when we hold it. But meanwhile, you can read a little bio about him and his book, extracted from Wikipedia:

"Debord traces the development of a modern society in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation: "All that once was directly lived has become mere representation." Debord argues that the history of social life can be understood as "the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing." This condition, according to Debord, is the "historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life."

The spectacle is the inverted image of society in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, in which "passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity". "The spectacle is not a collection of images," Debord writes, "rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images."

The seminary will be hold on June 15th at 12:00 at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), in the Social Psychology Department (Martín Baró's room). The entrance es free and open for everyone. 

Photo Credit: Randy Lemoine