Society of the Spectacle report: our last POBICS seminary

Yesterday in POBICS, we held a new meeting and, among other topics, we discussed one of the best

known books written by Guy Debord: The Society of Spectacle. Here the report, where we tried to answer two main questions: 1) What is a spectacle? and 2) What are images, and what are the role of images in the Debord's sense?

Spectacle is a reversal (the other side) of life, spectacle is a shift where life goes to the re-presentation (in the Simulacrum's sense given by Baudrillard)

Spectacles are dispositiffs, whilst spectacle is power. The second one is not visible but the first ones it does. 

Spectacle is the opposite of dialogue, that is, in spectacle there is not text, neither words or a discursive situation. Instead, spectacle is the inheritor of the weakness of the whole Western philosophical projects, and so, it is an understanding of the activity dominated by the categories of vision.

The spectacle is the conclusion of the everyday reality of the image. The image has nothing to do with our everyday reality, but it (the images that appelas to itself) becomes our reality. It is the maximum output of the spectacle. The spectacle is an image that is the experience itself, an image that refers to itself. And we thinkg that mage epidemics operate in the same way.

Spectacle then, is chiasmus, the separation between art and life. But what separates, is it art or image?

In any case, what is the image? Knowledge, a fragment of it which has lost all reference and is self-referential. Furthermore, it goes in one direction: the eyes (although it can be completed with other sense like ear. The image is more than the world and impose themselves as the only reality. The concept of image given by Debord may have to do with the etymological meaning (portrait, copy, imagination), and therefore does not have to be only visual (eg, a "mental" imaginary or invidividual which is also self-referential and superficial, the sense that if you escavas find the same, nothing else).

Image = knowledge, epistemic cut, which comes to us through one-way (eyes). It is a piece of knowledge, not an image as something that is visual: it is a knowledge that comes to us through the eyes. Baudrillard idea of simulacrum is very similar.

Spectacle as "Trompe l'oeil" (trampantojo in Spanish) = as a simulacrum, in urban planning, capitalism, imaginary ... The spectacle is the moment when the goods have arrived to the total occupation of social life. Not only the relationship the merchandise is not visible but she is the unique we can look: the world you see is its world

Relationship between images as a state of emergency and images - show.

The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images. For instance, romantic love in movies, (how a girl sees her boyfriend for instance), is mediated by the set of images of the Twilight movies, sexism Love Hollywood, etc ... and then, real girls in their daily life applied this romantic-hollywodean images to the relation with her boyfriends. Then, romantic-hollywodean images (a more than the lay meaning of images) mediate in the relation between couples.

The starting point for spectacle is not me, is the "bounce", thanks to a formal structure comes to me.

Spectacle are looking for our alienation. The society of spectacle corresponds to a concrete manufacture of alienation.  Image as spectacular uniqueness.

Espectuacular means "means to see, to witness", that is, mediation by sight, or sight.

What is spectacular time, in relation to time-event (Aion) and linear time (kronos)? It may be a time to start the expropriation of time (sentence #159: "To bring workers to the status of producers and "Free" time-goods, consumer preliminary condition It was the violent expropriation of their time. Return spectacular time has not become possible only from This first stripping producer. "). It would be kairós FREECODE, a bubble or invagination in which an event occurs.

Photo Credit: gwynydd michael