Episode 170: Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle” (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 170 is something like what is culture? Or maybe are we all brainwashed? And if so, how? We read Guy Debord's Society of the spectacle from 1967. For a link to the reading and other information, please check out partial. This is Mark Linsenmayer reinforcing the spectacular system by denouncing it in the abstract.

0:31 Seth: In Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth Paskin mediating my relations with others through images. In Austin, Texas, this is Wes Alwan.

0:40 Wes: Really looking forward to the iPhone 8. In Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:44 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, degrading from being to having in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:49 Seth: Woo hoo. Is that the first time all four of us have managed to pull something out?

0:54 Dylan: It's a spectacle.

0:56 Mark: Hey, and I have another bit of ritualistic spectacle. By Dylan's request, let's read the ground rules. Ground rules for this discussion include try not to assume that our audience has read what we're talking about or has any other background in philosophy or Marxism or critical theory, etc. Number two, don't make arguments that hinge on something other than what we've agreed to read. Don't say you know what I was talking about if you just read Leibniz's treatise the Best possible world on $24 a day. Number three, we will be rigorous and exact in all that we say, unless doing otherwise would be potentially more entertaining. Should we do some opening statements? We didn't really pick someone to start.

1:32 Seth: I'll start.

1:32 Mark: Oh, go ahead.

1:33 Seth: The book's called the Society of the Spectacle, published in 1967 and Guy Debord was involved in a lot of the movements and upheavals that were happening in the famous, I guess they called it the spring of 68. At the time and prior to that the movement there was a. Of Parisians or students, Marxists who took over Paris for about. Was it 12 days? Something along those lines? Maybe it was more than that. It could have been a couple of months. So there was this revolutionary fervor in France at the time and there was a genuine belief that capitalism as it had been instituted was potentially failing and that there was a viable communist alternative that could be put into place.

And we're talking about here the west, right, because these people were looking to the USSR at the time as a model for communist society. And there were a lot of Marxist theory rolling around. The Commune that took over Paris. They also took over a number of other cities and were quickly dispatched the other cities first by the French state police. And there was a fair amount of bloodshed in Paris when this went down. Keeping that in mind as the backdrop, this book was written at a time when, when Marxism was still very much a viable ideology, a revolutionary ideology, and there was still the belief that there could be a historical movement of the workers to somehow overthrow the capitalist order and take control of their own destiny.

So one of the things that I read or heard about was that this was his modernization or updating of Marxism to include sort of modern media. Like it's sort of a mesh of Marxism and Marshall McLuhan. Marshall McLuhan, you'll just have to google him. Sorry, I'm not supposed to name drop.

3:31 Wes: But the message is the medium.

3:33 Seth: The message is the medium. And what Debord is basically trying to, I think in this book, what he's trying to do is highlight that the challenge for a proletariat or a worker revolution is, is no longer what it was when Marx was writing or even in the early part of the 20th century, but that now we have to contend with this thing which he calls the spectacle or the society of the spectacle. And the society of the spectacle is just simply that our authentic interactions with each other and with the world and with nature have been replaced by representations.

And this is driven, it is not a conscious thing. It comes out of the modern means of production and as a result of the commodification of essentially everything. So after the Industrial revolution and we start to have everything as a commodity, or I should say the commodification of more and more of our sphere, we start to replace our authentic or our direct, maybe that's a better word, direct interactions with each other, with interactions that are mediated by commodities. So we start to become isolated and in so doing, right, we lose touch with our own authentic desires.

And more importantly, the machine needs to ever increasingly replace those commodities which don't satisfy our direct desires or our real needs with new commodities. So it's this machine that's self perpetuating, where it just must constantly produce more and more things to mediate our relationships with the world and with the each other. And because they never are satisfying us, they need to be constantly replaced. And so he's, I think, trying to highlight this as a. And there's a lot more to it, but it's a barrier to having some kind of class consciousness that would somehow spontaneously create this revolutionary movement.

So we have to be conscious of the fact that we're now caught inside of this system, and it's not just the media. It's like everything that we do in a modern, productive society that is basically preventing us from having direct awareness of what's actually happening, Direct awareness of our own experience, direct awareness of others, direct awareness of what's happening politically and socially. And in fact, you know, we'll get into it. It shapes and replaces our social behaviors. And I think he's just trying to raise this and point out that it is something that needs to be dealt with or needs to be.

And this is where I lose the Marxist connection theorized. Or somehow we have to come up with a strategy for practical action to address it.

6:16 Wes: Yeah, so I thought you really captured the essence of it, Seth, with the whole Marshall McLuhan reference, even though that's against the rules that we just read for the first time in a long time. And I think I said the message is the medium. It's actually the medium is the message is the idea that's associated with him. But I think the main point is we saw in our Marx episode that communism, in a way, it's supposed to be the result of a sort of an inevitable historical progression. Marx is taking Hegel's idea of history and applying it at the level of ideas, at the level of material conditions and the economy.

And communism was supposed to be sort of a natural outcome of basically technological advancement, where as technology gets better and better and our productivity gets higher and higher because of it, and we essentially have machines doing a lot of the work for us. We should be freed from having to work essentially, ultimately, or work as much or do the kind of work that we don't want to do. That doesn't happen for a few reasons that Marx lays out. And one of them is just the fact that there's a way for the bourgeoisie and the capitalist overclass to sort of hoard the benefits of increased productivity for themselves.

And that's where we get a lot of critiques now of income inequality, where you can essentially just lay off workers and have machines doing the work for you. And then unemployment drives wages down and the benefits don't accrue to everyone in society until things get bad enough, where there's inevitably some sort of revolution, where the working class, the proletariat, seizes the means of production for themselves. Another way that to sort of keep the proletariat in their place is ideology. So this was a really important concept when we read Marx, and I see Debord's book here.

As sort of just an elaboration, a much more sophisticated elaboration of Marx's concept of ideology. And ideology was just the ruling class's representation of its own interests as being in the interests of everyone. So for instance, saying capitalism is the best to reference Marx, Leibniz reference, it's the best of all possible worlds. And it just happens to be the case that some people are going to have less than others. But that's just the way it has to be. But it's still better than what came before. So that's like the simplest version of kind of ideological statement that you could use to brainwash the masses so that they don't engage in the revolutionary activity that would lead to them seizing the means of production.

And in this book we get something that's much more sophisticated because it's not just some sort of ham fisted proclamation or propaganda doled out by the bourgeoisie. It is woven into the fabric of a capitalist society. Ideology becomes a kind of fantasy world that we all live in, produced by the way we live in a capitalist society consuming products and entertainment and having our more concrete real lives compromised by that in ways that lead us to want more of that. Sort of like a drug addiction or something. Including the iPhone 8 by the way.

I'm just going to mention that again. That's my drug of choice. One other thing before I pass this on is you mentioned the USSR, Seth. So DeBord was a particular kind of socialist. He's a lot like Orwell in that he was anti Stalin and anti Soviet. There's a lot of that in this book. He explicitly talks about that and he was a kind of defender of like Orwell's civil liberties. So I think he's been called like Orwell, a libertarian socialist. So I think that's one important connection to some of the stuff we've done recently.

10:03 Seth: Yeah, and I apologize if I suggested that he was using it as a model. I was just saying Western Marxists were looking at what was happening in the Soviet Union and reacting to it in a variety of different ways.

10:13 Wes: Right, right.

10:14 Dylan: I was just actually going to only add to your guys really good comments in summary, that he has an extensive critique of sort of historically based of the USSR and what amounts to that current version, both actually in China and in the Soviet Union, of the bureaucratic dominance that was manifest in those communist regimes and basically argues that they become a kind of withered version of capitalism and have similar, if anything, worse features in that the kind of freedom that you have that is alienated in capitalism is worse under this authoritarian circumstance of bureaucratic domination in the contemporary communist regimes.

11:03 Wes: Yeah, all of that read so much like Orwell.

11:06 Dylan: Just like Orwell, exactly.

11:08 Wes: I actually did a little research on whether he had read Orwell or was very much influenced by them, or maybe they were influenced by the same people in their critique of Stalin and the Bolsheviks. And I saw some story that he and his wife, when they talked about Orwell, would just refer to him as George. So they definitely had read him and knew him. I don't know. I didn't get far enough to figure out how all the influences work. But, yeah, it's the kind of critique we've seen before.

11:33 Mark: All right, so let me throw in one more piece of the background, which will also serve to give some pointers to what Debord's alternative to the society, the spectacle, might be, what his positive solution that he wants to put out there besides just revolution, Total revolution. So he was a member of this group that Seth was referring to that was engaging these political activities. At least the part that Debord was part of was Situationist International. So that's a group of avant garde artists, intellectuals, political theorists prominent in Europe from about 57 to 1972.

So this book is seen as one of the main texts of that movement. And he was a filmmaker as well. So one of the things toward the end, when he starts talking about culture, he refers, for instance, he has several of these aphorisms. This whole thing is made up about 200 some aphorisms. Détournement, if you're not a French speaker, which in French is rerouting or hijacking, it's the integration of present or past artistic productions into a superior construction of a milieu. So in other words, like what his films were like, supposedly, I have not actually seen any of these.

They really were not seen outside of the France of his time, was just like a bunch of referential images and dialogue. So from popular culture, from reading Hegel and Marx out loud and things. So it's all just combining. It's like collage making. And the way that that's supposed to subvert the status quo is. For instance, one of the examples I had seen was there's a giant Marlboro sign with the cowboy, and you deface it. So it says, like, boring or something. You know, something in French that is the equivalent of that. There's sort of pranksters.

There were a lot of pranks associated with the movement. And what he was looking for, what a situation is, is on authentic encounter with your environment. So we have here a really interesting combination between a straight up neo Marxist, very Marxist, but of course reflecting on what historically had happened since Marx's time. And he spent a lot of time in this book hashing over why different movements didn't work in certain places and the ways in which the capitalist system defends itself against revolution. Such that revolution is certainly not inevitable and is something that really needs to be worked toward.

But we've got a combination between that and something like an existentialist humanism. Whereas Marx was trying to get us to turn away to some extent from navel gazing to the idea of being. Yes, he was in favor of non alienated work. And so yes, there's a natural relation that needs to be restored or established between us and our environment. But it seemed less introspective in general, more materialist. Whereas some of what these situationists are shooting for ultimately, yes, to have revolution, to get rid of the spectacle, you do need social action, you do need praxis.

But the situationist ethic in itself is a matter of having an individual experience. And some of the things I was, you know, secondary sources on this, I was watching Slash, listening to were talking about the tradition that goes back in Paris to being able to stroll through the city aimlessly and let it guide you. And so this kind of explains the really vehement rant against modern city planning that Debord gets into toward the end of the book, that he just thought that the environment that capitalism is creating is very unfit for natural human impulses that are natural.

We become alienated from our natural human impulses by the deformations of living under the job system and under consumerism and the spectacle dominating everything about us and making us inauthentic to ourselves. I don't think he uses that word

15:21 Seth: authenticity, but it's used in my translation.

15:23 Mark: Oh, he is? Okay.

15:24 Seth: Yeah.

15:25 Mark: This Heidegger's critique of technology occurred to me and other things like that that we've read. Hannah Arendt, who was a critic of Marx, who similarly talks about the need for if you don't have a authentic reaction toward time, toward your life, toward yourself, then you're not going to be able to have authentic relations with other people. Kind of like the Erich Fromm Art of Loving book that we read. I don't know if this is a particularly unique synthesis, but it was good to see that historically these two things that I had, it seems like at some point in time were opposed. The Marxism and the existentialism or the proto existentialism were joined up at Least in many thinkers at this time, which shouldn't be surprising. I mean, Sartre himself was a major

16:13 Wes: communist and said, if you're not a communist, you're evil. Didn't he?

16:16 Dylan: Yeah, and a Stalin apologist. But we won't go down there just to react to a couple things. I'd be interested to hear more about how much, Mark, what you were talking about, like the fruition of this in the situationist movement was a lot more interesting. He seemed in this piece to not give me a whole lot about what that vision of the authentic or the solution of proper living or something like that. The way to subvert the spectacle was.

16:46 Unknown speaker: Right.

16:46 Wes: So I vote for holding off on that until we. You get the negative part first.

16:50 Seth: The spectacle, we don't have to hold off on that because it's no different than any other Marxist critique, which is. The critique is amazingly strong and well powered and the solution is always completely dissatisfying.

17:01 Wes: That's the other problem.

17:02 Dylan: Like a lot of Marxist writings, particularly newer Marxist writings, I find myself. There's a language and a pace and a way of speaking that is characteristic of it. In particular the use of this word spectacle, and what a spectacle means. And the first, I don't know, 80 aphorisms or something like that involve many versions of the spectacle. Is this the spectacle? Is that the spectacle, Is this. So in a way he's defining it and I found it a very slippery idea and I appreciated Seth's summary of it and I thought it was very cogent. But I'd really like to understand because in particular, Debord has the notion of the spectacle has this self reflection about it and this kind of participation in the dialogue dialectic of going back and forth on itself, which I think is part of what makes it slippery.

At some point, he says, speaking of two things at the same time and speaking the truth while being false. And that kind of aspect of it which is true of the way he uses this word, this really important word, and he uses it in a very unusual way.

18:11 Mark: How is it hard to understand that the spectacle is the concrete inversion of life? There you go.

18:17 Wes: So I think in a way it's easier to start out with chapter two, the Commodity, and then go back to

18:22 Dylan: chapter one, the culmination of separation.

18:24 Seth: There's a part in here it might be Wes, it might be in chapter two. My notes are all based on the actual numbers of the aphorisms. So let's take a look at. I think it's Starting around the 40s, one of the basic tenets of Marxism is the idea that the worker or the producer is alienated from the product they produce. So it used to be in whenever times you were a cobbler and you fixed the shoes or you made the shoes, and you had a connection to the result, the output of your labor. And in capitalism, labor becomes wage labor and the laborer becomes alienated from what they produce.

That's sort of the basic alienation that Marx points out. The board says that huge part of the person's, the worker's life that revolves around work. They live in a state of alienation. But prior to modern commodified capitalism, they at least have the social life. They at least have their social existence, which is theirs and which they own. They're not alienated from their life outside of work. And what Debord is saying is that after the Industrial Revolution, when the purpose of the alienated labor's work is to produce things not that are consumed by somebody else, but are commodities that need to be consumed by the worker themselves, then the system needs to alienate the worker from their social life as well by inserting this need to consume and to eat commodities, as it were.

Eat, consume, use commodities, what have you. And so there becomes this second stage of alienation in commodity capitalism where not only is the worker alienated from the product that they produce, but they're alienated from their own authentic relationship or direct relationship with themselves and others, because they need to be consumers as well as producers. So if you think about it in the basest terms, the spectacle is the whole machinery of society that turns individuals into consumers as well as producers. So it's not just mass media. It's every aspect of life, whether it's entertainment or media or news or the physical location of spaces.

All of these things contribute because it's important that you produce, and then you consume what you produce, and then you go produce more and you consume what you produce.

21:00 Dylan: So I have a quote about this. This is number 42. The spectacle is the stage at which the commodity has succeeded in totally colonizing social life. Commodification is not only visible, we no longer see anything else. The world we see is the world of the commodity. Modern economic production extends into dictatorship both extensively and intensively. It goes on. Alienated consumption has become just as much a duty for the masses as alienated production.

21:27 Mark: We just talk about that term commodity for a second because I assume that commodities refer to portfolios that we need, not just random doodads, but also food and shelter and basic things. But the French Commodite literally means amenity or convenience. So though he does have something to say about how the basic needs have been sucked into this. What he calls augmented survival. But basically, I think by commodities. The important part is that they are luxuries. That they're something that is not really necessary. But we've been built up to feel like we have to have them.

22:02 Wes: Yeah. Or even if they are necessary on some level. They have a layer. Their significance is no longer that. Their significance is whatever they. This extra thing that they're imbued with. Which is the spectacle. This extra thing that makes us want them. It's more than something to eat. It's something that's going to make me happy forever. And unify me as a person. And fulfill all my hopes and dreams. Something like that. The sort of stuff you see in advertisements. Where you give this sort of extra meaning to something. Even whether it's necessary or whether it's a luxury. You're selling it by means of something that's almost quasi religious.

22:40 Seth: Yeah.

22:40 Dylan: He uses in what I quoted the word commodification. Or at least the translator did. Where I took him to be saying that virtually anything can be commoditized. And that that's what happens in our version of modern capitalistic society. Is that almost anything can become the stand in for that kind of symbol that west was referring to. That we attribute meaning not out of itself in some kind of authentic engagement. But as the sole mediator. To me, it made me think of the way money works. Money becomes sort of the universal equalizer. So that everything's leveled out.

Anything can be exchanged for anything else. And you have a reduction of value. Because nothing becomes valuable. Because everything becomes exchangeable. And in fact, it's not just the things we need. Not just things that are grown. Like you trade commodities on the market or whatever, or minerals or something. But literally anything can become commoditized. So media is commoditized and experiences are commoditized.

23:39 Seth: I think you're onto something there, Dylan. And Wes, you are too. Although he talks about the unity piece later on about. It's that leveling, kind of like banalization. But if you look at sections. This is a brutal page in my. I have the Knabb edition, page 18. It's like sections 45, 46 and 47. 45 deserves some time of ours on its own. But Dylan to articulate in sort of technical, economic, Marxist economic terms. He talks about exchange value and use value. And use value is the value of the thing that you can use it for. And exchange value is the value that you can trade it for.

And the way he articulates what you just said is that essentially this is section 46. Exchange values could arise only as a representative of use value. But the victory it eventually won with its own weapons created the conditions for its own autonomous power. By mobilizing all human use value and monopolizing its fulfillment, exchange value ultimately succeeded in controlling use. Use has come to be seen purely in terms of exchange and is now completely at its mercy. It's the idea that when it used to be that meat had value because it was life sustaining.

And now after industrialization and factory farming, meat has become a commodity, so its use as life sustaining is diminished. And now it's really just something that you can buy and that you can exchange.

25:09 Wes: I go out and I buy a fork and I might think, well, how do I know what the value of a fork is? Is it the amount of labor, the amount of hours it took someone to produce it? Is it how much use I'm going to get out of it in the scheme of things? Well, in a market economy, it's just whatever willing to pay for it, given your level of desire and the amount of forks that are out there, that's the exchange value. And the exchange value does not match the use value. It just doesn't. So to a socialist like Debord and Marx, that's a source of frustration. So the value really becomes a function of our desire and the amount of importance that we imbue something with, not its real value. So in 45, he's saying, well, exchange value should be a function of use value, but instead it's completely autonomous of that really. It's a function of demand, right, and supply.

26:06 Dylan: It's an interesting contrast because when I think about the notion of an authentic experience, one of the things that I might imbue in meaning, say even a fork, would be things besides its usefulness. Now there's the abstract commodification in terms of maybe I could sell it to a highest bidder or something like that. But there's also other parts of that experience. Maybe it's the fork that belonged to my grandfather that he carried with him in his kit bag when he was in World War II, that there's some kind of value to it that has to do with much more than its usefulness, but it is not commodification.

So that notion that those items should be valued for their usefulness seems to be a little bit at tension with the notion that there's ways of having usefulness. That's not merely a commodity that would lend itself towards authentic experience. It seems to me that just felt like a tension in that.

26:59 Mark: Yeah, because essential to the commodity is that I think that it be universalizable that something that just has sentimental value to you really doesn't have value at all.

27:09 Dylan: I'll give another example. My sister in law bought a recumbent bike recently and it was a little expensive and it has a little electric assist. And one of the reasons she bought it is that she wanted to commute on her bike more often. And she lives there are some hills and it's far enough away that the fact that having a little bit of that assist would actually get her to ride the trike more often. And she has been. And she actually rode up to my house today to drop some stuff off and we were talking about it and she made the comment that she wasn't sure that it really was an economical deal.

That she wasn't clear to her her that in the end because the bike was pretty expensive, that it was going to actually save her money in terms of gas in her car or whatever. My response was but there's so many more, much more meaning to what you're getting out of having that bike than that particular conversion of it to saving you money on gas. There's many, many more ways to value both that item and that experience than that way. I think the same thing's true of the notion of. Of usefulness. That seems to me in accord with what Debord is saying about the social ways in which for instance, that one would value something that have been attenuated by capitalism but are not useful.

28:28 Wes: Yeah, so he's decrying the way in which exchange value has controlled use value. And the idea is just that if it's just supply and demand that regulates the value of something, then we can be driven to want valueless things, what he calls useless things in 45 and so instead of automation, right, instead of automation leading to the reduction or elimination of work, you preserve labor as a commodity. Labor is also a commodity by the way, because you produce all these jobs which are essentially designed to glorify and distribute these commodities and persuade people that these unnecessary things are the things that they need.

They're magical. They're going to change your life. You get the advertising industry and all the rest of it. You multiply all of these pseudo needs and that's one of the mechanisms by which you prevent technological advancement from reducing the need for people to work.

29:28 Seth: So I Think it actually might be a little bit stronger than that. It's not just that. The way you said it, Wes, made me think of my job, which is marketing. We have to convince people to consume things that they don't need or. That's not how I see my job, of course, but the idea that you're trying to convince people to consume superfluous or unnecessary things, it's more pernicious than that. It's that once you divorce the economy from an exchange between individuals with needs, needs for uses. So it's like, okay, I need a plow because I have to farm my land.

This person has a plow because they're a blacksmith. And, you know, blah, blah, blah. You get into the whole exchange, this idea of making your decisions and making it based on use. So it's not even about convincing you to overcome your use needs with superfluous exchange and desire things. It's that your entire worldview gets intercepted and conditioned. And so when you look to another person, you can't even connect with what it is you actually use and need. You can only have the experience of having all of your relations mediated by these commodities.

So it's not a question of being persuaded to do this. It's that you don't see anything else but the commodity.

30:45 Wes: Yeah, I didn't say it wasn't that. I just was quoting 45, in which he said all these jobs where you have people persuade. But yeah, I think you're onto the more important part of it. I mean, I don't know about the relative importance of advertising versus just all the other stuff that goes on culturally. Right. That makes us one things and makes us. Gives us this sort of weird relationship to things that they're not just objects of necessity, they're so much more. But I think, Seth, part of what you're getting at is the survival and necessity.

You know, going back to 40, economic growth has liberated societies from the natural pressures that forced them into an immediate struggle for survival. But they have not yet been liberated from their liberator. The commodity's independence has spread to the entire economy it now dominates. This economy has transformed the world, but it has merely transformed it into a world dominated by the economy. The pseudo nature within which human labor has become alienated demands that such labor remain forever in its service. And since this demand is formulated by and answerable only to itself, it in fact ends up channeling all socially permitted projects and endeavors into its own reinforcement.

The abundance of commodities, that is the abundance of commodity relations, amounts to nothing more than an augmented survival. And I think he's using this phrase augmented survival because it goes beyond what we need to survive, obviously. Right. This is all the stuff that's unnecessary. But in a way, we operate as if it is necessary for survival. That's the whole point of this word pseudo nature. We operate as if our relationship to commodities is natural in the same way that we would, you know, so we consume media in the same way that we might consume something, food, just to survive or something like that.

32:33 Mark: And it's socially reinforced the fact that, you know, it's not just that I want an iPhone, it's now that to do things in the world, you kind of. You don't have to have a smartphone, but it really. To keep up and be able to do things in the most convenient way. I mean, he was even against cars is one of the things he's really against here. He rather people walk through the city and have authentic experiences as opposed to being in cars that alienate you from other people. And who can get along without a car. Like, you have to make a special. You're a rare person and have to make special arrangements to like, live in a way that you won't need a car or, you know, I'll just use the bus, I'll just use bikes, whatever.

But it's sort of the default is that you need all this stuff. You need a better, faster computer. You need even just to be in touch with the culture. You need to have access to HBO in some way. So you talk about Game of Thrones or whatever if you're going to be where society is at.

33:26 Wes: Yeah. So you would think that this liberation from the natural pressures of an immediate struggle for survival, that would just be freedom, that would give us all these options. But instead we are shackled by the existence of those choices because we just get this new augmented survival layer where we're still functioning in the. In a kind of state of pseudo nature.

33:49 Seth: We were promised leisure and instead we're still just in augmented survival mode.

33:55 Wes: Yeah.

33:55 Mark: Who's going to live like a monk in terms of like one of the most wasteful things is going out to a restaurant. You can eat so much more cheaply making things yourself. But it's just become a social necessity for many parts of society for business lunches and social stuff and whatever that. To just shun that entirely, you have to be a certain kind of, I'm off the grid man. Know if you're going to shun all these things that society has deemed as necessary. I'm just saying I'm not willing to do it.

34:24 Seth: You got to be careful, though, when you're talking about philosophers, Mark, because basically you can't be a philosopher without a cafe. At least not since the turn of the 20th century.

34:35 Mark: Buy your $5 cup of coffee.

34:37 Seth: That's right. Although Starbucks hasn't done anything to increase the number of philosophers in the United States. I'll have to rethink that thesis.

34:44 Mark: It's a place of employment for philosophers. So I want to read 49, which is the transition from this use, exchange, value back to the spectacle. And Dylan was saying before how the commodity is like money in a certain way. So while the spectacle has been introduced in chapter one in a lot of abstract ways that we haven't talked about yet in chapter two here, it's specifically related to the commodity, that the ubiquity of commodities is at least one of the main symptoms of the spectacle, if not the spectacle itself. Okay, so here 49. The spectacle is the flip side of money.

It too is an abstract general equivalent of all commodities. But whereas money has dominated society as the representation of universal equivalence, the exchangeability of different goods whose uses remain uncomparable, the spectacle is the modern complement of money, a representation of the commodity world as a whole, which serves as a general equivalent for what the entire society can be and can do. So what do you guys think of that?

35:42 Wes: The currency of potentiality is what I wrote in the. In the margin there. I think it's great. I mean, yeah, this is a really important section. The spectacle is money one can only look at because in it all use has already been exchanged for the totality of abstract representation. The spectacle is not just a servant of pseudo use. It is already in itself a pseudo use of life.

36:05 Mark: A lot of individually difficult concepts stuffed into here. So, yes, please explain.

36:11 Wes: Yeah, so let's see a representation of the commodity world as a whole, which serves as a general equivalent for what the entire society can be or do. In other words, the spectacle represents the consumption as the ultimate value. And what an entire society can be and do, its aspirations are sort of defined by the market economy. If you get online and look at the average column or the way people talk about what should be and what their values are, you can see, even if it's something that might seem to be non related, you can see that it's informed by these sort of assumptions about things being a kind of ultimate good and things not in just the sense of, again, stuff that we need to survive, but things in the sense of stuff that when we Consume it makes our lives meaningful.

So it's like money in the sense that it's exchangeable for these commodities and these other manifestations of the spectacle. They're things that we can trade in for little bits and pieces of pseudo meaningfulness, I think.

37:16 Seth: So I'll give kind of a similar to Wes. Instead of using meaningful, I'll use the term value. But I think there's a specific economic principle that I think is underlying this. So the purpose of money, in order for a market economy to work, you have to have prices. So price is the thing that tells you what something is worth. So the idea behind a free market is that prices are dynamically and emerge from market activity to regulate the exchange of goods. So in order to have price, you have to have a currency, you have to have money. You have to have something that's stable across, that mediates between uncomparable items.

And what I feel like he's saying here is that the spectacle is the thing that is the mediate currency for our social interactions that allows us to value things across differences in a kind of similar kind of price mechanism. So the idea is that I can make the claim that I am cool or I'm well dressed or I'm a hipster or whatever. There's a currency. The spectacle establishes a way to mediate between my coolness and somebody else's nerdness. Right. Or something along those lines. It's not a currency, but there is a variety of social norms that are mediated by commodities, clothing, words, possessions, skill sets related to, you know, like programming versus not programming and all these kinds of things.

And so it creates that ability to mediate between difference and come out and assign value.

38:52 Wes: Let's try some specific examples. I was going to start with the iPhone, the general equivalent for what the entire society can be and can do. What is an iPhone a signifier for? In that sense, it represents a certain set of values, a certain set of habits about, you know, what a good way to use your time is, what the kinds of interactions with other people are valuable. For instance, sending them videos or liking something on Facebook or communicating with them by text or voice instead of in person. An iPhone isn't just this thing. It's a set of. And I think Seth was. This is what you're kind of saying too. There's a set of norms that go along with it, a set of habits and behaviors and values.

39:34 Dylan: I think it's a good example, and

39:36 Wes: we could probably come up with more examples like that.

39:38 Dylan: I'd like to understand more why this is a feature of capitalism and not a feature of any kind of social interaction, no matter how old and how pre capitalist. I mean, even before money, right? My cow is worth a certain amount of labor to have some guy fix my roof. A bartered economy would have the similar kinds of exchange. And same thing with social interactions. There are social norms regarding who's beautiful and who's not and who gets to have sex with whom and who doesn't get to have sex with another person. And there are social norms regarding what makes you successful, such that you do get laid more often or not, or cool or whatever.

And it's not at all clear to me that there is a world of difference between the guy with the zeus beard in 2017 and the guy with the Zeus beard in 400 BC. Especially in this kind of critique, right? There may be an intensity, and maybe that intensity is what really makes the difference. But it's not clear to me how the fact that our relationship with the world is mediated by our perceptions and by what we hold value to, and that that value is socially mediated by norms that we interact with others and are part of how we get and realize our desires is something that is capitalist.

41:00 Mark: So one of the other quotes in here that I was using to make sense of this section 49 that we'd read was section 17. And this I think we could use to maybe make sense of your question as well, Dylan. So it says the first stage of the economy's domination of social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having. Human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed. The present stage, in which social life has become completely dominated by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing.

All having must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances. So what you were describing in terms of, yeah, you could look on any past stage in history and at least imagine, or through fiction or whatever, depict people being very shallow in terms of, well, they're really not considering the being, they're considering their possessions or how they appear. But it doesn't have that three stage movement that he's pointing to of being turned into having by the dominance of the economy. And then having turning to appearing, which is exactly what the talking about the ubiquity of the commodity, turning to the spectacle.

The spectacle is something that is essentially illusory. And so the thing that we are describing here is that commercialism has become so universal that it itself becomes the status thing, which at least seems it might have some surface level similarities to the way things were in a pre industrial time that like wow, you have a really cool cow and I admire you for your cow. And that cow has some social value apart from its use value, but it seems like the intensity is much less. And some of these other things in terms of who gets to have sex with who and stuff, I would think that that would have been rationalized at least you could even describe that perhaps as a matter of being as the first stage as opposed to mere appearance.

I think these interpretations of the situations are kind of under determined by the situations themselves. Is this admiration of somebody for having an awesome beard a matter of judging their being in some significant way as it might have been in the super olden days? Or is it merely about appearance which is a further degradation of some commodity description?

43:11 Wes: I mean, I think Dylan's critique is something I had in my head reading the whole thing and always do with these types of accounts. You know, how much of this is actually a result of capitalism and how much of this is just sort of human nature and the kind of thing that goes on and vanity. I thought of Hume's long rant about human vanity and all that stuff. And maybe you might say well it's amped up by capitalism and by mass production and mass media and all that stuff. And then the question is well, how much is it actually amped up? Maybe the average social interactions in a pre industrial time were enough.

Maybe they were already so amplified that people weren't really just being and or even having then, but living completely inauthentic lives. Because that's the nature of the social, just inauthenticity. But again, I'm not saying that. I just think that's always the question in the back of my head when I'm reading these things. Is this really just a critique of the social rather than a particular economic situation?

44:13 Seth: I appreciate that criticism or questioning distinction that you guys, that Dylan, you and Wes both brought up. I'm going to argue in favor of the fact that it's whether Debord in the general sense is diagnosing capitalism or just current state independent of capitalism. I do think that the critique is pointing at something that is unique to the modern system of production and capitalism, different from say feudalism or some of these other systems. Sorry, I'm going to read from. To go back to the first book, section 25, page 8 of the Knabb Bureau of Public Secrets edition.

Separation is the alpha and the omega of the spectacle. The institutionalization of the social division of labor in the form of class divisions had given rise to an earlier religious form of contemplation. The mythical order with which every power has always camouflaged itself. So I believe that the assertion is that this is something categorically different than what we've seen in the past, because, first of all, there's no doubt that the spectacle is asymmetric in terms of its impact on individuals. So having money and power exempts you from the spectacle or takes you more out of the impact of the spectacle than being underclass or what have you.

But because Debord is claiming that the spectacle arises from the modern form of production, he's essentially saying that what this is is different in kind from what has passed before. It's not simply that this is just as, you know, thus it ever was. As far as human nature, there's the commodification. The spectacle serves the purpose of isolating individuals away from their direct connection with themselves, with their own humanity, I mean, with others, other individuals, and with nature. And if you look at. I mean, just in thematically, in what was happening in the 20th century, to take Heidegger as an example, because he was mentioned earlier in this podcast, so I feel like I'm permitted.

You know, Heidegger had a nostalgia for the farmer, for the farmland, for the peasant, and this idea of this direct connection. And he believed there was a way to recover this direct connection in the face of this technological world that turned everything into a commodity. And I think what Debord is extending that criticism and saying at this point, that's not even recoverable. There's no nostalgia that you can go back to, but it's not a function of human nature. It's a function of the modern system of production.

47:04 Dylan: You know, the part of the Marxist critique that I in this case find resonant is the notion that capitalism yields just a different kind of slavery, so that you get alienated from your work and you're making pins over and over and over again. And we can point to a way in which you would have an authentic life that was founded in freedom and you were actualizing your own actions. But in the presence of capitalism, you become merely a cog and yet another kind of slave. And one of the ways in which that makes sense to me is that that kind of alienation and that kind of lack of authenticity in one's life that is manifest in being enslaved has been true throughout history by all kinds of things.

And that, in fact, being free and having the power to be free has been a problem, as far as I can tell, forever. And capitalism is one of those ways in which you are prevented from being free. That makes sense. And it makes sense to me that it's maybe a new twist on that problem.

48:13 Seth: Hmm, that's a really interesting point. So essentially, the Spectacle is just the most refined version of getting the most number of people into slavery.

48:23 Dylan: Yes. The one thing that you might add is that it's better to be a slave in the Spectacle than it is to be a slave in ancient Egypt. Right. Because at least you have an iPhone.

48:32 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

48:34 Seth: And a longer life expectancy.

48:36 Dylan: Yeah. I mean, there's all kinds of reasons why you might say that it's better to be a slave to the spectacle and have your contracted freedom or lack of freedom than it would be at many, many other times in history. Right. Freedom, schmedum.

48:53 Seth: Well, your basic conditions of existence. Right.

48:56 Dylan: Are way better.

48:57 Seth: Are way better. It's easier for you to get food. I mean, you have indoor plumbing.

49:03 Dylan: I don't want to be a Russian peasant in 1830.

49:06 Seth: No, I don't either. I'd rather be a hipster in Austin in the 21st century. I get it. Doesn't make me any less a slave.

49:12 Dylan: Well, that's an interesting question. That might be a different. That might be an extended question.

49:18 Mark: I don't think it's essential that this be the worst kind of slavery that we've ever encountered for it to be legitimate critique.

49:25 Dylan: Yes, yes, good point, Mark.

49:27 Mark: Well, one of the things that's unique about this kind of slavery is that there really aren't slavers. Of course we demonize the 1%, and that's a common Marxist thing. But he actually doesn't focus on that. He thinks that everybody, including the people economically at the top, are also slaves of this system. That the system itself has become autonomous, that has gotten out of control. And a lot of that is just a matter, like Seth was pointing at, of how our mores have changed in response to. He doesn't use this term, but in some of his other readings, becoming homo economicus.

Capitalism has made us into the economic animal. And one of the things I thought that the ubiquity of the commodity, the ways that it made life difficult for us, was that, I think, according to Debord's critique, not only are we distracted by all the spectacles, which we haven't really talked about, you know, what's going on in politics. The spectacle, you know. Yes, that's definitely one of the spectacles. It's not just the media, but it definitely includes the media, it includes popular entertainment. Includes all these things that we talked about in our Adorno episode is these things that are supposed to put us to sleep.

You know, in our Adorno episode, it really was the ruling class kind of pulling it over on us in a fairly self conscious way to keep their power. Whereas I think Debord's analysis makes it much more subtle. Way of being enslaved.

50:51 Seth: Yeah. The spectacle in Debord's analysis is Skynet. It hasn't become self aware, but this movement is self perpetuating. Going back to sections somewhere, 20 through 24. Right. The spectacle expresses nothing other than modern society's wish for sleep. That's number 21 and number 23. The root of the spectacle is power. Maybe this lends credence to Wes and Dylan's claim about human nature. Like in the face of this modern onslaught of commoditization, we are overwhelmed as human beings. You know, you can call it the lizard brain versus the animal brain or whatever it is.

Like we're just, we're completely overwhelmed and we just want to not have to deal with it. We want to sleep. And so the spectacle says no problem. I recognize that the way to self perpetuate in the face of this, instead of overwhelming you, I need to put you to sleep. So we have the society of the spectacle whose job it is to basically distract you while you're awake. So it's as if you were asleep. And it's almost like you can think of it as a self defense mechanism or something more aggressive. It's an emergent phenomenon out of the movement of the modern system of commodity production.

Because if you woke up, you wouldn't want to buy anything and then what would happen?

52:10 Mark: And as one of the results of this, I was a little unclear about this. Supposed to be that not just that we can't relate to each other because we're asleep, because we have all these deformations, but that we actually, we're so used to dealing with everything in economic terms, we are homo economicus, that we deal with each other that way as well. And that's one of the things that prevents authentic relationships is that we're sort of always looking for what the other person can do. For me, we're not interested in them as a person. That was for instance, one of my ways of thinking about going back to our political discussion of the Trump voter of somebody who's.

I've worked hard all my life and been treated like shit. So I'm just not interested in anything that's not going to directly improve my material well being or something. You know, I'm not interested in trans rights or all these crap like that. I don't want to deal with any of that. That that's the kind of closedness that the economy forces upon us, that it grinds us down until we're just not able to be interested in culture, to be interested in art, to be interested in much of anything, let alone other people.

53:14 Seth: No, you need to know what Beyonce is doing.

53:19 Mark: Yes, okay, we're interested in people as spectacles, but we're not interested in having relationships with them. I guess maybe I am interested in having a relationship with Beyonce, but that's not the same. That desire would not be of the. That would be exactly the kind of bogus desire, something that is totally unrealistic, that's related to the spectacle. So where in this text should we look to next? Is there more stuff in chapter one that we still. There's a lot of imagery packed into here. Are there quotes we want to pull out of there still to get at what makes this a pseudo world, I guess is what interests me.