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

0:00 Wes: Yeah, why not just have fun to say, this world, this is a lot of fun, let's do it. And what's wrong with it?

0:06 Dylan: And also what makes for an authentic experience and what kind of level of mediation we're talking about. One of the reasons I've been thinking about in particular is that I've renewed a certain kind of obsession with motorcycles recently, and particularly fast motorcycles. And I think that's a pretty authentic experience myself. And I would be happy to articulate that as the kind of dialed in, very, very present in the moment kind of experience. It seems to me exactly what one would talk about when being in the moment, doing any number of other things, walking down the street in Paris, experiencing what comes before you in the city, or a really good meal, or your interaction with friends. I mean, all kinds of ways that the criteria of the authentic experience is not clear to me, that it's, for instance, unmediated by technology.

1:00 Mark: Yeah, certainly you could see a description both ways in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig describes that riding the motorcycle is way better than being in a car where you have. It sounds very much like the spectacle that you're looking at everything through a window. But I think you could make just as good an argument that the fact that a motorcycle is loud, it separates you from the sounds of nature that it is. It has been so commoditized and imagined and you know, all the classic The Fonz and James Dean or, you know, the famous cool motorcyclist. You just must be brainwashed by your.

1:41 Dylan: The Fonz and James Dean, those which you come up with as the cool motorcyclist.

1:46 Mark: You must have been brainwashed by your days watching Happy Days. I mean, this just falls in general, the false consciousness thing that he wants to accuse everybody who. This is a text that is embraced by folks. This was recommended to me by. Actually, many of our listeners have recommended this to me, but most recently one of my Facebook friends who hosts the Revolutionary Left Radio podcast. There's a group of people that I see Facebook posts by that are uniformly like, they don't think that Trump is an exceptional thing. They think that that is just symptomatic of the fundamental bankruptcy of the system.

And I think Debord is definitely in this category of person that he explicitly denounces near the end of the book. Any kind of. Of half hearted. You can't do a sociological critique of the spectacle because sociology itself is a tool of the spectacle. You know, you can't criticize the wastefulness of affluent people because it normalizes the wastefulness of everybody else. You know, yes, it's not as bad as the worst things, but dwelling on the worst things, doing critique, if you don't do it in quite the right way is not enough and actually undermines any kind of critique.

It's just the spectacle ends up winning. And the same thing, my tagline when I introduce myself here from a quote of him, is that if you just denounce the spectacular system in the abstract, you could even use this exact language that Debord is using and agree with the things Debord is saying. And if it's not coupled to revolutionary action, then really it's just another form of the spectacle. It's just you being distracted. So all this contemplation, all this philosophy, this is stuff that's classically dismissed by Marxists like Debord as being a distraction from real action.

And you're in false consciousness. You think you're enlightened, but you're still sleeping.

3:42 Dylan: Yeah, there's purity involved, right? That's one of the challenges in the language, right?

3:47 Mark: There's a move to purity even while he's very conscious. He's got these whole chapters about the history of class consciousness. This chapter four, which we mostly can ignore the proletariat as subject and representation, but where he's just looking at actual revolutions or attempted revolutions or the movements in various countries and how he's critical of how unity breaks down, how people get purist in some certain way, and it ends up excluding a lot of people that could legitimately help the movement. It seems like something that's an essential part of this kind of ideological critique, that to make things happen, you would need to work together with others.

Well, what's going to make those others somebody that you could work with is that they've woken up in the same way that you have. And so that's what his whole the situation is. And I think this is ultimately what the authenticity is supposed to amount to. It's not a matter of just something in itself that is good. And you can go back and be like Heidegger's favorite rural farmers, but if you are awoken from the spectacle in the proper way, then you can act with other people to do revolutionary things. But if inevitably there's going to be a lot of disagreement on exactly what consequences come from being awoken in this way, then your revolutionary movement's never going to get off the ground.

You're never going to have enough people unless they fall under your sway. You can't get independent thinkers to work together in that way.

5:13 Seth: Wasn't that the reality of all these competing socialists and communist factions that at least as far as the representation is to, you know, that there were all these different factions that ended up competing with each other and fighting for supremacy and all that. And something about the Bolshevists, the way that they were able to succeed in the revolution and then ultimately succumb to Stalin. But this idea that the revolutionary practice, the response, okay, so the response to the hegemony of this spectacle and to capitalist ownership of production and all this is that there needs to be this spontaneous class consciousness which somehow motivates people to action, but somehow doesn't turn it into factionalization, like, where it's like, oh, you know, I think the Trinity is three in one.

And one says, oh, well, the Trinity is just an appearance. It's really a unity, you know, and. And part of what Debord is saying, and this, I think, I don't want to say it contradicts because he doesn't provide much of a positivist program. But it's this notion that struggle, so he says in section 55, right. The struggles between different powers for control of the same socioeconomic system are officially presented as fundamental antagonisms, but they actually reflect the system's fundamental unity both internationally and within each nation. The idea that there's a true antagonism to the system would be to opt out.

It would be what you just described, Mark.

6:45 Unknown speaker: Yep.

6:45 Mark: To even vote at all, to purchase things.

6:48 Seth: You know, there's this idea that I guess maybe you would grow your own food or, you know, something along those lines. I'm not exactly sure what that would look like. But anything that stimulates antagonism that is not a negation of the society of the spectacle. If it's not a negation of the spectacle itself, and it's not a negation that's done through some means that isn't already sanctioned by the spectacle, then it's just part of the spectacle. The society of the spectacle sets up false oppositions and antagonisms. So this whole thing was spurred by.

You were talking about the affluent and their consumption. They don't know any better either. Right. That's a function within the system. They serve as models. Affluent people who can over consume serve as models for people who have less means to aspire to, even though they can never achieve that. Right. And so this apparent antagonism between the 1% and the 99% is all still within the society of the spectacle. To truly have an opposition to spectacle, it would have to be something that would negate the spectacle itself. It would have to be direct experience.

It would have to cut through image and representation and do so in such a way that it was not somehow mediated. You would have to have a direct experience with other people. This is the fundamental problem here, is that to oppose the spectacle, individuals have to have a direct experience with each other. The proletariat, this class consciousness, they have to come to some kind of spontaneous awareness of direct relationship that's not mediated by an image or representation and then suddenly go, wow, we just woke up, we have been being lied to on all these different ways and now we're going to march arm in arm like those, you know, Soviet era propaganda films and what have you.

But the reality is, what happens is that even when people realize that they're being screwed by the system and they come together, they end up in factions because there isn't this spontaneous enlightenment movement. And if you try to enlighten them by means of theory, you end up getting wrapped up in the spectacle already again.

8:57 Mark: And in fact, the enlightened position is explicitly dialectical. The way he talks about at the end that it's not that you can just say, here's my enlightened position, and then you can list a bunch of quotes from the society of the spectacle. No, it's sort of as soon as something becomes conventional Wisdom, then it's no longer true. What's essential is to get a certain novelty, to really to grasp the truth yourself, rather than just be mouthing what has been pushed on you in some way. And so that's like Plato's question, can you teach virtue?

I mean, not really. You could try to do these things, walk through Paris authentically and stuff, and hope that that builds something up in you. But learning some kind of dogma. The best that a text could do like this would be to inspire you to think for yourself, not to actually tell you what to think. Because the important part. Part is to stop being passive.

9:52 Seth: Right.

9:53 Mark: The spectacle keeps us in passivity. And maybe this is actually a way of making it less unattainable than what I was just describing of a Buddhist. Like enlightenment that we cannot possibly share. No, we just have to actually participate. So getting together, you know, I guess it's just, again, are you having an authentic conversation with someone, or is it something that is part of the process of putting you to sleep? So society provides us with bars for hanging out in. And so are those places a symposia of honest.

10:26 Wes: Yeah. So he says at one point, the overwhelming realities of present day social existence prevent people from actually living events for themselves. This is 200. And this is actually one of the clear statements of the positive versus the negative in Debords. This idea, you know, we have this idea of living events for ourselves as opposed to being spectators in the.

10:46 Unknown speaker: Right.

Right.

10:47 Wes: In a way. Right. That's what the spectacle essentially does, is it turns every relation in society, everything we do, into. Changes it from praxis, from a real doing, into just spectacle, into being a kind of an audience and not really related to the thing that we're apparently relating to.

11:04 Mark: I was hoping, Wes, to get you to relate this to the question you asked last time for Vertigo, which we didn't actually talk about so much, is what is a spectator?

11:13 Wes: And this kind of goes towards Dylan's criticisms and the kind of thing I was thinking about while reading it, because with Lacan's idea that there's no such thing as a sexual relationship and the role of the imaginary, which is functionally very similar to the spectacle, is that we are relating to our fetishized ideas of people more than to people themselves. Or maybe we are sometimes, maybe we aren't, other times. Maybe there's a whole spectrum of that. But you can see an account in which that's just basic psychology, right. That inauthenticity and a role of a spectacle or an imaginary and the way it kind of intervenes between an authentic, real relationship between people, you could give that account completely independently of capitalism.

Of course, you can link them up too. And lots of people have. I mean, I'm reminded in Vertigo where Judy says, well, why can't you just love me for who I am? This whole idea of being loved for who you are, are. And the kind of the idea that haunts the movie, which is that, well, maybe there is no who you are. Maybe there is just the image, maybe there is just the covering, the appearance. And that's the kind of same sort of question that always pops up in my mind when people talk about the authenticity and actually living events for themselves.

And I have to wonder, well, am I living events or am I just completely in the inauthentic mode? Where am I in all of this? And is it even possible? Is this just a sort of utopianism? Which I know he explicitly rejects in this book, but it sounds almost like a kind of utopianism where we invent this world in which there are these real authentic relationships between people, as opposed to when I think a lot of that human relationships are complex and there's a great deal of authenticity, but it's run through with so much other stuff that you might think that there's nothing authentic about it.

And then you might blame that on the system when it's just sort of human. It's the human condition. So I don't know, that's all.

13:11 Dylan: So one thing along the line that I got thinking about was something that is, I think, relatively modern with modern media is the notion of having a brand, of being a brand, and that you would tend to yourself as if you are a brand and you would market yourself in that way. I think there are some things that are different about that notion, particularly the really self conscious notion that you are a brand and you have a kind of double life. Because when you think of yourself as a brand, you would often contrast that with your sort of, let's call it your normal self or your unbranded self or whatever.

And that you would be manifestly understanding a mask that you would wear in interacting with people that you would self consciously understand as further away from your. Or a slice of your. Something like your real self compared to other kinds of interactions that you have with people. And what Wes was saying about whether or not that question, can't you just love me for who I am? And whether or not those things are. There's some content to the notion of just who I am, I'd think about the cases in which we feel pretty clearly that we're not being who we are.

And so that would make presuppose that there's something more authentic about us somewhere, even if there are some multiplicities to that.

14:43 Mark: I think we should acknowledge how much Debord is aware of Hegel's view here. He brings up Hegel a few times. If you go back to our Hegel on self consciousness episode, we talked about this in several other contexts. That if he's talking about an authentic self, it's not the fact that each one of us has this authentic self that we're born with, but that the self is something that is grown socially. And just that what he's pointing to is how capitalist system does not allow a full growth of self at all. That it sort of by default sets you up wanting what other people want, wanting what other people have told you to want. The bounds of acceptable behavior as laid out in the spectacle.

15:28 Wes: Right. The key to an authentic self is, and I was just thinking this before you're even saying it, Mark, is this knowing what you really want as opposed to being given all these desires which aren't really yours and living those desires.

15:44 Seth: There's another layer of this. He kicks off chapter nine with a quote from Phenomenology of Spirit. Self consciousness exists in itself and for itself only insofar as it exists in and for another self consciousness. That is, it exists only by being recognized. And if you tie that back to the theme of isolation, alienation that we talked about earlier, the capitalist system that literally not just physically, but emotionally isolates human beings and their own humanity from each other other, it means that you cannot actually become fully self conscious because you never have a direct experience with another self consciousness. It's all mediated by these images and these representations. And so you never have the chance to actually fully inhabit who you are in the Hegelian dialectical sense, which of

16:36 Mark: course, according to Hegel's dialectic, which Marx picked up on, it's the one who is bested. It's kind of the slave in the situation that can actually change some sort of self consciousness. The masters in this is not something that Debord actually says. I don't believe explicitly that the ones on top in this situation cannot attain self consciousness. But he does positively say many times in here that his hope is still in. Workers of the world unite. It's the workers, the ones who have been directly alienated from their labor, who have some chance to attain self consciousness.

17:12 Wes: Well, really, I mean, it's A dialectical combination, right, of master and slave. That's the thing that comes out as self consciousness. You have to have both. You have to. To be a slave. It means your consciousness simply is a function of other consciousnesses and what others want. And to be the master would be to be the one for whom others consciousnesses are simply functions. You rule their desires with yours and their consciousness with yours. Of course, we are all both combinations of that. So I think inevitably we're all. Even if we about authenticity in terms of what we really want. Well, inevitably what we really want is also determined socially. We can't distinguish between them in that way.

17:54 Mark: Right.

17:55 Wes: If I want to be a writer, I mean, there's a lot of reasons why I would want that, including what my mom wanted for me or what I saw in another person I idolized. And then at the core, if we're really talking about what I want, there's just the core experience of writing. Writing and whether or not that's joyful. So you could separate the actual experience and the enjoyability of an experience from whether I'm doing it for status or prestige or because other people wanted that for me. But that separation is a little tenuous because I actually can get real enjoyment in writing because of what it does at the level of some fantasy that I have of what others desire, whether it's the readers or parental approval or something like that.

So all that stuff gets tricky, I think. And also the spectacle is a bunch of signifiers of other consciousnesses that are formative of our own consciousness. Right? It's a signifier of what we should desire or what is desirable in itself, what everyone else desires. That's what the spectacle tells us. And so if we are going to have something authentic and know what we want, I think it's trickier than just saying I can divorce myself from the spectacle or I can divorce myself from the wants of others. We have to do something else that acknowledges the slave portion of our self consciousness.

And I don't know how to articulate that.

19:20 Mark: Doesn't it seem like that the parent could take the role of the master in this and originally has some desires for the kid, kind of tells the kid how to feel. And then at some point the kid, in very much the way Hegel has described, described, gains some independence, reflects upon the object that the parent's expectations, has created this personality, how you see me. And I can take that as the kid. I can take that as an object and say, well, actually I transcend that. I escape that. So I can Develop a self in that way. But chances are the way that I'm going to rebel is going to be very much typical of my generation.

It's going to be a cliche of some sort. It's exactly the kind of thing that Debord is going to say is one of those conflicts that's actually illusory, that both sides are really part of the spectacle. You're buying into youthful rebellion and against the establishment. And no, the rebellion is just one of the things that's served up for you as one of the spectacular options that's distracting you from real self consciousness. So it's again, these accusations of false consciousness that I just don't know how to judge. You're doing it wrong.

20:26 Wes: Being a self part of the measure of this is privation, right? He talks about that early on. If I went to a therapist and I wanted to figure out, well, is writing, is that something I really want, or is it just something I feel like I have to do and it's making me miserable. And a therapist would try to figure out whether or not it actually is something more like a compulsion or actually something enjoyable. And Debord talks early on about the way in which the satisfaction of the spectacle is a pseudo satisfaction. It's actually a kind of privation.

So consumable survival must constantly expand because it never ceases to include privation. This is 44. If augmented survival never comes to resolution, if there's no point where it might stop expanding, this is because it is itself stuck in the realm of privation. It may gild poverty, but it cannot transcend it. And he talks about poverty in this broader sense, right? Not just material poverty, but what we might call spiritual or psychical poverty. The task becomes to figure out whether you're in a state of privation, whether you're in a state of kind of psychological poverty, or whether you're in a state of abundance doing something.

And I think, again, part of the reason why people go to therapy is that it actually can be very tricky to figure out, what do I want? Is this really enjoyable? All of those questions, I think those are relevant to this question of authenticity and really, what's the way he puts it in 200, again, actually living events for themselves, as opposed to being something like a spectator really, to one's own existence that has been determined ulteriorly, or something like that.

22:01 Mark: I just did a search on pseudo in here and found there are 44 instances of pseudo, very pseudo things, pseudo

22:08 Wes: power, pseudo playful enthusiasms, pseudo world, pseudo nature, pseudo use 62.

22:17 Mark: That's in chapter three, unity and division within Appearances. The false choices offered by spectacular abundance, choices based on the juxtaposition of competing yet mutually reinforcing spectacles and of distinct yet interconnected roles signified and embodied primarily by objects, develop into struggles between illusory qualities designed to generate fervent allegiance to quantitative trivialities. Fallacious archaic oppositions are revived regionalisms and racisms which serve to endow mundane rankings in the hierarchy of consumption with a magical ontological superiority. And pseudo playful enthusiasms are aroused by an endless succession of ludicrous competitions from sports to elections.

22:58 Wes: So I'm not allowed to like football?

23:01 Unknown speaker: No.

23:02 Wes: That's what I think when I read things like that.

23:03 Dylan: Do you think Phil Collins was thinking of Guy Debord when he wrote Sussudio?

23:10 Mark: I don't think he was thinking at all. I think he was. I think he was pseudo things thinking. I certainly, as somebody who's kind of snooty about sports and has been since a young age, I always feel just sports Mark, just are you playing this? Being a sports spectator, not playing a sport, that's fine. But being a sports spectator. And that's exactly the kind of thing that he seems to be objecting to here. If you are using a sport as a way of experiencing the world directly and getting all sweaty, then that's great. But I guess, right, that the problem here is just the fact that you're watching it.

23:48 Wes: Well, the way it's used, right. We look at. Maybe I'm just talking about myself, but if you're watching an NFL game and you're watching these sort of heroic actions by people, part of the pleasure of it is identifying with the actors, with the athletes and the great things that they do. And I think imagining oneself in the position of doing such great things and then generically imagining those sorts of potentialities for one's own life. This goes back to the board saying the spectacle defines what's possible for us. And again, to refer back to the Lacan and the imaginary.

It's a way of looking, a kind of mirror and seeing an image of ourselves as more powerful, more put together, more accomplished than we are. And it can be a way to. You might think it could be something aspirational, a way to. And this is actually the way I think of it sometimes watching sports like it's. It's motivating, like, wow, yeah, I want to do something cool, awesome now, too. But it could also be a way not to do anything. It could be a way to simply be complacent and live through other people, simply vicariously enjoy their accomplishments and always live in the fantasy world of being about to go out and accomplish something but never really doing it.

So it becomes that kind of opiate, to use Marx's word.

25:09 Dylan: That sounds partially right. I mean, there's something also about sport which I think is part of the spectacle of it, is the partisanship of it. It has to do with. Not that you would be Clay Matthews or Aaron Rodgers. I don't know who you root for, Wes.

25:27 Wes: Those are my choices to Green Bay Packers.

25:31 Dylan: There you go. I am in Wisconsin.

25:35 Wes: It's either the Green Bay packers or the Green Bay Packers.

25:38 Unknown speaker: Take your pick.

25:39 Dylan: There's something about the partisanship of it where it's not so much that you imagine being them or it's that they're on your team, which is a little bit of a different thing. It's something like the way any kind of group identification works, where you feel invested in the outcome of whatever conflict it is and you're proud and excited about their winning and you're dejected when they lose. And that could be your local high school volleyball team, or it could be your NFL team, or it could be your country.

26:14 Unknown speaker: Right.

26:14 Dylan: There's something about that that's going on that's, I think, also related to the spectacle of it.

26:20 Mark: And there are obviously various degrees in which you can be involved that if I go out and have a street fight as part of my gang or

26:30 Wes: my political mark's former life as a soccer hoodlum,

26:35 Mark: then I'm participating.

26:37 Dylan: Right.

26:39 Mark: I'm not just being spectacular. But what's essential here is that these are fallacious, archaic oppositions that regionalisms and racisms, presumably, which is your sports team, is also. Also fallacious in some important way. Whereas if I'm rooting for my son's team playing volleyball, well, don't I have an authentic relationship to my son and such that there's something less fallacious about my wanting to root for that and being amused by that and identifying or caring about the outcome, or at least how things are going with him.

27:12 Wes: As long as you don't beat up any of his classmates.

27:15 Dylan: Who are you? We should do an episode about sport

27:20 Mark: at some point and get Jeff Gillooly to be the guest.

27:25 Wes: We have someone who suggested that and he wants to be a guest. I forget, who's Jeff Gillooly?

27:29 Mark: He was the guy who kneecapped the figure skater on behalf of his girlfriend, Tonya Harding.

27:35 Dylan: And yes, yes, he was.

27:37 Seth: Oh, Jesus.

27:39 Dylan: There was an article in the New York Times today about. Apparently in Finland there's this significant rise of sort of non traditional sports like swamp soccer and wife throwing

27:53 Wes: stuff like this.

27:54 Dylan: And this picture of these guys in shorts and T shirts standing in this swamp that was like knee deep that they're playing soccer.

28:04 Wes: That's when you've really run out of things to do.

28:07 Seth: How are there swamps in Finland in the summer?

28:12 Mark: Probably they're pseudo swamps.

28:14 Wes: They have exhausted their spectacle and they're really reaching at this point.

28:19 Seth: Yeah, it is the swamp of Finland and the Finland that is the swamp.

28:25 Mark: Talking about the difference between the spectacle as we've now been talking about it, is something we actually understand and capitalism. Because it seems like Dylan was saying before there that you had the ancient Roman Colosseum, you had all these things that are spectacles in an objectionable way that are supposed to put us to sleep and keep us from serious action, certainly politically disruptive action. Again, is this just a matter of capitalism amps it up. It makes these spectacles into commodities.

28:56 Seth: Yeah.

28:57 Mark: Okay, so it's just that much more pervasive. But it's not that spectacle is a new thing.

29:01 Wes: But is it more pervasive too? I mean, I'm not so sure about that.

29:04 Seth: You have to distinguish between the use of spectacle, which is like a big show, and putting on the common definition of the word spectacle, which is to put on some big showy thing and distract versus. What he's trying to say is just the notion that direct experience of something is replaced by a representation of that experience. So you don't go and actually hike in the forest anymore. You, you watch, I don't know, fucking naked and afraid or whatever the, you know, whatever the television show is, right. It's like you feel like you're experiencing what it's like to actually be out in the forest because you're watching a television show about it or you're seeing Facebook posts about it, right?

Like you're not actually experiencing it anymore. It's. Your experience is mediated by images. And that doesn't necessarily have to be like a spectacle, you know, with like, like Cirque du Soleil with clowns on giant, you know, 20 foot unicycles or anything. It's just that you recede into this position of isolation, isolated from yourself, isolated from others, isolated from nature. And your experience of everything is mediated by storytelling, by representations, in our case by computers. Right. And so that is something that's qualitatively different about the modern world.

Now whether you want to say it's the modern world, and technology versus, say capitalism versus feudalism versus whatever else. That might be a more interesting conversation. Whether it's technology that makes this possible and capitalism exploits that technology, or whether it's capitalism per se. And it would be do that, say, with whatever technology was available. I think you could probably tell a story about how this was organic because the technology of the transmission of ideas and the mediation of relationships with people have been trending towards this for quite some time.

Even during feudal periods and all that sort of thing. Right. The book, the printing press and so on.

31:03 Mark: You just sit there passively in front of a book. You're not participating with that book.

31:08 Seth: Not compared to sitting around the fire with like an oral historian, a troubadour.

31:13 Dylan: It makes me think of Socrates criticism of writing. Right. You know, or Plato's criticism of poetry. All these criticism of image based representations that separate you from the truth. It seems like there's a common thread there. Right?

31:29 Wes: Yeah. He actually talks about writing too.

31:31 Seth: Then he wrote a book.

31:32 Wes: It's section 131.

31:34 Mark: Just as a historical thing. Right.

31:37 Wes: Well, writing, okay, so writing is the ruler's weapon. In writing, language attains its complete independence as a mediation between consciousnesses. But this independence coincides with the independence of separate power, the mediation that shapes society. With writing there appears a consciousness that is no longer carried and transmitted directly among the living. And in personal memory, the memory of the administration of society. Writings, and he quotes Novalis writings. The thoughts of the state archives are its memory. So yeah, I think writing is problematic. I think there are connections here to, to what Dylan is talking about.

32:14 Mark: And I think you could argue either way about what should Debord think of the advent of the Internet. You could see that, oh, this is just exactly what he predicted. We are just. We're up to our asses in spectacle.

32:26 Seth: We're just.

32:27 Mark: Our phones are hounding us at all times.

32:31 Unknown speaker: We have.

32:31 Seth: There's no escape from tweeting that

32:36 Wes: it's

32:37 Mark: a swamp of specific spectacle, the socially dictated mode of being. On the other hand, it's much more participatory that he explicitly says the things that he objects to about the communication aspect of the spectacle is that it is profoundly one way and certainly most of it is still that. But yeah, we can make this podcast. We can talk about. I don't know if power's going to hear us. You could say this is pseudo action. If we were doing this for political reasons. Well, the political is so big and it's operating at such a high level that nothing that we could do to say it's chattering among insects compared to what could actually accomplish anything. So I guess you'd have to dismiss all of our actions on the Internet, all of our likings on Facebook, that those are just pseudo actions. They're not real expressions of anything.

33:25 Dylan: It's poser participation.

33:27 Wes: It's mediated as well, remember? So the mediation part of things is important to him as well. Whether it's two way or one way. I was thinking of have section four where he says the spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by images. And then the question is, well, what relation between people isn't mediated by images? Which I think is actually a difficult question. But at the very least, between that and his other talk, I think of mediation versus what's not immediate. We pick up the iPhone and we can use that as a way of avoiding people even while we supposedly connect to them.

We could text people in a casual way or just interact with them through Facebook and liking stuff in a way that's left less demanding of our time, of our emotions, of any sort of commitment. The devices where we can have these mediated forms of communication with people, they damp down the relatedness and the how much is at stake and how much emotional investment there is in such relationships. Obviously that's a common critique of Facebook, but I mean, I think that is a real consequence of mediation. And you know, with someone who, like, I didn't have a computer in college and I didn't have a cell phone until I was 30 or something, I know what it's like before all the.

I barely kind of remember it, but before this post apocalyptic nightmare, the way people relate definitely, I think has changed.

34:47 Dylan: I agree that there are plenty of things that are different about the way we relate to the world and that technology, for instance, affects our lives. And there is a mediation there that's worth being very attentive to reading through it once I got over some of the language of it. There's a lot of that critique that centers around being a free human being interacting with the world. That resonates with me. What I find the theoretical underpinning less persuasive than the observation itself. So attributing it in some kind of straightforward way is.

It's all the economy, it's all commodity or those kinds of things. There is something to that, there's something to that account. For instance, it's not as if merely reading a book or merely watching a movie means that I have an alienated experience. It doesn't seem at all that straightforward. And Maybe it's not a rhetorical nature. I don't know how you guys would characterize the way in which the language works, the. That it's sort of soapboxy, declarative. It is that I find myself instantly feeling like that there's a kind of puritanism and religiosity to it that I find hard to take serious.

It just gets kind of overwrought. Even if I see some significant part of the point to it and sympathetic to it, I do get turned by the language a bit, I have to say.

36:14 Wes: I know I really enjoyed this whole thing. I mean, really, really enjoyed it. But by the end of it, man, it's just like, God, do you hate everything? Is it. Does everything suck? Is it like nothing is good enough? And it begins to sound like the kvetching of an old person where it's curmudgeonly. There's some ideal in which. And then I'm thinking, well, you know, maybe life is just like this, and it's not entirely terrible. There are things to say about the drawbacks, but it's not this dramatic. This is what we're stuck in socially, and we need a revolution to get out of it.

Maybe it's just this is life, and the revolutions are going to be personal little victories that we have, the moments of authenticity. They're not going to happen all the time. They're going to happen sometimes, and they're going to happen with effort. And I'm sort of committing the crime of denying that this is all just a matter of. This is a very popular idea today, right? That everything that's wrong with the world is just a matter of an improper social or economic arrangement, that if we fix it, people are going to get that. And that is the kind of thing that I'm more inclined to the psychosocial model, in which I'm focused less on the idea of a sort of corrupt culture that makes people inauthentic and just on the fact that human existence is complicated and people are flawed and that this stuff is always going to be a part of our lives and even the most virtuous of people is going to be afflicted with some of this spectacle stuff.

37:40 Mark: Sounds like the spectacle has kicked your ass.

37:43 Wes: Yeah, I'm just. What does de Beauvoir call it? The subman.

37:49 Mark: But having that attitude still is not incompatible with buying a lot of the specific critiques, you know, buying that, yes, it is bad that we are so consumerist. It is bad that we are enslaved by work, that we are blackmailed he uses that term that this relationship between want and survival, what we need to survival and this, this augmented survival as he calls it. There's something very funny about that. We also haven't talked about his critiques of modern takes on space and time. So in particular like I thought of Thoreau and his talk about time as something that you can sell as a bunch of interchangeable seconds of the day.

All these things. Just the fact that I hate to log my time or at least to track my time time for jobs in a very accurate way. I don't like that. I would rather kind of let natural rhythms flow and do things and then note that I did them. But I don't like to keep track of minutes like that seems.

38:53 Seth: I'm sorry, when would you like to start, Mark? At the nones. At Vespers. I finished at Vespers. I'm sorry, they don't, they don't have a Vespers tab on this time tracking. Mark, you are the Rousseau. Compliment to the Debord critique.

39:12 Wes: I'm on pre industrial cyclical time. Thank you.

39:20 Mark: I found that part kind of insightful just in terms of how when people had to just work the land then yes, there was this cyclical time that was imposed and that until they could beat that and not be slaves to that, that then he says really history could not take place. That you couldn't actually sort of accomplish anything. You couldn't think about large scale projects. He reads very much like a Nietzschean. I mean I think the situationist thing is very much about making your life an art on a day to day basis. So very much like what we talked about in the discussions of Nietzsche.

So yeah, being free of artificial like it's fine if maybe if nature imposes some sort of regularity. I'm must eat and urinate every once in a while. Like that's fine. I don't feel like I'm a slave to that. That I need to overcome that through some monk like conquering of the self. But if something is going to be just like the weekend, the work days versus the weekend is just some freaking arbitrary social convention that is going to try to tell me what days I can sleep in and what days I can't. Well screw that. That seems I would have a more free life life without such structure.

40:33 Wes: Would you get much done?

40:35 Mark: Well, the idea is if you can take ownership of history, your personal history.

40:41 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

40:41 Mark: And you get sucked into projects.

40:44 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

40:44 Mark: It's the project that drives things. It's not.

40:46 Wes: But projects are also, also work and it's. I thinking again, a Hume's account of human vanity and laziness and all that stuff. I think that's actually a big factor and structure and accountability and stuff like that actually is important, at least for me, motivationally important, even when it comes to getting the things that I like to do done.

41:05 Seth: I listened to one of the podcasts that you sent us, Mark, on the way back from Houston today. The conversation, I don't remember the guy's name, Will something or other, with Will Self, the author.

41:17 Mark: Yeah. Who wrote one of the introductions to the recent versions of Society of the Spectacle.

41:22 Seth: There was a conversation there with questions from the audience, and they were talking about some other works that came out during the same time. And I don't know if it was a situationalist, but they were talking about somebody else who was talking about the freedom for Leisure, like that. It's not just about the opposition of projects that are given to you by capitalists and projects that you want to pursue on your own. Like, yeah, I want to go do art or whatever, but I can't make a living, so I have to work at McDonald's. It's about, like, the freedom to do nothing.

The freedom to lay around and not be beholden to anybody else. This idea, there was a strain of that thought, as one of these Marxist threads is, you know, look, part of the goal of the Marxist revolution should not just be that from each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs. Right. That the whole concept of the productive society, whether it's run by capitalists or run by the collective proletariat, ignores the needs or the desires of those who want to just lay around.

42:26 Wes: And look, the solution is just to stay single. That's really. You're not gonna have any problems.

42:38 Seth: Oh, boy.

42:39 Wes: Lots of me time.

42:41 Dylan: Lots of me time.

42:47 Mark: Some more of these things that we discussed in our New Work episode, a vaguely Marxist thing from a few years ago now, have gotten even into the news more often in terms of, is automation making jobs go away? Is that ever going to happen? Or various economists saying, yes, that's going to happen, or no, no, always. New needs are developed. And another one of these things was actually considering a universal income. There was just a Wall Street Journal or whatever editorial about this very recently from a conservative economist saying, yeah, that would be just devastating to a whole generation of young people who would just lie around.

That's not a reason for me to reject the idea out of hand, but it's certainly something that Frithjof himself, when we talked to him, said, yeah, no, I don't support the idea of a universal basic income. Because a good half of his new work program is getting people to figure out out what would actually motivate them and make them not want to lie around. And so that lying around is one of those kind of pleasures of the beasts, just like Mill's higher and lower pleasure, that if you know both of them, you're not going to choose the lower. So, yeah, I think you would still sometimes lie around if you have purpose in your life, and that would be fine.

And maybe, in fact, we should not be dictating how much of your day you get to lie around. That should be something that is between you and your constitution to work out and you and your will and what you want out of life. But certainly work would need to be done, has to be done. If Debord is right that we have been crippled by our current economy or economic way of life into not having authentic desires. We're just used to being bossed around. We don't even know how to be free at this point. So it seems like a significant portion of, of this enlightenment project or of the revolutionary project is to get people to figure out actual meanings in their lives, figure out something that will get them out of bed.

I'm not sure that I see that in this text. Maybe because he's coming from the point of view of this group of artists who, they have a lot of desire, they have a lot of passion, they have a lot of things they want to do. It's really not a problem for them. So I guess that's going to be their solution for everybody else, is that everybody else has to wake up in a similar way. And once you have these experiences of authentic time, authentic being with yourself, then you are going to be enlivened in a way that is just going to make it so you are not going to be a slug for the rest of your life.

It is ultimately a fairly depressing way to live to be a slug.

45:20 Wes: Yeah, I think there's a lot to be said for necessity and that that part of reason why people actually work a lot and overwork is that the freedom, it's too much. And being asked to figure out what you really want or even to do what you really want can be too much. Yes, Authenticity, real. I think of Larry David and curb your enthusiasm now. Like the demand for some sort of stop and chat, like demands made on him for presumably real social contact. And he's just like openly. I just don't want that. I'd rather be a isolated curmudgeon most of the time. And how many authentic moments in actual activity can we really have in our life? And so again, this is the argument for external structure and for some level of leavening out our day to day with some amount of shallowness just for the sake of not being overwhelmed.

46:23 Dylan: I couldn't agree more with the idea that doing what you really want to do is really hard and that it requires a kind of discipline and dedication that is often frankly, just exhausting. And there are times where you have to learn to say that what you really want to do is go sit at the lake. Which is what I'm going to do tomorrow. I'm going to on vacation, which is a terribly bourgeois thing to do.

46:54 Wes: I know, leisure time.

46:57 Seth: It's part of the cyclical work. Weekday weekend.

47:03 Wes: Are you going to be looking at the lake Dylan or the lake, unquote?

47:13 Dylan: Only if you put it in italics.

47:17 Mark: He's probably not even going to be there. He's going to be reading the article for the next episode.

47:23 Dylan: I won't be present. I won't even be present at my vacation. I'll be somewhere else.

47:30 Mark: So I really want to. The same group of nagging leftists that like the show still. We get comments like, I keep wanting you guys to cover some more hard leftist stuff, but then every time you do, you really disappoint me because you're so dismissive, because you really don't take it seriously. Because it doesn't fundamentally change you, it doesn't wake you up in the way that some of these people would like. So that we really do see the Republicans and Democrats as two sides of the same coin and whatever other things are supposed to come out of that and see that we're just so messed up, we're in such a messed up situation that that whether it's an actual violent revolution, but just something significant would really have to happen.

It can't be a matter of incremental or individualist solutions to these things. Do you feel like you have met that challenge that you've let this reading seep into your soul?

48:23 Wes: I mean, I consider myself a libertarian socialist of the Orwellian stripe. And I think Debord is very close and I think you could still call yourself that and have lots and lots of questions about all the details. So for instance, and this is something that actually the board criticizes, so I would differ with him on this. But I think, as I said in our Marx episode, the way to think about Marx is to engage in a kind of science fiction thought experiment. When you say, all right, what does technology look like at its ultimate? And how does that affect society?

What happens when we all have robot slaves? What happens when. And all the work can be done by machines and we're just free to enjoy the benefits of that? What happens then? I think that's a really important question. But I also see, and I think Marx, although Marx was conflicted, you have to meet the right technological requirements before socialism is actually something that's feasible. It's not just, hey, I'm going to seize the utilities and the corporations or I'm going to establish a dictatorship, I'm going to establish this, this oppressive totalitarian bureaucracy, or I'm going to wake myself up, or there have to be real material conditions on the ground before it becomes something feasible.

And that's where I think I differ from a lot of people who today call themselves socialists who think that they are going to. And Debord is sort of the stripe who think that the way forward is a kind of education. It's a kind of consciousness raising self enlightenment. I think that is much more pessimistic about the usefulness of that and much more optimistic about, as Marx called them, material conditions. And what might happen when those conditions are ripe and when those conditions have inevitable social and economic effects. Is it a matter of waiting for the technology to get advanced enough and then the inherent contradictions and then the inevitable revolution and sort of Marx's theory of history?

Or is that just. Again, Debord criticizes that point of view as a kind of quietism. No, it's not enough. And no, also, the answer is not to be a Stalinist. The answer is not the totalitarian bureaucracy. You don't try to force the hand of history either. Debord's solution and kind of the common solution, see in popular lefty discourse today is consciousness raising. In a sense, of course, it's the solution, the chosen solution of the academic left. Consciousness raising. We're just going to educate people. We're going to educate people about their privilege, we're going to educate people about inequality and all sorts of things.

And once they wake up, once they get woke, once enough people do that, that's the revolution. I think that's the way people think. And I think that's extraordinarily naive. And that's where I differ. So I can be a socialist, but not that kind of socialist.

51:18 Dylan: So I find myself being very sympathetic with the notion of trying to live authentically, to Try to interact with the world in as close a way as possible in other people. But I find when I read things like this, well, I find myself intrigued by the language and the images and some of it is quite persuasive. But I find myself having the same reaction that I do with many kinds of religious fervor where I'm not woke by it. Most of the points I get, but I'm not sympathetic with the all or nothing aspect of it. I do find myself thinking a little bit about whether the time. Something about the time is different. Seth, when he made the opening, gave a little bit of context of the kind of period of social unrest that was going on at the time. And I don't know if I would feel. Feel different than I do now. But that's my lame closing. I felt like I closed earlier.

52:19 Mark: So, Seth, anything else?

52:21 Seth: Man, I had so much. I got so many notes. There's so much to say about this. So apparently he wrote a follow up to this in 1985, something like that. 88, was it? 88 notes on society of the Spectacle. So he had a good 20 years of hindsight.

52:40 Wes: He tried to turn it into a franchise. Sorry, go ahead.

52:43 Seth: Anyway, that might be interesting. There's. We didn't even come close to getting. There's a lot more in the book, a lot more to say. It is not easy reading wrapped as it is in the language of consciousness raising Marxism. But so thinking about this, I recently, at some point in my memory that I can recall, I read Ralph Ellison's the Invisible man where there are some themes about the protagonist being appropriated by the communists in New York City to be a charismatic figure. And it made me think of what Wes was just saying about consciousness raising.

This idea that it's not enough to consciousness raise. In fact, you just thinking about Spinoza too, right? You can't speak to the vast majority of people in the language of enlightenment or rationality. You have to inspire them, you have to guide them them. And so what's required is charismatic figures. But charismatic figures who are delivering a simple message, that's the right message. And that of course never happens or never happens. Well, or never happens for an extended period of time. That's one of the problems. Another thing that struck me, there was a section between like 86 and 87 where he says something to the effect of revolutionary practice is the only true agent of negation, which I mentioned earlier.

Earlier. He says consciousness comes too soon. So consciousness comes too soon. So you need this education. And it made me think of Letters from a Birmingham Jail, which is a real throwback for us. It's going back about six years, I think, where the thrust of Martin Luther King's missive from jail is that you tell me to be patient, to be wait, that it'll all come in good time. But the reality is that revolutionary practice will always be inconvenient. It will always come at the wrong time. And it feels to me like this still has that what are the conditions, that there's a path out.

And I'm not convinced that the class structure that's articulated and the consciousness raising, the notion of a class, of a worker class and all that stuff makes as much sense now or. And I'm sure there are modern Marxists that can address that. And of course there's much in here that resonates with the modern spectacle that we have in the White House and what's been happening, you know, with the news cycle and the fact that every day there's some kind of a drama that's designed to bring you into a narrative and make you pick sides and get outraged about one thing or another.

And there's no rational discourse, there's no actual level headed dialectic or investigation or anything that goes into on. I'll end with this. There's a section 83 where he talks about utopian socialists that didn't understand that there are some social groups that have a vested interest in the status quo and they have the forces to maintain it and the false consciousness to reinforce it. And this is sort of an evolution of that critique of utopian socialists where it's not a specific group anymore that has a vested interest, it's the system itself, the system that needs to endlessly produce for the sake of producing more in order to generate capital.

Generating more capital. In this sense of production and consumption, it takes on a life of its own. And any individual player in that system doesn't understand how they're contributing to it. So I'm not even sure that there's a class anymore against which somebody could revolt. If the system now has a life of its own, if the spectacle is a completely autonomous thing, what good is it going to do us as little worker drones to rise up and destroy the people who own the means to production? All we can do is destroy all of the means of production and come up with an alternative mode of production.

And maybe that's artisanal, locally crafted vodka and local organic foods and you know, handcrafted, I don't know. But I would encourage anybody who's listening to the podcast. Who doesn't want to go and read Debord? Society of the Spectacle, which, by the way, is definitely worth reading and is a tremendous book. And it's difficult at times, but there's lots of. Good point. You know, there's plenty of tweetable content in it. Instead, they should rent John Carpenter's movie they Live starring Rowdy Roddy Piper, and that will give you everything you need to know about the society of the Spectacle.

57:15 Wes: Yeah, Rowdy Roddy Piper, artisanal. That's like the perfect example of the spectacle trying to harken back to like, you know, guild, the days of the guild and real craftsmanship and stuff that actually is just part of a mass producing society.

57:33 Seth: I mean, this is the one place where I saw, like, I was thinking of Zizek, because I saw this thing Zizek was talking about, about how conscientious consumerism, like, oh, I buy fair trade coffees and I don't buy palm oil, whatever. It's a myth we tell ourselves about the system that make us feel better about participating in it. And really the only way that it's not. You can't be a conscious consumer. You have to step out and abstain from consumerism at all if you want to truly negate the system.

58:00 Wes: Yeah, your clothes were made by children. That's.

58:05 Mark: I'm going to grow artisanal opium and I will give it to the masses. I will not sell it.

58:12 Wes: That will awaken them.

58:15 Mark: Yeah. So looking forward, this is certainly not going to be the last episode talking about how brainwashed we are. Baudrillard, the simulacrum and Simulacra has also been requested a lot. And of course there's another big stack of, whether Marxists or, you know, at least European leftists that Walter Benjamin and Marcuse and Habermas and et cetera, et cetera. I buy a lot of the individual critical points that our author has made here, but ultimately some of it just seems exaggerated in terms of the fundamental falsity of our. Of all of our experience because of the way that we've been brainwashed.

Like, no, I just don't buy that. And it seems very elitist. It seems like the kind of thing that, like, well, maybe I could buy that a lot of people are in this thing, but, you know, I'm a philosopher artist, so certainly I can't be brainwashed in this way. Like, and I don't want to. I don't know. I'm always suspicious of views that entail that kind of. It just they don't seem that helpful. That they seem again, kind of an exercise in reflection on your own moral superiority and how much more awake you are than all those sheeple out there.

59:24 Wes: Have you guys seen the Andy Samberg Saturday Night Live skit? Throw it on the ground. Yes, and I threw it on the ground. I'm not part of your system, so everyone should google that. And he's got like the Marxist worker get up too. That's what he's wearing. Like the communist intellectual thing and the glasses and the hat and everything. As much as I like the board, I do think of that. I was thinking that video occasionally while reading it, you know. Oh, you think he found a way out? Throw it on the ground. It's just part of the system.

1:00:00 Dylan: I'm on a boat.

1:00:02 Wes: Yeah, right. That's the other. That's the celebration of the commodity.

1:00:06 Dylan: Exactly. Back to back.

1:00:10 Seth: I don't want to extend this conversation, but V for vendetta.

1:00:16 Dylan: Okay.

1:00:16 Seth: Blow something up. Blow up a means of production. Don't talk about it, don't argue about it. It don't make a thing about it.

1:00:23 Wes: Just engage in revolutionary violence.

1:00:25 Seth: Just engage in revolutionary violence. Exactly.

1:00:28 Mark: Don't you think Debord would be more likely to deface partially offending violence, Deface the signs on the means of production to make it say something snarky so that it'll jar people out of their opiated sleep rather than actually blowing something up.

1:00:45 Wes: It's the means of seduction.

1:00:47 Seth: You're just suggesting that that would be a French way. A French would be to deface something as opposed to actually take violent revolutionary action. I think it's actually quite the opposite.

1:00:58 Mark: You make a collage.

1:01:00 Seth: The French are much more likely to strike, take things over, shut shit down, destroy it. They have a good revolutionary DNA that most of the rest of it, well, Americans have forgotten and I don't think the British have had in quite some time. Just speaking about our Western, the Spaniards though, the Buddhists.

1:01:18 Mark: As a transition to announcing our guest next time will be Robert Wright talking about his book, his new book, why Buddhism is True. These are all just the illusions of Samsara anyway and we don't have any. Not only not a true self, we have no self at all.

1:01:36 Seth: So there you go, speaking of being mediated by representation.

1:01:40 Wes: False self, no self.

1:01:42 Mark: There are some representations I would point people at, one of which is our Facebook page, our Facebook group, our website, partiallyexaminedlife.com they're just there, many representations of us on those things. You could type some things to us to tell us what you thought of this episode. You could type some comments and in a mediated way have a peaceful exchange with other listeners and with us about the content of this episode. So there are lots of options. We would love you to get involved.

1:02:08 Wes: We should just have a show with just us throwing things at Mark. Random stuff that he has to turn into a segue that actually needs to

1:02:16 Mark: be said that I have to turn into a commercial.

1:02:21 Wes: Right, Right. And it has to be selling something.

1:02:24 Mark: Yeah.

1:02:24 Seth: Please don't tweet at us that we ourselves have become commoditized because we have advertisements in our episode. We're well aware.

1:02:31 Wes: We're completely self conscious. That's a virtue to the.

1:02:34 Seth: Exactly. We still read books.

1:02:36 Wes: Whores, and we know it.

1:02:37 Seth: We're whores who read books.

1:02:39 Mark: Have a good time on your boat, Dylan.

1:02:41 Dylan: I will.

1:02:42 Mark: And welcome back.

1:02:44 Dylan: Seth.

1:02:44 Unknown speaker: You are.

1:02:45 Mark: You are actually here firing on all cylinders. So I really. It is wonderful.

1:02:51 Wes: Yeah.

1:02:52 Seth: I was fired up by this reading.

1:02:53 Dylan: It brought a tear to my eye.

1:02:55 Wes: This is vintage Seth. It's gonna get a lot of people.

1:02:58 Mark: More cowbell.

1:03:01 Wes: This is artisanal, Seth. Frankly,

1:03:06 Dylan: it was aged for four years.

1:03:09 Seth: Single barrel, small batch.

1:03:14 Mark: Our closing song this evening is Millionaire by the Mekons. Mekons are a collective. They're super Marxist. And one of the composers of this song is John Langford, whom I interviewed on Nakedly Examined Music, episode 22. That discussion covered, among other things, a song called this Funeral is for the Wrong Corpse, explicitly about capitalism. Whereas millionaire here from 1993's I Heart Mekons is much more ironic and could be seen as a siren song from the spectacle itself, or at least deeply symptomatic of the spectacle. You can check out that interview@nakedlyexaminedmusic.com all right, thanks, everybody.

1:03:50 Unknown speaker: Good night.

1:03:51 Dylan: Good night.

1:03:51 Wes: Good night.

1:04:12 Unknown speaker: Everybody's so in love. But they don't touch on me. Eyes are weeping eyes A red. Bunch of flowers in the street. I love a millionaire I love a millionaire I love a millionaire I love a millionaire the champagne was never cheap But I could pay someone to drink it for me Never rise up from the sheets Watching time just roll away. I love a millionaire I love a millionaire I love a millionaire I love a millionaire Stretch. Stretching out my bones. A million miles from home Lust corrodes my body I've lost count of my lovers But I can count my money Forever and forever I love a millionaire I love a millionaire I love a millionaire I love a millionaire.

Dreaming of a creature who is too pale and large to stand and only feels the terror on his vein of light from us. Lust corrodes my body I've lost count of my lover But I can count my money Forever and forever I love a millionaire I love a millionaire I love a million a millionair I love a millionair I love a millionaire I love a millionaire I love a millionaire I love a millionaire I love a millionaire, a millionaire I love a millionaire I love a millionaire I love a millionaire I love a millionaire I love a millionaire I love a millionaire I love.