„French outskirts burning!“ A critical appraisal fo the 2005 autumn events (original) (raw)
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French outskirts burning!': a critical appraisal of the 2005 autumn events
2010
Le spectacle n' est pas un ensemble d'images, mais un rapport social entre des personnes, médiatisé par des images ... Le spectacle ne peut etre compris comme l'abus d'un mode de la vision, le produit des techniques de diffusion massive des images. Il est bien plutôt une 'Weltanschauung' devenue effective, matériellement traduite. C'est une vision du monde qui s'est objectivée...La réalité vécue est matériellement envahie par la contemplation du spectacle et reprend en elle-même l'ordre spectaculaire en lui donnant une adhésion positive. La réalité objective est présente des deux côtés. Chaque notion ainsi fixée n'a pour fond que son passage dans l'opposé: la réalité surgit dans le spectacle et le spectacle est réel. Cette aliénation réciproque est l'essence et le soutien de la société existante ».
4000+ words submission for Perspectives in Art Theory 1 MCA Masters first year paper (lecturer N.Loefler). Impact of public spectacle on both the landscape of society and as reflection of societal condition.
Society of the Spectacle (International Encyclopedia of Media Effects)
This essay gives a summary and overview of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle and its continuing relevance for media studies. It explains the spectacle as conceived by Debord by means of four terms (separation, passivity, alienation, representation) and situates Debord's work within the Marxist tradition, and it explains why mass media can be seen as the embodiment of spectacle logic. The essay ends with a discussion of media studies work that has engaged with his work. Main Text The society of the spectacle is a term coined by French Situationist writer and filmmaker Guy Debord, as well as the title of his 1967 manifesto that continues to be read in humanities curriculums across the world. Outside the university and against all odds the term has become somewhat of a common term to talk about media-dominated societies, albeit this came at the
and the one of the Twin Towers (9/11/2001) are the two "falls" that, at inverted dates, have unmade and remade the world where we live in the twinkle of two decades. In a famous interview issued to Giovanna Borradori a few months after the 9/11 terrorist attack, Jacques Derrida argued that "in many respects, it was a delayed effect of the Cold War" 2 . Starting from this suggestion, this article will attempt to outline a genealogy of our present time, from the "balance of terror" of the Cold War to the current "time of terror", not only by identifying the deep connections between those two epochs, but also by stressing their historical differences. Hence, by asking "if 9/11 was 11/9?" we are really posing the question: which are the continuities and which the fractures in our recent history? What did remain the same, and what has changed from the Cold War to the present? In order to make such a question useful for the social sciences, however, it's necessary to relate it to a defined framework, with the intent to find a common ground of comparison. This is the reason why I decided to work on the notion of spectacle, in which Guy Debord recognized at the end of the Sixties the very essence of post-industrial societies, ruled by the twin idols of consumption and telecommunication. The notion of "spectacle" doesn't designate any kind of object, but rather a kind of relationship: "the spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images" 3 . The point of this thesis, as Debord himself underlines, doesn't reside in the concept of image, but more properly in the one of mediation: since an "image" is whatever representation supported by a medium, the society of the spectacle, then, is far more a "society of the media" (supporting a complex of discourses, music, conversations, pictures, videos etc.) than simply a "society of the images". The relationship between people mediated by the complex of discourses and pictures of the spectacle, however, is rooted in a more fundamental relation that has existed long before the appearance of the interconnected system of mass media. This relationship is the one between the facts and their representation, or between the events and the words and pictures through which they are depicted. From this point of view, we could set the birth and development of the Society of the spectacle as a stage in the long-term history of such relationship, namely as the form it has taken in the age of electricity and global media 4 . As WJT Mitchell points out, in fact, what remains invariable across the ages is that: 1 Der Feind ist deine eigene
2013
2008-2012 the article aspires to illuminate the fruitful dialogue between contemporary art and theory, in a time of enduring volatility for our globalized world. My analysis will begin with the three video installations of 'Le Temps Spectaculaire' for two principal reasons: firstly, because video is a time-based medium and the title of the exhibition refers to the concept of time, which has been pivotal in Debord's work; and, secondly, because I wish to allude to the fact that a dematerialized object, like digital video or spectacle itself, can profoundly affect the 'real', physical world. This is a point of particular significance in the Age of Data Capitalism, in which money (and its flows) has been largely transmuted into an immaterial existence. The investigation of this 'trajectory' and its associations could-I hoped-lead us from globalized spectacle to a few useful conclusions regarding the nature of the global economic crisis of 2008-2012. Since the examination of the exhibition's works will unfold parallel to Debord's assertions in La Société du spectacle, I have included in parentheses the paragraph numbers of the book, so that the reader can easily make any cross references needed without depending on any particular translation or edition. Apart from the videos and photographs accompanying this article, further documentation of the works and more information can be found on my website at www.billbalaskas.com. AFTER THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE Any attempt to investigate the global economic crisis should encompass the very basis of an economic system: the mode of labour. More than forty years ago, Guy Debord was the first to explicitly associate the accumulation of capital with the production of images in La Société du spectacle: 'The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image' (34).