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2008 --
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This is a file with my notes after reading Debord and with one focus -- Performative Principle. Resurrection is spectacular only because of the appocalypse. SummaryThis page is an extention of the Philosophy of Act, but I don't remember where the texts are.NotesCome on! The thought, the feeling, the gaze -- this is the true act! Everything else is only the results!...
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I come back to the same tought: "And God said, 'Let there be light"; and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness..." [Genesis, Chapter 1.]
This is how I started the book....
Secrecy dominates this world, and foremost as the secret of domination. Guy Debord[1]The biggest secrects are always something well-known. Totally and universally accepted to the point of being trivial. The gravity was a big secret for long long time. You can imagine how many such secrets are still around. We follow this tradition, we create our secrets, thinking that we discover them. We are the absolute secret, and it gets more secrative, because we everywhere and beyond it.
The society which rests on modern industry is not accidentally or superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally spectaclist. In the spectacle, which is the image of the ruling economy, the goal is nothing, development everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself. (14)
The End of the World is no less complicated process that its begining -- the Creation. I remember that week and that day. The day of Adam. That is when I understood that everything was created for him; the day and night, the stars and light, water and fire. The world got a spectator. And then more of them and more. "For the people, by the people...."
I hope you understand the above statement I wrote from the Lucifer's POV. Yes, I identify with him, I think I can see what he saw, and I know what he means by the original primal need for a spectator. Well, Lucifer and the armada of spirits were the spectacle themselves. What is the spectacle without somebody seeing it? Not only seeing it, but appreciating it as a spectacle. What could be better for this part than man and men?
We are here.
Aristotle put it in his "Poetics" as a textual, not structural principle and in class I have to explain to students that in our times, the POMO era, texture is structure. Spectacle is the Idea in itself.
I do not know how much they understand, I do not know how much we understand the changes that took place.
Did I tell you already, that he developed this new habit of leaving messages on my desk? Maybe he learned it from my kids, you know -- "Papa, we went shopping with Mama. Will be back soon. Love."
The kids are not with me anymore, he knows that I am by myself now -- and he now leaves the messages next to the computer screen. "Work on the Perform file, you are ready. Love. L."
"L" is for Lucifer. Sometimes he even opens the file on the screen, so I can get to it right away. On one hand, I don't mind it, but on another hand, it could get on your nervs, you know. How does he know am I ready or not? But I understand why he feels as a part of my family, after all, I do think about him, I think about him a lot.
"The spectacle does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality." (#19)Actually, it's both. The first part is know and discussed by the Marxists. The second is the subject of the postmodern writers.
Anatoly....Let me speak. Let me say it.
I need it, Anatoly. Let me explain.
There were many I admired. After all, I was here on Earth, I always was near them, the best and the worse. And the worse call me Devil, the weak need to place the evil somewhere else. That is how the weak become evil. But the best did what He did, they serve the rest....
Purification of reality is Resurrection. It kills (Apocalypse) before it brings it back. Image is an alienation of the object. Formatting an object as an image, I present it to the audience, which knows only image. I format this image, according to their desires. Yes, virtual, my friends, virtual, pure....
Yes, they need it, the spectacle. How else can they get the message? They can't see the silent signs, most of them can't even think. You have to show them. If you want them to understand, you have to show it to them. I accepted it. I accepted His World. The world of the people.
He didn't appear, no forms, only the voice I heard. I understand, sometimes you don't need to see it, you need to hear it only. I understand, my friend. Sometimes you don't to hear anything, you want to see it. In silence. This is how I understood the Spectacle of Resurrection. I turned the sound off.
Mass events. Rock and sport crowds are pm forms of classical public festivities; carnivals and revolutions. Disciplined by the game our crowds buy their public experience. They pay for organized (culture) communal life. Popular culture is mass history, the real power, because it's the best mechanism of mind control. Peaceful (simulated) dramatic experiences, a release of raw psycho energy. Why do the people, not governments pay?
.... I accepted them all. I accepted millions for the sake of a few. Oh, it was a while ago! You call it "modernity" -- the kingdon of "Now"! Present is always new. And I gave my powers to them. Not to the few, but all of them. What a spectacle we do have now!I wish they still would come, the Trinity, I would like to say a few words about him, Lucifer. I guess, the old story is still not over, because while we spend most of my days together, trying to finish this book, they do not visit me at all. Maybe they still can't be in the same space, I don't know. Maybe they will get in fight and and both parties do not want me to see it, but they don't come anymore. It's okay. I know that they see what I write. They know what I think. Maybe when I am done with my writing and, if it's good, they will get together.
...."Thanks," Lucifer said. "You are kind. Don't worry about me, Anatoly, think about the book, concentrate on this chapter, on every sentense. I think that this is a strong thought that the spectacle "philosophizes reality," meaning that the reality becomes "humanized" -- a text, a message. Not like in the First NNature, but at you face communication. I think you wrote about it in the chapter about ideology principle. You cannot miss this spectacle reality, it's not a sunset, the new spectacle is a target message, you force to understand it. "The spectacle is the guardian of sleep." (21) The masses must be prevented from action....
The new level of the spectacular, possible because of technology, is a simulacra of wars and natural disasters. Film violence has to produce emotional equivalent of the catastrophic. Visual safe end of the world is a must for evolution. We must be reminded of the potential, the accident has to be always on our mind, death must be remembered. Medieval carnivals had a cult of death, so do we. Except, in our global calendar (no a specified sacred hour or day) the show is on around the clock.
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation. (Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord. 1)[2]
Spectacle is the form and the method of high modernity. Of course, it's unreal and non-life. It's a purpose of spectacle to be non-real. Of course, it's a consumption.
"What do you think when you watch TV?" I asked."That I am not needed anymore. That it's over. And I want to disappear. Be like you, just see and think. Maybe write a book. No, you write and let me watch you writing it. I moved too much for too long. I feel, how you, people, say it -- overworked. Why would you need me of Him? You can make your spectacles and disasters, you learned how to amaze each other, you don't us, the old fart."
There are, at least, three steps in reading the spectacle:
"The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images." (4)
Therefore,
"The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification." Debord (3)
Global presence won't be possible without the spectacle. Human kind is an abstraction without this cultural unification through the spectacle. The world has to perform to be noticed. Without becoming an event (news), there is no spectator. The real has to get split into two....
Debord continues: "Separation is itself part of the unity of the world, of the global social praxis split up into reality and image." (7)
The second nature asked for a second level of unity, not physical but human. Spectacle is a theory-practice territory where with simulated of the real before its institualization. The training grounds where we examine the future. We can't experiment with the real (Hiroshima), the Spectacle is the Mechanism of Collective Conscience. Of course, it has to be separate, thinking and doing. Thinking (feeling) is a pre-doing.
The secret of new (spectacular) unification:
"The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate." (29)Alienation is not only produced, but mass produced. Re-enforced alienation.
"Anatoly, if you are not about to comment on it, I have to put in my comments....""I told you, you can't do it!" I took the manuscript from his hands. "This is my book, write your own!"
"But you must write it. You saw the greatest spectacle in history, you lived in the Soviet Union, you saw how hard they tried. I will be on your case untill you write what you saw!"
"This is for another book," I cried. "I know what I am doing! Why don't you go on tempting somebody else? Why do you came back to me? You are practically live here!"
All right, I will make one point. There are chapters in the book, where I talk about media and ideology. What Deborg is saying, that we are held together by the news and images, by the commercials. The difference is that in past the culture united us in the same time and space, now it's not the unity in space -- and even our togetherness in time is questionable.
I have to say a few words about the first, the main spectator.
"God?"
"Yes, if you understand that you are the first yourself."
.....
The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image. (34)
Everything has to be measured, must have human value, OUR exchange value -- everything has to become a product. The world must go through (constant) re-evaluation -- the dance of use values. It's possible only if we alienate everything from itself. Make it all into commodities.
The world at once present and absent which the spectacle makes visible is the world of the commodity dominating all that is lived. The world of the commodity is thus shown for what it is, because its movement is identical to the estrangement of men among themselves and in relation to their global product. (37)
Without the estrangement nothing could be visible.
The spectacle is the other side of money: it is the general abstract equivalent of all commodities. Money dominated society as the representation of general equivalence, namely, of the exchangeability of different goods whose uses could not be compared. The spectacle is the developed modern complement of money where the totality of the commodity world appears as a whole, as a general equivalence for what the entire society can be and can do. The spectacle is the money which one only looks at, because in the spectacle the totality of use is already exchanged for the totality of abstract representation. The spectacle is not only the servant of pseudo-use, it is already in itself the pseudo-use of life. (49)
Sometimes I see lines and even paragraphs I don't remember writing. Yes, don't remember everything and, yes, I write in his name, when I need it. But I suspect that he also gets to my computer and writes, when I am at work. I do with it what I do with my own writing; if it's good, I leave it in. What the difference who wrote it, if it's good? I am used to this position that sometimes I do not understand what I write and it takes me years to understand it.
That is what I read:
".... I did it for my people. Yes, for the great minds, for poets and artists -- I wanted them to be safe, I wanted to protect them from the crowd. I accepted the End and the Last Judgement. I accept everything I was rejecting before."
At the moment of economic abundance, the concentrated result of social labor becomes visible and subjugates all reality to appearance, which is now its product. Capital is no longer the invisible center which directs the mode of production: its accumulation spreads it all the way to the periphery in the form of tangible objects. The entire expanse of society is its portrait. (50)
Let me show it...
.... [ image ]
Somebody has to pay for sunset and snow fall -- how much does it cost? We know prices; call your travel agent. We know who pays. Everything has price, good and evil. The Spectacular makes you work hard. Like a machine. You can have a comfort of paradise as long as you work all the time.... What else would you do with you life anyway?
How much do we have to invest in construction of God? What is our budget for building of paradise?
Sometimes, yes, yes, we do it together, me and him. We watch it and we do not have to talk, we both know what we see and think. We see the world, so many places -- the events. It's happening now and here, even if I not there....We watch the news on TV.
The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living human being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of a possible role. Being a star means specializing in the seemingly lived; the star is the object of identification with the shallow seeming life that has to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations which are actually lived. Celebrities exist to act out various styles of living and viewing society unfettered, free to express themselves globally. They embody the inaccessible result of social labor by dramatizing its by-products magically projected above it as its goal: power and vacations, decision and consumption, which are the beginning and end of an undiscussed process. In one case state power personalizes itself as a pseudo-star; in another a star of consumption gets elected as a pseudo-power over the lived. [But just as the activities of the star are not really global, they are not really varied.] (60)
I hope that you read the chapter BLISS and I do not have to repeat what was said already. Our spectacular bliss is different. We make it. We creat and we consume it....
Did you forget that your rights are your obligations? Liberty, yes, and -- happiness, too. Don't you see how hard they try to be happy? American stars are professionals of happiness.
The agent of the spectacle placed on stage as a star is the opposite of the individual, the enemy of the individual in himself as well as in others. Passing into the spectacle as a model for identification, the agent renounces all autonomous qualities in order to identify himself with the general law of obedience to the course of things. The consumption celebrity superficially represents different types of personality and shows each of these types having equal access to the totality of consumption and finding similar happiness there. The decision celebrity must possess a complete stock of accepted human qualities. Official differences between stars are wiped out by the official similarity which is the presupposition of their excellence in everything. [...] The admirable people in whom the system personifies itself are well known for not being what they are; they became great men by stooping below the reality of the smallest individual life, and everyone knows it. (61)
Once I was some kind of celebrity, it was twenty years ago, whe the USSR still existed. In a communist country the paradox Debord writes about was extreme -- P{ublic anatoly became my biggest enemy. He was anti-me, and this is while using my qualities, mind, memories, experience, feelings. It him I defected from. I am glad he is dead....
What hides under the spectacular oppositions is a unity of misery. Behind the masks of total choice, different forms of the same alienation confront each other, all of them built on real contradictions which are repressed. The spectacle exists in a concentrated or a diffuse form depending on the necessities of the particular stage of misery which it denies and supports. In both cases, the spectacle is nothing more than an image of happy unification surrounded by desolation and fear at the tranquil center of misery. (63)
Communists are present because communism is a part of pomo capitalism.
I can't talk much on this topic, I spent enough time in PostAmeriKa, trying to explain it. I only can repeat that the understood postmodern conditions have no division between capitalism and communism. Think about the title -- POV. Think about the concept of it -- and you will understand.
[ image ]
"Pseudo-cyclical time leans on the natural remains of cyclical time and also uses it to compose new homologous combinations: day and night, work and weekly rest, the recurrence of vacations." (150)
Listen, I spend day after day at the computer. I don't remember when I went out last time. How do I know what day or hour I am in? At the corner of my computer there is a digital clock and a calendar. Of course I can set it the way I want -- Alaska time, or Moscow time, it's up to me. But the day still has 24 hours and after Sunday comes Monday....
(154) "The epoch which displays its time to itself as essentially the sudden return of multiple festivities is also an epoch without festivals.... The reality of time has been replaced by the advertisement of time."
The paralysis of time? Time must be controlled, arrested. How else can we remeber it? How else can we record everything?
"Time, stop!" Remember? Recorded time is the frozen time. I don't think you fully understood what photography is. Maybe because of the simplicity of it, tne phenomena wasn't noticed. I don't have a single photo -- think anout it, Anatoly, so many important things can't be photographed, only the reflections, the effects on the world of matter. So, what is celebrated? Time or matter? Or their relations? I saw your photos and I want to know how can you watch yourself on those photos or, God forbit, video? The mirror was already beyond me!"
167. "This society which eliminates geographical distance reproduces distance internally as spectacular separation."
... I myself is a message to the world. If it's not a message, it doesn't exit, I don't see it. If it's not a message, I make it into a message, I "read" intro it. Into anything, into a total nonsense.
I am a message to myself sent across time and space. I am this spectacular separation. I use the old word -- writing.
"Now you understand why they wanted me to be at your side," sometimes Lucifer had this sentimental mood. "Now you see. That is what we all wanted -- we wanted you to see, so you can write it."It took me a while to get used to him, especially to those moments, when you feel that he is not really here in the same space with you, it's like a split second delay, like you blink or something. I asked, of course, but I knew that he has this ability to be in many places at once, well, almost at once.
"How could you do it?" I saw that moment again. "How you can keep the conversation, when you jump from place to place? Where had you been right now?"
He looked in my eyes, we both knew what I am asking for -- to see it. Lucifer had to see, if I am ready, if I can't handle it. Because it weren't visions, you were there, even more than in dreams. He tried to guard me, because of the emotions. Of course, he could deal with it in his cool manner, he has no soul to be shock. Maybe, if I would see so much for that long, I too would become indifferent.
"No," he shaked his head. "You won't. That's the difference, my friend. Maybe I better tell you, sometimes, well, you know, it could be too much for you."
I am careful now, I know what he means. I learned my lesson, when he had to snapped me from the body of a woman, who was raped. I was shaking and he was holding me, because I was screaming and everything was screaming in me. I don't know how long it took for me to come to my senses. I still remember it all, I remember the pain, my heart filling out my body, my soul leaving it...
I didn't see it all, I only could guess many things, because it always like shots, not together, but broken.... "She died," he said then. "That why we had to leave. You could die, you are not like me."
I felt as if I did die then. I know that he has to be careful with me.
"Yes, I want to see it," said.
"It's bad," Lucifer warned me again. "Are you sure?"
"Is it something close to me?"
"Yes, very close."
We both were sitting in silence for a long time.
"Do I need to see it?"
"I don't know," he said. "Only you who can judge it."
"Do I need it for the book?"
"Maybe later," he said. "Some other time."
Sorry, I can't finish this chapter, or even the thought. "Time is money" -- sometimes the known and common makes my heart sick. How can we say it? How can we accept it? It's true, it's fact, but how can we think about this statement as normal? This is the real catastrophy. Sometimes I just want to drop the conversation/ What to talk about after this? What's the point of thinking? I say, just forget it.
What is the event in this chapter? Why can't the story go any further unless we go through this SCENE?
Make contrasting images him in power!
Relations to other chapters must be stated!
Marx and Marxism:
In a well-known letter of December 7, 1867, accompanying an article where he himself criticized Capital, an article which Engels would later present to the press as the work of an adversary, Marx clearly disclosed the limits of his own science: " . . . The subjective tendency of the author (which was perhaps imposed on him by his political position and his past), namely the manner in which he views and presents to others the ultimate results of the real movement, the real social process, has no relation to his own actual analysis." (89)
"Frozen societies" (129) -- we watch ourselves.
COMMENTS:
Cyclical time in itself is time without conflict. But conflict is installed within this infancy of time: history first struggles to be history in the practical activity of masters. This history superficially creates the irreversible; its movement constitutes precisely the time it uses up within the interior of the inexhaustible time of cyclical society.
On The Thought Method in Spectacular Times:
204. Critical theory must be communicated in its own language. It is the language of contradiction, which must be dialectical in form as it is in content. It is critique of the totality and historical critique. It is not "the nadir of writing" but its inversion. It is not a negation of style, but the style of negation.
....
@2000-2003 film-north * NEXT: timeproduction
