Guy Debord

And we are going to be reading the first three chapters of the classic of situationist theory, even though the author would have literally, literally would have punched you if you had use that particular phrase.

The book is The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord.

First published in, I think, 67 in France under the French title La Société du Spectacle.

English edition started to come out very early from 1970.

But I also thought to myself, reading some of the phrases, is this hyperbole? with some of the things that came up, you know, the way he's phrased some of the concepts.

And I also thought to myself, could this have been written by AI in a way? So as we go through, we'll see that there are a lot of kind of choice phrases, which I think will make sense to a critique of capitalism.

today but also in some way some of the things some of the pieces some of the aphorisms that I read I thought I actually have no idea what this what Guy Debord is trying to get across like is this hyperbole um That's a kind of critique in a way.

I mean, I think it's a very valuable piece to read.

Um, but, uh, But it was an interesting conversation because I kept saying, you know, it's not only the fascists who wanted to want to get to the root of society and change it and wouldn't even.

And what would Guy Debord say about this essay you've written that was so pessimistic and asking us to.

accept defeat and depression and the the the you know and a reality where we could only make very small incremental changes um to maybe protect

the

Jameson was an advocate for Utopian thinking would you say

he was an advocate for utopian thinking so long as it wasn't so disconnected from? Material reality that it became speculative an idealist, right? I mean Jameson was always a Marxist and made that very clear but he was certainly not a doctrinaire Marxist or a Kind of reductionist historical materialist.

He made his debts to people like Hegel and Sartre Berlaponte And for that matter, Guy Debord, very, very clear throughout the course of his work.

And I think that's what really gave it its richness and its power, even if I don't agree with him about everything, right? And again, what he's mildly favorable about when he comes to evaluating 50s and 60s sci-fi, written by people like Ursula K.

I would try to make them as less, the least patronizing as possible, and then just be like, I fucking hate this shit, so you do what you want.

Anyway, so the title is Guy Debord, or Debord probably.

We have been reduced to spectators in a society of endless spectacle.

And he basically takes this guy from mid-century, this mid-century French philosopher, takes his idea about how the end goal of capitalism is essentially to keep you constantly in the machine, whether you are actively producing capital or not.

Thinking is sexy, people, especially when we do it together.

In 1968, Guy Debord, the situationist, warned us that the government, the financial institutions, and technology had merged with advertising and media to create a powerful illusion of reality that was going to suck us all in.

He called this mass hypnosis the integrated spectacle.

What is the integrated spectacle? It is the mass media manipulation that is being broadcast directly into our brain pan 24-7.

Society of the spectacle, whatever the fuck, who gives a shit.

Guy Debord, dead French guy.

Point that I'm trying to make is, is it's like I, I, I've already resigned myself to the fact that it's over.

I refuse for it to be over and boring.

You can see it in the latter half of the movie.

And then he founded an art movement, an art collective called Panic Movement, which sounds like a sort of revival of Guy Debord and the Situationist International.

Or

it sounds like a hardcore band from the late 90s and early

Now we must introduce the main characters before the play begins.

Um, the main, main character, definitely had main character syndrome, is Guy Debord, who is, like, the chief sort of theorist of, of the Situationist International.

Probably you'd say he's their, their leader, although you'd definitely be expelled from the Situationist International if you said that.

So Guy Debord, he's really a ...

I suppose he's a political theorist and then he makes films as of a, as of a main activity is making films.

He's also, like, a chronic alcoholic who drunk himself to death.

And we'll, we'll go, we'll talk a little bit more about, like, his, his history and the ideas that he produced.

He wrote the, definitely the main text of the Situationists, which is The Society of the Spectacle, which is published in 1967, I think.

So let's look at another answer to the question of what could exist.

This is Guy Debord's map of Paris.

It's based on what he called psychogeography, which is essentially how he felt while he walked around.

So the result is not a map of streets, but of zones that he's broken apart and reattached based on mood and based on memory.