Society Of Spectacle Research Articles

Making Sense of the Global 1960s: The Situationist International and the Navel of the World1

ABSTRACT This article revisits the history of the Situationist International (SI) from the perspective of its relationship with the Third World, with a specific focus on the Congo and, to lesser degree, Algeria. The SI is most often remembered for its critique of alienation in the West. Yet, the questions of decolonization, the Third World, and Third-Worldism were at the center of its political project, including its conceptualization of everyday life and of the society of spectacle. This project was not static and the SI went from a warm embrace of Third World revolutions to a position of strong skepticism, which was further accentuated after the uprisings of May 1968 in France. In its analysis of this evolution, the article revisits the works of Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem, Mustapha Khayati, and René Vienet; it also draws from the journal of the SI, the published correspondence of Debord, and various archival documents about the group. A strong focus is put on the importance of the notion of totality in the situationist critique. The article argues that this notion offers an interesting entry point into the current historiographical debate about the periodization of the global 1960s.

Dimension of Framing and Capturing in the Surface-driven World: A Study of Li Shuns Internet Sketch

This research paper discusses the works of art from artist Li Shuns solo exhibition-Brave New World in Enclave Contemporary, Shenzhen, 2022. The exhibition features Lis latest production continuing Internet Sketch series, which he uses Google Map to take virtual tour in foreign museums and appropriates the masterpieces for reproductions. Although Li tends to situate the viewers to consider the new dimension in viewing at the world, he also presents a confined pleasure that both combines and challenges conventional viewing. His intentional juxtaposition of multiple creations of the surface-driven imageries, fulfilling Nicholas Bourriauds Relational Aesthetics and Guy Debords Society of Spectacle, unhides peoples fragmented understanding of truth under the chaotic contemporary world. Welcoming viewers engagement and interpretation, Lis exhibition encourages critical reflections on the ongoing pandemic control, capitalist economy, globalization, and consumerist culture. The 2019 pandemic is lacked abundant scholarly reviews, but popularly being adopted as subject matter by worldwide artists. Therefore, scholarly reviews would be focused on the artworks, and then the reflection of their spatial installment on institutional critique and contemporary art market. Based on that, I will also analyze how the happening social situation is going to become the mainstream for art practice.

ХОМО КОНЗУМЕНС У ДРУШТВУ (МЕДИЈСКОГ) СПЕКТАКЛА

Abstract: This paper considers the concept of homo consumens in the context of today’s society of the (media) spectacle, from a communicological-sociological point of view. The paper takes the studies and the theories of Erich Fromm and Zygmunt Bauman on the consumer and the consumer society as a starting point and connects them with Debord’s society of the spectacle, and takes into account Baudrillard’s simulacrum and simulation and Castell’s network society, considering the relation between man and the media and media content today. Namely, this paper also looks at the theories of DeFleur, as well as the Uses and gratification theory in the era of digital communication, in a time of technological expansion, and also a time of spectacle and sensationalism, alienation and constant consumption of things, ideas, content, media, time... Keywords: consumerism, media, the society of the spectacle, sensationalism, uses and gratification theory, homo consumens

Frankenstein’s Revenge: Hegemony of Post-Human Spectacles in Golden Fleece

The rapid development of image media today has been reinforcing what Guy Debord argued as society of spectacle. Ubiquitous visual advertising marks that spectacle has invaded diverse aspects of today’s life. The alienated labor relations proposed by Marx are once again simulated into a pseudo-desire structure guided by consumption symbols. Robert J. Sawyer’s Golden Fleece is even set in a post-human world where a society of spectacle has achieved its full maturity. Seeing from Guy Debord’s theory of spectacle society, this paper analyzes how spectacle seizes hegemony over human in future post-human world by means of coercive monologues and history-denying. Moreover, this paper further liberates science fiction from the anthropocentric perspective and discusses the identity of artificial intelligence in post-human era.

Concrete-philia in Contemporary Art: Israeli Art Between Real Estate Gluttony and Militaristic Architecture

In this article I examine how contemporary concrete art intersects with various manifestations of concrete in Israeli culture. I first present contemporary works of art that explore the phenomenon of real-estate gluttony and the spectacular element associated with contemporary tower architecture, in which concrete is used as a defining element of the structure. I then demonstrate how, at the turn of the twenty-first century, contemporary concrete art has joined the critique of the society of spectacle that has led to the erasure of architecture’s human function – as a space at the heart of which lies the human inhabitant – in favor of its actual capital value. The real-estate gluttony echoes or continues what is identified here as the Israeli “concrete-philia,” manifested in concrete’s status as a fundamental material in the Zionist revival narrative. I discuss the meaning of concrete in regard to works of art that reflect a critical stance toward the Zionist-national concrete narrative in Israel. This discussion is followed by an examination of contemporary art that questions the meaning of concrete in its specific relation to Israeli militarism, as manifested in contexts of heroism, commemoration, and recollection. The final stage of mapping the presence of concrete in Israeli militaristic contexts, as reflected in contemporary Israeli art, presents a discussion of art works that engage with the Separation Wall, which can be regarded as Israel's most significant Brutalist concrete project of the 2000s.

MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION IN A WORLD WITH NO REST NOR RELAXATION. NARRATIVE PROSTHESIS AND HYPERREALITY IN OTTESSA MOSHFEGH’S NOVEL.

The representation of a form of disability in literature can be used not only as a way of distinguishing the character and setting the narration in motion but as a metaphor of social and individual collapse. Following this idea, I will focus on Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a 2018 novel that narrates the experiences of a privileged woman in a context of growing aestheticism and its consequent loss of political meaning in the American society of the 90s. In it, I argue, the depression that she suffers from can be observed to work as the engine of the narration and the result of the emptiness derived from the current society of spectacle. I use David T. Mitchell’s and Sharon L. Snyder’s Narrative Prosthesis to delve into the role that the depression the main character suffers from plays in the novel and how she follows the pattern traditionally found in disability narratives. I also use Jean Baudrillard’s analysis of the current state of simulacra to explain her disabled experience.

Better Problems

Better Problems

Мемориальный музей: экзистенциальная оптика пространства

The modern museum is not only in the sphere of mass interests, but also serves as a reflection and expression of certain mass trends. While maintaining the status of a classical cultural institution, it was to a large extent precisely the museum that has become an arena of public discord on determining the strategies of cultural reproduction. This issue gains a pronouncedly contentious character due to the rapid development of information formats of traditional leisure now including interactive technologies, arbitrary historical reconstructions, elements of theatricalization. In “Escape from Amnesia” (A. Huyssen) the ‘society of total spectacle’ demands searching for new means, which often contribute to loss and substitution of values. The visitor’s interest towards the history of the quotidian greatly influences the dynamics of changing the creative potential of a museum, predominantly a memorial museum. Long-term practices of modeling the historical space reveal the internal form of the concept of ‘ex-position’. This is the natural cause of an internal conflict, when being ‘arranged in a straight line’ replaces the principles of accurate and documentally verified positioning of memorial objects. ‘Museumness’ should not supplant ‘the quotidian’, ‘the existential’; however, the functional principle of arranging the objects, their ‘pattern’ is often replaced by the composite approach, in which ‘decorative’ or ‘design’ solutions become dominant. This trend actively competes with the key theoretical foundations of museum source studies, and the traditional museum is increasingly transforming into a kind of parallel model of culture. The memorial object, as a fact of intellectual history, is significant within the material culture and spiritual heritage. At the same time, the alleged meanings and false semiotization often substitute the biographical realities, when ‘fit for exposition’ is everything that the mass museum visitor connects in his mind with his arbitrary understanding of the past. These are key aspects of the subject of modern museum criticism. This article discloses our understanding of the memorial exposition as a self-organizing system with a certain aesthetic code. Methodologically significant is the existential turn towards ‘evidence paradigm’ – giving up the impersonal demonstration of old things. This is a turn towards the model ‘things-speak’ (self-awareness, self-disclosure of things) – towards the structure that communicates ideas and life meanings. It is where the memorial object, understood as ‘message’, ‘material communication’, can disclose the fullness of its historical authenticity.

Fashion and Desire: The Society of Spectacle in Post Reality

Fashion was a contemporary phenomenon that increasingly developed to meet the needs of users in its digital industry era. The rapid development of fashion has made the industry compete to present the latest fashions faster and faster. The support and advances of the Internet in communication technology have helped to accelerate the spread of power through virtual networks. Digital media have brought people into a new experience, namely "post-reality", that had never existed. This study focuses on fashion consumption in the form of clothes with a fast production scale or fast-fashion along with low costs, as well as sneakers that were consumed by young people. One hundred and twenty-nine students at five universities in West Java Indonesia have interviewed. Using a qualitative method which was supported by the summary of the distribution of questionnaires, conducted throughout 2019 and early 2020, the results of this study were then analyzed using Guy Debord's theory of spectacle society. The study has found that the consumption of fast fashion and sneakers by students had an impact on their spending patterns, self-identity, self-confidence, and the role of the user as a commodity spectacle in today's fashion industry.

„U njegovim rukama i velika se umjetnost pretvara u kič” L. Giesz

Slučaj Dimitrija Popovića nakon velike petdesetljetne retrospektive u zagrebačkim Klovićevim dvorima uputio je i na finale trivijalizacije jednog opusa koji je obećavao veliku maniru i relevantan sadržaj na početcima kada još nije bilo potrebe za grotesknom nadrealizacijom u društvu estradizacije. Dorflesovski rečeno, Popovićevo je slikarstvo s vremenom u istu ravan dovelo Salomu i Severinu, Kristovo tijelo, „prikazano u simbolu kruha koji je narezan na kriške ili Madonu koje se fizička ljupkost pretvara u rafinman izgleda nekog foto-modela.” Dimitrije bira dramu egzistencije i velike teme u nadi da će one odraditi posao za sebe, to jest pukim izborom, primjerice, sadržaja iz Dantea ili Leonarda, postati velikom umjetnošću. To je ona vrsta lijenosti duha, onaj gemütlichkeit koji proizvodi, kako bi rekao A. Moles „komfor srca” kopiranjem jezika prošlosti, kao da je umjetnost prijelazna i da je samo dovoljno biti u njezinoj blizini i za njom posegnuti pa da i sami postanemo dijelom njezine veličine. No ipak će biti, kako kaže L. Giesz opisujući kiččovjeka nalik na Dimitrija, da se „u njegovim rukama i velika umjetnost pretvara u kič.”

Кризис высшей школы или стагнация? От гуманитарных метафор и публицистики к веберианской политической социологии

This is a response to the article by P.A. Orekhovsky and V.I. Razumov, “The Carnival Time: Russian Higher School and Science in the Postmodern Era”. Treatment of the negative phenomena of modern higher education in Russia using such humanitarian metaphors as “carnival”, “postmodern”, “the society of spectacle” is not productive, as well as journalistic invectives such as “spiritual prostitution”. The Weberian paradigm of political sociology as more adequate approach includes four areas of analysis: 1) politics, administration; relations of power within the university and around it, 2) economy, monetary and other resource relations in higher education, 3) culture, symbolic sphere, status, prestige, reputation as social relations. 4) solidarity and conflict; violence and violence control. The usual qualification of what is happening in Russian higher education as a “crisis” is also doubtful. A real crisis is a condition that has ceased to be acceptable while the usual ways and means of correcting the situation are useless. With this understanding no “crisis” is observed in modern higher education in Russia. The dissatisfaction of certain groups does not at all lead to an unacceptable state, to the subsequent intensive search for reasons and adequate ways to rectify the situation. Indeed, higher education in Russia is gradually leaning toward greater bureaucracy, simulation, virtualization-distance, and segregation. This state is not referred to as a “crisis”, but as a relatively stable equilibrium, getting into the attractor with vicious “stability” i.e. stagnation with slow but steady degradation. An exit from this state is extremely difficult, fraught with great alarms and threats. In order to switch to the “successful dynamism” attractor the discontent of involved social should lead to productive discussions with the indispensable participation of management practitioners, administrations of different levels, potential employers, resources holders. These groups on the basis of solidarity and trust then should realize pilot reforms with monitoring, promotion and incentives for the dissemination of successful experiences.

Pontos sem nós: o controle do acaso na era da algoritmização da vida e da hiperespetacularização da realidade

Os lances de dados jamais abolirão o acaso, ou será que a datificação e a algoritmização não estão colocando em xeque exatamente a margem de indeterminação da própria vida, como máquina de invenção de novas realidades? As formas contemporâneas de poder e de controle (quantificação e espetacularização) tramam contra a biodiversidade informacional e a diferença, baseada na qualidade, na intensidade e na própria emoção humana. O artigo caracteriza e exemplifica o fenômeno através do atual estágio da sociedade do espetáculo, definida pela união entre hype e algoritmo, numa espécie de biometria emocional (codificação das emoções).

Success, Fame and Independent Art in Contemporary Art

Günümüz sanat ortamında başarı miti ünlü olmak mefhumu ile sarmallanmış bir konumdadır. Söz konusu bu sarmallanma neoliberal kapitalizmin doğasının yansımasıdır. Neoliberal kapitalizm, girişimci özgür bireyler olarak sanatçılar için giderek tüketimden bağımsızlaşan ve daha fazla üretme gerçekliğini dayatan piyasa koşulları altında, özellikle de rekabetçi ortamın da katkılarıyla başarı kavramının içeriğini, gen yapısını değiştirmiştir. Özellikle günümüz teknoloji ve sosyal medya ortamı düşünüldüğünde Andy Warhol’un 1960’larda sarf ettiği “Bir gün herkes 15 dakikalığına ünlü olacak” sözü karşılığını bulur niteliktedir. Paylaşım ağının genişlemesi, aynı anda yüzbinlerce insanın bir arada olabilme ihtimali/gerçekliği üretimin fazlalılığı karşısında nitelik kavramını bir anda niceliğe çevirmiştir. Bu bağlamda, Theodor W. Adorno ve Max Horkheimer’ın Batı Kültürü ve Aydınlanma eleştirileri olarak kaleme aldıkları Kültür Endüstirisi ve Guy Debord’un Gösteri Toplumu gibi kavramsallaştırmaları günümüz kültürel koşullarının öncü okumaları olarak karşımıza çıkmaktadırlar. Diğer taraftan günümüz sanat piyasası koşullarını belirleyen bu problematiklerin karşısında yer almak ve piyasanın dışında kalarak eleştirel bir tutumla ayrı bir stratejik konum ve yer edinmek ilk bakışta olası görünmekle beraber çelişik bir konumu da beraberinde getirmektedir. Bu çalışmada söz konusu bu yaklaşımlar ışığında başarı ve ona sarmallanmış ün mefhumlarına değinilecek, bu koşulları oluşturan etmenler günümüz sanatı bağlamında tartışılacak, bağımsız sanat/sanatçının neliği irdelenecektir.

„Да бъдеш свободен през 1968 означава да вземеш участие“. Aкцията “Tap and Touch Cinema” на Вали Експорт и идеите на Ги Дебор като провокиращ акт на освобождение на публиката чрез участие

The desire to participate in the 1960s was symptomatic of this period. Through the “Tap and Touch Cinema” action of Valie Export and “Society of Spectacle” a movie of Guy Debord, attempts have been made to present two methods for making the audience an active participant. What connects two authors is their struggle against alienation and passivity.

Hacer de la vida una forma propia

El presente artículo pretende reflexionar sobre la particular mirada que tiene Giorgio Agamben de lo político a partir del uso que hace de algunos autores (Debord, Heidegger, Foucault, Kojève) y conceptos (“espectáculo”, “poshistoria”, “vida”, “forma-de-vida”) con los cuales durante más de veinte años abordó cuestiones del pensamiento político contemporáneo. El recorrido interpretativo está centrado entre los años de la publicación de Medios sin fin (1996), un libro pequeño pero bisagra en su producción escritural, y el final de la saga Homo Sacer El uso de los cuerpos (2014). 
 Palabras clave: Giorgio Agamben. Guy Debord. Sociedad del espectáculo. Vida. Forma-de-vida. Poshistoria.

Donald Trump’s appeal: a socio-psychoanalytic analysis

ABSTRACTThis article explores the appeal of President Donald Trump’s persona in North American society, appeal that enabled the formation of a fan-base-like loyal and passionate constituency. The analysis centres on two radical social changes that created the conditions of possibility for Trump’s emergence as a prominent political figure. First, it discusses a shift from a society of discipline to one driven by enjoyment. Here it looks into the consequent alterations of symbolic authority figures and their relationship to morality, further enabling a perverse structure of fantasy to increasingly orient and organise our contemporary society. In this context, Trump is associated with the father of enjoyment and the archetypal trickster. Second, the article brings into focus a shift from the symbolic to the imaginary, investigating the various conditions enabling Trump to strive in a society of spectacle. In what follows I contextualise how Trump’s campaign and presidency took advantage of these two radical social changes.

Tondelli and the 1980s: Four Keywords for a Reassessment

This article challenges the interpretation of the 1980s in Italy as a period in which a large section of the population and, especially, the younger generation, turned away from politics and a retreated into the private sphere after the revolutionary ebullience of the 1960s and 1970s. The discussion centres around the figure of Pier Vittorio Tondelli whose collection of short stories Altri libertini (1980) inaugurated a new understanding of the cultural role of literature, and a new relationship between authors and readers. While devoid of the ideological preoccupations that characterized the protest movement(s) of the previous decades, Tondelli’s work, it is argued, is anything but escapist and rather seeks to provide a sensitive and thoughtful account of the transformations taking place in Italian society and culture during a critical decade in which Italy, like other mature Western societies, was precipitously projected into the post-Fordist phase of contemporary capitalism. From this vantage point Tondelli’s opus demonstrate the constant and sustained engagement of its author with a disorienting new world in which the contradictions between personal and collective desires and aspirations are increasingly mobilized to fuel the “society of spectacle” Guy Debord had foreseen. It can hardly be questioned that Tondelli’s struggle raises ethical issues, but it is important to see that this ethical dimension is inherently connected with a political horizon, albeit a politics of desire that traditional Marxist approaches have some difficulty identifying as politics, let alone as revolutionary politics. In order to appreciate fully the significance of Tondelli’s cultural contribution and disentangle it from the debates that it originated, the author proposes a fresh approach. Mindful of Raymond Williams’s eminent example (Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, 1976), the analysis focuses on four keywords that can help us traverse Tondelli’s work and identify its strengths as well as some of its weaknesses. Affect, Commitment, Postmodernism, and Theory are intersecting vectors in a reassessment that through Tondelli reopens the discussion on an entire decade, and its aftermath.

Una filosofia dell’intermedio. Ricordo di Mario Perniola

The article aims at remembering Mario Perniola, died last year, philosopher and author of a large number of books translated all over the world, devoted especially to the field of aesthetics, whose research could be intended as an open reflection dealing with not only the traditional topics of the discipline, but with the broad and differentiated phenomena involving the sphere of perception and feeling, operating in the world of communication and media, in society, politics, religion, and arts. The distinctive feature of his thought is here identified in his extraordinary ability to put in contact different and distant authors, concepts and things and at the same time to separate them, giving rise to the development of subtle, smart and penetrating concepts capable of reading our time. Thus his research is here defined as a “philosophy of between”, which strives to think of the intermediate state that separates but also that space connecting; a philosophy that rejects any apocalyptic position but at the same time avoids surrendering to the society of spectacle and communication in which we live.

The Romanians Are Coming(2015): Immigrant bodies through the British gaze

The Channel 4 documentary series The Romanians Are Coming generated strong protests within the Romanian community, stressing the unfair depiction of the Romanian immigrants through its disproportionate focus on extreme poverty and the Roma community. This article explores the psychoanalytic dynamics that keep orienting the British gaze toward certain associations of images that recur in this film. It highlights the juxtaposition the film enacts between a desolated Romanian landscape, the UK society of spectacle and festive Romanian homes. Further still, the documentary confronts the viewer with the heterotopic underside of the UK marketplace, namely, a nursing home in the United Kingdom that reveals vulnerable alienated human bodies. In this context, this article argues that the constant return to the Romanian family space, which comes alive through outbursts of spontaneous festivals, is an expression of a nostalgic fetishistic outlook of the British gaze. It further represents an attempt to deal with the traumatic vulnerability experienced in a neoliberal society.

БРИТАНСЬКИЙ КОЛОНІАЛІЗМ ЯК “СУСПІЛЬСТВО СПЕКТАКЛЮ” В РОМАНІ “ПОДОРОЖ ДО ІНДІЇ” Е. М. ФОРСТЕРА

БРИТАНСЬКИЙ КОЛОНІАЛІЗМ ЯК “СУСПІЛЬСТВО СПЕКТАКЛЮ” В РОМАНІ “ПОДОРОЖ ДО ІНДІЇ” Е. М. ФОРСТЕРА