As written in "
Lipstick Traces" by
Greil Marcus regarding
Guy DeBord & his "spectacle":
"The spectacle was at once the kidnaping of the impulse of "I am nothing and I should be everything" and its prison.
As a theater the spectacle was also a church: "Modern mastery, the domination of nature by technology, the potential abolition of the domain of necessity in the modern society of abundance, had not "dispelled the religious clouds where men had placed their own powers, detached from themselves: it has only anchored them to an earthly base."
This earthly based was modern capitalism. Having satisfied the needs of the body, capitalism turned to the desires of the soul. It turned upon individual men and women, seized their subjective emotions and experiences, changed those into objective, replicable commodities, placed them on the market, set their prices, and sold them back to those who had, once, brought emotions and experiences out of themselves--to people who, as prisoners of the spectacle, could now find such things only on the market.
Here a miracle as strange as that claimed by any religion was repeated again and again, every day. What was, once, yourself, was now presented as an unreachable but irresistibly alluring image of what, in this best of all possible worlds, you could be.
After long acquaintance with his role, a man grows into it so closely that he can no longer differentiate his true self from the self he simulates, so that even the most intimate of individuals speak to each other in Party slogans.
"The more a person contemplates, the less he lives; the more he accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires. The fact that his gestures are no longer his own, but those of another, who represents them to him, the star of social life, be it martyrs, Jesus Christ, the faces on the billboards. The idealized self was always present, but always out of reach.
IF at bottom revolution was rooted in the desire to create one's own life, a wish so deep and voracious its realization demanded the creation of a new society, then the spectacle took that wish into itself, and returned it as the wish to accept one's life as it already existed, as it existed in the constantly renewing utopia of the spectacle.
"The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relationship among people, mediated by images."
-So what do you think this means? I probably shouldn't read this before bed.
