I just read Society of the Spectacle. I've never read a

>>8627612
All aspects of modern capitalist society is mediated by images and we constitute our idealized self-image within that spectacle.

From being into having into appearing

Some notes on the text, which are straightforward by just browsing the OP link:

The text is divided into nine chapters, each chapter being prefaced by a related quote. It is further subdivided into 221 sections (not counting the chapter-opening quotes), or as I like to say "pronouncements", which range from a sentence to a very long paragraph or two.

This choice of numbered paragraph-by-paragraph organization of a short, serious text is very much in the European philosophical tradition of shorter texts. Locke's second treatise of government, Kant's prolegomena, Luther's 95 theses, all operate in the same way.

The pronouncements are divided among the chapters like so:

I 1-34
II 35-53
III 54-72
IV 73-124
V 125-146
VI 147-164
VII 165-179
VIII 180-211
IX 212-221

Thus I propose for discussion to copypasta precisely the above 18 pronouncements which delimit each chapter's end points, although of course they are readily accessible in the OP link. Posting them here and encouraging a direct discussion of them ought to be a good starting point for discussion of the text, I think, although this fairly presupposes that a browser has actually read the text.

File: Arnoldstoned.jpg (17KB, 300x263px) Image search: [Google]

17KB, 300x263px

What if we lived in the matrix, starring Keanu Reaves as Neo?

>>8627622

Yes, this is the introductory rhetoric of the text (which wiki also focuses on the opening statements of chapter 1), but Debord goes on to consider other sectors of modern life - physical territory, culture, and time among them (which seem to remain popular discussions in leftist discourse). And this is a good place to recapitulate the chapter-by-chapter, in my own initial take:

I Separation Perfected

Statement of meme-principles. It's all a spectacle, man, but it's not just your tv. Marxist understanding of the above is begun to be hinted at, and the contemporary reader gets hints of how we read the internet today.

II The Commodity as Spectacle

Debord demonstrates a "The First bits of Capital" Marxist vocabulary, I guess. It's abstruse but there's "commercials n shiet are bad!" going on here.

III Unity and Division within Appearance

This one is frankly both confusing and interesting. The theme of the chapter is the tension of unity and division, especially as they are obliged to operate with respect to Debord's spectacle: both contradicting and reinforcing one another at this-or-that point. One gets a sense that the strange and contradictory language of this chapter entails both Hegelian and Marxist dialectic.

IV The Proletariat as Subject and Representation

This chapter is the long slog. On one level (though this is only my read and possibly not Debord's full authorial intent) it's a recapitulation of (mostly) the Soviet Union up until the time of the writing of the text, the early sixties. Debord seems to observe "oh damn, this didn't work out quite as well as we had hoped", and so the Soviet bureaucrats, Revolution-betrayers, Stalins etc are the new thug-bourgeoisie, who must "appear" to be proles, or something along those lines. The point being that there is a spectacle here as well, though the word is barely invoked in the chapter.

V Time and History

This one deserves a re-read. various versions of time (cyclical, progressive (linear)) accord somewhat to certain familiar political views.

VI Spectacular Time

Vacations, work shifts, etc are artificial and not-objective modes of bracketing time. Keep this in mind.

VII The Organization of Territory

Comments on the "sameness" of cities, destinations, standardization. "Complaint of banalization" (take it up with modernism as opposed to capitalism?)

VIII Negation and Consumption Within Culture

Disruption of "culture" (art, old society) by capitalism. Elaborate ways of saying that the spectacle (modern capitalism) is "false" culture, or otherwise disruptive.

IX Ideology Materialized

Discussion of "ideology" (sniff) with reference to all of the above. Debord's positive solution is a vague re-work of Marx, the worker's "councils" (mentioned earlier), who are presumably Woke, or on the path to being Woke from the Spectacle.

>>8627773
Please don't ever write like that again.

Le epic memes xD

>>8627773
'
desu I was planning on reading this as part of my media theory studies but this turned me off

sounds like just another shrill moralizer