>In the historical society divided into classes, culture is

>>9422380
You'll have to excuse me, my english is pretty shit and also I'll be checking my translation of the book, but he's pretty much saying that mythological thinking operated in it's own rules outside of the class society, and access to culture then was communal (arguable, but not wrong), but the stratification of culture promoted by modern nation states create the notion of a "offical culture" (this is more part of my reading / study of his oeuvre than the text itself), it creates another way to separate the proletariat from another possibility of production (if only artists produce art, what workers do can't possibly be art and so on).

I gotta re-read tSotS, but keep in mind Debord detourned the whole book, meaning he just took excerpts from other authors and switched words (the first thesis being the first paragraph of The Capital). While as a work of art this is beautiful to me, this often creates very weird situations in the text, so often it helps to go after the original quote, try to understand it and see what Debord changed.

I also suggest you read about vanguard theory, the IS was pretty much the culmination of 60 years of vanguardist thinking and it shows.

>>9422471
Excellent explanation, thank you

>>9422508
You're welcome mate, feel free with any other doubts you might have, I fucking love Debord and got nothing else to do today

>>9422556
I've been dissecting tSotS these past few months and trying to glean a few situationalist films. Surprisingly dense read but the message is ominous.

It's both frightening and fascinating how saturated the world has become with commodities - to the point where they are exchanged as representations, a testament to the unity of the spectacle's penumbra (his keychain example illustrated this perfectly imo).

Is your native language French per chance?

>>9422592
No, I'm brazilian.

The thing about situationist theory is that indeed, the texts and pieces are very dense, but it works fractally. The core message is quite easy to understand, but the more you extrapolate this core message, the more complex and, to use your term, ominous this message becomes.

I don't know how acquainted you are with their stuff, but if you want some easier texts I recommend you their journals, On the Poverty of Student Life and Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life. SPECIALLY Poverty and Revolution, btwo, as far as I know, they're the easier texts to get into the situationist lang and atmosphere.

>>9422626
Thx for the recs. Got into Debord recently so I haven't had much exposure to other situationist texts.

One thing I've noticed is how powerful their rhetoric is

>Fixated on the delusory center around which his world seems to move, the spectator no longer experiences life as a journey toward fulfillment and toward death. Once he has given up on really living he can no longer acknowledge his own death. Life insurance ads merely insinuate that he may be guilty of dying without having provided for the smooth continuation of the system following the resultant economic loss, while the promoters of the “American way of death” stress his capacity to preserve most of the appearances of life in his post-mortem state.

It seems like their theses revolve around exposing paradoxes of Capitalism Marx didn't live to experience; a new friction where distortion of reality itself is packaged, embellished and forcefed. What do you think?

In the translation I'm reading Knabb says that the only way to really understand the book is by using it.
Do you think this accurate?

>>9422753
If that's the case we missed our shot in 1968

A lot of his claims come as intuitive to me and it's easy to see what he's saying in the world. I think it's important to understand your position as a spectator and identify the ways you are assaulted by the spectacle. Once the symptoms of being a proponent of the society of the spectacle are tangible, the rest is a matter of identifying patterns and concepts. At least this is how I've been reading it.

>>9422746
Sorry I disappeared dude, had to run some errands.

Yes, that's is precisely his point, to update Marx's theories (specially commodity fetishism) to what has since then been called late capitalism. The thing is, I think he goes even further than that, tSotS is essentially a exercise in futurology, some of the stuff he claims was still sort of hazy in the 60s but very clear now (I mean, people get baffled daily by whatever stunt Trump is pulling, and everyone acts as if Surkov is some sort of evil mastermind, but they're both exploiting the Spectacle, and they only do it because people want to believe in the Spectacle) but the whole post-truth thing is nothing more than a technicization of the Spectacle as a whole.

>>9422753
Yes, Debord wasn't a theorist, he is writing (and art) had praxiological intentions as well.

>>9422777
This desu, but the tools the books (and situationist theory as a whole) give you can be extremely liberating if you're willing to.

If you guys are into Debord, I strongly suggest you get into some post-leftist thinkers, I feel they're the best possible antidotes to the new right and the old left, and often find myself wondering how people like Bob Black or Hakim Bey aren't meme-tier here, their whole outlook seems to align perfectly.with a bunch of over-educated degenerate NEETs / sub-employees like ourselves.

>>9423513
post-left? situ heirs are the French ultra-left my dude. bey is in dialogue with anarchism not marxism like debord and later gilles dauvé

>>9423538
I don't think there is any dialogue going on between them, but I also think stuff like poetic terrorism and TAZs are extremely indebted (to avoid saying they're downright stolen) to situationism and even ppl who hate situationism like Stewart Home have to recognize Debord is a guy (no pun intended).

>>9423553
im not sure why you don't think that. it's pretty explicit.

>>9423513
Finished the book 10 minutes ago. It's incredible how prescient he is of current 'revolutions' and how their successive attempts exist only to reinforce the spectacle.

Do you have any insight or recommendations on Debord's perspective on universal history in the context of worker's councils and emancipation? Unless I misread he wants to reincorporate class consciousness in the proletariat, eliminate pseudo-cyclical time imposed on workers by the bourgeoisie, and reignite the momentum of history

I would take anything Debord writes with a massive amount of salt, he admitted they failed to materialize any of his theories, contributed to a Gaullist victory, the fact his only victory was to annoy a small Church assembly contributed to his suicide, etc.

Legitimately one of the most pathetic philosophers ever to exist.

>>9423586
It is explicit, but they're not dialoguing. It's been quite a while since I read TAZ, 10 or so years, but I don't remember him even trying to address any point raised by any situationist. He just takes these things as a given (in TAZ at least, I don't know about Chaos) and builds his own ideas from there.

I also think there is a pretty clear influence of Situationism in the post-left, but the dude here >>9423538 seems to disagree

>>9423657
I suggest you give Benjamin (and maybe Bataille, though I'm not well read in his work) a read, they both seem preoccupied with the same sort of interruption-of-history-as-apocathastasis as Debord sometimes seems to be.

Benjamin also has a very similar outlook to him in his views on negation.

>>9423712
What the fuck are you even talking about, Debord offed himself 15 years after Gaullism ceased to be a thing.

Also, calling him a philosopher is pretty retarded if you are at all acquainted with his philosophy, and I seriously doubt his failure to "materialize his theories" (which he never saw or mentioned as theories as far as I've seen) had anything to do with his suicide, which was by all accounts caused by a mix of his own health deteriorating due to alcoholism and alleged depression after being accused to murder Gerard Lebovicci.

Even as a fan of his, is pretty easy to criticize a lot of Debord's views, I don't even agree with the thesis in OP, but the way you're doing it is just ridiculous.