Analyzes the relationship of power, bureaucracy, and change in modern society.

For the first time, Guy Debord's pivotal work Society of the Spectacle appears in a definitive and authoritative English translation. Originally published in France in 1967, Society of the Spectacle offered a set of radically new propositions about the nature of contemporary capitalism and modern culture. At the same time it was one of the most influential theoretical works for a wide range of political and revolutionary practice in the 1960s. Today, Debord's work continues to be (...) in the forefront of debates about the fate of consumer society and the operation of modern social power. In a sweeping revision of Marxist categories, the notion of the spectacle takes the problem of the commodity from the sphere of economics to a point at which the commodity as an image dominates not only economic exchange but the primary communicative and symbolic activity of all modern societies.Guy Debord was one of the most important participants in the activities associated with the Situationist International in the 1960s. Also an artist and filmmaker, he is the author of Memoires and Commentaires sur la société du spectacle. A Swerve Edition, distributed for Zone Books. (shrink)

Modern society has long been a spectacle. As defined by Guy Debord, a spectacle is not a collection of images but rather a social relationship mediated by images in a consumer economy. Whereas the spectacle offers the illusion of consumer choice, behind each manifestation is to be found the same alienation. Such aimless, persistent consumption does not lead to personal fulfillment but to drudgery. Breaking free of the spectacle is facilitated by an awareness of the (...) symbiotic relationship between ideology and revolution. As such, it is useful to those who are exhausted and disillusioned by rampant consumerism to examine how variants of the terms ideology and revolution were employed by Debord in The Society of the Spectacle, and to use that understanding as a basis for individual and collective liberation. To that end, this study examined variants of the terms ideology and revolution at the sentence level of usage. The results provide a comprehensive comparison of the themes and sentiments of those variants. Revolutionary freedom from the spectacle can only be achieved by overcoming the consumerist ideology embedded at the core of the capitalist regime of power. (shrink)

In The Society of the Spectacle, Debord describes the spectacle as a capitalist social formation that is at the same time reflective of the privileging of vision in the history of Western philosophy. This article highlights Debord’s appeal to the Hegelian-Marxist notion of reciprocal alienation in his discussion of how the spectacle invents the visual form. Reciprocal alienation produces a dialectical relation between concrete social activity and the spectacle, which I argue is key for understanding (...) how the political subject is represented in the hyper-spectacularized societies of the 21st century. (shrink)

In _The Political Economy of the Spectacle and Postmodern Caste_, John Asimakopoulos analyzes the political economy of the spectacle conceptualized by philosophers like Guy Debord through a broad interdisciplinary-nonsectarian approach concluding every society is a caste system legitimized by ideology.

This book reveals the sense in which our postmodern societies are characterized by the obscene absence of the intellectual. The modern intellectual--who had once been associated with humanism and enlightenment—has in our day been replaced by media stars, talking heads, and technical experts. At issue is the ongoing crisis of democracy, under the aegis of the société du spectacle and its vast networks of politically-induced idiocy, industrially-produced biocide, and militarily-provoked genocide. Spectacle fills the resulting moral and intellectual vacuum (...) with electronic technologies of control, punishment, and destruction. This postmodern tyranny reduces intelligence to mechanistic, positivist, and grammatological models of inquiry, while increasing the segmentation, fragmentation, and dissolution of human existence. The apotheosis of the spectacle explains the intellectual void that lies at the heart of our postmodern decadence; it also accounts for the need to recuperate the humanist values of enlightenment promoted by the modern intellectual tradition. (shrink)

ExcerptTimothy W. Luke, Screens of Power: Ideology, Domination, and Resistance in Informational Society, revised edition. Foreword by Ronald J. Deibert. Candor, NY: Telos Press Publishing, 2020. Pp. xxiii + 340.

The aim of this article is to explore how the differences between Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze delineate two different interpretations of the politics of found footage cinema. To do so, the notion of cinematic interval is crucial. While Debord's practice of détournement presupposes a Hegelian-inspired notion of interval that allows for self-awareness to be achieved, Deleuze puts forth a Bergsonian concept of interval that functions as a condition of possibility for creating an ‘image of movement in itself’. To explore (...) these two interpretations, this article uses Guy Debord's 1973 film The Society of the Spectacle as a case study. By focusing on this specific object, the two interpretations of the cinematic interval make it possible to compare two alternative ways of dealing with the representability – or unrepresentability – of capital, and hence to sketch two alternative views on the politics of found footage film practices. (shrink)

Alongside the robots, rockets, kitchen appliances, and other technical wonders displayed at the great expositions and world’s fairs of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, visitors frequently found deceptively staid demonstrations of banal bureaucratic tools: cards, fiches, and files. Yet these technologies of information management were aestheticized and presented as integral to the generation and pursuit of the fairs’ ambitious ‘world projects’: global networks, universal intelligences, efficient cities, colonized galaxies. The small, moving parts of information functioned as critical tools for city- (...) and world-building. In this article we begin with the 1964–5 World’s Fair, where bits and fragments of information fueled space-age visions, then trace those mid-century imaginaries back to the 1939–40 World’s Fair and a constellation of expos at the turn of the century, to see how the small, moving parts of information management ‘scale up’ to generate grand fantasies, and, at the same time, how they serve to index their own particular political and cultural milieux. (shrink)

During the past decades, the culture industries have multiplied media spectacles in novel spaces and sites, and spectacle itself is becoming one of the organizing principles of the economy, polity, society, and everyday life. An Internet-based economy has been developing hi-tech spectacle as a means of promotion, reproduction, and the circulation and selling of commodities, using multimedia and increasingly sophisticated technology to dazzle consumers. M edia culture proliferates ever more technologically sophisticated spectacles to seize audiences and augment (...) their power and profit. The forms of entertainment permeate news and information, and a tablodized infotainment culture is more and more popular. New multimedia that synthesize forms of radio, film, TV news and entertainment, and the mushrooming domain of cyberspace, become spectacles of technoculture, generating expanding sites of information and entertainment, while intensifying the spectacle-form of media culture. Political and social life is also shaped more and more by media spectacle. Social and political conflicts are increasingly played out on the screens of media culture, which display spectacles like sensational murder cases, terrorist bombings, celebrity and political sex scandals, and the explosive violence of everyday life. M edia culture not only takes up expanding moments of contemporary experience, but also provides ever more material for fantasy, dreaming, modeling thought and behavior, and constructing identities. Of course, there have been spectacles since premodern times. Classical Greece had its Olympics, thespian and poetry festivals, its public rhetorical battles, and bloody and violent wars. Ancient Rome had its public offerings of bread and circuses, its orgies, its titanic political battles, and the spectacle of Empire with parades and monuments for triumphant Caesars and their armies, extravaganzas put on display in the 2000 film Gladiator.. (shrink)

Rousseau maintains that the spectacle isolates us at the very same moment when it brings us together. This article argues that this striking remark must be understood within the more general framework of a critique of the spectacular nature of modern society. But if the spectacle is not simply an occasional form of entertainment, but a social relationship that pervades modern society as a whole, how can we escape from it? Rousseau’s homeopathic strategy, according to which (...) we should fight an evil through small doses of that very same evil, offers a solution that is crucial for grasping the scope of Rousseau’s critique of the spectacle as well as for rethinking the possibility of democracy. (shrink)

Resumen: Este trabajo tiene como fin analizar el teatro como una representación de los conflictos del ser y su relación con el mundo. Se centra en el teatro de Gustavo Ott, para quien el Espectáculo es la Alteridad de la sociedad contemporánea, sus obras dramáticas plantean en el tema y la puesta en escena conflictos existenciales del hombre, así como la violencia, la muerte, lo absurdo, lo oscuro, la crueldad y el humor. Por ello, la investigación pretende describir cómo el (...) autor estetiza la violencia y experimenta puestas en escenas teatrales con la literatura y el cine, utilizando teorías y de La Alteridad de M. Bajtín; La Sociedad del Espectáculo, M. Vargas Llosa y El Cine de Q. Tarantino, por medio de una investigación cualitativa, con lectura analítica y amplios registros documentales.: This article is intended to analyse the Teatro, As A Representation of the conflicts of the self and its relationship with the world. Search the Through the actors--the characters, the Other being no more than the Self, evidencer A Concienc Cultural heritage in a Show society. The Research focuses on the theatre of Gustavo Ott, for whom The Show is la Alteridad of contemporary SocietyTheir Dramatic works Pose in the subject and staging existential conflicts of man, as well as Violence, death, the Absurd, the dark, the cruelty And The humour. Therefore, the article intends to describe as the author merely aestheticised the violence and experiments in theatrical scenes with literature and cinema, using Theories and methods of La Alteridad of M. Bakhtin; La Sociedad of the Show, M. Vargas Llosa, The Cinema of Q. Tarantino, Through qualitative research, with analytical reading and extensive documentary records. (shrink)

SummaryScholars have pointed to Montesquieu's influence on Rousseau's work generally. Other scholars, who focus more intently on the Letter to d'Alembert, discern a crucial but limited influence of Montesquieu in two of Rousseau's teachings there: first, that some practices, including the theatre, can be appropriate and even wholesome for some societies, while noxious for others; and second, that mores are important in determining what types of laws and institutions a given people can tolerate and maintain. Careful consideration of Rousseau's Letter (...) in light of Montesquieu's Persian Letters and Spirit of the Laws reveals a much more pervasive influence, however. Rousseau's depictions of the theatre as well as his discussions of the role of women in both French and English society reveal that the Letter bears a striking resemblance to, and, in fact, appears to be a response to, aspects of Montesquieu's thought. Montesquieu's captivating depictions of the sociability that the French theatre can engender was surely an obstacle for Rousseau's opposition to its influence in Geneva. In resisting such influence, Rousseau counters many of Montesquieu's specific arguments and judgements. (shrink)

The paper presents a comparative analysis of the interpretation of the phenomenon of social control in postmodernism and metamodernism. The similarities and differences in the description of social control mechanisms are identified. The concepts of “society of the spectacle” (G.Debord), “society of surveillance” (M.Foucault) and “society of control” (J. Deleuze) are analyzed, which show the evolution of postmodernists’ views on social processes.. The concept of the “listening society” (G.Freinacht) as a metamodern alternative to the development (...) of modern society is presented. Postmodernism focuses on criticizing society, drawing attention to its increasing fragmentation, the crisis of metanarratives, and the growing role of the media as a tool for social control. In contrast, metamodernism tries to balance modern and postmodern theories, recognizing the importance of centralized and decentralized forms of social control. This allows simultaneously taking into account the diversity of identities of a modern person and the possibility of his or her integration into society through the adoption of common norms and rules. Metamodernism seeks to reconstruct metanarratives that can contribute to new forms of social control based on cooperation and common interests. It emphasizes the importance of empathy in social control, whereas postmodernism rejects it as a false, simulated form of social relations. While postmodernism focuses more on critical analysis of existing structures, metamodernism aims to find hybrid and adaptive forms of control that combine traditional methods with the latest technologies. All these differences in the interpretation of the phenomenon of social control reflect the paradigm shift from postmodern deconstruction to synthesis and reconstruction within metamodernism. (shrink)

Considering formative twentieth-century theories in relation to contemporary technosocial developments, this article examines ideas of spectacle and surveillance as ways of approaching visual politics. I argue that the historically important relationship between the visual and political fields is now intensifying and mutating. First discussing Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, I show how his influential approach proves inadequate to the politics of image-saturated societies. I next show how critics of imperial and racial spectacles, from Michael Rogin (...) to Claudia Rankine and Tina Campt, provide better ways of engaging power and political contestation in the visual field. Third, I examine how Michel Foucault deployed notions of spectacle in his own work but argued for leaving the term behind, presenting surveillance as not just a different modality of power but also spectacle’s temporal successor. This account remains essential for both historical understanding and reckoning with contemporary surveillance. Fourth, however, as Simone Browne argues, Foucault’s separation between spectacle and surveillance is too stark, his history too prone to occlude race. Furthermore, recent surveillance technologies and practices have changed in ways that confound his terms, while extending and also altering the racial dynamics explored earlier in the essay. Today, even surveillance based on optical media contributes to a “postvisual” image world in which algorithmic, machine-machine communication abets forms of power neither tied to human perception nor graspable as subject formation. With surprising assistance from Debord, I end by discussing the significant theoretical and political challenges posed by the ironies of postvisual visuality. (shrink)

The letter sent by the Royal Society to the London optician, John Marshall, in 1694, commending his new method of grinding, has been reprinted, and referred to, in recent years. However, there has been no comprehensive analysis of the method itself, the letter and the circumstances in which it was written, nor the consequences for trade practices. The significance of the approval by the Royal Society of this innovation and the use of that approbation by John Marshall and (...) other practitioners are examined. Gaps in existing accounts of Marshall's method are partly remedied by supplementing surviving written materials with accounts of contemporary, and present-day, trade practices based on his method. The reasons why Marshall and his contemporaries failed to record his method and specify his improvements are discussed. The reactions of the Spectacle Makers' Company and its more prominent members, both to the innovation itself and to the Royal Society's letter, are analysed. The impact of the new technique on contemporary and later opticians is described. (shrink)

In 1967 Guy Debord published the pamphlet-sized The Society of the Spectacle, a book written in the form of a collection of short theses. Debord was criticized for inventing the “spectacle” out of thin air by thinkers of his time such as Michel Foucault. We can, however, detect salient manifestations of the Debordian spectacular society in China of the 2010s. This paper demonstrates a deep and pervasive trend of spectacularization in China by analyzing (a) Taobao as (...) a desire-creating machine producing the buy-buy-buy fanaticism, (b) the beautifying operation that has engendered perverted effects in sexual relationship, (c) the spectacular dialectic epitomized by the celebrity culture, and (d) the reality-twisting effects of the spectacles. The paper further offers a comparative analysis of the contemporary spectacles vis-à-vis the Maoist spectacles of the 1960s, which sheds light in understanding the enactment of antientertainment actions in recent years. The spectacles in contemporary China, in the fashion depicted by Debord half a century ago, have effectively produced a specific worldview of commodity and consumption, and this worldview transforms itself, through blind trust, into a type of objective force. The social terrains needed for spreading and cultivating socialist values were heavily colonized by the such spectacles (consumption, beautification, celebrity culture, entertainment); the latter have significantly absorbed the masses’ attention in the last decade to such level that it has almost occupied all spaces for communication and played the leading role in regulating people’s daily lives. The “Beauty is justice!” slogan that has been extremely popular in contemporary China reveals one significant change in Chinese culture and its sociopolitical effect: the trend of spectacularization, through elevating spectacle to the supreme value and turning the country into a spectacular (un)reality, has not only homogenized China but also effectively depoliticized the country. (shrink)

This book explores the tradition, impact, and contemporary relevance of two key ideas from Western Marxism: Georg Lukács's concept of reification, in which social aspects of humanity are viewed in objectified terms, and Guy Debord's concept of the spectacle, where the world is packaged and presented to consumers in uniquely mediated ways. Bringing the original, yet now often forgotten, theoretical contexts for these terms back to the fore, Johan Hartle and Samir Gandesha offer a new look at the importance (...) of Western Marxism from its early days to the present moment-and reveal why Marxist cultural critique must continue to play a vital role in any serious sociological analysis of contemporary society. (shrink)

For theorists interested in screen cultures and the digital economy, looking beyond Facebook and YouTube prompts a more refined conceptualization of participation and monetization on social networks. This paper examines YY as representative of Chinese platforms that monetize spectacles of social inequality. I first discuss why these financially successful platforms have eluded the attention of media and cultural critics, and then explain how these social network platforms blend subversive texting with streaming through a format called ‘bullet screen’. This format collapses (...) social inequality into a spectacle of money flowing and vanishing on screen. This investigation contributes to the theoretical discussion of mixed-semiotics, reorients several Marxian neologisms and explains what texting means on screen in both semiotic and economic terms. (shrink)

Debra Bergoffen’s Contesting the Politics of Genocidal Rape shows us beautifully what is gained by considering rape as a consequence of genocide. What gets lost here, in relation to considering cases of rape that are not the result of such, such as gang rape, “mass rape,” or other instances of rape? Is rape qua rape a human rights violation of a sort that is articulated within the context of the “right to sexual integrity”? Can a case be made, even in (...) “non-wartime” societies where rape occurs systematically as an instance of patriarchy and misogyny, that rape is a human rights violation of the right to sexual self-determination? Or is it the case that the conditions of wartime rape merit a different set of considerations in order to locate it as a human rights violation? My comments attempt to think through some of these questions with Bergoffen. (shrink)

Avant-garde theatre is often invoked as the bellwether for a society that has become postdramatic – fragmented, alienated, and critical of efforts to create collectively shared meanings. A theatre whose sequenced actions have no narrative (so the story goes) mirrors a social world where the most conflictual situations no longer appear as drama but merely as spectacle: a society where audiences look on without any feeling or connection. Because only half right, these theses about postdramatic theatre and (...) society are fundamentally wrong. As modern societies have expanded and differentiated, the elements that compose performances have become separated and often fragmented in both theatre and society. If they can be brought back together again, performances are viewed as authentic and meaningful. If (re)fusion cannot be achieved, performances fail to communicate meaning. The aim of this essay is to demonstrate that a shared ambition to (re)fuse fragmented performative elements has defined the most important strain of avant-garde theatre over the last two centuries. Most radical theatrical innovation has sought to open live drama back up to the telos of myth and ritual. Neither in theatre nor social life can the world transcend dramaturgy; it is fundamental to the search for meaning in a world beyond cosmological religion. (shrink)

Introduction. Analyzing the popularity of television series in the XXI century makes it possible to conclude that this format of video production has changed significantly in comparison with the second half of the XX century: the fascinating (seductive, enchanting) function in it dominates over the narrative-entertaining one. At the same time, not only the individual performer becomes the instrument of fascination, but the entire specially created visual environment of the series. This situation makes it possible for a researcher, on the (...) one hand, to identify the most significant emotional and psychological needs of modern society and thereby clarify some of the philosophical and anthropological aspects of today’s culture. On the other hand, it makes it possible to classify serial production on the basis of hedonistic values, that is, to identify the basic models by which the fascinating environments of popular serials are created. One of such models, the existential one, becomes the subject of special attention in the article. The purpose of the study is to present the existential model as one of five generative models of the screen spectacle on the basis of analyzing visual cues from the 2020 television series (Tales from the Loop. Amazon Studio, Fox 21 Television Studios, USA, 2020); to consider «Tales from the Loop» as a screen model that gives a viewer the experience of philosophical and anthropological reflection. Methods: In the course of the study, the authors use general scientific methods of analysis and synthesis; the method of phenomenological reduction, which makes it possible to record the sensually perceived qualities of object-spatial screen images; a hermeneutic method that makes it possible, on the basis of visible sign structures, to reveal the deep intentions of a visual image. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that we consider the television series as an anthropological phenomenon, not only reflecting the interests, aspirations and values of the society, but also modeling the society through a deep suggestive (fascinating) influence. A typology of such environments is created, corresponding to basic hedonistic needs and reflecting the degree of demand for certain states of pleasure in modern society. The method of creating a visual environment that draws a viewer into a state of philosophical reflection, which in this case is interpreted as a way to achieve «the fulfillment of being» (Aristippus), is specially clarified. Results. In the course of the analysis, the authors applied to television production a hedonistic-ontological typology of a visual image, which includes five generative models; a targeted analysis of the popularity of the most influential television series of the 2000s – 2020s was carried out, taking into account the level and causes of spectator fascination; as exemplified by the television series «Stories from the Loop» and in the course of the analysis of its visual components, it becomes clear how the modern series succeeds in involving a viewer in a state of philosophical reflection. Conclusions. The philosophical and anthropological analysis of the modern television series shows that the entertainment and narrative functions that are relevant for the twentieth century have been replaced by the function of fascination, a deep influence on a viewer at a suggestive level. In this case, the purpose of fascination is to involve a viewer not only in hedonistic states of pleasure, but also in states of faith or philosophical reflection. (shrink)

This essay excavates the pre-capitalist influences of the thought of Guy Debord, French postwar critical theorist and founding member of the Situationist International. Tracing a lineage of what can be described as Debord’s aristocratic sensibility, we discover not simply an aesthetic approach to navigating social life, or guidelines for outmanoeuvring an adversary, but also contempt for honest labour, monetary transactions in cultural affairs, and conventional political gestures. Together these themes remain part of a legacy of an aristocratic past, one that, (...) as will be examined here, informed Debord’s acrimony towards his own mid-20th-century moment. The following discussion will advance a genealogy of Debord’s thinking with these themes from late antiquity to the Italian Renaissance, and finally with an extended examination of the baroque, a concept that helps advance Debord’s diagnostic concept of the society of the spectacle. (shrink)

‘The Strong Arm of the Law’ seeks to explain how the identification with military power that is produced through corporate mass mediated spectacles such as bodybuilding threatens democratic identifications. What is more, the militarized body aims at ever-greater control over the physical world yet results only in evergreater estrangement from it. The article begins by illustrating the martial dimensions of the bodybuilder’s body. Then, it reveals the extent to which the built body promises safety, security, and freedom while contributing to (...) the militarization of civil society – a process at odds with democratization. Next, it demonstrates the logic behind the bodybuilder’s identification and appeal as not merely soldier but weapon. The article concludes by raising the possibility of imagining the democratized body. (shrink)

Writer, artist, filmmaker, provocateur, revolutionary, and impresario of the Situationist International, Guy Debord shunned the apparatus of publicity he dissected so brilliantly in his most influential work, _The Society of the Spectacle_. In this ambitious and innovative biography, Vincent Kaufmann places Debord's very hostility toward the inquisitive, biographical gaze at the center of an investigation into his subject's diverse output-from his earliest films to his landmark works of social theory and political provocation-and the poetic sensibility that informed both his (...) work and his life. Instead of providing a conventional day-to-day account of Debord's life, Kaufmann deftly locates his subject within the historical and intellectual context of the radical social, political, and artistic movements in which he participated. He traces Debord's development as an intellectual: his involvement with the lettrist movement in the early 1950s, his central role in the Situationist International from 1957 to 1971 and in the events of May 1968, and the productive and frequently misunderstood period between the dissolution of the situationists and his suicide, during which time Debord clarified the rules of his war against inauthenticity. As Kaufmann makes clear, for Debord political thought and action were inseparable from aesthetics and poetic expression. Whether envisioning the recovery of a lost, protocommunist age of authenticity and transparency in _The Society of the Spectacle_ or critically assessing the possibility of revolution against postmodern capitalism two decades later, Debord advocated and practiced an art of defiance, a concurrently martial and melancholic poetics. Avoiding the mythologies about Debord that both admirers and critics have cultivated, Kaufmann provides a groundbreaking and generous assessment of Debord and his uncompromising struggle against a corrupt civilization. (shrink)

As much as Zimbabwe is considered one of the highly literate countries in the Global South, with well documented succession and inheritance laws, womenfolk continue to be stripped of their assets after the death of their husbands. This trend became even worse during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic when movement was restricted, making it difficult to access the courts of law. Using a mixed methodological approach of a desk research and qualitative interviews conducted in the Methodist Church in Zimbabwe, (...) Zororo Comfort circuit in Harare, it has been noted that women and girls face numerous horrific experiences, pushing them to wallow in the margins of society. This study therefore calls for the church to address the vulnerability of women and girls using a deviant theory. To date, there are increasing figures of domestic violence, sexual assault, and child marriages. Financial and communal disturbances corresponding through continuous pandemic challenges for women are aggravated, and those who survive find it challenging to hunt for fairness because of stockpiled court issues and freedom for the perpetrators. The fact that women are dispossessed of their belongings because of the cultural status of being a woman calls for a cultural cue. Using a deviant theory in the narrative of a tenacious widow in the gospel of Luke 18:1–8 from a sociological dimension, this study provides a critical edge into interpreting the action of this widow who deviated from expected societal customs. The study concludes by calling faith communities to re-read the widow’s story through deviant theory spectacles to raise questions on how this widow courageously represented herself from societal margin to undermine the centre (patriarchal standards) and to utilise the text as a resource for addressing the plight of women to be repositioned and be empowered in Zimbabwe.Contribution: This study contributes to the ongoing academic studies on women, pandemics, religion and gender, using the Methodist Church in Zimbabwe, Zororo Comfort circuit as a case study. It concludes by an invitation to faith communities to re-read the widow’s story using a deviant theory in order to use the text as a resource to alleviate the plight of women and empower them to the position of equilibrium with men. (shrink)

This paper explores the Shanghai 2010 World Expo to show how spectacle serves a governing function of the Chinese developmental state. I introduce soil exegesis as a method to excavate sedimented power relations of spectacle, undergirding the expo’s presentation. This approach investigates how spectacle is a state-territorializing project and pedagogical venture that relies on and denies the state socialist-era’s waste, to produce a ‘new nature’ and perform socio-technical management of crisis and crowds. Dynamic rearrangement of soil quality (...) and composition facilitated the urban redevelopment zone of sustainable futures, while interactive-technocratic environments inserted visitor bodies into expo surveillance systems and infrastructure without reference to the embedded political ecology of the mass event within Shanghai and beyond. The article concludes by considering ethical legacies of the event and the ways ‘sustainable spectacle’ operates through waste administration and environmental performance that ‘greenwash’ the socialist past and obstruct other governing arrangements. (shrink)

This paper aims to examine the nature of the situationist concept of spectacle, especially by separating it into its philosophical elements, in order to check the effectiveness, from a systematic point of view, of situationism’s radical critique. In doing so, the main focus of our attention will be Debord’s major theoretical work: Society of the Spectacle. In fact, the concept of spectacle, repeatedly evoked in other writings, has its most far-reaching version in that small but great (...) book, whose first edition was published in 1967. (shrink)

The article addresses the critical strategy of profanation in the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, focusing on the example of pornography. Agamben’s references to pornography as a site of radical political transformation have recently been criticized as abstruse, vacuous or absurd. Moreover, his own work on the concentration camps in the Homo Sacer series has been disparagingly referred to as ‘pornography of horror’. This article ventures to refute these accusations by interpreting Agamben’s paradigmatic use of pornography in the context of his (...) wider project of profanation, understood as the overcoming of all social separations and the return of objects of social praxis to free use. Read in this context, pornography is grasped as the paradigmatic site of the constitution of the unprofanable, the epitome of the late capitalist ‘society of the spectacle’ and thus the primary target of profanatory criticism. In the remainder of the article we elucidate the logic of Agamben’s profanatory strategy and conclude that, far from being politically irrelevant, profanation constitutes the condition of the actualization of Agamben’s messianic ideal of a generic and non-exclusive community. (shrink)

Hryhorii Skovoroda's philosophy is distinguished by a variety of interests and a combination of different genres of the embodiment of philosophical ideas. Skovoroda's philosophical views were reflected in his various life practices in different ways. And yet these different practices harmoniously support each other, ensuring the successful integral self-support of Hryhorii Skovoroda both as a philosopher and as a person. He highly valued the importance of practice for human improvement, but did not develop a special concept of practice of his (...) own. Since Skovoroda himself did not clearly distinguish different types of practices, it is necessary to reconstruct them based on modern ideas about possible philosophical practices. Among the various types of philosophical practices, which are distinguished by modern philosophy and some signs of which can be found in the life and work of Hryhorii Skovoroda, the following were found: practices similar to avoiding metanarratives; practices similar to deconstruction; practices of metaphorization; informational diet practices; improvisation practices; practices of avoiding the effects of the society of the spectacle; spiritual self-reference practices; critical thinking practices; social networking practices. The article attempts a reverse theoretical reconstruction of Hryhorii Skovoroda's philosophical practices. That is, from the standpoint of modern philosophical concepts, the meaning of those life practices that Hryhorii Skovoroda adhered to when he embodied his philosophical views in his actions, mostly without unnecessary declarations, has been partially reconstructed. Skovoroda's practical philosophy was not built by him as a theoretical system, although his life clearly shows the coherence of various life practices. All the practices followed by Hryhorii Skovoroda were fundamentally philosophical – he lived like a philosopher and approached everything like a philosopher, with a philosophical heart and a philosophical head. There were many of these practices, and this article mentions only some of them, namely those that seem significant to us today in the light of the later development of European philosophy – as we know it to this day. It is quite likely that other philosophers of our time, and even more so philosophers of the future, will see in Skovoroda's philosophical life also other various practices. (shrink)

The effects of humankind during the Capitalocene period caused planetary changes that resulted in the devastation and destruction of the Earth. The nuclear tragedy at the Chornobyl NPP on April 26, 1986, should serve as a constant reminder to society as it provided an example of dysfunctional totalitarian management. The topic of Chornobyl has become socially tiresome in recent years due to the trivialization of this large-scale anthropogenic, ecological, economic, and humanitarian disaster. The image of Ukraine as a hazard (...) area has gradually been replaced in world consciousness. When Russia, the aggressor country, started to intimidate the world with nuclear and thermonuclear weapons and to take the nuclear power plants in Ukraine under fire, the danger of radioactive materials came up once again. Phosphorous ammunition used in Ukraine in 2022 demonstrates that the terrorist state is capable of anything. Scientists also relate to earthquake motions that occurred in Turkey in February 2023 and Japan in January 2024, with the displacement of continental plates of the Earth’s crust resulting from missile attacks at the surface of the Earth. In the 21st century, there was a need to reconsider and refresh memories as well as to reread the works under a new perspective to draw attention to crimes against the safety of humanity and the environment, as well as to popularize, preserve and pass historical knowledge to future generations to protect them from traumatic experiences and self-destruction. The article aims to look at the postcolonial environment in contemporary literature of fact through the spectacle of ecocritical discourse via reading the works on the Chornobyl disaster. The objects of the study are Galia Ackerman’s work “Crossing Chornobyl”, the documentary and publicist chapter “Chornobyl Scenario” from the novel “Non-format Journalism” by Hryhorii Krymchuk, Volodymyr Shovkoshytnyi’s semidocumentary short story “Chornobyl: I Saw It”, the chapter “Elon Musk, “Tesla”, and Nuclear Power Engineering” from Maks Kidruk’s popular scientific book “Theory of Improbability”, Oleksii Radynskyi’s literary report “Chornobyl Is Ukraine”, and Markiian Kamysh’s travelogue “Stalking the Atomic City”. Study methods include principles of science, objectivity, and source verification. General scientific and special scientific research methods used in the study are a descriptive method for synthesizing and systematizing selected material; comparative and typological methods involving the elements of cultural, comparative, and narrative studies to compare the ways various authors have covered the Chornobyl topic; an ecocritical method that has made it possible to apply naturecentric approach to conceptualizing interaction between a human and nature to develop eco-conscious society; a postcolonial method aimed at conceptualizing the consequences of colonial rule via non-fiction text. (shrink)

In A Politics of the Ordinary, Thomas Dumm dramatizes how everyday life in the United States intersects with and is influenced by the power of events, on the one hand, and forces of conformity and normalcy on the other. Combining poststructuralist analysis with a sympathetic reading of a strain of American thought that begins with Emerson and culminates in the work of Stanley Cavell, A Politics of the Ordinary investigates incidents from everyday life, political spectacles, and popular culture. Whether juxtaposing (...) reflections about boredom in rural New Mexico with Emerson's theory of constitutional amendment, Richard Nixon's letter of resignation with Thoreau's writings to overcome quiet desperation, or demonstrating how Disney's Toy Story allegorizes the downsizing of the American white-collar work force, Dumm's constant concern is to show how the ordinary is the primary source of the democratic political imagination. (shrink)

In this paper, the author establishes and defends the thesis that the 1980s horror film production acts as a paradigm of the spectacle, especially in terms of the system of reduction of immediate life to image related mediations and phenomena. Thus, three disparate elements are now connected in a conceptual framework by which author supposes one must judge the media theory and media at large at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. The three (...) elements are the Heideggerian notion of the age of the world-picture, the Debordian notion of the spectacle, and the Deleuzian experiment of the philosophy of film that, through Beller, establishes itself as a film philosophy, to be a possible answer to the contemporary state of a society in which the film spectacle reflects itself in the essentially cinematic culture, that is, in society put in motion exclusively only through the relation of image representations. (shrink)

I argue that Giorgio Agamben employs two, contradictory theories of the state in his works. Earlier works, such as "The Coming Community" and "Means without End", suggest that the state today functions as an aspect of the society of the spectacle where spectacle is the logical extension of the commodity form under late capitalism. This part of Agamben's work attributes a determined character to the state and a determining power to the economic forces of capitalism that conditions (...) particular forms of the state. Later work, such as "Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life" and " State of Exception", are preoccupied with the logic of juridical sovereignty and the increased frequency of states of emergency. This part of Agamben's work attributes a determining strength to the state under current conditions. Although his earlier work provides a more coherent narrative of how it is possible to move from contemporary society to ideal community, it does not provide the theory of political action necessary to overcome the power of the state he describes when he theorizes the state in "Homo Sacer" and " State of Exception". None of the three possibilities of political action present in his later works provides passage beyond state sovereignty without violating his philosophical commitments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:January 25, 2012 (9:31 am) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3102\russell 31,2 064 red.wpd 1 See Russell’s exposure of this derogatory contraction of “Viet Nam Cong San” (“Vietnamese Communists”) in his War Crimes in Vietnam (London: Allen and Unwin, 1967), p. 45n. On the importance of language, cf. the legendary remark of Russell’s correspondent, Mohammad Ali: “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.… No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.” Russell attempted (...) to enlist Ali on behalf of the iwct (see the ra for their letters of 8 April, 18, 31 May, 11 Sept., 17 Oct., 15 Nov. and 16 Dec. 1967). russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. 31 (winter 2011–12): 167–87 The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn 0036-01631; online 1913-8032 ibliographies, rchival nventories, ndexes A SECONDARY BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE INTERNATIONAL WAR CRIMES TRIBUNAL: LONDON, STOCKHOLM AND ROSKILDE Stefan Andersson [email protected] i.wintroduction T he International War Crimes Tribunal (iwct) on the United States’ warfare in Vietnam was founded in 1966 through the moral outrage of the British philosopher and political activist Bertrand Russell, his private secretary Ralph Schoenman, Ken Coates, Chris Farley and other people connected to the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. They wanted to inform the world about the us government’s attempts to convince the Vietnamese population (who were mainly peasants) that capitalism is a better political-economical system than communism, by killing as many “Vietcong”1 and unarmed seniors, women and children as possible with regular carpet bombing, cluster and phosphorus bombs, napalm, Agent Orange and other illegal weaponry, and oTering the survivors pleasant lodgingsinwired-inhamlets far away from their homes and the graves of their ancestors. This charm oTensive went on for more than ten years, and although three times as many bombs fell on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia as were dropped during the whole Second World War, surprisingly enough the Vietnamese were not to be converted. In the 1960s this macabre spectacle could be watched on television all over the world, but very few protested against it. Until 1968 the majority of American January 25, 2012 (9:31 am) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3102\russell 31,2 064 red.wpd 168 stefan andersson 2 See Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History (New York, New American Library, 1968). He met up with Noam Chomsky, “a slim sharp-featured man with an ascetic expression, and an air of gentle but absolute moral integrity” (p. 180). Both were arrested and spent a night in prison together. 3 See Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York: Random House, 1973), p. 348. See also Natalie Atkin, “From Margin to Mainstream: American Peace Movements, 1950s– 1970s”, in issue “Peace Movements in Western Europe, Japan and the usa since 1945”, Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen, no. 32 (2004): 175–92. 4 See May 1970: Birth of the Antiwar University (New York: PathWnder P., 1971). 5 The so-called “Chicago conspiracy trials” or “Chicago 7 trials” that followed, when sevendefendants—AbbieHoTman,JerryRubin,DavidDellinger,TomHayden,Rennie Davis, John Froines and Lee Weiner—were charged with conspiracy and inciting to riot, showed that the us government was not going to tolerate such “unpatriotic” and “criminal ” behaviour. See James Tracy, Direct Action: Radical PaciWsm from the Union Eight to the Chicago Seven (Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1996), pp. 145–51. 6 See Mark Kurlansky, 1968: the Year That Rocked the World (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004), and David Caute, 1968: the Year of the Barricades (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988), pp. 3, 7–8, 12z–13. 7 Fredrik Logevall, “De Gaulle, Neutralization, and American Involvement in Vietnam, 1963–1964”, PaciWc Historical Review 61 (1992): 69–102. citizens were for the war, although some earlier, well-attended rallies against it, like the 1967 march on the Pentagon in late October,2 might have made some think diTerently. sds (Students for a Democratic Society)3 and other antiwar organizations never became the united force that could challenge the government ’s reliance on what Nixon called the “silent majority”. It was not until the us attacked Cambodia... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 30.4 (2000) 38-58 [Access article in PDF] Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead Andrew Norris Death is most frightening, since it is a boundary. —Aristotle, Nicomachean EthicsAnd as the same thing there exists in us living and dead and the waking and the sleeping and young and old: for these things having changed round are those, and those having changed round are these. —Heraclitus, Fragment (...) 88 What is politics today? What is its relationship to the tradition from which it emerges? The questions are difficult ones to answer in part because contemporary politics seems so schizophrenic. In affluent Western countries politics is increasingly a matter of spectacle on the one hand and managed economies on the other. Hannah Arendt seems quite confirmed in her claim that the once-glorious public realm of appearance is fundamentally degraded when it is overrun by concerns more appropriate to the private realm, such as household management and gossip. If this "unnatural growth of the natural" [47] inclines us to nostalgia for a time when the two realms were more decisively separated, such nostalgia is likely intensified by the "ethnic cleansing," rape camps, and genocide that we now associate with names such as "Yugoslavia" and "Rwanda." But as improbable as any flight to the past may be, it is even less likely that the politics of that past could help us navigate the treacherous waters of our current technological society. I have in mind not only the familiar claim that the attempted genocides of our time are only made possible by quite modern forms of technology, organization, and experience, 1 but also recent scientific and "medical" advances. Consider just two: first, the corporate driven and controlled development of biotechnologies, in which huge multinationals are acquiring patents to genetic "information" such as "all human blood cells that have come from the umbilical cord of [any] newborn child." If there is any doubt that such developments will lead us to redefine the human being, these may be laid to rest by the case of John Moore, an Alaskan businessman who found his own body parts had been patented, without his knowledge, by the University of California at Los Angeles and licensed to the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Corporation [Rifkin 60-61]. So much for Locke's attempt to ground the institution of private property in the fact that "every Man has a Property in his own Person"! 2 In its place we seem to be moving [End Page 38] toward something more like the "logical synthesis of biology and economy" called for by the National Socialist Institut allemand in Paris in 1942 [Agamben, Homo Sacer 145]. A similar process of redefinition is already underway in the field of death, a phenomenon that scientists and lawyers are having a harder and harder time pinning down. Where once death was defined by the cessation of the movement of the heart and lungs, recent life support technologies have forced scientists to define death in terms of such technologies. Witness Doctor Norman Shumway's defense of the definition of death as brain death: "I'm saying that anyone whose brain is dead is dead. It is the one determinant that would be universally applicable, because the brain is the one organ that can't be transplanted" [163]. By implication, if and when technology is developed that allows for brain transplants, even those whose brains are "dead" will be brought back to some kind of life, perhaps as organ farms for others who are less ambiguously alive.Giorgio Agamben, from whose book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life I take both this last grisly example and its analysis, argues that, contrary to appearances, such developments do not represent a radical break with the tradition. His analysis both builds upon and corrects Michel Foucault's claim that politics in our time is constituted by disciplines of normalization and subjectification that Foucault labels "bio-power." For Foucault, biopower is fundamentally modern. "What might be called a society's 'threshold of modernity,'" he writes, "has been reached when the life of the species is wagered... (shrink)

Baudrillard's remarkably prescient meditation on terrorism throws light on post-9/11 delusional fears and political simulations. Published one year after Forget Foucault, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities may be the most important sociopolitical manifesto of the twentieth century: it calls for nothing less than the end of both sociology and politics. Disenfranchised revolutionaries hoped to reach the masses directly through spectacular actions, but their message merely played into the hands of the media and the state. In a media (...) class='Hi'>society meaning has no meaning anymore; communication merely communicates itself. Jean Baudrillard uses this last outburst of ideological terrorism in Europe to showcase the end of the "Social." Once invoked by Marx as the motor of history, the masses no longer have sociological reality. In the electronic media society, all the masses can do—and all they will do—is enjoy the spectacle. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities takes to its ultimate conclusion the "end of ideologies" experienced in Europe after the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the death of revolutionary illusions after May 1968. Ideological terrorism doesn't represent anything anymore, writes Baudrillard, not even itself. It is just the last hysterical reaction to discredited political illusions. (shrink)

The method chosen here draws on concepts borrowed from sociology and anthropology. This double conceptual approach is necessary for a society divided between values inherited from medieval Christianity and precapitalist practices. Seventeenth-century France did not think of itself as a class society but as a society of orders. Since sociology is a system of knowledge whose concepts are taken from an imaginary construct, it is thus more suited to analyzing bourgeois society than societies in transition.6 In (...) trying to measure the past with the aid of tools forged in and for contemporary societies, the sociologist runs the risk of only measuring an artifact, produced by his theories in the field of history. Hence the need for the anthropological concepts, including the notion of exchange, among others, whether material , symbolic , or sexual .This approach will bring to light the contradictions underlying the society of the ancient régime. Whereas an ordinary sociohistorical approach views the reign of Louis XIV as unified under a dogmatic classicism, the socioanthropological approach stresses the tensions and oppositions running through this society. Classicism appears then as a façade covering up the change that it cannot imagine. This “spectacle”7 makes it possible to unite contradictory social practices, both those produced by consumption and which originate in the medieval economy and those belonging to the early accumulation of capital which sketch future bourgeois economic practices. 6. See Cornelius Catoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey .7. See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, rev. English ed. . Jean-Marie Apostolidès is professor of French literature at Stanford University. His publications include Le roi-machine, Les metamorphoses de Tintin, and Le prince sacrifié. Alice Musick McLean, a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago, is specializing in medieval narrative and the literature of the fantastic. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS Men Astutely Trained: A History of the Jesuits in the American Cen· tury. By PETER McDONOUGH. New York: Free Press, 1992. xxi +616 pp. $24.95. Last summer in Paris, sitting at one of the sidewalk tables that line the Boulevard S. Germain, a young Jesuit priest just finishing his doc· toral studies narrated some of the horror stories associated these days with " the joh market." Having (...) suffered through my own variation on that theme, I could only share with him the results of my own experi· ence. This novelty in the Jesuit stance provides Peter McDonough with a major theme in his narrative, for he describes the change in the So· ciety " from a rule-governed hierarchy to a role-driven network " (p. 459). He locates this transition in what he calls " the American century," roughly from 1900 to 1965. McDonough's study, an exciting and profitable read, traces the shift from Aquinas to the Age of Aquarius. Especially for an extern (i.e. a non-Jesuit), he has taken on a formidable challenge. Generally well received by the Jesuits, Men Astutely Trained tells how American Catholicism moved from an immigrant church to an upwardly mobile society. In the shifting loyalties, aggravated by the Second Vatican Council, Jesuits and their institutions felt the crunch. Since this innovation, loosely identified with " the democratization of culture," has precipitated the Society of Jesus "into the most serious crisis in its history " (p. xiv), McDonough must do a counterpoint he· tween the inner life and its external expressions. So the saga gains both breadth and depth. Without denigrating the accomplishment, at once earnest and literate, I want to take issue with the hook. As one of my colleagues taught me many years ago, we cannot stimulate discourse if everybody is con· tinually agreeing. First then, I want to comment on the flawed methodology. Next, I will say something about its thesis and conclude with a few reflections on "modernity." For Jesuits of my generation, the work of Malinowski proved normative. The anthropologist spent ten years among the natives who in· habited the Trobriand Islands in Melanesia. It apparently took that long for him to understand the stories and symbols, their myths and rituals. When he put his encyclopedia together, he could describe their institutions and social structures. In short, he worked from the inside out. McDonough, on the other hand, works from the outside in. In my 711 712 BOOK REVIEWS opinion, this represents a major failing in methodology. Two consequences flow from this deficiency. The author is never able to relate the works of the Society to the principal texts of the Society. The Spiritual Exercises, for example, does not rate even a mention. The Constitutions merits a fleeting reference on p. 160. St. Ignatius himself does not appear. Divorced as he is from the principal experience of Jesuits, our author cannot provide an adequate understanding for any of their priorities. This awareness makes his claim to present "the inside of the Society of Jesus" (p. 462) somewhat pretentious. Because he does not have the interior life in focus, many of the readings strike me as unnecessarily cluttered. He has yet to recognize the validity of John Stuart Mill's principle, "No man's synthesis can be greater than his analysis." While he has not left out three-fourths the data, perhaps he has neglected one-half. Secondly, he does not acknowledge Jesuits principally as churchmen. Instead, he makes us look like an acephalous torso. The church-con· nection reveals a major dimension to understanding the Society's coherence and institutions. It does not occur to the author that Jesuit priests are also bound to the universal discipline of the Church as found, for example, in the Codex Juris Canonici (1917). According to the Pio-Benedictine Code, all priests (and not just Jesuits) are expected to recite the breviary, to stay away from politics, and to avoid all "spectacles" including baseball games. Moreover, it is not entirely true to say that Jesuits acted independently of local bishops. Jesuits were able to establish their schools precisely because the local bishop invited them and encouraged the work. The ecclesial dimension becomes especially... (shrink)

To Dean Volek and Assembled Panel:Needless to say, the incident that transpired the morning of February the 8th was regrettable to all concerned—to Mrs. Horvath, who had to play witness to such a spectacle of savagery outside her office window, to the students who witnessed the same, to the college itself, which had to clean up the mess, literally as well as with the press—and of course my sincerest apologies to the local chapter of the Audubon Society, whose (...) more enthusiastic members have unfortunately discovered my home address. While on my current and indefinite leave of absence from my instructor position, I have had ample time to ponder things, and I write this letter as an unofficial explanation for the.. (shrink)

The “Puerto Rican wannabe” is one contemporary, local expression of contested racial identities—identities that are also inflected with class and gender meanings. This study uses interviews with local youth and young adults to explore their use of the caricature of the wannabe to create and contest race, class, and gender boundaries. The wannabe’s challenge to racially designated categories provides a symbol onto which nonwannabe kids project their own stereotypes, anxieties, and desires. The stories told about the wannabe in this study (...) reveal both the persistence and the fragility of race, class, and gender identities and underline the centrality of sexuality in bolstering and undermining them. Boundary negotiations in one category rely on and affect other categories: In this study, the contestation of racial boundaries reestablishes heteronormative and hierarchical gender relations. (shrink)