/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.2157882]

Need moar like this /lit/!
Please help!
For those that have not read this, I highly recommend that you do, SHIT WAS SO CASH!

[Anonymous No.2157886]

http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/

[Anonymous No.2157888]

Read comments if you haven't already.

[Anonymous No.2157890]

>>2157888
Elaborate please.
Also
>dem trips

[Anonymous No.2157892]

Hey, OP, read my dick.

It's quite the grand spectacle.

[Anonymous No.2157896]

>>2157892

[Anonymous No.2157915]

Gilles Deleuze's Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Everything by Jean Baudrillard

Everything by Julia Kristeva

[Anonymous No.2157918]

>>2157882

Reading the wiki page for this book, it doesn't seem so interesting OP. I'm tired of works that condemn the exacerbated consumerism and shallow culture of modern society, without actually delving into the causes of such situation, trying to provide actual reasons for why it is a problem, or discussing possible solutions. Is this book different or is it just another pseudo-intellectual babble?

[Anonymous No.2157929]

>>2157918

It condemns exuberant consumerism. Don't read anything about culture from Marxists if you're looking to live within the culture.

[Anonymous No.2157951]

>>2157918
Society of the spectacle can be reduced to: In an advanced capitalist society reality is a commercial. In typical leftist fashion it shrouds simple ideas in obscured complexity.

[Anonymous No.2157965]

>>2157951
>>2157951
>he thinks Society of the Spectacle is shrouded in complexity

No, no it isn't. It's actually one of the easier books to read from the left. Try Gilles Deleuze. Now that's obscurantism.

[Anonymous No.2157975]

>>2157890

Debord wrote another book in 1989 called 'Comments on the Society of the Spectacle'. Can be found here: http://itsnotworking.mezoka.com/debordtext/index.html

In this work he explores how the diffuse and the concentrated spectacle have now merged into the 'integrated spectacle'.

The way Vincent Kaufmann put it in his book 'Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry' is that Debord changed from the theorist of revolution in SotS, to the theorist of the absence of revolution in the 'Comments...' This is because Debord outlines in the latter how modern states employ increasingly totalising networks of surveillace despite the fact that any actual, collective contestation of the ruling order by the populace has become increasingly rare, to the point of non-existence (though things seem to be moving back towards a re-awakening of revolutionary/insurrectionary action). He offers some slight hope by pointing out that governments are in fact collecting so much data that they are often incapable of efficiently utilising it.

He also goes into a frighteningly prescient discussion of terrorism - given that he wrote it over a decade before 9/11.

Check out Kaufmann's book for a decent study of Debord's entire output; there's actually so much more to him than just Society of the Spectacle. Check out 'Panegyric' for instance: http://debordiana.chez.com/english/panegyric.htm or his film 'In girum imus nocte
et consumimur igni': http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord.films/ingirum.htm

[Anonymous No.2157979]

>>2157890

[Anonymous No.2158015]

>>2157975

He's more relevent to /lit/ than many may realise. I never understand people who complain of 'obscuring complexity' etc. in reference to Debord's more explicitly 'theoretical' work; it seems to me the sheer brilliance of his prose blinds them. He was truly a master stylist, clear and concise, and had a particular talent for biting invective. What's more, he never wrote anything which was 'unnecessary', only what was essential, essential to the total critique of society.

His entire poetics was based around a peculiar sensitivity to the irreversible passage of time. The key is to let it pass, not to try and fix it in false, anemic re-presentations, but to really live, and living is what is increasingly impossible due to the conditions of late capitalism. Positioning himself as the culmiation of Europe's 20th century avant-garde movements, he essentially managed to create an ouevre without works. The key was to not work, to refuse work, something he somehow managed to accomplish throughout his life, without, as one may assume, the aid of some inheritence or fortune. When he (very occassionally) wrote something - Panegyric for instance - it was to simply to show himself as a singular example of the possibility, and the need, to reject society and live outside (though he would show himself without simply subjecting himself to the enquiring gaze of the spectacle and its concomitant autobiographical exhibitionism). "His works are calling cards which he sent to the living, to remind them that they are really dead, that he is the only man alive."

[Anonymous No.2158018]

>>2158015


With moderism having destroyed any basis for common communication, the only place the avant garde could go, for Debord, was into the streets, to collapse art into everyday life. This was nothing to do with some bullshit fluxus happenings; it was to bring about, through the revolution of the proletariat (which he pointed out now essentially includes everyone in society, for we are all enmeshed in the same alienating conditions - 'we are the 99%' one could say), the actual conditions in which life could be truly lived without representation; to 'make good' on the promises made by art. This is repeated throughout his time with the Situationist International: that after modernism art is dead, and producing more art is simply prolonging the decomposition. What is needed is to reinvent communication, but it won't happen in the specatcle of the art world, but in real life, on the streets, in the revolution.

[Anonymous No.2158038]

"What passions do we have, and where have they led us? Most people, most of the time, have such a tendency to follow ingrained routines that even when they propose to revolutionize life from top to bottom, to make a clean slate and change everything, they nevertheless see no contradiction in following the course of studies accessible to them and then taking up one or another paid position at their level of competence (or even a little above it). This is why those who impart to us their thoughts about revolutions usually refrain from letting us know how they have actually lived.

But I, not being that type of person, can only tell of “the knights and ladies, the arms and loves, the gallant conversations and bold adventures” of a unique era.

Others may define and measure the course of their past in relation to their advancement in some career, or their acquisition of various kinds of goods, or in some cases their accumulation of socially recognized scientific or aesthetic works. Not having known any such frame of reference, I merely see, when I look back on the passage of this disorderly time, the elements that constituted it for me, or the words and faces that evoke them — days and nights, cities and persons, and underlying it all, an incessant war."