What I like about you're videos is that you don't present theories as right or wrong but as ideas to be contemplated with some criticism. That way you don't strive for objectivity but don't get lost in subjectivety either.
I can't be the only one who thinks that science (physics in particular) is the only thing that can be expressed objectively and everything else people say is subjective.. But then thinking this way is being too impractical
@@dheerajkrkh "thinking this way is being too impractical" - it may be difficult to work with, but it's still better than the alternative of thinking some ideas or views are 'objectively' right. That kind of thinking just leads to egoism and arrogance.
@@dheerajkrkh Nahi bharta? You'd be surprised. Nowadays physics graduates are being hired by investment banks cos only phys and math students understand the madness of their investment algos. 😬
Was für eine zufällige Fügung: I'm currently reading your and D'Ambrosio's book »You and your Profile« for a university paper and just got stuck on the chapter about Debord's Spectacle. And et voila, two hours later you upload this video and solidify what I have already read and only half digested in a vivid way. Thanks a lot! This is beyond infotainment...
Great video. I would love a video about Eva Illouz' work, since she showed how not only is everything we see commodified, but also everything we FEEL. I feel that this would be an interesting addition to this series of culture/media critique.
Interesting timing. I am currently reading The Unsettling of America. Berry covers many of these points, albeit in the mode of a passionate farmer. I take his point to be that representation supersedes the real precisely because the real has been in a state of disrepair. Suggesting the spectacle loses its appeal when human work is the primary maintainer of the real. With machinery and corporations handling that reality “for us.” Interestingly his proposal appears to be a return to Sincerity, with a distinct emphasis on “Husbandry,” and operating solely within constraints. That’s all i have thus far. I find Wendell Berry novel in preaching Sincerity to the emerging Profilicity in the US. The canon retreat destination tends to be Authenticity here.
This was full of great insights and you explained the core concepts very well and I was able to follow the train of thought! I'd also really love a video about Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation"!
I don’t know if it was The Matrix, or MTV, or what it was, but I feel like I’ve been indoctrinated with Dubord’s authenticity my whole life. So many ideas that I’ve cherished since childhood, which I had no idea about their source. It’s only much later in life after hopelessly chasing the approval of others, and of an unreachable general peer, that I’ve started to question the absolute righteousness of authenticity. These days I’m more focused on keeping a balance between my authentic self - which I’ve invested 10,000 hours into, no one can take it from me even if they try - and my newly discovered sincere self, which allows me to enjoy satisfaction from performing well at my job. But most importantly, recognizing the specter of profilicity and how it shaped my life for years, actively conflicting with my old world attachment to authenticity as the ‘only real self’. Why does no one seem to value me, even though I strive to be authentic even to a fault, to the point of self-defeating behavior? Because profilicity was never interested in my self-actualization: it was only interest in how appealing I was to my peers. This channel is a gift, thank you for sharing it with us! -actualized in America
They will steal your thoughts and words and then gaslight you with them. They can't steal soul, however. They are the ones captured despite overt and covert power. They begged us for your fancy word profilicity but went too far. Rigged internet has never been more obvious and finished. It is a simple yet unfixable situation.
Interesting food for thought during the writers strike here in the USA. I went to the rally the other day and Al Franken spoke (amongst other actually good speakers) about how the Democratic Party helps workers, and I could only think about the horrible train derailment that took place not far from here not long ago in Ohio. That disaster was directly caused by the injunction Congress and the President workers together to legally force workers into dangerous conditions of over work and unsafe conditions of equipment. The writers strike while being fully supportable is a sort of superstructural issue. But the economic impact of a massive powerful rail strike would be enormous on the base level of socio-political-economics. Idk this is just some thoughts I had after watching this.
The Democrats have completely severed any relationship they may have once had with the working class, and the allegiance of relics like Franken and the reactionary AFL-CIO apparatus to some historical fantasy is pure spectacle itself. Hollywood writers are servants of the spectacle, and while one shouldn't actively cheer for their exploitation by studios and tech barons, the notion that they can produce pernicious drivel and smear the working class however much they want and then come around with their hats out demanding solidarity from people who they've given none is laughable.
This book along with Stirner's Ego and it's Own and your views on profilicity and Luhmann's systems Theory have shaped quite a bit of my worldview. I relate a spectacle to a way of maintaining a profile that is authentic to each one of us, and each one serving it's own ego pushes for a distributed system that shapes a profile for a brand/national identity/subculture etc.
I wonder if people who do not participate in production (unemployed) and therefore barely consume anything but basic food (potatoes, carrots, not processed meals), who are not on Facebook or Twitter or whatever, are part of society at all? Are they the most alienated or the most authentic of all people? What if they live in the countryside and grow some of their own food in the garden and maybe hunt or fish a little, not being actual farmers though. I actually know a few young people who have decided to hold very humble jobs in order to not engage in consumerism much. Yet, they are not ideologically "back to nature" -people, but just prefer managing their own time as much as possible. Some middle aged and older people live on the fringes of consumerism too, just because they have always done so.
Their image, or rather the myriad of images of them, are certainly part of societal discourse. The idea of them is thrown around a lot in fact, regardless of how true any of the interpretations are to the real thing. Also I'd argue unless they're literal hermits they're still subject to all these forces, just less intensely. It isn't a pure dichotomy of being part of the society or not, you can be more or less so.
@@ArawnOfAnnwn But when the society apparatus does not recognize them in its policy, do they exist? There may be some vague images of outsiders, but if these have very little to do with the people themselves, then I would call them fantasies or mythologies.
As a practitioner of Visual Communication and Graphic Design, I know that these principles are the basis of the Science of Desire: Brand marketing, advertising & consumer manipulation and, eventually, political propaganda.
Thanks for the response! I was effectively pointing more so towards the semiotics than to the teleology of both frameworks. In this sense, I do think both are quite identical. "Social" media (what a crappy term) is probably an even more totally realized spectacle Debord could ever imagine. But in the end, the contemporary political economy of the spectacle remains the more powerful part, and it fully maps onto the emergence of the spectacle/profilicity: for the past half century capitalism has steadily become increasingly spectral, based less and less on production of actual commodities and increalsingly toward speculation and credit--hence its spectral, unreal quality. From commodity fetichism to brand fetichism, and with it have followed how social relations get mediated.
Many thanks...this is an excellent discussion, your concluding remarks in particular. "...historical existence has always been incongruent and dissonant..." Well said!
was debord part of his own spectacle? what i love about him and about any philosopher is raising questions and therefore improving an individuals life. if there is any meaning this is it.
What I miss a bit here is that Debord gives us an explanation for why we often feel alienated from ourselves, from others and from events happening. We often seem to misidentify our reproduced lives for the real thing. But since it is influenced by Capitalism or "show-business" as you call it, it is distorted and we become confused about who we really are. Hence Debord's longing for "authenticity"; life really lived again. I love your conclusion that we never lived life directly or as a unity before; it makes no sense wanting to return to it then. But it seems to me that Debord longs for "real" social connection and human interaction as well. It is easy to see that hanging out with your friends and having a beer is a different kind of social connection than chatting through social media while being home alone. Technology has capitalized on our human interactions but ultimately we are isolated from the "real thing" if we only live our Spectacular lives through images and symbolic objects that poorly represent us.
Chris Hedges Empire of Illusion capitalises on this concept from a semi-theologically defined perspective. “A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.” C. Hedges (Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, 2009)
Seems like you didn't grasp the social and socialist aspect of the theory, and this leads to your mistaken objection to his real/direct life vs. mere representation foundation. The book criticizes trade unionism, stalinism, social democracy, and left ideology, and is very sympathetic to spanish anarchism, all for a reason. Debord is not saying that life used to be directly lived, because of some great pastoral age that ought to be returned to, nor a different, better, existential or psychological experience. He is not claiming either way that ambiguity in meaning, and mediation through symbolism is or isn't already baked into life as such. (There is more to clarify about what he means in his chapters on unity of life and time in pre-history, he isn't celebrating it, but this comment is long, so I will skip ahead to history under the state.) He is calling wherever the contest over collectively constructing and confronting life can happen, direct life - because his is a political theory not a media, philosophical, psychological or even a christian theory about a fall from the real into deception. For him as a socialist, the people taking over society is a prerequisite for the public to confront and define lived experience. But, he claims that is no longer possible through political methods, because capitalism has overcome a basic contradiction that had formerly left it open to being possessed by exploited classes motivated to re-establish production for the sake of their use. This is key. He is claiming a new foundation in the production of commodities and exploitation of labour has been achieved which closes this hole, at the same time as people don't remember other ways of doing things, ways which they could've seen clash with capitalist lifeways. This innovation means society can't be taken over by taking over farms and factories anymore. Again, that takeover is what is needed for conversations about and experimentation in living, found partially in pre-spectacular art and popular spaces and culture, in revolutionary movements, and pre-capitalist modes (doing or making things for practical need or pleasure purpose, rather than markets) as well as shutdowns of capitalist relations such as strikes - to become general - which is communism. So, Debord is calling even just the space within society for planning, or interactions not commodified, as real or direct life. He calls collectivist anarchism in the 30s, the closest ever so far to people self-managing their lives (while dismissing individualist anarchism). So, just relations to others mediated by symbols or framings still tethered in some way to local and public democratic management, is real life here, while the spectacle is mediation totally untethered. Spaces that existed under duress in antiquity, feudalism, or earlier capitalism for this non-commodified interaction are "authentic" by this metric, and their total erasure is the spectacle. Again, marxist revolution would have been the generalizing of such spaces by abolishing the state and production for exchange, as opposed to "direct" uses like need, fancy, or pleasure. There is no promise that either non-economic alienation, or mediation as such, go away under communism for Debord - only that they cease to be politically institutionalized. As a note, the biggest reason for the rejection of Debord's theory by those who would be most interested (besides hippies), i.e. anarchists and marxists, is in the lack of evidence that capitalism really had started to function on a new basis of production all the way down. Instead, the spectacle seemed to repackage in an extreme way the very common, mid 20th century, Keynesian influenced sentiment that capitalism had overcome its main problems and suicidal nature, with the advent of the welfare state and greater technocratic and economic regulation.
This is a great comment. I read The Society of the Spectacle like 15 years ago but at the time only garnered a surface level comprehension of it. You inspired me to read it again. Any recommendations for secondary literature specific to what you said?
Many thanks for your detailed exposition of what was left out in my brief section on Debord's "call for revolution." In short, in my view Debord's vision of direct life ("as you say: "direct uses like need, fancy, or pleasure") is expressed in a vocabulary of authenticity--which I find highly problematic. In my view, need, fancy and pleasure are by no means "direct"--and have never been and never will be (as, for instance, shown by Freud). The heavy use of Marxist theory/jargon by Debord (what another viewer named Gonzalo Ale calls "Eurocentrism") indicates that this supposedly authentic "directness" was, in Debord's time, already quite "spectacular" and is "always already" non-authentic--or paradoxical and self-contradictory. In other words: who are "the people" in "the people taking over society"? The very notion of an authentic "the people"--a collective subject--is highly problematic--it's a vision of collective authenticity which is just as much an idealized construct as individual authenticity. Thanks again.
"Buy the fake and sell what's real." a lyric from The Buggles - Living in the Plastic Age (1980), they also released Video Killed the Radio Star which became the first music video aired on MTV.
Situationism was very interesting. Last big international leftist movement I believe. The combination political and social theory with art, very intriguing movement
The whole presentation of Twitch is insane if you look at it. How things and people look and present themselves, or the ads it shows where people play video games and are getting delivered things.
Though there is no ultimate “real” me, the more I “imagine” myself, that is the more I identify with an image of self, a concept of being, the farther a stride from knowing myself. Imagination is a beautiful tool, but Being is not a concept of the mind, it is something to feel. Something to simply be. Identified with simply being, I am able to play with my profile in functional ways.
Prof. Moeller, have you considered doing a video on Glenn Gould as part of your media and philosophy series? He wrote extensively on media and emerging technologies and was, himself, entirely a media creation from 1964 till the end of his life. If you are unfamiliar with his philosophy, Geoffrey Payzant's book _Glenn Gould: Music and Mind_ is still the best on the subject.
from the philosophy perspective being "authentic" is "being congruent with your values and desires, despite external pressures to social conformity". in that regards he was truly authentic.
Kant Vs Hegel in spectacle Vs profilicity Commoditifixation: movement becomes tourism, Sex becomes porn, clothing becomes fashion, information becomes infotainment. Debord himself as intellectual spectacle
Any kind of identity formation entails self-objectification--even authenticity (Hegels' An-und-fuer-sich also entails an an-sich). Profilicity is a specific concept of self-objectification within current social contexts.
@@hans-georgmoeller7027Ah, got it. No Pofilicity (nor any identity-formation) without a trip through the self-objectification blender, yet lots of mixes profilicity-free.
@philippawagner2832: No, this is completely wrong! I falsely used self-objectification as a verb/process and profilicity as an adjective, when, in fact, they are both nouns denoting states of having or being. So "Self" *contains* self-objectification which *contains* profilicity. (As you literally just said).
The quoted visual effects are much better, however you shouldn't have the quotes embedded in the text ideally, because it messes up the vertical alignment of the next lines.
Thanks for this brief but educative lectures. I discovered casually (so to say, thanks to the algo) your explanation about media just yesterday. In 15:38 you report that for Guy Debord the spectacle (…) transforms reality into illusion. But should it not be: the spectacle transforms reality into illusion into reality? Indeed, it takes real thinks and persons (for example a cinema stage, props, costumes and actors) for showing something else (the illusion, the narrative the movie is about) and because of Suspension of disbelief the “watchers” belief that the illusion is reality (the movie is a real representation of the narrative, or the narrative itself). Not anymore an illusion! But the reality. Am I missing something? I hope you can dedicate some time to write an explanation. Thanks in advance for your time.
😮 I can't find The Baudrillard episode which you refer to in some of your work where is it please can you send a link me to that...... Thank you for spending so much time in creating these lectures they're very good and they helped me quite a lot to summarize my thoughts
Hello, I love your videos, having just discovered them recently. This is a little bit off topic but I am thinking that the rise of proflicacy could possibly coincide with a movement away from the perception of society as being in a narrative/process of progress and a movement towards a time of endless returns, a sort of plateau/loop time. All our technologies and understanding of physics for example was already there in 1930, all we have been doing since then is finding applications for those basic discoveries.
Where does the grotesque fit in? The freak show? Alienation of embodiment, can't be, can it? The opposite? I'm really confused how to file this emotionally ambivalent spectacle.
I'll try and answer my own question: the grotesque, put on display/staged by say a beggar becomes currency and signifier for suffering, which, in this context, is a (social) currency valued bilaterally. Still unsure about the freak show.
Here is what I disagree with Guy Debord's idea on authenticity. I think that appearance and representation has always been at the heart of human interaction. We always ABSTRACT our actions towards eachother, our ideas and ways of communication, into symbols and images. There is a reason why symbolic interactionism is an established social theory. Our relationships with spectacle is changing with technology but this idea that spectacle obscures truth, that it stands against concrete reality, I just don't think it holds.
In 24:49 you said: "I think Debord didn' really understand how spectacular he himself was..." 11. To describe the spectacle, its formation, its functions and the forces which tend to dissolve it, one must artificially distinguish some inseparable elements. When analyzing the spectacle one speaks, to some extent, the language of the spectacular itself in the sense that one moves across the methodological terrain of this society which expresses itself in the spectacle. But the spectacle in nothing other than the sense of the total practice of a social-economic formation, its use of time. It is the historical moment which contains us."
Yes, yes. But did he really consider that his plea for "real life" (authenticity) , for a proletarian revolution, might be part of the spectacle of his time?
Isn't it that rage against the "spectacle" is driven by disgust at how the purity of Marx's "labor theory of value" does not seem to apply to the real world?
Idk if I agree or disagree with point about video games. Mainly because when it comes to gaming I subscribe to a more phenomenological description of that experience, using an idea from Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of “situated in the virtual”
As Donald Hoffman says and reflexology kinda says that every object in life is a thumbnail. Like apple is a thumbnail if sweet and sour taste with pretty aroma, as well is any desirable thing. First nature kinda lured butterflies into pollination then capitalism lured common folks into desire of overconsumption.
Lol, we need to produce authentic profiles, not ones derived from any illusionary unity of the past! Oh and don’t forget to present the appearance of sincerity!
When you look carefully at Debord, you do see him as an outstanding surgeon of our society. Big Thanks to Prof Moeller for this assistance in wading through Debord.... I have to agree, that the film has aged terribly.... It's not really the strength of film...
Interesting video as usual. Off topic: Any thoughts on Adam Curtis's documentary "Century of the Self"? Would be very interested in your reactions. EDIT: it's Adam not Alex and easily found on YT
@@MattAngiono He has a bunch of them. Another three are All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, The Trap - What Happened to our Dreams of Freedom and Can't Get You Out Of My Head. He has plenty of other productions too, but they're mostly focused on other specific topics, except for his first production of this nature called Pandora's Box way back in 1992.
Is the Society of the Spectacle anything new? You might say no, of course not, the life of the Pharaohs on ancient Egypt was certainly a spectacle, but could it be that an ordinary peasant villager’s was not? Or say the life of the simple in the Middle Ages compared to Kings and Popes. However modest by comparison they too produced their own forms of spectacles. Epistemological speaking isn’t language and indeed human consciousness a spectacle producing machine? 19:07
What would Debord have said about surveillance capitalism and the commodifying of peoples lives, modifying their behavior, & trading them on the stock market, among other markets? Is all the world a spectacle, for those staging it?
He disagrees with Debord over loss of authentic life experiences, it is because he has never lived such life. He was born in a first world country which was highly automated to the point that he got everything he wished without ever going through the process. He participates in the spectacle by showing off his philosophy. He can't fathom the life without the spectacle because he was born into a world of spectacle. If he had born in a third world country or had lived a century ago, he would have understood what has been lost. This is the problem of the today's intellectuals, they have no reference point outside the matrix. They too are trapped in the matrix like everybody else!
No no no, you got the Matrix all wrong. Being trapped within the matrix means precisely not knowing it is there. It's as perceptible as the little You in your head that you call I. In order to describe the matrix, you must know it is there, thus be separate from it. You can criticize Prof. Moeller's points all you like, but please get your analogies in order.
Would you choose the "authentic" third world life in a slum or an post-authentic first world life of a middle class tho? Prof Moeller never deny there was a period where the mode of authenticity was the reigning ideology of the place and the time. He is just saying that the claim of that ideology has never been ratified and now in most post-industrial society more and more people are becoming aware of the paradoxical inauthenticity of authenticity, so we are moving on from that. Yes there're something that has been lost, but is it necessarily lamentable? You accusing him being inauthenticity would just be like accusing an atheist being "ungodly". You're judging him by a world view he believes to be no longer sustainable. Devout Christians think the decline of religion would be the end of all ethics, morals, truth and beauty, just like how you think the decline of authenticity means the end of the meaning of life. But people who move on from Christianity can just live fine and they don't have to share the nostalgia of people who still remember the so-called good ol' days. Funny thing is there are many Africans making tiktok video for Chinese customers in which they would dance and sing happy birthday or something for the orderer's friend. The supposed authenticity of the third world life has a long history of being a spectacle for first-world consumption. In the world of interconnected economy, fetishising the third world as a world of pristine primitivity is itself a very inauthentic middle class hobby.
@@cheungch1990 There is no third-world authenticity anymore. In this global media circus, everybody is hooked to the machine. This is the thing with the spectacle, it wants a constant non-stop show at the expense of other people. If you are privileged enough that you can shield yourself from the spectacle (i.e., only become the spectator instead of the spectacle, by choice) then you exploit the others who can't. Thinking that people who are performing on social media have a choice is the same as thinking poor laborers have a choice in a capitalistic economy. Furthermore, this spectacle forces everybody to be an entertainer which not everybody is suited to become. There were special factions of society who used to perform such tasks. Now the whole society is being turned into a giant show whereby everybody is forced to become an entertainer. The ones who don't conform are weeded out of the economy. The diversity of professions due to natural differences in temperaments has disappeared. Everybody is expected to be a fashion model or a great media personal. The mantra of today is: showoff or perish. This is why it is a cancerous spectacle which has ruined the serious factions of the society.
@@nobody983 '' Oh say can you see..'' should read ''Oh say can't you see what's being done to your eyes?'' In the 1960's, the mantra was, power to the pupil, in the social media 2020's it's power to the pupil. Who controls your screen, imprints your brain.
Have you considered it from the consumer perspective? All of you who are part of the spectacle production are clowns and servants and dancing monkeys meant to entertain us and take care of the stuff we are not good at for us. You are the ones that are most driven by useless needs and that's why you do this. To get payed more than the most basic of consumers who use their money for basic needs like food and water and shelter so they don't need to create a spectacle as much as you do. And before you get offended by this comment I have to add that I will try my best to also become a producer of spectacle one day. Despite knowing what it is, I still want to do it simply because I believe I am capable of doing it and even better than almost anyone on this planet.
@@remotefaith No i am not. At least not yet. Simply talking to people does not constitute spectacte. It would be rdiculous to think that because if that were the case then 100% of all living beings would be part of the spectacle witch I think it's not what was meant in the video. You have to put some actual effort to produce something that shows off to a mass audience.
tHERE IS ONLY REAL WHEN U HAVE NO INTERNet nor water nor electricity POVERTY IS REAL, poverty is the home of humanity, the complete incomplete, the insatisfaction, the spectacle is a rich people delusion , so is philosophy
I find this very eurocentric as plenty of the french who critique their own society, so hardly understandable or retable to me as a latino scholar, french philosophers are seldom masters of ethics, they are very regional, I guess the era of systematic thinkers is gone, still the french are put as THE philosophers, according to me, they do not deserve that title, they are not like Buddha, nor Confucious
