So, I got into hot debate about this book. I read it, or attempted to do so in French, my native language. Thing is, while I do have some philosophical culture, I do not have a degree in philosophy, and people told me that my opinion is therefore irrelevant.
Debord in this book insists on being obtuse and obfuscates relatively simple ideas. Worse, he would masquerade opinions as reasoning and loves using vague words without defining them, jumping from one possible meaning to the other the next sentence.
The thing is unreadable and the ideas it contains (I read some explanations of the books by other "lesser" philosophers) pretty basic.
Better read Manufacturing Content by Chomsky. I don't know why Americans are so enamored with French philosophers while they have decent ones at home. I am a bit ashamed that the aura our culture has is used to promote such hacks as the situationists.
> The thing is unreadable and the ideas it contains (I read some explanations of the books by other "lesser" philosophers) pretty basic.
Why are you taking the opinion of someone concerning what a book says if that book is unreadable? Clearly there must be something must be wrong either in your ability or in their confidence.
> Better read Manufacturing Content by Chomsky.
Society of the Spectacle and Manufacturing Consent don't cover the same material. It's a good book recommendation, but Society of the Spectacle is effectively a dissection of a heavily commoditized society, whereas Manufacturing Consent concerns dissecting the current state of media.
I consider the book unreadable, as I don't think the goal of the textual medium should be to disorient the reader. I was pointed out, by people more versed in academic philosophy then I, that Debord actually designed his book like a puzzle, full of hidden references to other texts from other obscure philosophers and that it takes a lot of notes and an almost perfect memory of other books to reassemble what he means.
I trusted that account and once deciphered, the book is just a re-hash of some marxism and some vague criticism of the dynamics of mass-media and consumerism of leisure time.
Realize that his book is about the "society of spectacle" and he dives in, never explaining first what he means by "spectacle" (which mostly means "a show" in French but can be used by analogy to any performative action), letting you guess, and sliding from one meaning to the other all the time.
This book is probably a nice literature puzzle that I can not fully appreciate, but it is as much philosophy as Lady Gaga's meat dress is haute cuisine.
>I don't think the goal of the textual medium should be to disorient the reader
"Now, from what you write about my language, to be honest, I find it very difficult to imagine that you mean it seriously. Your argumentation shows a true obsession with the thought of the reader. With my stuff you obviously didn't even come up with the idea that I'm not interested in him, neither in catching him, nor in snubbing him, but only in the most adequate and rigorous presentation of the matter possible. That is probably the only linguistic thing that can be done seriously against the cultural industry." -- Adorno
>I trusted that account and once deciphered, the book is just a re-hash of some marxism and some vague criticism of the dynamics of mass-media and consumerism of leisure time.
This is awfully reductionist; it is as ridiculous as saying that after Capital has been deciphered it's just a re-hash of some socialism. Not to mention, the book isn't really about mass-media and consumerism (though those do factor into it); you only have to read the quote at the beginning from Feuerbach in 1841 to know there's more to it than that. Yes, you can express any complex idea as a "re-hash" of something. Yes, you need to do background reading to understand literature that builds upon two centuries of philosophy.
>and he dives in, never explaining first what he means by "spectacle"
The endless quest for definitions laid out clear as day is fruitless, and not a mark of good philosophy. Marx never laid out all the dimensions of what he means by "capital", he never even defined "class". I don't consider that to be a fault of the work.
> but it is as much philosophy as Lady Gaga's meat dress is haute cuisine.
It should be first considered a work of critical theory before philosophy. Besides that, professional philosophers of all stripes would disagree - after all, philosophers study Debord, not Lady Gaga's meat dress. A great many works have been inspired and built on top of Debord's larger project, and Society of the Spectacle in particular.
To answer Adorno's quote: that's fine, do literature then. Do not present it as philosophy. Some people explain machine learning using haikus, that's a fine exercise, but not a good engineering practice.
The Capital does not need to be deciphered. I read it, it is not the easiest or the clearest text ever but it is understandable. It talks clearly about economics and politics. It introduces some concepts that I think were new at the time: class warfare and capital concentration. I failed to discern such essential concepts in Debord's book, whereas many of his fans seem to believe that he introduces new dynamics that are as important as class warfare with his book.
> The endless quest for definitions laid out clear as day is fruitless, and not a mark of good philosophy.
Indeed, academic philosophy wants obscurity as it is a good tool to hide the indigence of its thought. All the other fields of applicable knowledge understand the need to define words clearly. Why would philosophy be an exception?
It has become a field of literature: it prefers style over substance.
Yes, Marx is a bit hard to follow because he does not lay down well his definitions. I do consider it a fault, but a 19th century text gets a pass if it expresses interesting ideas. Marx also mixes economic and political ideas, often mixes factual and moral statements. I wish philosophers who built upon his ideas elaborated the substances while correcting the style.
After all, no one learns newtonian physics by reading Newton's books anymore. We have better notations and clearer styles now. The ideas are what matters and Newton is still rightly revered because of them. Why is philosophy so enamored with reading the old text instead of extracting the good ideas in it and putting it in a better, more formal framework?
> after all, philosophers study Debord, not Lady Gaga's meat dress
It is a shame, I suspect the latter offers more interesting philosophical and cultural statements than the first one.
> A great many works have been inspired and built on top of Debord's larger project, and Society of the Spectacle in particular.
Would you have just a single example that is relevant outside the field of academic philosophy?
> that's fine, do literature then. Do not present it as philosophy.
You're not understanding that the distinction between literature and philosophy is a false opposition of concepts; a good philosophical work answers not only to the philosophical commitments of the author, but also stylistic and linguistic ones. The style itself is part of the philosophy. So when Adorno and Debord write against the culture industry, it would be almost ironic if they were to use the style of the industry. They snubbed the industry in everything they did, and that included writing.
>The Capital does not need to be deciphered.
But it does! For the past century there have been debates as to the actual logical unfolding of concepts in the book, what certain words mean, where and how certain things are "proved", and the relation of the order of the chapters book to Hegel's Logic or even Dante's Inferno. The fact that the draft for Vol. 3 was written before Vol. 1 was sent to the publishers is also important. My point is this: philology and hermeneutics are very important in so-called "continental" philosophy and critical theory.
>All the other fields of applicable knowledge understand the need to define words clearly. Why would philosophy be an exception?
I'd argue that it shouldn't be the exception - other fields should be more like philosophy. The fact of the matter is that some concepts can only be understood in totality, not in isolation from one another and expressed axiomatically in sentences. The breadth and abstractness of the material precludes most instances of expressing something as "x means y" so directly. But the more important point is that the unfolding of the concepts, their logical presentation, has to do with the reality of the concept. Unlike formal logic in which syntax and semantics are separated, other logical systems (such as the one used by Marx) trace the concept through its exposition. The book, effectively, mirrors reality - going from more abstract to more concrete.
This is why philosophy being "updated" and reformulated makes no sense, it would mean that the concepts are torn apart. When you re-write a text, you lose an aspect of the presentation which readers generally agree is core to the ideas being presented. Ironically, even the people who do reformulate reformulate it in a different logical order[0] - but only because they realize the method of presentation is core to the concept being expressed.
Anyway, the idea that what we do "now" in philosphy and science is necessarily better than what we did before is dubious, to say the least. The reduction of philosophy to formal-logic statements only means that philosophy has been reduced to just another field under the calculation and quantification of modern society. It loses its stylistic and revolutionary character.
And yeah, I agree that Lady Gaga's meat dress is philosophically interesting, possibly even linked to what Debord and Adorno wrote about. You can talk about Lady Gaga's meat dress through Debord's conception of the spectacle, Adorno's conceeption of the cultural industry, Althusser's conception of ideological state apparatuses, or Marx's conception of the reproduction of society or "opium of the people". What makes the works to fecund is their abstractness and extensibility, and you only get half of that when you start expressing the concepts divorced from society and history (such as in formal logic).
I think I'll bookmark this whole answer as to why I think academic philosophy is now useless to people who are interested in uncovering interesting new philosophical ideas instead of pursuing a vacuous style of hermeticism.
I think I disagree with every of the statements you make. But as all I have to provide are arguments devoid of any stylistic essence, so much more embued with the properties to distinguish greats thought about philosophy, I think I'll just abstain.
Philosophy is literature. It is absolutely beyond me why you think literature must be (1) dry and without style, (2) written in the logical system you favour. I'm not saying philosophy is invalid if devoid of style, I'm just saying that philosophy with style is just as good, if not better - because it communicates its ideas via another dimension too.
Manufacturing Content by Chomsky. I don't know why Americans are so enamored with French philosophers while they have decent ones at home
Because we’re talking about the academy of the humanities. This is an institution built on obscuring and gatekeeping ideas rather than sharing them. Why do they do this when their mandate is to create and share knowledge? These scholars are in a constant struggle to remain relevant, both individually and as departments in their schools.
Fortunately (or unfortunately) these scholars collectively decide what is and isn’t relevant. This process takes the form of fashion trends, because there are no objective measures of validity the way there are in math and science. Fashion itself is a never-ending ladder climb.
The collateral damage in this is the domain of actual philosophy, which is a very important intellectual domain.
It is now done by scientists, politicians, economists, who have insights that can really help the field, but they are dismissed as intruders by this academic field.
I'm hearing an echo of Francis Schaeffer here. He said (circa 1980) that we didn't really have philosophy anymore, we only had antiphilosophy. We had existentialism, which dealt with the big questions but was an antiphilosophy because it did so in an irrational way. And we had linguistic philosophy, which was rational but was an antiphilosophy because it didn't deal with the big questions.
In effect, Schaeffer said, our chairs of philosophy (at universities) are largely vacant. The real philosophy is being done by people outside of academic settings.
I should add that not all scholars of the humanities operate this way but that these individuals are becoming increasingly rare. The problem is ultimately economic and external.
For a long time, the academy used tenure as a means of shielding scholars from external economic pressure. Now, as the education arms race accelerates, more and more people are attempting to crowd their way into the academy. The epithet of “publish or perish” has become a mantra among the aspirants. Obscurantism is only one of many tools for separating the grain from the chaff.
It's interesting because I can entirely see where you're coming from because Debord really does have those tendancies in his writing, but if you consider his background with the Lettrist movement and all of the avant garde artistic techqniues that they were experimenting with in the 50s (Check out some films by Isidore Isou) then you can see his later obscurantism as a development of those techniques and as an attempt to imbue those techniques with the same philisophical and political impact as his core message.
The book is really very tightly packed with ideas, working as it does.
Oh, sure, Debord had his context and was experimenting.
However if you consider that philosophy is a useful field, full of serious questions that one ought to seriously try to answer, I think you have to dismiss the Lettrist movement as unhelpful at best, as a failed experience or a dead end of modern philosophy, if you are as disappointed in it as I am.
They may be an interesting literature movement, but they are as helpful to philosophy as would be people who would proclaim that all quantum theory makes more sense when expressed in Sumerian.
Debord in this book insists on being obtuse and obfuscates relatively simple ideas. Worse, he would masquerade opinions as reasoning and loves using vague words without defining them, jumping from one possible meaning to the other the next sentence.
This has been my experience with a lot of academic humanities writing in English. I can't take anything written like this seriously. I shouldn't be surprised that other languages would have the same problem.
But Debord's work is not an academic dissertation, nor should it be taken as such. It doesn't present new evidence or advance a logical hypothesis, it merely shows another way of thinking about the things we all know and see; much like so many works of art.
In any case, I think the criticism is much overstated. A lot of the book is quite plain to read.
I don’t totally disagree with your criticism of Debord or other French pomo obscurantists. But there is some irony to complain on a coding forum that someone used language in a way that’s hard to appreciate without extensive experience in the field.
On the point of ambiguity in words, while the approach of STEM is to minimize it, in the messy world of liberal arts, ambiguity must be accepted; this is a significant message in postmodern thought, anyway.
I do appreciate art and ambiguity in literature or many culture endeavor. I'd have no qualm in Debord if he was saying he wrote a literary experiment.
However, it claims to be philosophy, not an art performance. I am of the position that while you can (and should!) imbue philosophy into your art, you should not present ambiguous and undecipherable art as a piece of philosophy.
I can make a sculpture that use integral calculus in the way it forms shape, but that would not be an appropriate way to present a theorem at a mathematics conference.
Even in STEM, there is tonnes of obscure jargon. Much of it also sounds like it could mean something you are familiar with. Think of all the words in theoretical physics: strings, worldsheets, bubble nucleation, or just plain energy and action. Yet no lay person could hope to follow along if reading one of the "seminal works". That is just the nature of specialisation. And there is often plenty of ambiguity in there too, despite the efforts to avoid it.
Because state sanctioned sources with an incentive for American discord have used it to subvert the educational system. If you don't believe me, take a look at what a competitive high school or college policy debate looks like today. It's literally 4 kids speed reading (as fast as they can!!! Seriously auctioneers would be proud!) Obscure French post-modernist philosophy. They avoid any discussion that might be about a policy implementation of the topic being debated (it's not strategic to use regular language or arguments anymore due to the judges) As a result, I routinely speak with wealthy 15 year olds who insist on calling themselves "maoists".
Don't believe me? Look up "TOC semi final policy round" or "Harvard vs Berkely finals policy debate" on YouTube. anything even kind of like that. There's no way that this happened without the intervention of either spooks or worse, foreign spooks
Books like this, or the works of other terrible French scholars, are the bread and butter of this fashionable nonsense
"take a look at what a competitive high school or college policy debate looks like today. It's literally 4 kids speed reading..."
There was a great radiolab episode about this.[1]
"There's no way that this happened without the intervention of either spooks or worse, foreign spooks"
Apparently, the trend towards that sort of debate is student initiated. Students want this. Though at the same time, students aren't unanimous in wanting this style of debate. The radiolab episode goes in to detail about the controversy.
It's very easy for an intelligence agency to make it look like this was a Grass Roots movement. I am a member of this community (debate community) and I believe that it was anything but grassroots.
Also, the students have to adapt to the judges, not the other way around. I'm sure that judges are more to blame for this than anything else.
If this post becomes greyed out than it's obvious that I've hit a nerve
"If this post becomes greyed out than it's obvious that I've hit a nerve"
Or it could be just a reasonable reaction to a conspiracy theory presented with absolutely zero evidence.
Rather than intelligence agency involvement, who are unlikely to care about debating formats, I find it far more credible that some students are just lazy, and would therefore prefer to rattle off nonsense or memorized text too fast to follow than actually do the hard work of persuading the judges with arguments they can understand.
I do wonder why the judges let them get away with it, though. I'd personally just fail whoever tried anything remotely like that.
My guess is that the judges led the way here, with a well-intentioned but ultimately destructve desire for a scoring system that is ostensibly objective, repeatable and free of any cultural bias, but at the cost of depending on gameable proxies as a substitute for meaningful values. Once such a system is put in place, the incentives will drive behavior towards extreme gamesmanship, while at the same time driving away anyone preferring real debate.
I further suspect that, at least within high-school debate, pressure from parents, in the form of a minority incessantly and agressively arguing against the judges, played a part in the desire for 'objective' measures.
Update: here's a relevant quote - note the emphasis on the number of arguments, in light of the fact that it is easier to increase your count by adding another argument than it is to increase your count by adding another argument that specifically refutes one made by the other side:
We developed a situation where one team decided, "I'm going to present eight arguments," and the other team talked slower and only answered six of them, and the judge says, "Well, you didn't answer two of these arguments so you lost the debate because you didn't answer those arguments." So the other team said, "We need to answer all eight of those arguments," and they started to talk faster. And the other team said, "Well, we'll present 10 arguments," and then they answered 12. It escalated to a point that, in some instances, has gone way too far.
>Books like this, or the works of other terrible French scholars, are the bread and butter of this fashionable nonsense
I must admit, at someone familiar with the works, I couldn't disagree more. Althusser never seemed like nonsense to me, nor did Foucault, Badiou, Deleuze etc. - but the fact that it can be used as fashionable nonsense by a university debate team does not make it so. If you want real arguments and discussions on the topic, put it into Google Scholar and read some papers around whatever work you think is "fashionable nonsense". It's not as though the authors want to keep it as "nonsense" either - Debord famously published the Comments too.
How do you read Lacan or Deleuze and think those thoughts?
"it's about the "mirror stage", except my body without organs didn't reterritorialize enough for me. Such a Westphalian cartography of thought is telelogical and causes Freud's solar anuses to explode from my nose."
Is this a Deleuze or Lacan quote? No, but you'd be hard pressed to prove it isn't because you can ctrl-F through any word or phrase I used above and find the exact line where they begin their charade. The worst part about them is that now people think that Freud's bullshit was right. No the Oedipus complex doesn't exist.
The additional context of knowing why DnG or Lacan are critiquing Freud doesn't help when you realize that every intellectual link in that chain is bankrupt. Worse yet, they abjectly failed to treat any psychiatric patients and themselves literally went crazy. Deleuze killed himself. Althusser killed his wife. All of them hurt future psychiatry with their nonsense.
And don't get me started on lacans bullshit math symbols.
>The worst part about them is that now people think that Freud's bullshit was right.
Freud used to get a lot of attention, and now he doesn't - mostly because of his treatment by Popper, a treatment that has been refuted several times over. I'm not saying Freud is unassailable, but to say he's so useless as to not be used is ridiculous. There's much more to Freud than the Oedipus complex.
>Deleuze killed himself. Althusser killed his wife. All of them hurt future psychiatry with their nonsense.
This is a very uncharitable treatment of the authors (it's unclear why their personal problems have anything to do with their work; name me an author less saintly than Tolstoy or Spinoza and I'll find words to hang them), and the fact that nobody really practices psychoanalysis based on Deleuze, and Althusser wasn't even in the same camp. My point was that it's wrong to paint every French scholar of the 60s, 70s and 80s with the same brush. The actual legacy of Deleuze in psychiatry is nil. His legacy in psychoanalysis is slightly more than nil.
I did look this up. How this can be construed as a coherent argument in a timed debate is... it's nearly unbelievable to me.
Yes, they fit in far more information and logical constructs than I could in that kind of time but it throws all oratory practice out the window. It's not just incoherent, indistinguishable babbling, it's also terrible to listen to with those deep, throaty breaths he has to take in order to accomplish his speed read...
The thing is, so-called "debate" is a competitive sport with its own weird rules. You are incented to babble a lot because then the opponent has to waste time on countering what you said - since that's what the rules require. It doesn't have to make sense, it still confers an advantage.
IMO most games—especially ones that are more intellectual than physical—get worse over time as the rules get more and more "gamed" and "correct play" gets nailed down & optimized. Kills all the fun.
What good are the arguments if they can't be understood. And I don't mean for their philosophical obscurity, but practically. Even slowing down that audio doesn't render discernible words.
> Don't believe me? Look up "TOC semi final policy round" or "Harvard vs Berkely finals policy debate" on YouTube
Actually this kind of reconciled me with this "debate club" thingie that I thought was nonsensical. Now I get it, that's just a game. It is a gamification of the rules of debate but that's as close to real debate as starcraft is to real strategy.
The whole book is a play with other philophical concepts (from Marx and Hegel among others) which are most of the time not explicitly quoted, with a lot of détournements on top of it.
As for the importance (or not) of the situationist movement (their members refuted the term situationist) it needs to be recontextualized with its time and the place it took in the art and politic to judge if it is just a hack, as you assume.
I recommend Simulacra and Simulation by Baudrillard over The Society of the Spectacle. Less obscure. Better Style. Also check out America by the same author:
> I went in search of astral America, not social and cultural America, but the America of the empty, absolute freedom of the freeways, not the deep America of mores and mentalities, but the America of desert speed, of motels and mineral surfaces. I looked for it in the speed of the screenplay, in the indifferent reflex of television, in the film of days and nights projected across an empty space, in the marvellously affectless succession of signs, images, faces, and ritual acts on the road; looked for what was nearest to the nuclear and enucleated universe, a universe which is virtually our own, right down to its European cottages. I sought the finished form of the future catastrophe of the social in geology, in that upturning of depth that can be seen in the striated spaces, the reliefs of salt and stone, the canyons where the fossil river flows down, the immemorial abyss of slowness that shows itself in erosion and geology. I even looked for it in the verticality of the great cities. I knew all about this nuclear form, this future catastrophe when I was still in Paris, of course. But to understand it, you have to take to the road, to that travelling which achieves what Virilio calls the aesthetics of disappearance.
Thanks for the link. I didn't really "get" the first part, as I don't really have a close relationship with the American West, but once it hit New York, I was impressed with how succinctly he summarized my impressions of the American East.
[edit] After familiarizing myself with the author's style on the topic of New York, it was well worth rereading the rest of the book.
I would agree but also add that the implications of Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation are extremely relevant to the political sphere we inhabit today.
Shameless plug: If you are interested in reading and discussing some of the books mentioned in this thread, we're looking for additional members: https://strangers-club.com
I don't think it was literal images/pictures, but the philosophical idea that an image represents (but is itself not) another [authentic] thing.
Edit: An example:
You make a post on Facebook simply about your $HOBBY. I hit the "Like" button. Do I actually, authentically like that Hobby, or you talking about it, or both? Am I just pressing it out of a social obligation? I instead could have reached out and called or texted and had a conversation about your $HOBBY. And you could have then judged to what degree my interest and "liking" of your $HOBBY was authentic, and how that reflects my interests, or how I am trying to branch out and am taking a genuine interest in you-the-person. But in lieu of a real conversation, I hit a "Like" button and let the image of an authentic feeling of "liked-ness" travel to you, instead of taking the effort of conveying the actual feeling of "I like you" to you.
I think "authenticity" with regards to the society of the spectacle is also a kind of image, but I know what you mean.
I have in mind the modern trendy value on authentic things. For example bespoke craft foods. The striving for authenticity in these things are itself a type of spectacle.
Generally I struggle with Debord but with the Society of the Spectacle I think I've got it down to something like:
1) Where once Bob could be cool in himself and people wanted to be like Bob. Being.
2) Then people saw the cool clothes that Bob wore and got them. Having.
3) Now people just get the things that look like the clothes that the people who look like Bob have. Image.
For "authentic" foods, same thing. People made good quality foods. Then people got the same thing that these people had or bought their products. Then people bought things that looked like it was the same thing. Or people valued the look of having these things. Image.
I think it's basically consumerism. But I suspect it's something deeper and applies to non products also. For example the image of being a good person, or a useful employee.
With regards to social media, clicking "Like" could be an authentic emotional response to an image. "I want to be like this"?
I think that people are fundamentally trying to find ways to love and approve themselves. They think that's found in Being. (It's not - Bob may not have it, either, but people think he does.) But they don't have that, so they try to buy it with Having or fake it with Image. And it works, a little bit... but not really.
I think the main problem is that communication technology makes it easier for people to fall into sins, and harder to stay away from sins. If you internalize the idea that envy, rage and sloth are bad for you and should be kept out of your head, then Facebook and Twitter shouldn't pose much trouble.
Good point, but beyond internalizing those ideas, you also really have to be on guard these - the technologies in question are ubiquitous. They are almost inescapable and are designed to get you hooked. It's easy to say look something up on reddit and then dive into tangentially related material which ends up turning into procrastination.
This thesis seems uncannily similar to the central theme in Huxley’s Brave New World, translated into Marxist academic language. Nevertheless, these ideas are highly relevant in our social media and mass media dominated world.
At this point, they may now have become so obvious that they’re cliché.
Things becoming cliché is how you know that beingness has supplanted havingness, with doingness long gone out the window.
A society which puts more attention on the results of an activity rather than the factuality of the actions is long on its way out. Witness for example, modern America's relationship with its illegal wars: nobody wants to know what America is really doing, as long as the result is attained...
He made a movie of this text, which is available online, it's low resolution and some of the subtitles are hard to read. There's an updated version that's more legible but which stays true to the original in all the important ways:
https://youtu.be/irdHSmRrdh0
I would also add that 'The Dialectic of Enlightenment', is perhaps a more thorough precedent to 'The Society of the Spectacle'... if you're at all interested ... the chapter 'The Culture Industry' is good.
https://thecharnelhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Max-H...
I heard many times people mentioning this book but I also heard it is not very readable. Could somebody explain for people without a degree in philosophy like me what are the main ideas that are exposed in this book?
Debord in this book insists on being obtuse and obfuscates relatively simple ideas. Worse, he would masquerade opinions as reasoning and loves using vague words without defining them, jumping from one possible meaning to the other the next sentence.
The thing is unreadable and the ideas it contains (I read some explanations of the books by other "lesser" philosophers) pretty basic.
Better read Manufacturing Content by Chomsky. I don't know why Americans are so enamored with French philosophers while they have decent ones at home. I am a bit ashamed that the aura our culture has is used to promote such hacks as the situationists.