Unity in Division
What you're reading is an attempt to delve deeper into the seventh aphorism featured in Guy Debord's 'The Society of the Spectacle'. If you missed the last one, you can read it here.
Here's the actual passage:
Separation is itself part of the unity of the world, of the global social praxis split up into reality and image. The social practice which the autonomous spectacle confronts is also the real totality which contains the spectacle. But the split within this totality mutilates it to the point of making the spectacle appear as its goal. The language of the spectacle consists of signs of the ruling production, which at the same time are the ultimate goal of this production.
I've been writing this for a little over a week now, and have reached a point where I keep questioning myself as to why I do this. This paragraph gave me the answer: for the past 15-odd years, I've been feeling a sense of alienation, a large part of which stems from my peripatetic upbringing.
Moving once every 3 - 4 years, to wildly disparate places brought on a sense of nausea and disorientation that caused me to withdraw into myself. It also didn't help that my family members did the same, mostly by burying themselves into the respective roles that they had been assigned (read: accepted).
Alienation is nothing but a form of separation. The more disconnected you are from your immediate environment, the greater the chances of being alienated.
Separation is Unity
As a young boy in school, I would often encounter the phrase: "United we stand, divided we fall." It would either be scrambled in the school 'diary' that we were required to maintain, or it would be spoken every now and then as the 'thought of the day' in the school assemblies that would be held every morning.
Pardon me for giving this an Orwellian twist, but tweaking that phrase to "Divided we stand, united we ...?" seems far more intelligible, especially in light of the extreme polarization that one sees in the world conjured by the spectacle.
A large part of how we go about our daily lives is deeply influenced by the wedge that the spectacle has driven into it. Reality contains the spectacle, but the spectacle has subsumed it to the point where reality is re-oriented towards creating, maintaining, refining, and propagating the spectacle.
The Language of 'The Man'
In American slang, 'The Man' is commonly used to refer to an authority, usually the government, and is a commonly accepted euphemism to refer to some omnipresent entity that is symbolic of oppression in any society. If we were to entertain this manner of thinking, we could say that 'The Man' speaks the language of the spectacle, one whose constituents are derived from the pre-existing methods of production.
It suffices to say that such a language is not just constituted of the signs of the ruling methods of production, but also reinforces them to its origin, thereby creating a loop that feeds itself with every passing iteration. To borrow an analogy from the 'business bros', this is a 'flywheel' that gets faster and more robust with every revolution.
If any of this sounds relatable, please write to me. Part of the reason I write this is to seek out more people who feel the same way I do about the modern Internet.
If you enjoyed reading this, you might like my cleverly disguised rants on LinkedIn too.