Vivisecting the Illusion
What you're reading is an attempt to delve deeper into the 11th aphorism featured in Guy Debord's 'The Society of the Spectacle'. If you missed the last one, you can find it here.
Here's the actual passage:
To describe the spectacle, its formation, its functions and the forces which tend to dissolve it, one must artificially distinguish certain inseparable elements. When analyzing the spectacle, one speaks, to some extent, the language of the spectacular itself in the sense that one moves through the methodological terrain of the very society which expresses itself in the spectacle. But the spectacle is nothing other than the sense of the total practice of a social economic formation, its use of time. It is a historical movement in which we are caught.
Vivisecting the Illusion
Given how abstract the spectacle is, it is futile to attempt to describe it by breaking it down further. However, that is precisely what Debord claims must be done if one intends on tracing the lifecycle of the spectacle.
I cannot describe an event that has subsumed itself into reality without attempting to divorce it from the circumstances that birthed it. For instance, I can describe what it was like to be a part of the maiden batch of my alma mater. But doing so will require me to use certain referents that would be embedded into the spectacle itself, which brings us to our next point.
Alien Tongues
My stated intent of describing an experience to you warrants that I ground certain concepts within you. I can only do so by invoking a set of constructs that I believe the two of us implicitly agree on. That is the precise moment at which I m unwillingly situating myself in the rules that inform the society of the spectacle.
It is also the point at which I begin to speak the language of the spectacle, however much I think otherwise.
Discarnate Entities
A spectacle exists independently of space and time. To the individual witnessing it, it simply is. Granted, there are several ways to discern its origins and map it to a certain set of coordinates, but that's beside the point.
What I believe Debord was trying to get at is that the spectacle flexes the notion of time so brazenly that it becomes the primary referent. Think about how we sometimes describe a certain event in our past; we tend to bolster it with phrases like "I was there when (insert event) happened." or "It was a time when (insert event) was taking the world by storm.
What is the 'event', really? How was it taking 'the world' by storm? This is a whole new paradigm of thinking, one that could have only emerged in the wake of the spectacle.
And we're caught in the thick of it.
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.