Situations: from Anti-art to Situationism

This week’s reading says that we are going to look at the ideas and the various ‘situationist’ practices that occurred before Debord’s key text ‘The Society of Spectacle’. For this week’s reading I started reading ‘The Society of Spectacle’ so as to know a bit about what he said.

The relationship between the spectacle in reference to situationism.

An original definition of the spectacle is relating to something being a spectacle worth watching like an event, a shooting star, etc or someone making a spectacle of oneself. For my reading I started Debord’s ‘The Society of Spectacle’. The book goes into the spectacle and what is the spectacle, something which sort of confused me. The book explained the spectacle by going into descriptions of it through what it is and what it isn’t, some of it seeming a bit contradictory.

For those who did not read this book or the beginning of the book, chapter one ‘The Culmination of Separation’ starts with a quote which makes the parts of this chapter which I can understand make sense.

“But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence . . . truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred. Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.”

—Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition
of The Essence of Christianity

This Chapter talks about the spectacle in very many ways, some of which sound contradictory to themselves. It starts on how the spectacle simultaneously presents itself as society and a means of “unification” then it goes on and focuses on awareness and vision. It then goes on to say “But due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation.”

What is this sector in which is seen as separate and why when it is the unification of society can it go on to talk about it being “a universal language of separation”

Though it talks a lot about the idea or fact that the spectacle in many ways refers to the image over the original event and how this changes the view of the world, at the same time it is not so much the images as it is “the relationship between people which is meditated by images”

It seems the spectacle is multi-media. It features news, television and movies where the images have become more important than reality.