Dear Adbusters, are we not from this world?

For the longest time I was always excited when a new issue of Adbusters hit the news stand at our local co-op grocery store, 20 some issues can attest to that, until one day it hit me, several years back...No, it was not the obvious problem that I am buying a magazine which is the self-proclaimed bible for the anti-consumer(ism), for I love to consume its our "natural" way of life.  As ironic as that fact my be, its not that I have to pay to read about not paying for things that bothers me, rather, it is the constant message that my world, our world, is not ours and that we have somehow lost our world or that we are alien to this world brought on by hyper-consumer capitalism.

Adbusters is constantly reminding me that we are something else, we are not the materialists that capitalism desires us to be and Adbusters is completely right in saying that we are not this type of materialist. Though we are not hyper-capitalist materialists we do live in a material world and desire the material.  Up until this point I agree with Adbusters but the magazine's repeating conclusion that we are somehow "naturally" not materialists troubles me.  The troubles continue, Adbusters seems to pride itself on guilt-ing its readership into agreeing that it is "our" fault, the consumer's fault, as in the Big Ideas of 2011 issue, "Our five-planet lifestyles are the primary cause of the floods in Pakistan."

I feel the lack of class perspective regarding Adbuster's mantra of anti-consumerism puts the burden and blame on "our" shoulders as if we are the free-market engineers.  When the majority of Americans live in both material and intellectual poverty brought on by capitalism, a brutal war against our (working) class there is no need to insult us and blame us in the very same magazine we buy for enlightenment.  I am not sensitive to critique or to debate regarding the excesses brought on by capitalist consumption but I will not take the blame for something I do not do, nor do I expect my class to.

There is another underlining argument which flows throughout the pages of Adbusters that is intertwined within the blame and guilt written about ourselves in the magazine, the notion that we are not of this world somehow alien.  Again, in one sense I agree, we are not of this world because we are living in perverse capitalist interpretations of the world but regardless of our hatred of capitalism we are still of this world.   

I hope I get this right, in a Hegelian-Marxist-Debordian way, we are part of this consumerist world, it is our world, we brought this about, but what matters is not how guilty we feel about it or how much blame we place on ourselves, what we do as proactive dialectians is what matters.  Here, should not forfeit our own agency, autonomy, or political power by blaming ourselves and trying to consume less but instead look to the soviets(workers-councils).  I am not totally sure how positive i feel towards Lenin(ism) as historical necessity in the sense that we once needed a literal vanguard, but I do feel positive that we do not need that form of a workers vanguard today.  We are no more in need of advertisements telling us what we need than we are in need of the Party telling us what we need.     

This world is ours, the cell phone conversation you just had via texting is just as natural as our face to face conversations.  The cell-phone is merely a tool not some apocalyptic doomsday machine and the day our soviets rule over the material world is the day that we decide if mining the African and South American earth is worth the effort.  Not until then.



I hope to move beyond the discussion of whether or not this or that is ecologically sustainable and discuss the issue I have with ideologies or philosophies that attempt to place human beings and human activity outside the "natural" world.  I totally agree that we, even as a capitalist society, should not produce in a manner that is ecologically unsustainable but I will never agree to, or caste off our responsibility to this Earth, in saying that what we as human beings and producers do is not "natural".  I rather take my chances in this (hyper-consumerist) capitalist filth as a dialectical materialist than reduce my existence to vessel full of guilt and blame.  Our methods of producing, are indeed destroying the planet, but our methods are "natural" nonetheless. Our behavior on this planet is as "natural" as the behavior of frogs or any other animal.  It just seems for some scientific and philosophical reasons we are more conscious of our methods and behaviors but these "facts" do not make us any less "natural".

                      

 I hate the assumption that class society is "natural".

Perverse...

One Reading, Two Reading, Many Reading...

Society of the Spectacle is almost done and over but where do we go from here? What is to be done (joking, but no seriously)?  Anyway, the people have spoken and as always there is confusion, we want to go everywhere from science fiction to Frantz Fanon (Algerian revolutionary-nationalist). There will be a meeting to further discuss the qualitative and quantitative possibilities of our reading group. Until then keep your thinking caps on, guns clean, and theory and practice tight.  And remember you are now the proletariat dialectician.

Notes From Second Meeting

Just to get it started, here were some questions raised at the second meeting on 12/4/10
Post your additions or risk looking like you weren't paying attention...


-How does society relate to privilege, or the rejection thereof?
-What can be said of the guilt of the spectator?
-What are the implications of the denial of the spectator?
-Summation of the spectacle as anything attempting to attribute universal value.
-Capital::Commodity/Spectacle::image


Spectacle Nuance as Defined by Debord:
Concentrated Spectacle
-associated with concentrated bureaucracy (eastern bloc, fascism)
-property, communication, music, everything is concentrated/identified with bureaucratic class
-identifies with a powerful political leader
-made effective through state of permanent violence and terror
Diffuse Spectacle
-associated with advanced capitalism and commodity abundance
-commodities compete with each other, preventing whole consumption
-more effective than concentrated at suppression of non-spectacular opinions
-operates through seduction
Integrated Spectacle
-associated with modern capitalist countries
-borrows from diffuse and concentrated to form synthesis
-goes by the label 'liberal democracy'
-depends on permanent and general secrecy (the job of experts and specialists to define and translate statistics, morality)
-terrorism is the invented enemy of the spectacle, as it needs a comparison to be superior to in order to survive


Some outside things that got mentioned...
Joseph_Beuys
Walter_Benjamin
CWC- Fighting in the New Terrain
Barthes- Mythology

What are some of instances, even if fleeting, where you have seen a crack in the spectacle?

What was the most spectacular thing you experienced this week?

show up and take over

wanna get into it?

download Society of the Spectacle and read sections 1-4. 
download Capital Vol. I, Chapter I, and read section 4. 

we are meeting at the Glenwood Community Bookstore roughly every week.
we will probably meet Sunday, December 12th, before or around 8pm.
bring ruthless criticism, respect, and new reading ideas. 



<3

Notes from First Meeting 12/1/10

Notes from 12/1/10

Glenwood Community Bookshop

Society of the Spectacle, Sections 1-4, Debord

Section 4: The Fetishism of Commodities, Capital Vol. I, Marx

I took these notes as people had condensed questions, critiques, or comments that were able to be transcribed amidst a broad and long conversation. Apologies for all lost subtleties and things left out entirely. Please use the comment section and new posts to update notes if you remember shit that's not on here.

________________________________________________________________

How is “the spectacle” different than the idea that all experience  is “socially constructed” (through our brains, language, communication, i.e. “mediation” in general)

Transition from Industrial Capitalism to Advanced/Spectacular Capitalism?

            When/how did it happen, what did/does it look like?

At what point does Spectacular Society emerge?

            -mutual emergence with the acceptance or proliferation of global capital.

Evolution of advertising over the last 40 years.

            Absurdity as commodity

            irony > turning an image on itself to justify its circulation

Spectacle as an event (i.e. 9/11) versus spectacular consumer relations ( i.e. crustpunks.com) the commodification of resistance circulates an image of resistance that is produced and consumed by the spectator.

Spectacle vs. Symbol

            spectacle - secondary or new total meditation of social relations

            symbol - primary mediation of lanuage

Materialist Dialectic (Dialectical Materialism)

            Proletarian Conception: “one divides into two”

            Bourgeois Conception: “two fuse into one”

                        ^This tension or historical struggle defines what is considered “history” for Marx,                  Debord.

Use Value: NEED. USE. Literally what it can be used for or what you think you need.         Quantitative. Human labor.

Exchange Value: Abstraction of use value for its equasion with other objects (commodities)

            Denail of physical property of the thing for its exchange. Qualitative. Wage labor.

“Real Activity” = Un-alienated labor

Authentic vs. Manufactured Need (pseudo needs)

            Authentic- primary human needs (eat, sleep, privileging of use-value)

Manufactured- “pseudo needs,” the privileging of exchange-value, market desire, fusion of need and desire.  

Spectacle creates the need to “feel authentic” and a general fixation on authenticity.

Concept of consumable survival (?)

The feeling of choice as a psychological state of the spectacle, related to the Id and the Ego (Freud), Base and Superstructure (Marx, Althusser), Need and Desire (value systems).

Sign that the Spectacle has been cracked or toppled: When the idea of needing to feel “authentic” is no longer a concept.

_______________________________________________________________

End of the meeting notes: We agreed to try a closer, more thorough reading of Part 1: Separation Perfect on Saturday, 12/4, at 10am at the Bookstore.

Proposals for further readings and reading strategies:

*partnering up or breaking the reading into sections that different people would bottomline a close reading of and notes on each meeting

* going section by section and breaking it down

* continuing to pair SOTS with relevant outside readings to help contextualize or contrast.

* reading Fiction or other non-theory/dense related stuff in-between denser texts to help bounce ideas and provide some contrast.

*reading historically relevant material for SOTS and other theoretical texts.