‘You have to assume that you don’t have rational consumers. Faced with complex decisions or too much information they default…’ Martin Wheatley.
That the spectacle believes in irrationality is hardly news of course, still as the above quote from one of the UK’s financial regulators demonstrates that it now no longer believes in rational choice is rather a critical moment. The default is irrational choice, the mass consumer is regarded as being incapable of rationality… Bourgeois ideology at its finest, where both rationality and irrationality exist and are fundamental to the existence of the spectacle and yet where there own ideology blinds them from the obvious understanding that there is no such thing as irrationality in the spectacle…
i have had this book since 2008 and have never been able to read it. because it contains early versions of a favorite novel.„ the sublime The Sailor From Gibraltar… one day perhaps…
Today, Easter Sunday morning
a sudden snowstorm swept over the island
between the greening hedges lay snow. My young son
drew me to a little apricot tree by the house wall
away from a version which I pointed at those
who were preparing a war which
could well wipe out the continent, this island, my people, my
Family
Red Rosa now has vanished too.
Where she lies is hid from view.
She told the poor what life is about
And so the rich have rubbed out.
remnants of colonialism … (1919) and a favorite dead god…(mass consumptive version from Egypt)
Quotes from #Ranciere
“as the opposite of the passive spectacle in the texts of Guy Debord….”
“the concept of the spectacle implies that images are no longer doubles of things but. but the things themselves, the reality of a world in which things and images are no longer able to be distinguished. Whenever the the image no longer stands opposite the thing, form and image become indistinguishable from one another….”
I was initially intending something rather different, more akin to a rejection of Ranciere’s understanding of art and the media, but when looking at the work again it became obvious that the real problem remains that he is thinking of the spectacle solely in terms of that moment in the 1960s when the Hegalo-Marxist spectacle was understood in terms of images, false consciousness and mass consumption. In a sense whilst that precise moment may haunt Ranciere’s perspective, it is also evidence of how static his work appears to a contemporary non-academic reader. In a mass consumptive network society Ranciere’s focus on the image avoids the necessary extension of the spectacle into language, data, the network society and beyond. In a few years unless checked it will be reaching down into genetics and up into the clouds.
“Guy Debord’s critique of entertainment as spectacle, meaning the triumph of alienated life; the identification of entertainment with the Debordian concept of play as the antidote to appearance….”
Entertainment of course references the ongoing triumph of alienated life. Art does not manage anything better. But let’s be clear that passivity as Ranciere references it exists where readings and theories of the media are not placed within the spectacle.
I have worked all these years, have seen
the seasons change little behind window panes, working
for the car, for papers, doctors, for food and the house.
Doing not what I ought to have done, but neither
what I should have done; not with the slow mind
of the wise, nor with bright eyes,
nor with a glad heart.
But the dark water beyond the future,
the still lake that lies unvisited there,
of that I knew how to speak; and you
that hesitate over these words should know:
behind the proud complaint and the feeble anger
it is one in you and me.
What we have left of all this history presents nothing but two languages as such, narratives or legends and proofs or figures, words and formulas. Thus it is as if we were confronted by two parallel lines which, as is well known, never meet. The origin constantly recedes, inaccessible, irretrievable. The problem is open.
I have tried to resolve this question three times. First, by immersing it in the technology of communications. When two speakers have a dialogue or a dispute, the channel that connects them must be drawn by a diagram with four poles, a complete square equipped with its two diagonals. However loud or irreconcilable their quarrel, however calm or tranquil their agreement, they are linked, in fact, twice: they need, first of all, a certain intersection of their repertoires, without which they would remain strangers; they then band together against the noise which blocks the communication channel. These two conditions are necessary to the diaIogue, though not sufficient. Consequently, the two speakers have a common interest in excluding a third man and including a fourth, both of whom are prosopopoeias of the,powers of noise or of the instance of intersection.(1) <#1>Now this schema functions in exactly this manner in Plato’s /Dialogues/, as can easily be shown, through the play of people and their naming, /their resemblances and differences/, their mimetic preoccupations and the dynamics of their violence. Now then, and above all, the mathematical sites, from the /Meno /through the /Timaeus/, by way of the /Statesman /and others, are all reducible geometrically to this diagram. Whence the origin appears, we pass from one language to another, the language said to be natural presupposes a dialectical schema, and this schema, drawn or written in the sand, as such, is the first of the geometric idealities. Mathematics presents itself as a successful dialogue or a communication which rigorously dominates its repertoire and is maximally purged of noise. Of course, it is not that simple. The irrational and the unspeakable lie in the details; listening always requires collating; there is always a leftover or a residue, indefinitely. But then, the schema remains open, and history possible. The philosophy of Plato, in its presentation and its models, is therefore inaugural, or better yet, it seizes the inaugural moment.
HG: Is the impulse to know alot, or is the impulse to copy things that strike you?
JMB: Well, originally I wanted to copy the whole history down, but it was too tedious so I just stuck to the cast of characters.
HG: So they’re kinds of indexes to encyclopedias that don’t exist.
JMB: I just like the names.
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the names with which a subject surrounds itself are not indiscernable. But the external witness, noting that for the most part these names lack a referent inside the situation such as it is, considers that they make up an arbitrary and content-free language. Hence, any revolutionary politics is considered to maintain a utopian (or non-realistic) discourse; a scientific revolution is received with skepticism, or held to be an abstraction without a base in experiments; and lovers’ babble is dismissed as infantile foolishness by the wise. These witnesses, in a certain sense, are right. The names generated - or rather, composed - by a subject are suspended, with respect to their signification, from the “to-come” of a truth.
-an early discussion (from the January 1983 issue) between Basquiat and famed Metropolitan curator Henry Geldzahler. from Interview magazine.
-badiou b.e. 398
Answer:
It’s the Hamburger translation from the 1978 Arc publication… i typed it from the book…
All afternoon
a thunderstorm hung on the rooftops,
then broke, in lightning, in torrents.
I stared at lines of cement, lines of glass
with screams inside them, wounds mixed in and limbs,
mine also, who have survived. Carefully, looking
now at the bricks, embattled, now at the dry page,
I heard the word
of a poet expire, or change
to another voice, no longer for us. The oppressed
are oppressed and quiet, the quiet oppressors
talk on the telephone, hatred is courteous, and I too
begin to think I no longer know who’s to blame.
Write, I say to myself, hate those
who gently lead into nothingness
the men and women who are your companions
and think they no longer know. Among the enemies’ names
write your own too. The thunderstorm,
with its crashing, has passed. To copy
those battles nature’s not strong enough. Poetry
changes nothing. Nothing is certain. But write
“Systems of representation have become consumer objects; they function almost according to the throwaway logic of fads and tissues” Lipovetsky
Philosophical moments on the network should all be read carefully through the mirror of the above proposition.
