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.
…for the UK publication of Althusser’s lesson… here you can see the central problem with Ranciere in the 1970s and more interestingly in the present.
“The sociology of misrecognition, the theory of the spectacle and the different forms assumed by the critique of consumerism and communication all share with Althusserianism the idea that the dominated are dominated because they are ignorant of the laws of domination. This simplistic view at first assigns to those who adopt it the exalted task of bringing their science to the blind masses. Eventually though this exalted task dissolves into a pure thought of resentment which declare the inability of the ignorant to be cured of their illusions…” #Ranciere (2010)
What is obviously mistaken about Ranciere’s is the idea that when one speaks of the impacts of mass consumption, of the spectacle that we are speaking of the ‘blind masses’ whereas in actuality we are speaking of him. Which is to say that we are speaking in the 21st Century of immaterial labour, of proletarianized intellectuals rather than of supposedly ignorant industrial workers. Immaterial labour is just as delusory, if not more so than any other group of people working in a mass-consumptive socio-economic system. Trapped in a profound ideological relationship with the network society in which they exist.
His reading is wrong then because the proper logic is to push these understandings of the socio-economic system further than he can manage and recognize that the ‘masses’ are him… That he is as ridiculously guilty of the exalted task he is as contemptuous of (in 2010) as anyone else, perhaps more so because he is still maintaining a separation and difference between the dominated and the exalted ones which we would refuse..
Perhaps only intellectuals believe they are outside the multitude.. So that there is a tendency to support the network society, the internet and the very structures that oppress them, as they become increasingly proletarianized do they resist ?
