ACFM - ACFM Microdose: Reading The Society of the Spectacle

Episode Date: September 27, 2026

Following their recent Trip episode on Situationism, the gang offer a close reading of The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, first published in France in 1967. Nadia, Jem and Keir explore the layered references and subversions throughout Debord’s extremely quotable aphorisms, focusing on the first three chapters of the book. Find a PDF of the book at Libcom.org Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

This is acid man. Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the Weird Left. I'm Jeremy Gilbert and I'm here as usual with my friends Nadia Idol. Hello. And Keir Milburn. Hello. And this is a microdose episode, a follow-up, if you will, to our main trip episode on Situationism.

And we are going to be reading the first three chapters of the classic of Situationist, even though the author would have literally, literally would have punched you if you had used that particular phrase. The book is The Society of the Spectacle by Giede d'Ebor, first published in I think 67 in France under the French title, The Suceded du Spectac. English editions started to come out very early from 1970. I think, of course, to make it all more convenient for everyone, we're working from two different editions.

but are we going to be reading the first three chapters. The book is organised into aphorisms, so it won't matter about page numbers. It's basically each separate paragraph is numbered. So we'll be able to explain what we're referring to quite easily. But why are we doing this book? Well, we're doing it, well, quite obviously really, because we did an episode about Situationism or the Situationist International, perhaps we should say.

And this is the most famous book to have come out of that movement and the most influential one, the one that's been widely read, widely published and republished. And we're going to go through it and think about some of its ideas, like where they came from, what they've influenced subsequently, to what extent they're still useful today. So guys, any thoughts before we really get cracking with this, like Nadia? When I went back and read it this time, I thought to myself, well, this is a work of very quotable sexy freighters. if anything in an ironic way, this is almost like the most Instagrammable phrase book that we've done so far. But I also thought to myself reading some of the phrases, is this hyperbole with some of the things that came up, you know, the way he's phrased some of the concepts?

And I also thought to myself, could this have been written by AI in a way? So as we go through, we'll see that there are a lot of kind of choice phrases, which I think will make sense to a critique of capitalism today. But also in some way, some of the things, some of the pieces, some of the aphorisms that I read, I thought, I actually have no idea what this, what Guillae-Dabor is trying to get across, like, is this hyperbole? that's a kind of critique in a way. I mean, I think it's a very valuable piece to read. Like you said, Jeremy, we're only going through the first three chapters, but as listeners will hopefully find out, I'm very excited about this. I just wanted to kind of posit this idea of the way it's written

and the way ideas are presented in the 21st century. You could be thinking, is this written by AI? I've got a couple of points. The first one is we're doing this reading. We're going to read through aphrasm, aphrasn by aphorism, hopefully not every word. Just pick out the choice ones, as Nadia says. But, you know, whenever we do this,

we say you can go and download a copy of this off the internet. In fact, if you go to libcom.org, I presume, you can get, you know, you can download chapter by chapter and just read along if you so desire. But a comment on its quotability, Nadia is, like in loads of ways, like loads of this are sort of, he's sort of quoting other people basically and changing them. So like the opening aphorism is an alteration of the opening sentence of capital by Marx,

basically. Perhaps you can understand it as like he's detourning a load of quotes, basically. And so detourment, we talked about this in the episode of what situation is international. It's a way in which they sort of like tried to take existing culture and twist it in a way. it came to mind when you were mentioning that because Gieda Borg much later in life writes an autobiography of a sort called Panegeric and it's an autobiography

just made up of quotations by other people he's not got an original word in there basically we're not going to pick up all of these references but there are certainly some in there and like you know so that's part of what he's doing basically he's sort of like he's framing his own sort of original thoughts such as they are

amongst what already exists but he's doing it in an almost explicit way by like really ostentatiously sort of detourning famous sayings, etc., from the history of philosophy and revolutionary thought. Yeah, right. That's all true. I'm glad to hear it. So are we starting with the first one?

The entire life of societies in which modern conditions of production reign announces itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation I mean, arguably that is the whole thesis of the book. Yeah. And if you know a bit about earlier direct elements of Marxist theory,

I would say if you read that sentence and go back and reread Lukats' history and class consciousness, he pretty much got his point here. He is, as you said, he's alluding to Marx talking about the accumulation of commodities. The first sentence of capital is, the welfare society in which the capitalist mode of production prevails presents itself as the immense accumulation of commodities. And, you know, later on we're going to have aphrism after aphorism about commodities. And in some ways, it's like he's basically extending, like, Marx's critique of alienation

from production into culture, but like also positing like the spectacle as like the modern, as was, form of commodity fetishism or something like that. or an extension of commodity fetishism. My notes use posit as well, Kea. So great minds think alike there. I was thinking exactly the same thing. So I've got a slightly different translation, of course. Yes, now it begins.

And in mind, the last bit is everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation. So, I mean, I get my comments, and not much to add, but on the first one is, yes, this sets out the thesis. Yes, it kind of extends this idea of accumulation into the sphere of spectacles, as in it's saying to us, spectacles are a thing that can be accumulated. I think that's important. But I also thought it was interesting in my translation, you guys don't have this, the use of the term receded, that life recedes into a representation, which I think is an interesting, because it says something about, you know, temporality and high, there. But yeah, boom, as with a lot of other readers, like, pieces, it's a background, right? It's

like the first line, you're like, okay, it sets up what you are going to get into. And I think that, you know, the next few aphorisms probably do, do similar. Where should we go from that? Well, I have got the French edition in front of me as well now, but we'll be here all day. We're going to be here all day if I start commenting on which is the better translation. I think it's probably worth framing for listeners, actually, before we go any further, like a couple of these key concepts from Marxism, which are really central in here. There's a concept of alienation. In Marx, alienation, it doesn't just mean everybody becoming moody and, like, you know,

and sort of personally distant from their society, which is the way people really come to use the term in the mid-20th century. I always think it's useful to understand that alienation is this term that actually comes from, like, 18th century economics. an alienation means like making something foreign to yourself and it really was the term for like privatization when the crown, when the state sold off some land that it had previously owned it, alienated it.

Marxist theory of alienation in the German ideology and in later writing is that what happens in the capitalist society is actually people produce all this stuff together in factories and what have you but then they come to experience that stuff for something that they don't have any direct control over or contact with. And then all the kind of material goods in society they experience in this alienated way. And then according to the same logic by a certain, but as a result of the same process,

they come to think of a whole bunch of social institutions like the state and the economy are somehow separate from them and having power over them. And actually, when we talk about the state or the economy, we're just talking about the outcomes of people's cooperative activity. And the whole point for Marx is, look, these things like the economy, the state, whatever, they're just people doing stuff. So all you have to do is change the stuff people are doing. And you can change the way those things operate and change their outcome.

Can I just add a tiny bit to that, which is, so for Marx, like, you know, that realm of alienation is production. And we can sort of think of it this way is that, like, you know, the worker acts on the world and can change the world through its activity. But that activity becomes alienated to him, he's not in control. of it. He's not a control of what he does. The direction, he's, he sort of gets separated from the product of it, so he doesn't understand that. So basically what you get separated from is the knowledge that you, you're the one who builds the world together. We all build the world

and so we could build it differently, basically. That's what you're alienated from. And so what for, I think that becomes important later on when we, when the board sort of moves this into the realm of consumption and so forth, because like, so what's your experience of the world? And you, even though you're active, you're actively building the world, you experience it as passivity, as though you're not actually building the world, etc. So you become a spectator of your own life rather than seeing yourself as the agent who could change everything, basically. Yeah, yeah, that's right, yeah. And then the second concept is I wanted to refer to is the idea of commodification, just the fact that capitalist profits are mostly generated by turning things

into commodities. And those things might be the raw materials that you turn into text. And styles or domestic goods or increasingly over the course of the 20th into the 21st century, they might even just be like services that used to be produced collectively or that used to be made available in some other way. So you can think about the way which like care services in our society have been turned into things you pay for, like you purchase them in a retail transactions, commodities. And the exact status of like commodity production and commodification, like in a capitalist society is one of the points of debating contention in the history of Marxist theory, because famously Marx starts off capital, his book, his big three-volume work about capitalism.

He starts it off with the analysis of the commodities. Look, capitalism is all about producing commodities. It turns everything into a commodity, and it kind of presents commodification as the basic social logic that everybody experiences in sort of everyday life and in the wider economy. But then famously, if you read the whole three-vodity, You sort of get to the point where Marx says, actually, you thought it was all about commodification. Actually, look, people are producing and circulating commodities in all kinds of societies. What's actually specific to capitalism is capital accumulation.

It's about all this commodity production. It's not just like to make a bit of a decent income for the people making commodities or to make things tradable. Actually, it's so that these weird institutions like the capitalists and corporations can accumulate vast, historically unprecedented amounts of capital. that gives them all kinds of social and economic power. And then I think over the course of 20th century Marxist theory, there's quite a lot of variation in the amount of emphasis people want to put on commodification as the key process, actually the key process of capitalism,

and how much they don't want to do that. And I think this is an example of somebody looking at the way in which everyday culture seems to have been computer, completely saturated by that logic of commodification in a way that, you know, even Marx could barely imagine. Like, it's in the age of mass media and in the age of mass consumption, having been through a couple of generations now and sort of responding to that. So anything we want to add to that before I allow us back to the text?

But you'll be pleased to know, I don't really, I don't have that, I don't have that many notes after that on the next few pages, because I think that, I think I've just explained everything this going on in the next chapter. So I think you guys can now tell us which aphorisms you want to talk about. Right. Let's do number two in my translation and see, and Jeremy, you can do a live critique of the translation there. So I've got number two as saying, the images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudo-world that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world evolves into a world of

autonomous images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the non-living. I think there is a lot there, and one of the things, the themes which for me is a question mark, which maybe we can have a discussion about, because you guys might understand it differently, is his use of the concept of unity, which he keeps on cycling back to. So obviously, we're just at number two, so it's just being introduced now. And I think it's interesting how that's done, him thinking about unity in this way and what it's used to represent. And that's something that I'd like to unpack later. But as you can see, there's so much there.

So this idea that there is a unity of life and it can no longer be recovered under the spectacle, this idea that there is a separate pseudo-world is introduced and he comes back to that again, you know, the separation of these two worlds, this idea that I think is really poignant, you know, for the 21st century, for 2026, where we are now, this idea that even the deceivers are deceived, which is interesting to think about, and this idea of an autonomous movement of the non-living, because he has this kind of implicit theme

of almost like a zombie theme. He doesn't say that explicitly, but that kind of rides below. So Aphorism 2, number one is the thesis. Number two, I think, is the introduction of all of these different concepts that come back. Obviously, you guys have different translations.

So anything you want to add on that? Your translation is slightly better, I think, slightly better formulated English. It's basically the more That's the same. It's slightly more contentious as well, as a translation of the French. Oh, is it? Ours is, the translations is a bit clumsier, but it's less controversial. I mean, this thing about the autonomous movement of the non-living, that's just capital, basically. That's dead labour.

That rules over living labour, I.S, basically. And it's dead labour because, you know, it's been produced in the past, etc. It's got its own autonomous movement now. And so that's that, I guess. of like we've conjured something up basically, which is, which, which seems to rule autonomously over us. So in fact, you know, it is nothing but our own past labour, etc. Right. I think your point about the sort of rhetoric of unification and separation is really important, actually, you know, because I mean, this chapter is called separation perfected.

So on the one hand, the whole, the theme that seems to animate the whole chapter is this feeling that there is a possible, that there is a kind of natural way of being in the way. world as a human, which is to feel kind of present in the moment and non-alienated in your labour and maybe spinning at your wheel or tilling in your field. And that really, but humans have been all kind of, you know, separated from themselves by this whole process of capitalism. And there's all, but there's also this rhetoric of the unity of the spectacle, the idea that kind of the homogenous nature of the capitalist spectacle itself, the kind of unanimity with which capitalist media

sort of advertise the brilliant of capitalism. He never does anything as clumsy as explain that's what he's talking about, but it's kind of implied. That is also part of it. I think that is important, actually, because it's partly, you can understand

a lot of what's going to happen in French, sort of Marxian and post-Marxist theory and philosophy after this as a way of actually trying to deal with seemingly some of the problems there. So, for example, I mean, the assumption that there is such a thing is like an unalienated human existence. I mean, people like Lacan, the French psychoanalyst,

they're actually drawing on Hegel, is like an early 19th century philosopher, and readers of Hegel, like Alexander Cochre, they're going to be saying, no, that humans always, like, feels sort of separate from themselves. Like, you know, you can go back and read, like, the Greek classics, you know, then Greek poets, you know, like a thousand years ago moaning about how they sort of can't get, can't get no satisfaction and, you know, everything's a bit weird. And like, they're dreaming of a golden age when, like, humans were like just, like, sitting around in a garden, like, and didn't have to work, didn't have to do politics.

So, and that kind of thinking, like, trying to work out, well, are we, like, is unity good or is bad? Is it a myth? Is it real? Is it oppressive? Is it liberatory? It's going to end up being a big theme in a lot of, like, thinking in the, like, radical philosophy in the 70s.

I mean, yes, it kind of complexifies, if that's a word, the kind of crude materialism, but I think in a useful way. An autobiographical note, that's part of the reason why I sort of ended up finding this sort of theory unsatisfying and then moved on and found sort of stuff like Dillers and Guatari, more satisfying because they've got a theory. Like for them, it's like, well, look, all subjectivity is produced. It's like, what are the assemblages that produce the ones, certain ones and not other ones? do you know what I mean?

So there's not an idea that there is a liberated human or just even liberatory desire just, you know, that pre-exist in some sort of natural essence, do you know what I mean, that sort of idea. Yes, yeah. I mean, the question that haunts the society of the spectacle, like it is going to horn the work of people like Jean-Bogier who are influenced by it later is, well, what do you think culture was like

before this or before capitalism? You know, do you think, because, because like, If you look back at medieval culture, it seems like people believed a lot of weird bullshit, as I like to put it. And, you know, we're being told what to think by priests and, like, we're quite miserable a lot of the time. So, anyway, we can't dwell on that too much. Let's move on.

But I think we're going to come back to that later, though. So in defence of DeBoer, I found myself unexpectedly taking his side, you know, he'd say, yeah, but he does later on, he says, you know, before capitalism and, you know, in the early days of capitalism, you know, we were desperately trying to satisfy our needs, basically. Now, we've got to the stage where we have satisfied our needs and capital has to invent new needs or pseudo needs. That's a very good point, yeah, that's true. I mean, the response is, yeah, the response is, yeah, we're now clearly living in a society where no one needs to go hungry. So why are they still making it suck? Let's get to that later. Let's skip aphorism three

and just note aphorism 4, which is the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people mediated by images. Once again, this is a detourned sentence, famous sentence from Capital Volume 1, which says, where Marx says, capital is not a thing, it is a social relationship between people

that is mediated by things. Once again, a detourne sort of marks, but it's also quite an important point for DeBuy's, not just talking about, he says later on, I'm not just talking about mass media or cinema, etc. Do you know what I mean? Those are just the most crass displays of the spectacle. This is something much more, much more ingrained in society and much harder to get out of. I mean, that point I just made, though, is emphasising the next two aphorisms in which this spectacle is described as a Wilton Scheng, a world vision that has become objective,

And then in aphorism six, the spectacle is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real world, which I quite liked. But it's emphasizing the sort of same point, I think. And then right at the end of aphorism six, DeBoer says, the spectacle is also the permanent presence of this justification of the system's conditions and goals, since it occupies the main part of the time lived outside modern production. This is the first indication actually is saying sort of, you know, alienation has leaked out of

from production. You know, that's not just, that's not the realm where, where we are alienated from ourselves. It's also consumption and like the spectacle just takes up most of our time. When he's writing this, you know, there are TVs. I don't think DeBoer spends a lot of time watching TVs. He goes to the cinema, etc. but he hadn't got a phone in his pocket, nudging him all the time,

and basically trying to get him to scroll through these series of images, et cetera, et cetera. And it was that sort of idea that like, you know, this is early on in the age of mass consumption and the domination of all time outside of consumption by commodities. This is early on in that process, really, earlyish on. We're well further down that line now. Sure, but the effect of the tea, you know,

the television in people's private homes will have had, you know, have had, did have, like, a huge effect on society. And he had, in fact, in Aforism 5, I think he does say, he does use the term mass media technologies. And we come back to that again. I mean, I think he's also thinking the printing press and, like, news, etc. Um, obviously the way it materializes affects people's condition, um, and self-image is, is, has developed, uh, in a complete, not completely different direction, but to a different effect in the 21st century. But it was marked as in like a moment in history in terms of media theory for sure. And I think that's what he's reacting to there. In Aphorism 7, I have the first piece as separation is itself an integral part

of the unity of this world, of a global social practice split into reality and image. Again, I'm slightly yeah I'm not entirely sure what he means though do you guys can you guys shed any light again on his use of the the phrase and the rhetoric around unity here well he's he's sort of saying that it's like that first

bit again everything that was directly moved lived has moved away into representation saying there's a split between reality and the image basically that's the split in the unity the previous unity of the world perhaps something like that yeah so in effect we've become spectators of our own

lives, basically. I mean, what's never clear, I'm going to say, it's never clear, is he saying this is true of everyone? In which case, how does he know? How is he, is he just a spectator of his own life? Like, what is he, you know, what exactly is the epistemological of the status

of the claims he's making? Never very clear. It's not the kind of book that is going to be clear about that. Later on, he does mention less, underdeveloped countries. He even mentioned imperialism once, actually. I think drinking on the left bank lifts the veil, I think, is what's in Paris. No, but I think that's true, Nadia, because what you've got to remember, part of their practice pre this book is like trying to get to situations where they call it the construction of situations in which they're freely choosing what they do,

and they're trying to break with the logic of capital, et cetera, and commodification. What does that mean? Are they brewing their own wine? I don't think so. They're probably buying it. Localism, I don't think localism is part of the agenda. But that's interesting because that clarifies something for me, maybe was less clear in my translation,

is that part of the use of unity, at least here and so far in the southern that we've gone through, is something to do with like the original sense of like the world as it is maybe supposed to be until the spectacle becomes the reality, the good explanation by you Kiyah, to help me kind of read his use of that rhetoric throughout. Yeah, I mean, in the next sentence he goes on and says the spectacles become the totality, but like it's got that division. It can never overcome that division, basically, between reality and the image or whatever he puts it. It's mutilated.

It says the totality of the spectacle is mutilated from within. Okay, what's next? In Aphrodism A, he says, and one cannot abstractly contrast the spectacle to actual social activities. So he's saying we can't do what I've just accused him, spent eight aphorisms accusing of doing such a division is itself divided. The spectacle which inverts the real is in fact produced. Lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle.

I mean, my sort of meta observation would be that a lot of this language is very sort of Hagedian or quasi-Hagadian like everything is always a reflection. of itself, back to itself, or itself in itself. And I would say a lot of that sort of language and its popularity with French writers, including Lacan, but it's also there. You find it sometimes in people like Sartre. A lot of intellectual historians today would say it goes back to these series of lectures given in Paris, I think in the 30s, about Hegel by Alexander Kojev. there loads of people attended

and the hot ticket if you're a young French philosopher or a student at that time and Kozzev has a particular reading of Hegel and like the bit of Hegel he's most into is the famous the master slave dialectic bit where Hegel says

you think between the master and the slave or the Lord and the bondsman, however you want to translate it they're completely dependent upon each other for their status like the slave the master is only the master because the slave recognizes himself as the master and actually actually the slave is more free than the master because the master is more dependent on the slave his status and his kind of subjectivity

than is the slave and right you can make of that what you will if that is not that is not a kind of formulation that is never useful it's kind of interesting like you can apply it in all sorts of ways but I sort of think you know that kind of blew people's mind and it created a sort of a rhetorical and a kind of conceptual style, which becomes very fashionable in certain strands of Parisian radical discourse for several decades. And in a way, you can understand the society of the script of the text we're reading today is sort of, is sort of the last heraer, actually, of that mid-war Higainianism before it gets displaced by post-structuralism and people like Deri Del and Dulles and Gutari. and one reason is because they get supportive. But these endless paradoxes in which everything is always reflecting everything back to itself

for itself and in its own ends, etc. It's a style of phrasing, which I think you can see as actually part of a little tradition that goes on for a few decades there. The later bits we're going to get to, I think it's had some really interesting things, but this bit, I'm very dubious of it. Like I'm always dubious of even today of like, there's a particular tendency like an American elite critical theory to always want to say,

you thought I was going to say that this thing was just a, I'm telling you about was just a function of capitalist ideology. But it's not even that. It's that the whole way you're expecting you to talk about it is itself a function of capitalist ideology. And at which point I tended to say, well, what? Is that meta? Yeah, it is that.

The last sentence of text. in my translation it is, but a critique that grasps the spectacle's essential character reveals it to be a visible negation of life, a negation that has taken on a visible form. And I think that's, you know, it's both what Jeremy was saying, and it is kind of that point that he's trying to make,

is that the negation has a visible form and that is the spectacle, and that's part of its essential character. And I think that sets up a lot of what he's going to argue later. In 11, I was just going to affirm what Jen was just saying is a sentence at the middle. It says, when analysing the spectacle, one speaks to some extent the language of the spectacle itself. Then later at the end of that aphorism, it is the historical movement in which we are caught, basically. So it is that idea that like there isn't an outside from which we can make a pure critique.

Although I would argue that like they set at like councilism as an mediated form, which is like an outside, a pure political outside. side from which you can critique all existing politics, basically, apart from councilism. But later on, that becomes, or that sort of way of thinking of saying, like, you know, yeah, basically, you know, we have to use the form of the spectacle against itself,

which is like sort of what the torment is, basically. You know, we'll use the spectacle, but we'll turn it against itself. That goes through when people start to think, well, actually, perhaps you can turn pop music against itself. Perhaps we can get pop music to eat something, which is indigestible, basically, which is one of the early original

sort of like situationist groups thinking around a pop group which is so horrible and disgusting that it will break pop music and that's one of the ideas that fed into Malcolm McLaren's Jamie Reed's idea of what the sex pistols could be so yeah in a way it has it that has sort of like real life strategic implications seems strange to use the word strategic with the situationists but it's perhaps some post-ban pro situation is have used these ideas in the strategic manner, or at least try to. So on 12, I like this bit of what appears is good and what is good appears. I think that's poignant, and I think that's making an interesting point.

The passive acceptance it demands is already effectively imposed by its monopoly of appearances, its manner of appearing without allowing any reply. And I take from that some, I think some comment about trying to translate it into 21st century about kind of visual pollution as well. I mean, it's a thing that is referring to itself in a way, which hilariously is then what the next aphorism is, which is number 13, which is all about totology and the nature of the spectacle, having that kind of tautological sense.

And the first sentence is, the tautological character of the spectacle stems from the fact that its means and ends are identical. I think that's also kind of central to what is trying to say, but you kind of have to get your head round it as you go through the rest of the book. Yeah, that bit about the attitude which it demands is in principle, passive acceptance. That's what consumption is, basically.

We have all of this choice, but basically we don't have any, we have choice about, you know, 50 different brands of toothpaste, but we don't have choice over, you know, of the important things in life, basically, or the direction of society, or whether to tackle climate change, or any of the important things, basically,

that we would probably want to redirect resources to if we could get beyond this passive acceptance. Yeah, and I've always thought it is a very powerful evocation of an aspect of what it felt like, to live, like in the age of television. Like I said on the main episode about situationism, I think it's easy, even for those of us who grew up, like, pre-internet,

it's easy to forget now. Like, how very alienating and disempowering it felt a lot of the time to live in this world, and which indeed, all of your culture was sort of served up to you, you know, via a medium you had no way of engaging with or producing yourself. And I think it's very easy for people these days, especially listening to people like me and Keir Talk,

to get this nostalgic idea. Like everybody was like, we were all down local venues, venues like, you know, dancing to like punk bands and like, you know, squatting social centers and, you know, dancing Northern Soul. Like those things were tiny little fragments in a much bigger culture that, you know, most of the time, the vast majority of your cultural experience was completely passive. And it did feel like that. It felt like, well, everything was just sort of a spectacle that you were alienated from, that you couldn't really sort of intervene in in any meaningful way. and that has to be taken seriously, I think.

Yeah, there were a few punk gigs, but mainly it was watching Crossroads with your nan, because there's only one TV in the house, there's only three channels. And even punk, as I always say, for most people, was just something you watched on the telly. Like, even if you liked it, even if you were into it, you watched it on the telly.

Maybe you listen to John Peel on the radio, but if you thought John Peel's selections were often very boring, which I did, actually, like I'm afraid like there wasn't much you could do about it you couldn't just tap into YouTube I liked one record John Peel played tonight I want to know more about that kind of music you had to just wait until the next time

and it was so I think it is that's not true you could write to John Peel and complain and you could vote for your favourite record of the festive 50 that is the birth of interactivity I mean John Peer would probably reply to it after time but like that was a very exceptional part of

you know, that was the, you know, you had two hours of radio, you know, starting at 10 o'clock at night, where you would hear things which were unusual. But the rest, like most of like the radio, you'd have to listen to pop music, would have a very constrained, you know, playlist, basically, chosen and repeated it at nauseam, basically. So yes, there is a certain passivity involved in that, that form of media. Return to the text. I've got 17. I'm on 17 as well. great. Do you want to go first now?

No, no, no, you do it. You do it. With 17, he's making this sort of distinction with Marx, I think, where he says, look, the first phase of domination of the economy of a social life, which is drawing from reading Marx, I think it's probably like the early Marx rather than capital. The first phase of the domination of the economy of a social life brought into the definition of all human realisation, the obvious degradation of being, into having. So the first phase of domination of the economy, you see this slide from being into having, basically. The present phase of total occupation of social life, but they accumulated results with the

economy leads to a generalized sliding of having into appearing, from which all actual having must draw its immediate prestige and its ultimate function. I mean, so I think it's that Marx writes about this form of alienation, which slides from being and existing in the world into having things, I have having commodities or buying commodities. And this is like, you know, well, yeah, but you're having doesn't make sense unless it moves into appearing, basically. I can't help think about things such as, you know, TikTok shopping, etc. You know, he talks later on around these enthusiasms about commodities, etc. And, you know, the way that, like, we'll form our personalities out of like the clothes that we wear, for instance, display and all of that sort of stuff.

That's how I'm interpreting the slide from having into appearing. Is it in Marx being and having? I always think of it again as like mid-interwar existentialist, preoccupation, the distinction between being and having. But they might have borrowed it from Marx. I think it's early Marx actually, yeah, 1844 manuscripts. I mean, I just put three ticks halfway down this aphorism and written Instagram. So yeah, I kind of came to the same conclusion, Keir.

The spectacle isn't just images. It's a social relationship mediated by images. And he sort of like he starts to explain why this must be references to like some philosophical work that I'm not aware of. B starts to talk about vision being the privileged human sense in the contemporary world, whereas touch was for many epochs that the privileged human sense. And then he says, but the spectacle is not identical. fire bulb with mere gazing, even combined with hearing, the sound, sound on the movies. It is that which escapes the activity of men, which it escapes reconsideration and correction

by their work. Basically, that's that, that conception of alienation, basically, is that, you know, what gets produced, etc., disappears into representation, which means that, you know, it's separated from the activity of men where men can, like, build something, recognize that they built it together. When I say, men, I'm picking up on his translation. Human beings, I mean to say, you know, they basically can act in the world, you know, and then they can look at their work and control it and reconsider it and, like, redirect it, etc.

And instead, we're trapped by capital or the spectacle. We probably put it that way. But, like, the most important part of that is that, like, we make the world, we could remake the world, but we don't realize that we make the world. We think it's made by entrepreneurs or by a, uh, a fine, financiers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, by specialized people, basically. Or it's just like the laws of the economy mean, the gods of the bond market, mean we cannot do the things that everybody agrees we must do.

And we find ourselves trapped by this thing that we've produced, but seems to rule over us like a god. Well, just before we get to anyone, on 20, it's just like what I just said. He says it, but he makes it very clear. He says, the spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion. Spectacular technology has not dispel the religious clouds

where men had placed their own powers detached from themselves. It has only tied them to an earthly base. That's just that credit that, you know, the idea of a fetish, etc., where what we produce comes to seem like something independent that rules over us. We invent the idea of God.

Then we think that God is a thing that invents us and God is a thing that prevents us from doing certain things because the conception of God that we operate with, that exception of religion we operate with, always seems just by chance, and all of the laws of nature, all seem just by chance to coincide with the interests of those who have control of resources, those who are wealthy, etc. You've got clouds, I've got mists. That was a difference in translation there, which is interesting. I like 21 because, yeah, it just creates a certain

atmosphere. My translation has, as long as necessity is socially dreamed, dreaming will remain a social necessity. The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep. I thought it was quite spooky the way that was put. I mean, I don't have anything interesting politically to say about that. I just, you know, I just like the phraseology there, but I kind of, I experience. I experience it exactly. I experience it as a good line rather than, you know, as like life-changing politics. And I'm not sure, you know, to what usefulness, some of this stuff is, to what extent those sort of phrases have in terms of being unpacked. I think, you know, there's some stuff

that is quite poignant and other stuff from like, well, I just like the way it's written. I'm experiencing it as poetry rather than politics, to be honest. I think that's how a lot of people have experienced it historically. It's partly why we're so popular. Yeah. Unfortunately, I can't do that. No, no, but the necessity bit, I think that's once again, where there's this idea in the post-war, in the 30 glorious years, as the French put it after the Second World War, there's a sense all the way through that, like, the problem of abundance has been solved,

the problem of necessity of, like, we have to work in order to satisfy our basic needs of, like, hunger, etc. That era's over. Mark's idea that there would be increasing immiseration is over and in fact now necessity is socially dreamed basically and that can be an iron prison or it can be well in that case we've just fucking dream

something else then basically if we can just release productive forces from its entrapment and capital but I do agree DeBore put it better and more poetically than I just did I think 23 is important because it's the first time at least in my

translation we read the word power Yeah. Hmm. So it reads, the root of the spectacle is that oldest of all social specializations, the specialization of power. The spectacle plays the specialized role of speaking in the name of all the other activities. It is hierarchical society's ambassador to itself, delivering its official messages at a court where no one else is allowed to speak. the most modern aspect of the spectacle is thus also the most archaic.

I mean, I enjoyed that and also I was like, what does that mean? So it's, you know, but he does bring up power and I think that's important, right, as in terms of the signaling of where he's going with this work. But I think that's just like the older social separation is, it's not what they, we may say it's gender, we don't know, basically, but like, you know,

it's that when some people separated themselves off from others because they had access to resources basically and became warlords or kings or various forms of rulers or priests, etc. That's the oldest form of social separation. You know, best not just to rely on your ability to kill other people to justify that rule because you'll get old and they'll kill you back. So best invent some sort of reason why that separation is some natural or God-given or something like that. That's That's the oldest separation, basically. The most hackneyed of, and provincial in my sort of eyes, a conception of a hierarchical world, which just basically doesn't match up to

the fact that basically people are all pretty relatively equal and have equal capacity to govern themselves. And so the spectacle is just a race, latest iteration of that. So in a way, it's like nothing new, same old story sort of thing. what is new in 24 is this new technology which embeds itself within our everyday life and halfway through 24 it says if the spectacle taken in the limited sense of mass media which are the most glaring superficial manifestations it invades society as mere equipment the equipment is in no way neutral but it's the very means suited to the total self movement of the spectacle and so it's just and you know so it's that is that idea that like it's not just a mass media. That's just the most superficial way of understanding the spectacle. But like it's a pretty good one because all of a sudden we've got these TV boxes

in the corner of our rooms basically. And they're on broadcast and not on receive. Yeah, I've got three ticks next to that one with meta Facebook, Instagram, written on the side of it. Yeah, you can see a progression in technology, can't you, basically. And that progression in technology, he would say, he would say, is dominated by the needs of the spectacle to extend the spectacle, etc. We might want to say, in fact, the direction of technology is also determined by class struggle.

It also contains our own desires, which is where I'd separate from the situationist's critique of culture myself. Next, where are we? Yeah, so in the middle of 25, my translation says, in contrast, the modern spectacle depicts what society could deliver, but in so doing it rigidly separates what is possible from what is permitted. The spectacle keeps people in a state of unconsciousness as they pass through practical changes in their conditions of existence.

And I highlighted that because he's talking about consciousness here and I think he brings that up. Maybe is this in the first page or maybe this is the first time, but I was interested in talking about states of consciousness there and then making a comparison. goes on like a factitious god, it engenders itself and makes its own rules. So yeah, so I was interested in that because of bringing up the conscious and the unconscious and obviously I and we are very interested in consciousness raising and kind of references to that in political texts.

So yeah, that was an interesting bit for me. It would be interesting to think through what situationist style consciousness raising would be. I'm not quite sure. Like I said, drinking on the left bag. Yeah, the construction of situations, I suppose, where you're trying to analyze and get out of the condition of your life. Yeah, I remember attending a workshop at the Anarchist Book Fair in the 90s, where I was assured that it would involve drinking absinth. Really? That sounds very extensive for the 90s anarchists. They made their own.

You're bringing up Absinthe. I mean, I wonder whether that was my subconscious link to the situation. I used to be big on Absinth and used to bring bottles and bottles back. from the Czech Republic where my father used to live and have absent parties. So, you know. Yeah. I think they were mixing up their moments of French bohemianism, to be honest. Absinth is like an 1890s thing.

Exactly. Exactly. That's what I was thinking about. In the 90s, we had to make do with special brew. It was a very similar drunk. White lightning. The brew crew as the ultimate dialectical manifestation of situation. What would the situationist say about that?

Well, there was a strand. There definitely was a strand. strand of thinking in post-bunk situationism that effectively would have just advocated for the brew crew. But it is an interesting point. The guy who edited a situationist fanzine in Liverpool in the late

80s was a casual, like a football casual, who wrote a book, this guy, Rick Turner, who wrote a book about how he liked being a football casual, meaning casual being football culture slang in Britain for like someone whose hobby

is violence, whose hobby is going around getting into organized gang fights with other groups of football supporters. And, you know, they were known as casuals because they dressed in casual clothes rather than wearing football rather than wearing team colors. And his thing seemed to be, yeah,

like somehow, like the immediacy, the immediacy of the experience of physical, deliberate physical violence, was like a way of transcending the alienated condition of life in spectacular society. Or you could just do yoga. Yeah, yeah.

of violence. They're both good in a way. But of course, that's also the premise of Fight Club. That's exactly the sort of the premise of that film, isn't it? Or the premise is somebody might construct a fantasy within which that would be a sort of solution. But actually, arguably Fight Club as a film is a critique of that idea that it was it. And quite gender. I'll stick to the yoga and not hitting people. One of the groups who were a fused entry into the situation this international, as a US group who were originally called Black Mask and then,

they renamed themselves up against the wall motherfuckers who described themselves as a street gang with an analysis basically. I think one of their slogans was, were everything that you called us, you call us as in like, you know, freaks and hippies and waste, and we're proud of it sort of thing. And then the British wing of that king mob, which we talked about last time, who were like in dialogue of them, they would all praise basically mods and rockers fighting, turn up kids, they used to call it as well, who basically were like people who, rode motorbikes and as fast as they could with like, you know, no fear of death, you know.

And it's that, there is that line of like, well, one way out of the same with drinking yourself to death, which is basically what DeBoer ends up doing, you know, that obliteration as like, that is the ultimate construction of situations as in, you know, that is a way out of, that's one way out of capital. Well, I mean, that is a very, very live example here, because we're just now, you know, on this month of recording, one of the top news stories is about, you know, boy racers taunting the police based on like TikTok trends.

Driving the roadway down the motorway is the actual thing and then filming yourself doing it and in fucking dying. Yeah, and variations of that. There's also the crashing your joy right, crashing your car into people's front drives and stuff. So we've had several of those incidents going on in the last few days. Well, one of the famous situationist slogans was nihilists, one more effort if you were to be situationists. And it was like, you know, that nihilism

is like a really good, you know, it's pure, it's great, you know, that all loads, that guy going fighting. But with just one more effort, you could get an analysis and he'd become a street gang with an analysis and we'd move beyond nihilism. But like, nihilism is there. It's one of the starting positions. Yeah, I mean, that's not the direction that I guess I'm interested in from, or I read the situationist texts with. I'm not saying that's, you know, what you're, you know, what you're saying is wrong or doesn't exist as a tendency. But, you know, I'm very pro-life. Don't use that term out of context, please. But I'm very, you know, like pro-joy, pro-life. And those are like where my politics come from. So like breaking things and hurting people is not, you know, a tendency that I'm,

I'm interested in. And I still take a lot of value from this text. So I don't think it's like a necessary, that's necessarily, a, kind of necessary outcome. But we can also flip this contextualization around and say, well, this text is just one of loads and loads and loads of cultural and conceptual responses from about the mid-50s to a widespread sense that indeed a culture of consumerism, a culture of affluence on a historically unprecedented scale that were still nonetheless organized along fundamentally capitalist lines, was producing a sense of frustration, a sense of in authenticity, a sense of passivity. And that got manifested in all kinds of weird ways. There are people in Japan for whom he got manifest in the idea that actually we should go back to an imagined version of samurai and basically be fascists.

And there were people in, you know, Jack Kerouac is saying, you know, what you should do is like right stream of consciousness poetry and, you know, bang loads of women and take speed. And kind of valorise your friend who you think is cool because he does that. And then, you know, then people like Ginsburg are saying, no, let's try yoga in Zen and Ascent. and maybe even hang on to a bit of communism as part of our package. And it is interesting considering the historical project of ACFM. Because part of our founding proposition is there's a set of sort of answers to that question or attempts to answer that question that come out of the late 60s and the 70s, which we're kind of interested in and we're interested in still drawing on and activating.

And DeBore is very close to them in some ways and very far from them in others. is very close to them. And this was true of loads of people. There's loads of people at art school in Britain in 1968. You know, they've basically, they've been exposed to lots of this stuff since the mid-50s. And they can see that, well, Kerouac gets you nowhere. Where does Kerouac's ended up as a reactionary? And the hippies aren't really going anywhere.

Like, they've all, you know, that's just degenerated into chaos in Hay, Asbury and the smart ones are all moving to Oregon already. And, you know, the mods and the rockers, like, obviously, like, the cultural studies analysts would say, thought they were trying to engage in kind of some sort of symbolic resistance, but they weren't getting anywhere either. And, you know, the Beatles had just become this kind of national treasure that sang songs complaining about their marginal tax rates. And so you can see that Dabor is sort of give, at least he's offering quite a serious analysis, which is showing how all of this stuff

is consistent with a certain logic of capitalism. There is, like, much more rigorous and it is much more kind of analytically serious. So it is really limited. And the limitations, are going to drive people in the 70s, I mean, basically like to invent cultural studies in Britain, to develop new kinds of complex like Marxists thought in Italy and in France. But to a large extent, they're all, that's all a bit later. And it's partly, as I said before, partly those people are all partly provoked by the fact

that a lot of them who were quite smart and quite engaged politically and not into all the miserableism can see, this isn't really going to go anywhere either, probably. this isn't really going anywhere apart from doing fanzines and pranks and feeling really superior to everyone and then getting arrested. But you can also see how it's a sort of necessary stage in a way

I think actually towards a lot of stuff that we're much more into still to this day, I think. Anyway, back to the text. Just on 27, the Afrizen 27 sort of ends discussing the increase in leisure time. So basically leisure time is expanded and you get things such as, you know, the invention of the teenager and youth because there's some sort of expansion of leisure time.

And he says, The increasing leisure is in no way a liberation within labour, nor a liberation from the world shaped by labour. None of the activity lost in labour can be regained in the submission to its result. And it's that way of like, you know, just basically embracing leisure is not, you know, opposing leisure to work. And like, you know, that is no way out of it, basically. There's some famous graffiti in Leeds on a railway bridge from the early 80s, no mid-80s,

which says neither work nor leisure by a post-situationalist group called the pleasure tendency. I think that's the point they're making. They may be referring exactly to this aphorism. What have you got on 28, Nadia? 28, really, what I want to point out is, again, it's just a choice phrase that I like, this reference to lonely crowds as I have it, which I just think as a concept is quite useful. I don't feel like we need to go through all of it, all of that whole aphorism,

but it's a nice phrase, lonely crowds. That sentence is good, though, I think. From the automobile to the television, all goods selected by the spectacular system are also weapons for the constant reinforcement of the condition of isolation of lonely crowds. So we're all watching the same TV show, but we can't communicate about it

until we get, you know, Reddit forums, in which case we have communism. Yeah, I agree. I agree. That's a great sentence. I mean, the only crowd is a phrase first calling by David Reisman, American sociologist in 1950. And they was already onto this idea.

Arguably, this idea never goes away from sociology, actually. I mean, Simul is talking about this in the 1890s, talking about the fact that in capitalist cities, people come together in these big crowds but don't know their neighbours. So, I should say, listeners, if you think the condition of living in a big city and not knowing your neighbours is new, it's not, it's something people were noticing about what it was like to be in a modern city like 130 years ago. But that doesn't make it any less worth noting. And I agree that aphorism is a really good one. And the point about cars, the point about automobiles are a way of isolating us from each other.

you know that would end up being an important point like the anti-roads movement in the 90s which involved quite a lot of people who'd read this book at art school and hadn't really had any other exposure to any sort of radical theory or philosophy and it was you know it was a pretty powerful analysis you know you could get quite a long way with this observation that you know the way carls just sort of separate off everybody from each other well that's like an analogy to and an example of the way in which we're all kind of separating from each other in spectacular capitalist society, like sat at home watching our TVs instead of enjoying the fresh air together or forming meaningful sort of collectivities. You know, you can get,

it's not actually in itself original, it's not distinctive, but it's a powerful little nugget. Yeah, it adds to that whole thing around the city planning as well, which comes later, this idea of like arranging the world according to the car, which is basically coming to a head at this point, you know, like maybe the decade after, you know, the 70s and even maybe the 80s actually, where cities are being redesigned for the cars and then a lot of European cities kind of reverse that, again, realize that people don't talk to each other and have nowhere to even come across each other if you're designing a city for the car. So, so yeah. Don't drive around in your own alienation anymore. I had a bumper sticker that was issued

with a situationist fanzine, I think from Leeds, that you were supposed to go. stick on the biggest car you could find locally that said don't drive around in your own alienation anymore i never did stick it on a car i think i think i gave it to nick open for his fanzine collection sorry go on no on after him 30 i've just there's a nice sort of end to it basically and so the the externality of the spectacle in relation to the active man appears in the fact that his own gestures are no longer his but those of another who represents them to him. That is why the spectator feels at home nowhere, because the spectacle is everywhere. At home he feels like a tourist, everybody. And then I would move to the

last aphorism of this chapter, aphrosom 34, which says, the spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image. I don't really know what it means, but it's nice and short, so that's always good. Yeah, that's nice. I've got slightly, different translation on that, which is the spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images. Yeah. The French phrase is actually becomes image technically. So you could do it either way. Yeah, I'll say one thing about that image point, though, this related stuff we said earlier. Another thing that's consistent in some of this radical thinking at this time that is going to be developed by other thinkers in the 70s is this critique of kind of visuality. And the

the idea of the visual as kind of the sense which is associated with authoritarianism, with the control of women, with objectification, etc. And it is interesting. You can partly trace it into that to Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and his kind of philosophy of the senses in the 30s and 40s, although I don't think he makes the same kind of political claims. But all these guys, they see themselves as making a break with this long, tradition which you can trace all the way back to Plato and Aristotle, which says, well, actually,

vision is the highest sense. It's obviously the purest sense and it's the one that's the most important. And yeah, there's this, and so it is interesting. I think, and I think that's partly, again, what ends up giving the idea of the spectacle some of its power is that it is, it's part, even if it's only at the level sort of vibes and terms rather than a worked out theory, like the, for example, the sense that there's some connection between, the subordination of women in society and a culture where it privileges the visual over other sort of percentages of media. That's an idea that's starting to circulate and sort of develop

in a way that gives it some sort of power for people, if only intuitively, I think. Okay, so we're now going to chapter two. The title in my translation is the commodity as a spectacle. Is that the same as yours, Nadia? I have it without the article. So the commodity as spectacle. And it opens with a big quote from the book I mentioned earlier, actually, Georgi Lukach, History and Class Consciousness, which is a book which is written by Hungarian,

Marxist thinker. I looked up actually when it would have been first translated into French, and so it would have become available just a few years before this. And it was heavily championed by Lucien Goldman, who's now largely sort of overlooked in the English-speaking world, French, sort of Marxist, social theorist, historian of ideas, who was friends with Lefevre, and Raymond Williams was a big fan of Goldman, actually. I could just do an hour and hour about history and class consciousness. All I'm going to say is you can read about it on Wikipedia.

It's a really interesting book. It's really the book in the history of Marxist's thought that properly introduces the concept of class consciousness, which is implied but very underdeveloped in Marx. Obviously it's important to people like Lenin. It's important as a political idea, but it's Lukach who really tries to develop it.

And so that book is often understood really as the sort of the beginning of the so-called Western Marxist project, even though Lukach isn't Western, is in Eastern Europe. And he's a communist official for much of his life. But because it's understood as part of the 20th century project to develop theories of, politics and ideology in the Marxist tradition. It's a book which focuses quite a lot on the fact

that capitalist culture generates experiences of alienation. It talks about things like the idea of reification, the way in which commodification, like reifies, in other words, it sort of freezes in time, it turns into things, experiences which should actually be understood as social processes and the outcome of social processes. It's a really interesting book. But I'm not going to dwell on it for ages now. I'm just going to say, I'm going to say also, my experience of all this actually was as an undergraduate. I had been really into situationism as an idea when I was like a teenager,

before I went to university. And then when I finally read a bit of Luchat, it was like, oh, this is where it all came from. And this is a more coherent theory. And then I just sort of lost interest, actually, in DeBourne. And this is really, I have gone back to it, for purposes of teaching and at times when DeBoer was really like trendy on like the anti-capitalist scene like decades ago. But I think it obviously is quite, it is drawing on LeuCats pretty heavily,

I think, especially this chapter. It's basically trying to adapt Leuchat to the circumstances of France in the 1960s. Should we go to Afrosam 35? It's got another nice detourment out of a bit of Marx, I think I'm going to sort of paraphrase this this um this aphorism it starts in the essential movement of the spectacle then it's some words it says we recognize our old enemy the commodity who knows so well how to seem at first glance something trivial and obvious while on the contrary is so complex and so full of the metaphysical subtleties and that's a reference to the the sentences on commodity defecism in capital volume one. And in particular this sentence, which is from volume one, Chapter 1, Section 4, a commodity appears at first glance to be something very trivial and

obvious. Analysis reveals that it is in reality a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological obstruities. I like the introduction of our old enemy, the commodity. And then it goes on in the next, you know, it explicitly references. the principle of commodity fetishism, the domination of society by intangible as well as tangible things, which reaches its ultimate, no, its absolute fulfillment in the spectacle, where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it,

and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible power excellence. Yes, that's a good point. And I think, again, you can understand this as one version of a kind of intellectual operation which a number of different people do around this time in history which is to notice that the processes of commodification

are more and more affecting areas of life that aren't even about buying material goods. So we're living in this world in which advertising is coming to dominate the kind of culture like more and more and the sense that commodification is actually a kind of abstract logic rather than just a process by which things

get made. It comes to be very important. It's important for De Bois. It becomes important for Boja. It's important to the value form theorists in Germany as well, which we're not going to have time to dwell on here. But I think, and it's, yeah, it's an important point. And it's, you know, and it's something that's really important to understanding the world we live in today. It's really important to understand that that logic of commodification of turning things into commodities that don't have to be commodities and that maybe shouldn't be commodities there should have some other kind of social status

is really fundamental to capitalism and it does have all kinds of effects I always think you can really sum up the whole history of the past 150 years in a way by noting that well the idea that education was a commodity isn't actually new I mean it's that's like education was a service

you had to pay for to be honest like formal education was a service you had to pay for in most societies, like up until the early 20th century. But one of the great achievements of liberal and social democratic and socialist society was to decommodify education to say no, education shouldn't be a commodity, and education should be understood as something else, as a kind of the product of a set of collaborative and cooperative relations, both in terms of the relationship between students and teachers,

but also in terms of the society which feeds and trains, the teachers and, you know, and feeds children to the point where they don't have to go down minds and go to school instead. And then neoliberalism represents this aggressive attack on that kind of idea, this attempt to actually re-commodify education and to do, and to bring education then into circuits of capital accumulation to an extent that it was never really within those circuits historically. So I think you can see this attention to the abstract nature of the commodity as being quite ahead of its time and quite important in DeBoer, I think. But then you can also say, well, it was always their remarks without which it was. I mean, education can be understood as a

service, but not necessarily as a commodity, right? So there's various understandings of how that can sit, depending on, you know, the political economy, but, but yeah, point to income. The next, the next aphorism I'd point to is Afrizzan 40, where they introduce this, in a way, it's just this capital having to invent sido needs or reinvent or re-impose lack. To some degree it's a product of its time, I'd say, as we said earlier, the 30 glorious years where capitalism seems to be producing abundant consumer goods, etc. It says the increasing, the incessant expansion of economic power in the form of the commodity which transformed human labour into commodity labour into wage labour,

cumulatively led to an abundance in which the primary question of survival is undoubtedly resolved, but in such a way that it is constantly rediscovered. And so he's sort of like, I think he then calls this sort of like expanded form of necessity, increased survival. So not just basic survival, but, you know, in order to survive in 21st century society, for instance, you need a whole set of stuff. You need like a phone and you need, you know, you need a credit card really to be honest in order to be a full member of society

etc just to continue to exist and be accepted as a full member of society etc there's an increase in what it means to to survive in contemporary in the contemporary world yeah it is it's the it's the production of false needs as i think marcusa caused them and again debor was not the first person to notice that marcus is already talking about that in the late 50s, I mean, it's quite widely observed even by non-Moxys sociologists and economists, like something quite mad has happened since about the 1920s, which is once we've reached the point where basically most people can afford to buy the basic stuff they need, like instead of shifting into some post-material or post-capitalist society, we've entered

into this society where capitalist institutions are frantically trying to create demand all the time. And even to the point of, for example, like, organizing the entire urban landscape in America in such a way that you have to have a car to go most places, like, which is just, if you think about it objectively, like, and retrospectively, it's just insane. It's an insane thing that happens, but it does happen. And, like, lots of people are noticing that that happens and that is happening. And lots of people think it's kind of crazy. I mean, there are even some conservatives who think this is just, this is a mad way to live. And that is, yeah, that is exactly what he's talking about.

And there is this sense in which, well, on one level, it looks like it's proved Marx wrong and the revolutionaries wrong because it seems like capitalist society has been able to deliver people a level of material comfort that it was assumed it never would. And then it turns out, oh, actually, a more kind of abstract level, but a really important level, like Marx is actually right, because capitalism just won't stand still. It won't let people just enjoy the historic and precedented level of material comfort. It will start trying to reorganising everything so that they don't feel happy with that and they don't actually feel like they can just live their lives and participate in society on the basis of that set of needs being met. Now they have to have a whole bunch of other needs that if they're not met, they'll feel like isolated from the whole society because of that.

So turns out actually Marx is basically right. And there's this progressive process of sort of immiseration of people. So that even once you've got a bunch of stuff that your parents thought would be all you would ever need to live, suddenly you need a bunch of new stuff. And like, you know, we've all lived through that now. We've all lived through the situation where, you know, a mobile phone has been something like you can't really be a functioning citizen without. I do think at some point we should have an episode on abundance.

Because this is definitely a from a piece. in which ecological issues were not apparent, basically. And so that whole thing of like, is lack just created by capital? Is it like, you know, is it a sort of a tragic condition of a tragic component of the human condition? You know, that sort of looks a little bit different now in the age of, in the age of climate change and resource constriction. But perhaps you shouldn't discuss that now, but abundance. I think it would be a good topic.

I say that in a totally uninterested way just because I have a book called Radical Abundance. Not at all related. So 42 is interesting to me because the first sentence is, the spectacle is the stage at which the commodity has succeeded in totally colonizing social life. Commodification is not only visible.

We no longer see anything else. The world we see is the world of the commodity. I mean, it's just like one of the central thesis, I think, of this chapter. There's interesting bits in this aphorism, though, because you'd say, it's a total occupation of social life. Hang on, like this is in 1968, what about all those areas of the world, which basically are not abundant, a long way from abundant, you know, colonial countries which are colonially dominated, etc.,

in which hunger and starvation is pretty prevalent, etc. And they say, you know, the spectacle dominates those sorts of countries because it occupies the, you know, it sets the goal, or it already sets the goal that the elites are following, etc, etc, etc. But then it's a question of like, well, you know, if it's totally occupies, well, how is control operated? It says, here there are specialised sciences of domination,

which fragments itself into sociology, the great evil, of course, psychotechnics, cybernetics and semiology, etc., watching over the self-regulation of every level of the process, which reminds me a little bit of like, you know, there's very little class analysis in this is there, basically. The working class is some sort of pure outside in the board's, the board's sort of conception. But, you know, this is the sort of, just after this is when people are trying to really grapple

actually with like, what is the contradictory class location of like the professional middle class, etc., which Barbara Iron Reich sort of talks about a little bit later on. Do you know what I mean? not people such as us, the sociologists in the room, etc. Yeah, but I do think it's, what's valuable about this text is it's, you know, it's, it's, it's a different frame. Like coming at capitalism and the commodity from a position of the spectacle, it's just a different kind of work than one that centers class politics. Like it doesn't mean that it sits outside class politics, you know, or that it's, it's completely,

I think, sidelined in the thinking, I just think it's not the framework in which we're being offered to think about something that's kind of central to capitalism, which is why I think it's important, right? I think you're, you can have very strong class politics and a class analysis and still, you know, find a lot of this work very useful and not necessarily in its, you know, not necessarily in its totality or its essence contradictory in a sense. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And it's also probably why this book can. has been so appealing to people who were a bit outside, kind of ordinary class relations.

Like I keep saying, because I think it's true, it's not just anecdotal, that this book was really popular for decades with people who went to art school. Like during a period when going to art school was sort of the ultimate manifestation of a certain kind of social democratic privilege. Like you went, you know, it was still the case when I was a, you know,

a teenager in the late 80s, that going to art school was seen as a sort of cushy option if you weren't, if you weren't planning to work hard enough, like to get to do one in your A levels and go to university and didn't want to have to read too many books, but you were quite, you were intelligent, you were creative, you were sort of bohemian. And it meant that you could often go for like up to five years, like just sort of kicking around some institutions, sort of maybe actually honing some fine art skills, but, you know, a lot of the time just doing, you know, various kinds of experimental creative practice. And for somebody like that, somebody, the class location of somebody in that

position is very hard to read, actually, like, because you might have come from a council estate, but you're not living like people historically on council estates have ever lived. And you're, but also, you're not, I mean, you're not a worker, but also, you're not really, you're not really in the labour market at all. So I think that probably is, and this isn't criticising anyone for anything at all. I think it's a really interesting point as to, like, who this text, like, resonated with historically. I think it probably did resonate with people whose relationship to capitalist culture was that of someone who felt outside of it, alienated by it, but in terms which weren't primarily really thinkable in class terms. I liked 44. It says this spectacle, the, it says this spectacle, the

spectacle is a permanent opium war, whose aim is to make acceptable the identification of goods with commodities. And by goods there, it just really means anything that satisfies certain needs. And of satisfaction with survival, augmenting according to its own laws. But if consumable survival is something which must always increase, this is because it never ceases to contain privation. if there is nothing beyond augmented survival no point where it might stop its growth this is because it is not beyond privation but is privation become enriched

and I think that's just saying exactly what I said a minute ago basically it's just describing that process by which capitalism keeps creating needs rather than just enabling people to experience the satisfaction of needs but I think that's quite important I mean, it's like it's built into the whole idea of a commodity, isn't it? It cannot satisfy your need. If it did satisfy your need, then you wouldn't have to re-buy a commodity,

which would be great for use value, but fucking terrible for exchange value, which is... Yes, that's true. The problem. And then the next one is about automation. So that's very contemporary in the age of AI. With automation, which is both the most advanced sector and modern industry in the model where its practice is perfectly summed up, the world of the commodity must surmount the following contradiction. The technical instrumentation

which objectively eliminates labour must at the same time conserve labour as a commodity and as the only source of the commodity. In order for automation or any other less extreme form of increasing the product activity of labour not to diminish the actual social labour necessary for the entire society, new jobs must be created. The tertiary sector services represent an enormous extension of continuous rows of the army of distribution and a eulogy of present-day commodities. The tertiary sector is thus a mobilisation of supplementary forces which opportunity encounters the necessity for such an organisation of rear-guarded labour in the very artificiality of the need for such commodities.

To put it very simply, you've got to massively expand the service economy, otherwise everybody's going to not going to be able to be able to. to massively reduce their working hours and that's not what capitalists want. But therein lies the problem like AI, if it's got a political project, is to try and automate services basically. Yeah, but this is

why the basic expectation should be from a kind of Marxian perspective that rather than, you know, them just creating a massive army of the unemployed like demanding, you know, basic income and benefits, they are going to try to figure out some new kind of bullshit jobs

for us all to do to keep us busy. And I feel like even most of the left discourse on AI, it's really focused on this idea that there's just going to be massive unemployment. And that might be what happened. I'm not saying a kind of classic Lee Malmanteen prediction is always right, but all the history of capitalism should teach us. That's not what we should expect. We should expect to relatively short periods of massive unemployment or be used to undermine organized labor across all sectors. But then they will invent a load of bullshit that they want us to do, you know, that we haven't even thought of yet, that from the vantage point of 2026 just sounds like really stupid stuff like you would have to

pay people to do. But all the historic experiences, rather than to let us all have less work, they'd not, they're going to figure out something they want to make us do, probably something servicing the AI or something, you know. Well, make tax digital is the first thing. for those of us who are self-employed, because we now have to go through our accounts four times a year. It might be stuff like that. Yeah, it very likely will be. I mean, 47, I just like the penultimate sentence,

which is the real consumer has become a consumer of illusions, which, you know, speaks a lot to 2026. It's not the only kind of consumer, I would say, you know, but it's an important facet of consumerism. Yes, yes. and then in the in the next few in sort of 48 to 49 you get this think he's trying to think about that marksian distinction between exchange value and use value so hated by classical economists

makes classical economists apoplectic with rage which is because they cannot understand the difference between the concepts of value and price which you might not think is that complicated a distinction but it is one which is entirely lost on the entire field of classical economics, and they're pathetic, they're pathetically misinformed critiques of both Marxism and Keynesianism. I don't really want to read it out because actually, because it's just quite confusing, and I'm not sure how to parse out what it's actually saying.

It's basically talking about the fact that the question of, well, what even is use value in a society are very highly developed, like consumer capitalism, becomes very complicated and things like the advertising industry have to sort of convince you and changes to social arrangements have to convince you that the commodities have use values, they have actual uses even if they don't seem like they do really. So, I mean, you could connect this to the ideas of someone like Pierre Bordeaux, who's like talking about the way in which increasingly like consumer society is a society in which people use commodities like clothes or food or music

to signal something about their social position to themselves in the world rather than actually just because of the use you can make of those things materially. And you can sort of connect that here. You can say something's going on with the development of spectacular society according to the bore whereby use values, uses have to be given to use values, uses have to be given to things like. an example would be to something like, you know, teenage girls feeling like they must have a certain kind of clothing or they'll be socially ostracized. Like, therefore, at that point, the item,

this particular item in clothing, you might think only has exchange value. In other words, its value is entirely dependent on its price in the shops because people are willing to pay for it. But the way in which spectacular capitalism is organized is making the young woman feel like she actually has a definite use for that thing. She can't really participate in society without it. And I think that is kind of what he's getting at, although the language, especially in translation, is quite difficult. So I don't really want to read that one out.

Yeah, one of the limitations I find with a situation is theorising is, you know, there have been moments when young girls take control of the direction of fashion and, like, you know, use consumption in a way in which they gain more control of their lives, basically, do you know what I mean? And that's, you know, one of the punk being one of those things, etc., etc., etc. And those moments have led to, like, anti-capitalist critique at certain points, do you know what I mean? That would all be, or seem impossible, I think, from the Boers type of point of view,

because it's like a totalising critique. Everything's already recuperated, basically. And so you could compare that to something like Frederick Jameson, who sort of like, you know, he analyzes films and he says, look, there's always a utomboe moment in those. They didn't have any sort of like connection with like what with our own desires and that desires which could break with capital. Then we wouldn't be fucking interested in them, basically. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I agree. I think there's something, that's a really good point here, that the way everything's presented in the text is that there are kind of no cracks in the system.

Yeah, that totality. whereas of course we know that's not the case because history proves otherwise. Yeah, well, I think you really summed it up, Nadia. Like we should really make, we could almost call the episode like no cracks in the system. Because that is sort of, that is basically the DeBoer proposition or it seems to be rhetorically that is the proposition.

There are no cracks in the system, which is contemporary consumer capitalism and its control of media apparatuses and its control of culture. And this is a theory, of culture, like in a way it's a foundational text of cultural theory, but it's a completely pessimistic theory of culture from the point of view of somebody whose own class position is that of an avant-garde artist, basically, who has a very deep material investment in being

completely dismissive about the idea there's any progressive potential within any part of contemporary culture, because really the implication is, if there was going to be any progressive potential in culture, it would only be from specialist to avant-garde artists. of some kind. So it is really problematic and it's totally the case that it's a really important it's been a really important strand of feminist sociology, media studies and cultural

studies since the 70s to point out like Keir says that if you're going to say the whole world of popular culture and shopping is like it is just a kind of edifice of oppression and everyone involved in it is a moron then above all you're completely

dismissing the cultural lives of like whole generations of young women because that's something then you've got to be really careful with because you've got to be really careful because then you end up with a situation where it becomes there's a bunch of people in like Anglo-American cultural studies in the early 90s wanting to say well basically anything that young women do is cool

so young women like being just obsessed with boy bands and pop stars is actually cool because that's how they express their agency and then you lose any possibility of saying actually those young women are sort of oppressed like they need they might want a better culture for them than like boy buns and stuff. So it is really, so it's another example of the way in which this text is, it's doing it in this really rhetorical, polemical way,

but it's posing a set of questions. And it's not the only text to pose those questions. It's not the first text really to pose any of them. I mean, arguably they've all been posed already in Herbert Marcus's book, One Demental Man and things like this, but it's posing them in a way that lots of people, that is going to provoke loads of people to think about them, in ways, which aren't going to be really productive.

And I think in that sort of art school derived sort of post-punt, sort of counterculture, that Keir and I were both affected by and part of, like, when we were much younger, I would say there's a sort of weak situationism, which draws on a bit of DeBer's analysis and rhetoric and general situation is vibes to produce the idea, well, actually, maybe it's cool if, like, you know, girls are like making their own clothes, making their own fashion, and reimagining what the things they're buying and wearing mean and doing that with some deliberate intent. And then there's what you might call a strong pessimism,

which is just these really miserable, like seemingly clinical depressed guys who like just want to tell you that absolutely everything you ever thought was cool is in fact part of the spectacle. And that sort of strong situationism is like it was very problematic and it didn't, well, it would have been if anyone had been interested in it or taking it seriously, but they didn't really.

But that weak situationism was really inspiring to loads of people in quite a productive way, I think. One of the things that goes along with like really totalising critiques, everything is fucked to critiques. Everything now is already recuperated. What goes along with that, what tends to go along with that is like a seemingly naive, fafing spontaneism that like there will just be a spontaneous uprising and everything will be fine.

Do you know what I mean? I want one of the things that gets removed from that is strategy. Yeah. Basically, everything's already corrupt or recuperated. So basically I have a faith in spontaneousism, but not particular interest in it as far as the situationist go, which I think, I've said it on the situationist, the main episode we did, which I think it just like, from the point of view of the boy just sits there as like, this provides me an outside upon which I can do a total critique, you know what I mean? But you're right. The other danger of this is just like late 90s, early 2000s sort of cultural studies, which just, which Frederick Jameson once said like that.

Cultural studies at the moment is a bit like the FBI in the 1950s. It sees resistance everywhere, which is a fucking great grip. Resistance in like, I like Beyonce. Resistance. Anyway. Well, I mean, Jameson was entirely sort of copying, you know, critics like Jim McGuigan, the British cultural studies scholar, Jim McGuigan. had made that argument 10 years earlier.

And McGregan is someone who really deserves to be remembered. He was an advocate for a certain kind of left cultural studies coming out of people like Raymond Williams at a time when that stuff, that was quite unfashionable. I want the last aphorism of Chapter 2. 53. It's self-explanatory. The consciousness of desire and the desire for consciousness are identically the project, which in its negative form seeks the abolition of classes.

that is the direct possession by the workers over all the moments of their activity. Its opposite is the society of the spectacle, where the commodity contemplates itself in a world which it has created. So we want class struggle. Class struggle would be the solution to the spectacle. Class struggle had the abolition of classes, therefore the control over our own activity. Chapter 3, in my version is called Unity and Division within appearance.

Any alterations? Appearances. Right. Let's spend the next 25 minutes debating what that difference means. It also has a little quotation to start with. I think this one is ironic because it's from the red flag of Peking, which I think was the official communist party of China's publication with sort of like Maoist discussions of one devise into two

or the two fuse into one. We could probably skip that. But it gives us an indication of where we're going. in this. And I was struggling with the first couple of aphras. I didn't quite understand what was going on until a bit later on, where he's making this argument that the world is split into two different forms of the spectacle, the concentrated spectacle and a diffuse spectacle.

And we can think of the concentrated spectacle as perhaps something like Stalinism, Stalin's Russia, something like that, and a diffuse spectacle as American capitalism. And like, so we, you know, it takes a little while for me to remember, oh, yeah, he's talking about a world which is divided into two. And that division is between, you know, actually existing socialism or the communist bloc, etc. And then the free world, of course, the capitalist bloc or DeBoer would say that, like, actually, this is not a split between capitalism and non-capitalism. In fact, the east is dominated by, he'd call it bureaucratic capitalism, perhaps state capitalism as well as other people. have put it. And at the same time, the sort of capitalism in the, in the West is increasingly bureaucratized, we put it that way, basically, dominated by big bureaucracies, both state bureaucracies,

and like big edifices of managerialism. So yeah, this is the thing, right, is that he's starting to use unity in this chapter in a different way that he's using unity at the beginning. Because as we previously discussed in the beginning, the unity was in reference to, to the world kind of before the spectacle or the non-spectical world in a sense. And that's how he's using it. And then now in this chapter, unity comes back as kind of a central concept,

but as you just explained, Keir, he's using it slightly differently. It's almost like he does this kind of poetic setup, and it's only like a few aphorisms down the line, that in some of the chapters, you start to realize what he's talking about. Well, in 59, he starts talking about purely spectacular rebellions, etc.,

pseudo-enjoyments, etc., these sorts of things, which is going to dismiss most forms of, like, rebellion or resistance that takes place. But then on aphrosm 60, he introduces the celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living human body embodies the banality by embodying the image of a possible role. The star is the object of identification with the shallow seeming life that has compensated for the fragmented productive specialisations which are actually lived. When I started reading this, I started to remember the discussion that we had about Walter Benjamin, where we also sort of came across the celebrity.

I'm thinking, oh yeah, there's a definite line here, isn't there, people trying to come to terms with new forms of technology. In Walter Benjamin's case, it was like trying to come to terms with radio in lots of ways in cinema, I suppose. And in DeBoer's case, you know, it is things such as, consumerism and television, etc. These sorts of these sorts of things. Yes, I thought in this section, actually,

my only two double-highlighted aphorisms were this one and the one after, where he kind of elaborates on this idea about the star, the celebrity, and the place they play in the culture. But he then has this bit about Khrushchev and Kennedy, sort of drawing a kind of equivalence between them. Yeah, political celebrities, basically. And when he talks about celebrity in the aphorism before, he's talking about, he talks about state celebrities. He's talking about Stalin and it's talking about how the concentrated spectacle, which is like bureaucratized, sort of as Stalinist, actually existing socialism, as it was called at the time.

You know, the way that the state becomes figured in a particular individual and that representation of that individual in particular. And compares it with the celebrity, the Dolly Partons of this world. Dealey departed, much missed. Before we get on to the, yeah, the Christchief and Kennedy bit, let's read, well, with my translation, the second half of, I think, of that number 60, so listeners can kind of get a flavor of what we're talking about, the one, the aphorism on stars.

So I think from the middle, from where you left off here, they embody the inaccessible results of the social labour by dramatizing the byproducts of that labour, which are magically projected above it as its ultimate goals. Power and vacations. The decision-making and consumption that are the beginning and the end of a process that is never questioned. On one hand, a governmental power may personalize itself as a pseudo-star.

On the other, a star of consumption may campaign for recognition as a pseudo-power over life. But the activities of these stars are not really free, and they offer no real choices. So this is an example of the kind of totality that we were talking about. Like it's a kind of closed system in a way, like you cannot escape from this kind of picture

that he's painting. And I think this aphorism on the specifics of celebrity is a good example of that. Agree, agree. There's a sentence here, says a star is the opposite of an individual. Passing into the spectacle as a model for identification,

the agent renounces all autonomous qualities in order to identify himself with the general law of obedience, the course of things. I mean, it's just like people who become like pop stars and stuff. They always say like who the fuck was my image. It's not me. I didn't create it. It's not me. It's like, you know, I don't recognize myself when I see myself on stage, etc. And then it ends by say, individuals become great men by stooping below the reality of the smallest individual life and everybody knows it, which I think is. I think this is like a Hagell reference, basically. But I think this is also a good example of a theme, which runs through back to people like Adorno, writing in the 40s,

and it's still a theme in a lot of cultural critique as late as the 80s, the point that although the capitalism seems to promote kind of individualization and individuality, but actually it tends to promote quite high levels of conformity, like as any kind of mass culture probably does. Obviously, the individual is kind of a valorized term here, like it's a positive term. There's an idea that individuality is a good thing in itself,

and the problem with capitalism is it promises it, but doesn't deliver it. I'm never that fond of that language, because I think it already makes too many concessions to liberalism. I agree. I did pick that up. I'm happy that you made that point actually because I did think about the use of the word individual there. Yeah, I think it's good to have pointed that out and made that critique, Jeremy. Very useful. Well, I would say, I mean, it's a language which you get. It's also a language you get, for example, in Oscar Wilde's essay, The Soul of Man Under Socialism. He goes on and on about how actually capitalism is bad for, he actually uses the phrase, indeed. individualism. But I would say in most of these cases, and it's the same when, you know, it's the same when Marx is talking about how great it would be free to, like, do different jobs at different times of day. The language is used quite loosely. And what they're talking about

is what properly, philosophically, I would call singularity or uniqueness, like the recognition that every person is a kind of singular being who is unique. But, you know, my philosophical argument has always been that you're unique only because of the specificity of your social relationships. There is no individual in the sense of the thing which can be divided, like the core, the essence, the thing which is outside any social relationships. Yeah, I think that is a really important philosophical point, but it's also important to acknowledge that lots of people use the term individual much more casually. I mean, almost anyone uses it more casually than I do. And from that point of year, you can say, well, actually, they're making the point, which is it is always a

valid point there. It's a valid point in later critiques of neoliberalism, that neoliberalism claims to be all about freeing the individuals to compete with other individuals, but it doesn't. Like actually, neoliberalism in the education system is about creating all the standardized testing and lead tables and rules, which says to both teachers and students, there's only one kind of thing you should be doing. There's only one kind of way you should be learning. There's only one set of outcomes which matter, and it's all about ultimately generating profits for capital in the labour market. So it is an important critique, but I think also we want to be careful with terms like individual. But that's the point he's making.

And again, as a kid, you know, it was a really powerful point. It was a really powerful observation to me that it seemed like, you know, it felt like commercial popular culture in the 80s and like commercial music culture was really conformist. It was about promoting the idea at any one moment that everybody should get their haircut, like Simon LeBond or Princess Diana or whatever. and it was kind of important to recognize that that was coming from capitalism. It's also true, as Keir keeps pointing out,

a lot of this is still in the context of the Cold War, and it's really important that the idea that socialism produces conformity, like it enforces it and it produces it, was absolutely central to the Cold War, kind of ideological propaganda on behalf of liberal capitalism, on behalf of consumer capitalism, and against socialism. So it becomes really, really important for Marxists and socialist to say,

well, no, consumer capitalism does not do the thing it claims it's doing, which is promoting some real freedom of expression. Yeah, I was just going to say, and the relationship between consumption and freedom especially. Yeah, exactly, yeah, exactly. I mean, the next few aphorisms, there's some good bits actually about, you know, the archaic oppositions, regionalism, racism, racism. etc, et cetera, et cetera.

This is where he introduces this idea that there's two types of spectacle, the concentrated spectacle and the diffuse spectacle, et cetera, and it starts to critique bureaucratic capitalism, i.e., you know, we're talking about Stalin and Mao, etc., these sorts of things at a time when Maoism is very big, and so is Trotskyism in France. I sort of moved to AfriZem 67, though, if anyone's got anything in between.

That's fine, yeah. Because then I quite like these bits about the satisfaction which no longer comes from the use of abundant co-commodities now sort of the recognition of their values as commodities. The use of commodities becomes sufficient unto themselves. The consumer is filled with religious fervors for the sovereign liberty of the commodities. Waves of enthusiasms of a given product supported

and spread by all the media of communication and thus propagated with lightning speed, a style of dress emerges from a film, a magazine promotes nightspot, which launched various clothing fads, etc, etc. And it ends with that. The fetishism of commodities reaches moments of fervent exultation similar to the ecstasies of the convulsions and miracles of the old religious fetishisms. The only use which remains here is the fundamental use of submission, and he's just drawing out, once again, that link between, well, the meanings of fetishism, basically. you know, it's originally a term to talk about like magical objects and then, you know, to understand religion, etc.

And he's saying, you know, that we, all of those ecstasies we now get in a secular form, pseudo-secular form in terms of our attachment to commodities. Once again, though, I would say, you know, I think that's a bit too totalizing. Yes, I think that's probably true. Although in the next aphorism, he does try to sort of problematize it, doesn't he? 68. It says, without doubt, the pseudo-need imposed by modern consumption cannot be opposed by any genuine need or desire, which is not itself shaped by society and its history. But the abundant commodity is an absolute rupture of an organic development of social needs. So he's acknowledging that needs

are always socially constituted to an extent, but he's saying nonetheless, we have definitely lived through some significant break in the past few decades. And I think, yeah, he's right, actually. on both points. And he says it's mechanical accumulation. The mechanical accumulation of the abundant commodity liberates unlimited artificiality in the face of which living desire is disarmed. The cumulative power of independent artificiality is followed everywhere by the falsification of social life. So he's trying to sort of get at some sense of like desire as being like something which can be authentic. It can be not just a production of the capitalist need machine, but it usually isn't under capitalist circumstances. And again, I think there's no question,

this is going to influence Deleuze and Guittari. Like, it's going to influence Deleuze and Guittari when they're writing anti-edipus, well, they're writing it kind of, they'll start writing it the following year, I think. And they're very preoccupied. We're trying to figure out, like, what does it mean for desire to be like a good, to be true, to be authentic, to be productive, to be revolutionary? So that's interesting. Then in the aphorism after that, he makes this strong critique of consumer society, which again, it's not very original, but it's a great aphorism. And he talks about how basically every commodities or promises to solve all your problems, like promises to be the thing, which is a sort of powerful critique, although

it's not new by the time he's making it. In the aphorism afterwards, he links at this idea that every commodity, because the last commodity didn't satisfy your needs, this one, it moves by a series of denunciations, which he links to Krushchev's denunciation of Stalin, basically. And he says,

each commodity has to denounce the one that came before. I know, I know that iPhone was a bit shit. It didn't really satisfy you. But like this one's really good, honestly. This one solves the problem of the last one. Yeah, he does. It's a great line. Stalin, as well as the outmoded commodity, are denounced precisely by those who imposed them.

Every new lie of advertising is also an avowal of the previous lie. Every fall of a figure of totalitarian power reveals the illusory community which approved him unanimously and which was nothing more than an agglomeration of solitudes without illusions. So it's all shit and neither Washington nor Moscow but international situation isn't I think that's so we can

take that one home to the bank yes and so we just finish it off with like aphorism 72 the unreal unity proclaimed by the spectacle master class divisions upon which real unity of capitalist

mode of production rests and so he's basically right at the end of this chapter, he sort of brings back in class struggle as the real unity of society and the thing that will undermine the false unity or totality of the spectacle, basically. Yeah, well, the last line I think is very strong of aphorism 72 here, which is what produces society's abstract power also produces its concrete lack of freedom. It's very good, yeah. Aphorism 72 is very good,

though it is basically just a summary of Marx and Engels, the German ideology. But that's a good summary of it. It's a very good summary of it in like a couple of sentences. And I think that's, yeah, that's a useful thing that lots of people have obviously found quite compelling.

So we've only read like the first three chapters. I don't know what do you reckon, a third of the book or something, perhaps something like that. they go on there are bits here which goes on and discuss this stuff

which you might not expect to find in a Marxist diatribe they discuss sort of like Dada and surrealism etc also they go on and like that

they start discussing workers councils but there's a lot to be said for this form right I think like this is not the first time we read a text

that is written in this kind of aphorism and I think there's a lot to be said for like the white space on the page and when you are discussing quite intense ideology or in historical context

especially like I think for any reader it's a nice way to introduce oneself to ideas and then you can go away and read around it but I'm a big fan of these smaller texts with a lot of the way it's spit up in aphorisms I think it's good

yeah when I go back and read it now because I first read this or last read this a long time ago. The bits which seem more of its time and basic are more obvious to me in some sorts of ways. And like, you know, there's lots of different ways which you could sort of see that. One of them is like a sort of relatively naive faith in the productive forces produce an abundance. That doesn't seem to be what's happening anymore. Like, sido needs are being mirrored by more basic needs, basically. I mean, and, you know, provision is being withdrawn from, like, wider and wider sections of society rather

than, or particularly provision of, like, more essential things, basically, seems to be being withdrawn. The essentials of life become more expensive and being withdrawn much more, you know, and this was a time in which inequality was diminishing, material inequality was diminishing, and, you know, since, like, the late 1970s, it's massively expanded again, and we look a little bit more. more like we're in the period of like which preceded the sort of first world war you know the period of incredible inequality

and oligarchs etc but at the same time with this incredible pressure of ecological crises basically so like some of this seems out of time basically but like there are still lots of bits where you really think oh this is quite a nice critique of consumerism

basically uh yeah and a critique of which doesn't go easy on contemporary life. Oh, contemporary life, yeah, which doesn't go easy in any element of contemporary life. For me, I'm sort of more interested in thinking. I like I like the way that it would make you think about how your everyday life is implicated in all of these dynamics and like you can help you understand them, etc.

The whole idea of like just denouncing everything is probably less interested to me. So I think there are cracks, there are opportunities to do things, basically. There are ways in which you can like even turn consumerism back on itself to some degree, do you know what I mean? Capitalism will sell you the rope to hang the capitalist, basically. Those sorts of thinking. And I think that hidden away in even the most sort of obscene sort of commodities and films and cultural productions, you know, there are like glimpses of utopian desires,

basically, which I'm sort of much more interested in. And I think the board would denounce me as a running laugh dog of the spectac. for saying so. Which we know you are not. Don't know, all that time on letterboxed. Let me, allow me to introduce you to the critique of a free and immaterial labour in the social factory. For me, the Society of Speckle is a really useful analysis, and it continues useful to the last chapter on ideology.

It's analysis of a certain set of social and cultural logics and patterns. I think you can definitely see spectacular logic, I would put it at work in our culture, in our society, in the world of social media. I think the idea of the spectacle is kind of rhetorical and polemical, and it doesn't help that much, basically, because there's no cracks in it, like Nadia says. But I think the idea, I think there is spectacular logic at work in our culture in the way he describes. And I think it's really helpful for understanding that.