Debord!

Guy Debord!

You out there?

They say you were bitter and sad and you drank yourself to death or was there a gunshot? Doesn't matter.

There were things you couldn't foresee. Things no one could foresee.

Guy Debord saw the stasis first. That's what I want to tell you.

The Situationists were intelligent this way: they saw the limits of protest culture and inevitable commoditization of everything under the spectacle, at this point a TV and Radio marvel but zummi traced the origins of the spectacle to the written word itself. I would in some sense go further: the spectacle is strongest in image.

The root of the spectacle is in the part of Sin that is shame. To live in the knowledge of your shame is to be human. To have others know your shame is a great fear. Thus the strength of the attention of others was bound very early. In some extreme interpretation it predates humanity. Cats have a sense of drama: QED.

Thus the spectacle at its height was a worldbuilding master class, God in full splendor, in a sense, a very very terrible sense, in that way that makes the divine somehow seem unholy.

Nevertheless, the spectacle of King Louis' Court was still a narrative of power. The spectacle in our ages is disempowering. If you have read this far I trust you are wise enough to understand this: if you wish to refer to the spectacle at the interval of its highest corrosion of our agency, which is to say from Debord's understanding of it (1967) through punk's death to grunge to dubstep to Now, you might refer to the Spectacle, capital S. Do not be confused by the implied reification (DO not _idly_ reify the spectacle or you reveal yourself as careless and promulgate an agency robbing mythos): the spectacle isn't real.

There isn't a building of the 'spectacle', unless it is all buildings of commerce. Is the mall the tool of the spectacle? Was the mall tour the disney princess audition chain Britney Spears passed through? Very well, the Spectacle is real, and its Temple is the mall.

The difficulty, of course, is that a mall is a fun community space. This is the problem of recognizing the totality of the spectacle: it explains why things are the way they are, without really giving you the cowtools you want to do something about the way things are.

(My point, with this question of the nature of the reality of 'the spectacle,' is to disambiguate the agency robbing mythos around an idea that the forces of media/narrative consumption in the nation state will always reinforce a heteronormative capitalist status quo. It's not easy but it is possible to direct change.)

For Debord, the spectacle was triumphant, forever and ever. All change, all potential for change, is recuperated by the very systems which must be changed.

But Debord could not have foreseen the Internet. Debord died in 1994. Apparently whether or not it was a suicide is up for some debate.

WE HAVE BEEN LIVING IN THE LONG LIMINAL

HAIL ITS PASSING

EVER CLOSER WE DRAW TO THE WRITING OF A LINE