Notes from 3-5-09, Thanks Layna.

Critical Theory Notes: 03/05/09

• The Family

  • Status symbol of success

    • Couple on couch, children in background

    • “warm inviting” smiles

  • France is becoming the same as Western Culture

    • Similar advertisements

    • Status symbols: car, clothes, income, home

    • Conformity is spreading across boundaries and cultures

  • The Family Unit

    • Square/ Grid geometry juxtaposed against leisure and happiness

    • Redundancy, boring = absurd

    • Victimization to commodity

• Commodity

  • Falsity

    • life is being falsified by commodity

    • A disconnection occurs through commodity

      • Connection through disconnection

    • Need

      • How do you define a need?

      • Society defines our needs, it shapes our desires and needs

        • Needs are advertised for our core being –our identity- and target other people’s desires to only sell

        • Mentality of wants controlled by media is passed on

        • People become consumed in the details and become overwhelmed. The spectacle grows.

        • Contradiction of the past and the present, from wanting to explore the seas, and extend our boundaries to being content with staying stagnate, and staying away from what is considered foreign

          • Foreignness creates division

      • Real needs/necessities

        • Food, shelter, community/social connection

• The Spectacle

  • Social needs create the spectacle

    • Debord’s thesis #4: The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.

  • Cognitive about the spectacle

    • It is up to the individual to be/become aware of the disconnection created through the spectacle

    • The spectacle has influenced our lives, whether we are aware of it –or not

• Examples

  • Facebook:

    • Representation of reality through images

    • Knowledge of the disconnect/ consciousness of a disconnection

      • Ritual

      • Contains disconnection, may be following former patterns of social networks, i.e. advertisement, cinema, art

  • Art/Cinema:

    • Reflexive: Debord’s films are about the destructive/ controlling nature about film in itself

    • Equally as fake as reality

    • It’s considered entertainment to watch fake reality

    • Cycle of redundancy

• Mimetic Behavior

  • Plato’s Theory:

    • Ideas

      • Knowledge

    • Perception

      • Imitations of ideas

    • Art

      • Imitations of imitations

      • draws upon emotions, which are not wholly rational

      • encourages mimus/ immitation

      • people learn through imitating behaviors and emotions (bases of knowledge)

      • people copy what is seen on stage/tv

      • copying has a rational and irrational side (intellectual and emotional)

  • Mimetic Cognition

    • None of us know why we are copying certain behaviors

      • Positive/Neutral/ Negative behavior

    • A form of enslavement

      • Debord is commenting that this is how we are being controlled

        • Whoever/Whatever shapes our lives, or conditions, controls us

    • Identification

      • We cannot stop identification, so we have to learn how to control the identification process

      • Avante-Guarde cinema breaks the audience from ‘straight cinema’ (Hollywood narrative film-making)

        • Debord’s films are an example of Avante-Guarde cinema.

          • Makes the audience uncomfortable because the audience has nothing to identify with, no hero to root for/want to resemble

            • When the audience is comfortable, the audience stops thinking. The audience begins to think when they are uncomfortable. The audience becomes aware/conscious

Guy Debord is trying to ask the audience to reflect on where his/her behavior is coming from. His films are a collage to show what we are being conditioned by. Art is just a representation of representations of ideas; cinema is also a form of art. Debord is being reflexive by saying through art that art is conditioning society and the individual. Mimetic behavior is how people learn. Negatively, perceptions are being altered and conditioning individuals, feeding into the cycle of the spectacle. Debord is consciousness of the good and bad of mimetic behavior; however, he is fed up of the representation of society. Through his reflexive films, he is questioning the audience. He poses no solution, but rather techniques and strategies in order to wake up from the illusion.
The next step to take in order to break the cycle is to be aware, cognition being the tactic. Society has become poisoned and the cure is more of the same poison. Plagiarism is a tactic/strategy. By changing the context, you are creating a new meaning. There is no copyright in critical theory. The notion of property is being destroyed. Marcuse says that the Bourgeois society was subject to property. Debord is saying that they (Bourgeois Society) are happy with their wealth, property and showing it off. This is not a moral happiness. The no copyright ideal is also a concept of no property rights and because of this critical theory can then form a new notion of art and idea. The internet is dismantling the previous concept of anything. The spectacle has potential, but this potential is also dissolving. Copyright has the essence of originality, and to property. Debord is staying away from originality.