So, yeah, we spend a lot of time on YouTube, watching DirecTV commercials or clips of Metropolis or Shirley Temple singing the Good Ship Lollypop, or any number of other cultural detritus…it might be fair to call Crazy Tom a detritivore.
But sometimes, we read books. Here’s a little Guy Debord:
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The spectacle is the other side of money: it is the general abstract equivalent of all commodities. Money dominated society as the representation of general equivalence, namely, of the exchangeability of different goods whose uses could not be compared. The spectacle is the developed modern complement of money where the totality of the commodity world appears as a whole, as a general equivalence for what the entire society can be and can do. The spectacle is the money which one only looks at, because in the spectacle the totality of use is already exchanged for the totality of asbstract representation. The spectacle is not only the servant of pseudo-use, it is already in itself the psuedo-use of life.
I don’t really get it, but I sort of do. The book is like a scent–I catch it sometimes but sometimes just feel like I’ve lost the trail. Spectacle as the general equivalence of what the entire society can be and can do. Money which one only looks at. Putting on a stage show means making a big thing to look at. How can we pull it out of only looking/listening/consuming? Or do we even want to do that?
I got nothin’, not right now.