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is the title of a book i'm reading by Guy (his name but also what he is) DeBord (NOT how the book leaves me feeling). I'll admit the language is difficult, but from what i understand it's a story about an entire society where everyone, at all times of the day, is watching a small monkey in a clown costume riding an old timey bicycle (with the big front wheel). Can u imagine? i can't tell if the monkey is riding in circles or figure eights but i have a while to go. how does this mak eu feel? do u sometimes feel like the society? maybe the monkey (you shouldn't, guy debord specifically has a thesis that says u can't feel like the monkey)? |
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Jul 13, 2021 22:06
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| # ? May 4, 2024 11:39 |
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monkeys are a mixed bag, sometimes I like them and sometimes I find them a bit creepy but I will gladly read along https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm
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Jul 13, 2021 22:14
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i feel like the bicycle op
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Jul 13, 2021 22:15
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they live in a society monkey text
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Jul 13, 2021 22:18
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monkeys love to make spectacles of themselves. its because they love the attention
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Jul 13, 2021 22:19
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I'm just wondering where is the monkey going with this, where can it lead us |
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Jul 13, 2021 22:20
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yeah i can climb a tree too. you don’t see me showing off
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Jul 13, 2021 22:20
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ya ill bet its the society of the spectacle... because all the millennials sat too close to the tv when they were kids
https://i.imgur.com/xQxnooW.png |
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Jul 13, 2021 22:21
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i have the new edition and in the preface, the author clarifies that the Avengers are still the bicycle monkey
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Jul 13, 2021 22:23
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oo monkey eat banana with foot? oo oo like little baby? like a stupid little baby person who doesnt know about how to behave in polite society? you think thats cute? its juvenile. grow up
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Jul 13, 2021 22:24
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nut posted:i have the new edition and in the preface, the author clarifies that the Avengers are still the bicycle monkey I would watch the poo poo out of that movie |
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Jul 13, 2021 22:29
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"The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion. Spectacular technology has not dispelled the religious clouds where men had placed their own powers detached from themselves; it has only tied them to an earthly base." while interesting this suggests that we have less lost our collective and individual connections to reality than substituted one illusion for another? I'll have to keep reading
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Jul 13, 2021 22:29
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hmm well it is tough going that's for sure. I do find something true and creepy in this observation: "Whereas in the primitive phase of capitalist accumulation, “political economy sees in the proletarian only the worker” who must receive the minimum indispensable for the conservation of his labor power, without ever seeing him “in his leisure and humanity,” these ideas of the ruling class are reversed as soon as the production of commodities reaches a level of abundance which requires a surplus of collaboration from the worker. This worker, suddenly redeemed from the total contempt which is clearly shown him by all the varieties of organization and supervision of production, finds himself every day, outside of production and in the guise of a consumer, seemingly treated as an adult, with zealous politeness. At this point the humanism of the commodity takes charge of the worker’s “leisure and humanity,” simply because now political economy can and must dominate these spheres as political economy. Thus the “perfected denial of man” has taken charge of the totality of human existence." literally when your boss starts to treat you like a person, it's because your entire existence, not just your time on the job, is required by capital
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Jul 13, 2021 22:52
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Jul 14, 2021 00:01
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lol
https://i.imgur.com/xQxnooW.png |
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Jul 14, 2021 00:06
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lol
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Jul 14, 2021 00:06
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it is a religious allegory op. the monkey represents Jesus and the bicycle represents former tv star Joey Lawrence. |
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Jul 14, 2021 00:40
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Jul 14, 2021 00:55
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i think I have told this story here before. in the 1940s my grandfathers brother's family would take in all kinds of animals and one of them was a monkey. when guests would come over the monkey would climb on top of the highest furniture and then masturbate while staring at the guests.
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Jul 14, 2021 00:59
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Luvcow posted:i think I have told this story here before. in the 1940s my grandfathers brother's family would take in all kinds of animals and one of them was a monkey. when guests would come over the monkey would climb on top of the highest furniture and then masturbate while staring at the guests. now THAT’S a biblical allegory |
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Jul 14, 2021 01:00
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Luvcow posted:i think I have told this story here before. in the 1940s my grandfathers brother's family would take in all kinds of animals and one of them was a monkey. when guests would come over the monkey would climb on top of the highest furniture and then masturbate while staring at the guests. can't tell if i'm supposed to give this monkey money when he comes around
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Jul 14, 2021 01:07
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Luvcow posted:i think I have told this story here before. in the 1940s my grandfathers brother's family would take in all kinds of animals and one of them was a monkey. when guests would come over the monkey would climb on top of the highest furniture and then masturbate while staring at the guests. do you think he should have not stared? that could have been v rude by monkey standards.
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Jul 14, 2021 01:35
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Luvcow posted:i think I have told this story here before. in the 1940s my grandfathers brother's family would take in all kinds of animals and one of them was a monkey. when guests would come over the monkey would climb on top of the highest furniture and then masturbate while staring at the guests. in his defense, humans are hot |
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Jul 14, 2021 04:17
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Luvcow posted:i think I have told this story here before. in the 1940s my grandfathers brother's family would take in all kinds of animals and one of them was a monkey. when guests would come over the monkey would climb on top of the highest furniture and then masturbate while staring at the guests. tried to train it to stop doing this but it turns out that spanking the monkey didn't help |
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Jul 14, 2021 05:40
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I don't know if I'd really watch it. The monkeys weren't even able to play their own instruments when they were in that band. It was just about their looks. I bet someone else is actually controlling the bicycle. |
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Jul 14, 2021 06:16
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society of the spectacle is a very interesting read, here is a link to an on line version if anyone would like to learn about monkeys. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm the main thing i got from reading it is that people watch the monkey and go "ha ha, that monkey is over there and we are over here. that monkey is happening and we are a special kind of being called a 'spectator' who exists outside of this happening." they see themselves as separate from the society which produces the spectacle rather than as both a producer and production of the spectacle. an analogy would be to the idea of the "consumer." a consumer is a class of person theoretically separate from production, existing as a kind of judge of exchange value and as the endpoint of the productive cycle (production-->distribution-->exchange-->consumption) but marx argues there's no such thing as consumption, consumption is just production in a different phase, and for debord the same thing is true of spectation, spectation is production and the main thing it both produces and is produced by is alienation (both economic alienation from the means of production and psychological alienation from real society). Manifisto posted:"The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion. Spectacular technology has not dispelled the religious clouds where men had placed their own powers detached from themselves; it has only tied them to an earthly base." yeah exactly, although i wonder about "tied to an earthly base" because that suggests that debord thinks "religious clouds" weren't tied to an earthly base, but you could argue that there were/are all kinds of religious "technologies" -- churches, pulpits, whatever -- that were spectacular in their own way. sorry to be serious about the monkey. |
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Jul 14, 2021 13:54
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also |
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Jul 14, 2021 14:03
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"The satisfaction which no longer comes from the use of abundant commodities is now sought in the recognition of their value as commodities: the use of commodities becomes sufficient unto itself; the consumer is filled with religious fervor for the sovereign liberty of the commodities. Waves of enthusiasm for a given product, supported and spread by all the media of communication, are thus propagated with lightning speed. A style of dress emerges from a film; a magazine promotes night spots which launch various clothing fads. Just when the mass of commodities slides toward puerility, the puerile itself becomes a special commodity; this is epitomized by the gadget." I feel attacked
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Jul 14, 2021 14:06
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I'm pretty sure I'm the idiot watching the monkey in this scenario |
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Jul 14, 2021 14:10
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debord's shift from living to having to appearing is one of the easiest parts for me to grasp and i feel it like eating to eating the new bigger big mac to watching someone mukbang thirty new bigger big macs on youtube
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Jul 14, 2021 14:46
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the mental faltering you feel for just a microsecond before you refer to a youtuber as "a friend i know" when telling a story about something you saw them do
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Jul 14, 2021 14:47
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i'm also too stupid and unlearned to know what are probably very obvious limits to the comparison, but i like debord's concept of non-living as a side product of "free" time in an alienated life compared to freud's death instinct. I think both capture the absolute boredom and disenfranchisement of our lives, tho
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Jul 14, 2021 14:51
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Luvcow posted:i think I have told this story here before. in the 1940s my grandfathers brother's family would take in all kinds of animals and one of them was a monkey. when guests would come over the monkey would climb on top of the highest furniture and then masturbate while staring at the guests. A friend of mine knew a spider monkey who would masturbate,  ejaculate onto his own chest, and then eat the dried cum later
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Jul 14, 2021 15:05
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nut posted:i'm also too stupid and unlearned to know what are probably very obvious limits to the comparison, but i like debord's concept of non-living as a side product of "free" time in an alienated life compared to freud's death instinct. I think both capture the absolute boredom and disenfranchisement of our lives, tho while I find his points on this stuff pretty interesting, the problem I have is the utter lack of basis for comparison. he doesn't describe and presumably can't describe what an unalienated, uncommodified existence would be, nor could we really appreciate what he meant given the absolute ubiquity of the spectacle in global society. is he describing something that would always be there regardless?
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Jul 14, 2021 15:53
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Manifisto posted:while I find his points on this stuff pretty interesting, the problem I have is the utter lack of basis for comparison. he doesn't describe and presumably can't describe what an unalienated, uncommodified existence would be, nor could we really appreciate what he meant given the absolute ubiquity of the spectacle in global society. is he describing something that would always be there regardless? I get what you mean, but i think debord is trying to describe a historical process, underscoring that the spectacle feeds itself and grows after the initial separation/alienation, maybe in the form of labour as the manipulation of nature and our means for living. Where we insist we see social relations, we often fail to recognize they are actually commodity relations. One such alienation, i think, is in exchange, which appears social (two people are meeting and exchanging something) but it's actually a meeting dictated and centred around commodities, to which humans become producers and consumers and obey the laws of their commodities, not vice versa. i def don't know much, but the situationist international seems to talk a lot about opportunities and efforts to recapture life with social meaning independent of the alienated relationships that permeate much of what we do. 2 steal from lewontin, i try to read it as "things are the way they are because they got that way, have not always been that way, need not always be that way". What those alternatives are? Only one way to find out.
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Jul 14, 2021 16:10
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i mean
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Jul 14, 2021 16:13
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nut posted:i mean constantly lookin at this guy |
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Jul 14, 2021 16:26
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Manifisto posted:he doesn't describe and presumably can't describe what an unalienated, uncommodified existence would be, pretty sure it's communism |
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Jul 14, 2021 17:03
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bad guy posted:pretty sure it's communism 
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Jul 14, 2021 17:47
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| # ? May 4, 2024 11:39 |
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wish debord would put some jokes in this thing. deleuze & guattari are always good at that. still enjoying the read, i’ll post some thoughts when i have more ample time.
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Jul 16, 2021 21:18
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