The beginning

It's time to bring the old girl back. Here comes the truth:

Context: "Society of the Spectacle" and "Comments on Society of the Spectacle" by Guy DeBord.


I. The Spectacle is the thinking we would do, if we were able. The way we accept information is if we believe that, given the right starting point, we would have concluded the same information. In a way, this already speaks to the division of labor, as people simply forget about certain aspects of our society (like the garbage) even as they play their role in it. The Spectacle gives us information we are afraid of missing, because we are afraid of falling behind its ever advancing flow. In this way, the dialectic thinker is turned against himself: he is always searching for new antitheses to his perspective, so that he may continue to evolve as a thinker. However, due to the monopoly of information the Spectacle possesses, he is unable to compare his thoughts to any information that is not spread through commercialized media, necessarily limiting his perspective. The fact that it becomes an economic imperative to process and understand certain information speaks to modern societies total domination over dialectic thinkers in particular and thought in general.

II. Our perception of the world is the shadow of our ideology. When you look at the sun, its image is burned into your retina. Or something. Regardless, when you look away, you see the inverse of the sun's light: it is blue, and is laid over whatever else you are looking at. The Spectacle is the radiant sun of ideology, which we cannot behold in its entirety because it is so overwhelming, and that even in short exposures leads to similar imprinting of its visage in our modes of perception. In this way, the real world seems to us to be in that blue shadow of materialized ideology. Instead of modeling our brains on our perceptions of the outside world, we are modeling the world based on the construction of our brains, as necessitated by the economy. This is the principle cause of the commodification of the world and the worldification of the commodity.