‘The spectacle is the flip side of money. It, too, is an abstract general equivalent of all commodities. But whereas money has dominated society as the representation of universal equivalence – the exchangeability of different goods whose uses remain uncomparable – the spectacle is the modern complement of money: a representation of the commodity world as a whole which serves as a general equivalent for what the entire society can be and can do. The spectacle is money one can only look at, because in it all use has already been exchanged for the totality of abstract representation. The spectacle is not just a servant of pseudo-use, it is already in itself a pseudo-use of life.’*
I’m trying to catch up; I also know that I never will but what else can one do? I remember this conversation in 1968 in which a friend, name of Joe, was breathlessly informing me about the Situationists – I had never heard of them and apart from the name I don’t remember the content of what he told me about them. But in the last months I’ve become aware of them once more and am currently reading Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces. The latter is subtitled A Secret History of the Twentieth Century and was first published in 1989. And in those days most of my reading was around psychoanalytic thought. Though whether that is sufficient reason for my not registering Marcus’s linking of the Sex Pistols with Dada and the Situationists is not so certain. It is both catching up and looking around at what is going on economically and politically and trying to catch hold of ideas that might be helpful. I am sure that Debord would have relished last year’s August riots – a festival of the excluded dreamers.
After mentioning the supply of oxygen you continue with a puzzling tense: ‘I had already spent last weekend . . . ‘ leading to an expectation of a follow up phrase that might have started, ‘when . . . ‘ but no. Nothing. Perhaps you had something in mind and then got distracted by a different thought. This hiatus then set the ground for disappointment. The numbers tell the story: 500 and 30. These suggest a discrepancy – there was room for 30 but ‘we' could shovel in 500 (paying, I assume) even if this meant 470 floating about slightly lost.
Now 30 sounds an interesting number. Challenging but not necessarily overwhelming. With 30, thoughts could fly around, be heard, laughter could be unleashed, the weird joke of death examined (or not), a play improvised, written, and performed . . . but 500?
Mind you, 500 practicing their PRANA YOGA together. WOW! Sucking all the energy out of the city and obviously levitating the RFH.
I noticed in the Guardian yesterday morning there was a question as to whether independence fever would reach Wales. Now there’s a thought. Cameron, the great European nay-sayer, EU basher, presiding over the dismemberment of the UK.
Will the coalition government continue to discover that they enjoy impoverishing great swathes of the population? Certainly Osborne always has a malicious curl of his lip. Though perhaps, after all, it will be alright (there, there, wipe your tears). We’ll find solutions – political, technological, aesthetic and patch together new agreements, new compacts, understandings.
In these clear, high pressure skies – cold but bracing – I can look up to see the 500 in their levitating RFH drifting with the air currents perhaps somewhere in the direction of Denmark, say, or the Ukraine. Or is it out to the middle of the Atlantic?
*49 Society of the Spectacle page 41