The Society of the Spectacle has its demands too.

[Cramulus]

(a work in progress, post will be edited as I edit it)
It demands your attention.

It demands that you state your position in the form of a sound-byte which can be re-contextualized by another sound-byte.

It demands a remake of yesteryear's summer blockbuster, the one with the hairy hippies on drums and mud, but with this year's celebrities.

It wants to roll up your energy and sell it to kids on the street corner in a dime bag they have to hide from their parents.

It demands that you smoke that energy in secret and get all excited, fuzzy headed, forgetful, then you want more, and it's got some, but the next hit's gonna cost you.

It demands a glass jar full of passion, on display, so we can see the passion through the glass without getting any on our hands.

It demands that by end of the episode, we return to the nuclear sitcom family you saw in the opening credits.

It demands that you stop bringing up its disease, because that is embarrassing to both parties.

It demands your attention to these issues right now, before it listens to you.

It demands that you stop talking over it.

[Luna]

Good stuff, Cram.

[LMNO]

Yeah, this one's a keeper.

[Triple Zero]

I demand that these demands are met before they get popular.

[Cramulus]

(thread moved to OKM)

copy posted at http://23ae.com/2011/10/the-society-of-the-spectacle-has-its-demands-too/

feedback welcome

[Roly Poly Oly-Garch]

(a work in progress, post will be edited as I edit it)
It demands a glass jar full of passion, on display, so we can see the passion through the glass without getting any on our hands.
--
It demands that you stop bringing up its disease, because that is embarrassing to both parties.

...as an example of the Hell Yeah.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

I keep thinking that something like this should be done for situationism. It demands that your arguments be irrational, and therefore incapable of being the subject of a coherent counterargument. It demands that culture consume itself in an orgy of detournment. It demands that you read about it with the underlying assumptions that Marx and Freud were right. It demands that you ascribe to the idea of a joyful life sold by a group of people whose last movement dissolved into a bad hangover, who disowned their revolution even before it failed, and who went on to commit suicide decades after the spectacle first reverse engineered their tactics.

[Cramulus]

bah, say what you will about situationism, but from where I'm sitting, those cats hit it right on the head. They didn't become the dominant paradigm, but that wasn't their goal.

Situationism demands nothing from you. You can drift with them, or ignore them--they don't care because your head is your party.

to contrast - the society of the spectacle exerts pressure on everything it touches.

Once upon a time, I complained to a school teacher that kids on the playground kept chasing me. She told me that "it takes two to chase."


None of us signed a consent form to be participants in this western capitalist democracy experiment. Situationism, like the proctor of some Stanley Milgram experiment, reminds you that you can walk out of the lab at any time.

The absurdist revolution doesn't have tents and demands and a political party to back it--it takes place inside your head.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

Nevertheless, situationism has hidden assumptions that need bear examination.