At art school, we were exposed to the work of several critical theorists.
One in particular stood out for me as particularly interesting.
Guy Debord’s book, The Society of the Spectacle, is a critique of society, which Debord noticed was becoming increasingly obsessed with the value of images and appearances over reality, truth and experience. While this sounds like a familiar condition to a reader in 2023, it’s worth noting that the book was written over fifty years ago against a backdrop of a Paris aflame with the student riots of the sixties.
After the Second World War, Europeans had become gripped by consumerism. Flush with the rewards of booming economies, they simply filled their lives with things.
The Society of the Spectacle is a critique of consumer culture and commodity fetishism.
Debord argues the spectacle cannot be understood as merely visual excess produced by mass media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually materialised; rather than being imposed upon us from above, Debord thought the spectacle as diffused throughout our society and that we all participate in it and are all responsible for sustaining it, which I find particularly interesting.
What would Debord think of Twitter, dating apps, Facebook, Instagram, the constant streams, the constant screams?
The distinction between what we perceive to be certain, and what we sense and feel are such important elements of my practice.
From my point of view, the separation between what we know and what we think we know is vast.
Our obsession with sex, desire, the fulfilment of our fantasies and the continual need for release. Is this a release from spectacles that we have created ourselves? How much desire has been born from spectacles, and as a result, how much dehumanisation has actually occurred?
My concern, beyond all of this, is human relationships and the fragility of our connections, which is at the heart of what I am trying to understand. I could literally write pages and pages about lost love, and it seems that we hurt ourselves and each other until nothing is salvageable. We don’t even understand how it entirely happened. We are almost helpless.
In The Guardian, Will Self explains, It is the spectacle’s genius to have ‘turned need against life’ and thus effected ‘the separation and estrangement between man and man’.
As a mistress, I am aware that I willingly play into the spectacle and that I operate within it. The relationships I form float seemingly in and out of me. It feels like a fleeting exchange, lots of fuzzy complex moments of joining the dots, which quickly evaporate into another version of a spectacle.
Even though I am part of the spectacle, I feel I have found a genuine therapy, and in my opinion, a very much needed one. I feel the practice needs modernising and progression needs to be made, for it to be respected accordingly.
There is hope there has to be, and I am leaning toward slowing down, even partially meditating with my subs in session. There is an easing, there has to be. We need to create more moments of absolute freedom from our fantasies, technology, and the ricochets of our thoughts.
Sensual Domination can, I feel, offer a different form of solace.
Guy Debord realised we needed to create very private moments.
The Situationist movement, of which he was such an important member, wanted to create moments in which’ the monotony of everyday capitalism’ was disrupted. The movement wanted people to find truth and real experience amidst the al-persuasive consumerist lie. The situations they created were small, an aimless wander through a city, for instance, to come across new people and places or experience new things.
The Situationists rejected the idea that the apparent successes of advanced capitalism, such as technological advancement, increased income and increased leisure, could ever outweigh the social dysfunction and degradation of everyday life that it simultaneously inflicted.
I feel very aware of the spectacle myself, maybe too aware. I made a film at art school, where I interviewed a transgender sex worker and layered footage of myself on top of this film. This footage consisted of videos I had taken on my phone for a man I thought I was falling in love with. I had forgotten myself, and it was an illusionary tale, but it was like I made a film, within a film, just haunting.
An echo to a memory; it wasn’t even real, and yet it was.
I think Guy Debord really had something.
Charlie