'Rage and Reason in a World of Manifestos' Essay

'Rage and Reason in a World of Manifestos' - Essay Example The Polemic Debord’s thesis in "The Society of the Spectacle" is that, â€Å"in societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.† (Debord, 1967) Debord provides a critique of the consumer society, with conspicuous consumption and packaged identities related to advertising and marketing images in contemporary culture. Formative Assessment Debord’s critique in "The Society of the Spectacle" was a formative influence on Baudrillard and others who developed post-modern media studies through the lens of semiotics. In understanding the use of symbols, signs, icons, and archetypes in mass-media advertising, the artist or designer can bring a critical method into the work that promotes reform and change through awareness of situationist themes. Discussion Debord states, â€Å"The spectacle is not a collection of images, b ut a social relation among people, mediated by images.† (Debord, 1967) One can consider this in the later critique of Noam Chomsky as this relates to the control of media discourse and the manufacture of consent for war and imperialism through propaganda techniques that relate to not only political discussion, but also the â€Å"lifestyle choices† that are pre-packaged and ideologically constructed. Debord’s critique can go towards the recognition of cultural hegemony in mass-media communications, and charts new territory in film and cinema in sampling surrealist, dada, and other modernist methodologies into a new form of expression. â€Å"The root of the spectacle is that oldest of all social specializations, the specialization of power. The spectacle plays the specialized role of speaking in the name of all the other activities. It is hierarchical society’s ambassador to itself, delivering its official messages at a court where no one else is allowed to speak. The most modern aspect of the spectacle is thus also the most archaic.† (Debord, 1967) One aspect this relates to is cultural hegemony and the viral means of propagation for critical strains of analysis. These critiques can also challenge cultural hegemony by the sampling and re-contextualizing the images of the mainstream culture into a new frame of reference, as Debord did in his film of the book. That philosophy is generally not filmed outside of surrealism is a bias, Debord goes to show the underlying patterns of belief that are unconscious in the mass-produced images of mass-communications, and how they also relate to authority and control. Debate In the second part of the book, Debord writes, â€Å"The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life.† (Debord, 1967) In the theory of transcendence related to symbols and signs, the signs are objects themselves pointing to other objects. In this manner, a type of ob jectification of being occurs in this critique, contrasted by transcendent activities such as free expression, true love, nature, poetry, ecstasy... romantic ideals in some manner repackaged in a post-modernist critique. Situationism as an outgrowth or evolution of Surrealism, dada, and critical theory as it relates to Marxism makes it a unique cultural expression at the formative point of the post-modern philosophy and aesthetic. Influence on professional practice The situationist