So there is this guy, Guy Dubord, Who wrote a pamphlet named, "The Society of the Spectacle" http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/pub_contents/4 Wikipedia has an excellent overview of the pamphlet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_the_Spectacle Guy Debord and his group , the "Situationists" are pretty interesting and worthy of an afternoons reading but I digress.
I present this pamphlet because the points it makes are so relevant to culture today and ultimately our experience day to day. In it he asserts that, "All that was once directly lived has become mere representation." I spent a few weeks in the early Nineties going to various churches with my dear friend Linda who, by the way has recently lost her husband Victor; Jesus Linda what can I say. We were looking for Gospel of the homespun variety. What we found were churchfulls of people who participated entirely in the service. Although it is true that the "Spectacle" was present in the form of preachers and choirs and bands of various sizes doing their thing on risers above the faithful, the dynamic had a call and response feel in which the events on the stage served as foci from which a maelstrom of activity and emotional intensity emerged. This was not mere group participation. It was more like a merging.
I write about this because, A. It was beautiful and if you've not done it you should, and B. because it is an example, I think, of how the human spirit prevails within the context of the "Society of the Spectacle". Our very closest assumptions about culture and our places in it are formed in the thickest muck at the bottom of the lake of our collective subconscious. Those assumptions form the boundaries or parameters of our expectations of self and society. This lake of subconscious is ultimately fed and grows through streamlets and rivers of myth, ever changing and evolving. Myth is the story we tell ourselves over and over, the story that we tell our children. It is a recursive phenomenon. On one hand it may be presumptuous to think that "Spectacle" has any power over this process. On the other hand one might assert that our self image as a society is based on an assumption of passivity. An assumption that we are, if only until we get out our wallets, like princes and princesses in court fanning ourselves while a parade of spectacles parades before us.
"Ah Me!"
We are seduced by the spectacle while being entirely unaware that it is the spectacle insidiously that forms our definitions of self and society by replacing the function of myth within our society. We feel empowered by the parade but are constrained by it's very nature to not merge with it. It has become an industry, one that exists throughout the world and one that is, once seen for what it is, extremely interesting.
So what's it all about Alfie?
Well first of all, I think, we gotta yell in church. Second of all we gotta not abandon the root of our myth as served up by our predecessors because it is only through evolution that myth can change. Third we gotta mix it up and see what comes. Most of all we gotta see the process for what it is and know that life is far richer than we are led to believe, that the sky is the limit. K.
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