Category Archives: La société du spectacle

CHAPTER ONE

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• The entire life of [our] societies where modern conditions of production reign, manifests itself as – and proclaims itself to be – an immense accumulation of performances and images.  Everything that used to be lived directly has become removed and distanced: and has become a replica, a second-hand representation.

* – * – *

This means that instead of people using the myth – as they once did – for introspection and illumination… the myth now has become its own thing. And we have gotten to a place where  having an aggregated myth about yourself, plus a set of selfies and a ‘personality’…  everyone has become both an actor and a cinematographer, and they’ve forgotten… even though Nature is acting upon them… they respond in the third person. And they don’t feel the visceral knowledge: which means they’re out of synch with Great Nature.

And so what used to be the great dramas and passion plays, that were used to reconnect you to tribe and to Nature and a deeper sense of being, have finally all been turned into the opposite.

It actually turns you away from everything. It even turns you away from others, because then you compete in your spectacle.

* – * – *

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• In a world which has been truly turned inside out, the ‘true’ is a beautiful moment of sublimely realized falsehood. 

* – * – *

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• The concept of  ‘le spectacle‘  – of these performances and images – encompasses and explains a huge diversity of phenomena of appearance. Their diversity and variety are the way these appearances appear, organized socially, which must be seen and understood as the ubiquitous verification of its existence. Considered on its own terms, ‘le spectacle‘ is the   a f f i r m a t i o n   of appearances, and the affirmation of all human life – which is to say life in society – as simple appearance. But the critique which gets to the true heart of ‘le spectacle‘ discovers it to be the visible  n e g a t i o n   of life; because, in fact, it is an on-going    n e g a t i o n  of life which has here   b e c o m e   v i s i b l e .

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CHAPTER TWO

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• It is the essential gesture of these performances and images to capture as performance and image everything that, as human activity, exists in a fluid state, in order to own it – to make it property – in a frozen state, in the shape of things that have finally become society’s sole source of value: by formulating themselves as the imprint: the negative image, as it were, of value as it can actually be lived. In this essential gesture we recognize our old enemy, who knows so well how to appear at first glance something trivial and perfectly natural, whereas on the contrary it is in fact something tremendously complex and full of metaphysical subtlety: consumer goods.

* – * – *

In the English-speaking world, money was first used to escape from social obligation – to buy out one’s social obligations… This was the reason it first became widely used.

But as we learn in budo: if you escape a social obligation, then you also don’t have – you don’t get to acquire – the experience of performing that obligation. And so you have no idea of the real value of performing that obligation…

And as we can see, increasingly, today… and this is becoming more and more visible: by definition, the “imprint” is made by people who are under pressure, under compulsion… in a hurry.  So they h a v e no real sense of value.

And consumer goods are the comforting short hand, the abbreviated avatar of their guilt – for the social relations escaped from.

So, in the English-speaking world, when the pre-Reformation abbeys, convents and monasteries were abolished – they became big, fancy houses for rich merchants and nouveaux riches… with no chapel.

Whereas in a recusant household, the chapel would still be there: still the beating heart of the household… and they would sing the old music – and play it on viols – wood and gut and voices raised in sweet harmonies, making the air dance all together.

And often, today, we see something that originally was religious – pantheistic or animist, rooted and local – and many-layered – for sale in a simplified form. A form that you  c o u l d  still use to build a deeper understanding – but no-one has the time or the know-how. So its monetary value is a wish based on a distant memory of its real, experienced value.

That wish is how the keeping-you-always-wanting-more works!

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CHAPTER THREE

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• The performances and images of ‘le spectacle‘,  like modern society itself, are at one and the same time a coherent whole, and fractured and fragmented. Like modern society, they build their unity on division and tearing people apart. But all this social contradiction, when it emerges into view in these performances and images, is in its turn contradicted by the upending of its meanings: – – –  all the division and divisiveness that is displayed becomes clearly part of a larger whole, with a certain coherence…  but at the very same time, the coherence that [the system actually intends to be] on display is clearly seen to be fractured and divided.

* – * – *

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• It is the struggle between these two Powers – which have come into being to the administer and manage this single socio-economic system – which is deployed as the ‘official’ contradiction in our global society…  but they belong, in fact, to a real unity:  both on the global scale, and internally in [the conventional left-right politics of] every nation.

* – * – *

It is entirely natural that, as we transitioned to the Information Age, the geographical centers of that supposedly “other” Power should become more and more visibly part of the global socio-economic system:  with the gradual evolution of China, and with the fall of the Soviet Union…  And all the ‘official’ contradictions we are deluged with, today, are themselves merely ‘spectacle‘… and you will find that the best place to ground yourself against them is in the ‘practical’ – in human ‘sensed and felt’ activity: “menschliche sinnliche Thätigkeit: Praxis“.

Budo – what you’re doing – is totally, absolutely  p r a c t i c a l .

It is of no use if it’s not practical.  That is not to say, that practicality isn’t the gateway to the divine and the most deep and the most penetrating awarenesses, the most beauty, the most deeply real, the best kind of relationships…

Whereas that abstract, abstraction-y appearances world is false and leads to nothing but more false… until people don’t know that there ever was an actual smell or taste of anything…

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CHAPTER FOUR

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• All of this change and progress, that constantly works to abolish [whatever is] the current status quo, has dominated society ever since the bourgeoisie won out in the economic sphere, and has become more and more visible ever since that victory was translated into their political victory. The ongoing development of the forces of mass-production and productivity has exploded all the former artisanal relationships… and everything that was unchanging and immutable has fallen into dust. Everything that once was absolute, is now subject to the forces of history.

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CHAPTER FIVE

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• Man or woman, “that hollow being, that hollow vessel that  I S  only to the degree that she or he overcomes ‘Being’, ”  is absolutely one and the same as time [itself]. When a woman or a man seizes hold and takes control of her or his own nature, this is just as much a taking hold of the ongoing unfolding and creation of the universe.  “History is, itself, best seen as truly a part of   n a t u r a l   h i s t o r y,  that part that is the transformation of nature into humanity” (Marx).  But, equally, what we call “natural history” has not a single part of it that exists outside the ongoing process of human history… outside that part of history that comprehends the complete totality of history very much in the manner of a modern-day telescope that can reach   b a c k   t h r o u g h   t h e   c o u r s e   o f   t i m e  to capture the flight of nebulae to the farthest edges of the universe. History has always existed, but not always in the form of history – – –  the temporalization of humanity, as it has been effectuated by this one particular ‘society’, is at the very same time the humanization of time.  The unconscious movement of time becomes manifest:  shows itself and   b e c o m e s    a   t r u e   t h i n g    in our conscious awareness of history.

* – * – *

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CHAPTER SIX

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• The time of economic production – “commodity-time” – is an infinite accumulation of equivalent intervals. This is an abstraction of irreversible time, in which each segment on the chronometer only has to prove its quantitative equality.  This time is, for all practical purposes, nothing more than it has to be for the purposes of exchange. “Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at best the carcass of time.” (The Poverty of Philosophy)  This is time that has been drained of everything that is valuable. It is the complete inversion of time as “the field of human growth and development.”

* – * – *

And so… we don’t feel the flow of time… We can’t explore time… But in class, in the dojo, what I am doing is trying to get you guys to explore yourselves as time itself. Because you are not a person experiencing time. You are time-space. You really are.

Ken-ki-tai…

And when you have truly unified mind and body…  “sword, ki-energy, and body”… then you will find that you have become autonomous. You will find that whatever you do has its own time to it…

…and then you will gradually discover that often Great Nature – or your communality with the people around you – is telling your body what to do…

* – * – *

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• This standardized, ubiquitous time of human non-growth and non-development, exists also in a complementary aspect: “consumable time” – which is what we have when the time of rigorously over-controlled productivity washes back and permeates the every-day life of our culture. This is pseudo-cyclical time.

* – * – *

So. In America, once a town was just a town. You had a church, and you had a pub: where you did all your political stuff.  Then – as the factory got built – one of the first things they’d do was build a clock-tower. Because people didn’t have watches…

And it took about three generations to totally program the people to commoditize their time. And now we’re slaves: we don’t even feel time any more. All we feel is the pressure of time.

And up in the mountains it is possible to get above this… but:  you will have to spend time working at ways of integrating yourself with nature…

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CHAPTER SEVEN

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• Capitalist production has unified and integrated the dimension of space on this planet: space which is no longer marked out and delineated by border-societies outside of the system.  This unification is at the same time a wide-spread and intensive process of banalisation.  The piling up of consumer goods produced one after another for that abstract place: ‘the market’,  just as it was always going to break down every regional and legal barrier, and all those guild/corporative restrictions, dating from the middle ages, which maintained and upheld the quality of artisanal production, so it was also destined to dissolve every specificity of place:  to break down the autonomy and the distinctiveness of absolutely every  p l a c e   . This power of homogenization is the heavy artillery that has made fall all the walls of China.

* – * – *

…which is why a resolute NON-standardization – learned, maybe, from Jorge Luis Borges’ catalogs and cartography 1) –  goes hand in hand with leet-speak, encryption and hacking of all kinds. Because, online, it is actually now so easy to recreate those havens – those “border-societies outside of the system” – that disappeared from the physical world in this last half-century of modern roads, electronics and globalizing culture.  Because with a little hacking and a leave-of-absence from the database, you can have the modern, computerized enforcer – who relies on the virtual world to do his work in the physical world – sounding just like the cartographer, colonialist or missionary quoted in The Art of Not Being Governed:

• “Making maps is hard, but mapping Guizhou province especially so….The land in southern Guizhou has fragmented and confused boundaries….A department or a county may be split into several subsections, in many instances separated by other departments or counties….There are also regions of no man’s land where the Miao live intermixed with the Chinese….  Southern Guizhou has a multitude of mountain peaks. They are jumbled together, without any plains or marshes to space them out, or rivers or water courses to put limits on them. They are vexingly numerous and ill-disciplined….Very few people dwell among them, and generally the peaks do not have names. Their configurations are difficult to discern clearly, ridges and summits seeming to be the same. Those who give an account of the arterial pattern of the mountains are thus obliged to speak at length. In some cases, to describe a few kilometers of ramifications needs a pile of documentation, and dealing with the main line of a day’s march takes a sequence of chapters. As to the confusion of the local patois, in the space of fifty kilometers a  river may have fifty names and an encampment covering a kilometer and a half may have three designations. Such is the  unreliability of the nomenclature.”
• “The hilly and jungly tracts were those in which the dacoits held out longest. Such were the country between Minbu and Thayetmyo and the [swampy] terai at the foot of the Shan Hills and the Arakan and Chin Hills. Here pursuit was impossible. The tracts are narrow and tortuous and admirably suited for ambuscades. Except by the regular paths there were hardly any means of approach; the jungle malaria was fatal to our troops; a column could only penetrate the jungle and move on. The villages are small and far between; they are generally compact and surrounded by dense, impenetrable jungle. The paths were either just broad enough for a cart, or very narrow, and, where they led through the jungle were overhung with brambles and thorny creepers. A good deal of the dry grass is burned in March, but as soon as the rains recommence the whole once more becomes impassible.”
• “The surface has been minutely trenched by winding streams. So numerous are the creeks that the topographical map of a single representative county of 373 square miles indicated 339 named streams, that is, nine streams for each ten square miles. The valleys are for the most part “V”-shaped, with rarely more level space along the banks of a stream for a cabin and perhaps a garden patch….The isolation occasioned by methods of travel so slow and difficult is intensified by several circumstances. For one thing, the routes are round-about. Travel is either down one branch along a creek and up another branch, or up a stream to a divide and down another stream on the further side of the ridge. This being the case, married women living within ten miles of their parents have passed a dozen years without going back to see them.”

…and what happens if society’s generalized ability to stay organized – in the virtual or the physical world – becomes so degraded that the above is the norm… ???

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CHAPTER EIGHT

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• Culture is the general sphere of knowing and showing life-as-it-is-lived, in a society divided along class-lines, but alive to the possibilities of history. Which is as much as to say: it is the ability of abstraction which is allowed to exist on the sidelines, so to speak: as one pole of the intellectual division of labor… and as   t h e   intellectual labor of division… Culture emerged when it became separate from the wholeness and solidarity of our old myth-based society, “when the power of unification disappeared from men’s lives, and when opposites lost their living relationship and dynamic inter-action and acquired autonomy…” (Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie) In gaining its independence, Culture began an empire-building trajectory of wealth-acquisition and self-development which is at the same time, a continual and gradual erosion of its independence. History – which fabricates the relatively autonomous space that Culture lives in, and also the ideological illusions that sustain this autonomous space – expresses itself in part as the History of Culture. And the entire triumphal History of Culture can be understood as the history of the gradual revelation of its own inadequacy, and as a long journey towards its own self-imposed abolition. Culture is the place where we look for and attempt to understand our lost wholeness, our lost one-ness. And in this search for wholeness and one-ness, Culture, precisely to the extent that it is a separate sphere, finds itself compelled to deny its own existence.

* – * – *

Don’t think that what you do will be professional activity thirty years from now…  In the world of art, for instance, we have been working back towards everyone-is-an-artist ever since Picasso walked into the Muséum Ethnographique des Missions Scientifiques…

…and in less than a decade, we have become a people of great photographers, and there are more Indie musicians – people who are really doing it – than any one person, in any one place, can keep track of…

…because all humans have always been artists: it’s the natural expression of a mind that can walk upright, dance and fight.

* – * – *

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• The struggle between tradition and innovation, which is the internal motor – the developmental principle – of all historical societies 1), can only progress by the ongoing, permanent victory of innovation. Yet innovation in these cultures is the result of an overall sweep of history which, as it becomes aware of itself as a totality, works towards transcending its own cultural presuppositions, and moves towards the suppression of all the separation that has been integral to these cultures.

1) that is: narrowly read, all Western societies that are within the scope of written history…

* – * – *

And in our century, even as technology continues to develop, it will look less and less like a self-sufficient arrow-trajectory up and up – and more and more like just one element of our tool-kit for dealing with problems caused precisely by that old illusion of ‘progress’…

Planting trees, caring for the land, caring for what land is in our cities, eating less meat, less fish and traveling shorter distances will help us more to handle climate change…

…for instance than geo-engineering, which will feel not like progress, but just like one more bulwark against the evil inversion of “progress” that is killing us.

It will be the end of our three-hundred year old faith in “progress” as the giant turtle, rising from the sea, carrying our world on its back… ever onward…

And when the Ogalala aquifer dries up, then growing teff and millet, crab apples, green-gages, okra… will look like a wise use of the past and of the heirloom knowledge of the planet. It will not look like some transcendent, self-justified machinery… disappearing upwards on a trajectory forever into the future…

What is over, is over.

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CHAPTER NINE

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• Ideology underlies every thought in a class society, all through the conflict-driven course of history.  Ideological “facts” have never been out and out chimera, but rather the deformed awareness of actual realities, and, as such, they have been real factors which exert, in return, a real deformative action. And even more so: the   c r y s t a l i z a t i o n  ,  the  m a t e r i a l i s a t i o n  of  ideology  – which comes with the concrete success of automated economic production, in the shape of these all these performances and images – makes it hard to distinguish, in practice, between reality and an ideology which has succeeded in refashioning everything that is real according to its model. 

* – * – *

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• Ideology is the abstract drive to [establish] ‘the universal’ – and to establish the illusion of ‘the universal’. And when ideology comes to be legitimized by ubiquitous, ‘universal-izing’ abstraction and the effective dictatorship of illusion in our modern society… then this is no longer the willful struggle of a partial viewpoint, but its outright victory. And from this point on, the ideological pretension acquires a sort of one-dimensional, positivist exactitude: it is no longer a historical choice, but something that seems completely obvious. When it is so affirmed, the specific  n a m e s  of ideologies vanish.  And even the specifically ideological portion of the work done to support the system is no longer thought of as ideological: but as a recognition of the “epistemological basis” of everything, which is thought of as being far beyond any ideological phenomenon.  Ideology, when it is materialized, crystalized, physicalized as objects and structure… becomes a thing without a name.  Just in the same way as it is – now and going forward – without any historical program that could be put into words.
• This is as much as to say that: the history of ideologies is over.

* – * – *

So what I always say is: “don’t look for truth, let truth find you…”

Because truth will find you. In fact, it will often hit you upside the head. If you’re trying to avoid it. You don’t have to go looking for it. It will come to you.

If you are looking in the real, physical world: it will really, physically come to you.

So train yourself to be in a state where you are open to new truths.

So, for instance, a lot of martial practices talk about ‘strategy’, and the idea is that there’s something that you would do – as a strategy – to deal with life. But, obviously, this will separate you from life. And so we don’t do that.

What we do do, is we have to have sincerity. We have to unify body and mind (which means doing enough repetitions that our learning is absorbed by our body), and we have to have sincerity – makoto.

And amidst this culture of appearances, sincerity means a sense of respect for your own self and for the other person. It does not mean the complete divulgence of every little nuance of your existence – you can leave that to Wikileaks… because that doesn’t allow you to grow, and in fact it can freeze you because other people will stereotype: and then you go to talk to them, and instead of seeing a liquid, living, growing, evolving spirit, all of a sudden you’re this  t h i n g :  you have  t h i s  quality, you’re stubborn’ ‘you’re this’ ‘you’re that’…

Because, in fact, ideology has been super-ceded by a simple, binary, ‘whose side are you on?’

Which is so obviously fallacious that it is actually easier to drop. And that is the next place that we can all move to.

Because fixing everyone in place with ‘whose side are you on?’ doesn’t allow budo to work. Look at what Tesshu achieved, and his trajectory through the Meiji revolution – trusted by both sides – and after: that’s the perfect example… Because we need to be able to keep moving. And growing.

At any moment any of you can have an insight which would totally alter your life.

That’s what we hope.

And we have to be open to that, and open to that happening for our friends whom we work with.

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