Read society of the spectacle

read cockshott

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it pronounced ghee

Banediga?

Aye

I'm reading Comments on the Society of the Spectacle right now, taking it easy and only reading one "chapter" a day.

A dismissive comment by Ismail about Debord informed me about the existence of the following bit of "wisdom" in The Society of the Spectacle:
cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/tsots02.html
In classical economics and Marxism, use values are descriptions of what things are useful for. Heterogenous goods are not put into an aggregate one-dimensional pile of use value, so the only way to talk about a quantity of use value, so that you might talk about a growth or shrinkage by this or that percentage, is by talking about multiple units of one thing (or multiple units of identical piles of things). This frankly looks like somebody liked using big words without knowing what they mean.

It's a détournement you clueless retard

Nope. A détournement is the recycling of a piece of capitalist pop culture, a highjacking, turning it against capitalism.

Don't talk back you imbecile
notbored.org/SOTS-detournements.html
bopsecrets.org/SI/detourn.htm
Now fuck off

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It doesn't look retarded, it fits perfectly into the context and pretty much expected if you are familiar with Debord's other works. It only looks retarded if you are illiterate and expect Debord to fuck up because a deranged Maoist-Hoxhaist told you that Debord was dumb.

You see, the vile capitalist mouthpiece Karl Marx is cleverly subverted by this daring radical intellectual Guy Debord. But it is probably too deep for you. Just like you need to be full of other books to truly understand Marx, you need to be full of alcohol here.

I've linked you the user guide, didn't I? Détournement is not just "subversion" of capitalist "pop culture." Just read it already and stop with this nonsense.

Yes, but it is the main thing that it is. That's what most examples are drawn from. May I ask you: What of Marx have you read so far?

> bopsecrets.org/SI/detourn.htm
This is literally the most definitive text written on détournement, it's how it started. Stop trying to claim that your Wikipedia tier understanding of it is somehow better.

I've read enough the first part of Capital so I know what the commodity is, if that's your problem. May I ask you: What of Debord have you read so far?

listen to hauntology music

i tried but i didn't really understand it

i tried but all i found was him fraternizing with undesirables

true
(i haven't read bordiga.)

marx was socdem

Hmmm. Yeah, no. Détournement is almost entirely about fucking with pop culture. You know, advertisements and so on.

Are you trolling? You can't be this retarded. Détournment literally comes from Debord and that text is where he explains it.

If your goal is to look like a clueless retard it's working.

>I've read enough the first part of Capital so I know what the commodity is
Situationists call culture a commodity. So they certainly don't know what a commodity is.

Is culture not bought, sold, and produced? Are cultures not fetishised for their "richness"? As in, do people not fetishize the exchange value of "cultured" items? Seems like a commodity to me.

Polite sage for double post, but is society of the spectacle a good read?

Yes, it's a bit hard but very good.

Culture gets constantly commodified, there are cultural items produced to be bought, but culture as a whole is not one big commodity, nor is it just a pile of commodities. A gigantic part of culture is information in the public domain, which is not a commodity. I read a situationist statement that culture is the ultimate commodity. To make such a statement, one needs a very different definition of commodity than Marx, and without communicating what that definition is, it's rather a useless statement, isn't it.

Do you have autism? Serious question.

Maybe people should stop arguing about books and actually read them for a change

I really don't think they actually believe you can buy and sell an entire culture, but to deny the strong connections towards culture being a commodity, is bad form. I'm almost certain they were just referencing something similar to what I described.

Care to explain what the quoted Debord passage means? Is it sensible to use the term "use value" if it isn't meant, and if it isn't meant, what is meant? (The most banal way of doing a détournement is flat sarcasm, just exclaiming the opposite of what one means, as a way of drawing attention to it. Offering a guest a very hard surface to sleep on, and he says, "Oh, that's soft!" While he knocks on it.) It's clear in the context that it doesn't mean exchange value. Let's look at the context of the quote:
An explanation that may not sound very nice if you are a Debord-stan, but that is highly plausible, is that the author thought about something more in line with the modern notion of utility, and lacking familiarity with Marx, but having heard some words in the radical milieu and knowing that terms of radical origin are good for creating a certain association and wooing gullible students, he said use value instead.

I have to go to bed now, so take your time.

I think this explains it.
It seems like he is using them more or less interchangeably, due to the relation he sees between them. He obviously understand that there is a difference, (as he uses two different terms), but he could have misremembered the falling rate of profit as use value. That isn't really, objectively wrong, you could argue that the falling rate of profit would necessitate/imply/be associated with a falling rate of exchange value/use value. That would sort of be hard to back up, but it isn't ridiculous that he is just using use value to refer to exchange and thusly profit.

Wait I'm absolutely fucking retarded. Check other translations of The Spectacle, it is probably a mistranslation.

But it's also just over 100 pages so it also quite short.

I can't understand, I'm only on like paragraph 40 but it seems like he is just positing things with no proof.

Should I watch the documentary?

He's talking about things becoming less and less useful how is this not understood.

Have you ever seen an infomercial or got a toy in a happy meal.

Debord has certainly read a lot of Marx, there's no questions about it.

Explanations:
46. As we all know, exchange-value only exists because the commodities have use-values, otherwise the social metabolism wouldn't work. However, in the spectacle the commodity completes its colonization of social life (see 42), monopolizing the fulfilment of all use-values. This means that exchanging commodities and fulfilling use-values are no longer distinguishable, they are one and the same. Exchange-value overcame use-value.

47. This process of exchange-value overcoming use-value (the falling rate of use-value) made a new form of necessity necessary, which compels the masses to engage in wage-labour despite the abundance of commodities. Even the most basic use-values are only available in the illusion of augmented survival (see 40), all consumption is the consumption of the illusion of the commodity (see 36, 37), which in its most general form is the spectacle.

48. Use-value used to be "contained" in exchange-value as a precondition, but that is eroded by the domination of exchange-value and use-value now has to be made explicit as a pseudo-justification for the new pseudo-world.

You argue from a very idealistic and dogmatic point of view. The vast majority of détournements in the ＲＥＡＬ ＷＯＲＬＤ are with pop culture. That's how it is. Suppose the Antifa Super Soldiers of Holla Forums have a meeting, and it turns out there is only one muscular guy in there, let's call him Chad, and he says:
He looks at your single-pixel-width legs.
You, the virgin situationist:

Society of the Spectacle: The Movie

vimeo.com/218908974

It's not a question of the ＲＥＡＬ ＷＯＲＬＤ, idealism or your feelings, it is listed as a détorunement by Debord in his list of détorunements for translators.

Even if it was not, Debord wrote that text I linked, he describes there what his concept of détournement is. The falling rate of use-value is clearly a détournement by Debord's own standards. Claiming that it cannot be a détournement and has to be some kind of economic term because the détournements you are familiar with are usually pop-culture based is simply stupid.

It's literally written there:
juralibertaire.over-blog.com/article-releve-des-citations-et-des-detournements-de-la-societe-du-spectacle-42307956.html
> 47 — «la baisse tendancielle de la valeur d’usage» : détournement de Marx, Le Capital : «la baisse tendancielle du taux de profit».

Debord's archive contained careful reader's notes on Marx. His works contain plenty of quotes and détournements from Marx. Only someone who lacks any basic familiarity with his works would doubt that he had read him.

Now that we have unquestionably established that it is a détournement and not the quantitative decrease of a qualitative concept, it's not that hard to figure out what it is. From the context it already makes perfectly clear that it is the development of exchange-value's domination over use-value. The question that remains is why call it the falling rate of use-value, what does it have to do with the TRPF? If we go back to thesis 45., it becomes clear:
Here Debord is clearly talking about the TRPF, and how it is delayed by capitalism using the service sector (this is a well known fact). Since services are just the economization of previously social activities, it is now plain to see that the the falling rate of use-value is the logical side-effect of the falling rate of profit.

Turns out Ismail is a clueless faggot.

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Thesis: read Bordiga
Antithesis: Google Bookchin
Synthesis: Google Bordiga

So, what makes Debord great is that he states something that is well known in a way that is hard to comprehend? That's what deep theory is all about, eh.
>Since services are just the economization of previously social activities, it is now plain to see that the the falling rate of use-value is the logical side-effect of the falling rate of profit.
All the services that now happen for money are not an exact replication of what previously happened outside of the market sphere and I don't see how you could call that pile of goods and services that now exists smaller than what it used to be.

don't read it, it's 150 pages of masturaborty fluff. the entire book can be explained in one sentence: people are focusing on representations of their lives instead of their actual lives and that's bad.

he was doing it for the meme

Correction: I suppose falling rate of use value, a less inaccurate term would be falling rate of use values, doesn't need to be about the entire pile of use values, instead it might be about the slacking of the growth of it, that is a falling rate of marginal utility. However, you have to put that into a relation with some X, so that you have a ratio, only then can you meaningfully say that per additional unit of X you have an increase of utility that gets smaller and smaller. (Just like you can only make a meaningful statement of Debord's knowledge of Marx if you consider Debord's consumption of Karl's writings relative to Debord's consumption of alcohol). So, what's X? We could talk here about utility per hour worked or utility per dollar spent. So Debord's finding becomes: As capitalist production increases, the marginal utility of it decreases. I'm sure this is a statement almost all economists will agree with, and Debord's achievement is that he presents that statement in the most convoluted and fruity language I've ever seen.

Is there any particular connection to Marx in the line of thought Debord presents there (aside from lifting terms that seem to lose most of their original meaning)? Marx spoke of surplus value in Capital, and he pointed out that there are different ways of increasing it. One way is that people work longer. But the working hours don't have to change: Another way to raise surplus value is to improve technology in the production of things that the proles consume, so that a smaller fraction of the working day goes into producing that. Marx called that relative surplus value. Debord's line of thought seems to be that it's possible to raise the profit rate by going in the opposite direction. So, could anybody clarify and re-state Debord's argument as an economic model that could be tested? Did he flesh out that thought more in some other writing?

It's a détournement it's not meant to be accurate

Why is it bad though?

Tried to watch the film one time, thought it was pretentious garbage. Why bother with the book?

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Why you are such a fucking brainlet?
These are the type of people who came on this board just to shitpost the altright. Fuck off.

Debord is describing how in increasingly more cases the consumption of use-values become inseparable from the exchange of commodities to the point where the average person can no longer distinguish between the two. It is not an actual decrease in objects having use-values, it's a decrease in cases where the use-value can be seen without the exchange-value. This is what he calls falling rate of use-value. It's a détournement, it's not supposed to be taken too literally.

Humans probably prefer the representation over the real, that and the fact that the proles aren't exactly revolting over their concrete conditions of existence leads me to think things must not be so bad for them.

You could say the same thing about capitalism.

YOU CAN'T JUST MAKE ANY DUMB STATEMENT PROFOUND BY SAYING IT'S A DÉTOURNEMENT

But you can easily make a profound statement look dumb with it.