Unwiring yourself from the sea of representations, bobbing your head above water to scream truth from your vantage. That's exactly what Debord was trying to make room for; how to orient yourself towards the real when everything around you is false, even your own image colonised tongue.

He says it right at the beginning of the book:

The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living. — fdrake

So, why don't you try to apply all these to the Spectacle of Kavanaugh vs Ford situation?

"What is important here is not truth itself". Truth is the most important thing here, even if it is not treated that way by politicians. Truth is non-partisan, and we should encourage our elected representatives to keep that in mind. — Relativist

Definitely, truth plays some subordinate role. Debord: “the truth is a moment of the false”.

The role of the philosopher is to examine and challenge any group consensus from the outside, not as a flag waving loyalist of any particular team. Any group consensus by anybody anywhere has the potential to be dramatically wrong, and so the philosopher provides a valuable function by kicking the tires of the group consensus, any group consensus, to see if that group consensus can withstand a determined assault.

Imho, philosophers diminish their role by simply repeating a group consensus being endlessly repeated on every cable TV channel, whatever that group consensus might be. While the polarized partisans chant their memorized slogans in the public square, the philosopher should be looking to explore some angle which is not already being examined. The philosopher should be looking to add something to the conversation. — Jake

Thank you for the good points! I think what deserves our attention and analyses is the situation when both Kavanaugh and Ford acted, played and performed as actors; yet, in comparison with theatre, they played and represented their own lives and biographies. (By the way, while playing a role, is an actor honest?) The real facts of their lives were entirely overshadowed by the quality and persuasiveness of their performances, and most commentators were talking just about who made a better impression. What is important here is not truth itself, but the condition of the whole game, which make some enunciations looking more or less truthful.

My take is that (at least democratic) politics has likely ALWAYS been about the spectacle, — Erik

Indeed, in Periclean Athens, leading politicians (including Pericles himself) took part in a kind of spectacle, political theatre. Yet, there was an entirely different regime of truth; direct democracy functioned without the medium of mass media. In Society of the Spectacle, it is absolutely impossible to find out the truth. If you compare CNN with Fox News, you will find the two utterly incompatible (but extremely plausible) versions about Kavanaugh vs. Ford.

Is all this just about a better performance? Debord pointed out in the Society of the Spectacle: “the truth is a moment of the false.”

That's the solipsism part. It's self-authorizing, because it authorizes itself through reference to a third party that is guaranteed not to arrive. But this makes it only authorized to itself, or to others who also have the absent third party in mind- which is not actual authority. — csalisbury

It is these assemblages, these despotic or authoritarian formations, that give the new semiotic system the means of its imperialism, in other words, the means both to crush the different semiotics and protect itself against any threat from outside.” — Number2018

:sad: :gasp:

There's a way of discussing Deleuzian philosophy that fails. It provides the 'content', but is not effective. It doesn't express it, precisely because it is still trying to possess it. What's expressed is not the purported content, but the will-to-possession itself. The will-to-possession is expressed in a kind of triangulation, which is legible in the form. There is the writer, the content, and a specific didactic form: the authority of one who speaks what is known to be true. The content is approached and handled in the way that form dictates. Its a kind of ownership. — csalisbury

I agree with you, just want to add that the constellation “There is the writer, the content, and a specific didactic form: the authority of one who speaks what is known to be true” is actually constituted by what Deleuze and Gvattari call “an abstract machine of faciality”: “Significance is never without a white wall upon which it inscribes its signs and redundancies. Subjectification is never without a black hole in which it lodges its consciousness, passion, and redundancies. Since all semiotics are mixed and strata come at least in twos, it should come as no surprise
that a very special mechanism is situated at their intersection. Oddly
enough, it is a face: the white wall/black hole system. The white wall/black hole system is constructed, or rather the abstract machine is triggered that must allow and ensure the almightiness of the signifier as well as the autonomy of the subject”

The 'content' of Deleuze is something like immanent self-authorizing expression. If the form is not as much a part of this self-authorizing expression as the content, then the speech will fail. It will be read, correctly, as a kind of insular self-authorization.

It's insular because it's really speaking to an absent third-party. It can neither fail nor succeed because the third party isn't present. That's the solipsism part. It's self-authorizing, because it authorizes itself through reference to a third party that is guaranteed not to arrive. But this makes it only authorized to itself, or to others who also have the absent third party in mind- which is not actual authority. — csalisbury

I would like to question what you call “insular and solipsistic” characteristics of “self –authorized, possessing expression.”
Your analyses are not entirely Deleuzian since if one starts looking for the foundations of this conceptualization, it could lead
to closed off or transcendental conditions.” Particular assemblages of power impose significance and subjectification
as the primary forms of expression, in reciprocal presupposition with new contents: there is no significance without a despotic assemblage, no subjectification without an authoritarian assemblage, and no mixture between the two without assemblages of power that act through signifiers and act upon souls and subjects. It is these assemblages, these despotic or authoritarian formations, that give the new semiotic system the means of its imperialism, in other words, the means both to crush the different semiotics and protect itself against any threat from outside.”
So, according to Deleuze and Guattari, there are no entirely insulated utterances, and if the statements or discourses are spoken in the regime of faciality, they are determined and conditioned by the concrete socio-political assemblages.

For all that novels only reach a minority of the population, and perhaps a smaller proportion now than it was forty years ago, I don't think any medium has replaced it as the closest in people's minds to that ideal. — andrewk

I think that most of my disagreement with others about the situation with literature, the novel, and reading has been rooted in the incorrect use of the critical terms applied here.
We do not have the same art, literature, authors, readers as it was in the past.
The cultural practices have changed dramatically and applying the same signifiers
just lead us to confusion and misunderstanding.

So literature, or print, as we conceive of it now, is actually a relatively recent and brief phase in the history of human civilization. Already, if we group together all the new forms that came to prominence in the 20th-21st centuries, this new age is comparable in length to the age of print. — SophistiCat

You are right in stating the objective facts as they are. Much more difficult to imagine the world where the book (you call it" print") was the primary source of knowledge, meanings, and values and to understand how the disappearance of this world affects our thought and the way of being.

If people were even remotely paying attention these days, they would realize that the vast majority of what gets posted on the web these days is pure bullshit on steroids, as life and the problems we face, just aren't so simple that they can be resolved with a 100 word post on twitter, google, or facebook. — LD Saunders

I think that the explosion of texting and social networking chatting as the smooth, familiar and enjoyable way of communicating and expressing one’s immediate thoughts and feelings deserves our attention as an essential socio-cultural phenomenon of our digital time. (Curiously, isn’t it the highest chain in the evolution of the epistolary genre, at the beginning of which one could find Seneca’s Letters to Luciliius?) Some thinkers assume that behind this phenomenon there is an imperative to force one to expose herself, to speak incessantly, to take part in numerous public and normative communications.

There are still plenty of Writer's Festivals around the world, where lots of people turn up just to hear authors talk about their work, their views on life, the universe and everything, and maybe read from their books. — andrewk

Furthermore, the directors and actors are so carefully stage-managed by their media minders that there is scarcely any opportunity to get an authentic thought about the world out of them publicly anyway. — andrewk

Authors are not able to compete with the directors and actors in shaping people minds, regardless of the authenticity of their thoughts.
Jeffrey Nealon in his book “Post-Postmodernism” takes the point that "media images have taken over the very resistant, interruptive power of the “thought from outside,” that for so long was the privileged territory of literary language, that has made literature a privileged ethical discourse within modernism and postmodernism… writers have become the last believers – not in any positive content or anything as predictable as “meaning,” but writers are the lust believers in language’s ability to be the primary driver in the interruption and reshaping of subjectivity (which is also to say, the resisting and disrupting of so-called normative subjectivity)"

I'm sorry, but I don't see the fine literary novel ceasing to be what it was before — Bitter Crank

Don DeLillo lays out in his novel" Mao 2": “The novel used to feed our search for meaning… It was the tremendous secular transcendence. The source of language, character, occasional new truth. But our desperation has led us toward something more extensive and darker. So we turn to news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe.
This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. We don’t need the novel.”
Yet, it is not just that the novel cannot compete with other media, which are using more intensive means affecting human minds. “Crime and Punishment” or “In the Search of Lost Time” were neither written nor read for pleasure or satisfying some intellectual or emotional utility needs. They were true experimental laboratories of human existence for both writers and readers, where writing and reading constituted the ways of becoming with the unknown outcome. When DeLillo and Self say that the novel has no future, they probably try to express their intuition that it loses its fundamental functions.

Please expand on this. I'm not sure what you mean. — Bitter Crank

Will Self:" In the early 1980s, and I would argue throughout the second half of the last century, the literary novel was perceived to be the prince of art forms, the cultural capstone and the apogee of creative endeavor. The capability words have when arranged sequentially to both mimic the free flow of human thought and investigate the physical expressions and interactions of thinking subjects; the way they may be shaped into a believable simulacrum of either the commonsensical world, or any number of invented ones; and the capability of the extended prose form itself, which, unlike any other art form, is able to enact self-analysis, to describe other aesthetic modes and even mimic them. All this led to a general acknowledgment: the novel was the true Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk."

I don't think so. Even the physical book isn't going to fade away: it's simply still so useful and handy. If one argues that the hey-day of book reading is over, that less people read books than earlier, I'm not sure about that. — ssu

One could argue about the quality of reading and about its importance.

There has always been a demographic of eager readers; it has varied over time, but it has included the educated elite who like to read; the upward aspirational immigrants who want to partake of the Anglo-American culture; ordinary educated people (not elite) who like to read, and then a few people who read for a living: book editors and reviewers. The chattering classes read because they need fresh fodder to chatter on about. — Bitter Crank

I agree with you. But the point is that literature, authors, their critics, book's reading have lost their privileged position in our culture, they do not generate and translate the most advanced meanings and values anymore.

The book, in my estimation represents a private relationship with knowledge. To engage in a private relationship one must have something that approximates to a private self. The decline of the book as such is a consequence of the decline in the relative significance of the relationship with the self, the private cultivation of the intellect for the benefit of the self alone. Increasingly human beings are public entities, with public lives external to the self — Marcus de Brun

Historically, the book not always has mediated the relationship with self. For example, for ancient Stoics and Epicureans, the spoken word of a teacher was the most important. And, one can doubt the private character of the process of the ancient “care of self.” Nevertheless, you are right that we experience the dramatic decline of the book culture, and reading cannot provide us with our own private and intimate space.

Classics are rare, because most old books don't fare well as time passes. Not a lot of people still read Chaucer, but thousands do. Far, far fewer (scores of people) read Gower, Langland, or Boccaccio. — Bitter Crank

Thousands - are not bad at all, I assumed less.

Furthermore, there are too many books to read, from the very ancient to merely old to new yesterday. There is far, far, far too much short-form writing to read, as well--fiction or factual. Too much music to listen to, too many films to see, too many web sites to visit. There are more cute cat videos than one has time to watch. — Bitter Crank

You are right - too much of everything! As far as I know, most teenagers do not read books at all.

In 2200 people are going to be looking to Gibson for 'essential insights into the nature of humankind' more than Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. — fdrake

I am quite surprised; I think that ”essential insights into the nature of humankind” have become meaningless.
“To all those who still wish to talk about man, about his reign or his liberation, to all those who still ask themselves questions about what man is in his essence, to all those who wish to take him as their starting-point in their attempts to reach the truth, to all those who, on the other hand, refer all knowledge back to the truths of man himself, to all those who refuse to formalize without anthropologizing, who refuse to mythologize without demystifying, who refuse to think without immediately thinking that it is man who is thinking, to all these warped and twisted forms of reflection we can answer only with a philosophical laugh – which means, to a certain extent, a silent one.”
― FOUCAULT MICHEL, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

Such a conservative stance is being taken by Number2018. — fdrake

Why conservative? I would say - realistic. Do you know anybody, who is reading “Don Quixote” or “Peace and War”? I do not know. Though, very few classic novels are read by students, forced by curriculum and their teachers. Without the readers, these books will become just museum artifacts.

E-books and audio books maintain reading culture, although the latter to a lesser extent. The printed book isn't "special" when compared to its electronic form, at least not in the gnostic sence. — Grey Vs Gray

Technology has made possible a more eco-friendly method of passing stories and information. While I own over four-hundred physical books and enjoy the smells, the nostalgia and textures, I also use and enjoy other mediums of acquiring information and stories. — Grey Vs Gray

It is not a matter of nostalgia, and definitely, the digital age provides us with a lot of new possibilities. The problem is that the practices of reading and writing have changed. You are right, much more people are reading nowadays, but their reading
has become fragmental and instantaneous – and the process of reading is inseparable from the way we are writing.

Global revenue for books is about 8 times more than music in 2017. — fdrake

Many writers think that serious literature is going to become extinct under the market’s pressure. Thus,
Will Self pointed out: “There is one question alone that you must ask yourself to establish whether the serious novel will still retain cultural primacy and centrality in another 20 years. This is the question: if you accept that by then the vast majority of text will be read in digital form on devices linked to the web, do you also believe that those readers will voluntarily choose to disable that connectivity? If your answer to this is no, then the death of the novel is sealed out of your own mouth

The bias we should be concerned about is the bias shared by almost every media outlet, the bias for drama. Most media is ad supported. That is, they aren't really in the news business, they're in the advertising business. Ad prices are heavily related to the size of the audience, and this pushes most media outlets towards the lowest common denominator. If it bleeds it leads, etc. — Jake

"It is important to understand that the possibilities, however, limited,
of manipulation and of the suspicion of manipulation, which
is sometimes exaggerated, and sometimes not pervasive, are a set
of problems internal to the system and that they are not an effect
generated by the mass media in the environment of their system."
It is not a bias or a kind of manipulation, it is how the media functions.

If I tell you there was a fire in a department store downtown, and the news tells you there was a fire in the department store downtown, and there was a fire in a department store downtown, and neither of us gets overtly political about it, but reports basic facts such as when and where, — Baden

There are tremendous gaps between 3 facts about “a fire in a department store downtown” – 1) when I learn it from you, 2 )when I watch news about it, and 3) the actual event of the fire – they have absolutely different cultural, anthropological and ontological status! Whatever is not mediated and reported by media does not actually exist.

the media both reflects and constructs social reality and being aware of how they do that is important in interpreting events. — Baden

So, what is actually going on when the media does report about the fire in downtown? As Luhmann pointed out: “Every selection decontextualizes and condenses particular identities which in themselves have nothing 'identical' (= substantial) about them, but merely have to be identified in the context of being reviewed for purposes of reference, of recursive use, and only for that purpose. “
Therefore, the main goal of reporting the fire by the media is just to use the actual event for involving and engaging a particular group of viewers, consuming “the breaking news “
according to the set of pre-established codes. The media localizes and structures not real socially independent autonomic groups, but socio-psychological patterns, created by its mass action. “Medium is the message.”

For a start, news reporting is obviously not purely in the realm of narrative and divorced from objective reality. That would be a better description of fiction (and even then facts usually make up part of the mix). Sometimes, for example, the facts do take centre stage and the narrative is fairly benign and aimed at providing a minimum of structure, so there's no significant bias to be concerned about. — Baden

According to Nikolas Luhmann, even when mass media look like reporting the essential news, first of all, they reproduce their own self-referential communicative machinic reality:
Even if one distinguishes different selectors in news and reporting, there is a danger of generating still much too simple an image of the way the mass media construct reality. It is true that the problem is in the selection, but the selection itself is a complex event - regardless of which criteria it follows. Every selection decontextualizes and condenses particular identities which in themselves have nothing 'identical' (= substantial) about them, but merely have to be identified in the context of being reviewed for purposes of reference, of recursive use, and only for that purpose. In other words, identity is only conferred if the intention is to return to something. But at the same time, this means there are confirmation and generalization. That which is identified is transferred into a schema or associated with a familiar schema"

One way of approaching philosophy which has been resonating with me for some time now is as a cartography - the art of map making — StreetlightX

Deleuze and Guattari developed their theory of philosophical cartography, they radically contrasted mapping with tracing:
“Make a map, not a tracing. What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. For it is inaccurate to say that a tracing reproduces the map. It is instead like a photograph or X-ray that begins by selecting or isolating, by artificial means such as
colorations or other restrictive procedures, what it intends to
reproduce. The imitator always creates the model and attracts it. The
tracing has already translated the map into an image; it has already
transformed the rhizome into roots and radicles. It has organized,
stabilized, neutralized the multiplicities according to the axes of
significance and subjectivation belonging to it. It has generated,
structuralized the rhizome, and when it thinks it is reproducing
something else it is in fact only reproducing itself. That is why the
tracing is so dangerous.”

maps can be maps of all sorts of different things: terrain, air pressure, vegetation density, and so on. None of these maps are more true than the other, and maps are useful to the extent that they are used for some purpose or another — StreetlightX

Tracing is a kind of reproduction, following an already established pattern; and using and making maps can also be a kind of calcomania. Whereas the true mapping is about making oneself a part of the rhizome, taking the risk of a becoming with the unknown outcome.

One's judgment related to this project cannot be separated from one's movement generated by a creation of the new cartography, and this movement is similar to autopoietic
self-establishment of aesthetic becoming.
— Number2018

And in English? — Pseudonym

"We are not in the presence of a passively representative image, but of a vector of subjectivation. We are actually confronted by a non-discursive, pathic knowledge, which presents itself as a subjectivity that one actively meets, an absorbent subjectivity given immediately in all its complexity... This pathic subjectivity, before the object-subject relation, continues to self-actualize through energetico-spatiotemporal coordinates, in the world of language and through multiple mediations..." Guattari,
"Chaosmosis"

I fail to see how this integrates with any form of judgement. If a philosophical investigation can be considered a kind of map, no more true than any other and no less valuable than its specific utility, then how does one go about judging such an investigation? — Pseudonym

One's judgment related to this project cannot be separated from one's movement generated by a creation of the new cartography, and this movement is similar to autopoietic
self-establishment of aesthetic becoming.

I think analysing the rhetoric of the right and how it's penetrated political discourse is a different topic from discussing the intersection of political and consumer identities. — fdrake

In principle, the rhetoric of the right is inseparable
from the rhetoric of the left. And, if so, the topic of this thread should be considered in a broader context.
[quote="fdrake;209833"
The idea that all politics is done from the sole motivation of satisfying consumer identity is anathema[/quote]
It is much more complicated. Nevertheless, politics today is the politics of affect,
with numerous mimetic implications.

a strategy for influencing public discourse can become self sustaining once it has obtained sufficient attention. More attention generated means even more attention generated. — fdrake

it is difficult to transmit nuanced political analysis through the attention economy of social media, it is far less difficult to transmit a faceted perspective through the same. This is achieved by creating memetic content that contains framing devices. — fdrake

It is possible to assume that the rational and ideological modii of public discourses function just as a supportive disguise - the real goal is to mobilize a maximum public attention at this particular instant,
forming, expressing and satisfying mass desires.

What appears in shame is thus precisely the fact of being riveted to oneself, the radical impossibility of fleeing oneself to hide from oneself, the unalterably binding presence of the I to itself. ... It is, therefore, our intimacy, that is, our presence to ourselves, that is shameful." (Levinas, On Escape) — StreetlightX

It looks like Levinas's ethics does not work anymore...The relation of self to oneself has changed dramatically,
it is mediated by numerous collective apparatuses aimed at preventing one to stay with oneself...
For Primo Levi, "the shame of being a man" was a central existential meaning of life after surviving
The Holocaust; today it is almost impossible to understand it.

The challenge is to transcend our own desires and ask why it is that we desire what we do. We are not the authors of our own desires. We desire things - but why? Why do we desire to live as opposed to die? Could desire be a form of manipulation, in the same way that pain and fear manipulate us into certain courses of action? — darthbarracuda

“Our desires” are part of us as social beings in our society. It is not a form of manipulation, we desire things not because we are victims of commercials or brainwashing. For example innovations, desires to have a better product or service are reciprocal, shared by producers and customers. After been taken up by media and numerous experts, the desire starts looking as familiar and natural. If we want to transcendent, we need to escape or to stay alone, cutting off some social connections.

the problem of what is consciousness or how is it that you are conscious. This seems to only answer the question of where consciousness come from. My understanding of emergent theories is that they explain how consciousness can arise in a purely physical environment. — Hanover

Daniel Stern' in his book "The Interpersonal World of the Infant" proposed the following stages of a child development: the sequence of the Senses of the Self - they include the Sense of an Emergent Self (birth‐2 months of age); Sense of Core Self (2–6 months); Sense of Subjective Self (7–15 months); Sense of a Verbal Self (15 months on). These Selves are different kinds of conciseness coexisting in an adult's mind as heterogenic components of one complex assemblage.

The thought or belief of hunger, thirst, or physical pain isn't the same thing as experiencing actual hunger, thirst, or physical pain — TranscendedRealms

Is that possible for a conscious individual to experience actual hunger, thirst, or physical pain without thinking about them?

But lose the paranoia, dude, penis amputation is not a mass movement. — unenlightened

If most of these operations got support and provided by a variety of publicly funded medical institutions,(which is impossible without previous intensive research) and many individuals considering the possibility of this operations get publicly funded guidance and support
(which is possible just in the presence of numerous qualified and trained staff), and all related issues
may become (I am not sure about it) a part of the mandatory school curriculum - how would you call it?

One resists identification with an alternative identification; — unenlightened

You may think that "an alternative identification" is your private enterprise; yet, it should be examined if it is really a private one. Almost any identification nowadays is a way of getting involved into a socio-political
mass movement.

So the craziness of the trans-gender is perhaps rather a sane response to the craziness of society, and 'we' had best try and accommodate them within our social constructs. — unenlightened

You are absolutely right! It is impossible to understand the whole phenomenon as isolated from what is going on in the society. So many institutions and organizations, backed by mass-media are leading all the process of creating new self-identification of a transgender. Numerous talented young people see the
goal of their life in changing a gender and the whole movement is represented as a kind of revolution of nowadays. Yet, this "revolution" does not challenge any basic principles of our society.

:smile: :lol:

Of course it is an important distinction to make in others. And even more important to make in oneself. — unenlightened

Absolutely! I try not to judge others, the most important for me to find out if I am authentic myself.
This problem related to our values (Do we still have them?), and about our lives (Can we change anything in our lives? Can we even pose a problem of a proper life nowadays?)

This book is really difficult. Adorno tried to make points related to the situation in Germany in 1960s, and, particularly tried to show that so-called "authenticity" is the phenomenon of mass-culture societies, but it was established in works of Heidegger, Jaspers, and others.

Adorno wrote a book “Jargon of Authenticity,” analyzing the phenomenon and its implications for our societies.
"While the
jargon of authenticity overflows with the pretense of deep human
emotion, it is just as standardized as the world that
it officially negates; the reason for this lies partly in its
mass success, partly in the fact that it posits its message
automatically, through its mere nature. The jargon affirms
the reliability of the universal by means of the
distinction of having a bourgeois origin , a distinction
which is itself authorized by the universal. Its tone of
approved selectivity seems to come from the person
himself. The greater advantage in all this is that of
good references . It makes no difference what the voice
that resonates in, this way says ; it is signing a social
contract."