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Review Apr 23 2009 « | »
Elevator Gallery presents Debord and the 'Society of the Spectacle' The Hackney-Wick-based Elevator Gallery ventured across to King's Cross last night to present the second in a series of......

Harry Williams

The Hackney-Wick-based Elevator Gallery ventured across to King's Cross last night to present the second in a series of three talks on contemporary theory. The host is the radical bookshop Housman's on the Caledonian road, and a strange mixture of young arty types and hairy middle aged men in leather jackets crammed into the small space between the 'Noam Chomsky' and the 'Anarchism' sections, sweating slightly on this balmy Spring evening.

Guy Debord and the Situationist International have undergone a muffled renaissance of late in arty circles - an English translation of Debord's 'Society of the Spectacle' (1967) only appeared in 1995 - and this was an excellent brief introduction to his life and work. A good looking, breathy young man - the representative of Elevator - took us through a series of dense quotes from 'Society of the Spectacle', illustrating Debord's adaptation of Marx (the commodity becomes spectacle), and his relation to Foucault's idea of the Panopticon and Baudrillard's sense of 'hyper-reality'.

Debord's literary, abstract prose was grounded in concrete examples, notably the range of toothbrushes on sale at Tesco's (the illusion of choice), and the failure of democracy to offer real choice (Labour and Conservative as effectively the same thing). One of Debord's most prescient ideas is that of 'pseudo-cyclical' time, ie history does not exist in our spectacular society, the pattern of work and leisure repeats itself endlessly with no sense of the past. Yet without an understanding of history, 'states cannot operate strategically'. Here, it was suggested, Debord effectively predicted the disaster of the present occupation of Iraq.

The talk was followed by a 20 minute collage of some of Debord's films. Next up is 'The Postmodern Condition', next Wednesday, 29th April. You can find the Housman's website here.

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