Monday, March 31, 2008

Debord says:

"no one can be the enemy of what exists"

This he said in 1988, referring to the spectacle's (i.e. post-industrial capitalism's) instant absorption of all opposition, confirming Badiou's ontology/event schema--wherein an ontological situation (composed of all the knowledge, ideoleology, modes of production, relations, etc. that exist) can only be disrupted by a revolutionary event that forces a new knowledge, a new discourse, a new spirit, a new mode of production or social relation hitherto unthinkable... hitherto non-extant. 

What this means is that we can position ourselves as enemies of the capitalist spectacle only from a retrospective vantage point to  be determined on the heels of the revolutionary event.

Tired socialist utopian rhetoric of imagination hereby deemed entirely ineffective, we must tease out the void in the extant situation--that which has not been properly counted by the state (see: "the spectacle is merely the excess of the media")--in order to reveal its foundational shortcomings. Only then can we rightfully claim to know that we have indeed been enemies of the spectacle all along. 

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