Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography by Guy-Ernest Debord. Of all the affairs we participate in, with or without interest, the groping search for a new way of life is the only aspect still impassioning. Aesthetic and other disciplines have proved blatantly inadequate in this regard and merit the greatest detachment. We should therefore delineate some provisional terrains of observation, including the observation of certain processes of chance and predictability in the streets. The word psychogeography, suggested by an illiterate Kabyle as a general term for the phenomena a few of us were investigating around the summer of 1953, is not too inappropriate.
It does not contradict the materialist perspective of the conditioning of life and thought by objective nature. Geography, for example, deals with the determinant action of general natural forces, such as soil composition or climatic conditions, on the economic structures of a society, and thus on the corresponding conception that such a society can have of the world. Welcome to Society of Illustrators of Los Angeles. <b>cultureandcommunication.org</b>/galloway/Debord.
Debord's Nostalgic Algorithm Alexander R. Galloway Published in Culture Machine #10 (2009): 131-156. 'I await the end of Cinema with optimism,' Jean-Luc Godard announced in 1965. And indeed the end was near. Guy Debord never recovered from the crisis of the 1970s. These times were times of crisis. Moro's body was discovered in the trunk of a red Renault R4 hatchback; he had been shot ten times. The decade of the seventies was long in Italy. Much has been said about Debord being at those May barricades, certainly in spirit if not also in the flesh, with Situationist graffiti festooning the pediments of respectable French society.
Although Debord had declined to engage significantly with Negri or Moro, he had indeed monkey wrenched with the Italian political scene by helping Gianfranco Sanguinetti author his August, 1975 hoax pamphlet 'The True Report on the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy,' as well as translating the text from Italian to French. The game proceeds in turns. Gloria and Monica. In Honor of the Arrival of the WeathermenBilly Graham PresentsFragmentary OppositionThe dance of revolutionIs This Our Fate? The End of CPEYou are wandering...Godard Disruption Address to Women’s LiberationGloria and Monica [Photo of Che Guevara’s corpse] The International Liberation School announces its first required course: Why pay pig morticians who use wood ripped off from the People of the Third World? A plain pine coffin and People’s Morticians will end this international banditry. With the advance of the cybernetic welfare state, the alienation of the proletariat is intensified. [January 1970] [Painting of crucifixion, with photos of the Chicago Eight pasted over the heads of Jesus and the saints] The Left abounds with Christ-figures.
“Fragmentary opposition is like the teeth on a cogwheel: they marry one another and make the machine go ’round, the machine of the spectacle, the machine of power.” [On the Spectacle cogwheel it says “Keep on grindin’.” [February 1970. [April 1970. Situationist international online. The Society of the Spectacle. The first version of this translation of The Society of the Spectacle was completed and posted online at my “Bureau of Public Secrets” website in 2002. The first print version was published by Rebel Press (London) in 2004 and several other editions were subsequently published in various print and digital formats. Meanwhile I continued to fine-tune the version on my website.
Although I will continue to tweak the online version as further improvements occur to me, this new printed edition is probably pretty close to final. There have been several previous English translations of Debord’s book. I have gone through them all and have retained whatever seemed already to be adequate. In particular, I have adopted quite a few of Donald Nicholson-Smith’s renderings, though I have diverged from him in many other cases. Many people have told me that they became discouraged by the opening pages of the book and gave up. The book is not, however, as difficult or abstract as it is reputed to be. Bureau of Public Secrets. Guy Debord. Guy Ernest Debord (French: [dəbɔʁ]; December 28, 1931 – November 30, 1994) was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International (SI).
He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie. Early life[edit] Guy Debord was born in Paris in 1931. Guy's father, Martial, was a pharmacist who died due to illness when Guy was young. Guy's mother, Paulette Rossi, sent Guy to live with his grandmother in her family villa in Italy. Involvement with the Letterists[edit] Debord joined the Letterist International when he was 19. Founding of the Situationist International[edit] In 1957, the Lettrist International, the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, and the London Psychogeographical Association gathered in Alba, Italy, to found the Situationist International, with Debord having been the leading representative of the Lettrist delegation. Written works[edit] The Society of the Spectacle by Guy-Ernest Debord. But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane.
Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness. Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation. 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. In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false. Nothingness dot Org.