Guy Debord (part one)

We are looking at a screen where freedom is running away from us.

Accessibility, openness, awareness, automation, abundance - on the one hand. Disarming and false diversity on the other. The man is lost, he is too small to know about the world in which he lives. Previously, there was no possibility of this knowledge, the question was removed, now the question is imposed.

Living in obscurity means living in fear and discontent.

The word “virtuality” comes etymologically from Latin. Vir is a man. The Romans formed another word from it - virtus. It denoted the totality of qualities inherent in a man - physical strength, moral dignity.

The culture of our time breathes under the sign of postmodernity. This is the state of modern culture, a synthetic state of philosophical positions, the entire past baggage of the arts, multiplied by the mass culture of today's broadcast network.

The value of any authority is relative, the system expands, and itself cannot keep track of its borders, it falls apart. Literature, psychoanalysis, cinema are intermediaries participating in the process of utterance, which was previously self-sufficient without all this.

Jean Baudrillard calls the gap between sign and object the cause of alienation and devaluation. The sign turns into an independent object, which, through a long series of self-copies, is completely divorced from the reality that it is intended to designate and forms a virtual reality that has nothing in common with genuine reality.

“The personality gradually loses its uniqueness, becomes a unified element of a meaningless kaleidoscope of masks, becomes an object among objects.”

Wachowski's film "The Matrix" - in one of the initial scenes of the film, the main character picks up Baudrillard's book "Simulacra and Simulations" . The film itself plays by the same rules, using the philosopher's work as a sign.

A fragment of the annotation for the publication of Slavoj Zizek’s work “On Violence” :

“...the same action can be considered violent or non-violent depending on the context. Sometimes a polite protocol smile can be more violence than an aggressive hooligan behavior. ... What is a bank robbery compared to founding a bank? ..."

The figure of Zizek himself is another excellent example. Charm and manners (“and so on, and so on”) - the image as a whole plays a cruel joke on the philosopher. Others would rather call him a man who tells funny intellectual jokes about totalitarianism and, using examples of classic cinema, tries to convey to the viewer the bright ideas of psychoanalysis.

A fragment of his speech from the documentary film “Žižek!” (note the movie title):

“There's definitely something going on here, and I just wanted to bring attention to it, how popular it is, and I think so, so I can give you the right answer now. I suppose I'll agree with this. There's something about me that's like a clown, as they put it in the New York Times, one of the Marx Brothers or whatever it was. All this... I can play with it. But still, I get tired of it because I notice that sometimes people write stupid reports about me, reactions to me, some wild impulse, comparison to make me seem like a funny person. And the real question would be, where does this desire come from? Why this need to show me as a person who can only succeed through jokes? Even my publishers are buying it. Do you know that my book about Lenin was almost rejected by Verso? Why? First of all, they always made me sick in Verso. “Oh, you’re just joking.” Then I told them: “Okay, now you have a book, a text about Lenin.” And you know what they answered: "Where are the jokes? Nobody will buy the book." So, you know, there's a lot more going on here than it seems. This is a rather complex phenomenon. I’m almost ready to say that the popularization of me is a resistance against taking me seriously.”

At the end of the film, on the location of the filming of Hitchcock's Vertigo, Žižek stages a jump down a high spiral staircase.

“And so I believe that my duty is to commit a kind of public suicide of myself as a popular comedian or whatever I am perceived to be.”

Žižek himself loves to play these postmodernist games; sometimes this game can replace the work of thought. Leveling an attempt at reflection into an already prepared wrapper. But it is worth noting that behind Žižek’s shocking facade there is a wealth of knowledge, for example, Lacan .

Jacques Lacan is a French psychoanalyst and philosopher who reinterpreted Freudian psychoanalysis using Hegelian dialectics and linguistics.

As a basic scheme of his teaching, Lacan proposed the following triad: Imaginary - Symbolic - Real.

Each of the elements is interconnected with the others and the opening of one will inevitably lead to the collapse of the entire structure.

The imaginary is the actions of another person, from whom the subject tries to psychologically protect himself and therefore creates an illusory image of his own “I”.

The symbolic is the other person in itself.

The real is how the subject perceives events, his own reality.

Correspondence with Freud's Ego - Superego - It. At the junction of this Lacanian triad, a person’s feelings, his relationships with others, with himself, with the world around him are formed. Postmodern psychoanalysis is not a painstaking long-term dialogue in search of catharsis. This is a game of reason with constructs.

In Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman , the hero discovers that it took him a whole year to recount the events of the first day of his life, and another year to describe the second day. In this regard, the hero complains that the material of his biography will accumulate faster than he can process it, and he will never be able to complete it.

The original object is copied, copied, and new copies are made from its copies. Bertrand Russell , an English philosopher and mathematician, in his book Mysticism and Logic offers an argument called the Tristram Shandy Paradox. This reasoning demonstrates a violation of the “part is less than the whole” principle, which is characteristic of infinite sets.

In an interview, Slavoj Žižek said: “...The incredible social dynamics of today's capitalism, along with scientific and technological breakthroughs, have so changed the existing system that the old ethical and religious systems no longer work.”

Probably, the causes of the crisis should be sought in the realm of spirit. In Marx's time, opium was used medicinally as a painkiller.

Every model and ideal is vulgarized and dragged into the realm of consumption. Jesus Christ is not the son of God, but the hero of a rock opera. During the Inquisition, theological constructs were sometimes used in an inappropriate manner, but they did not lose their meaning. Irony and renunciation comprehend ethics and morality. The ontological value of knowledge, gray and stingy with emotions, gives way to the bright pictures of deconstruction and flies, somersaulting, down the rabbit hole.

Louis Althusser wrote about the theory of the “death of the subject.” Initially directed against ideological constructs, the theory finds application in humans. Man can no longer be the explanatory principle of any investigation. This attitude is fixed in the worldview, in the culture. Man is portrayed as a character subject to psychological and social destruction, and man's identity with himself is in question. The concept of the decentred subject has been discussed by many others, including Lacan.

However, the paradox is that all attempts to theoretically get rid of the subject ended with the subject still appearing in theoretical consciousness as an elusive, indestructible quantity. The reason for this is the fact that such a quantity itself theorizes this problem.

Bayan Shiryanov is a well-known Russian writer in narrow circles, the author of the shortest literary work. According to legend, the novel The Blank , written in 1998, consists of a single space. According to the author, he urgently needed to write something for the competition, but there was no time. The novel was nominated, and its discussion amounted to a total of more than 500,000 characters of text.

The problem with modern art: you can twirl your finger at your temple, or you can just honestly admit to yourself that someone else did it, not you. Contemporary art is either not accepted or understood, or they pretend to cope with these two challenges. The question is how paintings like Picasso’s Guernica continue to exist on the same plane.

James Joyce's Ulysses showed, among other things, that there is nothing solid left anymore, only techniques and means, so let's juggle them. The text of the novel is monumental, but it does not compare with the thickness of a volume that would contain everything ever written about Ulysses. There is a holiday - “Bloom Day” , which is celebrated by fans of the writer’s work. On June 16 in Dublin, celebrants walk the route of the heroes of the work. Enthusiasts dress up in period costumes and even order the same dishes as in the novel.

It must be said that there is another answer, in which “Ulysses” is only a novel about a day in the life of Stephen Dedalus, and everything that is not written by Joyce’s hand is swept away.

But Debord, who is implicit in the context of this entire description, would hardly be satisfied with such an answer. No personal belief will change the order of things, but the main thing is that the context is given, let’s move on to the second part.