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Themesicon: navigation pathArt and Cinematographyicon: navigation pathDebord
 
 
 
 
 

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general, [which] as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.» Although this distinction itself merits a close and careful reading, for the present investigation it must suffice to say that the latter use of the expression is allegorical: «The spectacle, as the present social organization of the paralysis of history and memory, of the abandonment of history built on the foundation of historical time, is the false consciousness of time» (SoS, Thesis 158). The conflation in turn stems from Debord´s rhetorical employment of the notion of spectacles qua images or representation to concretize his reading of «spectacle» as the allegory of late capital.

2. Spectacle und Cinema

A characteristic instance of this strategy can be found among the illustrations in the journal Internationale situationniste (hereafter IS)—a rich collection of montage/collage work on pieces of commodity culture, including such détournements [5] as recaptioned or reworked advertisements, comic strips, newspaper photographs, problematic depictions of scantily clad women, illustrations from industrial manuals, graphs,

 

and so forth [6] . In one of the last issues of the journal there is a reproduction of a magazine advertisement for German Eumig home movie cameras [fig 6.3 und Bildunterschrift] whose text reads, «I LOVE MY CAMERA BECAUSE I LOVE TO LIVE: I record the best moments of life and revive them at will in all their richness.» Underneath the image there is a caption entitled «The Domination of Life by the Spectacle» that reads as follows: «This advertisement for Eumig cameras (Summer 1967) evokes very well the petrification of individual life, which has reversed itself into a spectacular economy: the present can now be lived immediately as memory. Time is submitted to the illusory order of a permanently available present and, through this spatialization of time, both time and life have been lost together.» [7]

Here film functions not as the cause but as an illustration, an ‹evocation»›or figure—albeit a privileged one—for a socio-political and epistemological shift that has taken place under late capitalism. An attitude toward the production of spectacle (home movies) is taken as a symptom of a «spectacular economy» (the temporality of an alienated social condition). As Debord

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