kyle /danm 210 /weallwearspectacles

We All Wear Spectacles

Instead of doing something sensible, like homework, or sleeping, or drinking beer, I just spent the last hour or so writing a sort of rant about why I think we should call ourselves 'We All Wear Spectacles'. Read it below and feel free to comment here or to build links to your own wiki or whatever. Please make counter suggestions, including, but not limited to: "But I don't wanna be associated with a dead, alcoholic, ill-liked french dude". yours, kyle

So, basically, I'm attracted to this name for our project cluster because I like it as a sort of pun.

It works, of course, to describe Elizabeth, Alex, Christoph and me (Kyle), inasmuch as we do all wear corrective lenses. But so what? We all wear pants, too (more on this later).

It might also be a productive way to think about our projects--or new media generally-- in that, like glasses, new media reshapes the way that we see the world. The web, for example, like glasses, can be thought of as a prosthetic that modifies our ability to comprehend our world and the social relationships that construct/ reproduce that world.

The projects that the four of us have proposed bear little resemblance to one another in most regards; our affinities lie more in our conceptual orientation. The tenuous threads that tie us together--at least at this initial stage--might be something like a desire to radically alter the way that users view their worlds. That is, there is a prescriptive (as opposed to 'descriptive') element to the works that the four of us have presented.

The other end of the pun is pretty dorky/ theory nerdy, even for me. One of the primary, uhh, 'lenses' that I generally view art activity--and late Capitalism more generally--through is Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle. If you're not familiar with that text, or with the Situationist International , there is a plethora of interesting information available on the interweb. SotS is a short text, but a pretty rigorous one, and though I recommend it to anyone interested in a radical critique of capitalism, it is pretty heavily laden with Marxist theory. A lot of people read it, and a lot of people read it wrong... see any/every issue of Adbusters if you want a sampling of how to misunderstand Debord's ideas.

The briefest, and most ad hoc introduction to Situationist Theory:

Society of the Spectacle is Debord's attempt to update Das Kapital (Vol. I) to the late twentieth century. The biggest difference between Marx's time and the late 1960s (when Debord published this text) is the proliferation of images. Though mechanical reproduction of images (photography, the printing press, lithography) were commonplace in Europe in the latter half of the nineteenth century, it would have been impossible to predict the effect that these images would have on constructing late capitalist subjectivities (the identities and ideologies of folks today). Debord's central claim is that, in contemporary society, images circulate as commodities. You may recall from Marx that commodities are social relationships (between worker and boss, etc.) masquerading as the "real" things that we buy and sell. We, then, communicate through these commodities (they act as stand-ins for the social relationships that, in their exchange form, they obscure) to such an extent that we really have no language that isn't always-already shot through with commodities. This condition is called 'commodity fetish', and it is what makes up the known world as subsumed to capitalist social relations.

Debord's observation (and, in retrospect, a central observation of Benjamin/the Frankfurt school; some would say of Barthes as well) is that because of the proliferation of imagery, and its role in the exchange of commodities, images themselves have come to act as commodities. This is so commonplace to us today that it might not strike you as noteworthy; but imagine, there was a time, not so long ago, that if you bought a pair of pants, they were just that, PANTS, purchased for their use-value of keeping the ole' legs and butt warm. Now it is impossible to buy pants, or virtually anything else, without also buying the image of those pants. You are buying the advertising that the pants company paid for, the whole bundle of 'public relations' and propaganda that the corporation constructed to sell you the pants, and, when you put the damn pants on, you become part of that same advertising system. You are wearing the image of those pants. You can't opt out of the spectacle: wearing different pants, more PC pants, pants from a thrift store, whatever, also functions as a image of wearing pants. You could wear a dress, or go naked (how's that for a 'spectacle'?), but these choices would all have meaning only in relationship to the semiotic ground of 'pants'. It's like telling someone, "don't think about ELEPHANTS." It isn't possible. Images-as-commodities, commodities-as-images, are as pervasive in our era as the air we breath. In Debord's words, "The language of the spectacle consists of signs of the dominant system of production — signs which are at the same time the ultimate end-products of that system" (Debord, 7th aphorism).

And the internet is, without doubt, the greatest triumph of the Spectacle. Debord and his nerdy French buddies (the Situationist International) were deeply sceptical about the value of art. Neigh, they sought to destroy "Art" as a system of representation--a part of the Spectacle, but the part that operated closest to home in their snoody circles of avant-garde types. Today we might do well to turn the same critical eye to our efforts as 'new media artists'--but without Debord's proclivity for exclusivity and over-dramatic in-fighting. That's how I would understand 'We All Wear Spectacles?', as an admission that we are participating in the spectacle, that it adorns us as an apparently innocuous object even as it produces us as subjects, and a critical move towards identifying and undermining the very system that produces us.

So that's it. I just think it's a pretty clever pun.

From Christoph: My choice is 'Spectacles' and I am okay with 'We All Wear Spectacles;' in a way there is one word for every person. It alludes and plays with the unifying idea of reification from a better-liked German dude named Marx. I've written about my work being disembodied or an entity in itself. In a way, I see all of our work as an entity in itself. In another way, spectacle can also be looked at in the context of creating a public spectacle to get a message across like dressing up in smeared makeup and tawdry clothing to protest the homogenization of queer identity as one example. It's clever and pretty meaningful.