Week 2: Debord

 An interesting discussion class focused on the reading assignments. Below, an interesting portion of one such reading which demonstrates and exemplifies the fact that in a Capitalist society, we can be made to work and consume on the basis of a purely fictional "need". 

1950's advertisement for fall out shelters

From the Reading: Geopolitics of Hibernation:

It is easy to see that these (already widespread) individual shelters could not possibly work, if only because of such gross technical oversights as the absence of an independent oxygen supply; and that even the most sophisticated collective shelters would offer only the slightest possibility for survival if a thermonuclear war was actually accidentally unleashed. But here, as in every racket, “protection” is only a pretext. The real purpose of the shelters is to test — and thereby reinforce — people’s submissiveness, and to manipulate this submissiveness to the advantage of the ruling society. The shelters, as a creation of a new consumable commodity in the society of abundance, prove more than any previous commodity that people can be made to work to satisfy highly artificial needs, needs that most certainly “remain needs without ever having been desires” (Preliminaries Toward Defining a Unitary Revolutionary Program) and that do not have the slightest chance of becoming desires. The power of this society, its formidable automatic genius, can be measured by this extreme example. If this system were to go to the point of bluntly proclaiming that it imposes such an empty and hopeless existence that the best solution for everyone would be to go hang themselves, it would still succeed in managing a healthy and profitable business by producing standardized ropes. But regardless of all its capitalist wealth, the concept of survival means suicide on the installment plan, a renunciation of life every day. The network of shelters — which are not intended to be used for a war, but right now — presents a bizarre caricatural picture of existence under a perfected bureaucratic capitalism. A neo-Christianity has revived its ideal of renunciation with a new humility compatible with a new boost of industry. The world of shelters acknowledges itself as an air-conditioned vale of tears. The coalition of all the managers and their various types of priests will be able to agree on one unitary program: mass hypnosis plus superconsumption.


For the whole text go here: Geopolitics of Hibernation

This again, brought up the idea that we are all selling our time to work for the class of people Debord has designated as "the managers".

A question we were left with: If you try to think about it, if you hadn't as a child been guided by your parents in any variety of activities (piano lessons, dance lessons, french lessons, soccer, football, etc.) and then, reinforced into specific roles in the educational system, what, since the time you were a small child, would you have chosen to do with your time (your whole life), and who would you be now?