THE FETISH IN THE SPECTACLE

On the nature and forms of redemption
 introduction

 

In the past, it was a fear of a "great other", today it is the fear of our own seemingly infinite possibilities that we allow ourselves to be seduced into. But how can our "I" bear fear at all and in what rituals and discourses can one communicate with others about shared fears?

Let us start with Michel Foucault. No, let us rather start with Guy Debord, because the title of this project already gives it away - as soon as you read "spectacle", you think of Guy Debord. And that's a good thing.
So let us start with Guy Debord:

Guy Debord introduces his book ″The society of the spectacle″ with a quotation from Ludwig Feuerbach, who concluded in his theses that God is only an idea, a projection of man. Man imagines God according to his own wishes and needs, so Freuerbach. However, because these ideas are culture-dependent, different religions have developed. More on this elsewhere. Back to Guy Debord.

Debord even gives the quotation a title, a number:
           I. The completed separation 
"But of course, this time, which prefers the image to the thing, the copy to the original,
the idea to the reality, the appearance to the essence; for sacred to it is only illusion, but profane is truth. Yes, holiness increases in their eyes in the same measure as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion is for them also the highest degree of holiness."
Feuerbach (The Essence of Christianity, Preface to the Second Edition) , 1841

Feuerbach was not the only one to notice the alienation of the so-called civilised societies. He stands between Hegel and Marx...

And ok - the concept of alienation is a basic concept of philosophy and its development can be traced back to Greek antiquity. And the term has, of course, adapted to the respective Zeitgest, but alienation basically denotes an individual or social condition in which an originally natural human relationship is suspended, reversed, disturbed or destroyed. To whomever this relationship may have been. Shortened, one could say that for a long time it was the relationship to God that dissolved relatively quickly when the industrial revolution promised faith in prosperity and progress.

And today - today even the most uncritical thinkers of progress and believers in growth should not have failed to notice by now that in all these "civil societies", i.e. societies that have fully committed themselves to this belief in progress, that there the individual human being is increasingly falling by the wayside due to progress itself.

For the price of this promise of prosperity is being paid by more and more people in the form of exploitation, unemployment, illness, a lack of meaning and increasing helplessness.

The order of things