Tag: PhD

Situationist Space, and Pervasive Gaming

In scattered and barely noticed ways, the desire to construct one’s own life was shaping the twentieth century p.10

(This and all subsequent quotes are, unless stated otherwise, from Essays in Guy Debord and the Situationist International edited by Tom McDonough (MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2004))

Those who have been following my tweets over the past two weeks are so will have seen that one of the places I’ve started reading for my PhD is contemporary philosophy. Now there’s a degree to which you could argue philosophy has nothing to do with the advent of technology and the arts. And that’s the degree to which you’d be wrong. Philosophy takes a step back from the world, from society, and looks at what it is to be. It is the science of thought, it brought us into the age of enlightenment, it showed us why we felt empty after religion became irrelevant and it shows us how we’ve tried to fill that gap. The two main movements I’m looking at to kick off with are the situationists, and phenomenology. One looks at the reclamation of physical space from the spectacle of advance capitalism, and the other attempts to form a science of subjective realities.

OK, it may not be sounding strictly relevant yet.

I believe in 3D thought – I think that theory is nothing without practice, and also, that practice is nothing if not situated – to some degree, within theory. I don’t necessarily mean the dry theory of academia, anything, even art for arts sake is situated in theory – in thought – by design. I’m going to look at the situationists here, because they have everything to do with an event I’m attending tomorrow – a city wide pervasive gaming event held by Hide&Seek.

The situationists came out of nothing. Literally. They developed out of Dadaism, which, in reaction to the horror of the world wars, made art out of nothing, and nothing out of art. Dada had seen life treated as nothing, the situationists had seen the beginning of this nothing being replaced with a bigger, newer, shinier absence: consumerism.

If society is organized around consumption, one participates in social life as a consumer; the spectacle produces spectators, and thus protects itself from questioning. It induces passivity rather than action, contemplation rather than thinking, and a degradation of life into materialism. […] Desires are degraded or displaced into needs and maintained as needs. p.8

The situationists talk about a life built on spectacle, a virtual world built of everything we’re told we should think, say and feel. It’s not just the tools of consumerism such as “advertising, or propaganda, or television. It is a world. The spectacle as we experience it, but fail to perceive it, “it is not a collection of images, but a social relationship between people, mediated by images”” p.9

Our society is dominated by the spectacle- by the spin of modern politics, by the narrative of modern life, by the dreams we’re given and happily ever afters we’re taught to crave. The situationists saw this. But they also saw that we are united.

Foreclosing the construction of one’s own life, advanced capitalism had made almost everyone a member of a new proletariat, and thus a potential revolutionary. p.11

The solution? The reclamation of our world, the subversion of the spaces dominated by narratives not of our own making. They suggested two modes of change: the dérive, and détournement. Continue reading The Cracks Between the Worlds