I cite

discipline and participatory media

In First Monday Kylie Jarrett provides an interesting account (and critique of Andrew Barry) of the ways participatory media discipline: Jarrett. Here's an excerpt:

Participatory media can thus be associated with the production of flexible subjectivities, aligned with the needs of the culturally intensive capitalist industries associated with neoliberalism or advanced liberal economies. Interactivity therefore, is a technology which enables the reproduction of neoliberal regimes of power by producing subjects fit for the continuation of that system of power and its particular regimes of control. The interactive Web 2.0 consumer is, therefore, not only the subject of advanced liberal government as previously argued, but is also subject to that particular form of governance.

Consumerism is not the problem

Americans are given two messages: go shopping and spend responsibly. Measures of economic well-being include indexes of consumer confidence, consumer spending, housing starts, etc. At the same time, we read reports of out of control spending, outrageous credit card balances, the lowest levels of household saving in a hundred years. The American consumer is out of control and the American consumer is the lynchpin of the global economy.

The political form that these messages typically, but not necessarily, take in the US is that the right places all responsibility for the situation with individuals while the left blames capital. The conflict over the state is a conflict over the ways to direct policy, to regulate the behavior of individuals or to regulate corporations. This summer, beginning, though, in presidential primaries, there has been increasing commentary on the ways that the left and right are blurred, and blurred to favor finance capital: finance is bailed out and taxpayers (not to mention future generations) are posting the bail. Naomi Klein's "shock doctrine" seems appropriate: the US as a whole is encountering the shock effects of neoliberalism's transfer of wealth from public funds and the work and savings of people to the pockets of the .001 percent, who continue to get richer and richer. It's what has been going in the former socialist countries, Latin America, and much of Africa. Now it's happening to us.

I don't know of much theory on the left that is helpful here. Think, for a start, of the messages of consumerism: go shopping and spend responsibly. Are these messages simple reflections of the contradictions of capital? Ideology's distorted image of a fundamental incompatibility? And, is a better approach one that emphasizes abundance, infinite productivity, the productive desire of the multitude (even considered in terms of the symbolic labor of hackers as a class ala Wark)? For me, these approaches are ever less convincing.

Americans produce debt. The capitalization of debt has been at the core of the economy for over 20 years. It is parasitic on consumerism, but requires much more than that. An article in the NYT today describes the ways that credit today is no longer based on the assumption that loans will be repaid. Rather, loans pay. From the fees for administering them, the penalties attached to them, the costs in refinancing them, to their repackaging in complex debt structures, debt is the primary US asset. It's what "foreigners" buy, what we export and they invest in. It's not an economy of abundance but an economy based on a hole or absence. It circulates around this absence and is premised on buying it, selling it, betting on it--or against it (selling short).

Some have seen this consuming for a long time: corporate "mergers" and the buying of companies only to strip them of their assets, fire their workers, take on their debt, and sell that as well. Commentators have been telling us for a long time that manufacturing has declined. There have been major layoffs in white collar idea-based industries (advertising, dot coms) as well. The economy runs on debt. That's what we make now.

So the idea of the consumer as producer so prominent in net critique isn't wrong. It just hasn't named what consumers produce. Consumers produce debt.

Vanguard of the popularity culture

Against the Machine is concerned with the way that the popularity culture of the internet leads people to package and perform their selves. Why is this a problem? Siegel's answer relies on a set of oppositions:

--between fabricated and authentic
--between public and private
--between calculated and uncalculated
--between crafted and uncustomized
--between popular and singular
--between childish and adult

His critique, then, operates by prioritizing the latter term over the former, without explaining why the latter is to be preferred. Here's an example:

You remember high school. Everybody wanted to be liked by everybody else ... Yet you didn't just mold yourself to other people's interests, talents, or skills. You used your own interests, talents, and skills to gravitate toward--and attract--people who shared them.  And out of the conformist cliques based on some type of talent or skill would come the perfection of that talent or skill. Then came work, and accomplishment, and rewards, all of which reduced the pressure to conform almost to the point where it didn't exist . . . You became an adult.

I wonder who and when and what Siegel has in mind. He certainly doesn't have in mind the sociology of the fifties and sixties that worried about conformism and organization man. He doesn't have in mind Marcuse and his critique of repressive desublimation.Over the past few decades, there have been lots of layoffs throughout various sectors of the economy. I bet most of those folks don't feel like they got the rewards Siegel mentions, particularly those in blue collar jobs. And what about people who don't work outside the home? And even for those with recognition and rewards, isn't there pressure to conform? Pressure that we put on each other?

At any rate, Siegel thinks that popularity culture means conformism, people don't become unique adults but strive for popularity for its own sake. He writes:

And driving the gospel of popularity is an appeal to each one of us to replace the inflated icons with an inflated sense of ourselves--whether we have talent and discipline or not. Web culture's hatred of the famous figure often comes down to an indiscriminate mania for access to what other people have and we don't.  It's not the gaseous star we dislike; it's the fact that he possesses a status and authority we feel we deserve.

Siegel refers to web culture, but the discussion leading to that point is primarily about television and film, and the awfulness of reality tv over and against earlier television like All in the Family and Roseanne that always had a social dimension (I wonder what he thinks about My Favorite Martian and The Brady Bunch). Here's the problem: Siegel writes as if the primary emotion in popularity culture were envy. If one thinks that the democratic impulse is necessarily enviousness, then one would agree with this. But what if the 'inflated sense of ourselves' is better than this, what if it is a kind of egalitarianism that recognizes the luck and contingency in who gets the goodies? Talent doesn't always rise to the top and the top are often not very talented. Another way to put it: the top doesn't deserve status and authority. Why should Siegel, or anyone, be threatened by the fact that millions want to sing and write and make art and take advantage of the opportunity to do this and to share what they've made? It must be that the threat to cultural authority is too scary. After all, no one forces us to watch American Idol and read blogs.

Siegel (suffering from authoritarian personality disorder, perhaps, or maybe his own inflated sense of himself?) thinks that

Culture needs authoritative institutions like a powerful newspaper; it needs them both to protect its critical, independent spirit and to make sure that culture's voices get heard in the louder din of more powerful economic and political entities ... a newspaper is a lot less biased--for all its commercial pressures--a lot less susceptible to hostile influences than the unchecked ego and will of a single blogger.

Notice the move from culture's voices in the plural to the unchecked ego of a single blogger. Siegel makes a newspaper comparable to one person rather than to multiple blogs. After Judy Miller it's pretty hard to take the point about bias seriously--and also unnecessary, as anyone with a bit of knowledge of the history of journalism knows, newspapers and broadsheets were formerly strictly identified with specific parties and points of view; the idea of objective journalism is a recent development that overlaps with the rise of journalism programs and a professional class of journalists.

In this vein, Siegel repeats a bunch of old criticisms: the internet hates expertise, blogs are not accountable for what they post, stuff changes too much. He even writes that 'the blogosphere gets nary a critical paw laid on it.' This is just nonsense, particularly sense none of the criticisms Siegel makes are original. One of the most annoying:

Blogs are in the vanguard of the popularity culture. They must sound more like everyone else than anyone else is able to sound like everyone else.

Siegel seems unaware of the fact that there are multiple groups, clusters, archipelagos, topics, or carnivals. He writes as if there were no difference betwee, say, Spurious and Gawker or Infinite Thought and Little Green Footballs.

I was going to try to recap his discussion of personality--but there's not enough of a there there. He simply repeats the old lament of people not being physically present to each other, which he says leads to a sense of unlimitedness of being a person without end. Why? Because "just being on line means that you are communicating with everyone in general." Not true with email or chat. Not true when commenting on a blog. Not true when writing a post--one doesn't presume an audience of everyone. But then again Siegel doesn't think that writing online is even writing--why, because "you lack the autonomy and detachment that accompany the act of writing." He doesn't provide any support for this point. It confounds my sense of writing, particularly insofar as I don't think of my own writing in terms of autonomy or detachment. The best writing days are those in which four or five hours vanish and I don't notice it.

Popularity Culture (on Lee Siegel's Against the Machine)

I can't recommend Lee Siegel's Against the Machine. But I'll still probably write a few posts about it because the ways that it gets things wrong could be useful.

Two aspects of the book that I can't stomach are clearly matters of taste. Others might actually appreciate them. First, I hate the overuse of second person. Since Siegel's observations are so contrary to my own sense of things, the second person installs onto me a set of views I don't have. This gets increasingly annoying. Second, the book provides next to no evidence for empirical claims. For example, he claims that the fact that MySpace and YouTube are owned by giant conglomerates causes more and more "users on these sites" to "operate with an eye to material advantage." That is an empirical claim. But where is the evidence for it? I can believe it's true--but it needs to be supported with actual evidence.

In this same vein, there are all sorts of claims for how 'the audience' identifies with figures on a screen, all sorts of claims regarding identity, all sorts of claims implying that no one has ever criticized the internet. Siegel seems unaware that there are academic literatures, real existing empirical research, on these topics (he is aware of Alvin Toffler's futurism, Fred Turner's book on Stewart Brand, Chris Anderson's long tail, and Malcolm Gladwell's tipping point, which he hates with unfathomable intensity). Weirdly, Siegel's lack of substantial research mimics what he criticizes--the sloppy work and opining of bloggers and wikipedians--even as it fails to achieve the level of citation and detail that characterizes the best work by bloggers and wikipedians. One might excuse Siegel because he is a journalist. But if this is an example of "what criticism used to aspire to in terms of range, learning, high standards, and good writing," (a jacket blurb from David Rieff) then I'll take blogs any day.

Siegel's argument is simply structured. He takes the old debate over high culture versus popular culture and maps onto this debate a distinction between popular culture and internet culture or "popularity culture" (while Siegel's primary target is the internet and blogging, to make his case against popularity culture, he criticizes American Idol and pornography). The opposition didn't hold up then and it doesn't hold up now.

Siegel writes:

The last thing a budding young songwriter wanted to do in 1964 was write an imitation of "I Want to Hold Your Hand."

This is news to me. I had thought that the success of popular songs was formulaic, that producing a recognizable hook is challenging, and that imitating previous successes could lead to a hit.

But for Siegel popular culture is characterized primarily by originality, excellence (rooted in skill), authenticity, and authorization (attributes previously associated with high culture). Extending from television shows like Friends, popular musicians like Elvis, all the way to "abstract expressionism, cool jazz, film noir, beats, and hipsters," popular culture, for Siegel, is characterized by disciplined work, struggling toward originality, in the setting of a field clearly defined by predecessors and traditions. In contrast, rather than striving to be original, popularity culture aims toward reproducing originality. Siegel writes:

Whether in high or popular art, originality creates a new experience for its audience, whereas a quirk is a novel distraction ... A quirk attracts attention. Originality holds it.

What's wrong with this view? First, Siegel uses newness and stickiness as primary values despite the fact that he argues against these values throughout the book (he also has a hard time with this insofar as he acknowledges that collages and remixes can be original). Second, the idea of a new experience is too vague and slippery to be useful here, especially with respect to cultural productions. This is in part because, third, the copy is prior to the original. The presence of a copy is what makes an original an original.

Siegel's mapping of a distinction between popular and popularity culture onto the old binary of high and popular culture is accompanied by a second argument regarding identity and interiority. That is to say, the problem of popularity culture is a problem for subjects. Siegel is worried about the "packaging of interiority" an innovation that is the "driving engine behind web culture." Thus, one of his major foci in the book is the "Internet's standarized language of performing, packaged selves."

The notion of packaging interiority presumes the prior existence of a constant, manageable self or subjectivity. It is as if a blogger can capture and present herself to others, as if this self exists in a coherent way, that this coherence is prior to its expression, and that this expression is without ruptures and remainders. It seems like Siegel may be the last writer living in Brooklyn who has never been in analysis. Or that he's not read much psychoanalysis or sociology, for example, Goffman's discussions of the presentation of the self in everyday life; self-presentation, packaging, performativity, are not unique to the internet.

Siegel cites Christopher Lasch on the narcissistic personality and, not surprisingly, finds such narcissism rampant on the internet. So he depicts image uploading as an attempt to get noticed (rather than say a way to share vacation photos with friends) and "consumed"  by strangers.  He writes:

Your playful leisure time acquires the rational, calculating, self-conscious quality of labor in the marketplace. ...  Demassification has made areas of privacy and intimacy that always stood apart from the marketplace part of it. The saddest personal experience, the most outrageous sex act, the most blatant insult, gets "produced" as a video clip or blog entry for worldwide consumption.

Siegel assumes that blogging and participating on social networking is only and necessarily undertaken as an act oriented to a 'worldwide audience.' He assumes, in other words, a mass media model for networked media. This is a problematic assumption for various reasons, not the least of which is the fact that the majority of teenagers participating in social networking sites restrict viewers to friends. Another reason the assumption is wrong: language differences, interest differences, topic differences. The kind of 'production' that irks Siegel is commodity production, the packaging of selves and experience. But the presentation of a self or experience, no matter how banal, is not necessarily commodity production (like, academic articles are not commodities; local theater productions are not commodities; stories written by school kids are not commodities).

In my next post, I'll take up the problem Siegel associates with packaged selves.

Inflicting your stupid stuff on the rest of us

Why is it that blog posts and comments are so often described as "inflicted" on the rest of us? It's like 'the rest of us,' everyone in the entire world, are victims of what is written on a single blog, in a single post, in single thread. How is it that the world became the victim of bloggers, and not just some specific blog, blogger, or group of bloggers, but bloggers in the abstract inflicting themselves on a victimized people in the abstract?

The general language of victimization around bloggers inflicting their boring lives, their busy lives, their sex lives, their stupid pet videos, their speaking dates, their naked photos on the rest of us is not a version of the criticism of rapid political bloggers or snarky celebrity bloggers all working round the clock to attack their specific targets. It's different, a criticism that sees blogging per se as an activity that victimizes and harms regardless of the content. Harm is an element of the practice, embedded as a feature of the platform, like a link or tag.

Fortunately (for all of us, really, for the entire world), Zizek (a superhero if there ever was one) has provided the analytical tools necessary for grappling with this conundrum (maybe like Indiana Jones' whip, although Dr. Jones can't quite be classified as a super-hero; weird how Superman doesn't seem to use tools at all, like if tool use is somehow constitutive of being human then he is posthuman). Contemporary mediated subjects are fragile, narcissistic subjects, perpetually commanded to enjoy. Without stable points of symbolic identification, they tend to oscillate between the imaginary and the Real, crafting their ever adaptable, morphing, trendy identities yet necessarily under threat by the success, presence, enjoyment of others. Commanded to enjoy, yet unable to, they see others as enjoying when they can't. The others must be stealing their enjoyment...

So, if bloggers weren't inflicting their stupid stuff on the rest of us, the rest of us would be out enjoying, having a a great time (like the episode of the Simpsons when they didn't have television). We would be honing our writing, not reading the half-assed thoughts of idiots. We'd be making real art, not looking at stupid cat videos. We'd be spending time with our family, not chatting with strangers on social networking sites.

The structure of the language of infliction, then, rests on the premise of fragile, narcissistic people, threatened by the presence and enjoyment of others, preoccupied with the worry that others' lives are more meaningful or fun than theirs. And, when they read our blogs and discover that our lives are really not worth having been read about, then they are furious, outraged--why did you waste my time? Why did you take my precious?

The very big Other

I'm frustrated with In Defense of Lost Causes. Zizek writes:

the example of cyberspace clearly demonstrates how the big Other is present more than ever: social atomism can only function when it is regulated by some (apparently) neutral mechanism--digital solipsists need a very complex global machinery to be able to persevere in their splendid isolation.

and

The task of radical politics is therefore not to denounce the inadequacy of every small other to stand in for the big Other (such a 'critique' only reinforces the big Other's hold over us) but to undermine the very big Other and, in this way, to untie the social bond the big Other sustains. Today, when everyone complains about dissolving social ties (and thereby obfuscating their hold over us, which is stronger than ever), the true job of untying them is still ahead of us, more urgent than ever.

These passages come from a section of the first chapter. One of the general ideas, I think, is Zizek's oft-repeated account of the claustrophobia that results from the decline of the symbolic, the loss of a space of appearances wherein something stands for something more than itself. The only way these particular passages make sense to me, then, is if one assumes a very different notion of the big Other to be at work. We could call it the very big Other or the psychotic big Other, designating thereby the monstrous imaginary other that merges with the Real when the paternal function is foreclosed. So long as no small other can appear as more than what it is, so long as it remains simply itself in its idiotic empiricality, we remain mired in immanence, seriality, strings and strings of S2.

The cyberspace example, though, doesn't work. Rejecting characterizations of contemporary media that emphasize the suspension of social ties, Zizek writes:

in order for an individual to immerse herself in the virtual space, the big Other has to be there, more powerful than ever in the guise of cyberspace itself; this directly universalized form of sociality which enables us to be connected with the entire world while sitting alone in front of a screen.

Can the codes and connections enabling networked communications be understood as a form of the big Other? I don't think so. Not if the big Other is indistinguishable from the Symbolic. Part of the pleasure of digital media is the sense that what one does or sees or writes doesn't register to the big Other, that it connects or enables snippets of intensity without 'counting;' shoot, even 'counting' doesn't quite count (the big Other doesn't know how many returns I get when I google my name). It makes more sense to think of the internet in terms of the merging of the imaginary and the Real, the Real networks and transactions, the matrix, combined with what we imagine these networks and transactions to be for us. So it could be the very big Other, the scary, necessary, and now inextricables codes and protocols we can't quite escape.

What could it mean for Zizek to say that the true job of untying social ties is ahead of us? that the task of radical politics is "to undermine the very big Other and, in this way, to unite the social bond the big Other sustains"? It has to involve some version of seeing or experiencing the ties as representing something else.  Perhaps it means that another has to be able to appear as symbolizing something more; so we have to relinguish our human ties to enable the appearance of inhuman ones.

Hooked on a feeling

Although I remain confused and mystified by The Community Community and Means without Ends, one of my favorite ideas from these books is the spectacle's return to us of our linguistic nature in an inverted fashion.

The spectacle contains and captures the possibility of a common good. We could even say its production of a common is its good or that the power of spectacle is its production of the common as a feeling, necessarily shared. Its form is inseparable from its affect. A spectacle is affective form and this is its common good.

Yet this common good is so fungible, so commodifiable, that we feel its force most often as lost. Zizek would emphasize stolen. We might also call this feeling of lost common good a sense of corruption or distorted. The common, the we, appears or is manifest only through distortions, inversions, and corruptions, via theft, commodification, and capture. We feel the common, our commonality or a commonness, by feeling also and at the same time its corruption or capture. Conceptually it's possible to separate the common good from the spectacle that inverts and returns it to us, but only conceptually, not actually.

Actually we encounter our hope for change channeled and manipulated into mainstream political parties and candidates, into commodities and ads and packaged experiences that promise to be different, this time, to be spectacular. We encounter or experience our own feeling pushed and distorted into too simple packages of for and against, optimist and pessimist. Where one argues that the pessimists are cynics demeaning one's authentic political longing, another views the optimists as kool-aid drinking compromisers. In either case, the common good as intensity of being and belonging together impresses itself upon us with and as the intensity of our sense that another is trying to take or distort, capture or coopt it.

If optimism is felt as a threat, then, this is not primarily a fear of feeling or an inability to risk hoping again after being disappointed. Yes, it is felt as a threat when one feels pressured to like-feeling, to identifying with the group spirit or identifying group spirit as the common good: having grown up Southern Baptist, I know this feeling well, this pressure to feel the Holy Spirit, to feel Jesus in the room. Did others feel It, Him? Or is what they felt the pressure to feel? And did they name this pressure God, the big Other? (My son says his friends are incredulous that he is an atheist, "Dude, but God is like awesome!"). In this example, it isn't the specificity of optimism that's the problem. It's the compulsion to feel like everyone else, on their time. If there is a sense of threat, and there may not be, this sense comes first and it itself part of the inverted return of common good. This sense is the carrier, the impulse we invest with our hopes and fears, our optimism and pessimism, our faith in the future or defense of lost causes.

Rather than optimism as what is at risk, hope as a desire too fragile to sustain, optimism and pessimism are two aspects of the same distorted common feeling, what the inverted spectacle returns to us. The spectacle may be political (it always has political effects), commercial, religious, sexual, even natural (understood as unavoidably mediated). Spectacle is a form for imagining, projecting, experiencing, believing in the movement of others, we are moved because they are. 

Ranciere

Ranciere writes:

The many, in whatever form they appear, will continue to hold sway.

Can they appear without a form? Or does a form, any form, enable them to appear? Is the emergence of a form an event? Or is an event the rupturing of a form through the appearance of a many that exceeds it?

Cicero as blogger

An article by John Nicholson in The Classical Journal describes Cicero's communicative practices. He enjoyed exchanging letters, no matter how vacuous. Here are some excerpts:

I prefer to write an empty letter than not to write at all.

I really have nothing to write about, as you have just left.

This then is all I have for you, nothing new. "Why bother then to write?" And, when we are together, and chatter away with whatever comes into our heads? Surely there is some value in causerie, in which the mere interchange of talk is agreeable, even if there is nothing behind it.

Perhaps the some value is whatever value, the value of anything whatsoever in its affective connective capacity, it's attempt to express, open, and link, to open through expression of anything whatsoever. And here I wonder about the relation of whatever value to potential for in expressing this rather than that, whatever it might be, one is expressing something not nothing. That nothing is no longer present as potential. Through expression, one has exposed oneself to a new nothing, a non-responsiveness. The primary nothing is gone, not-nothing. Something, anything whatever, has been exposed and exposure is risky.

"A kind of eternity of noisy insignificance" (on disintegrated spectacles)

I've been looking again at Debord's Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. I'm interested in how it misfires when media consumers are media producers. The basic problem: he presupposes broadcast media.

1.  The spectacle is not a form of state power. This does not mean that it does not provide mechanisms of control, but that the mechanisms are dispersed into communication networks. People can circumvent spectacles staged by politicians and the msm. But this does not mean they are any more free. It means that capture operates according to different technologies. So I disagree with Debord when he writes:

Spectacular government, which now possess all the means necessary to falsify the whole of production and perception, is the absolute master of memories just as it is the unfettered master of plans which will shape the most distant future.

No.

2.    Debord provides a helpful list of the attributes of a society at the stage of the integrated spectacle:

--incessant technological renewal (which surrenders everyone to the mercy of specialists)
--integration of state and economy
--generalized secrecy
--unanswerable lies (have eliminated public opinion which has lost the ability to make itself heard)
--an eternal present

My list counters his:

--incessant technological renewal (which contributes to the production of amateurs and a sense that no specialist ever really knows)
--neoliberalization of governance (authoritarian state that uses it power to maintain inequality; Debord's account remains bound to a critique of technocracy and the welfare state)
--generalized publicity (revelation and disconcealment)
--a decreasing ability to distinguish between truth and lies, a decline in a politics wherein truth matters (collapse of symbolic efficiency)
--a focus on what's next, prediction, forecasting, the biggest thing after the next biggest thing (and here I like Debord's remark that "the uses of media guarantee a kind of eternity of noisy insignificance")

3.    Debord emphasizes the experts that serve the media and state, the experts as falsifiers and fools. But this sets up a kind of underlying faith in amateurs, in ordinary people, in individuals with the "capacity to see things for themselves" (his phrase). To this extent, it can't account for the ways that participatory media itself functions to enthrall people to communicative capitalism.

4.  Debord suggests the problems that arise when "those who control information" can alter at will individual reputations. But what about when we alter our images ourselves?

5.  Debord rightly emphasizes the repetition constitutive of "the spectacle," for repetition is a characteristic of (specular) drive (the logic of disintegrated spectacles). Yet he laments that "there is no place left where people can discuss the realities which concern them." Today people discuss this constantly and everywhere and this very discussion provides a barrier against acts. Talk. Talk. Talk.

6.  Debord notes that in spectacular society, democracy is no longer open to attack. This is true enough (Zizek offers a version of this argument). Yet he says it is because "all argument has become useless." I think it is because the very fact of arguing, which is everywhere and constant, is raised as evidence for the fact and success of democracy.

7.  Debord says that people have never been less entitled to make their opinions heard. He says the spectator is supposed to know nothing. Today, the opposite is the case: everyone has a right to her own opinion. And the truth is out there--just google it.

8.  Where Debord is brilliantly prescient:

Such a perfect democracy constructs its own inconceivable foe, terrorism. Its wish is to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results . . . The spectators must certainly never know everything about terrorism, but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else must be acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic.

9.  Debord worries about images as the individual's connection to the world. His worry, though, stems from the fact that the images are "chosen and constructed by someone else." This suggests, again, that freedom from spectacular power might be found in participatory technology. Freedom through Apple and Flickr. Anyone who makes their own images is a threat. Again, this leaves out the underlying problems of ownership of infrastructure and the acceleration of an image environment as ever more people upload videos to You Tube. It's not that "spectacular discourse leaves no room for any reply." It's that replies are not responses, they are contributions to the circulation of messages.

10.  The next passage is helpful, if not quite right. Debord writes:

The erasure of the personality is the fatal accompaniment to an existence which is concretely submissive to the spectacles rules, ever more removed from the possibility of authentic experience and thus from the discovery of individual preferences.  Paradoxically, permanent self-denial is the price the individual pays for the tiniest bit of social status. Such an existence demands a fluid fidelity, a succession of continually disappointing commitments to false products. It is a matter of running hard to keep up with the inflation of devalued signs of life.

Might this be a glimpse of whatever being? A glimpse unfortunately compiled via a modernist (romantic and liberal) conception of the self in terms of authentic experience and individual preference but nevertheless attuned to the erasures of distinctions in the wake of the fluidity of identities under communicative capitalism. It's not self-denial, though, that's the problem here. Injunctions to enjoy prevent subjects from enjoying as they fight the "inflation of devalued signs of life."