NASCAR, Sturgis, and the New Economy of Spectacle maps the structure of economies of spectacle in stock car racing and large displacement motorcycle rallying. The book traces the historical development of economic spectacles and models the structural components and moving parts that sustain them. Economies of spectatorship emerge when activities and legends in the cultural commons are privatized or enclosed as immaterial property. Once privatized, a spectacular diegesis supports a triple-circuit of profit: spectatorship markets (payments to see), sponsorship markets (payments to be seen) and trophy markets (payments to be seen enjoying). Vivid illustrations of legendary action in NASCAR and carnivalesque displays at Sturgis reveal how spectator events function as intensive sites of profit-making in contemporary capitalism.
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Series:
Daniel Krier and William J. Swart
Debord, Time and Spectacle
Hegelian Marxism and Situationist Theory
Series:
Tom Bunyard
In
Debord, Time and Spectacle Tom Bunyard provides a detailed philosophical study of the theoretical work of Guy Debord and the Situationist International. Drawing on evidence from Debord’s books, films, letters and notes, Bunyard reconstructs the Hegelian and Marxian ideas that support Debord’s central concept of ‘spectacle’. This affords a reconsideration of Debord’s theoretical claims, and a reinterpretation of his broader work that foregrounds his concerns with history and lived time. By bringing Situationist theory into dialogue with recent reinterpretations of Marx, this book also identifies problems in Debord’s critique of capitalism. It argues, however, that the conceptions of temporality and spectacle that support that critique amount to a philosophy of praxis that remains relevant today.
Manuel Mireanu
of the country’s population. As such, it is a logic of security, one that operates on the basis of employing various measures of exclusion and oppression in the name of protecting a threatened group. These exclusionary oppressive measures are mainly legitimated through the spectacle of the
Series:
Giles Waller
, where understanding is won by effort. claire preston , ‘Ekphrasis: Painting in Words’ 2 The ekphrastic conjuring of absent, offstage tragic spectacle forms a crucial part of early modern drama, both Shakespearean and more self-consciously neoclassical. Passion plays such as Hugo Grotius’ 1608 Christus
Chapter
In The Transformations of Tragedy
Edited by Fionnuala O’Neill Tonning, Erik Tonning and Jolyon Mitchell
- 05 Nov 2019
Ivan Phillips
Virginia Woolf famously dated the origins of the modern sensibility to December 1910. This chapter, using the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk or ‘total work of art’ as its theoretical starting point, argues that Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera, published in the same year, represents a distinct product of this sensibility. Enacting a compelling narrative of ‘monstrous’ unsettlement within mass culture, the novel is one of the iconic monster fictions of the twentieth century, although it continues to be critically neglected compared to similar literary horror classics. The Opera Ghost, Erik, a grotesque social outcast, is a special effects artist on a grand scale, a fairground magician and inspired architect as well as a torturer, assassin and psychotic obsessive. Beneath the Palais Garnier he creates a world of trapdoors, pulleys and costumes, of smoke and mirrors, of flame effects and water, creating a Gesamtkunstwerk within a Gesamtkunstwerk. His legacy is a troubled, prophetic and inexhaustible allegory of emergent modernity, in particular of mass media spectacle and shared popular fantasy. As charismatic as he is terrifying, as tragic as he is cruel, this beast in search of beauty seems to embody both the fear and the fascination of a complex mediated environment. Ultimately, the spaces he inhabits offer singular perspectives from which to explore the cultural conditions of the last hundred years.
Chapter
In Monstrous manifestations: Realities and the Imaginings of the Monster
Edited by Agnieszka Stasiewicz-Bienkowska and Karen Graham
- 01 Jan 2013
Tom Bunyard
philosophical and theoretical influences, and in doing so draws attention to his concerns with time and history. These concerns are used as a means of clarifying Debord’s theory of ‘spectacle’ and of highlighting its virtues and failings. The essay uses Debord’s remarks on subjectivity and temporality to pursue
C.J. Ruijgh
LE SPECTACLE DES LETTRES , COMÉDIE DE CALLIAS (Athénée X 453c-455b), avec un excursus sur les rapports entre la mélodie du chant et les contours mélodiques du langage parlé par C.J. RUIJGH Mnamosæn& FilologÛ& te SOMMAIRE: § 1. Les trois fragments en trimètres iambiques.—§ 2. La parodos.—§ 3
Epic Theatre and the Culture of Spectacle
Aesthetic Figuration of Body and Race in Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus
Series:
Ljubica Matek
order to clarify either the author’s position or perception of the Venus figure within its complex historical and contemporary context. Despite the relative abundance of scholarly insights into these topics, the play invites another reading focusing on the phenomenon of spectacle as played out in Venus
Chapter
In Exploring the Black Venus Figure in Aesthetic Practices
Edited by Jorunn Svensen Gjerden, Kari Jegerstedt and Željka Švrljuga
- 08 Oct 2019
Series:
John Asimakopoulos
In
The Political Economy of the Spectacle and Postmodern Caste, John Asimakopoulos analyzes the political economy of the society of the spectacle, a philosophical concept developed by Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard. Using the analytical tools of social science, while historicizing, Asimakopoulos reveals that all societies in every epoch have been and continue to be caste systems legitimized by various ideologies. He concludes there is no such thing as capitalism (or socialism)—only a caste system hidden behind capitalist ideology. Key features of the book include its broad interdisciplinary-nonsectarian approach with quantitative and qualitative data.
The Political Economy of the Spectacle and Postmodern Caste is well written and clear, making it accessible to the general public.
Jillet Sarah Sam
consumption has also been analyzed by Walter Benjamin ( 2002 ) 9 and Rosalind Williams ( 1982 ). 10 The visual spectacle in such spaces has been a constant theme in such analyses. Guy Debord ( 1994 ) is credited with the concept of the spectacle, defined as a social relationship mediated by the visual
