Critical Studies Research Group

After the reading week break, our next work-in-progress presentation will take place this forthcoming Tuesday (12nd Nov). Dr. Tom Bunyard will present a paper on “Temporality, Praxis and Ethics in the Theoretical Work of Guy Debord and the Situationist Internationalt“. Tom has kindly sent us an abstract for his presentation:

Within Anglophone academia the work of the Situationist International (S.I.) often seems to be viewed largely in art-historical terms, whilst the work of the group’s primary theorist, Guy Debord, tends to treated as a crudely essentialist critique of the mass media: his theory of ‘spectacle’ thus becomes an elaborate diatribe about a society that has become saturated with literally visual forms. His most famous work, 1967′s The Society of the Spectacle, is however best understood as a book about history; or, more accurately, as a Hegelian Marxist account of a society that has become characterised by an alienated relation to its own historical agency. This article will attempt to pursue these aspects of Debord’s account by attending to his much neglected concern with temporality. If that interest in time and history is pursued via an engagement with the philosophical and theoretical material that informed his own and the S.I.’s work, then one can go some way towards accessing the notions of praxis and historical agency that underlie it; and if one does so, it may prove possible to extract from them a set of ideas pertaining to strategy and political organisation that could perhaps be considered in their own right. The article endeavours to frame this problematic as an attempt to push the concept of spectacle beyond its current iteration within Debord’s extant formulations, and does so by demonstrating that the concept’s purview need not be reductively identified with the consumer capitalism that it was primarily intended to define.

As always, we’ll meet at room 303 (Pavilion Parade) between 1-2pm.