Black Friday is not only a chaotic holiday for shoppers, but it is also an extremely exciting time for those in the media to represent the spectacle of this chaos to the public. The public then consumes this content at face-value, continuing the chaos online and in their homes. In light of Black Friday’s “festivities,” Guy Debord’s Society of Spectacle shone out to me as a great way to explain it. It’s not really a phenomenon, but an obsession in a society that perhaps values the commodity more than other areas. This personal essay explores the parallels I have seen between Black Friday and Guy Debord’s writing.
All citations are from Guy Debord in his work La Société du spectacle (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1967). Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994).
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“The world the spectacle holds up to view is at once here and elsewhere; it is the world of the commodity ruling over all lived experience. The commodity world is thus shown as it really is, for its logic is one with men’s estrangement from one another and from the sum total of what they produce.”
I’m a Search Engine Optimization Specialist in French and in English for a marketing company in Detroit. I like to say that I fix the Internet for a living, while getting to implement my French Literature degree. The reality is that I put the right words in the right places, and if the search engine algorithms take kindly to them, these words will rank better on Google. I describe it to my college advisor as, “writing French and English prose poems about the Chevrolet Silverado.”
I celebrate my anniversary at the company in November. My manager congratulates me. She was worried I wouldn’t make it this long, away from my family and friends in New York, in a field that isn’t as creative as one might hope. (Conversations with my manager include, “No Allegra, you can’t say that the Chevrolet Malibu is ‘making waves in Ottawa.’ I don’t think Canadians even know what Malibu Beach is.”)
As Black Friday and Cyber Monday approach, I think about the chaos of those days. Sitting in the cafeteria at work, I ask my coworkers if they have ever waited on line for Black Friday specials. One had waited five hours for a discounted computer. I envision my colleague, as he describes, in a beach chair waiting in the depths of daylight savings and Michigan cold outside a store for a better processor and graphics card. Cyber Monday is better, according to them. No lines. Instant gratification. Two-day shipping.
“The spectacle corresponds to the historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life. It is not just that the relationship to commodities is now plain to see—commodities are now all that there is to see; the world we see is the world of the commodity.”
In college, I learned that the dawn of the Internet, much like the Industrial Revolution, and future innovations, had artists and politicians thinking about its potential functions. Whether it was Marinetti’s claim that the rumble of a car’s motor was more beautiful than La Victoire de Samothrace, or the early use of hypertext breaking down the visual fourth wall in choose-your-own-adventure stories, the avant-garde loved its new technologies.
Augmented reality is the geolocation of a digital object in physical space. For example, if I built a virtual box and placed it on the latitude and longitude where my desk is in physical space, and used a certain mobile application on my smartphone, I could see the box on my device, sitting on my desk. My entrepreneurial mind saw the practical applications it could have in the business sector. This was much to the horror of my artsy peers. I fell silent and prostrated myself in my mind before the great artists and writers:
“Art for art’s sake,” chanted my visions.
In November of 1967, Guy Debord, the Situationist who both mourns the death of the avant-garde and starts the process of rebuilding with his famous words “A reprendre depuis le debut,” published La Societé du Spectacle. In it, he describes the evolution of industrial progress, and its own demise. A reprendre depuis le debut: to start over from the beginning. It sounds exciting and terrifying. A fresh start from the destruction of earth, over consumption, from the need for the commodity.
Several of my colleagues are buying smart watches on Cyber Monday. They will refresh their browsers until a white apple appears at their door with their discounted merchandise. They will like the product for two weeks. They will wear the product and talk about it (and to it) incessantly. They will buy another one next year. They make more money than I do. I don’t know if that matters to me anymore.
I walk past a busker singing and playing guitar downtown. She has hair the color of the Statue of Liberty after it rusted and parts of it are like a Mediterranean wave. I am jealous of her. My mother says I am jealous of a moment.
“A blocked practice and its corollary, an antidialectical false consciousness, are imposed at every moment on an everyday life in thrall to the spectacle—an everyday life that should be understood as the systematic organization of a breakdown in the faculty of encounter, and the replacement of that faculty by a social hallucination: a false consciousness of encounter, or an “illusion of encounter.” In a society where no one is any longer recognizable by anyone else, each individual is necessarily unable to recognize his own reality. Here ideology is at home; here separation has built its world.”
You’d have to be a moron-o to not buy the Buick Verano. I don’t dare to put it on a website. I think of the busker. I want to find her. How do you Google a moment? How do you add a memory to your connections on LinkedIn? I don’t know enough about Search Engine Optimization to find her, and facial recognition technology still makes me uncomfortable. A chat-bot pops up. His name is Jerico. He asks me if he can help me find anything on this website, whose business is located in Vancouver. I close the window.
The Black Friday specials are up on all the websites. You can buy a car online these days. As I drive in my trusty foreign car, I wonder if the Futurists would have made good car salesmen. I wonder if they would have worn smart watches. I look at my wrist, sporting a bright pink hair-tie. I do not want a smart watch. I want to travel around France by train, circling places I have been before, over and over again. I want to dye my hair the color of the Mediterranean and paint pictures on the smooth stones that line its beaches. I want to have a financially stable life. I do neither. I will buy clothes on Cyber Monday and regret it. I won’t return them.
“In contrast to the passing fashions that clash and fuse on the frivolous surface of a contemplated pseudo-cyclical time, the grand style of our era can ever be recognized in whatever is governed by the obvious yet carefully concealed necessity for revolution.”
I wonder, after all, if anyone is actually paying attention to the itty-bitty prose poems on these websites, if anyone is buying a car on Black Friday, and if, in a year, we will order our tickets to the singularity, never to return.
“Art is tough,” write the graffiti artists, creating in the dark. They beckon me to join them, spray-painting a cartoon entry-way and creeping inside. From the inside, I can see that it is cloudy. I hold up my phone to the doorway. An inscription above the entrance reads:
“The Chevrolet Impala is like a gazelle, with a powerful motor to get you where you need to be around Quebec quickly, efficiently, and with elegance. On sale for Black Friday now, schedule your test drive today!”
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Allegra Rosenbaum is an Assistant Blog Editor at Asymptote. She attended Bard College where she earned a Bachelor’s Degree in French Literature. Her writing has been featured in SEPT, Le Temps, and Sui Generis.
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