“Live in your world. Play in ours.” Like most advertising slogans, this one for a certain digital game console presents itself as a statement that aspires to the status of a fact. There are two worlds, it announces, as if this was something to which we could only agree. One belongs to you; one belongs to a corporation. I am welcome to stay in my own world, but there may not be much to do there. Come to their world, which is much more fun, and really so very inexpensive!
If one were to think like a Situationist, this ad might appear a little differently, and a little more critically. It is not a matter of pointing out that the slogan is in some sense ‘false advertising’. Situationists are not ‘Adbusters’, pointing out the deceit involved in any particular ad.* On the contrary, what might appeal about it from a Situationist perspective is that it says something quite true.
“Live in your world. Play in ours” is a true statement about a falsified life. This can be a difficult idea to grasp, but a powerful one. From a Situationist point of view, it is not that particular statements in or about our world are untrue. Rather it is that this world is itself untrue. It has been made over in a false image. Whatever else it may have to say for itself, the spectacle – as the Situationists termed this world of appearances – truly advertises its own falsity. Where the usual assumption is that things may be false in a few particulars but overall the world is true to itself, the Situationists thought quite the reverse. The world is false as a totality, but occasionally true in a few particulars. “In a world that really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false.”
So, paradoxically, the “live in your world, play in ours” slogan is a true statement about a falsified world. It’s truth resides in the split it announces between a world in which one merely ‘lives’, and another, brighter one in which one ‘plays’. The life one is obliged to live and the play that might otherwise enliven it have been separated, and the more lively if less lifelike of the two is the property of the spectacle. This divided world is a world alienated from itself. When I am free to act in the way that conforms to my desires, it is merely in a game where my actions have no purchase on the world. Where my actions do have purchase on the world, I am not free to act on my desires. I have to work on making a world that is not of my choosing.
This is the first operation one might perform, in the name of a Situationist critique. The ad speaks truly about a false world, in which desire and action are separated from each other. The second operation is to ask: Call this living? Call this play? Not only are living and playing separated from each other, but both have been devalued by this separation. There is a poverty to both my actions and my desires. My actions are cut off from my desires, and become tedious, boring, repetitive. My desires are cut off from my actions and become mere fantasies, uninteresting even to me. My fantasies are so boring that I would have to pay someone to take an interest in them. And hence there is psychoanalysis in which I might pay for privilege of just talking about my desires.
If one were to judge this society by its advertisements, it seems like a richly rewarding world. And yet on closer examination, this ‘society of the spectacle’ merely advertises its poverty. I could choose to play in ‘their’ world, and if I’m lucky, I get to give myself carpal tunnel syndrome twizzling a controller playing games. Of course I do not have to ‘choose’ that particular world to play in, and others may seem to some more interesting. The spectacle offers me ‘freedom of choice’. And yet, I still have to choose, and everything from which I have to choose is essentially the same. A key question goes unasked amid this repetitive splendor: “What would not be wasted time? The development of a society of abundance should lead to an abundance of what?”
Or at least, that is what the spectacle offers in its overdeveloped sectors – Europe, Japan, America. In its underdeveloped sectors, I may be trying to melt the mercury out of junk circuit boards for a living, poisoning myself and everything else in the process.* Thus, on one side we have abundance of poverty, and on the other, the poverty of abundance. This too is a key Situationist idea. It is important not to feel guilty, to repent one’s ‘privileges’ – rather, one denounces them as the false coin of a falsified realm. That there is so much scorched earth somewhere else is no justification for the boredom and banality of the spectacle in full bloom.
Not everyone is content merely to ‘live’ in this world, and ‘play’ in some corporate theme-park. And yet for every spurious desire the spectacle claims to satisfy, it only pushes forward the fugitive longing for something else altogether. Situationist writings have always addressed this blind spot in the spectacle. The Situationists created slogans, advertising copy, brands – for a way of life that doesn’t exist, that can’t be commodified and yet cannot simply be displaced by some new product. Or to put it in one of their slogans: “Our ideas are in everyone’s mind.”
Or almost everyone’s. Aaron Bondaroff is a New York scene-maker who is determined, he says, to “make history”. After years acquiring downtown fame, he became something of a corporate muse, selling his knowledge of street culture. He was good at it. His birthday party was underwritten by Nike. But rather than rent his sensibility, he wanted to capitalize on it, so he created his own brand, aNYthing. This, claims the New York Times, is an example of the new underground, the new bohemia, the new avant garde.*
To which one might ask: avant garde of what? It’s simply a matter of making a spectacle of one’s self. Of internalizing and reproducing the spectacular separation of life and commodity. Rather than fret about what is lost when the lived experience of the underground is transformed into a mere advertisement for itself, live instead the very act of advertising as if it were life itself. For Bondaroff and the Times, all this can be given some patina of coolness by connecting it to Ginsburg’s Beats or Warhol’s Factory. Didn’t they all, in the end, ‘sell out’? Yet rather than legitimate this shop-counter culture’s shirts and hats, this very connection is its downfall. The Beats and the Factory were to the Situationists the pseudo avant gardes which learned from the spectacle only how to market themselves. They turn advertising to their own advantage, but not against itself.
And so, rather than “make history”, one makes t-shirts, which will be worn, discarded, and shipped off to Africa or India.* Then the next t-shirt comes along. The idea on everyone’s mind, if they care to admit it, recognizes the futility of this. Resistance is useless – a suitable slogan for a t-shirt. Perhaps all that’s left is not only to identify with brands and logos, the whole corporate theme park, but to over-identify with it. Make myself a brand! Turn myself into a thing for sale. Be product. But be a good one. And if I can succeed in being a good product, I can afford, in turn, to buy only the best. Organic food, designer clothes, a house that had an architect, perhaps even a ‘starchitect.’
But somehow, it isn’t very satisfying. It just raises the standards of boredom. The good product, be it an obscure hip hop track or an heirloom tomato, only appears good relative to something else, to dull pop or supermarket produce. Nothing really has much quality. Since something is only any good relative to something worse, there is always a better cut – of meat, of cloth, of music – being had by someone else, somewhere else. There’s no escape from a cascade of envy.
It is in the nature of the spectacle as it exists today to always be insisting on distinctions. It gives meaning to everything in relation to the model above and below it. The trick is not to reject one particular product clutching a better one. It is to reject the whole hierarchy of value entirely. Reject it, not because it is false, but rather because it is true – a true portrait of a false world.