Sites of Spectacular Agency:

A theory of politics for everyone and

no one Paul
Boshears

the Poncey-Highlands Reading Group

Europäische Universität für Interdisziplinäre Studien/The European Graduate
School (CH)
“ The spectacle presents itself
simultaneously as all of society,
society
as part of society, and as
instrument of unification...the
unification
unification it achieves is nothing
but an official language of

”
generalized separation.

Investigating spectaclist
economic relations provides an
evocative analytic for palpating
the contours of that new mode
of agency required in the
fruition of globalization.
The contingency mode of organization
 Today the dominant
mode of political action is
pornographic – a ritual
action that is performed
so as to inculcate in the
viewer a sense that
something has been
satisfied.
Like political action:
 Rituals promote solidarity among the group


Rituals reinvigorate and reinforce membership

Rituals do not have to be based on metaphysical truths,

but rituals require appropriation and re-envisioning in light
of the context (propriety). Ritual divorced from propriety is
pornography.
Welcome to the collective.
You are Anonymous.
You are Legion.
You do not forgive.
You do not forget.
And You do not matter.
Ceci sexxxy

Ceci n'est pas

sexxxy
Lingua Trauma
Andrea Fraser. Untitled. (2003)

Johan Grimonprez.
Double Take. (2009)
 The commodification of memory, “reconciles
the individual-as-consumer with this world,
offering a seeming re-assertion of his or her
unique personality – by making choices
among mass produced commodities the
affirmation of one’s taste.” - George Markus.

A spectaclist economy assumes that the agents

believe themselves to be fundamentally alienated from
one another and the objects with which they come in
contact.

Cool is to spectaclist economics as

value is to capitalist economics
If you were cool in high school
you didn’t ask too many questions.
You could tell who’d been to last night’s
big metal concert by the new t-shirts in the
hallways.
You didn’t have to ask
and that’s what cool was:
the ability to deduce,
to know without asking.
And the pressure to simulate coolness
means not asking when you don’t know,
which is why kids grow ever more stupid.
Dave Berman.
“Self-Portrait at 28”
Cool is a fully mimetic-communicative relation
between all reality (actual and perceived)

Cool, impossibly, seeks to collapse into each

other the subject that asks and the object
that would answer

Psycasthenia – losing oneself in one's

surroundings
“We’re creating it to where that’s the artist you have to be
period. To where a motherfucker just gotta like YOU.
That’s a superstar.” Lil' Wayne. Tha Carter. (2009)

“My drawings, like my texts, are of a dramaturgical

order…. For me, the most authentic vision of what I do is
in what I show.” Pierre Klossowski
“I am determined and ready to
be a commodity that fulfills
everyone’s fantasies.”
Sasha Grey

“It is the horizon based on which

the image may have a meaning,
by pointing to a desired world,
which the beholder thus
becomes capable of discussing,
and based on which his own
desire can rebound.” Serge
Daney
The flâneur, like Whitman’s Song of Myself,
composes itself in the shared experience of being in
this space at this time. It is an affirmation.
Spectacular Agency – a
theory of politics for
everyone and no one.
Spectaclist economics
requires two messages:

1) that who you are is

primarily the result of
your purchasing
decisions

2) that you are only as

important as your
purchasing capabilities.