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{The Effects of the Spectacle on the Spectator /TSDF}

The alienation of the spectator - the subject who is simultaneously the product, the witness and the unintentional cause of his own fragmentation and atomization - which reinforces the rule of the contemplated objects, is a process which can be summarized as follows: the more he contemplates the images, the less he actually lives; the more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The Spectacle's estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual's gestures are no longer of his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him/her.

The present stage of the Market's domination over social life, in which social life has been completely occupied by the mechanical accumulation of commodities, has brought about an evident shift firstly from "being" to "having", which is now succeeded by yet another level of downward spiraling from "having" to "appearing". Consequently, all "having" now must derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances.

The image, mediated by the Spectacle, has to return as series of fragments to the fragmented individual, so that the person could never actually realize the image of blissful social unification through consumption, promised by the spectacle. The fragmented individual is left intentionally unsatisfied as an unfinished product, who, in order to feel complete, is dependent on the images and objects distributed by the media-industrial complex. But the reality is that the fragmented individual can never attain this image or the total recollection of his fragmented Self through the consumption of objects, for the objects and images that were prestigious in the spectacle become mundane as soon as they are taken out of the structural context of the spectacle. The machinery of the spectacle is dependent on the anxieties and insecurities caused by the isolation and alienation of the subject from his own subjectivity. This is why the spectacle has to be everywhere: to make the person feel as if he could not be at home anywhere else. However, it is precisely due to this fact - the fact that the spectacle is everywhere - that the person feels at home nowhere.

With every situation that we once directly lived being receded into a mere representation(*), the whole world is ultimately converted into a series of representations(*) that are now being exchanged between people and mediated by images. In a world where only means for social interaction and unification are exercised through images via technological apparatus of the spectacle, and when the world itself is reduced to nothing but a crowd of representations that are lacking any real meaning or depth, the images become real beings, leading to the total alienation of self-reflective thought and thus, ultimately, of subjectivity.

Subjectivity is the capacity of the Absolute Spirit to project its self onto itself and reflect on itself, which manifests as the self-conscious being’s inner world. Subjectivity arises from the recognition of one's own existence and upon reflection on the cognitions reconstructed off of the surrounding external world. In order for there to be Self-consciousness, there firstly has to be a perceiving being that is distinguished from mere objects by the fact that it has the capability to form perceptions. Secondly, there has to be another being, so that one can become aware of oneself by seeing oneself through the eyes of another. One cannot have any concept of oneself without having actually experienced a moment of identification with the other and thus, it requires the other’s recognition of one’s being.

But, since the people are increasingly surrounded by and exposed to the presence of commodities and images - distributed by the spectacle’s media-industrial complex - that lack the ability to perceive and thus identify with the other, the process vital for the formation of the subject’s subjectivity is threatened. Furthermore, even though the images and commodities produced by the alienating Spectacle lack these qualities that we, as self-conscious beings, self-evidently possess, human beings with a sense of self can identify with these images, due to the fact that images have become real beings (or, figments of real beings).

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{Alienation Perfected /TSDF}

When a human being excessively identifies with the commodities and images produced and provided to him by the spectacle, his strength of self-consciousness is gradually diminished and, conversely, the probability that his consciousness is replaced with a false-consciousness (that is, a consciousness which diverts the true desires of a consciousness towards the fabricated false-needs devised by the Spectacle) is increased. Ultimately, he is degraded to the level of a spectator, who is forced to observe himself in a state of unconsciousness as he passes through practical changes in his condition of existence.

Imprisoned in a flattened universe bound by the screen of the spectacle, behind which his own life has been exiled, the spectator's consciousness no longer knows anyone but the fictitious interlocutors who subject him to a one-way monologue about their commodities and the politics of the commodities. The Spectacle as a whole is his ''mirror sign,'' presenting illusory escapes from vapid senselessness.

In a society where no one can any longer be recognized by others, each individual becomes incapable of recognizing his own (un)reality. The Spectacle, the ultimate false-consciousness, is at home; separation has built its own world.

The Spectacle obliterates the boundaries between true and false by repressing all directly lived truths beneath the real presence of falsehood, which is maintained by the organization of appearances. Individuals who passively accept their subjection to an alien everyday reality are thus driven to the brink of madness, the situation in which the undermined consciousness of the subject copes and reacts to the fate he has been forced into by resorting to illusory magical techniques. The result of this pseudo-response to an unanswered communication is the indirect acceptance of the Spectacle and consumption of its commodities.

In the society of the Spectacle, which seemingly is capable of satisfying the needs of the individuals, although only momentarily – until the spectator’s next disillusionment with some other mediocre commodity – independence of thought, autonomy, and the right to political opposition are being deprived of their basic critical and (r)evolutionary function.

In such a society, the Spectacle may justly demand acceptance of its principles and doctrines, and reduce the opposition to the level of either mere incoherent rabble or timid discussion and promotion of alternative policies within the spectacle’s realm (of interests).

Thus, under the conditions of superfluous commodification of everyday life, non-conformity with the spectacle’s system itself appears to be socially useless, heavily disapproved and condemnable act, and the more so when it entails tangible economic and political disadvantages and threatens the smooth operation of the whole.

Furthermore, when every form of opposition and antagonism are reduced to the role of criticism and then recuperated as a part of the spectacle’s internal dynamics of structure, the antagonistic forces die out, once the avant-garde revolutionaries discover that their actions, instead of undermining the spectacle’s power, are, in fact, only supporting its structure and dynamic movement to its next, stronger stage.

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{On the 'Shadow-figures' /TSDF}

Thus, the people are left powerless, voiceless, and forced to surrender under the power of the spectacle. Under this pretext the spectacle seizes the absolute authority over dictating the needs, hopes, dreams and even desires on behalf of the people, for it presumes (and partly deludes itself) to be the one and only true expression of the will of the people.

It is with this absolute power that enables it to invade the inner-world of the people and to reduce human beings to the level of images, after which they become mere hollow shadow-figures – analogous to rechargeable projector-mirrors – that manage only to reflect the prevailing order of the Spectacle, that is: the ruling order's nonstop discourse about itself, its never-ending monologue of self-praise, its self-portrait at the stage of totalitarian domination over every aspect of life.

These hollow ‘shadow-figures’ are linked solely by their one-way relationship to the very center that keeps them isolated from each other. The spectacle thus reunites the separated, but it reunites them only in their separateness.

Consequently, this one-directed discourse gives rise to a pseudo-world that ends up falsifying everything with its false-representation of reality (in essence, a pseudo-ideology materialized), which is imposed upon these ‘shadow-figures’ through the distribution of images via the media-industrial apparatus. In this world real adults - people who are masters of their own lives - are nowhere to be found, for there are no longer people who are capable of forming an authentic and independent thought about things that, rather than being merely amusing or entertaining, are serious and important. This is to say: there are no longer stoics, only epicureans who fail at even imitating a genuine stoic.

It is the last dance of the narcissistic egoist, of the antiperson who denies that 74 68 65 20 75 6E 65 78 61 6D 69 6E 65 64 20 6C 69 66 65 20 69 73 20 6E 6F 74 20 77 6F 72 74 68 20 6C 69 76 69 6E 67 and who gleefully watches and rejoices 6C 69 74 74 6C 65 6E 65 73 73 2E 20 as he, under the spell of hedonistic rampage, dominates the world’s center (him as its universal polar) in a desperate attempt to salvage any and every 򌗩(444F4D/ that he can grab.

Politics in such a world is centered around one issue: who gets to have the most time in being the center of attention, to occupy the nexus of the world around which the world - and as an extension: the people in it - rotates.

A thought is generated, invariably, by a motive, which has its ground in desires, needs, interests and emotions. But since the spectacle has replaced the subject’s needs with pseudo-needs, obscured his innate desire for consciousness with å sense of false-consciousness and diverted his subjective interests towards the interests of objects, it can be said that nothing motivates him, and thus he is no longer capable of original thought – only superficial and detached emotions. This is Nietzsche’s worst nightmare come true: nobody wills anything, and even those who still are willing can only manage only its degenerated form – that of ‘will to will’.

Twisted and transfigured by this pseudo-world and with the internalized duty of alienated consumption and appearing, he has become an uncritical, unreflective and passive being who lives an inauthentic life governed by his öne-dimensional thoughts that are circling around commodities, sensual pleasures and appearances, and, naturally, around himself. He can avoid facing his undefined existence by wallowing in comfort and by clinging to the dominant mindsets and images, imposed by his surrounding culture. He is sufficed with the exchange of his free-will for a custom-made individuality – individuality that can only be affirmed in how he personalizes his commodities.

Despite this possibility to customize one’s own individuality, it is not genuine individuality – it is an individuality promised by images of need and fulfilled through consumption of objects. His individuality is determined by his distinctiveness from others through appearances and possession of objects of mass production, which are antithetical to genuine ‘beingness’. Therefore, he is clearly the enemy of his own individuality and the closer his life comes to being his own creation, the more he is excluded from that life, for it is the objects one own, that end up owning one’s Self.

All his energy is spent for the purpose of getting what he wants, and he will never question the premise of this activity: that he knows his true wants. He never stops to reflect whether the aims he is pursuing are something he himself wants, since he is incapable of thinking outside the spectacle’s dominion.

If such thinking were to surface, the spectacle would cloud it amongst the noises of static hissing and crackling that are coming from the blind mechanical movement of the apparatuses of the spectacle. If an original thought is formed, the spectacle diverts and clouds it with the static noises common to the apparatuses of the spectacle.

The Spectacle's material reconstruction of the religious illusion of paradise-on-earth is everything he thinks he will ever require for leading a satisfying life.

What the spectacle has done is that it has formed a new ideological mindset, which we are coining here ‘comallodianism’. It is the outcome of 1) the blurring of the border between what is real and what is simulation 2) the inability to rebel or resist the spectacle 3) forced consumption of images and objects and 4) the debilitation of the subject and his reduction into a feeling, consuming object that can choose and change its color to its liking and choose its own ambience to set the pace for this object’s monotonous movement.

This mindset emphasizes the convenience of wallowing in comfortable apathy or acedia, in comparison to the surrounding harsh desolate reality. It teaches that pain equals bad, feelings equate truth, everyone should love oneself (including his or her ow imperfections), everyone is special, that everything is relevant, that there are no truths or falsehoods, that no one can be wrong and that one should always prefer to his illusions than to desperation.

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{A New Breed, or: The Shape of What is to Come /TSDF}

In time, these shadow-figures are exceeded by a new kind of breed, fit for the realization of the spectacle’s own machinations, once this new kind of ideological mindset has been thoroughly imprinted and condition into him and his whole essence subjugated into the spectacle’s alienated being-like [seinsmäßig] ‘’anti–beingness’’.

This all culminates into the emergence of a Homo Modernus: an incomplete product of these images. He is a convex image that believes itself to be a human being. In the event of not sensing its own reflection – that is: the warped image of itself, its self-image that superficially passes off as a real human being, but on closer inspection is, in fact, nothing more than the Spectacle’s haphazardly assembled simulation of what it takes to be a real human being –, the Homo Modernus must create its own reflection by projecting parts of it onto others frame by frame: those projected images make up its discourse.

While the Spectacle was, in the time of shadow-figures, left with the process of negating life, Homo Modernus does it for the Spectacle. It negates life itself, due to the fact that it lives under the illusion that it knows what it wants, while it actually wants what it is supposed to want – this illusion is the total perfection of the shadow-figure’s own original deception, only transformed into a more encompassing one. Moreover, Homo Modernus resists reality and confuses it with representations of reality, for the harsh reality that drove the shadow-figures to seek refuge in the Spectacle’s dominion has now become too harsh for them to be able to accept as the real reality, a condition which is the direct result of over-saturation of the Homo Modernus’s mental circuitry with pure positivity.

The Homo modernus believes in nothing. Therefore it is forced to believe in almost anything. And since the Homo Modernus believes in almost anything, it is forced to believe in love. It “imagines” love being as something out of a six-star romance movie of inconceivable reality, but immediately makes a hyperspace leap to porn – which is another spectacular advertising format. The Homo Modernus then proceeds to deeming others as something undesirable, for it cannot connect the dots between its perfect self-image with its negation at the moment of it coming into contact with another Homo Modernus that tries to see its own reflection in the other one as well. This defilement of its inner tranquility navigates it to heighten its own self-esteem through the modification of its images of appearance, which keeps its focus innately directed to its space-time being and thus successfully dispenses its focus on the screams of his own true being.

Homo Modernus does not realize philosophy, but he philosophizes reality. Everything concrete is abstracted into non-existence through the unconscious faculties of his mind, the very same faculties that were implanted to him by the Spectacle. Despite of this he does not reason, but, instead, he cuts and pastes images until he comes up with a sensible discourse. When there are no images to 'think' with, he numbs himself in order to forget that he is an image that thinks it is a human being. Those who do not numb themselves live neurotic and psychotic lives filled with doubt and desperation. Nevertheless, such anxieties can lead to interesting things... sometimes.

Ultra-violence, in any of its forms, attracts the Homo Modernus, for it has lost the capacity for subtle amazement: it no longer perceives the force that grants life its primordial essence – the force which makes the world go round and round. In addition, the Homo Modernus has internalized an unreal image of how the world is, was and should be. When a shadow-figure divides the world in a Disneylandian fashion into cartoon-like pure evil and pure good, the Homo Modernus takes this separative operation one step further: its perceptions are dominated by a naïve picture of reality, in which nothing but the ‘’good’’ is perceived in the world, and where simultaneously everyone has to discard $%4C 49 46 45 20 55 48 20 46 49 4E 44 53 20 41&/run() 20 57 41 59 6C 61 63 65 20 6F 66 20 77 69 73 64 6F 6D 2E

He feels dwarfed by the crowds and therefore tries hard to stand out. This leaves him no choice but to exteriorize his essence as an objective appearing, for this is the only way for him to compensate for his loss of subjectivity and to express this unconscious need for recognition of his subjectivity that has been buried under the programs and faculties implanted into him by the Spectacle.

Inherently, it is this very act of exteriorizing of all of his essence which leaves him empty and even more alienated from his subjectivity. It is this very emptiness which renders him useless, because this empty space cannot be utilized, for this emptiness, which occupies his very interior, is (now that of) "anti-beingness", which in its pure essence is solid emptiness.

All that remains of him, and the only thing that moves him, is his socio-emotional drives that the visual revolution cannot satisfy. Therefore, he is left in to the middle of the desert of the real: an image of happy harmony surrounded by desolation and horror, at the calm center of misery and boredom, concealed by plastic smiles and colorful neon lights and clouded by echoes of people's desperate wailings that are drowning below each other and mix together into static noises.

This is a total travesty of what the futurists had hoped for.

The only thing that prevents the Homo Modernus from succumbing to a total annihilation and psychotic despair of irredeemable proportions – which would, consequently, send his mind spiraling out of space-time existence into a state of monadic non-perception – are 1) the cognitions that are transmitted to him through the comallodianist paradigm (which is to say that there still is something occupying his mind and it is this very occupation which suffices as a cognition that exceeds the minimum threshold for a neuron to fire ) 2) the aforementioned ‘’solid emptiness’’ that occupies his interior and which prohibits him from imploding and collapsing on himself 28 74 68 61 74 20 69 73 2c 20 77 68 61 74 20 6b 65 65 70 73 20 74 68 65 20 6e 61 74 75 72 65 20 66 72 6f 6d 20 66 69 6c 6c 69 6e 67 20 74 68 65 20 61 70 70 61 72 65 6e 74 20 68 6f 6c 65 20 69 6e 20 68 69 73 20 e2 80 98 e2 80 99 6d 69 6e 64 e2 80 99 e2 80 99 20 6f 75 74 20 6f 66 20 68 6f 72 72 6f 72 20 76 61 63 75 69 29 3) the bright lights and plastic smiles, which produce a variety of necessary socio-biological responses in his being (which is why Homo Modernus still thinks it is a human being) and 4) the neurotransmitter impulses and synapses, and other autonomic nervous system functions that keep the Homo Modernus afloat while he hallucinates things into existence...

At the former stage of the Spectacle that precedes the Homo Modernus, even though the primary mode of communication is through exchange of images, people – which is to say the shadow-figures – don’t yet ‘think with images’, but contemplates on and interprets these images through a common means of expressing a meaning, that is: with a syntax-based language of one’s choosing, which, however, is slowly being taken over by the Spectacle. Thinking with images is a form of regression to a quasi-conscious state of mind, where no actual expression of one’s subjectivity is genuinely communicable – this is a hive mind of sorts. What has to happen in order to avoid this chain of events is the following: people must transcend from merely interpreting images through common means of expressing a meaning by surpassing it to a state of consciousness where images become pure expressions of meaning, namely ideas. Moreover, this transcendental process necessitates that real life experiences replace mere representations of these experiences – i.e. images. 5b 45 72 72 6f 72 2e 20 4e 65 63 65 73 73 61 72 79 20 73 75 70 70 6c 65 6d 65 6e 74 61 72 79 20 63 6f 6e 63 6c 75 73 69 6f 6e 73 20 6e 6f 74 20 66 6f 75 6e 64 2e 20 50 6c 65 61 73 65 20 63 6f 6d 65 20 75 70 20 77 69 74 68 20 73 6f 6d 65 2e 5d

When people start to think with images, the words, which are the primary constituent substance of these images, lose their meaning. This leads us to the grim discovery where everything is nothing but empty simulacra. 4c 65 74 e2 80 99 73 20 75 73 20 68 6f 70 65 20 74 68 61 74 20 74 68 69 6e 67 73 20 77 6f 6e e2 80 99 74 20 63 6f 6d 65 20 74 6f 20 74 68 61 74 2e

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The Shock Doctrine Foundation transmission has been concluded.

Project termination: successful.