Sorry, might help if I code the properly.
incursions into the society of the spectacle
from a quick look at the site, it looks like you fall into a trap Debord himself warned against, namely by focussing on advertising and marketing you treat the spectacle as a system of images and not a social relation mediated by images.
Guy Debord wrote:
The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images. (p.1 of The Society of the Spectacle)
I don't know why this guy is getting so much flak
sure, some of the arguments need elaborating on a bit, but he got our attention, which was surely one of the aims.
and some of the critiques of advertising, and how it fits into the mundanity of everyday life are pretty accurate, I think
and, surely the point is to critique the spectacle, so that we go beyond and understand the society that creates it, with an eye, then, to changing it
maybe he'd get a better response if he posted it on Friday afternoon!?
Joseph K. wrote:
from a quick look at the site, it looks like you fall into a trap Debord himself warned against, namely by focussing on advertising and marketing you treat the spectacle as a system of images and not a social relation mediated by images.Guy Debord wrote:
The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images. (p.1 of The Society of the Spectacle)
That's definitely a fair criticism which I thank you for, but by the same token look through it properly. I think if you read the commentary properly you'll see that what I'm trying to do is to offer critiques not of the advertisements themselves (anyone with half a brain can figure out for themselves what the problems with them are) but of the morality and ideology for which they stand. The intended focus is not the advertisement but the ideology of which they are an expression.
If you can offer a critique of the critique, please, by all means, leave a comment(s).
yeah i think what you're attacking is whats called 'nod-nod wink-wink' marketing, the kind of self-aware images that beckon you to participate in the joke, as a sort of active spectator. This school of marketing has developed as a response to widespread popular critiques of advertising, in an attempt to recuperate them.
I think some of the hostility you're getting is because often the approach of engaging critically with images remains in the realm of consumption, attacking 'consumerism' and not existing social relations themselves, thus helping to render production invisible and unwittingly furthering the notion of the death of the antagonistic proletarian subject, even while attacking the apparent murder weapon.
john wrote:
i think Zizek makes a similar point in The Sublime Object of Ideology - about the "nod-nod wink-wink" advertising and how it acts to disarm us in our resistance to dominant ideology
i'm only a hundred pages into my first zizek, but this is an interesting area which corresponds to the attempts at 'team building' etc at work to diffuse points of class conflict. I picked this up when studying a marketing module at uni, lecturers were telling us of this great technique and i was thinking 'why did i do this degree?' 
Its come in handy though.
Not wishing to be annoying, because its a nice site but i have two problems. Firstly as joseph k points out, its a bit obsessed with the imagery, but then given that its a site about adverts thats always going to be a problem you have to deal with in order to seperate yourself out from all the liberal 'culture jammer' types so good luck to you on that one.
Secondly tho, be careful about over stressing 'ideology', since the entire point of the spectacular society is that there is no single overarching ideology. People don't beleive in capitalism, likewise i don't go shopping because i beleive in it, neither do i go and see star wars because i beleive in it. I go precisely because i don't beleive it at all.
Oh and also, i think i know what you mean by 'those fucking suits', but its easy to mistakenly think you mean 'anyone wearing a suit'. Just be careful when you write stuff like that, since the first thing most of us do when we read anything, is look for phrases we find offensive and switch off when we find them. And reading that made me want to switch off because alli could think was, 'oh so he hates me for wearing a suit...right so he's mad' even though obviously reading on from the first sentence its clear you don't mean 'anyone wearing a suit'.
Joseph K. wrote:
yeah i think what you're attacking is whats called 'nod-nod wink-wink' marketing, the kind of self-aware images that beckon you to participate in the joke, as a sort of active spectator. This school of marketing has developed as a response to widespread popular critiques of advertising, in an attempt to recuperate them.
Yeah, that's definitely what they're doing.
Joseph K. wrote:
I think some of the hostility you're getting is because often the approach of engaging critically with images remains in the realm of consumption, attacking 'consumerism' and not existing social relations themselves, thus helping to render production invisible and unwittingly furthering the notion of the death of the antagonistic proletarian subject, even while attacking the apparent murder weapon.
That would definitely a fair criticism if it were true, but I don't think it is. In any case, if what we're doing is so off the rails why does it merit hostility and not mirth?
Exhibit "A":
http://www.targetaudience.org/?p=69
Exhibit "B":
http://www.targetaudience.org/?p=61
Here's just two of the obvious examples. More abound if you look at the site properly.
If you have any comments on particular criticisms (or false oppositions), leave a comment on the site so that other visitors can read and participate in a discussion as well, eh?
Meh. Everyone's a critic. Maybe I should have become a marketing consultant.
Horselover Fat wrote:
Maybe I should have become a marketing consultant
pays the bills 
all the best marketeers read debord (as do Israeli generals!).
I've had a look at those articles now too. I certainly think there's potential in the idea, but there are also definite traps to avoid (like the liberal adbusters thing mentioned above, which puts forth a 'radical' critique only to contain it in the realm of images).
The main potential seems to be in taking the ubiquity of capitalist images as a starting point, which is easily accessible precisely because of their hegemony, and extending this to a critique of social relations in their totality. This was a major line of thought in Debord, Vaneigem and co, where a critique of images was bound up with a critique of passifying power relations from wage labour to the communist party (mentioning wage slavery is a good start).
This is important, because as someone else said, we don't have to believe the images, only act as if we do. 'Nod-nod wink-wink' even relies on this resigned cynicism, a critical form of passivity. Only by extending the critique beyond images is there a potential for that passivity to be ruptured, imho. Good luck! 
Me and a friend have started a new website devoted to deconstructing the society of the Spectacle. Check it out and give us some constructive feedback. We're stuck at the arse end of the universe; we also need all the encouragement we can get. Thanks!
Target: Audience