The Spectacle of the Consumer: A Revolution in Personal Hygiene

“All the world is a stage.” – William Shakespeare

“It is in the logic of things that the last actor should film his own death.” - Raoul Vaneigem

In the 1950’s, Italian painter Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio set out to parody mass production with his “industrial paintings,” paintings that came off a roll and sold by the meter. His concept was “to davalorize art by cranking it out in vast quantities” (Black). Yet, even in the 1950’s, the cunning of the market prevailed, and when he arbitrarily jacked up the price of his “glorified wallpaper,” demand increased (Black). This demonstrates an example of the idea of reification, a concept coined by situationist politico George Lukacs. Reification is the notion “where the relationships between things replaces the relationships between people. Commodities take on a mind of their own, turning humans into robots mechanically worshipping them” (Elliot).

In his 1967 La Société du Spectacle or The Society of the Spectacle, Guy DeBord, key member of the Situationist International (SI) elaborates on this idea of reification. DeBord explains the spectacle as a modern phenomenon, where “modern conditions of production prevail,” existing since around the 1920’s when a market emerged where commodities were in abundance (12). The spectacle expands on the idea of reification where “all that once was directly lived has become mere representation” and where relationships among human beings have been lost to merely relationships with commodities (DeBord 12). Furthermore, the spectacle presents a state where these commodities take on a life of their own, or the “autonomous movement of the non-living” (DeBord 12). This spectacle is not a world of image-governed mind-control, but a monopolization of a social relationship between people arbitrated by images (Elliot). Reification divides people, but the spectacle unites society, “reuniting the separate, but reuniting them as separate” (DeBord 14).

As people become caught up in the frenzy of the consumption of these commodities or “image-objects,” rebellion against the spectacle becomes increasingly difficult. As they consume, they become part of the spectacle. In this state, every act, every thought becomes commodity:

Even the most radical gesture gets recuperated into the spectacle and turned into a commodity, negating the subversive meaning. It is a question not of elaborating the spectacle of refusal, but rather of refusing the spectacle. Everything becomes a commodity in the spectacle, even tv, radio, the internet, books, ideas, thoughts & desires. Rebellion is sold back to us as an image that pacifies us. (Elliot).

Once pacification occurs, a general passivity sets in. In their essay from Internationale Situationniste #10 of March 1966, the SI gives an account of how members of the public yelled to a suicidal man to jump (for their entertainment) instead of attempting to coax him down (Elliot):

For several years now, at least in the United States, it hasn’t been uncommon to see excited crowds watching someone who has been driven desperate threaten to hurl themselves down from a window ledge or roof. Whether the public has become blasé, or whether it is attracted by more professional spectacles, it doesn’t intend to pay any further attention to these “unofficial stars” unless they get on with it and jump. (Decor & the Spectators)

It was an otherwise average spring night in Albany, New York where 19-year-old Richard Reinemann quibbled on a twelfth-story ledge for two hours, while a significant portion of the crowd of some 4000 people watching chanted “Jump!”(Decor & the Spectators). One spectator explained, “I don’t want to wait all night, I’ve already missed my favorite TV show” (Decor & the Spectators).

This event occurred on April 16, 1964. Fast-forward almost exactly forty years to the year 2004, where we can add reality television, cell phones, pornographic websites, video games, and shock radio, just to name a few, to our everyday experience. With the passing of decades, the spectacle grows evermore spectacular. We are alone. We consume. We are unhappy. We consume. We are bored. We consume. For the situationists, boredom was a modern phenomenon, a modern form of control:

With God missing (presumed dead) people felt their condition not exactly as a fact but simply as a fatalism, devoid of meaning, which separated every man and woman from each other. They sought to understand that moment when people gain insight into the alienated patterns of their everyday lives, prompting the question “I’m not happy—what’s wrong with me?” (Fitzpatrick)

This is the precise moment that intrigues me, fascinates me. With the Situationist International serving as an historical moniker, this is the moment I have hoped to explore and capture throughout the process and execution of my thesis experience. This moment, this realization of a dichotomy of pacification and desire, representation and reality, possessing and living, placidity and passion, diversion and pleasure—this moment is revolutionary. The word situation stems from the existential philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre of which he asserted “life is a series of given situations which affect the individual’s consciousness and will, and which in turn must be negotiated by that individual” (qtd. in Fitzpatrick). DeBord took Sartre’s hypothesis and retorted “we must try to construct situations—collective ambiances, ensembles of impressions determining the quality of a moment” (qtd. in Fitzpatrick).

The situationists saw everyday reality being made up of moments of “love, hate, poetry, frustration, action, surrender, delight, humiliation, justice, etc.” (Fitzpatrick). In order to instigate any change in this world one had to consider changing life (Fitzpatrick). A curious bond occurs among antisocial types in their ability to see environments as they actually are (Fitzpatrick). Journalist and media specialist Marshall McLuhan stated, “the poet, the artist, the sleuth—whoever sharpens our perception, tends to be antisocial; rarely well adjusted, he cannot go along with currents and trends” (qtd. in Fitzpatrick). The situationists were masters of this perception and created a tool for it—detournement. Detournement translates roughly as diversion: to turn the spectacle’s images against it was to detourn or divert them (Fitzpatrick). This act of detournement involved appropriation. The situationists would take existing images/ elements of the spectacle, dissect them, and then reassemble them in a method as to give them new, always subversive meanings.

I wanted to use my thesis as an opportunity to set up a “situation,” a fragment of the larger spectacle, and present it as spectacle. In doing this, I wanted to utilize and build upon my design education by focusing on package design with the intent to explore ideas of consumption, the relationship between the consumer and commodities, the act of consuming itself, and the role of the designer as seducer in this consumer society. This would physically be executed as installation representing a fragment from a retail environment. I chose five personal hygiene products, bathroom tissue, toothpaste, deodorant, cotton swabs, and eye lubricant, to introduce and display as if available to browse and buy. I decided to target personal hygiene products because these are the items we tend to use when we are alone, in isolation—moments conducive to contemplation. These items are physically close to our bodies—they are intimate and we use them in times of preparation, ceremony, ritual. Furthermore, the five products I chose to explore relate to the five senses experienced by humans—sight, sound, touch, taste, smell.

I wanted the presentation of this display to be extremely sexy, sensual, based on current ideas of fashion and beauty, and hip, too. I wanted it to be incredibly seductive, inevitably luring any passing shopper to its realm by the sheer luxuriousness of its manifestation. Only upon close examination, reading of a label, flipping of a lid, etc., would the shopper become aware of the display’s subversive actions. I wanted it to function as a siren that would seduce, lure, and then in an unexpected moment of near bliss, punch in the face.

Now that I have provided a portrait of the Situationist International, set up an historical and philosophical context, and declared my intention with this project, I would now like to provide some facts and a bit of history on consumption, before moving along to the body as commodity in our contemporary culture, and finally a detailed analysis of the visual amalgamation of this project. The wealthiest fifth (20%) of the world consumes 45% of all meat and fish, 58% of total energy, 74% of all telephone lines, 84% of all paper, and a monstrous 87% of the world’s vehicle fleet (Shah). Having moved well beyond basic needs to include luxury items and technological innovations, we consume an ever-growing variety of resources in an attempt to improve efficiency (Shah). Over the course of history we have always sought means to make our lives easier and better, and such consumption beyond the minimal is not necessarily a bad thing in itself. Consumption, even if that means bartering, hunting, or gathering, is at the core of all societies. The impacts of this consumption, both positive and negative, are very significant to all aspects of our lives and our planet (Shah). Crucially important to address when discussing consumption patterns is the underlying system that promotes certain types of consumption over others (Shah).

The lavish commercial consumption that the wealthiest nations, and the rich elite of the poorer nations, partake in is a modern institution—it is not something that has always been around (Shah). Yet, the wealthy elite, of course, has spent heavily and extravagantly for centuries. Still, even in the United States, England, and the bulk of Europe, saving and being frugal was the norm for most throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries (Shah). Lavish spending on luxuries was deemed wasteful and frivolous. The majority of consumption was based on necessity (Shah). For the major rise of consumerism in the United States and similar countries to occur, “buying habits had to be transformed and luxuries had to be made into necessities” (Shah). This transformation involved a shifting of the meaning of goods, as well as their presentation and display (Shah). The department store became a consumer museum to display goods as objects in themselves:

Orchestras, piano players, flower arrangements, and so on would be used to present goods in a way that inspired people to buy them. The department store became a cultural primer telling people how they should dress, furnish their homes, and spend their leisure time. (Shah)

Advertising also became an institutional means to revolutionize the development and creation of the consumer:

The goal of the advertisers was to aggressively shape consumer desires and create value in commodities by imbuing them with the power to transform the consumer into a more desirable person…in 1880, only $30 million was invested in advertising in the United States; by 1910…$600 million, or 4% of the national income…Today that figure has climbed to well over $120 billion in the United States and to over $250 billion worldwide (Shah).

Aside from advertising, fashion as an idea and lifestyle, a given staple of society right along with diet, education, politics, dwelling, geography, weather, would further stir anxiety and restlessness over the possession of things that were not “new” or “up-to-date” (Shah). Fashion prompted people to buy for style, rather than need—from a desire to conform to what others defined as fashionable (Shah).

By the 1930’s, a decade defined by vast poverty, as well as art deco concepts of luxury and extravagance:

The consumer was well entrenched in the United States, complete with a spiritual framework and an intellectual rationalization that glorified the continued consumption of commodities as personally fulfilling and economically desirable, and a moral imperative that would end poverty and injustice. (Shah)

Jean Baudrillard, in his The Consumer Society declares that humans feel, or rather “mythically believe” they have needs that can only be met through consumption (Jessup). He goes on to state, “human needs can never actually be satisfied through the process of consumer goods. Consumerism is kindled not when needs for specific objects are created and consumed, but rather when the need to need, the desire to desire is manifested” (Jessup). It is the meaning of goods that is consumed, rather than the goods themselves. This is achieved through the process of advertising and display. Consumerism then starts to function as “social labor,” where people become controlled, exploited, consuming masses (Jessup). This unbridled consumption begins to define people; it becomes a deeply entrenched process of self-identification. People start to define who they are and what they hope to become through consumption (Jessup).

Japanese psychoanalyst Ken Oh-hira has fielded research on the relationship between identity and consumption. He reports that many of his patients have not possessed an adequate ability to express themselves and have had difficulty describing their relationships with others (Jessup). However, when these patients were asked about hobbies, food preferences, possessions, virtually all of them could depict their life as a consumer (Jessup). Many of them used “brands” to describe their personal relationships, their lifestyles, their opinions. Relationships between people were realized mostly by commodities. Self-identity was structurally linked to one’s ability to “collect and organize commodities” (Jessup).

As people form their identities by what they consume, one commodity becomes more desirable, more precious than any other—this object is the body. Baudrillard states:

Its ‘rediscovery,’ in a spirit of physical and sexual liberation, after a millennial age of Puritanism; its omnipresence in advertising, fashion and mass culture; the hygienic, dietetic, therapeutic cult which surrounds it, the obsession with youth, elegance, virility/ femininity, treatments and regimes, and the sacrificial practices attaching to it all bear witness to the fact that the body has today become an object of salvation. (129)

The body’s physicality, its existence as an “object” literally replaces that of the soul in the consumer spectacle. Today, in any given culture, that culture’s organization of the relationship to the body reflects its economic organization (Baudrillard 129). In capitalist societies, rules of private property apply to the body as well (Baudrillard 129). With the rise of the consumer culture, the relentless effort, century after century, to convince people they had no bodies, shifted to a pertinacious attempt to convince them of their bodies (Baudrillard 129).

The body was now capital, and instead of something that had been denied in previous eras, the body was now something to invest in heavily (Baudrillard 129). This investment in the body as commodity would in turn lead people into an endless pursuit to possess their bodies, to “own” their bodies, in an anxiety-ridden conundrum of knowing thyself by consuming thyself.

In the spectacle, self-identity requires the constant reappropriation of the body. People are locked in an endless cycle of “reinventing” themselves through diet, fitness, fashion, and hygiene, in a futile attempt to possess an identity. Without this incessant reinvention, or reappropriation, individuals would become outdated and disposable, much in the same manner as last year’s cut of jeans—their value would be depleted and thus they would vanish among the ever-growing plethora of trendy gadgets, fashions, and functionalisms. Baudrillard, in The Consumer Society depicts this bodily reappropriation by examining an article from Elle magazine entitled “The Secret Keys to Your Body Which Unlock the Door to Complex-Free Living”:

“Your body is both your outer limit and your sixth sense,’ the article begins, and it assumes a serious air by recounting the psycho-genesis of the appropriation of the body and its image: ‘at around six months, you began to perceive, as yet very obscurely, that you had a distinct body.’ After an allusion to the mirror-stage and a timid allusion to erogenous zones, it comes to the central point: ‘are you at ease in your body?’ Right away, in comes Brigitte Bardot: she ‘is at ease in her body.’ ‘Everything about her is beautiful…[her] secret? She really inhabits her body. She is like a little animal who precisely fills up her dress.’ (Does she inhabit her body or her dress?…this is precisely the point: She wears her body like a dress, and this makes ‘inhabiting’ a fashion effect. (130)

This magazine article guides the reader through the process of inhabiting, possessing, objectifying, and consuming their bodies. It states “you have to be in touch with yourself, you have to learn to read your body’ (if you don’t, you are anti-Brigitte Bardot) (Baudrillard 130). It goes on to illustrate a specific exercise the reader can do to “be in touch.” It suggests there are “lines of tendresse: along the spinal column, on the nape of the neck, the stomach, the shoulders…if you do not know them, then repression occurs” (Baudrillard 130). If you sin against your body by not knowing it, by not consuming it, you will be punished. If you do not participate in this commoditization of your own body, it will become a “repressive agency which takes its revenge” against you by depleting your value, erasing your identity (Baudrillard 131). Posed by this threat, the readers of this article obeyed and confessed, “I was discovering my body. I could feel it in all its purity” (Baudrillard 131). Moreover, “It was as though I was being hugged by my body. I began to love it. And loving it, I wanted to care for it with the same affection I felt for my children” (Baudrillard 131). With this juxtaposition, the body becomes the greatest object of disquietude, preponderating for itself any “normal” ardor for other human beings, and at the same time not taking on any real value of its own, for in this logic of appropriation, any other object when successfully manipulated could take on the same role (Baudrillard 131). The body, just like any other commodity object, becomes a sign, a signifier exchanged for a relative value, with that value merely being capital, void of any real affectivity.

In this never ceasing exchange of commodities, real desire and real pleasure are never fueled or experienced. Passivity replaces passion. Sexual desire is deconstructed, fragmented, and turned into an object. The body as object becomes functional, not desirable. The Elle woman is “’hot’ with that same heat, that same warmth one finds in modern furniture: it is an ‘atmospheric’ heat. It no longer comes from intimacy and sensuality, but from calculated sexual signification” (Baudrillard 133). A finality of desire is never attained. All is consumed rather than experienced. Appropriation conceals, and not even well, the repetition, the emptiness of this cycle that is meant to appease us. When the boredom of the cycle becomes too apparent, we rebel, but not really, for our rebellion is merely reappropriated and consumed by us in a manner that pleases us enough to take our places in the spectacular event all over again. The spectacle requires a little spice now and again to perpetuate it. One merely needs to turn to the nightly news, or the avant-garde performance space:

“I am nothing and you are everything,’ the performance artist says to her audience. She leaves the stage, descends into the paying crowd, seals her mouth with tape, takes off her clothes. “Do what you will with me,’ she mimes…She lies on her back with her legs open, inviting the audience to fuck her, to set her on fire, to try to get her to talk, to piss on her, to ignore her…all of these things have happened at avant garde performances. [And] these things have also actually not happened, because it is only the artist’s dispensation that has permitted the anonymous people in the crowd to seem to act. At the artist’s withdrawal of that dispensation…an assistant announces “the performance is over,” and the counterfeit actors immediately return to their seats. They once again become spectators, and feel comfortable: like themselves. (Marcus 100)

Both artist and spectator must feel a sense of accomplishment by their acts—smug for their rebellion, their intervention. Yet, they have been duped. No real intervention has occurred. From the start, the artist set up rules of chance, of risk, of violence, and the spectators-become-actors merely played by those rules. All was fixed from the start. No revolutionary act has happened, no rebellion has occurred, for the spectacular event has merely been consumed, and all safely and politely returns to the cycle. If only someone would have stepped forward from the crowd and shouted “No, no, I am now the artist, you must do what I tell you to do, you must play by my game,” then, and only then would a real moment have occurred. Then the original artist as well as the crowd “would be faced with a real choice, a choice containing all the intangibles of epistemology, aesthetics, politics, social life” (Marcus 100). This is akin to the question mentioned earlier when an individual has a moment of clarity and asks himself/ herself “I’m not happy—what’s wrong with me?” These are the moments when real desire, real longing surface—these are the moments that have the potential to incite revolution.

This moment is what I present with my thesis project. I am stepping from the crowd and shouting “No!” I am constructing a situation that turns the spectacle’s images against itself. I present no rules to the viewer. There is no proper reaction. I have no specific expectation—only that there is the potential to jolt the viewer to a momentary state of consciousness. It is my wish that they may be lifted to a sense of clarity where the realization that real human desire, real pleasure is void in this consumer structure. The reaction, the string of events to follow, however, is beyond the parameters of the work I present. I am only presenting a situation, a possibility, an intervention. Life cannot be reshaped by the informative, it has to be remade by real human acts based on real human desires—that takes a village; I’m offering a few bricks and some mortar.

From a distance, I want the piece to lure, to beckon with spectacular seduction—what the commodity structure utilizes constantly, but pushed to quite a high degree. I want to operate initially by the same rules as the spectacle. I want the display to be shrine-like, gilt and luxurious, suggesting the consumption of these products is a spiritual act. I want the body to be central to the images, yet fragmented, objectified, fetishized—a head here, an armpit there, the peeking of a single eye. As Linda Nochlin states in her The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity, “the postmodern body…is conceived of uniquely as a body-in-pieces” (55). The partial image or crop, while glamorizing the fetishistic objectification of the body, also expresses a grief for a lost totality, a utopian wholeness (Nochlin 55). Decadent beauty and glamour are at the height of elegance and desire for a society that has the lost the experience of orgiastic abandon, the Bacchanalian feast, the gods, the temple, love, passion, and sex. Here, I present those elements on the stage of commodity and functionalism. The feast can now be had once again, the passion, the love, the sex—all can now be attained for a price. All those giddy consumers suddenly discovering wild abandon among the throes of utilitarian commodity! Debauchery for the senses can now be possessed, owned by pulling out one’s credit card.

In order to achieve this sense of decadence, this abundance, I have turned to the Baroque period of art, examining carefully the works of artists such as Carravagio, Rubens, Gentileschi. These works depict unbridled passion and an expression of the body that was lost after the rise of industrialization and into the consumer culture of the modern and postmodern eras. What I found particularly alarming and captivating about these works was their inclusion of liquids and bodily fluids acting, not as an abject as seen in the works of postmodern artists such as Cindy Sherman or Jake and Dinos Chapman, but as part of an overall passionate eroticism of life. Milk flows into wine, which flows into blood, flowing into tears, saliva, semen. I found this fluidity lacking in the erotic advertising of the current era, where bodies are simply shapes, lacking blood and guts. Calvin Klein models are to be possessed, owned, rather than experienced as in a real human relationship. They depict unattainable desire simply because their sex

appeal lacks the sex—they are objects, famished, hollow, numb. There will be no sharing with these plastic lovers, no exchange of bodily fluids, no goodnight kisses, no heartbreak, no bliss. Their impotence and frigidity can only tease, but never actually fulfill any real desire or affectivity. They are disposable commodities. In order to move away from this, to present the consumer with images of the body that offer zeal, life, I have borrowed ideas and elements from the Baroque period, reinterpreted them in my own vision, and present them in a manner at odds with images found on the packaging of other contemporary products. In my packaging, wine is seen splashing into an eye, an armpit is offered like a flower, a movement in the bath is akin to an undulating snake.

Furthermore, I have instilled the use of vibrant expressionist color, a concept garnered from CoBrA paintings, an important forerunner of the Situationist International. Also, ever-present is symbolism from Greek mythology—Ganymede extends a golden goblet in the air as an offering to Bacchus. Zeus as a great bird, waiting to steal the youth away, is perched at his side, just concealing his genitalia. Art Nouveau elements come into play suggesting the sexy mystery of nature, the whiplash tendrils of a lily, a vortex of red, flowing hair. I introduce great symbolist and surrealist poets into the scene, as seen in the cotton swabs, as enchanting verse for the ear. All becomes a great display, offering, throne, gilt and flowing with velvet and silk. At this alter of passion and excess, one is ready to either kneel and pray, or fall to the floor and make love.

But not so fast—this is neither temple nor colosseum. It is the grocery market, the department store, the boutique. “And it is true that man lies because in a world governed by lies he cannot do otherwise: he is falsehood himself, he is trapped in his own falsehood” states Raoul Vaneigem in The Revolution of Everyday Life (123). It is commerce presenting an illusion of desire, not desire itself. Money and power cannot “regulate how lovers kiss or the taste for wine, or your dreams, or the smell of thyme on a mountainside”(Book of Pleasures 4). As the hierarchy instilled by trade appears everywhere through so-called human relations, “the word life loses its ambiguity…life’s reality does not accord with these loves you can buy and enjoy retail, and which go off to the factory as yesterday they went to the brothel, to sin, to the convent, to the family” (Book of Pleasures  7). The turning of a container to read its ingredients shatters the illusion. The eye lubricant contains human tears, deodorant is made with sweat, toothpaste gets flavored by saliva, semen, vaginal excretions. The act of consumption becomes ultimately grotesque. All that flows through a living human being, all that creates life and soul, is being offered over a commercial counter for the pure consumer.

Further exploration, more curious scrutinizing uncovers the subversion, the detournement at work, the turning of the spectacle against itself. Lingering among flowing lines of romantic Baudelairian poetry, we find truths that cut through the spectacle—“We Never Really Give Ourselves Over Completely To What We Are Doing, Except Perhaps In Orgasm,” or “The Reconstruction Of Life, The Rebuilding Of The World: One And The Same Desire!” A flipping over of a tin of deodorant reveals a labyrinth, suggesting the situationist notion of the dérive, a sort of aimless drifting, where the drifter wanders aimlessly throughout the city as a means of “taking” it, a psychic means of “violent emotive possession over the streets,” where he is freed from his own objectification by the urban space (Sadler 81). The dérive enacts a political use of social space where the drifter is “dependent neither on spectacular consumption of the city” nor commodity ownership, for the dérive “does not possess a space of its own, but takes place in a space that is imposed by capitalism in the form of urban planning” (McDonough 259). The dérive acts as an unentaglement where one can remove himself from the spectacle by getting lost in order to find his way again. I witnessed a similar situation when visiting San Francisco and stopping at Grace Cathedral. On the floor of the cathedral is rendered a giant labyrinth that worshippers can walk to rid themselves of worldly anxiety before communing with God.

After discovering that bathroom tissue, printed with excerpts of Anais Nin’s erotic The Delta of Venus, is actually made of human skin, the viewer finds on the containers’ flip-sides the words SCIENCE, LOGIC, SECURITY, PRUDENCE, a reference to Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 film Alphaville, in which these words appear on a highway sign leading into the city. Godard, whom the situationists scoffed for his glamorization of the spectacle’s objectification of human experience, presents in Alphaville an alarming, yet chic and hip depiction of French society’s relationship with and oppression by the new architecture. The citizen’s of Alphaville (a futuristic Paris), dominated by a massive computer system called Alpha-60 have lost their ability to communicate, to think, and to love. In a 1969 edition of Newsreel Godard states “You know, I more or less agree with the situationists, they say that’s it’s all finally integrated; it gets integrated in spectacle, it’s all spectacle” (qtd. in Knabb). The situationists, however, found his statement to be spurious, feeling he took on an anti-establishment posture while lavishly reaping the benefits it had to offer. To the situationists, society and cinema were one and the same—everyone an actor taking his place in the sociodrama of the false. This attitude is presented in my utilization of the phrase “Contre Le Cinema,” or “Against the Cinema,” a phrase that was found as graffiti outside the Sorbonne during its occupation of 1968. The events of 1968 in Paris were direct progeny from those individuals posed by that turning moment, that second of clarity that I here present:

Whoever, living through those days in France, dared to stick his neck outside the safety of his room had plenty to see and learn. It was not just a question of barricades, of tear gas in the eyes, or of the noise of concussion grenades. Peering through the yellowish atmosphere left by the gas, he could perceive what happens to a society when history quickens its pace, when the levers of power do not seem to respond to their masters, when factories stand idle while many minds begin to work on their own; in short, when the seemingly passive masses suddenly occupy the center of the political stage (Singer 15).

Obviously, I do not suggest the piece I present would provoke something in the scope of May 1968. Such postulations would be laughable for numerous reasons. However, I do wish for the ghosts of those days to linger here, to bewitch, to spook a society that has yet again succumbed to theatrics. In the words of painter Asger Jorn, “the outside of a house ought not reflect the inside but constitute a source of poetic sensation for the observer” (Andreotti 33). Moving away from rational functionalism, I aspire to offer this poetic sensation and to sew the seeds to be carried off and further nurtured by others. Like Meret Oppenheim, I offer the possibility of the fur of a Chinese gazelle where there currently exists merely a mass-produced teacup (Perry 245).

“The sacred presides…over the struggle against alienation. So soon as the relations of exploitation and the violence that underlies them are no longer concealed by the mystical veil, there is a breakthrough, a moment of clarity” (Dark Star 41). According to mystic Jacob Boehme in his Dialogues on the Supersensual Life, when the visible world perishes, then all that has come out of it and has been external shall perish with it, and what shall remain of it will only be “the crystalline nature and form, and of man also only the spiritual earth, for man shall be then wholly like the crystalline world, which as yet is hidden” (103). I offer an invitation to expose this hidden world, so that desire and consciousness are set free and “never again shall the spectacular society sleep in peace” (Vienet 122). Indeed, all the world is a stage, and while it may be in the logic of things that the last actor should film his own death, it is pleasure and desire, not logic, that will resurrect him.

“Life has neither goal nor finality. It escapes the economy and for fun will destroy it.”
Raoul Vaneigem

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