«Le spectacle n’est pas un ensemble d’images», notait Guy Debord en 1967, «mais un rapport social entre des personnes, médiatisé par des images». Un tel rapport social définit très précisement l’hysterie. C’est donc bien cette névrose généralisée qui caractérise la «société du spectacle». Le spectacle n’est pas «le capital à un tel degré d’accumulation qu’il devient image», c’est l’aliénation capitaliste devenue si générale et irrécusable qu’elle engendre une folie universelle. Le spectacle est l’aspect clinique de cette folie.

‘The spectacle is not an ensemble of images,’ Guy Debord would remark in 1967, ‘but a social relationship between people mediated by images.’ Hysteria is very precisely defined by just such a social relationship. It is therefore indeed this generalized neurosis which characterizes the society of the spectacle. The spectacle is not ‘capital accumulated to such a degree that is becomes image’, it’s the alienating effect of capital become so general and indisputable that it engenders a universal madness. The spectacle is the clinical aspect of this madness.

— Michel Bounan, La folle histoire du monde (2006, p. 109 [my translation])

In my æsthetic philosophy of flânerie, by far the largest branch is given over to the constellation of networked problems that arise from the issue of modernity.

Flânerie is a strategy that certain rare, dandistic men will always choose for gracefully surviving modernity:—for the accoutrements of modernity are products of civilization, and the condition of ‘civilization’ itself is produced precisely by the accoutrements of modernity.

Le dandysme apparaît surtout aux époques transitoires où la démocratie n’est pas encore toutepuissante, où l’aristocratie n’est que partiellement chancelante et avilie. Dans le trouble de ces époques quelques hommes déclassés, dégoûtés, désœuvrés, mais tous riches de force native, peuvent concevoir le projet de fonder une espèce nouvelle d’aristocratie, d’autant plus difficile à rompre qu’elle sera basée sur les facultés les plus précieuses, les plus indestructibles, et sur les dons célestes que le travail et l’argent ne peuvent conférer. Le dandysme est le dernier éclat d’héroïsme dans les décadences…. Le dandysme est un soleil couchant ; comme l’astre qui décline, il est superbe, sans chaleur et plein de mélancolie. Mais, hélas ! la marée montante de la démocratie, qui envahit tout et qui nivelle tout, noie jour à jour ces derniers représentants de l’orgueil humain et verse des flots d’oubli sur les traces de ces prodigieux myrmidons.

Dandyism appears especially during those transitional periods when democracy is not yet omnipotent and aristocracy is only partially debased and tottering. In the strife of these periods, certain classless, idle men, fed up but all of them flush with native force, are capable of conceptualizing the plan for the foundation of a new type of aristocracy, all the more difficult to break since it will be based upon the most precious and indestructible faculties, and upon divine gifts that cannot be conferred by labour and lucre. Dandyism is the last spark of heroism in the age of decadence…. [It] is a setting sun: like the declining luminary, it is superb, without heat and full of melancholy. But, alas, the rising tide of democracy, which seeps into and levels everything, daily drowns these last representatives of human pride and pours upon the traces left by these prodigious Myrmidons a deluge of oblivion.

— Charles Baudelaire, “Le Peintre de la vie moderne” (1885, pp. 94-9 [my translation])

In his critique of the Paris Salon of 1846, Baudelaire ended his diatribe with a manifesto proclaiming the heroism of modern life, declaring that the dandy’s black frock coat, so abused by the literati of his day as ‘unpoetic’, was the armour that the modern cavalier must wear, bearing upon his thin, bowed shoulders ‘the symbol of a perpetual mourning’—a cross as potent as Parsifal’s.

‘Modernity’ is as much a myth as ‘antiquity’, and as Louis Aragon says in the preface of his surrealist classic Le Paysan de Paris (1926), for the dandistic, flâneurial poet, bopping about the city in his sensual derangement, a new mythology of our modern condition springs fruitfully up at every step.

I notice in my own case, starting now to give an occasional live recitation of pieces from The Spleen of Melbourne CD, that my surreally Parisian vision of Melbourne has for my fellow citizens something of this effect: places and names rendered banal by familiarity are suddenly seen anew through the prism of a poetic prose; and it may be that the heroism of the urban everyday, the ‘actless act’ of observant walking, the flâneur’s fashionable swagger through the suburbs, will one day be thought as heroic a processional as the Snowy horseman’s ride.

But the problems of modernity give way to those of post-modernity, which is both imminent threat and immanent opportunity.

This is the penultimate period of the Spenglerian decline, the democratic tide of decadence risen so high that only the stiffest necks can pretend it isn’t up to their chins.

In our times, those stiff-necked captives are the Baby-Boomers, children of a liberal, international rules-based order. And at the other end of the spectrum, the poor souls trying to breathe underwater, are the Zoomers.

Neither demographic, I contend, has any idea what is going on, and both, in the chauvinism of mutual ignorance, are vociferous in prescriptions downward and proscriptions upward.

The Boomers, being thoroughly analogue people, cannot imagine a mode of life that is thoroughly mediated by the digital spectacle, and the Zoomers, who have no living experience except of an existence thoroughly mediated by imaged surfaces, cannot imagine a halcyon, organic time that was not exclusively dictated by 1’s and 0’s.

Only Generation X and the older Millennials—those of us who gained our majority before September 11, 2001—are really in a position to survey the salience landscape of opportunity and threat with something like a clear-eyed assessment.

As the waters rise around us in the West, those of us born between, say, 1966 and 1983 stand with one foot planted in a living memory of where humanity has been—its analogue history—and one in an imagining of where it must evolve to—its digital future.

We’re not digital natives, more like émigrés from the analogue to this new salience landscape. We’re forty years and more wandering in the desert, somewhat adapted to life in these climes but with a living remembrance of ‘the Old Country’ behind us.

As splenetic and depressive a soul as Baudelaire, as thoroughly ennuyé with life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as he was with life in the nineteenth, and as one who, like Baudelaire, was utterly alone in decrying the bourgeois myth of progress, scuttling my whole future in the 1990’s to become (of all unremunerative things) a ‘writer’ when it was unfashionable to believe that the bottom would soon drop out of capitalism, democracy and modernity, I smile with benign contempt at the leprous grifters online who now making a living sounding the bell about the decline of the West.

It is only now, as they start to take on ballast with every breath, that they can taste the salt in the air.

I made a fatal choice that I wasn’t going to buy in to this bourgeois myth of modernity, but that a ‘New Myth’ of modernity did indeed need to be written;—and that it had to be written; that the old analogue craft of taking a pen in one’s hand and shaping a thought on paper that was eminently ‘functional’, fit for its purpose but elegant in its form, could not be superseded by plastic keys, digital screens and spellcheck.

I was one of the few who actually drew the line in the sand of technological convenience beyond which I refused to cross when the stakes were still low enough to be containable, and I have held the line implacably, foreseeing the moral cul de sac of Web 2.0.

As analogue people, the Boomers are enthused by this ‘brave new world’, seeing nothing but exhilarating opportunity in the digital, while, as digital natives, the Zoomers, living with the moral consequences of a reified spectacle, see nothing but nihilistic threat in the social networking affordances of Web 2.0.

And observing the hopelessness of the younger generation—these young folks who were born after a time when a moral calculation on the relative costs and benefits of technological, capitalistic modernity could be made, and who are thus in no way responsible for the place, underwater, where they find themselves—as I said to someone recently, it feels, as a Gen-X/Gen-Y cusper, that the fatal decision I made on the verge of my majority to stove in my boat and go down, to pursue humanity over technology whatever the personal cost, to be a writer rather than a technocrat, was a premonition of the Zoomers’ future.

What I chose as a poet-prophet of the present has been forced upon them as an inevitability, and as the tide rises, the decline’s coming for us all.

Quand le monde semble une prison et l’existence une impasse, quand la conscience se révolte contre le lieu qu’elle occupe, ou quand elle erre désorientée comme dans les pièges d’un labyrinthe, ça s’appelle la mélancolie. Sa victime entretient avec l’espace la plus douloureuse des relations ; elle en éprouve tantôt le manque, tantôt l’excès ; sa finitude lui fait horreur, de même que l’infinitude la terrifie. D’où la recherche mélacolique des ailleurs et des lontains : à l’égaré, le voyage promet un but, au captif une évasion. L’ancienne médecine le savait bien, qui aux malades de l’âme prescrivait de prendre la route — soit pour conquérir un horizon et sortir de leur marasme, soit pour imposer un rhythme aux fluctuations de leur inquiétude.

Le XIX^e siècle, âge du spleen, est aussi l’âge des partances. La grande époque des là-bas. De Chateaubriand à Nerval, de Baudelaire à Maupassant, pas un écrivain (laissons de côté les «bourgeois», condamnés aux faux-semblants de leurs circuits touristiques) qui n’entende l’appel du large et n’y réponde à sa manière. L’un, parmi les bruyères de Bretagne ou dans les forêts d’Amérique, rêve de part et d’autre de l’océan aux espaces d’une autre vie…. Le second poursuit jusqu’au pied des Pyramides sa recherche des grands mystères. San quitter Paris, le poète des Fleurs du Mal s’en va … à la poursuite de son désir, ou plonge au fond de l’inconnu … vers la nouveauté d’un ailleurs. Et en 1889, n’en pouvant plus de voir la tour Eiffel confirmer le triomphe des mercantis, Maupassant fait voile vers la Sicile, avant de s’embarquer dans la démence. La puissante rêverie de l’exilé, et la pérégrination romantique vers les prestiges de l’Orient ; l’odyssée toute spirituelle du voyageur presque immobile, et la fuite écœurée loin du monde matérialiste : quatre modes d’évasion qu’a inventés le mal du siècle.

When the world seems like a prison and existence an impasse, when consciousness rebels against the site it inhabits, or when it wanders, disoriented, as if among the traps of a maze, we call this melancholy. Its victim maintains the most painful relationship with space; he feels sometimes the lack of it, sometimes the excess; its limits inspire horror in him just as its limitlessness terrifies him. From whence emerges the sad quest for ‘elsewheres’ and ‘other places’: to the lost, travel promises a goal, to the captive, an escape. Ancient medicine understood this condition well and prescribed the road to those sick at soul—whether to conquer an horizon and thus overcome their slump, or to impose a rhythm on the fluctuations of their anxiety.

The nineteenth century, ‘age of spleen’, is also the era of departures, the great period of going overseas. From Chateaubriand to Nerval, from Baudelaire to Maupassant, there is not a writer who does not hear the call of the open sea and respond to it in his own way—leaving to one side the ‘popular’ writers, condemned to the false pretenses of their touristic parcours. One, on the moors of Brittany or in the forests of America, dreams of the spaces of another life on both sides of the Atlantic…. The second pursues his search for the great mysteries to the foot of the Pyramids. Without leaving Paris, the poet of Les Fleurs du mal goes … after his desire or plunges to the depths of the unknown … towards the novelty of somewhere else. And in 1889, no longer able to stand the sight of the Eiffel Tower confirming the triumph of the moneylenders, Maupassant sets sail for Sicily before embarking for madness. The powerful dream of the exile and the romantic pilgrimage towards famous sites of the Orient; the entirely spiritual odyssey of the almost paralyzed traveler, and the revolted flight far from materialistic society: these are four plan of escape devised in response to the malaise of the century.

— Yves Hersant, preface to J.-K. Huysmans, Là-Bas (1985, pp. 7-8 [my translation])

Thus it is that in France, the nation that, through all its revolutionary social experiments with governance in the nineteenth century, sets the tone of modernity for the rest of the world, all serious writers feel a ‘fruitful despair’ and an urge to set off for ‘somewhere else’—materially different conditions of space and time that are, geographically and temporally, consubstantial with a new spirit of life, their own place and time being dead to them.

Over Easter, traditionally humanity’s solemn feast time for marking the annual cycle of descent and ascent, of death and resurrection, I found my eye caught by a provocative title on YouTube: “Why Young People Want to Die | Derrick Jensen Interview”.

As a survival of the nineteenth-century ‘age of spleen’ into twenty-first-century postmodernity, as the ‘down under’ interpreter of Baudelaire—as ‘là-bas’ – simultaneously, antipodally ‘down there’ and ‘over there’ – as Baudelaire could have wished to get!—your Melbourne Flâneur, trudging the camino of a city and a country in search of a better life than technological, capitalistic modernity has offered us, was sure to be attracted by such a wrist-slitting title!

Apparently Derrick Jensen is a writer. I don’t know Mr. Jensen or his work; I had never heard of him before my eye alighted on this video and have never read any of his books. But I liked the way he conducted himself in this interview and he spoke just as writer should do:—as the conscience—both in the English sense and in the French, as the ‘consciousness’—of his time.

When we hear so much unconsidered chatter on all forms of media, social and otherwise, polluting the sensemaking commons, it’s for those few of us who have mastered the human skills of the métier of writing—the abstract ability to rotate concepts in our mind as you can see Jensen do in this interview, and to consider the modular constructions that can be formed by words and ideas before he speaks—to guide the discourse, for we’re in the crow’s nest and can see both the Old Country behind us and the Promised Land before us.

I bring your particular attention to the section of the interview between 59:19 and 1:03:39 where Jensen talks about his introduction to Guy Debord’s concept of ‘la société du spectacle’. It’s a pretty graphic example, I warn you, but that’s to the point.

As Debord states and Jensen explains, in our addictive ‘mal du siècle’, addicted to a global spectacle composed of a mosaic of reified digital images which have colonized analogue reality, the images of human life must themselves become more graphic to deliver even a little hit.

But what is gained by the image’s graphicness comes at the cost of emotion, of connection, of relation to the real person behind the fake image.

Guy Debord, in the sixties, wrote about how if you take away relationship, the spectacle itself becomes boring. … [I]f you take emotion away from sex, if you take any connection whatsoever away from sex, it frankly can get kind of boring. And if it gets boring like that, you have to continue to increase the stimulus to make it so it doesn’t get boring.

— Derrick Jensen

When I heard Jensen’s explication of the spectacle, I was reminded of a quick and dirty video essay I made some time ago in Sydney—the one at the top of this post.

Wandering around the 20th-century galleries one rainy December day in the Art Gallery of NSW, I found myself attracted to an old silent short, “Toto exploite la curiosité” (1909) by Pathé Frères, playing in the Australian room, one of a number of early French films restored by the National Film and Sound Archive.

The plot is simple enough: A Parisian gamin finds a kaleidoscope lying in the street, picks it up and, as you can see in the video essay, just about goes into sugar shock as soon as he raises it to his eye to view the spectacle of coloured beads within.

Another gosse comes along, curious about the epileptic fit Toto is having in the street, and asks to have a look—with the same result.

Soon there’s a whole crowd of bons bourgeois gathered around Toto, who has had the bright idea of charging a fee to see the spectacle of the kaleidoscope, and almost as quickly, a riot breaks out at this nascent display of capitalistic enterprise, with even the gendarme who comes to restore order jockeying to get a look-see and just about fainting under the force of the spectacle.

What fascinated me were the hand-coloured inserts of the inside of the kaleidoscope, which look to be animated, though I’m not sure. It’s a sophisticated piece of early narrative filmmaking, and with nothing on me but my phone to record a swatch of it, as someone whose filmmaking and videographic style is heavily influenced by pre-Griffith silent cinema, I had to nab a couple of minutes of “Toto exploite la curiosité” as a kind of ‘visual note’ to myself on the level of sophistication it’s possible to achieve with an economy of technique.

But then too, I’m fascinated by kaleidoscopes which, as Toto’s exploitative brainwave shows, are the proto-cinematic spectacle par excellence. As David Thomson tells us in The Whole Equation (2005), whereas the Lumière brothers imagined the movies as a communal spectacle, a single screen we share in the dark, it was their competitor, the enterprising American Thomas Edison, who had the longer vision for the medium, imagining it not as one big screen, but as many small screens that every audience member could voyeuristically enjoy on his own, tuning in to the spectacle of his choice.

In essence, Edison imagined the kaleidoscopic spectacle of television, the personal computer, and even the smartphone.

So the kind of unconscious meta-referentiality in “Toto exploite la curiosité”—the fact that this short French film was in some sense using the kaleidoscope, an invention of the early nineteenth century, to predict, at the dawn of cinema, a spectacularly mercantile, American-inflected future for the medium it could not possibly have imagined—seemed to me a miraculous bit of cinema poetry, one that illustrated a quotation from my reading, an extract from French essayist Michel Bounan’s book La folle histoire du monde (The Mad History of the World).

Bounan, a doctor and friend of Guy Debord, is no longer with us, having died in 2019. This is unfortunate, as I would love to translate Bounan’s short, prophetic book, written in 2006, just before the big uptake in social media, and introduce his premonitory thoughts on the spectacular state of clinical hysteria and mass psychosis we now find ourselves in—and into which the Zoomers have been effectively born—to an Anglophonic audience.

Though he’s writing a whole decade before Brexit and Trump, and he never lived to see the Coronavirus, when I first read La folle histoire du monde mid-way through the pandemic, I was sure that Bounan was coyly referring to events across the Channel and across the Pond, that’s how prophetic his book seems.

And yet social media was not yet really ‘a thing’, as the kids say, when he was writing it.

In the citation I translate in the video essay, Bounan quotes Debord’s fourth thesis in La société du spectacle (1967)—that the spectacle itself is not simply an ensemble of images, but, as Jensen explains, it is a relationship between people that is mediated by images.

And as Debord, in his sidebar commentary on his own work, points out, this thesis is a paraphrase of Marx’s statement in Capital:—that capital itself is not an object, but a social relationship between people which establishes itself via the mediation of objects.

We see both these things demonstrated in the excerpt from “Toto exploite la curiosité”: It is the object of common curiosity, the kaleidoscope, that establishes and mediates the initial relationship between Toto and the other boy. Equally, it is the common object of curiosity, the spectacular object of the kaleidoscope, that mediates the entire social network that assembles on the street around Toto.

And furthermore, as Toto begins to charge the badauds for access to the spectacle secreted within the kaleidoscope (over which, through the law of ‘finders keepers’, he has sole propriety), it is both capital and the spectacle that objectively mediates the relationships of the society around him.

In essence, it is the ensemble of subjective images within the black box of the kaleidoscope that objectively dictates the formation of the social network, its relationship to itself, and its relationship to Toto.

What fascinates me about the kaleidoscope as a proto-cinematic device is that it is the perhaps only instrument of objective vision—quite unlike a telescope or microscope—that projects a purely subjective image. Looking into the black box of a kaleidoscope is like seeing pictures in the abstract shapes of clouds—while looking outward, you see a spectacle within yourself.

We’re now at a point in our evolution where the globe is like a giant mirror ball over which we have glued the tiny subjective screens of our narcissistic reflections projected through the spectacular, kaleidoscopic medium of the Internet. And we have two generations now who have been born into this reified world of digital surfaces applied contiguously over the organic, analogue reality which supports our life and relations with each other.

And that’s Bounan’s ‘universal madness’, the generalized hysteria illustrated in “Toto exploite la curiosité”, the hyper-stimulated relationships without emotion, without authentic human connection Derrick Jensen observes with sympathetic sadness in the young.