Guy Debord & Society of the spectacle
as part of Nottingham Contemporary’s Remember Revolution 68 to 40 season
The revolutionary thinker, Guy Debord was the leading figure of the French intellectual group who called themselves The Situationist International. His text, The Society of the Spectacle written in 1967 is one of the greatest theoretical examinations of our socio-cultural condition, describing in pinpoint accuracy, the corporate globalization craze currently sweeping the planet. His work was instrumental in sparking the student uprisings in Europe in the late sixties.
The Reading Room also screened sections of the 1973 film of the same name, which was written and directed by Debord. This event complemented the Remember Revolution season in association with Nottingham Contemporary & Broadway Cinema.
Download Society of the Spectacle Chapter One
Phenomenology – Martin Heidegger & Being and Time with Natasha Adams
Being and Time (German: Sein und Zeit, 1927) is a book by German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Although written quickly, and despite the fact that Heidegger never completed the project outlined in the introduction, it remains his most important work and has profoundly influenced 20th-century philosophy, particularly existentialism, hermeneutics and deconstruction.
Download this section of Heidegger’s Being & Time
Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan with Ellie Harrison
Leviathan includes Hobbes’ thoughts on nearly all aspects of philosophy. Starting out by laying the foundations for how humans function, by giving a Cartesian style critique of the senses, then he explores language and science as the tools we use to communicate ideas and establish truths. The chapters Ellie chose to refer to, the ‘state of nature’ of human beings, talks about the natural ways in which humans would behave, if there were no laws or state control. He uses this as part of his argument for the necessity of a strong sovereign power.
The book was first published in 1651 and should be viewed in light of the fact that it was written during the English Civil Wars (1642 – 1651). Hobbes was a Royalist to begin with and had to flee to France in 1640 when trouble first began, returning only when Leviathan was published. When it was published, he was considered a traitor by his fellow Royalists, but I believe this was mainly due to his anti-religious stance, which meant that he lived the rest of his life in fear of being tried for heresy.
An Entry into Semiotics (Charles Sanders Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure) with Jonathan Watts
Generally semiotics is said to be “concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign”. In the early modern era however, two thinkers –Charles Sanders Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure – working simultaneously but quite separately on different sides of the Atlantic, began rationalising the sign making process in order that they might outline a general theory of signs. Whilst Peirce, a pragmatic philosopher, was engaged in enunciating a vast static taxonomy of signs, Saussure, a linguist, imagined a science to discover the laws that govern the use of signs within a dynamic social life.
The text chosen for the the Reading Room session was an excerpt from Daniel Chandler’s lucid Semiotics: The Basics, outlining the constituent parts of both Peirce’s and Saussure’s models of the sign.
Download exerpt from Daniel Chandler’s Entry into Semiotics
Arthur Machen: All Hallows Eve Event with Blue Firth
The Reading Room presented The White People on All Hallows Eve for an atmospheric reading of this Gothic Horror classic with artist and Reading Room founder Blue Firth. ‘The White People’ is an early short story by Arthur Machen, a writer widely reputed to be responsible for the legend of the ‘Angel of Mons’ in WW1. The story unravels mysteriously as a conversation between two men on the nature of evil centres around a young girl’s odd diary entries.
A discussion of two men on the nature of Evil leads one of them to reveal a mysterious Green Book he possesses. It is a young girl’s diary which outlines in strange and evocative writing her day to day life, and conversations with her nurse. Her book makes curious allusions to nymphs,” Dols,” voolas,” “white, green, and scarlet ceremonies,” “Aklo letters,” the “Xu” and “Chian” languages, and “Mao games,” among other things. The girl’s tale gradually develops a mounting atmosphere of suspense with suggestions of witchcraft.
Download Arthur Machen’s The White People
Foucault & Marcuse : Sex & Oppression with Charlotte Kingsbury
For the second Reading Room, Charlotte Kingsbury introduced the connections between sexuality and oppression through examining two introductory texts: Eros and Civilisation: A Philosophical Enquiry into Freud (1955) by Herbert Marcuse – Extract from Introduction and Chapter One The History of Sexuality: Volume One: The Care of the Self (1976) by Michel Foucault – Introduction ‘We Other Victorians’
Perception : Bishop Berkeley & Samuel Beckett with Jennie Syson
Berkeley began his treatise by asserting that existence is the state of being perceived by a perceiver. Human minds know ideas, not objects. The three kinds of ideas are those of sensation, thought, and imagination. This theory, summed up in his dictum, “Esse est percipi” (“To be is to be perceived”), contends that individuals can only directly know sensations and ideas of objects, not abstractions such as “matter.”
The very first Reading Room at Thoroton House explored Berkeley’s philosophy alongside Samuel Beckett’s Film, 1964 starring Buster Keaton. Film explores the perspective from to stand points, that of the perceiver and the perceived.
Download Berkeley’s A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Sections I – VIII, 1710
