I've got a little spicy question for you. You're allowed to say whatever you want, of course, and we are behind the paywall.

But I think we need to grapple now with society of the spectacle as a historical document.

And the way I want to start that is by you know de board has a whole

section towards the end of the book talking about state capitalist or Stalinist

bureaucracies such as they existed right right? He calls, say the Soviet Union,

he would actually existing socialism, he would call it concentrated spectacle, right?

So it's the flip side of a diffuse spectacle, which is like capitalist commodity society right that exists

in in opposition and in pseudo opposition that is to say the Soviet Union so there's that and then so that's obviously

foreground's political analysis.

But now of course we don't have a Soviet Union.

We don't have a at least in this case a pseudo opposition to capitalist commodity society

so I wonder what we do with society is spectacle right is what how do we relate

now practically to what's written in this book given

that social material conditions political conditions are so different than they were

you know 60 years ago yeah I think it's a fantastic question, Sean.

I mean, not to bring up cured quail again, but in our first volume, Paul Maddick does a really

good job of situating DuBord's book within that Keynesian, you know, stimulus period, post-war

prosperity, post-war abundance.

And so Paul has an interesting critique of, well, you know, the book itself might have been important at the time

but this seems to render it you know sort of totally impertinent after the 70s and I mean it's an

interesting point but I think there is something about the

Pourds critique here that is not reducible to its own historical moment.

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