Blog of Gary Kaye

At the end of a week were a prolonged period of illness that has led to me being laid on my haunches catching up with the wonderful Danish political drama Borgen on iPlayer and taking the opportunity to re-read modern masterpieces The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord and Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist, another timeless literary reference kept swimming around my groggy head, in the form of Forster's 'only connect'. 

Reading the week's news surrounding those twin folk devils of the financial sector, Stephen Hester and Fred Goodwin I could not resist linking the press furore surround Hester's bonus and Goodwin's knighthood to both Debord's and Fo's texts.

In Society of the Spectacle theses 24 claims:

The spectacle is the ruling order's nonstop discourse about itself, its never ending monologue of self-praise, its self-portrait at the stage of totalitarian domination of all aspects of life

Hearing the BBCs fawning over how Stephen Hester may well have walked away from his £1.2m job, a job in which he merely loses less than the last guy on behalf of the British taxpayer, one felt squarely at the centre of the society of the spectacle. Robert Peston looked almost close to tears as he told us again and again that without such large bonuses (or 'compensation' as one city gent, with his finger firmly away from the pulse of public opinion, put it) the entire board of RBS may well resign and move abroad. Well at least a surplus in the housing stock of Mayfair may make house prices slightly more affordable in that renowned borough.

Even more pertinent was a passage in Accidental Death of and Anarchist (translated to English by Gillian Hanna) in which the Maniac asks an investigative journalist:

...what sort of democracy requires the services of dogs such as these? I'll tell you. Bourgeois democracy which wears a thin skin of human rights to keep out the cold, but when things hot up, when the rotten plots of the ruling class fail to silence our demands, when they have put half the population on the dole queue and squeezed the other half dry with wage cuts to keep themselves in profit, when they have run out of promises and you reformists have failed to keep the masses in order for them; well then they shed their skin and dump on you,...

So some whoop with glee as Goodwin loses his title and the Tories claim that this is a Cupid's arrow of compassionate capitalism. Similarly we boo and hiss as Hester forgoes £930,000 and looks to replace it with a societal pat on the back and three rounds of 'For he's a jolly good fellow'. 

But, the anarchist was still thrown from the 4th floor window; each of the millions of drops of blood that splatter the pavement is a lost comrade at best and a lost ideal at worst. 

The Spectacle is the Spectacle and we can act upon it or be devoured by it's rapacious appetite. Debord signs off in theses 221 by stating:

The self-emancipation of our time is an emancipation from the material bases of inverted truth. This is possible only when individuals are "directly linked to universal history" and dialogue arms itself to impose its own conditions.

Remember, only connect and 'whichever way it goes, you see, you've got to decide. Goodnight.