PERIPHRASIS

Debord: The reigning deceptions of the time are on the point of causing us to forget that truth may also be displayed by means of images. An image that has not deliberately been separated from its meaning can add great precision and certainty to knowledge. 

And more laterally...
 
Makers of images must fight the image's own desire to express a cliché or axiom of truth.

Reality is already a prolific forger of crystalline certainties, and these may be undercut by a judicious use of photoshop. In the instance above, the imager, brutalized by the image, which says look HERE and not elsewhere, did not resist sufficiently.

This was the willfully misunderstood point of Errol Morris's film on Abu Ghraib. The truth, the vertovian one, is there in the INTERVAL of the FALSE MOMENT and the TRUE MOMENT, but you must show both in articulation.

THIS JUST IN...

Several things are happening quickly right now, at once:

1. The fusion of producer and consumer of the spectacle.

2. Commodification and fluidification of identity. “I’m Guy Debord’s friend on MySpace!”

3. Intensification of eternal present. Extreme commodification of the temporal. Twitter is not information, but a way of carving up time. It is a time medium. Also: texting/email is orality barely disguised as visuality. OMG. LOL!

4. Visual Platforms (cartographies) for the specularization of social relations. (i.e. social networking) The fact that social relations are visible (like Vertov’s dream of the intelligible soviet society) makes comparison pleasurable and irresistible.  Rear Window social platforms.

5. Globalization of terror as a secret anti-spectacular force, the solution to which is, naturally, more surveillance.

6. Insofar as all things are mediated through images/orality, (but without any final accounting from an AUTHORITY as in tribal culture) nothing certain can be settled, history made impossible, the rule of indeterminacy and many beautiful & wild gardens of disinformation flourish.

BLACK HAWK DOWN / SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE

The basic work-problem of Globalization is to introduce spectacularity to the Favela/Colonia/Slum/Urban Interface. It is this vast “untapped” population which must be brought into cultural production of the spectacular.

KINO PRAVDA

All these vertovian kinoks running around with camera-phones, producing-consuming the spectacle – they have the cheap pathos of African child soldiers with their Kalashnikovs.