John Plant comments: 1969 I was in the Zoology dept of Swansea Uni. Before Autumn Term undergrads were required to take part in a week long visit to Galway Uni to be able to see first hand landmarks such as the Cliffs of Moher. I arrived a few days early in order to talk to people about their perception of the initial stages of "the troubles". Arriving in Galway on a Sunday I found the city immobilised (small problem for hitch-hiker) by a mass defiance of ne by-laws prohibiting fishing from the many bridges and canals that threaded the centre. Citizens soon stopped me and asked had I brought my fishing rod. There had been a popular mobilisation to encourage near-universal participation. I was soon lent a rod and can of bait. My ineffective angling caught a small brown trout, enough to win me invitation to a neighbourhood collective dinner. My reading matter for this trip included McLuhan/Fiore "The Medium is the Massage". It was too much for my capability at the time. I improvised a gang out of the itinerant zoologists, and the night before we returned to Swansea we graffitied the architecturally insignificant cathedral with the slogan "The consequences of the images will be the images of the consequences", misspelling with a surplus "n".,
Ha recently I've been thinking a lot about Debord, and about a lot *through* Debord, too. In my view we're definitely deep into the era of the integrated spectacle - the full global unfurling of which I think people like Fukuyama unwittingly celebrated with all their 'end of history' crap back in the early 90s. The question now is whether the way that Trump and co work is so obviously spectacular they risk drawing attention to the magicians tricks - that's my hope, anyway... I tried to work through all these ideas in a recent post on my own Future / Conditional substack newsletter - here's a link in case you're interested - and if you are, I'd love to know what you think! https://futureconditiona1.substack.com/p/the-end-of-the-end-of-history
John Plant comments: 1969 I was in the Zoology dept of Swansea Uni. Before Autumn Term undergrads were required to take part in a week long visit to Galway Uni to be able to see first hand landmarks such as the Cliffs of Moher. I arrived a few days early in order to talk to people about their perception of the initial stages of "the troubles". Arriving in Galway on a Sunday I found the city immobilised (small problem for hitch-hiker) by a mass defiance of ne by-laws prohibiting fishing from the many bridges and canals that threaded the centre. Citizens soon stopped me and asked had I brought my fishing rod. There had been a popular mobilisation to encourage near-universal participation. I was soon lent a rod and can of bait. My ineffective angling caught a small brown trout, enough to win me invitation to a neighbourhood collective dinner. My reading matter for this trip included McLuhan/Fiore "The Medium is the Massage". It was too much for my capability at the time. I improvised a gang out of the itinerant zoologists, and the night before we returned to Swansea we graffitied the architecturally insignificant cathedral with the slogan "The consequences of the images will be the images of the consequences", misspelling with a surplus "n".,
Ha recently I've been thinking a lot about Debord, and about a lot *through* Debord, too. In my view we're definitely deep into the era of the integrated spectacle - the full global unfurling of which I think people like Fukuyama unwittingly celebrated with all their 'end of history' crap back in the early 90s. The question now is whether the way that Trump and co work is so obviously spectacular they risk drawing attention to the magicians tricks - that's my hope, anyway... I tried to work through all these ideas in a recent post on my own Future / Conditional substack newsletter - here's a link in case you're interested - and if you are, I'd love to know what you think! https://futureconditiona1.substack.com/p/the-end-of-the-end-of-history