And while researchers expected students instructed by VOA to experience greater stress and negative emotion, they found no significant difference between the two groups. The researchers found that students who received VOA instruction and feedback learned surgical skills 2.6 times faster and achieved 36 percent better performance compared to those who received instruction and feedback from remote instructors. It thus contends that Debord's work can be seen to imply a model of collective political will, and offers initial suggestions as to how that interpretation might be developed.A student training on a neurosurgical simulator. Drawing attention to Debord's claims that theories should be understood as strategic interventions, and also to the S.I.'s calls for their own supersession, the thesis uses its observations on the nature of Debord's Hegelian Marxism to cast the theory of spectacle as a particular moment within a broader notion of historical agency. Yet whilst the theory itself may be problematic, the conceptions of time, history and subjectivity that inform it may be of greater interest. The theory is based upon the separation of an acting subject from his or her own actions, and in viewing capitalist society under this rubric it tends towards replacing Marx's presentation of capital as an antagonistic social relation with an abstract opposition between an alienated consciousness and a homogenised world. Addressing Debord and the S.I.’s work in this way also highlights the shortcomings of the theory of spectacle. The thesis connects the latter to Debord’s interests in strategy, chance and play by way of its existential elements, and uses these themes to investigate his own and the Situationist International’s (S.I.) concerns with praxis, political action and organisation. This approach thus offers a means of addressing Debord’s Hegelian Marxism. The theory of spectacle is shown to be not simply a critique of the mass media, as is often assumed, but rather an account of a relationship with history or more specifically, an alienated relation to the construction of history. Through doing so it highlights the importance of his largely overlooked concerns with time and history, and interprets the theory on that basis. The original abstract for the thesis reads as follows: This thesis addresses Guy Debord's theory of spectacle through its primary philosophical and theoretical influences. The basic argument and structure are, however, similar. It also looks at Debord's source materials in greater detail. The book is quite different from the thesis: it is much longer, it uses very little of the original thesis material, and it develops and expands on many of the thesis' claims. This PhD thesis formed the initial basis for my book Debord, Time and Spectacle: Hegelian Marxism and Situationist Theory (the paperback version was published by Haymarket in 2018 ). Returning to Debord in this way helps us problematize the banal liberalism that plagues many facets of digital culture today, despite that culture’s evident, if unwitting, embrace of Debord’s most innovative technical motifs. From this struggle emerges a tactical practice of sampling that functions as a radical corrective to historiographic method and a prescient prototype for the demassifying media tendencies of the telematic twenty-first century. From his earliest cine-club provocations, through his sober dialectical critiques of consumer capitalism’s optical empire, to his funereal and memoirish career capstone, Debord’s cinematic corpus unfolds as a permanent struggle to integrate incommensurate revolutionary movements in politics and communications. Debord scripted and directed six films (1952–1978), each uniquely exhibiting his ever-evolving cinematographic technique of détournement-selection and recombination of representative images of postwar mass media.

This chapter examines radical French social theorist Guy Debord’s film career as a revealing episode in media sampling’s prehistory.

Fostering apocalypse del