Tag Archives: annotations

The Society of the Spectacle

The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, newly translated and annotated by Ken Knabb, is due March, 2014. You can check out the text of this online at the Bureau of Public Secrets, and pre-order the print edition via AK Press.

Guy Debord Ken Knabb The Society of the Spectacle from AK Press

The Society of the Spectacle, originally published in Paris in 1967, has been translated into more than twenty other languages and is arguably the most important radical book of the twentieth century. This is the first edition in any language to include extensive annotations, clarifying the historical allusions and revealing the sources of Debord’s ‘détournements.’

Contrary to popular misconceptions, Debord’s book is neither an ivory tower ‘philosophical’ discourse nor a mere expression of ‘protest.’ It is a carefully considered effort to clarify the most fundamental tendencies and contradictions of the society in which we find ourselves. This makes it more of a challenge, but it is also why it remains so pertinent nearly half a century after its original publication while countless other social theories and intellectual fads have come and gone.

It has, in fact, become even more pertinent than ever, because the spectacle has become more all-pervading than ever — to the point that it is almost universally taken for granted. Most people today have scarcely any awareness of pre-spectacle history, let alone of anti-spectacle possibilities. As Debord noted in his follow-up work, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988), ‘spectacular domination has succeeded in raising an entire generation molded to its laws.’ [via]

Hermeneuticon

Hermeneuticon and the Hermeneuticon Wiki are some of the original site enhancements I’d planned to develop when I took over the Hermetic Library site. Hermeneuticon and projects hosted there are intended to enhance the content of the main library site by offering a place for the kind of additional information I personally find interesting and useful, and, of course, hope you will also. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons this companion site has lain fallow for far too long …

Recently I’ve renovated the Hermeneuticon site a bit, but also completely converted the Hermeneuticon Wiki to a new wiki engine and also more closely integrated it with the library.

 

Hermeneuticon

The Hermeneuticon site name is inspired by and a play on the folk etymology of “hermeneutics”, which suggests that the origin comes from Hermes, the messenger of the gods in Greek religion; because of the adianoeta and allegory with Hermes Trismegistus, to whom the terms hermeticism and hermetic are related.

I wanted to have a place where I could develop projects that added value to and encourage engagement with the texts offered by the main library site through sharing metadata, including hermeneutics, cross-indexes, cross-references, annotations and other marginalia; primarily through a wiki where such information could be collectively developed, but also through other projects as well.

There are currently five projects living at Hermeneuticon, four of which are being built on the wiki, including the Hermeneuticon Wiki itself but also Metadata, Concordance and Serapeion project spaces. A fifth project, the Aleister Crowley Reference Desk, is a separate development intended as a resource and generator for useful information, especially concordance tables and tag clouds, but is still in a very early alpha state though it may see itself renovated soon as well to support the rest of the projects, especially the Concordance Project for which it was originally developed.

 

Hermeneuticon Wiki

The primary tool at Hermeneuticon is the wiki.

The Hermeneuticon Wiki root namespace is intended to develop entries on key terms found across the entire main library site, similar to what one might expect from a wiki-based encyclopedia. However, articles in the primary namespace are intended to be unique resources, not copies or duplicates of another encyclopedia. If there are other articles or references, instead of importing them there, as one might on some other wiki, one will simply add them to one of the reference link lists toward the end of the article. However, if the material in another resource is of particular interest, one should consider quoting from those resources in an appropriately fair use citation.

There are some initial examples of articles and you can take a gander at all the pages and namespaces via the sitemap. Mostly there are some stub articles, but there are a few just a little bit more filled out, such as the entry for Florence Farr, to give you an idea.

 

I especially want to point out to you today the way that the information from the Metadata Project at the wiki is now more fully integrated with the rest of the library. As I mentioned already, the idea of offering a place for metadata is to increase the breadth and depth of engagement with the texts on the site. I think an example will do much to demonstrate what I mean by all of this.

If you head over to the main library site, and for this example I’m looking at Liber Ararita, in the upper right corner of most pages are a few useful links, such as a site search tool (including a convenient way to add the Hermetic Library site search to your browser, by clicking on the ‘+’ mark, if your browser supports such things), a link which opens some helpful bookmarking links, and a ‘Metadata’ link.

Hermetic Library metadata link

Clicking on this Metadata link will open a window which is populated with information directly and dynamically pulled from the matching page on the wiki from the Metadata Project.

Hermetic Library - Hermeneuticon Wiki metadata window

 

I think you can see from this example the potential for adding useful hermeneutics, cross-indexes, cross-references, annotations and other marginalia that are not part of the text itself, but of interest to the student and researcher, to the site. On the whole, there are not many entries available yet, but if you have comments, questions, or suggestions about these things or the site in general, feel free to contact me via the librarian alias.