Black Friday Shoppers Fan Out in the Dark of Night

The disturbances of 1968, which in several countries lasted into the following years, having nowhere overthrown the existing organization of the society from which it springs apparently spontaneously, the spectacle has thus continued to gather strength; that is, to spread to the furthest limits on all sides, while increasing its density in the centre.  It has even learnt new defensive techniques, as powers under attack always do.

                                                                                                                       Guy Debord

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Shopping on the Friday after Thanksgiving, a custom that is tradition to some and puzzling to others, got a new twist this year with several stores opening as early as 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day. Analysts said that retailers were aiming for customers who might have limited budgets and trying to appeal to people who would rather stay awake late than awaken for a 4 a.m. opening.

The first numbers on Friday’s sales results are not available until Sunday, but many malls and stores said they were seeing more visitors than last year. Macy’s Herald Square estimated that 9,000 people were waiting for its midnight opening, versus 7,000 when it opened at 5 a.m. last year. The earlier starting times seemed to bring out younger consumers who wanted to extend their Thanksgiving Day revelry by checking out the bargains. But many first-time Black Friday shoppers seemed puzzled by the fuss.

New York Times

                                                                                                                       Black Friday Shoppers Fan Out in the Dark of Night

Budget-minded shoppers will be racing for bargains at ever-earlier hours while the rich mostly will not be bothering to leave home.  The low-end and midrange retailers are risking low margins as they cut prices to attract shoppers, while executives at luxury stores say that they are actually able to sell more at full price than in recent boom years.  “We’re now into a less promotional environment than we were before the recession,“ said Stephen I. Sadove, chairman and chief executive of Saks.

New York Times

                                                                                                                       Opening Day for Shoppers Shows Divide

Oh, you shoppers – what fearless American Spectaclists!

So, to get this straight: In the United States, amidst the early stages of a “double-dip” recession, the shopping holiday of Black Friday has extended its hours and encroached onto the day of Thanksgiving, in the process raising sales a record 7% from last year while the rich mostly stayed home.  “Sale-crazed consumers” to use Post-speak, setting out like zombies across the land, pitching tents, lining up by the thousand at department and so-called big-box stores.  You cannot help but wonder: who are these people and what is driving them?

The first part of that question is the easier to answer.  They are probably people you know.  Or at the least they are people who people you know know.  They are about as ordinary and all-walks-of-life as I could imagine any demographic to be.  Just looking at their faces you can see how little they have to do with one another.  The common cause is clear, but as far as any sense of unity goes… it wasn’t surprising that things got ugly in a few places.  Just ask anyone who’s done it – bargain hunting is always teetering on the edge of a swerve for the violent.

The most fabulous and telling of the Black Friday spectacles this week was the Los Angeles woman who pepper sprayed other shoppers at a Walmart to beat out fierce competition for an X-Box.  Or as the New York Post put it perfectly: Woman Pepper Sprays Rivals in Sales Frenzy.  The frenzy!  My god.  Apparently she turned herself into police the next day.

Is it not perfectly obvious that this years excess of spectacular consumerist frenzy is a mirroring, if not a direct response, to the #Occupy movements around the country?  When I first heard of the numbers standing outside of Macys, I was immediately reminded of the wildly varying numbers that have been reported on the turn-outs at marches since the Occupation began.  And just on the heels of the origin of the Occupation having been swept out and evicted in the dead of night, accompanied by an unheard-of exiling of journalists – the dark of night, the pepper spray, the tents! – and what is the Movement doing to counter-act or aggravate this arguably greater Movement of demented consumerism?  By what spectacle-logic have these two Movements come into collision?  And where in the world will it take us?

America has forged a new big-box-store-cum-concentration-camp aesthetic by way of the common denominator.  And it is only growing.  There are already Walmarts in China.

What next?

With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning.  To this list of triumphs of power we should, however, add one result which has proved negative: once the running of a state involves a permanent and massive shortage of historical knowledge, that state can no longer be led strategically.

Guy Debord

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Tactical Aesthetics pt. 3 – a million little human fragments

On November 16th the scene at Zuccotti Square had once transformed into something as radically different as anything it had yet become.  The Square was ringed in barricades, dotted with Brookfield’s private security guards (relatively clueless guys in day-glo), completely clear of the gritty tented encampment which had taken shape in the pre-Halloween snowstorm, and with two entry/exits points under complete control of the NYPD.  It was a sad sight to be sure.  An Occupation become public holding cell. There was a crowd of a couple dozen Occupiers attempting to convene inside the barricades, but of the parks previous revolutionary form, hardly a sign of it was left – no people’s library, no kitchen, no media center, no drum circle, no button sellers, no tents, no tarps, no nothing.  All that could be seen were the golden crowns of the 55 honey locust trees, floating like a cloud over the once obscured footlights.

 

I found myself wondering: what is it called when they take the bones out of a fish?  Is it called boning?  Deboning?  And is it worth finding out, or should this word just be an absence for now?

The shadow of an occupied space in the shadow of two towers.  And what has that space become?  Which may be as ridiculous to ask as what have those two towers become?  And to mean it all quite literally.

Considering the cloud of bacteria which I play host to, and by which my existence is extended – these microbes, my veil of insects, eyelash mites &c, which live off of my face like a skyscraper lives off of the bedrock of the city.  In the invisibility of that which surrounds me, or is me, in as many ways as my cognitions or my organs are me, I am able to find some analogy to the events which are unfolding in New York specifically.

The brightest aesthetic point of the Occupation proper (not to mention the marches, swarms, bridge-cuts, &c) was its precipitous proximity to the shadow of the twin towers – its multiplicity opposing their duality, its amorphousness opposing their flat surface, its groundedness opposing their dizzying height.  In ten years since 9/11, the Occupation is really the only considerable event to provide some kind of counter-weight to the symbolic value of the destruction of the twin towers.  Though it may lack the singularity of their momentous collapse, the scurrying, shape-shifting nature of the encampment and its tangential actions has provided a similar locus-lens of perception where all things gazed upon become not what they appear to be.

The quiet at Zuccotti park echoed the similar quiet and stench of the 9/11 debris ten years ago.  The world for the loved ones of the 9/11 casualties is a world of drawn out suffering, where the event of their own personal tragedy intersects with the most public and politicized imagery of catastrophe in recent memory.  Somewhere among the concentric circles of spectacle lies the less-spectacularized aspect of the pulverization of three thousand human beings and their corporeal amalgamation with the buildings which buried them.  The disassemblage of bodies and identification of the parts mirrors the fragmented way in which suffering is drawn out.  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/nyregion/as-remains-from-9-11-are-identified-no-end-to-grieving.html?_r=1&ref=sept112001.  It is almost easier to imagine a world in which one’s loved ones were evaporated rather than reduced to an assortment of crumbs.  But the body is resilient – it almost refuses to be wholly destroyed.  The identification of pieces is a gruesome visible reminder of the law of conservation of mass.

Which brings us back to the Occupation.

Tents like cloud-sacs.  And a winter to consider.