The historical horizon is closed. The alt is a prerequisite to opening imaginative futures that challenge knowledge/power structures.

Since the 1980s postoperaist scholars have further developed Debord’s conceptual link between capitalism and the power of images by investigating the connection between the financial deregulation so characteristic of our time and the free-floating proliferation of iconic values and meanings.3 The emergence of the society of the spectacle in conjunction with neoliberalism’s financial system resulted in the rise of semiocapitalism, a term deployed by scholars such as Jean Baudrillard and later Franco Berardi.4 It designates a late stage of capitalism in which information technologies such as digital trading make it possible to merge the productive use of signs and information with capital valorization. In this regard, economies that capitalize on our attentive time – for instance TV series, social media, online games, advertising, etc. – which are framed as lifestyles and consumer preferences, have partially replaced the production of goods. Producing ideas in the form of visual signs and making people pay for them with their attentive time is the main way to grow profit in the “attention economy,” which leads to what Bernard Stiegler has termed “hyperattention,” an inevitable over-exploitation of that time. Hyperattention is understood as the current way put in place in accumulating capital.5 Stiegler describes a historical moment that is characteristic for a global simultaneity of events and attitudes. This was identified by Peter Osborne as the “contemporary,” a designation not only of the art of our time in which “the apparent closure of the historical horizon of the avant-garde” took place, but also a different understanding of temporality, sensed as a state of perpetual presentness.6

Is it only in the contemporary era, as described by Debord, that images have become synonymous with the valorization of time (the classical notion of capital), or have they always been essential to economy’s foundational principles? And if images are capital, as Debord maintains, how does this thesis relate to the historical a priori that grounds the knowledge/power regimes which construct contemporary viewers and capitalist consumers? When Debord criticizes his epoch, does he not look back and fantasize about a novel avant-garde which is characterized by radical aesthetic ruptures with the past, and the initial unacceptability of its art to the public? What is the relation of classical or historical avant-gardes to the values of contemporary art? Also, how do they both relate to the valorization of images that sustains the spectacle of late capitalism, so gloriously projected in the global art of our time? And in what ways does this spectacle relate to the premodern predecessors of knowledge/power regimes?