Spectacle (critical theory)
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The spectacle is a central notion in the Situationist theory, developed by Guy Debord in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle. In the general sense, the spectacle refers to "the autocratic reign of the market economy which had acceded to an irresponsible sovereignty, and the totality of new techniques of government which accompanied this reign."[1] It also exists in a more limited sense, where spectacle means the mass media, which are "its most glaring superficial manifestation."[2]
The critique of the spectacle is a development and application of Karl Marx's concept of
Description
Debord uses the word "Spectacle" to describe an overall social phenomenon where everything directly lived recedes into a representation, describing it as "a separate pseudo-world that can only be looked at" created from the rearrangement from fragmented images taken from every aspect of life.
Prof. Hans-Georg Moeller at the University of Macau has characterized the Spectacle as being composed of three theoretical components:[7]
- . The semiotics of how spectacular images relate to reality
- . The political economy that produces the spectacle
- . The ontology of what is really true in a society organized around the production of appearances
Forms
Concentrated spectacle
Throughout The Society of the Spectacle, Debord describes the spectacle as seen in the West in its diffuse form; however, he applies the concept to the
Diffuse spectacle
The diffuse spectacle is the spectacle associated with advanced capitalism and commodity abundance. In the diffuse spectacle, different commodities conflict with each other, preventing the consumer from consuming the whole. Each commodity claims itself as the only existent one, and tries to impose itself over the other commodities:
Irreconcilable claims jockey for position on the stage of the affluent economy's unified spectacle, and different star commodities simultaneously promote conflicting social policies. The automobile spectacle, for example, strives for a perfect traffic flow entailing the destruction of old urban districts, while the city spectacle needs to preserve those districts as tourist attractions.
— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
The diffuse spectacle is more effective than the concentrated spectacle. The diffuse spectacle operates mostly through seduction, while the concentrated spectacle operates mostly through violence. Because of this, Debord argues that the diffuse spectacle is more effective at suppressing non-spectacular opinions than the concentrated spectacle.
Integrated spectacle
In Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988), Debord asserted that in the two decades since the publication of The Society of the Spectacle, a new form of spectacle has emerged in modern capitalist countries that integrates features of both the diffuse and concentrated spectacle. Debord argues that this was pioneered in France and Italy. According to Debord, the integrated spectacle goes by the label of liberal democracy. This spectacle introduces a state of permanent general secrecy, where experts and specialists dictate the morality, statistics, and opinions of the spectacle. Terrorism is the invented enemy of the spectacle, which specialists compare with their "liberal democracy", pointing out the superiority of the latter one. Debord argues that without terrorism, the integrated spectacle wouldn't survive, for it needs to be compared to something in order to show its "obvious" perfection and superiority.
Terrain
Spectacular Time
Debord conceived of the commodified consumable experiences of the spectacle to be a form of "pseudocyclical time", in contrast to the "irreversible time" created by the overall forward direction of socioeconomic development that came with the Industrial Revolution. Debord said that the society of the spectacle came to existence in the late 1920s[8][1] with the rise of mass media. According to him, to turn workers into consumers, capitalism needed to first expropriate their time,[9] noting "the time that modern society is constantly seeking to "save" by increasing transportation speeds or using packaged soups ends up being spent by the American population in watching television three to six hours a day".[10] Thus, the overall project of the Situationists was to destroy the pseudocyclical time of the spectacle and create "a federation of independent times - a federation of playful individual and collective forms of irreversible time that are simultaneously present", and with the proletariat conscious of their place in time and history, bring about "authentic communism, which abolishes everything that exists independently of individuals."[11]
The City
Debord saw the creation of the
Recuperation
As early as 1958, in the
To survive, the spectacle must maintain
Debord discusses the close link between revolution and culture and everyday life, and the reason why conservative powers are interested in forbidding them "any direct access to the rigged game of official culture." Debord recalls that worldwide revolutionary movements that emerged during the 1920s were followed by "an ebbing of the movements that had tried to advance a liberatory new attitude in culture and everyday life," and that such movements were brought to a "complete social isolation."[15]
History and influences
Bernays and Adorno
Debord claims that in its limited sense, spectacle means the
Marx and Lukács
With The Society of the Spectacle, Debord attempted to provide the Situationist International (SI) with a Marxist critical theory. The concept of "the spectacle" expanded to all society the Marxist concept of reification drawn from the first section of Karl Marx's Capital, entitled The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof and developed by György Lukács in his work, History and Class Consciousness.[22] This was an analysis of the logic of commodities whereby they achieve an ideological autonomy from the process of their production, so that "social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them."[23][non-primary source needed]
Developing this analysis of the logic of the commodity, The Society of the Spectacle generally understood society as divided between the passive subject who consumes the spectacle and the reified spectacle itself. In a spectacular society, the system of commodity production generates a continual stream of images, for consumption by people who lack the experiences represented therein. The spectacle represents people solely in terms of their subordination to commodities, and experience itself becomes commodified.
The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.
— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
In the opening of Das Kapital, Marx makes the observation that within the capitalist mode of production we evaluate materials not by what purpose they serve or what they're actually useful for, but we instead recognize them based on their value in the market.[24] In capitalist society, virtually identical products often have vastly different values simply because one has a more recognizable or prestigious brand name. The value of a commodity is abstract and not tied to its actual characteristics. Much in the same way capitalism commodifies the material world, the situationists assert that advanced capitalism commodifies experience and perception.[3]
We live in a spectacular society, that is, our whole life is surrounded by an immense accumulation of spectacles. Things that were once directly lived are now lived by proxy. Once an experience is taken out of the real world it becomes a commodity. As a commodity the spectacular is developed to the detriment of the real. It becomes a substitute for experience.
— Lawrence Law, Images and Everyday Life[25]
Legacy
A long tradition of work exists in
In Green Illusions, Ozzie Zehner draws largely on Debord to argue that the spectacles of solar cells, wind turbines, and other technologies have organized environmental thinking around energy-production at the expense of energy-reduction strategies.[29]
See also
- Aestheticization of politics, a concept coined by Walter Benjamin in his 1935 essay
Notes
- ^ a b c Debord (1988) Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, II
- ^ a b Debord (1977) thesis 24
- ^ a b Guy Debord (1967) Society of the Spectacle. (Paris, June 1967). Chapter I: Separation Perfected.
- ^ Debord (1967) thesis 2
- ^ Debord (1967) thesis 10.
- ^ Debord (1967) thesis 29
- ^ "Guy Debord and the Society of the Spectacle". YouTube.
- ^ a b Eskilson (2005) pp.377-8
- ^ Debord (1967) thesis 159
- ^ Debord (1967) thesis 153
- ^ Debord (1967) thesis 163
- ^ Debord (1967) thesis 172
- ^ Debord (1957) pp.2, 10
- ^ a b c d Robert Chasse, Bruce Elwell, Jonathon Horelick, Tony Verlaan. (1969) Faces of Recuperation. In the American section of the Situationist International, issue #1 (New York, June 1969).
- ^ Section 3 The Function of Minority Trends in the Period of Reflux
- ^ Donley T. Studlar (2002) Tobacco Control: Comparative Politics in the United States and Canada p.55 quotation:
...from the early days advertising has been intimately intertwined with tobacco. The man who is sometimes considered the founder of modern advertising and Madison Avenue, Edward Bernays, created many of the major cigarette campaigns of the 1920s, including having women march down the street demanding the right to smoke.
- ^ Bernays (1928) Propaganda, ch.1
- ^ Eskilson (2005) p.386 n.8
- ^ Harry F. Dahms No Social Science Without Critical Theory, Volume 25 p.159
- ^ Garoian, Charles R. (1999) Performing Pedagogy: Toward an Art of Politics pp.70-1
- ^ Jostein Gripsrud, Lennart Weibull (2010) Media, Markets & Public Spheres: European Media at the Crossroads p.117
- ^ Debord (1967) Chapter 2 intro quote
- ^ Marx, Capital
- ^ Karl Marx (1867) Volume I, Section 4. The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof. Das Kapital (1867).
- ^ Lawrence, Law (2009). Spectacular Times: Images and Everyday Life (pdf).
- ^ a b McLagan, Meg. "Spectacles of difference: cultural activism and the mass mediation of Tibet", Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, 2002, p.107
- ^ Edelman, Murray (1998) Constructing the political spectacle.
Wedeen, Lisa (1999) Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria. - ISBN 978-1-134-92530-8.
Baudrillard's work is informed by his contacts with the situationist Guy Debord, and Lyotard was involved with Socialisme ou Barbarie and the mouvement du 22 mars, probably the groups whose political ideas and activities were closest to those of the SI. Allusions to the situationists are to be found in the work of both authors, and although postmodernism turns situationist theory against itself, the traces, even the tyre-tracks of the style, vocabulary, and scope of the situationist project run across postmodernism
- ISBN 978-0803237759.
References
- Eskilson, Stephen (2005) The Spectacle at the Fair in Deborah J. Johnson, David Ogawa, Kermit Swiler Champa Seeing and Beyond: A Festschrift on Eighteenth to Twenty-First Century Art in Honor of Kermit S. Champa, ed. Deborah J. Johnson and David Ogawa (Bern, Berlin, Frankfurt and New York: Peter Lang Verlag
- Debord, Guy (1977) [1967]. The Society of the Spectacle, translation by Fredy Perlman and Jon Supak (Black & Red, 1970; rev. ed. 1977). Online at Library.nothingness.org and at Wikisource
Further reading
- Adorno (1963) Culture Industry Reconsidered