THE SPECTACLE

Immediate experience opens the door to the Visible. However, intrusive barriers have been erected between us and reality, and the recognition of our inner selves. Our participation in society, our contact with nature, is increasingly mediated by technology. A new digital world of images and values has an immense, if often unconscious, impact on every aspect of our lives. Some are distracted to the point of blindness. For them, the real has become invisible.

Analysis of the Society of the Spectacle begins with Guy Debord, who in 1967 defined the Spectacle as a social relation between people mediated by images.[1] DeBord ran with the Situationist International, a group of European artists and intellectuals who believed that the shift from individual expression through directly lived experiences to individual expression by proxy through commodities inflicts significant and far-reaching damage to the quality of life. According to Situationist practice, the primary means of counteracting the Spectacle is the construction of situations, moments of life deliberately constructed for the purpose of reawakening and pursuing authentic desires, experiencing adventure, and the liberation of everyday life.[2]

The Spectacle is comprised of a frantic pace of life, manufactured news, cell phones, all intrusive social media, incessant advertising, an entertainment epidemic that includes porn, professional sports, wagering, and a throw away culture that generates more garbage than space to dump it. It now seems that DeBord’s brilliant, if somewhat convoluted, critique did not go far enough. Can anyone calculate the consequences of the digitalization of our lives? Is the Spectacle a more desired model than the tired options of the real? Is the real still real, or has the image become real; for example, aren’t “reality” TV shows, porn, televised sports, and celebrities more real than what’s actually real?

Civilization began with an emphasis on the importance of being, the care of one’s self whereby individuals developed a range of mental and spiritual attributes.[3] The focus on being changed with the advent of manufacturing and commodities to a focus of accumulating as many possessions of possible. The Spectacle generates another life emphasis: appearing to be someone important. One’s digital reality is now social in nature, not individual, and one’s image of himself or herself is no longer work or art or courage or humility but one’s life in the Spectacle. Indeed, the Spectacle ensures there’ll be no liberation from the drudgery of work because jobs and leisure are hopelessly intertwined.  As predicted a hundred and eighty years ago: “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions in life, and his relations to his kind.”[4]

The digitization of modern life has generated all sorts of commentary, much of it laughable. Some economists argued, for example, that the hedonistic desires of digitized youth would create lazy workers at a time when a strong economic environment conducive to continual growth was vitally important (as if the post-World War Two boom of the 50’s to the 70’s could be sustained forever). In other words, the contradictory demands of the Spectacle versus work will place excessive strain on market economies, generating economic turbulence, fiscal pressures, and political upheavals.[5] In fact, the very opposite appears to have happened; don’t many of us work so we can participate in the Spectacle? Meanwhile our Elites and their lackeys extoll the most intrusive of technologies, human digitization strategies, and what’s called “scalable innovation” which they claim will not only solve our problems, they may even save our lives! Here’s an example of misplaced techno-optimism: a May 14, 2013 Wired article too long, boring, and nonsensical to quote in its entirety:

“IN OUR HOUSES, cars, and factories, we’re surrounded by tiny, intelligent devices that capture data about how we live and what we do. Now they are beginning to talk to one another. Soon we’ll be able to choreograph them to respond to our needs, solve our problems, even save our lives . . . this is the language of the future: tiny, intelligent things all around us, coordinating their activities. Coffeepots that talk to alarm clocks. Thermostats that talk to motion sensors. Factory machines that talk to the power grid and to boxes of raw material. A decade after Wi-Fi put all our computers on a wireless network—and half a decade after the smartphone revolution put a series of pocket-size devices on that network—we are seeing the dawn of an era when the most mundane items in our lives can talk wirelessly among themselves, performing tasks on command, giving us data we’ve never had before . . . For the Programmable World to reach its full potential, we need to pass through three stages. The first is simply the act of getting more devices onto the network—more sensors, more processors in everyday objects, more wireless hookups to extract data from the processors that already exist. The second is to make those devices rely on one another, coordinating their actions to carry out simple tasks without any human intervention. The third and final stage, once connected things become ubiquitous, is to understand them as a system to be programmed, a bona fide platform that can run software in much the same manner that a computer or smartphone can. Once we get there, that system will transform the world of everyday objects into a design­able environment, a playground for coders and engineers. It will change the whole way we think about the division between the virtual and the physical. This might sound like a scary encroachment of technology, but the Programmable World could actually let us put more of our gadgets away, automating activities we normally do by hand and putting intelligence from the cloud into everything we touch. . . Perhaps the clearest two-sensor example is where one of the sensors is on us. “Presence” tags—low-energy radio IDs that sit on our keychains or belt loops and announce our location, verify our identity—are what let the Smart­Things system text your wife or fire up your A/C when you leave the office. It’s also the principle behind Square Wallet and a number of other nascent payment systems, including ones from PayPal and Google. (When you walk into a participating store today, Square can let the cashier know you’re there; you pay simply by giving your name.) For the four-legged set, Qualcomm has created a product called Tagg, a tracking tool that monitors your pet’s movements while you’re gone, estimating its activity levels and alerting you if it strays too far from home . . .”[6]

We’ve neither the time nor the energy to explore the onslaught of pro-Spectacle propaganda promulgated by television, movie, professional sports, wagering, pornography and tech interests. Before watching the videos below, however, it may be helpful to consider some reasoned concerns expressed by the Vatican:

“. . . when media and the digital world become omnipresent, their influence can stop people from learning how to live wisely, to think deeply, and to love generously. In this context, the great sages of the past run the risk of going unheard amid the noise and distractions of an information overload. Efforts need to be made to help these media become sources of new cultural progress for humanity and not a threat to our deepest riches. True wisdom, as the fruit of self examination, dialogue, and generous encounter between persons, is not acquired by a mere accumulation of date which eventually leads to overload and confusion, a sort of mental confusion. Real relationships with others, with all the challenges they entail, now tend to be replaced by a type of internet communication which enables us to choose or eliminate relationships at whim, thus giving rise to to a new type of contrived emotion which has more to do with devices and displays than with other people and with nature. Today’s media do enable us to communicate and to share our knowledge and affections. Yet at times they also shield us from direct contact with the pain, the fears, and the joys of others and the complexity of their personal experiences. For this reason, we should be concerned that, alongside the exciting possibilities offered by these medial, a deep and melancholic dissatisfaction with interpersonal relations, or a harmful sense of isolation, can also arise.” [7]

[1]  The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord, Soul Bay Press Ltd., 2009.

[2] See, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_International

[3]  See, e.g., The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Michel Foucault’s Lectures at the College De France, 1981-1982, Palgrave McMillan English edition, 2005.

[4] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Verso Edition, 1998.

[5] Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 1976

[6] http://www.wired.com/2013/05/internet-of-things-2/

[7] Pope Francis, On Care of our Common Home, Pauline Books and Media, 2015.