I am a fan of Guy Debord (see Society of the Spectacle — full text in translation or 1972 film on YouTube) and Situationism. The very language and posture of the movement and the whole idea of “The Spectacle” presents us with a good angle to view our cultural situation. Reading the Situationists may be difficult because the language is pregnant rather than pedestrian. Debord writes:
The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.
Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the project of the dominant mode of production. It is not a mere decoration added to the real world. It is the very heart of this real society’s unreality. In all of its particular manifestations — news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment — the spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. In both form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system. The spectacle also represents the constant presence of this justification since it monopolizes the majority of the time spent outside the production process.
The system we live in uses images both graphic and mental to organize our social and political/economic lives. The spectacle is the system.
Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is an affirmation of appearances and an identification of all human social life with appearances. But a critique that grasps the spectacle’s essential character reveals it to be a visible negation of life — a negation that has taken on a visible form.
How the spectacle is a negation of life is very, very important. Debord published Society of the Spectacle in 1967 long before the full flowering of technology that brought in the information age but he saw where we were headed. How is the spectacle anti-life? It creates images and fantasies and sets them up as legitimate goals of life or even life itself. The life that is truly convivial is about real interaction, conversations, shared meals, social relations, bonds of friendship, interacting with materials, creativity, fellowship and friendship. Instead we put ourselves into pictures that exist in our own minds and which we try to project on a screen for others to see. When we travel as tourists we view “sights” rather than travel to a place that exists as a place. We visit our images of a place and move on with the satisfaction of having checked off a goal in our grand view of ourselves. We take satisfaction in an attractive lover because it improves our self-image. Self-image? WTF is that? We create ourselves as tokens moving along the way of the Game of Life rather than as livers and lovers of life. Our status is not necessarily governed by our virtue but by our image our “Public Image” (well described by this song by John Lyden and PIL).
The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion. Spectacular technology has not dispersed the religious mists into which human beings had projected their own alienated powers, it has merely brought those mists down to earth, to the point that even the most mundane aspects of life have become impenetrable and unbreathable. The illusory paradise that represented a total denial of earthly life is no longer projected into the heavens, it is embedded in earthly life itself. The spectacle is the technological version of the exiling of human powers into a “world beyond”; the culmination of humanity’s internal separation.
Our society has created a profound disenchantment as an inevitable result of the radical philosophical materialism that has emerged out of industrialization. Man’s requirement of a mythical framework within which he/she can live was shaken. We developed a society of property and consumerism in order to accommodate both industrial production and a need for myth. We became, ultimately, “consumers”. Our value is measured by how much we consume. To consume goods and services is the prime definition of success. We bought larger houses primarily to house our images of ourselves, i.e., to provide a sense of importance for ourselves first and others second. The Wall Street criminals are not much different than the street criminals that live in the same city. All want to earn as much money as possible without the slightest care for anything else. There have always been investors who have cheated and committed fraud but the current fraud is systemized–nearly everybody is playing that game again without regard to what happens to the commons.
The environmental crisis is a result not of “bad planning” but of a profound alienation from nature and natural processes. Though we have sliced and diced nature in order to “understand” how it works we have only done so in the hopes of manipulating nature for our own mythic requirements. We understand nature, collectively, far less than we did in the distant past. We do not converse with the natural world and see it in its own terms but only in relation to ourselves. Now even if we want to talk to animals or trees we have no idea how to do so and, in fact, collectively we deny it is even possible. The “world beyond” Debord speaks of is the world of our minds that we have disconnected from the natural world including our own bodies–it (our new Heaven) “exists” as a mythological framework maintained by the images we worship whether they are celebrities (gods and godesses), icons like cars, houses, food and the whole panoply of consumer goods and services that is our chief religion. Even religion has become a series of images and stances people adopt; for the most part, in my experience, it is a lifestyle choice that provides a fuller spectrum of experience than normal consumer life does without having to go against the major tenets of the state religion of consumerism.
The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender “lonely crowds.” With ever-increasing concreteness the spectacle recreates its own presuppositions.
The most powerful argument against the current system is that it encourages a sense of isolation which in turn causes the need for spectacularly wasteful lifestyles. We drive in metal boxes separated from people. We live in large houses (if we can afford them) separated from our neighbors. We spend our time in front of computer screens and/or TV screens rather than each other. We spend our time listening to our IPODS or whatever rather than playing music ourselves or sharing it with others. We can live our lives never having any interaction with anyone that goes beyond the strictly necessary and trivial. Most, thankfully, do still crave social interaction but it is largely with a limited number of people who are not likely to differ in opinions, social class or tribal affiliation.
The notions of the Situationist Movement are hard to grasp (mainly because they are influenced by Marxism which was largely banished from the American Academy for a generation) but we do have an intuition that we are living in an unreal world and not just because it is mediated by technology. Technology is a factor and has its own underlying ethic that is largely invisible. Technology, as Steve Talbot tells us, is really a contrivance created by the contriving part of our mind. We have externalized that clever part of ourselves into technology–because of that it has become a threat to other parts of our nature particularly those parts that seek the deeper experience that can lead to joy and love.
Have you noticed that after the first thrill of gaming or watching TV the experience brings to face a kind of blank joyless stare–what is so absorbing about pixels that cause people to look that way? It is maybe the ultimate security–you can turn it on or off without endangering your own survival, you can encounter violence and illicit sex for which there is little consequence; you can go into tirades without ever risking a fist fight or social banishment (except, at worst, being kicked off a blog). It’s as if something was taking them over–really it is the external technology playing with the internal part of us out of which technology sprang; it is, in short, enhancing the facile the clever parts of us at the expense of the purposeful, relational, and profound parts of our nature. We must decide, and not just for our personal lives, but also for the health of civilization whether this course of life is sustainable and sane.
