Spectacular!!
There's a lot of chatter these days on the subject of Guy Debord's
philosophy and revolutionary insight into the horror of the social spectacle.
It seems those who have awakened to the reality of their socially manipulated
lives are now fighting mad and threatening anarchy. On a particularly heady
web site regarding "the spectacle" (nothingness.org),
I found the following quote from someone called Cronflakes:
"The aspiration of the SI (Debord's "Situationists") was
to expose and combat the method by which the people are oppressed and exploited
through the manipulation of images, language and ideas. In case you hadn't
noticed, that battle is not yet over. We cannot move on FROM here until
the rest of the revolution has moved on TO here. The SI was LATE in that
the attack preceded the defense, but before its time in that (incredibly)
most so-called radicals and activists still do not perceive the nature of
the problem. This is the only PARTY going on! Unless you want to go down
to Mexico and get shot at by the police."
Tsk, tsk! Why must this be so upsetting? Are we so bored with ourselves
and our lives that we must swing to such extremes when we find ourselves
deceived by the promise of our commodity lifestyles? Long before there
was Nike or Coca Cola or Microsoft, there were consumers. We just didn't
call them shoppers in those days. It was all about survival then.
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Lights! Color! Action!
These days the shopper is met with a sea of imagery:
colors, shapes, textures dazzle and seduce. The shopper is soon caught
in the comfort of the visual. It validates, it accepts, it consoles
him or her in its reinforcement of existence. It seems to say, "Yes,
I see you there, you are valuable and renewed." The commodity of
spectacle begs for contact, for the participation of all of the senses,
but it starts with the visual, with the gaze. It catches the eye of
the flaneur as he or she casually floats by, and its soothing display holds
him or her captive. |
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The display is sometimes watched. The panopticon of security
"eyes" watch shoppers as they move past the merchandise display. In
the corner of the store a fisheye mirror surveys the mob. It is this
glass eye that reverses the roles. The shoppers become the display
to be watched. For the security guard positioned behind this eye, the
shoppers are the fascination, they are the brightly colored objects that
catch his attention, distorting individuals and changing them into things:
shoppers.
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Is this the Brave New World?
In his book Brave
New World written in 1932, Aldous
Huxley described a similar vision of ideal culture -- a culture built
on happiness for everyone. The ideal society defined here would include
an enforced promise of perfection. In the "real" world, we buy our
happiness. It comes in the form of some attention-getting "new" thing
that's guaranteed to give us sweeter breathe, greater sex appeal and longer
life to enjoy more stuff. The Brave New World that Huxley envisioned
was a dour place, however, where escape was essential and numbing oneself
to stark reality ensured bliss. We've taken this vision and reworked
it a bit. We've polished it and imbued it with hypnotic fascination.
Why not? It makes us happy.
The question is: Is the spectacle a "bad" thing?
Must we fight this? Should we take up arms against the tyranny of an
oppressive imperialism? Are we merely controlled by external forces,
or do we see the enemy here and find that s/he is US. If the
idea of spectacle is to call our attention to ourselves, why do we put energy
into trying to control it instead of using the mirrored reflection to see
ourselves as we really are?
The spectacle is not just a manipulation of the somnambulistic
hordes who are easily led to their own destruction for the good of the
advertisers. This is not mere Pavlovian capitalism set in motion
by greed and lust for power.
Social interaction in the 21st century is gradually slipping
away. Society is redefining itself in the technological age.
The sparkles and glitter of a commodity culture lures us back into this
interaction, not away from it. It pulls us into contact with each other,
instead of allowing us to become plugged-in members of the web cloister.
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We look out on the world from inside
ourselves. The bright lights of our own responses catch us, pull
us out of the shells we insist on climbing into. Deep within each
of us a gnawing urge moves us to be with others of our kind. This is
what being human is all about. We can create incredible things, but
ultimately, we create ourselves and our relationships with other people.
This creativity is dazzling, colorful, attractive, spontaneous and eternal.
Each human being finds himself in the world and carves his or
her own life in it. It marks his or her passing -- it says, "I was
here" -- but, there's no way to control other people in this flurry of creativity,
and this is what we now, through spectacle, teach ourselves.
It seems all change feels like loss. Perhaps those who
become so upset by spectacle fear a loss of Self in all this glitz.
The loss is no more than a shifting, a shedding, a moving onto other things.
"What we lose is not the world,
but our captivation by the world."
-- Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink,
Sixth Cartesian Meditation.
Notes:
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle, Detroit.
Black and Red Press. (1977)
Husserl, Edmund and Eugen Fink. Sixth Cartesian Meditation.
Indiana University Press. (1995)
The point of return (if you want to go home now). |
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