Spectacle and the Self

The history of the spectacle is tied to the politics of illusion, seduction, fantasy, and exaggeration. The spectacle's main function is to promote passivity and confusion by manipulating the perception of events in such a way as to obscure their true nature. Under different social formations, it emerges in different forms. Under late capitalism, what constitutes the modern spectacle is a complex network of ideological and material conditions. These [Page 779]conditions now play an increasingly significant role in the formation of the sociopolitical sense of identity and self that panders to a subjectivity that is narcissistically concerned with its own development in the name of self-fulfillment. As such, the common good is built on the promise of symbolic rather than material satisfaction; the contested territory of competing political solutions gives way to culturally defined niche markets and other distractions.

In the early 1960s, Guy Debordthe experimental filmmaker and the principle theorist for the Situationist International (SI), a rag-tag, ad hoc assemblage of self-proclaimed revolutionary intellectuals and avant-garde artists sporting surrealist, Marxist, Maoist, and Frankfurt school beliefsfirst identified the qualitative change taking place in the character of capitalist society. In his book The Society of the Spectacle published in 1967, Debord advances the thesis that capitalism (both its liberal democratic and autocratic state forms), to cement its grip on all spheres of private and communal life, was turning society into an object. The condition of an all-encompassing social and economic system that promises the satisfaction of all individual needs is built on a kind of schizophrenia inherent in the taxonomy and idealism of Western society.

Though Debord was decidedly a Marxist in the 1960s at the time he identified the emergent spectacularization of society, he held the unique view that capitalism as an institution and a system had culturally co-opted its antithesis in the form of Soviet communism. Consequently, his critique of the spectacle as a totalizing environment of immediacy and manufactured values, rather than being rooted in a specifically class-based analysis, is premised on a model of difference and agency. From this perspective, reason, autonomy, individuality, self-representation, and self-determination are achieved and sustained only by resisting the distraction of capitalism's field of manufactured possibilities and opportunities, which are tied to its hegemonic ideology. The only true contradiction that exists within the society of the spectacle therefore is the one between imagination (creativity) and standardization (conformity). This critique builds on Walter Benjamin's view of the image world being created in the 1920s to 1930s by Hollywood in the United States as akin to the Nazis in that both used mass media to motivate and control their audience's imagination.

By attracting attention to the unpleasant, unusual, or ridiculous, the spectacle gives cohesiveness to reality by manipulating every subjective value and criteria until it has no other alternative but to become its opposite. This is then supplemented by a vision of cultural redemption in which it is proposed that neither group identity nor self-reflexivity are any longer necessaryand that these long-held goals just might be the cause of our present unhappiness. The Lacanian political theorist Slavoj Žizek envisions this phenomenon resulting from a condition he dubs “the passion for the real,” which leads one to become fascinated by violence and those agents who express raw rage without apology. This repressed admiration for the other becomes an all-consuming fantasy of destruction, annihilation, transcendence, mutation, and apocalypse that dominates popular culture. In turn, Žizek urges us to protect ourselves against our own protective capacities, which form the prohibitions that simultaneously perpetuate institutional, economic, ecological, social, and other injustices. Afraid of its self and all others, the resulting self this dynamic produces is vulnerable to the growing role that machination and manipulation play in assuring us what we truly desire is a more controllable world to which no alterity might be imagined. The power of the spectacle, therefore, resides in its ability to represent our fantasies as if they were always already real.

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