Hey everyone: Here's my thematic essay for this week. Viva la revolucion!
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Leora Fridman
3/21/06
IR180.95

Thematic Essay: Are we living the society of the spectacle?

According to Guy Debord, “The Society of the Spectacle” is the society in which individuals no longer actually experience events, but in which all action is instead conducted through the represented image. Debord points to an institutional center that allows for communication and divorced-representation at the same time. He writes, “Spectators are linked only by a one-way relationship to the very center that maintains their isolation from one another.” (Debord 22) Despite today’s endless conversation about the isolating ability of networked media, are we of the contemporary era in fact linked only by this center that Debord describes? Is any kind of communication possible in a fashion not mediated by institutional forces? More concretely, what is it that we actually experience or see through today’s media?

In an era that continually defines itself with words such as “network” and “connectivity,” it may seem counter-intuitive to call its people isolated, but Debord’s society of the spectacle gives a name to the multiplicity of imagery that makes intimate communication so difficult today. In an internet chat-room for example, one individual’s statement is multiply translated before another individual understands it – be it through language or through the meanings that that statement holds for the receiving individual. Without the visual interaction that at one point in history was necessary for communication, these multiple meanings are much more available than they were in the past.

When we look to the concept of spectacle in the light of global media, we must first consider the institutions that most define our concept of the spectacular. The spectacular to Debord is a mode in which a person’s experience becomes mediated by capitalism and its prioritizing of consumption in the place of personal satisfaction. In a more popular-culture meaning, to make a spectacle of onself is to make a show of one’s experience or imaged self. These meanings shed light on one another because they allow us to realize that while one can create oneself as a spectacle, one creates it for a society made up of various institutions and classes of individuals. When one makes a spectacle of oneself, one displays awareness of this society. For Situationalists like Debord, there is no distinction between performed real-life and performed pretend-life. “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.” (Debord 12) Experience becomes a commodity that can be exchanged in order to reach across to people. Though it is primarily referred to in a negative light, the spectacle is a unifying force, for “in the spectacle the totality of the commodity world is visible in one piece.” (Debord 33) The spectacle is in a sense necessary if we wish to establish discourse on image-related content.

In his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin articulates the concept of “aura,” which he explains as a reaction of awe to art and other tokens of past moments. Benjamin argues that capitalist culture allows for the “decay of the aura” by mass-producing relics to the point that they no longer hold this type of awe. While he differs from Debord in his emphasis on the historical, like Debord, Benjamin expands his theory of images to the social realm. He writes, “The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well.” (Benjamin III) It is important to note that Benjamin stresses the “organization” of human perception, rather than its existence or observation. This top-down language is similar to the central and singular imaging force that Debord describes. Benjamin draws a balance between the natural ability of many to organize his own perception with the historical necessity to organize this perception. When we consider the spectacular qualities of today’s image and media-relations, we must draw on this historical emphasis in order to understand the political workings of our global media.

With the advent of embedded journalism in today’s War on Terror, we are governed by an administration that clearly knows the power of journalism to communicate spectacle and has taken steps to integrate this communication into its definition of meaning in the War. A character like Saddam Hussein has been imaged differently throughout very recent history, but the contradictions of these multiple images are always held together by the spectacular connection necessary to communicate between the political arena and the general public. In the talk held in class last week by a panel of students at the Army War College (Lecture 3/15/06), one of the most striking characteristics of the discourse was the continual usage of the terms “good guys” and “bad guys.” Phil Scuda, Marine Career Infantry Officer, introduced his job with the description, “We find the bad guys and take care of them.” Speaking to a class at Brown University, the team must have been aware of the fact that they were not exactly “preaching to the choir,” so to speak. They in fact took several steps to defend military-press relations in a liberal light, but the “good guys” and “bad guys” remained unchallenged representations.

In order for a military to engage in a war on the other side of the world, it must remain spending and unbending, as well as vague, in its construction of the spectacular. While Scuda could rely on the historical awe and aura of the “bad guys” image to engage his audience in a unified understanding of who the War on Terror is fought against, in order to do so he had to separate this image from specific interpersonal connections. Corporal Frazier said at one point that, “Democracy is the freedom to…Fill in whatever you want.” However, in order to have a conversation about democracy, these fill-ins must fit within a limited number of blanks approved by the military administration.

In his 1988 follow up “Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle,” Debord specified the idea of the spectacle to the “integrated spectacle,” the most hazardous and commanding form of spectacle, which he posits operates today. The integrated spectacle is one in which the spectacle is controlled by individuals considered experts, who often operate in secrecy in order to protect against an enemy (terrorism) of the spectacle “liberal democracy.” It is essential to this integrated spectacle that terrorism exists comparatively, which was demonstrated in the un-critiqued language of the Army War College speakers. At another point in the discussion, Scuda emphasized that, “One of the most effective weapons we have in the War on Terror is the truth,” and used this as a reason for not taking away the freedom of speech of others. This protection of an image of truthfulness requires careful consideration, a fact that became even clearer as the discussion turned to the role of an embedded journalist.

The increasing use of embedded and immersion journalists in today’s media points at our fascination with the ability to insert ourselves in an image—especially one fraught with power and danger. Though there is no question that the journalist develops a form of empathy when living the every day life of troops, we as viewers “back home” are in our turn empathetic with the journalist who we see in a battlefield through our television. In “Truth and Power,” an interview in Power/Knowledge, Michel Foucault outlines truth as a concept that exists through “multiple forms of constraint” (Foucault 73) of power. These forms of constraint are certainly at work in the embedding of journalists, both through the restrictions that the military places on embedded journalists as well as the lifestyle constraints that we as viewers observe the journalist undergoing through embedding. Viewers tend to believe the truth of embedded journalists because they are constrained by the same constraints as the troops with which they are living. Viewers see the culture of home, of America (particularly white upper-middle class America), portrayed in a journalist who is constrained both the lifestyle of a soldier but who also constrains us in our understanding of what an individual of our culture would experience were we to be placed in such a foreign combat zone.

The process of a viewer’s determination of what side we are on in the conflicts narrated by global media allow an unfocused culture to understand itself behind a vague set of images. Debord describes modern culture as the locus of search for lost unity in an isolated representational world. (Debord 130) Benjamin further articulates a viewer who, unable to actually enter a world, instead consumes the image into him or herself and what he knows to be truth. He writes,
Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work of art the way legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art. (Benjamin XV)
This viewer ingests an image, rather than places himself into the world of the image to individually and thus critically comprehend it.

This idea of distraction is particularly meaningful in the context of today’s obsession with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) as both mental conditions and societal descriptions. Benjamin writes, “Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise…The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.” (Benjamin XV) What does examination entail if it is “absent-minded,” as Benjamin describes? Many have observed that it is the fault of today’s fast-paced media that so many children and adults develop symptoms of ADD. Critics of the influx of ADD diagnoses, such as Thomas Armstrong, Ph.D., author of The Myth of the ADD Child, put forth the suggestion that viewers in fact use distractedness as an excuse not to accept what is actually going on in the world. In “ADD As a Social invention,” Armstrong notes the following;
During the 1992 political campaign, CBS News attempted to introduce an innovation in its newscasts: 30-second sound bites from the politicians to give the viewer more 'depth" into their views. The project had to be abandoned because the average adult viewer could not sustain his or her attention that long (the industry average for sound bites is around seven seconds). If this is true of adults--who grew up during the days of radio and early TV--then how much truer it is of today's children, who are inundated with Nintendo, the Internet, MTV, multimedia, and more.” (Armstrong “ADD As a Social Invention”)
Armstrong argues that as viewers today we remove ourselves to a condition or a point where we don’t have to see what’s going on but we can just catch glimpses of its production. Are viewers then distracted in Benjamin’s sense? Viewers have an immense multitude of modes of media and specifically news media, with which to engage ourselves. Yet if, as discussed earlier, these multiple images are in fact all centered, why do we find them so isolating that we are endlessly distracted? When the viewer is called into the cultured constraints of media journalism, he or she does not have to create his or her own versions of power. Instead, he or she has only to switch the channel to be again overwhelmed by power constraints and specified terminology behind images such as “bad boys.”

Today’s viewer is in fact centered by distraction itself. Louis Althusser in “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus” expresses the concept of “hailing,” in which a subject of an ideology is called into being as such when he or she is called (“hailed”) by labels internal to this ideology or system. In today’s media-public relationship, one can see that the more aware of this hailing the viewer is, the more lazy he or she is able to be, because he or she realizes that they can come into being without defining him or herself individually. Here we seem to have come full circle back to the substitution of the personal for the multiplied image. Debord writes, “In a society where no one is any longer recognizable by anyone else, each individual is necessarily unable to recognize his own reality. Here ideology is at home; here separation has built its world.” (Debord 152) Today’s media imagery is continually multiplied to the point at which a viewer can no longer concentrate on an image individually and can no longer relate to another individual as a concentrated and focused self outside of the image. As watcher-consumers today, we have been inculcated with the idea that “the first casualty in war is truth,” but directly tied into this casualty is the casualty of the individual attention span. Perhaps instead of living exactly the society of the spectacle, we are living the society of the spectacular distraction.

Bibliography and Works Cited

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, Ed. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, Inc, 1998.

Armstrong, Thomas. “ADD As a Social Invention,” Education Week, 18 October, 1995.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Walter Benjamin. February 2005. UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. 21 March 2006. http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans. New York: Zone Books, 1995.

Der Derian, James. “Imaging terror: logos, pathos and ethos.” Third World Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 1: 23 – 37, 2005.

Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Power.” The Foucault Reader. Paul Rabinow, ed. New York : Pantheon Books, 1984. 51-75.

IR180 Lecture. “Students from Army War College.” Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, Brown University, Providence, RI. 15 March 2006.