Two senses of ‘spectacular’

The term ‘spectacle’ was used by Plato to refer to a particular event with the power to disrupt the bounded perspective of perceivers and so awaken them to a less bounded perspective. The term was also used by Debord who used it in The Society of the Spectacle to refer to the unchanging social perspective of knowers generated by the images of commodities whose circulation characterises capitalist societies.

Debord was a Marxist who described the alienation produced by this circulation and sought ways to achieve its revolutionary overthrow. So in one context it refers to a disruptive event and in another to a perspective that needs to be disrupted. In order to overcome this ambiguity I shall refer to the alienating perspective of the commodity culture as the ‘specular society’ and refer to the particular event as ‘a spectacle’.

There is another important difference between Plato and Debord; Plato believed that disruptive events reminded us of forgotten truths about an immutable place, Debord, following Marx, believed that human being make their place and that disruptive events change that place. For Debord the problem is to see how the specular society can be disrupted. Ruskin, Marx and Debord believed that industrial society’s identification of things with their representations that characterises capitalist production and consumption had established itself as an almost unavoidable imperative throughout society, but while Ruskin was an idealist who called for the establishment of a divine order, Marx and Debord were materialists who believed in the destiny of history. They saw that the specular society promised to be a universal and timeless society, but they sought to discover how history would realise its mutability.

Debord described the way in which commodity relations had produced an entirely inverted world in which everything that was once directly lived had become mere representation. The events of May 1968 had shown that those institutions that represent the interests of the workers were part of the specular society and therefore the revolutionary organisation must learn that it can no longer combat alienation by means of alienated forms of struggle. The hope of transforming society relied upon a faith that the possibility of transformation would be more meaningful than the possibilities offered by the specular society. They believed that revolutionary propaganda would be more meaningful that commodity propaganda.

Not everyone was convinced. In One Dimensional Man Marcuse argued that alienation had become a taken for granted aspect of consciousness. He claimed that: the extent to which civilisation transforms the object world into an extension of man’s mind and body makes the whole notion of alienation questionable.

A more fundamental objection to the possibility of revolution came from those structuralist and post-structuralist writers who put into question the humanism of the Marxist idea of history. Debord responded by asserting that structuralism was the specular societies expression of itself as the end of history. He argued that to understand texts as mere differences was to ignore the way in which they were the product of a historically specific social imperative.

The spectacular economies of literature, science, art and nature are marginalized by the specular economies of their conventional representations.

The following extract from Something Happened, by J Heller, is an example of an almost unavoidable imperative to represent.

Father ‘You don’t think the work I do is important.’
Daughter You don’t think it’s important either. You just do it to make money.
Father I think making money for you and the rest of the family is important. You know, it’s not always so pleasant for me to have the work I do at the company ridiculed by you and your brother. Even though your joking, and I’m not always sure you are. I spend so much of my life at it.

Father to himself Why must I win this argument? And why must I use this whining plea for pity to do it? Why must I show off for her and myself and exult in my fine logic and more expert command of language? I could just easily say. ‘Your right, I’m sorry. Please forgive me.’ Even though I am right and not really sorry. I could say so anyway. But I can’t. And I am winning, for her look of resolution is failing, her hesitations are growing, and now it is her gaze that is shiftily avoiding mine. (pages 199/200)

The aside in Heller’s novel illustrates the unavoidable distance between father and daughter. This distance makes them both unhappy. It is unavoidable because even though he is unhappy and he realises that his daughter is unhappy, the father knows he is not sorry, knows he is winning. This knowledge comes from a conventional perspective that cannot recognise anything but its own images.

Heller’s character does not perceive his unhappiness, or his daughter’s unhappiness, he only knows his representations of them. He and his daughter are powerless in the light of the strategic imperative generated by the deployment of his literal weapons. He cannot know himself because of the almost unavoidable hypocrisy in which he presents himself as someone for whom making money is not an identity, but only a function. The truth he cannot grasp is that money is not a convention separated from actual events, but a convention whose imperative has colonised the territory of actual events.

He belongs to a place where words are intended to satisfy the backstage intentions of their speaker. They are what is said about something. Any actions that express other intentions are translated into representations that disregard those intentions. His strategic inner voice makes so much sense that he can’t hear others. The image that he must present to others only takes them into account as potential performers of the same covert, but universal, strategic imperative. In this never ending game there can be no exchange of candid reflections such as often occur at the close of a chess match.

The specular society is not a non-human society; it is the production of a middle class. Without middle class management the specular society would collapse. It is possible that specular society will collapse by incremental failures of management rather than be overthrown by revolution. High quality, idealistic people took the first management jobs. In the twenty-first century the quality of management is falling and its idealism has evaporated. Management’s marriage to their organisation is becoming careless, cynical and corrupt. Managers are looking to make some money and get out from its tiresome politics in which the worst are full of passionate intensity.

The need for growth has led to turbulent markets and unsustainable levels of consumer expenditure. Growth is also unsustainable because what were ‘free’ environmental resources are becoming scarce and expensive.

More and more organisational effort goes into designing and implementing systems whose procedures are substitutes for management judgement. Only computer-based systems can cope with the volume and complexity of turbulent modern markets. Each system is a solution to a problem, but each system adds to the problems because no system can take account of the addition of new systems that it was not designed to interact with.

In short, the corporate world, which invented the specular society, will become increasingly unable and less interested in sustaining it. Hence the specular society is not the culture at the end of history, it is not a series of tableau vivant that can look after itself, but a human production that relies upon backstage ability and motivation. If that fails it will collapse.

There is no revolutionary class; the specular society will degenerate incrementally. No one will exercise any real choice in the trajectory history will follow then. Will people learn to live in a spectacular society in the aftermath of the collapse of this extraordinary specular society?