A Culture of Death

Wherever one looks, one encounters this same intent: to restructure society without community. 

Guy Debord

Society of the Spectacle

1967

The New Res Publica

After the Second War, an ad-conscious American army officer in Italy noted with misgiving that Italians could tell you the names of cabinet ministers, but not the names of commodities preferred by Italian celebrities. Furthermore, he said, the wall space of Italian cities was given over to political, rather than commercial slogans. He predicted that there was small hope that Italians would ever achieve any sort of domestic prosperity or calm until they began to worry about the rival claims of cornflakes and cigarettes, rather than the capacities of public men. In fact, he went so far as to say that democratic freedom very largely consists in ignoring politics and worrying, instead, about the threat of scaly scalp, hairy legs, sluggish bowels, saggy breasts, receding gums, excess weight, and tired blood.


Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media,
1964

The Lonely Crowd

The reigning economic system is founded on isolation; at the same time it is a circular process designed to produce isolation. Isolation underpins all technology, and technology isolates in its turn; all goods proposed by the spectacular system, from cars to television, also serve as weapons for that system as it strives to reinforce the isolation of "the lonely crowd." The spectacle is continually rediscovering its own basic assumptions -- and each time in a more concrete manner.

--Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967

Guy Debord and the Return to Normalcy

A not-so-recent article in the New York Times by Clive Thompson (Web Ushers in an Age of Ambient Intimacy) discusses how new media like Facebook and Twitter have given us an “ambient awareness.” The multiple and often mundane updates we publish online provide us with “a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of our friends' and family members' lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.” It is remarkable that we can be so intimately aware of the daily lives of any of hundreds of friends, family, and acquaintances that may be scattered over the globe, and it is very reminiscent of Marshall McLuhan's observation that electric technology involves "the family of man in the cohesive state of village living."

In fact, one of Thompson’s sources for his article described Facebook in this same way:

It's just like living in a village, where it's actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already," Tufekci said. "The current generation is never unconnected. They're never losing touch with their friends. So we're going back to a more normal place, historically. If you look at human history, the idea that you would drift through life, going from new relation to new relation, that's very new. It's just the 20th century."

So, in the broad sweep of history, we are finally returning to normalcy. Yet clearly, we are living in an entirely different environment. There is a qualitative difference between meeting your fellow village-folk at the well and discussing the events of the day and sitting in front of your computer or on your handheld of choice and being confronted with a list of updates. Twitter and the Facebook news feed both embody an evolution of our news media more than any other medium (it’s called a news feed). From the village herald to the newspaper to television news networks to electronic newspapers to Twitter, news has reversed from its pattern of broader and broader coverage to about as personal as it can get.

Yet is this really a return to normalcy? Guy Debord, a noted French social critic, wrote his esoteric critique of the technological society in The Society of the Spectacle. He claimed that the Spectacle—described variously as “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images,” “a worldview transformed into an objective force,” and the “chief product of modern day society”—is the preeminent factor organizing society today. It manifests itself in the content of news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment, and in the forms of the mass media and technology. Debord noted that though our technology may unite us, it “unites only in its separateness,” as he saw it reinforcing the isolation of the lonely crowd.

The question is then, does his critique stand? Tufekci says that we are returning to normalcy in our social interactions while Debord says that everywhere he looks he sees the same intent: “to restructure society without community.” There seems to be truth in the fact that our online personas require a little more personal consistency in as much as they disallow us from really leaving behind any social group. On the other hand, though our news media have reversed into the personal village gossip, we are involved in the village only as long as we sit in front of our computers.


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The Specter of the Spectacle: Guy Debord’s Neo-Marxist Media Theory

What do we really mean when we call something “spectacular"? Was Avatar spectacular because of the morals one might take from the story or because of the best special effects ever to be featured in a movie? The dictionary says that spectacular means “beautiful in a dramatic or eye-catching way,” and Avatar certainly was! Guy Debord, however, in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle, discusses what it really means for something to be spectacular, providing a much more penetrating significance. His incisive social critique surrounds what he sees as the defining characteristic of modern-day society: the spectacle. Similar to McLuhan’s focus on the transforming effects of media and Ellul’s all-encompassing view of the technological society, Debord’s spectacle reaches into all aspects of life and transforms them, acting as “a world view transformed into an objective force” (Debord 13). Debord’s concept of the spectacle is wide-ranging, and he explains how even in his time (before blogs, twitter, the internet, or even the personal computer) the spectacle has transformed society.

Debord’s definition of “spectacle” is peculiar, and he offers many definitions, corresponding to his use of the term as an all-encompassing descriptor of modern day society. Each definition contributes a new aspect or dimension of the spectacle’s existence, qualities, or transformative powers. The most general definition Debord offers we have already mentioned: the spectacle as a “world view transformed into an objective force (13). The world view provided by the spectacle finds its source in Western philosophy, the primary goal of which was “an attempt to understand activity by a means of the categories of vision” (17). As a result of the visual focus of the Enlightenment empiricists and other Western philosophy, modern society is now experiencing all the weaknesses of such an unbalanced understanding of the world.

This misunderstanding of reality has several implications for social relations, and social alienation is key to Debord’s understanding of the spectacle and society. For instance, “the spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (12). The mediation of social relationships by the spectacle is a transformation of traditional social relations. As a result of the spectacle’s abundance within society, the world is divided into two parts: reality and the self-representation of reality, which becomes superior to reality (22). The spectacle then functions as “the common language that bridges this division” (22).

Imagine two families, one relaxing around a fire, the other relaxing around a TV. The first family, gathered around the fire, can talk about the fire, but for a more interesting conversation, they must draw from some other source; perhaps the story of the fish that got away or the bear that almost didn’t go away. The second family is provided the bridge of communication by the television. They might watch the fisherman on the Outdoor Channel catch a fish or watch a bear attack on the Discovery Channel, but their social relationship in this setting centers around the television and the stories it provides them. People often view watching television with others as a ‘communal’ act, and don’t mind the use of television unless it becomes isolating. Yet, Debord sees this kind of one-way relationship to each other via the screen as uniting what is separate, though “it unites only in its separateness” (22).

More than just screen technologies demonstrate the spectacle, as isolation underpins all technology: “all goods proposed by the spectacular system, from cars to televisions, also serve as weapons for that system as it strives to reinforce the isolation of the ‘lonely crowd’” (22). In short, the goal of the spectacular society is “to restructure society without community” (137). This is evident in many different realms, particularly social relations and economics. Much of Debord’s book is a neo-Marxist discussion of the present-day situation of the proletariat, revealing how social isolation via the spectacle has prevented the development of a proletariat class consciousness and an ensuing revolution (89). The overthrow of the society of the spectacle is thus directly related to the proletariat overcoming alienation and revolting against the isolation of technology in a disalienating way (154).

Nevertheless, technology pervades our society, and the rapid increases in technology we have witnessed even in the forty years since Debord’s book have only further ingrained the idea of the spectacle as “the bad dream of modern society in chains, expressing nothing more than its wish for sleep” (18). That the spectacle is the guardian of this sleep is evident within Maggie Jackson’s book Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Certainly, her title is dramatic enough to compete with the intensity of Debord’s writing, and her writing reveals several phenomenon surrounding the topic of attention that reinforce Debord’s understanding of the spectacle.

A key idea within Jackson’s book that corresponds directly to Debord’s thesis is that “as the virtual shatters our conceptions of space and simultaneity redefines our notions of time, … a life of perpetual movement reshapes our relationship to place and what it means to be in the world” (Jackson 99). Jackson describes how our technologies have shaped us and our environment, and how this environment continues to reshape us. For instance, Jackson notes the very portable and mobile nature of modern-day Americans, quoting various statistics about dramatic increases in average annual number of miles driven and that “at any one time, three hundred thousand people are in flight above the United States” (101). The portability of our technology allows us the luxury of ‘staying in touch’ though we may be travelling across the world. Our social networking technology via the internet and other portable media devices certainly embody Debord’s understanding of isolation underpinning technology (22). Though we say we are staying in touch, touch is in fact completely unavailable via mediated communication.

Nonetheless, some maintain that virtual reality is still a form of reality, and Jackson documents the phenomenon wherein virtual reality is preferred to reality (66). This circumstance was obvious even forty years ago to Debord in his view of the division of the world into two parts: reality and self-representation (22). The young teenager preferring his video games to eating dinner with his family or the businessman preferring his Blackberry to his children both favor their particular virtual world because it is mediated via the spectacle. The teenager playing with his online friends and the businessman e-managing his coworkers are isolated not only from those around them but from those whom they are trying to communicate; they are united only in separateness (Debord 22).

Technology allows us to do more than just telecommunicate, it also allows us to “filter out noise, too-muchness, and others” (Jackson 65). Jackson gives the example of a DVD player in a minivan as a way for parents to ignore their children, and we see similar examples everyday: a wall of music via the iPod, the ability to ignore someone next to you in order to text someone across the room, and cell phone talkers at stores who are blissfully ignorant of anyone around them. What is the result of having so much ‘control’ over who we have to encounter? Jackson says that if we choose to filter out the actual world, “we become attentional wanderers, sated by the mirage” (67, see also Nicholas Carr’s new book, The Shallows). This is not necessarily the only result. Though a constant attunement to the distraction-making technologies that surround us certainly divides our attention, Debord’s assessment of the control that technology gives us is much more incisive: “the closer his life comes to being his own creation, the more drastically is he cut off from that life” (24). For both Debord and Jackson, there is something in the incontrollable, chance encounters in life that are more real and not to be avoided. In fact, these encounters seem to humanize people. Is there really something in a chance encounter that humanizes us, so that when we are caught off-guard we are really more ourselves?

Works Cited

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1995.

Jackson, Maggie. Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009.