Matei’s review of The Society of the Spectacle > Likes and Comments
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I think my main criticism of your approach is that I am skeptical that there is indeed such a large qualitative difference between a modern mass-media consuming society and a pre-modern one with respect to what Debourd calls spectacle. If such a difference does exist, he certainly does not delve with any sort of analytical system to make it clear.
While movies are an innovative way of looking at the world, like the sequence depicting factory workers offering a new glimpse, a new occasion for self-reflection, in order for this reflection take shape, in order for you to view this as a perception not bound to yourself, this ability and understanding must be already present in yourself. Are you not doing something similar when watching a painting? When reading a book? You can say that cinema - or other types of modern media - does this in a way that is different than in the past because it is more life-like, but in doing so I think you are just responding to a set of aesthetic criteria, to a set of artistic qualities which you have associated with realism, with participation in human experience. It is too simple to assume a naive consumption of media, that media, because of its form can "trick" its consumer to a state of passivity. Interaction with media, any media, still requires an activity of deciphering these aesthetic principles into some experience that we understand and interpret. Therefore, if ideology (for me a term indistinguishable from religion) is seeped into media, if the modern state uses media as a mechanism of control, it needs to do this at a level beyond the media itself, it needs to shape the interpretation of media. Otherwise, it is limited to a space of interpretation, it is limited to an aestheticized experience, so an experience that starts being perceived as not only having a "false reality", but an "artistic reality". So my first point of difference is that I challenge the notion that brute seeing, brute perception is possible, doubly so with respect to media.
This also applies for the possibility of creating a truly atomized, self-constructed perception of reality: we have no known example of this. While its true perhaps that the imagined space in which a medieval peasant was living out the spectacle of the world was more reduced than ours, this space was still a product of the society around them and therefore impacted primarily by concentrated, organized effort. However since the construction of this space is a communal process, I do not think that participating in it in an organized manner is inherently troubling: it could make use for example of specialized knowledge, or of correcting a far to local imagination. So we need some sort of differentiator to separate what would make this process natural or manipulated.
Let us say we do have a way of understanding how this process can be interacted with, the mechanics of belief formation - I am then still not convinced that political power can convincingly use it to create control. We now can look back at highly concentrated efforts of 20th century governments to use propaganda and it requires a certain disposition to deal with it uncritically. This goes back to my earlier point, that I think the spectacle is only effective to the converted, it can't by itself inject tabula rasa a new system of control. To claim that it does is to deny any effective power on the side of the consumer, it would mean treating this consumption as unmediated by any sort of interpretative act, which I've argued against. I think this becomes more clear when we deal with more concrete examples: media which attempts to impose an outside message we disagree with will always come off as corny. We are able to distinguish and recognize when we are dealing with media which is deceptive, but we are persuaded and engage deeply with media which resonates and challenges our own worldview. So the process of spectacle, since spectacle is understood as freely enjoyed and participated in, is less a control structure imposing itself on the ruled, and more of a reflective act, an amorphous entity attempting to transpose itself in an ideal, aesthetic way. It is an act of self-control.
I agree with you that a big differentiating factor is the spread and interconnectedness between the institutions dealing with this space and the average person, there is an aspect I want to highlight which also makes for this difference. The church functioned and functions as an independent institution with a particular universalizing mission. As you mentioned this created not only tensions with the effort the ground religious practice across a common framework, but it also had frequent tensions within and with the secular state. Tensions from within appear exactly because the institution was not arbitrarily oriented towards enforcing control but because it had a set of concrete ideals it was pursuing, so the institution can't pursue a purely pragmatic, arbitrary goal of power. The tension with the state is what ultimately caused the reformation however and was a far greater problem exactly because it was voluntary. So I disagree that the medieval state relied on religion to justify its power, rather it aligned with it out of the same reason that people outside of the control structure participated in it - it was a framework through which to decode self-reflection. This changes post-reform of course as it was a step towards both renouncing a universalizing process and of renouncing a separation between the religious and the secular.
You seem to suggest that elements of identity that separate people are both artificial and means of control, that the base human nature exists in its proper universal context. That we have been divided so we can be controlled. While I agree that these identities, like identity of race, identity of ethnicity, etc. are indeed artificial, they are established not to divide but as a faulty, uncoordinated and chaotic process of attempting to create a common identity. It is an attempt at building a trusting space in the absence of any process of the creation of trust. The absence of these modern identities would not lead to universal brotherhood because there is religious space in which this brotherhood was built. There is the nation state, who has taken the success of previous political organizations in constructing a common identity and running with it, while hinting - without any means of achieving this - at a possible universalization of this anti-universalization mindset.
All this being said, the reason for my harsh criticism I think still stands: you raised interesting points and structured these points both based on your interpreted experience and on some theoretical models - this was very interesting for me to read and very useful for me to try and formulate an answer to. Even if we disagree, the conversation is productive. This is because the method and form of your answer is based on a reasonable, rational process we both agree with. My main problem with Debourd is that his isn't, it's an in-group assertion without the backing of some framework outside of his interpretation of Marxism.
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I think my main criticism of your approach is that I am skeptical that there is indeed such a large qualitative difference between a modern mass-media consuming society and a pre-modern one with respect to what Debourd calls spectacle. If such a difference does exist, he certainly does not delve with any sort of analytical system to make it clear.While movies are an innovative way of looking at the world, like the sequence depicting factory workers offering a new glimpse, a new occasion for self-reflection, in order for this reflection take shape, in order for you to view this as a perception not bound to yourself, this ability and understanding must be already present in yourself. Are you not doing something similar when watching a painting? When reading a book? You can say that cinema - or other types of modern media - does this in a way that is different than in the past because it is more life-like, but in doing so I think you are just responding to a set of aesthetic criteria, to a set of artistic qualities which you have associated with realism, with participation in human experience. It is too simple to assume a naive consumption of media, that media, because of its form can "trick" its consumer to a state of passivity. Interaction with media, any media, still requires an activity of deciphering these aesthetic principles into some experience that we understand and interpret. Therefore, if ideology (for me a term indistinguishable from religion) is seeped into media, if the modern state uses media as a mechanism of control, it needs to do this at a level beyond the media itself, it needs to shape the interpretation of media. Otherwise, it is limited to a space of interpretation, it is limited to an aestheticized experience, so an experience that starts being perceived as not only having a "false reality", but an "artistic reality". So my first point of difference is that I challenge the notion that brute seeing, brute perception is possible, doubly so with respect to media.
This also applies for the possibility of creating a truly atomized, self-constructed perception of reality: we have no known example of this. While its true perhaps that the imagined space in which a medieval peasant was living out the spectacle of the world was more reduced than ours, this space was still a product of the society around them and therefore impacted primarily by concentrated, organized effort. However since the construction of this space is a communal process, I do not think that participating in it in an organized manner is inherently troubling: it could make use for example of specialized knowledge, or of correcting a far to local imagination. So we need some sort of differentiator to separate what would make this process natural or manipulated.
Let us say we do have a way of understanding how this process can be interacted with, the mechanics of belief formation - I am then still not convinced that political power can convincingly use it to create control. We now can look back at highly concentrated efforts of 20th century governments to use propaganda and it requires a certain disposition to deal with it uncritically. This goes back to my earlier point, that I think the spectacle is only effective to the converted, it can't by itself inject tabula rasa a new system of control. To claim that it does is to deny any effective power on the side of the consumer, it would mean treating this consumption as unmediated by any sort of interpretative act, which I've argued against. I think this becomes more clear when we deal with more concrete examples: media which attempts to impose an outside message we disagree with will always come off as corny. We are able to distinguish and recognize when we are dealing with media which is deceptive, but we are persuaded and engage deeply with media which resonates and challenges our own worldview. So the process of spectacle, since spectacle is understood as freely enjoyed and participated in, is less a control structure imposing itself on the ruled, and more of a reflective act, an amorphous entity attempting to transpose itself in an ideal, aesthetic way. It is an act of self-control.
I agree with you that a big differentiating factor is the spread and interconnectedness between the institutions dealing with this space and the average person, there is an aspect I want to highlight which also makes for this difference. The church functioned and functions as an independent institution with a particular universalizing mission. As you mentioned this created not only tensions with the effort the ground religious practice across a common framework, but it also had frequent tensions within and with the secular state. Tensions from within appear exactly because the institution was not arbitrarily oriented towards enforcing control but because it had a set of concrete ideals it was pursuing, so the institution can't pursue a purely pragmatic, arbitrary goal of power. The tension with the state is what ultimately caused the reformation however and was a far greater problem exactly because it was voluntary. So I disagree that the medieval state relied on religion to justify its power, rather it aligned with it out of the same reason that people outside of the control structure participated in it - it was a framework through which to decode self-reflection. This changes post-reform of course as it was a step towards both renouncing a universalizing process and of renouncing a separation between the religious and the secular.
You seem to suggest that elements of identity that separate people are both artificial and means of control, that the base human nature exists in its proper universal context. That we have been divided so we can be controlled. While I agree that these identities, like identity of race, identity of ethnicity, etc. are indeed artificial, they are established not to divide but as a faulty, uncoordinated and chaotic process of attempting to create a common identity. It is an attempt at building a trusting space in the absence of any process of the creation of trust. The absence of these modern identities would not lead to universal brotherhood because there is religious space in which this brotherhood was built. There is the nation state, who has taken the success of previous political organizations in constructing a common identity and running with it, while hinting - without any means of achieving this - at a possible universalization of this anti-universalization mindset.
All this being said, the reason for my harsh criticism I think still stands: you raised interesting points and structured these points both based on your interpreted experience and on some theoretical models - this was very interesting for me to read and very useful for me to try and formulate an answer to. Even if we disagree, the conversation is productive. This is because the method and form of your answer is based on a reasonable, rational process we both agree with. My main problem with Debourd is that his isn't, it's an in-group assertion without the backing of some framework outside of his interpretation of Marxism.
I think what you're getting at is that for us to be "worshipping the spectacle" there has to be an opposition to this "indoctrinated delusion", which is almost like a "natural state" of clarity, where man is somehow completely undisturbed by inner-metamorfoses of the self into something grander, something cuturally created or something religious (an ancient person conviced they're a god/supreme being for example). I don't think such a "perfect state" exists, so I think we agree there.
However, a friend once did a presentation on movies and she showed us some of the first ever filmed material, the closing of the factory and the people just walking out of the large doors. Boring to us; mind blowing to them. It struck me then that until the invention of cameras, humans were literally bound to their own flesh for perception. I could never see what it was like "to be somewhere else". For 99,99999% of human's existence, we were bound to our selves - forced to build our fantasies on limited experience of a singular story. Nowadays we gorge ourselves on the sights of others. I knew what "life was like" before my balls dropped, because I'd already seen 1000s of archetypical narratives play out with the most flashy angles, musical backdrops and convincing acting. Once again, it's not like if I grew up in a cave I wouldn't dream up all kinds of falsehoods about my potential futures, and camp fire stories about heroes might inspire me, but I haven't "seen" it. That's not "the spectacle" that's "the oracle".
Kids watch tons of stories in many different worlds, they influence them for sure. The way your brain makes sense of the world is no longer through what your own spectacle conjures up, it is now laid upon you by varying visible media. The ideas of divide n conquer, indirect rule, nationalism/race/sex as "genuinely important identifiers for human personalities" attest to this I'd say. Governmentality is more easily established if you are constantly in your subjects' minds, sonically, visually and psychologically. It was hard for the popes and kings to keep people Christian back in the day. Every year or two on patrol, some town or other would've created new saints. And the Church would have to fight them all over again. To keep legal and religious control was (apparently, so some articles said) a lot harder to keep than we like to imagine nowadays. Where "all medieval peasants were die hard christians who believed everything cuz they dumb," you needed more rigorous brainwashing, something those popes and kings just didn't have the tools for.
In short, and here comes my bias even harder:
We used to be indoctrinated with the ideas of kings, appointed by religion. Then the French revolution gave rise to the bourgeoisie, a class which gains power solely through exploitation and subjugation. There is no idea here, no goal, no God. There is only the coincidence of us being on top right now. This ruling class needs a justification to rule, to gather consent from their puppets; the tool they use are the many facets of the spectacle, in order to distort what "authentic" humanity is. Now what "authentic humanity" is, we can discuss of course. And perhaps you could just argue that, since this is the humans we have, these spectacle creators/believers surely are the most authentic humans, as this is then clearly what humans authentically do. But then we run into horrors in life and we wish to combat them. So here we go making theories with grand narratives again.
ps:
On a personal level, and I can imagine this varies greatly, I have been greatly impacted by media exposure in the way I perceive what the world is, who I am and what part I'm supposed to play. I'm sure I would've thought up some maniacal shite if I was in a cave too, though.
So I think I see your point, but I wouldn't bash it that hard. I reckon there's some food for thought in that book.
What ya reckon?