From New Dawn 195 (Nov-Dec 2022)
In the 1960s, a French intellectual came up with a novel theory on life in the 20th century. The basis of the theory was that in modern capitalist consumer societies like France, the United States and the West in general, authentic life had been replaced with its representation.
According to Guy Debord (1931–1994), we now live in societies in which individuals no longer actually experience events, but in which all action is instead conducted through the represented image. He called this “The Society of the Spectacle” (the work outlining his theory was published in French as La société du spectacle in 1967). Images, Debord said, have supplanted genuine human interaction.
Debord argued that the history of social life can be understood as “the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing.” In consumer society, social life is not about living, but about having; the Spectacle uses the image to convey what people need and must have.
A founding member of the radical Situationist International, Debord’s descriptions of human social life subsumed by technology and images are prophetic in light of the internet age now upon us.
The Spectacle is much greater than marketing and TV images. Debord argued that everything men and women once experienced directly – our ties to the natural and social worlds – had been incorporated into the Spectacle – a vast simulacrum – to be sold and fed back to us. Doomed to be simply passive consumers inside the Spectacle, men and women inescapably reinforce its dominance by giving it attention. The sun never sets, Debord dryly noted, “on the empire of modern passivity.” And in this passive state, we surrender ourselves to the Spectacle.
In his 1988 follow up Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle, Debord introduced the idea of the “integrated Spectacle,” the most hazardous and commanding form of Spectacle, which he posits operates today. This enlarged Spectacle is associated with liberal democracies marked by incessant technological development and a state of general secrecy. Society is governed and managed by ‘experts’ who invoke the terror or health threat to keep spectacular society in a constant state of fear and tension.
When we look back on our history, even from inside the Spectacle, we sometimes identify works of literature, art or cinema that accurately describe the reality of this modern world. One such breakthrough came in the form of the 1976 movie Network about a fictional TV network that airs almost anything for ratings.
Written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet, Network won four Academy Awards and was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
This movie forecast the direction in which the Spectacle was taking the world: news as entertainment, soulless consumerism, selfish corporate interest, borderless liberal globalism, unscrupulous mainstream media antics.
News, in Network, is a business, and facts will bend to it. This is told, explicitly, in the climactic scene, when the head of the network’s parent company, Arthur Jensen, speaks to Howard Beale, the disenchanted news reader.
“There are no nations,” Jensen tells Beale. “There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars.” Everything is now determined by television; it can dictate geography. He looks into Beale’s bewildered face and tells him: “The world… is a business.”
Jensen’s rant continues. “You get up on your little twenty-one-inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.” [Now we can include on that list Microsoft, Google, Apple, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Bayer, etc.]
That night, in the movie, Beale goes on air to preach the corporate doctrine of Jensen:
“What is finished is the idea that this great country is dedicated to the freedom and flourishing of every individual in it. It’s the individual that’s finished. It’s the single, solitary human being that’s finished. It’s every single one of you out there that’s finished. Because this is no longer a nation of independent individuals. It’s a nation of some two-hundred-odd million transistorized, deodorized, whiter-than-white, steel-belted bodies, totally unnecessary as human beings and as replaceable as piston rods.
“Well, the time has come to say, ‘Is de-humanization such a bad word?’ Because good or bad, that’s what is so. The whole world is becoming humanoid – creatures that look human, but aren’t. The whole world, not just us. We’re just the most advanced country, so we’re getting there first. The whole world’s people are becoming mass-produced, programmed, numbered, insensate things….”
The above first appeared in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 12 No 3.
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