[D66] Trump and the ‘Society of the Spectacle’

[A.O.]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/20/opinion/trump-and-the-society-of-the-spectacle.html

Trump and the ‘Society of the Spectacle’


Robert Zaretsky

THE STONE FEB. 20, 2017


Nearly 50 years ago, Guy Debord’s “The Society of the Spectacle” reached
bookshelves in France. It was a thin book in a plain white cover, with
an obscure publisher and an author who shunned interviews, but its
impact was immediate and far-reaching, delivering a social critique that
helped shape France’s student protests and disruptions of 1968.

“The Society of the Spectacle” is still relevant today. With its
descriptions of human social life subsumed by technology and images, it
is often cited as a prophecy of the dangers of the internet age now upon
us. And perhaps more than any other 20th-century philosophical work, it
captures the profoundly odd moment we are now living through, under the
presidential reign of Donald Trump.

As with the first lines from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “The Social
Contract” (“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”) and Karl
Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” (“The history of all hitherto existing
society is the history of class struggles”), Debord, an intellectual
descendant of both of these thinkers, opens with political praxis
couched in high drama: “The whole life of those societies in which
modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense
accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become
mere representation.”

In the 220 theses that follow, Debord, a founding member of the
avant-garde Situationist group, develops his indictment of “spectacular
society.” With this phrase, Debord did not simply mean to damn the mass
media. The spectacle was much more than what occupied the screen.
Instead, Debord argued, everything that men and women once experienced
directly — our ties to the natural and social worlds — was being
mulched, masticated and made over into images. And the pixels had become
the stuff of our very lives, in which we had relegated ourselves to the
role of walk-ons.

The “image,” for Debord, carried the same economic and existential
weight as the notion of “commodity” did for Marx. Like body snatchers,
commodities and images have hijacked what we once naïvely called
reality. The authentic nature of the products we make with our hands and
the relationships we make with our words have been removed, replaced by
their simulacra. Images have become so ubiquitous, Debord warned, that
we no longer remember what it is we have lost. As one of his
biographers, Andy Merrifield, elaborated, “Spectacular images make us
want to forget — indeed, insist we should forget.”

But in Debord’s view, forgetting doesn’t absolve us of responsibility.
We are not just innocent dupes or victims in this cataclysmic shift from
being to appearing, he insisted. Rather, we reinforce this state of
affairs when we lend our attention to the spectacle. The sun never sets,
Debord dryly noted, “on the empire of modern passivity.” And in this
passive state, we surrender ourselves to the spectacle.

For Marx, alienation from labor was a defining trait of modernity. We
are no longer, he announced, what we make. But even as we were alienated
from our working lives, Marx assumed that we could still be ourselves
outside of work. For Debord, though, the relentless pounding of images
had pulverized even that haven. The consequences are both disastrous and
innocuous. “There is no place left where people can discuss the
realities which concern them,” Debord concluded, “because they can never
lastingly free themselves from the crushing presence of media
discourse.” Public spaces, like the agora of Ancient Greece, no longer
exist. But having grown as accustomed to the crushing presence of images
as we have to the presence of earth’s gravity, we live our lives as if
nothing has changed.

With the presidency of Donald Trump, the Debordian analysis of modern
life resonates more deeply and darkly than perhaps even its creator
thought possible, anticipating, in so many ways, the frantic and
fantastical, nihilistic and numbing nature of our newly installed
government. In Debord’s notions of “unanswerable lies,” when “truth has
almost everywhere ceased to exist or, at best, has been reduced to pure
hypothesis,” and the “outlawing of history,” when knowledge of the past
has been submerged under “the ceaseless circulation of information,
always returning to the same list of trivialities,” we find keys to the
rise of trutherism as well as Trumpism.

In his later work, “Comments on the Society of the Spectacle,” published
almost 20 years after the original, Debord seemed to foresee the
spectacular process that commenced on Jan. 20. “The spectacle proves its
arguments,” he wrote, “simply by going round in circles: by coming back
to the start, by repetition, by constant reaffirmation in the only space
left where anything can be publicly affirmed …. Spectacular power can
similarly deny whatever it likes, once or three times over, and change
the subject, knowing full well there is no danger of any riposte.” After
Trump’s inauguration, the actual size of the audience quickly ceased to
matter. The battle over images of the crowd, snapped from above or at
ground level, simply fueled our collective case of delirium tremens.

Since then, as each new day brings a new scandal, lie or outrage, it has
become increasingly difficult to find our epistemological and ethical
bearings: The spectacle swallows us all. It goes on, Debord observed,
“to talk about something else, and it is that which henceforth, in
short, exists. The practical consequences, as we see, are enormous.”
Indeed. Who among us recalls the many lies told by Trump on the campaign
trail? Who can re-experience the shock felt when first seeing or hearing
the “Access Hollywood” tape? Who can separate the real Trump from the
countless parodies of Trump and the real dangers from the mere idiocies?
Who remembers the Russians when our own Customs and Border officials are
coming for our visas?

In the end, Debord leaves us with disquieting questions. Whether we love
Trump or hate him, is it possible we are all equally addicted consumers
of spectacular images he continues to generate? Have we been complicit
in the rise of Trump, if only by consuming the images generated by his
person and politics? Do the critical counter-images that protesters
create constitute true resistance, or are they instead collaborating
with our fascination with spectacle? We may insist that this consumption
is the basic work of concerned citizenship and moral vigilance. But
Debord would counter that such consumption reflects little more than a
deepening addiction. We may follow the fact checkers and cite the
critics to our hearts’ delight, but these activities, absorbed by the
spectacle, have no impact on it.

Surely, the spectacle has continued nonstop since Jan. 20. While Debord,
who committed suicide in 1994, despaired of finding a way to
institutionalize what, by nature, is resistant to institutionalization,
we need not. We seem to be entering a period similar to May 1968, which
represents what Debord called “lived time,” stripping back space and
time from the realm of spectacle and returning it to the world of human
interaction.

The unfolding of national protests and marches, and more important the
return to local politics and community organizing, may well succeed
where the anarchic spasms of 1968 failed, and shatter the spell of the
spectacle.
© 2017 The New York Times Company.