The organization of spectacular activity is the organization of real social passivity and pacification -- the grouping of human beings as spectators around the one-sided reception of the images of their own alienated life. The spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relation among people mediated by images. Real relations between people are transformed into relations between images: for example, the image of "Sammy Davis Jr." embracing the image of "Richard Nixon" on TV is supposed to show that the real human being Nixon, as a representative of middle America, is not a racist, and that the real human being Sammy Davis Jr., as a representative of black America, loves and respects Nixon. Again, when a "movie star" or "sports star" advertises a product, we are supposed to respond to their image as an ideal, and therefore to emulate it by associating ourselves with the images with which they associate themselves.
But the process goes further: spectacles become topics of conversation, discussion, and even the subject of further spectacles (e.g.., "The Tonight Show"). The conversation of urban children is monopolized by arguments about (and even renditions of) the TV programs they simultaneously watched the night before. Communications of lived experience become communications of (and about) spectacles, communication of passivity, non-communication. The spectacle in general names the ensemble of the social relations of non-communication, of isolation. Real means of communication would be means to dialogue as opposed to the technologies of "unilogue" which have developed with the spectacle. Unilateral, one-way communication is always authoritarian: the giving of orders.
The nightmare of the spectacle, of images which take on a "life" of their own, is fully realized when people consciously attempt to live up to the images with which they are presented: even in lovemaking, potentially the most perfect form of communication (the unity of pleasure-giving and pleasure-getting), human beings are constantly trying to present images of themselves to each other — "stud", "sensuous woman", etc. — the immediate contact of two human beings is lost in the pseudo-lovemaking of their spectacular images. [This is now officially recognized as a "problem" by sexologists.]
Meanwhile, the goods and services (commodities) produced by the proletariat are also part of the spectacle, in that they are sold back to the proletariat which produced them by means of their images: in advertising, the act of consumption itself is a spectacle. Commodity consumption becomes the only kind of consumption. "There are fewer and fewer gratifications for which one does not have to pay". Spectacular existence is by definition schizoid. The alienation of the spectator to the profit of the contemplated object (which is the result of his own unconscious activity) is expressed in the following way: "the more he contemplates the less he lives; the more he accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires... in that his own gestures are no longer his but those of another who re-presents them to him". [cf Debord, The Society of the Spectacle.]
Broadly considered, the spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image, i.e., becomes visible. Since the present world is nothing other than capital in its concentrated self- deployment, the spectacle is capital creating a world in its own image. Capital is the material God, and the spectacle is religion (ideology) materialized. As in religion the self-powers of human beings are alienated into the image of "God", so in the spectacle they are alienated into more literal images, which nonetheless become "subjects" of their own sources, the human beings themselves. This is as true of the "heroic proletarian" of the Chinese propaganda poster as it is of the "happy family" of Madison Avenue imagery. The spectacle, in its various forms, rules the world: the world which it re-presents as its world.
Postnote(s):
- The example of the car and happiness could be expanded to far more than the passivity of TV, which is too obvious. Passivity does not just depict sitting, as if thinking is to then be considered passive since no movement is possibly noted. It is less the actions (or lack thereof) and more the social relation which should be exemplified here. For instance, it is precisely the critical examining (or gaming with) TV that unfolds the social relationship as it is re-presented in shows, news, ads, segmenting, tone, colors, etc. It is not TV but the relationship with what is on TV that should be understood. This is still a problem today when all the talk of commodities as evil misses the social relationship that binds one to the incompleteness (e.g., partiality) of commodified creations and use.
- The example of Nixon and Davis, to be more clear, showed Davis spectacularly embracing the policies of Nixon, not Nixon. Seeing Davis as "black America" and Nixon as "middle America" is a spectacular view, as well. I think the example got clouded with the dislike of Nixon's policies, which in fact, were not even his own — but those of a system.
- The "movie star", "rock star", and "sports star" are now the products; it is no longer what they use but what they are (not) that is produced. They are images separated from their sources by a social relationship of the consumer more so in many cases than those of the producer. The spectacles are only possible by a mutual inclusive relationship between the image and the consumer of that image as a pseudo-fulfillment of alienated activity/life. They are only possible because of this social relationship. It is not movies, not music, not sports. It is the underlying social relationship which separates and re-presents a substanceless vitality to the image so that others may appear to live their lives again. Sorry gang, it works only partially and the "endless" well of funding to consume more and more is going dry. The "fake it 'til you make it world meets the real world of "fictitious capital" and the overspending of future assets — and, suddenly it's capital crisis time!
- Isolation is to be understood as not just "the aloneness of one" but as human activity being disconnected from its source. The attempts to re-connect are provided for by the same social relations that require the disconnection. The multitude of pseudo-communities (e.g., "women's movement", "black community", "abused husbands", "orphans", "left-handed masturbators") exemplify the degree to which partiality can go without challenging that which maintains and requires it. Isolation is a group is isolation supreme!
[The above is taken from http://www.lust-for-life.org/Lust-For-Life/LoadedWords/LoadedWords.pdf.]Now, the focused-upon over-exposure highlighted by this post:
"Chinese air force drill looks awfully similar to ‘Top Gun’"The spectacle of passively-absorbing the alien-ness of anything made in the image of the Capital social relation in one part of the Virulent Hierarchy as being substantially "different" from a fragment or glimpse of another aspect of that Virulent Hierarchy, is, in itself, a spectacle. It is our uncritical pondering that is sought. That is the colonizing process: taking as non-toxic any descriptive or "newsworthy" input what the system says about itself.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thecutline/20110131/ts_yblog_thecutline/chinese-air-force-drill-looks-awfully-similar-to-top-gun
We are seeing meta-fictionalization here.... There is the "mighty" personification of a potent killer jet (threateningly-floating across the skies like killer sperm), taunting all whose alienated self-powers have now been consecrated and concentrated into the State apparatus of the "US" reification.
We see this spectacle advertise itself — as a self-affirming self-reflection of itself, in the film "Top Gun".
Now we see another reflection, in a reflection of a self-reflection which is an alienated reflection back at the alienated producers.
Is any more credible than humans authentically managing their creativity at the point of its very production?! Hardly. They are all mirrored into mirrored versions of the originator and their self-disownership, their self-dispossession. All copies that flex ther ability to annihilate the original really cannot do so without collapsing back into a pile of broken mirror glass.
It might be called "farce calling itself onto the carpet", yet, the frozen pose is tolerated.
It is a inverted image of us.
It is the [pseudo-]presence of replicant held up by our own pseudo-absence.
We hold up the copy in lieu of the real: ourselves.
We barely exist so that it appears to exist.
Hence, "Kool-aid makes friends", and we yearn to be like it, and liked like and as it.
It, fact, we become more thing-like in our remaining sum of acts.
We act like what acts like us.
That mediation allows a system to mold our behavior, wants, and hyper-dimensional self-objectification.
"China", "Egypt", and "the "USA" exist because we do not.
"They" act because we do not.
Instead, we become citizen-objects while reifications parasitze a controlled flow of subservientized subjectivity.
In all cases it is the attempt of the false pretending to be real. The fictionalized value that substituted for what it has kidnapped, is never real, by definition. In exchange for not killing the original, the original allows the charade to mirror itself ever farther away. The life of the original gets more and more abstract, however, only by illusion supported by self-delusion that the original has no ultimate power.
Life reduced to things can never become the socially real; things can never be fully substituted for their N-removed essence. Even slaves and servants must imagine, think, and act.
Though humanity is encased with spectacle, atomized with cynicism regarding its real — because social — power, both administered by the apparti of the Virulent Hierarchy, Capital is just its latest mirage. The VH wears no clothes, except those which we slavishly project, polish, fold, launder, and iron!
Suggested reading:
The Fetish Speaks
