Courtesy: Lauren-Purje.jpg
Ashoak Upadhyay
“The spectacle is the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue. It is the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence” Guy Debord. 1967
“Why have Repose when we have activity. Why Consolation when we have Soma?” Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World
THE earnestness with which the Union government and its apologists are working to rebuild the image of the Prime Minister in particular after the global outcry against its pandemic (mis)management is in inverse proportion to its callous indifference to the way people are helplessly coping. Not just to stay alive but as Avay Shukla points out, to die with dignity.
Anger churns within the country but the image-management warriors, those ‘looking-glass’ warriors in the bureaucracy, media and in the groves of academe will find the means to air-brush the image of the leader, to wipe the dhool on the face. A country as replete with innovativeness as this will not disappoint the image-brand builders; anything will work: a dip in positivity rates, the discovery of new vaccines, conspiracy theories, Opposition parties, evil minorities, university students, farmers, old Muslim women, young girls in tattered jeans, the people of this country! out to destroy…all will go to refurbish the image of a leader with his hand to the wheel hamstrung by evil forces.
Dilip Simeon has opened up a subject that needs airing, a subject tied to the current dispensation of the ruling power to protect the image of the Leader. He opens with this:
The word image is a favourite with our media and politicians and clever policemen filing FIR’s against democratic activists. It is A Very Bad Thing to Tarnish the Nations’ Image. Criticising the Prime Minister, or his governments’ policies is also Very Bad for the Nations’ Image. Image = appearance, something other than the reality – as in imagination. Our government is very concerned about its image. Many can see this, hence the nick-name Feku.
But the deeper question is Why? Why are we so bothered about our ‘image’? Why is changing social reality less important than manipulating its ‘image’? Because we live in an age wherein the very standards of truth have been relativised and demolished. All that counts now is credibility, not truth.”
Simeon cites Guy Debord.s classic work The Society of the Spectacle as a reference guide to understand the government’s preoccupation with its self-image. It is possible however that Debord’s work deals with more than just the image as appearance, as a popular synonym for reputation. The way image-building is used transmits a preoccupation with an existential concern about appearances. In Debord’s case, the image is treated as an objectified cognitive commodity he calls the Spectacle, a category as a mode of domination.
“ In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation. “ (Emphasis in original.)
Representation. Not reality itself. The Spectacle replaces dirty throbbing reality with its fragmented but live memories that signify the recovery of the multiple selves and Time as a continuum of the Past Present and perhaps addled Futures. They are replaced by the Spectacle of discrete representations. Like photographs that freeze a life in a moment and strip it of memory; like a category or a metric whose abstraction hides more than it reveals. Like strings of Spectacle thrown at us that acquire a life of their own, an autonomous existence.
“The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living”
For Debord this movement of the non-living Spectacle is not an accidental or superficial outcome; it is intrinsic to a mode of production and defines its capacity to continue the reproduction of the ruling economy. Living through the image of the Spectacle, constantly at work creating a representational illusion-saturated world helps create the homogenized alienated subject, slave to the worship of the market economy yet distanced from it by the Spectacle that distorts his perception of it. The homogenized alienated subject is rendered as such by the Images that separate him from the fissures of reality, from the reality of Being into the illusion of Having, of consuming.
Debord termed the Spectacle the autocratic rule of the market economy. As the engine for rampant consumerism and distraction that hides the forces of domination from the public because the Spectacle is the “guardian of sleep.” He had western advanced societies in mind but fifty years later we can apply his notions of the Spectacle to developing societies with gigantic pretensions to being ‘advanced’, happy to be copy-cats in the adoption of the western telos of Progres through expanding consumerism.
For Debord, the Spectacle was not just constitutive of the consumption pof commodities wherein the image of brands become yardsticks of meaning for our fragmented lives but more perniciously, the stripping of meaning from the sphere of Politics. Democracy is reduced to the Spectacle of voting, dissatisfaction too becomes “spectacular” and can be commoditized; witness the protest songs of the 1960s that became products of great profit and Che Guevara T-shirts or the way the complexities of the epics Mahabharata and Ramayana are reduced to formulaic consumables by the entertainment industry.
The Society of The Spectacle and its razor sharp prose and clarity permit us to expand the idea of the alienation and distraction modern societies generate among the subjects it dominates by looking at what one could term Cognitive Spectacle or the role that discourse plays in alienating us from the fissures that mark and mar our lived realities. Consider the manner in which the Gross Domestic Product _GDP) indicator is used as a metonym for economic and increasingly for overall well-being of a nation.
There are several categories bundled into this Little Big Number that constitute Images or Spectacle, each one singly and together effecting an obfuscation of the “abyssal lines” (in Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ memorable phrase) that fissure societies according to race, caste, class and gender. The most totalizing one is the Nation that is represented by the GDP the movement of which measures the fortunes of that formation, itself symbolized or represented by the Flag, the Anthem and yes, the Supreme Leader. Images pile up, one on top of another, or as Debord would have it, as series of representations whose repeated and deliberate appearance defines our illusions. The illusions are not recognized as such because they have assumed cognitive tangibility. All of these Images expand our alienation from the Real, moving us along a spectrum from Being to Having to Appearance. As Debord argues, the constant reproduction of the Spectacle generates “a generalised sliding from having into appearing, from which all actual ‘having’ must draw its immediate prestige and its ultimate function.” (Emphasis in original)
Even as the pandemic stomps across the abyssal lines wreaking havoc among the inhabitants of those fissured settlements, the migrants, the dispossessed in particular, the manufacture of the Spectacle goes on relentlessly within academia, think tanks. We are constantly reminded that people may suffer, in life and death, the horrendous consequences of hubristic incompetence but we must not lose sight of the consequences of that suffering on the Little Big Number, the GDP. The pandemic’s worst impact, it is held by the Looking Glass Warriors is on the Nation’s GDP; the Gross Domestic Product has Fallen! The mainstream media echo the moan; a crisis is upon us because global ratings agencies are downgrading the Nation’s capacity to borrow, to become debtors; “Second Wave hurting India’s recovery: S&P Global Ratings” screams the headline in The Hindu newspaper. India’s GDP forecast for the current year slashed to 9.8 per cent on account of the effects of the second wave wails another. No worries, comforts a Reserve Bank of India official; an ‘eminent economist” she assures the reader that “India’s economy will do well once vaccination reaches a critical mass as pent-up demand, global recovery and easy finaincal conditions will boost activities…” (Times of India May18, 2021)
The Spectacle is in motion. Building and beaming Images of happy times to come. Slogans become Spectacle.
**
A little over ten years ago, in fact amdist the 2008 meltdown, economists Josoeph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and jean-Paul Fitoussi were asked by the then French President Nicholas Sarkozy to form a commission to assess Gross Domestic Product (GDP)―the most widely used measure of economic activity―as a reliable indicator of economic and social progress. The Commission was given the further task of laying out an agenda for developing better measures.
“Mis-Measuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn’t Add Up” critiques the importance that GDP had acquired in the destinies of nations; the Commission found better indices to reflect well being. The report didn’t make a difference to the importance, almost sacerdotal position that the Little Birg Number occupies in the imagination and calculations of governments and policy wonks around the world.
But how could it? More than just a convenient policy tool to measure a nation’s output in a given year, the GDP has become a commodity, a discursive commodity embedded with reflexive value systems and a self-serving life; you can’t hold it, kiss it or smell it, but you can dwell on the messages its movements transmit; you can measure a self-image by its fluctuations. It is a Spectacle whose performativity is spell binding and carves destinies of citizens and their collective Spectacle-laden consciousness. And it hides more than it reveals. Its underlying and unstated premise is to speak for and carve out the destinies of a Family, the Common Weal , the Nation; and by doing so it hides not just the fractures along those abyssal lines but also its centrality in the perpetuation of the ruling modes of production and domination.
The GDP brings Guy Debord’s classic work to life. The Society…does not mention it specifically, concerned as the author was with consumerism and distraction, alienation. But underlying his thesis is a prefiguration of the rise of Neo-liberalism that would gather pace in the twilight years of the Cold War and the fall of Communism in the 1980s. Francis Fukuyama’s End of History presaged–in retrospect rather hastily–the elevation of Democracy, Individualism and Free Enterprise as absolute truths. All dissidence from that course, as Samuel Huntington reminded us represented a clash of civilsations. The fall of Communism had created the grounds for Paradise on earth and it was being underwritten by western values of individual liberty, rule of law and most importantly rule of the Market. What other choices did we have now that the monster of Communism had been laid to rest?
The ‘spectaclist’ society was rejuvenated; the command-systems of the Wall that offered up totalitarian scarcity as a Common Good had met its due fate. Now the Market offered up a totalitarian alternative of Endless satiation through—The Spectacle. Satiation itself became Spectacle. And the temptations it offered spread, mirroring Oscar Wilde’s take that the best way to resist temptation is to yield to it. Freedom of choices we were told had come; the liberal reforms of the 1990s and thereafter would offer that cornucopia of choices denied us under Nehruvian socialism and the license raj.
Neo-liberalism and its Looking Glass ally, the Spectacle came onto the shores of every developing society. Happily the urban middle class and the leaders it threw up embraced it. In a profounder sense than even Debord could have imagined, the Spectacle found ardent support among the ruled, the subjects. They had always been willing to submit to the seductions of the Spectacle. Did not Aldous Huxley creating Brave New World tell us that? That the future forms of domination will not be through physical control by State power but through the power to control and channel the subject’s desires and lusts; by pampering and encouraging endless consumption.
Huxley was remarkable in his prescience. At the onset of the Great Depression he did not think capitalism was on its last legs but saw capitalism’s basic strength; not just a mode of production of goods and services but modes of efficient and endless consumption. And discourses that celebrate individual greed and lust for satiation. Why Think? Celebrate materiality because Nature, as one protagonist in the novel says , “”keeps no factory busy.” Why Read? And if no one reads because she is too busy self-gratifying why should State powers ban or burn books? Self-denial? Asceticism? Bah! As the character of Mond says :
“Industrial civilization is only possible when there is no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits is imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.”
The Spectacle underwrites this endless self-indulgence, the rout of memory, self-denial, compassion.
**
The critical and strategic significance of The Society of the Spectacle lies in its exposures of the Spectacle not as manifestations of a personality disorder or an authoritarian callousness of State power. To assume that this streak of political narcissism constitutes the Spectacle is to miss the centrality of the Image as “the guardian of sleep,” the guardian of a distracted and alienated individual rendered unfit to break through the looking glass to inquire into fissures of lived reality.
To break free of the Spectacle is to break free, even if for a moment, of the distractions, the veil of illusions that obfuscate modes of production and domination. It is to say NO! Enough already! As the protestors at Shaheen Bagh did, as the farmers are doing. But that is another story. The discovery that:
“My country has another face/Another set of people.”
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https://dilipsimeon.blogspot.com/2021/05/society-of-spectacle-image-emperors.html Cover image courtesy: https://hyperallergic.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/The-Society-of-the-Spectacle_Times-Square_Lauren-Purje.jpg --The postscript couplet is from My Country. By Lal Singh Dil. Courtesy India Dissents Edited with an Introduction by Ashok Vajpeyi. Speaaking Tiger.2017. p 214
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