imagination sterilized: the workings of the global spectacle

boundary 2 40:3 (2013) DOI 10.1215/01903659-2367064 © 2013 by Duke University Press

Imagination Sterilized: The Workings of the Global Spectacle

Ruth Y. Y. Hung

For the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to . . . be away from home and yet to feel . . . everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world. . . . The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. . . . Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. . . . A blockhead! a blockhead! and I despise him!—Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life”

In spectacle even alienation is turned into an image for the alienated to consume.—Hal Foster, Recordings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics

The theme of this essay is the immediacy of visuality, the dominant form of experience by which the species thinks itself of and in the world, as continuous with the world. It has now been close to two decades since the “linguistic turn” of the twentieth century that philosophers so passionately promoted and theorized gave way to what W. J. T. Mitchell calls “the picto-

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rial turn.”1 In this essay, “the pictorial turn” stands for the reality of a political economy that not only works to sophisticate the visual effect’s continuing power over human imagination2 but also witnesses how at a much grander scale the spectacle is active in fastening, securing, and simultaneously flat-tening the impressions of the everyday and the particular. Examples from the recent past range from Las Vegas, Hollywood, and Disney international to such fascist propaganda as Triumph des Willens (1935) and The Birth of a Nation (1915), and radical revolutionary praxis like China’s “Great Leap Forward” (1958–61) and the eight yangbanxi (model operas) performed during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), to mention just a few. These are well- studied examples of how the rhetoric of predominantly industrial and colonial capital camouflages the alienating effects of capitalism and culti-

1. W. J. T. Mitchell coined this term in his book Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). He notes that the “turn” in contemporary culture entails the “real-ization that spectatorship (the look, the gaze, the glance, the practices of observation, surveillance, and visual pleasure) may be as deep a problem as various forms of read-ing” (15). This sense of the visual as an abiding problem is not peculiar to critics working in modernist and postmodernist culture. Meanwhile, recent critical interest in the pictorial turn is more than a result of the ever-increasing and predominant presence of the shock- and- awe images in popular culture, a presence that feeds the “postmodernist” appe-tite for the phantasmagoric. Siegfried Kracauer’s study of German films and “the mass ornament,” Michel Foucault’s work on the panopticon, Debord’s manifesto work on “the society of the spectacle,” and Julia Kristeva’s study of the carnivalesque via Mikhail Bakh-tin, which problematize spectacles as reinvented ideologies of colonization and global racism in the twenty- first century all show that the problem of the visual reaches back to ancient philosophical debates on the iconoclastic. Those debates have deeply informed the thinking of post- Enlightenment modernism.2. The classic romantic position argues that memory, as a central starting point for poetic imagination, finds its way into art vis- à- vis the experience of an image. The most repre-sentative discussion of the image’s relations to memory and imagination lies in William Wordsworth’s 1798 poems, in parts of “The Prelude,” and in the 1802 version of the pref-ace to the Lyrical Ballads. Of course, behind Wordsworth’s creative theory and practice, and behind the vocabulary with which he describes the function of image in the creative process, is the philosophical tradition of John Locke, emended by George Berkeley, and exemplified in David Hume. This philosophical tradition of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume draws our attention to the fact that in Wordsworth the experience of an image is essen-tially an inner, intellectual, and philosophical one. In Wordsworth’s words, “I was often unable to think of external things as having external existence, and I communed with all I saw as something not apart from but inherent in my own immaterial nature” (note to the ode “Intimations of Immortality,” in The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. Jared R. Curtis [Penrith: Humanities, 2007], 160). See Mary Warnock, Imagination (Lon-don: Faber and Faber, 1976); and C. C. Clarke, Romantic Paradox (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962).

Future(s) of Criticism—II / Hung / Imagination Sterilized 103

vates desires, and how authoritarian spectacles work to achieve ideological indoctrination through either aestheticized politics or politicized aesthetics. In their strong and firm presence, these spectacles have expressed the dia-logical nature in the relationship between art and politics, representation and reality, ideology and practice. As the Frankfurt School and others have shown us, their aesthetics enable the state apparatuses to deploy politi-cized media (image and word) to manage populations, affect imagination, and produce ideological coherence.

Into the last decade of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty- first century, spectacles that attract world attention have broken away from notions of ideology and, at a slower pace, from the nation- state. Their emergence suggests the transformed role of the state in a globalized capital formation and the occurrence of two paradigm shifts: from the lin-guistic to the visual and from the dominance of the image to its dominance and reification by global capital. In order to foreground contemporary spec-tacles’ intimate relationship with the neoliberal capital order, I will call them “global spectacles.”3 Within the burgeoning financialized, corporatized, and mass- technologized “society,” global spectacles at present increasingly venture beyond the confines of the old ideological divides. The teeming anonymity of “hypercapitalized”4 and globalized life tempts individuals to abjure any remaining ideological faith in alternative modernities. It draws them into a post–Cold War, postindustrial society that is boldly indifferent

3. I would like to coin the term global spectacle despite my full awareness of Debord’s dis-cussion of the “integrated spectacle” in 1988, prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. I believe my term reflects more forcefully the irreversible end of the Cold War era and the full matu-rity of a world structured by neoliberal global principles. Although Debord also saw global capitalism’s imminent arrival and effects, he nonetheless found it necessary to fall back onto the old distinction between the “capitalism of today” and the “capitalism of bureau-cratic totalitarianism.” Hence, Debord foregrounds the “integrability” of his concept of the spectacle so as to emphasize the term’s genealogical link to two old types of the spec-tacle: the Eastern “concentrated spectacle” and the Western “diffuse spectacle.” Debord writes, “The capitalism of today’s integrated spectacle still pretends to believe that the capitalism of bureaucratic totalitarianism . . . remains its fundamental enemy, despite the innumerable proofs of their profound alliance and solidarity. But actually all established powers, . . . never forget what one of the rare German internationalists after the outbreak of the First World War managed to recall: ‘The main enemy is within.’” Guy Debord, Com-ments on “The Society of the Spectacle,” trans. Malcolm Imrie, originally published in French as Commentaires sur “La société du spectacle,” by Gérard Lébovici, in 1988 (Lon-don: Verso, 1998), 46.4. Philip Graham, “Hypercapitalism: A Political Economy of Informational Idealism,” New Media and Society 2, no. 2 (June 2000): 131–56; quotation on 139.


to either “ideas” or historic time, and is most successful in concerting and depoliticizing all efforts of human imagination into a natural phantasm—a fundamentally repetitive experience of the spectacular.5

The global spectacle, together with the new social media, has con-tributed to the creation of “visual allure” as a place to build common sense and the ethics of hedonism. It does so not only with its magnitude and ability to create a more extensive level of commodity fetishism but also by virtue of its ability to map on the species an encompassing system of appa-ratuses in which every cultural diversity, every individual desire, and every version and vision of life become essentially a realization of one of the pos-sibilities contained within the imagineering of the system.

With regard to the global spectacle’s power over human imagination, I therefore refer not only to the kind that found its logic within the culture of consumer democracy characteristic of the industrial and colonial capitalist states.6 Since the so- called post–Bretton Wood floating- rate era, the free

5. Ronald A. T. Judy, in his introduction to the “Tunisia Dossier” published last year, holds that the Tunisia Revolution should be a good beginning point and place to build the “inventory” of “general human dignity.” See the “Tunisia Dossier: The Tunisian Revolution of Dignity,” special issue of boundary 2 39, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 12. I realize that an event such as the so- called Arab Spring named and circulated by the same media I discuss throughout this essay offers one strong example of a potential difference from the experi-ence I describe here. Not enough time has passed to know this, however, and the media-tization of those events, including the public emphasis on the role of digital media, brings them into a proximate if complex relation to what I theorize here.6. The Benjaminian observation that the problem with bourgeois societies is a lack of imagination has now become a cliché. Critics have pointed out that the mechanical repro-duction of styled goods at the beginning of the nineteenth century paved the way for what Warren Susman, in Culture as History, termed a “culture of abundance,” which signaled the beginnings of a mass market and its control of the unconscious. Critics have, after all, objected to Benjamin’s utopian reading of the cinema by pointing to its commodifica-tion, function as an instrument of ideology, and mechanism for deep modification of con-sciousness. They have pointed to Hollywood, television, and photography as examples of the image’s displacement of writing and organic experience, and of mass manufactured goods’ ability to create believable imagistic fictions. Consumer capitalism employed both psychoanalysis and aesthetics as business tools. Once the study of human psychology and beauty, the two disciplines became interested studies of man and art for the purpose of informing industries of consumer response. The fundamental assumption underlying these efforts was that life must visibly change on a daily basis. Roland Barthes calls this phenomenon “neomania,” a madness for perpetual newness where “the new” is the sine qua non of “purchased value.” See Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transfor-mation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1985); Roy Sheldon and Arens Egmont, Consumer Engineering: A New Technique for Prosperity


flow of global capital has paved the way for the emergence of an increas-ingly integrated and interdependent world economy.7 Guy Debord’s founda-tional theoretical text, the manifesto of 1967, acknowledged and took note of the way capital mobility created a set of postmodern conditions of pro-duction and exchange that gave rise to the global capital market’s gradual maturity in the 1990s. For Debord, the 1960s found the whole life of society being turned into “an immense accumulation of spectacles”—a symptom of the totality of capitalism’s alienating power. The triumphant arrival of “the Society of the Spectacle,”8 Debord announces, turns “all that once was directly lived” into “mere representation.”9

In addition to Debord and the situationists, I am interested in the global spectacle’s work in structuring the human as a “desiring machine” so that the human inscribes itself as the functionary of the disengaged. In other words, the human species becomes motivated in applying its imagination to build the society of the spectacle but uninterested in educating its own

(London: Harper and Brothers, 1932); and Roland Barthes, The Fashion System (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984), 300.7. On the causes of the ultimate abandonment of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate regime (e.g., the collapse of the pound sterling in 1967, the devaluation of the French franc due to internal political unrest in 1968, and the revaluation and floating of the deutsche mark in 1971), see Peter M. Garber, “On the Collapse of the Bretton Woods Fixed Exchange Rate System,” in A Retrospective on the Bretton Woods Sys-tem: Lessons for International Monetary Reform, ed. Michael D. Bordo and Barry Eichen-green (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 41–494; proceedings of the National Bureau of Economic Research Conference held in 1991.8. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson- Smith (New York: Zone, 1995), originally published in French as La société du spectacle in 1967 by Buchet- Chastel. Although multinational capitalism can be dated from the postwar boom in the United States and the early 1950s, the 1960s that motivated and found Debord think-ing about the consumer society as a spectacle has to do with the arrival of the new international order inaugurated by what William Gaud calls “the Green Revolution,” an early form of neocolonialism, and by novel technological developments. Debord was in despair because of the totalizing effect of the spectacle in reaching into the every-day life of humanity. As Steven Best and Douglas Kellner clarify in their paraphrase of Debord’s more crisp and flamboyant statement quoted in the text, “The society of the spectacle is still a commodity- producing society, rooted in the capitalist mode of pro-duction, but reorganized as a consumer and entertainment society”; Best and Kellner, “Debord, Cybersituations, and Interactive Spectacle,” SubStance 28, no. 3 (1999): 132. See also Debord, Commentaires; and Len Bracken, “The Spectacle of Secrecy,” review of Guy Debord’s Treatise on Secrets: Commentaires sur “La société du spectacle,” CTheory, August 3, 2012, www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=275.9. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 12.


imagination for the pursuit of alternative realities. The global spectacle, so to speak, is a pastiche of the human imagination. While Debord’s society of the spectacle displaces “lived experience,” global spectacle creates displace-ments that are not secondary reproductions of what was once directly lived. Rather, global spectacle has the power of imagination, of literature to create the “as if” as if real. It triggers in the species an erotic effect by emphasiz-ing the spectator’s relation to the material world in his or her most authentic, creative, and imaginative self. My departure from Debord lies in my thesis that engagement in the global spectacle is not just vast- scale capitalist alien-ation, or the human acting on itself, for that understanding of the spectacle experience presupposes that criticism should embrace a future utopia in the past, or set as its task to return the species victoriously to “nature.”

In fact, the totality of spectacle’s work and politics is so extensive and advanced—and “irreversible”—that even Debord and the situationists themselves were sometimes tempted by the spectacle’s seductions. One might say that Debord’s manifesto, along with the situationists’ revolution-ary movements, had ultimately little served the revolution of the spectacle but themselves became, as Debord himself once suspected, “the latest revolutionary spectacle.”10 In the expensive and ever- expanding era of the spectacle, advanced capitalism opens its doors to all kinds of materials and situations. In this situation, Debord begins to recognize that the cost of criti-cizing the society of the spectacle can be as high as the cost of conformity; in fact, both constitute equal dangers to human subjectivity, individuality, and creativity.

The global spectacle that I treat in this essay emerged at the inter-section of the postindustrial political economy and the human species’ present ways of being atop a series of social and aesthetic categories that are at once privatized, social, and cultural. These categories are time-less pleasure, impulsive subjectivity, and recuperative possibilities. In the coming section, I will elaborate on these three categories and their comple-mentary relations with the (formative) global spectacle.

1. Some Examples

Global spectacles are recuperative; they assimilate and soak up any desires and possibilities for different ways of being and exclude any sense

10. Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (1981; repr., Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), 368.


of our living in historic time (or at least they deemphasize such sense). This feature separates the global spectacle from its predecessors. China, after its “thirty years of reform,”11 rather remarkably, has been producing global spectacles that privilege what Fredric Jameson calls “a perpetual spa-tial present.”12 Examples range from the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the PRC sixtieth anniversary military parade in October 2009, the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, the Shenzhen Universiade 2011, and the docking mission of Tiangong No. 1 in 2011, to the more recent touchdown of China’s Shenzhou No. 9.13 Whether taken collectively or separately, these spectacles show little interest in narrating for the world a history and future of China as an entity that has found ways to confront the global economy. At the opening ceremony of the Olympics, the spectacle indeed told the most conserva-tive story of Chinese civilization, arguably as an allegory of the history of Chinese modernity. That spectacle ended with a color- toned and lighted globe dramatically emerged from the stadium floor with dancers (nymphs?) circumnavigating the continents, and with superstar Sarah Brightman and Chinese singer Liu Huan singing hand- in- hand on the globe. In line with the event’s theme, “One World, One Dream,” they performed the song “You and Me” in two languages to an estimated 4 billion people worldwide.14

Indeed, the Beijing Olympics, which America sponsored via the monopolized corporate capital of McDonald’s, has made apparent an oxy-moron: the proliferation of a liberal- looking market brought about by an ever more glorious form of state power. It is as if neoliberalism noticed some-thing upsetting to its founding principles, simply darted across the problem,

11. “Thirty years of reform” (gaige sanshinian 改革三十年) is a popular and government term to describe the long- term economic results of the thirty years subsequent to Deng Xiaoping’s national policy of “Reform and Opening” formulated at the CCP Central Com-mittee plenary meeting in December 1978.12. Fredric Jameson, “Interview with Anders Stephanson,” in Jameson on Jameson, ed. Ian Buchanan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 47.13. On June 28, 2012, the Shenzhou No. 9 spacecraft carrying three astronauts returned to Earth after accomplishing the first manned manual space docking. The event drew global attention away from not only London’s Summer Olympic Games, which, spec-tacular in its own right, no doubt reminded its global citizens of the Beijing Olympics. The reportage of the event also diluted global attention on Chinese nationalism with the issue of gender: among the three astronauts returned to Earth was Liu Yang, China’s first female cosmonaut.14. Zimbio entertainment, “Olympics—Opening Ceremony,” August 8, 2008, www.zimbio .com/pictures/mkRPuY3JNnc/Olympics+Opening+Ceremony/ycuzWUG9nXW/Sarah +Brightman.


and diffused its power into the cracks and holes that have escaped state control. In David Harvey’s words, post- Deng China has presented neoliber-alism’s global implementation project with a problem. It requires “neoliberal elements to [interdigitate] with authoritarian centralized control.”15

Unlike Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda masterpiece, which aes-theticized fascist politics for the sake of naturalizing and thus legitimating authoritative control, China’s global spectacles aestheticize contemporary Chinese life (and history) for the sake of incorporating decades of already indoctrinated authoritarianism into the very life itself. Hence, more sophis-ticated than a process of naturalization that sacrifices life for politics, as in the case of the Third Reich and Red China, global spectacles bestow on life qualities that rationalize authoritative power’s continuous existence within neoliberal capitalism. Such qualities refer to the experience of the spec-tacle, an experience common, ironically, to both “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and liberal capitalist consumerism. In concrete terms, the Beijing Olympic ceremonies romanticize neoliberalism as an aspiration for and a means to post- Deng Chinese modernity rather than confronting it as a dominant ideology of the global order. They depoliticize and neutralize the new global order of life by putting erotics back to a life made ascetic by Mao’s revolutionary politics.16 Meanwhile, no sooner has the Beijing spec-tacle served as an easy propitiation of individual desires than it thrusts up for the spectator’s pleasure precisely the opposite: the irreducible pres-ence and art of state politics in the process through which the spectacle comes into being. As the spectacle legitimizes the way the Chinese state functions both as a promoter of neoliberal capital and an organization of control, it renders the battle between capitalist alienation and socialist com-munism altogether irrelevant. This is paradoxical, if not ironic, to the extent that global spectacle offers both control and pleasure, which is to say that it invites the spectators to take pleasure in acknowledging, defending, and living in loss time. As the Beijing spectacle marks the “loss,” it also cele-brates how the post- Deng Chinese overcame a mistake, a dead end. Our age has learned to accept and live with the defensive position of human creativity under the impact of thoughtless possibilities.

In relation to its magnifying effect on the present, global spectacles

15. David Harvey, “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 610, no. 1 (March 2007): 120.16. See my essay on the 2009 popular Chinese TV serial drama Woju for the discussion of xiaosan: Ruth Y. Y. Hung, “The State and the Market: Chinese TV Serials and the Case of Woju (Dwelling narrowness),” boundary 2 38, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 155–87.


share another consistent characteristic: the spectacle’s power over human imagination ties itself to the pursuit of a kind of primitive pleasure. By primi-tive pleasure, I mean those primal urges and sensations17 that consider only what is within the field of vision. Consider the now popularized and commercialized term shock and awe. The term, which originated in the US military strategy of “rapid dominance” in the US invasion of Baghdad in 2003, gained not just immediate attention in popular culture but also rolling profits since the first day of the war. On March 19, 2003, the Pen-tagon staged a great military spectacle to “decapitate” the Iraqi regime. It launched large numbers of missiles at a hotel in Baghdad where US intelligence believed Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi leadership were stay-ing.18 To add to the war’s media sensation, the administration also sent tens of thousands of ground troops on the Kuwait- Iraq border to poise for invasion. What immediately followed the bombing, which must be for mil-lions of individuals and families a life- changing trauma, turned the sublime into the ridiculous: corporations ranging from fireworks companies to those selling “everything from toys and sporting goods to telecommunications equipment” applied to patent and own the term shock and awe for their products.19

If it is true that the American war against Iraq had called forth some principles of protest or counterideology and some sense of indig-nation, the media presentation and popular cultural representation of the war advanced and foregrounded a recognition both clear and familiar: the visible is all; there is nothing behind the visible. The bombings that took place during prime- time news, reported in real time in front of dinner tables

17. Freud regularly noted such things as primal forces or drives, locating them in relation to death and desire, insisting on their primitive persistence despite modernization. With-out adopting this Freudian apparatus or echoing any of modernism’s embraces of myth, I make use of a similar rhetoric to denominate species’ capacities existing as potential, available for education or formation. Unlike romantic and postromantic thinking that made development (Bildung) an inherent value, global visuality makes the potential for forma-tion the occasion to mold humanity.18. On May 29, 2003, CBS News reported that no evidence showed that Saddam Hus-sein or his family was at the site in the first days of the Iraq War. For a discussion of the Iraq War in the form of the Bush administration’s “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” see Douglas Kellner, Media Spectacle (London: Routledge, 2003).19. Sebra Chartrand, “Patents; Before Shock and Awe Can Go from Battlefield to Lunch Box, There Is a Stop at the Trademark Office,” New York Times, April 21, 2003, www .nytimes.com/2003/04/21/business/patents- before- shock- awe- can- go- battlefield- lunch - box- there- stop- trademark.html?pagewanted=print&src=pm.


and circulated afterward by YouTube users, became popular images reduc-tively appealing to the global spectators’ emotions and appetizing to the senses. In other words, the new media, consumer pleasure, and entertain-ment industry have more effects on our being and judgment than a crisis in the standards of humanity—they replace not only knowledge and think-ing but even the mind’s last ability to understand and recall that information serves as the basis for will and judgment. Shock and awe appeases a col-lectivity of individuals enthralled in the trances of hedonistic existence who realize no limits to their pleasure.

In short, the transformation of a military strategy into a global spec-tacle reduces even the most morally contestable forms of contemporary experience to a purely retinal act.20 If the fascist spectacle and indeed also the military spectacle of the bombing of Bagdad in real time require “addi-tional curatorial help” to create meaning in time, the digital visualization of this “shock and awe” image that corporate capital, the new media, and image- carriers together manufacture is a “truly strong image.”21 Accord-ing to Boris Groys, the “truly strong image” is one that could “guarantee its own identity in time”; it could create and re- create meaning, and in so doing achieve an eternal value without depending on “a specific space, the specific context of its presentation.”22 In a society saturated by weapons of mass destruction, plasma TVs, the Internet, and telecommunication gadgets, disinterest in what José Ortega y Gasset calls “the principles of civilization”23 means “a return to the common life of barbarism” (74): “There is no culture where there are no principles of legality to which to appeal. There is no culture where there is no acceptance of certain final intellectual positions to which a dispute may be referred. There is no culture where eco-nomic relations are not subject to a regulating principle to protect interests involved. . . . When all these things are lacking there is no culture; there is in the strictest sense of the word, barbarism” (72).

The point here is not to say that any given cultural norms or posi-tive law could rectify a situation in which corporations inspire individuals or “market segments” into blind desiring that suspends all moral judgment,

20. It is surely no coincidence that Apple, the premier maker of the devices that serve this visual and corporate function, markets its gadgets’ screens as “retinal displays.” Apple has displaced Microsoft and Exxon as the most valuable corporation by capital in history.21. Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 82.22. Groys, Art Power, 83.23. José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: Norton, 1964), 81. Here-after, this work is cited parenthetically by page number.


indeed the entire realm of morals, of good and evil.24 As a matter of history, structurally and formally this is impossible, with major implications for poli-tics and criticism. The goal for capital, in this case as in all others, is a guar-anteed profit through zombielike commodity consumption.

The Bush administration’s military spectacle, “shock and awe,” opened wide the enormous discrepancy between the manifest aestheticiz-ing function of spectacle that pleasured a domestic audience and its latent function—to fatten corporate profits by establishing consumerism as the natural way of life. This discrepancy or digression would destroy such old forms of spectacle as Hitler descending from the clouds in Triumph des Wil-lens, which works one- dimensionally as an essential explanatory concept within the structure of the fascist state and its ideological apparatus. This difference draws attention to what I would call the recuperative function of the global spectacle, which is not only efficient at husbanding and control-ling the audience’s imagination but, when it encounters potentially disin-tegrative interests, is even competent to provide the resources that incor-porate and mobilize unforeseen desires. This recuperative function helps explain the increasing number of ideological neuters inhabiting and flour-ishing in the global spectacle.

What strikingly characterizes the current age of the mediatized global spectacle is the alarming excess of desires and subjectivities, which prove their impulsive nature by finding shelter in all sizes and types of portable image carriers. Devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, notebooks, ultrabooks, generations of iPhones/Pods/Pads/Touches, handheld TV/DVD combos, automotive GPS receivers, and eBook readers never allow the users cum producers of commodities to forget that they are every second of each day adding to the global spectacle even indeed as segments of the marketplace such globalized spectacles manage and create. A highly per-

24. Law is a problem. Many people, not merely anarchists, would say law contributes to barbarism. The Nazis and lynching laws in the US South are among the worst examples. There is also a long tradition of arguing that law is the counterpoint to barbarism. Thomas Hobbes makes this case strongly, as does Carl Schmitt. Both the US actions in Iraq and the patent/copyright practice were legal. Ortega y Gasset worked in the opposition between those who believe in natural law and those who believe in positive law. The latter are organized toward ends, while the former recognize that violence is inherent among humans who assign the right to violence to the state. This also allows for a means- tested law: law that is not just need not be obeyed. Positive law, as in the United Kingdom and United States, does not accept this position. I quote from Ortega y Gasset here because of my interest in the morals of justice; those who patent and market “shock and awe” are morally guilty in what they do even if within the law.


sonalized and friendly experience of globalized technology, the beckoning signs of the fast-growing leisure and pleasure culture, expands and intensi-fies their subjectivity and imagination.

In modernism, Frankfurt School–style criticism would have at least complained of the direst effects of such hypercommoditized colonization of consciousness by a surplus of screens, large and especially small. Perhaps even more strikingly, liberals might have referred to the Orwellian poten-tial in screens and cameras and in the “postmodern.” Others would have sharply defined this proliferation of devices and technology as the porta-bility of panoptical surveillance. Criticism now needs to extend its theory of these spectacular practices and their structural place and intensify its responses to the ever- expanding naturalization, reduction to the primitive, of screen and camera culture. There is more than sufficient evidence of the intersection of state and corporate power with these new linked technolo-gies of amassing, mining, and profiling data.25

No critics from either the “Left” or “Right,” so far, have been able to formulate a critical discourse that holds the workings of the global spec-tacle within the logic and terms of their own ideological camp. This is why, for me, Debord’s coining and conceptualization of the term integrated spec-tacle in 1988 has made a significant contribution to the future of criticism. Debord seems to think that the age of information entails the coming into being of a subject deluded by politics and power from both the Left and the

25. Social organizations concerned about state torture and discrimination have turned to social media—Facebook, Twitter, eBuddy—in order to “watch the watchmen” (Deci-mus Junius Juvenal, Satire 6, line 347, in The Satires; see “The Latin Library” website, www.thelatinlibrary.com/juvenal/6.shtml). However, these popular communication plat-forms also soon become surveillance tools for the police and sources to inform intelli-gence on sociopolitical activists. As in the case of the 2011 riots in London and Vancou-ver, protesters’ use of social media and cellphones resulted in the police’s attempt to take control of the new media; law enforcement authorities publicly declared the need for laws and technologies that enable the maintenance of “social stability.” Privacy and civil society activists worry that social media policing and surveillance bring about a totalitar-ian society. See Eric Lichtblau, “More Demands on Cell Carriers in Surveillance,” New York Times, July 8, 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/us/cell- carriers- see- uptick- in - requests- to- aid- surveillance.html?_r=1; on the US National Security Administration’s “Total Information Awareness” program, see also Shane Harris, “Giving in to the Surveil-lance State,” New York Times, August 22, 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion /whos- watching- the- nsa- watchers.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss. On a separate front, electromagnetic signals from cell phones can change a person’s behavior through affecting brainwaves, which are so fundamental to the internal workings of the mind that they have become for doctors the legal definition of life signals.


Right, who awaits every day for information and news to come to his door, or who consumes the mass media and gadgets to create simulations that imitate and replace realities.26 Yet, Debord’s account of the society of the spectacle focuses too much on acknowledging the new media’s function in producing the “nature” of our state of being. It does not take seriously enough the fact that most of the “portable” images are products of photo-shopping if not altogether self- made, in every aspect a means to affirm status quo rather than a given model of life. The experience of alienation in the era of the global spectacle has gone through a quantum and qualita-tive leap since the 1990s. If in industrial capitalism alienation means labor reification and commodity fetishism as a result of false consciousness, in global consumer society it means self- conscious indulgence in the general state of alienation. It is akin to the experience of creating different apps for taking pictures with an iPhone. Users across national boundaries and belief systems attempt to exhaust the apparatus by downloading and test-ing all the apps. While they constantly create and search for new apps, their machines automatically “update” existing ones. They endeavor to exhaust the system by creating as many apps as possible; while each app makes the system poorer by one possibility, the iPhone, or the iPhone series, as a commodity, becomes richer by one app. If the user- creator- consumer takes a picture of the world, it is often because he or she is pursuing and attempt-ing to exhaust the ever- increasing possibilities the apparatus affords. In this way, the world becomes a pretext, a testing ground of the utility of an app; the pictures are neither carriers of information nor a form of art but speci-mens of a “service platform”; and we the human (become) functionaries of the totalizing imagineering system. These residua of the spectacle’s phan-tasmagoric effects—namely, the iPhone, the apps, the specimen, and the functionaries—are filters and molds of the spectator’s own subjectivity and sensibilities; despite appearances and rhetorical claims, they are not best understood as information devices. They are dispersed “spectacles” exist-ing simultaneously in spectral and omnipresent forms, prying and penetrat-ing, as well as entrancing and absorbing.

One could conclude from the limits of Debord’s comments on the post–Cold War spectacle that contemporary spectacles are manifestations of a new technology of power that is paradoxically centrally planned and liberal capitalist at the same time. In view of their recuperative function—to

26. See Debord on what Ortega y Gasset calls “learned ignorance” and its relation to “confidential information” in Comments on “The Society of the Spectacle,” sec. 21.


integrate aroused desires and orchestrate imagination—global spectacles serve as one of the most dominant mediations of sociopolitical and aes-thetic experience, expressing “conspicuous” prophetic visions.27 They no longer treat commitments and questions about defending a certain way of life as important concerns compared with the need for posing itself as a plethora of possibilities. Yet, possibility to what ends? The global spectacle does not offer a ready answer to this question; it is more interested in pro-viding the experience of living in possibilities.

The Beijing Olympics, which was once considered “literally the great-est show on Earth,”28 is a remarkable model of such spectral possibilities. In a PRC national event, it is no surprise to see uniformed and unified identity based on what the state still erroneously calls “the people” as the essence and ontological basis of the state. Yet, in the Beijing Olympics—the global spectacle of aestheticized domination—it is curiously interesting to see an appeal to deepen interactions between state power and the population. For example, a core part of the opening ceremony featured the Four Great Inventions of Ancient China (the compass, gunpowder, papermaking, and movable- type printing).29 When it showed the compass and ancient China’s contribution to the development of sailing technology, the performance fea-tured the compass twice. The first time the compass appeared, it sat on the floor in the form of a gigantic replica of an ancient compass. When it reappeared, the dancer held it high above his head with both hands while walking rhythmically toward the spectators in the gesture of a pious fol-lower. This extremely plastic image affords infinite interpretations. Is the dancer offering the compass, a novel scientific invention, and evidence of human creativity, as a gift if not also a sacrifice? To whom is he offering the compass? If this is a ritual of sacrifice, one asks, then, for the sake of what illusions, what self- delusions, what hopes, and what prayers? The com-pass, defined by its function, reminds us of direction. If it is an act of offering sacrifices, is this not then also a pleading act of willing surrender of subjec-tivity? Alternatively, is it an appeal to a higher order, to those literally and

27. I am putting the word conspicuous in quotation marks to remind readers of the famous phrase “conspicuous consumption,” which Thorstein Veblen coined in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) to characterize the superrich’s predatory habits of consumption.28. Sports Yahoo, July 26, 2012, sports.yahoo.com/news/olympics--beijing- s- greatest - show- on- earth- set- the- bar- for- olympic- opening- ceremony- standards.html.29. The ceremony represents papermaking by a dance and by an ink drawing on a huge piece of paper, printing by a set of dancing printing blocks, the ancient compass with a replica, and gunpowder by the extensive firework displays.


physically sitting higher up in the steel “Bird’s Nest”? “Those” include at least ninety- one thousand spectator- consumers, whom we could catego-rize on different grounds ranging from their nationality, social identities, and political functions, to their roles during the Olympics, and endless others, and to whom we might refer as a metonym for a collective whole: the global market. Alternatively, one could refrain from interpretations and relax into the image. One could just sit back in wonder as pleasure’s child. Whatever the contents and effects, whatever meanings and efficacies the gesture- image affords, by this time of the ceremony, the compass is already a fully loaded, if sometimes also unsettling, image.

Spectacle images are tropes; they are loci of the vast stage for illu-sion that helps create “popular democracy.” This is a point conservative critics of commercial culture have made for some time, from the Left and the Right. We can set Daniel Boorstin, as a rightist example, alongside the Frankfurt School’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and its authors’ dismay over commercial media. Discussing New Age mysticism and pop psychology in America, Boorstin recalls the fleeting nature of the image in our image- making world. More important, by drawing attention to the differences in the ways images and ideals relate to the people, Boorstin allies the act of sense- making in the process of image consumption with popular democ-racy, and self- struggling in the process of ideal interpellation with illiberal government structures. He cautions that “an image is something we have a claim on. It must serve our purposes. Images are means. . . . The image is made to order, tailored to us. An ideal, on the other hand, has a claim on us. It does not serve us; we serve it. If we have trouble striving towards it, we assume the matter is with us, not with the ideal.”30

Although an apt differentiation, the ground of Boorstin’s arguments would not hold now that the world sees such global spectacles as the Bei-jing Olympics collapsing form and content. What happened in the global spectacle reflects a mutated kind of “state control” that empties out the image’s potential as a basis for subject formation, on the one hand, and that empowers individual consumers with the freedom to interpret the state- manufactured political icons, on the other. It displays state power functioning through not only ideological indoctrination akin to authoritarian states but also “necessary illusions” made reasonable by a conglomeration of strategies to shape society’s perception of political reality and the range

30. Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo- events in America (New York: Athe-neum, 1971).


of social possibilities. In addition, this specific kind of illusion has a func-tion practically different from the “fantasia” or illusion that Walter Benjamin and Susan Sontag were concerned with in their analyses of the fascist ten-dency in the cultural politics of post–World War I art.31 In other words, as the compass in the Beijing spectacle shows, authoritarian as the Chinese state power is, it identifies desire satisfaction and production as an effec-tive means to create subjects that find “nature” in the devices that the state uses for its own symbiotic purposes.

Pregnant, productive, and profitable, the spectacle might not cap-ture the audience’s attention for a long time, but it must have ringed their minds. Its inherent plasticity offers the spectators a feast of visual delight and excitement that sets off endless shifts of perspective. It welcomes the irony, the allegory, the analogy, and the simulation. With the visual effects and the free interpretations that characterize it, the entertaining but solemn presentation sets free all possibilities of sociopolitical relations. Meanwhile, while the spectacle sets free the human imagination to create and invent, and while the presentation calls forth a monstrous number of interpretive possibilities, any attempts to begin weaving a narrative or some meanings out of the global spectacle will only result in the individual’s continuous exposure to more interpretations and more visual indulgence.

2. Aesthetics and Politics of Global Spectacle

The contemporary society of the global spectacle has created a common humanity across ideological divides, a sameness that has risen over and above the once fundamental fight over the ways of social better-ment. By “common humanity,” I mean a habit of life and being that predomi-nates in social groups across cultural and national boundaries. Ronald A. T. Judy powerfully calls this the work and state of “dignity.”32 These ways of life are not “mechanical,” not a type of structural model that assumes dif-ferent social, ethnic, and national groups sharing some same qualities and, as such, can be systematized. My contention is that different social, ethnic, and national groups inhabit intuitively, creatively, and concretely, through

31. Frank Kermode, in The Sense of an Ending (London: Oxford University Press, 1981), identifies in the poetry of William Butler Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound ele-ments that could lead to their use by a dangerous politics whose “ideological expression is fascism” (107–9).32. See again “Tunisia Dossier.”


the medium of their culture and memory and experience, the process of globalization in which they eventually become imprisoned together with their counterparts. After all, as Stathis Gourgouris wrote of Greece’s 2012 national election, the event was for global capital “a specific experiment” to test the extent to which it could extend its profit at the cost of not only the Greek national economy but also “a specific society’s endurance or will.”33 Although the election demonstrated strong popular sentiment against the liberal Right and its reinvention and assimilation via Panos Kammenos into the New Right, there is no guarantee that what awaits Greece is the tri-umph of democracy and not a longing for a return to order. The chaos in Greece might become a pretext for the arrival of an overarching power, a prelude to a simulated form of fascism—one of the many sides of neolib-eral global capitalism.

Taken together, these global spectacles define an experience pecu-liar to our historical moment, in which individuals not only celebrate the tri-umph of the surface but also actively form values and define the human based on a transtemporal, transcultural experience of the spectacle. The dream of “One World” vis- à- vis the Beijing spectacle is, of course, specu-lative at best; the achievement of which would require hard and sustained work in both practical and intellectual terms. In reality, considering the ever- increasing number of ongoing conflicts between countries, militias- guerrillas, religious fundamental groups, and separatist and anarchist groups since the year 2008, “oneness” means nothing close to a decrease in state violence and tyranny. It means outbreaks of war, corporate- style torture, and hate crimes in the absence of redeeming ideological value and sustainable principles.34 Yet we are self- indulgent in clinging to the Imagi-nary via forms of consumption that corporate capital and the authoritarian state jointly orchestrate; and we dream with eyes wide open of living in “one world” by living within the framework of the new media. These are, evidently, measures or symptoms of our own attachment to the technolo-gies of globalization.

Contemporary global spectacles have become a privileged site for producing a “natural” condition of life in the era of global corporatism and capitalism. They level differences and become a kind of imaginative abyss. As they release the seemingly generative potential of visual allure, the end-

33. Stathis Gourgouris, “Greece at the Global Forefront,” Al Jazeera, May 3, 2012.34. For an updated record of wars in the world since 2008 and a list of ongoing conflicts, see the website Wars in the World, www.warsintheworld.com/?page=static1258254223.


less associative power of the sign, they also heighten the tempo of global-ization and crunch the tactility of human experience. Perhaps the most fas-cinating but also worrying aspect of our experience of global spectacles is the sense of immediacy and global flatness. We cannot sense the nuance of life, as we are absorbed into the ever more sublime visual infinite that turns all indigeneity and history—the cellar of consciousness and con-science, of human awareness and human memory—into an unapologetic commitment to primitive pleasure.

Sontag has voiced her worries about war photography along these lines, that is to say that photos, on their own and by themselves, can give us no more than truncated images, and this inhibits future generations from understanding and restoring justice. She writes, “In contrast to the amorous relation which is based on how something looks, understanding is based on how it functions. And functioning takes place in time, and must be explained in time. Only that which narrates can make us understand.”35 One must be aware it is not only the nature of (visual) pleasure as the principle of reality and the condition of being modern itself that leads to Sontag’s wor-ries about the problem of postwar photographic art. Sontag established an ethics of aesthetic representation at a time when the American literary scene was going through what she saw as an irrepressible surrender to sci-entific “objectivity” and positivist naturalism.36 The absence of narrative—that is, temporality—in the Age of Facts bogged down any critical attempts to expose state brutality and war crime. To say this would seem to acknowl-edge and pay only the necessary tribute to narrative’s extraordinary place in the Euro- American literature of the late eighteenth and nineteenth cen-turies, especially to its achievement via the romantic and Victorian novel. To define that success of narrative art is, however, at the same time to recall one foundational and obligatory function of the modern novel—what Henry James sums up in the carefully chosen word “interesting.”37

35. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Delta, 1973), 23.36. A classic example of photographic art’s claiming an aura of scientific investigation would be the horse photography studies done by the English photographer Eadweard Muybridge in the 1870s. Muybridge did his production experiment, now known under the title “Sallie Gardner at a Gallop (The Horse in Motion),” for his commissioner, Leland Stanford. Stanford wanted to know whether a galloping horse lifts all its four feet simulta-neously off the ground during the gait. Muybridge settled the question by breaking down the motion of a trotting horse with a series of shots.37. Henry James asks the novelist of the future to learn to be “worthy of” the very “free-dom” to which the novel has “the splendid privilege.” “The good health of an art which undertakes so immediately to reproduce life must demand that it be perfectly free. . . .


Interesting, etymologically related to the Latin noun interesse, means “to be between,” “to concern,” and “be of importance.”38 Hence, any representation of life must be the result of the novelist’s being in life and must insist on the representation’s competitiveness—James’s own word to suggest a style of engagement that is much more combative and engag-ing than that of the oft- employed word verisimilitude—with life. As the only piece of advice on the “art of fiction” against the “law of fiction,” employed in the effort to urge future novelists to give an account of life that is commen-surate with the complexity of modernity, James’s essay is remarkable for its early and tenacious perception of the modern condition. Both in theory and practice, James’s “art of fiction,” I think, injects the first dose of roman-ticism and moral indignation into a literary form that would become one of the most important means to American liberal democracy.

The society of the spectacle is the opposite of “interesting”; it is the refuge from an “incommensurable” life experience that the participants lack the intellect to comprehend, the curiosity to investigate, the expres-sion to describe, or simply the reverence and courage to live in. In the case of the fascist spectacles, it is a symptom of the intellectual poverty of a postwar regime in which individuals, and perhaps whole nations, enslave themselves to the habits of the immediate circumstances. Authoritarian spectacles offered their audience the astounding opportunity to overcome the Benjaminian sense of incommensurability and anxiety by co- opting and blending the individual’s character of freedom and decision into the logic of a single whole. Moreover, they do so without providing the modern man with the romanticists’ space—thoughts recollected in tranquility, nega-tive capability, and critical disinterestedness—to engage dialogically with institutional power.39 They appeal to the individual’s sense of self by politi-

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel without incurring the accu-sation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.” Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” first published in Longman’s Magazine, September 1884, and reprinted in Partial Portraits (London: Macmillan, 1888), 14, 4.38. OED Online, s.v. “interess, n.,” accessed November 11, 2012, www.oed.com/view/Entry /97728.39. At the beginning of his book Romantic Image, Frank Kermode finds it necessary to delay his discussion of the subject itself—the image in romantic poetry. His first chap-ter, titled “The Artist in Isolation,” treats “isolation” as indispensable to what he has to say about the “romantic image.” This isolation belongs uniquely to poet- seers, whose estrangement from the peasant or general public, as well as their difference, noncon-formity, and need for contemplation, turn them inward and make them deeply unhappy. Hence, quoting from Yeats’s “Ego Dominus Tuus,” Kermode argues that it is only in the


cal propaganda, which, as Erich Fromm reminds us, does not stress the individual’s insignificance but rather “flatter[s] the individual by making him appear important, and by pretending . . . [to] appeal to his critical judgment.”40 Fromm considers the cultivation of false consciousness as the path to state control, to an ultimate self- destruction. He draws us to think of the postwar subjects’ voluntary surrender of human creativity and imagi-nation as somehow conferring salvation of a sort—no doubt this is what he had in mind when he said that “destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.”41 Hence, “Those individual and social conditions that make for sup-pression of life produce the passion for destruction that forms, so to speak, the reservoir from which the particular hostile tendencies—either against others or against oneself—are nourished.”42

The global spectacle bears palimpsestic marks of the authoritarian spectacle. In his Art Power, which examines “post- communist” art’s func-tions in the power play of global politics today, Groys personifies what Fromm once called “the passion for destruction” via “the heroic body”43 as a timeless icon—the mass of blood and flesh that is “ready to destroy or be destroyed.”44 With destruction as its condition of being, this heroic body achieves eternity because it is the relic, that is, the material form of the civilization in ruins. Contemporary art, like such films as The Matrix or Kill Bill, Groys argues, builds itself on a new gratification in fascism experi-enced as a loss, an unreality—a commodity introduced for the public’s col-lective imagination and pleasure.

The Frankfurt School critics’ revelation of the almost mystical work-ings of the society of the spectacle is critically engaging and valuable. They believe that excessive political management and/or market money distract the course of human civilization and make men suffer more than does some less developed state of the human condition. Giorgio Agam-ben, whose understanding of the contemporary society of the spectacle is

image that romantic poets could “weld joy and misery together in some symbolic blaze,” namely, find reconciliation between their social self and their soul, between the uniformed human personality and the poet’s exceptional sensibility. To achieve such a reconciliation, however, poets must engage with the image via “an intellectual daily recreation of all that exterior fate snatches away.” Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), 11; my emphasis.40. Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom (London: Ark, 1984), 112.41. Fromm, The Fear of Freedom, 158; emphasis in original.42. Fromm, The Fear of Freedom, 158.43. Quoted in Groys, Art Power, 131.44. Groys, Art Power, 130.


representative of the Marx- influenced critics, sees as only a small step the transition from the old spectacle in the Age of the Body to the global spec-tacle of our time. For Agamben, the latter might as well be the quantitative expansion of the former.

Today, in the era of the complete triumph of the spectacle, what can be reaped from the heritage of Debord? It is clear that the spec-tacle is language, the very communicativity or linguistic being of humans. This means that a fuller Marxian analysis should deal with the fact that capitalism (or any other name one wants to give the process that today dominates world history) was directed not only toward the expropriation of productive activity, but also and princi-pally toward the alienation of language itself, of the very linguistic and communicative nature of humans, of that logos which one of Heraclitus’s fragments identified as the Common. The extreme form of this expropriation of the Common is the spectacle, that is, the poli-tics we live in.45

While there is little doubt that the spectacle builds its “triumph” on the extensiveness of its reach, the Marxist confrontation with the contem-porary global spectacle is exacting, nostalgic, and, as such, utopic. It is exacting in the way it indicts the contemporary spectacle for occupying the citadel of the human’s condition of being in which the species creates life by taking refuge from its “linguistic and communicative nature.” Yet it is also nostalgic in the way it reserves in its critique a space for a mostly imagined or romanticized concept of “the Common,” that is, the site of precivilized human innocence serving as the condition of possibility for a recovered inti-macy of “erotic life” that would have been achieved had there been no “por-nography,” or the “organs of commodities.”46 Part of this nostalgia results from trying to do more than hold up the phantasmagoric experience of the spectacle for understanding. Put differently, nostalgic critics move beyond the realm of criticism to “dereify” spectacle and so engage in a salvage operation. Their confrontation of the global spectacle’s enormous toll on human imagination calls for a different relationship with the present that attempts to formulate the present in moralizing terms and in so doing ratio-nalize the current ideological impasse.

45. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: Uni-versity of Minnesota Press, 2007), 87 (originally published in Italian as La comunità che viene in 1990).46. Agamben, Coming Community, 57.


In what follows, I seek not only to continue my account of the global spectacle as a distinct historical, world phenomenon but also to argue for the necessity to liberate the account from any familiar attempts to moral-ize the present as a field of utopian subversion. More important, I want to show the very presentness of the global spectacle in both temporal and tangible terms. This presentness gives contemporary spectacles a kind of tactility, magnitude, and totality that should halt those critics who hope that an ultimate “consciousness” is to be won through the spectacle, old or new, conceived of as a spiritual test or exercise.

One cannot be slow to see the basis of the global spectacle’s power, creativity, and intention. It is the collective desire for a global society ratio-nally organized in the service of pleasure. The modern man of the post–Cold War era has lived through enough, however, to acknowledge the power of organization—of overarching structures that manage human lives and imagination. Corporate institutionalization dominates contemporary forms of organization. Individuals should remember this chief character-istic of our age, but they remain seemingly obtuse to its effects. If the old society of the spectacle draws its audience to what Paul de Man calls the “rhetoric of temporality,” the global spectacle challenges both authoritative power and consumerist individuals to incessant narrative, to the freedom to explain the point of the spectacle. The greatest danger of such a challenge, of course, is that most of us enjoy living in the enigmatic process through which global capital lays down for contemporary life a structure of being without pressing on it. Any attempt to explain what it is exactly that one likes about the Beijing Olympics or takes away from the ceremonies is to go through an experience comparable to John Donne’s attempt to explain what it is that men see when they see angels. In his famous song “Nega-tive Love,” Donne declares that what he loves, namely God, is indescrib-able, beyond what either the body or the mind can comprehend: “If that be simply perfectest / Which can by no way be exprest / But Negatives, my love is so. / To all, which all love, I say no.”47

If we were to read the Beijing Olympic ceremonies analogically as the theater of global capital hosting and staging the world’s conflicting forces, we would see how the spectacle continually defers the meaning of what the monumental end of the Cold War in 1989 announced: the puta-tive end of history and ideology. The pattern of alternating the strong mes-

47. The Poems of John Donne, ed. H. J. C. Grierson, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1929), 1:66.


sage contained in the spectacle—“China’s peaceful rise”—with the event’s theme, “One World, One Dream” effects a desublimation, sterilizing not only “socialism with Chinese characteristics” of its awkwardness but also Chinese nationalism of its threat. The tribute to the visual spectacular, so to speak, drowns out any memory of the ideological divide and feelings of the immediate threats of Chinese nationalism. There is something immoral if not altogether anarchistic in the symbolically rich and ambiguous nature of the spectacle. Contemporary images—mediated no longer through a hoped- for historical narrative whose future aim is to restore justice, even if through market transactions—have become constitutive of authoritative organization and megacorporate corruption. They have become objects of rational and strategic action by commercial and political interests. The enigma of visual experience has become reified and susceptible to forms of domination.

The modern- made spectator in the figure of the flâneur is “a blockhead”48 standing balanced on the brink of the naturalized system of commodity exchange. Charles Baudelaire gave us the foundational under-standing of the modern consumer as spectator, who finds seeing to be “a fine way to fill one’s day” and who, in the evening, “hastens to the place of his choice to drink the cup of oblivion” after saying it is “‘the end of another day!’”49 In the first of my two epigraphs, which I take from Baudelaire’s 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” I have omitted in the ellipses one of the apt descriptions of the “passionate spectator.” Baudelaire writes, “His [the spectator’s] passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. . . . The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are—or are not—to be found.”50

The worst experience in the era of global capital is not alienation but a sclerosis of values in an “end of history” position. In China, one could easily argue that ex–Red Guards and cultural revolutionaries find it more comfortable to think that unlimited consumerism will make even their ex- enemies part of the same national social family than to think of possible recovery from their forever lost battle over ideology.

Troublingly, some academic intellectuals embrace a parallel if differ-

48. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964), 11. The original essay appeared in Le Figaro in 1863.49. Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” 9.50. Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” 9.


ent temptation. Enamored of the revolutionary utopia promised through-out the twentieth century, they cannot resist seeing traces of revolution-ary success in post- Mao China or populist traces of revolutionary utopian possibility in the population’s assent to the consumerism and technologies of the naturalizing spectacle. Theorizing global spectacle now lets us see that such readings of China are a persistent critical indulgence and that as part of any correction, academics must add critical nuance to the phrase “pictorial turn.” Contemporary corporate colonization prefers staged and sponsored radicalism to hegemonic and/or authoritative oppression in part because it finds and projects the order of life values in the “networks of objects.”51 In this sense, as global spectacle integrates and recuperates myriad critical voices and political scenes, it also instrumentalizes them for the perpetuation of the spectacle effect.

3. The Specter of Imagination

A historic estimate of the sociocultural and political conditions of our era must always agree with Debord that our experiences swell with and within the conceptual folds of the everyday ahistorical visual. Interestingly, just as some academic intellectuals have found moments of utopian possi-bility in post- Deng China, so others have defined all manner of public “spec-tacles,” from Baudelaire’s Paris52 to “delirious New York”53 in manifestly liberating terms. In contrasting the kind of realist narrative that enjoyed a tremendous vogue among twentieth- century modernist writers, the “deconstructivists” or “destructive creators” optimistically wished to locate an alternative to European modernism in the analogical images and cul-tural politics of postmodern art and spectacle. “A celebration of spectacle”

51. The phrase comes from Jean Baudrillard’s writing on the features of the consumer society. “Few objects today are offered alone, without a context of objects to speak for them. The object is no longer referred to in relation to a specific utility, but as a collection of objects in their total meaning. . . . We can observe that objects . . . are always arranged to trace out directive paths. The arrangement directs the purchasing impulse towards net-works of objects in order to seduce it and elicit, in accordance with its own logic, a maxi-mal investment, reaching the limits of economic potential.” Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 30, 31.52. See, for example, Charles Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil ), at Fleursdumal.com, fleursdumal.org/poem/220. Editions of Les fleurs du mal were pub-lished in 1857 and 1861. A “definitive” edition appeared in 1868, one year after Baude-laire’s death.53. See Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York (New York: Monacelli, 1994).


is the first item under “key characteristics of postmodernist architecture” in Tim Woods’s dictionary account of postmodernism.54 By “spectacle,” Woods means liberation from the boredom and rigidity of “monotheistic modernism.”55 To be spectacular is to prefer fiction and form to function, to prefer what Jameson calls “the intensité”56 to the Latin noun interesse on which, as we discussed earlier, James builds a whole world of narrative art and ethics.

I am calling for a new theory of spectacle’s effects on the human and its “humanity.” What practices of life have taken place in the global spectacle in which human imagination proliferates to beget the species to find nature, safety, and idle plenitude in the visual enigma? My direction so far has been to attend to the spectacle as both potentially the new cre-ative energy of civilization and the necessary locus of criticism’s present and future work. I have returned to the beginning time of the “postmodern” era to account for the “pictorial turn” and to Debord for insights into how the society of the spectacle applauds an “impersonal ahistoricity.”57 The terror of triumphant neoliberalism urges me, however, to identify the spec-tacle as not only the defining experience of our time but also the common denominator of consumerist democracy and a renewed observational form of authoritarian state rule.

The “turn” from language to the Benjaminian conception of “the opti-cal unconscious” is not a sea change.58 We need another trope than “turn”

54. Tim Woods, Beginning Postmodernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 112.55. Woods, Beginning Postmodernism. Also see David Harvey, The Condition of Post-modernity (London: Blackwell, 1989), 97.56. Jameson uses the word in his attempt to account for the act of “looking” as an impor-tant critical gesture and mechanism of postmodern art. Jameson writes, “The silence of affect in postmodernism is doubled with a new gratification in surfaces and accom-panied by a whole new ground tone in which the pathos of high modernism has been inverted into a strange new exhilaration, the high, the intensité.” Fredric Jameson, “Post-modernism and Consumer Society,” in The Anti- aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Cul-ture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983).57. John Berger, About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 102.58. Walter Benjamin uses the concept of “the optical unconscious” to refer to the way the camera extends the spectator’s vision beyond the realm of subjective intention. In this sense, the camera, as a tool placed between the spectator and his or her environ-ment, enables the spectator to gaze anew at what “had previously floated unnoticed on the broad stream of perception.” In other words, the camera rediscovers for the modern subject an instinctual visual capability that lies outside of the normal spectrum of sense impressions. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Techno-


to register in our age the need for another layer of criticism both to explain the role of the figural in subject formation and to attach greater significance to the pictorial within the textual.59 Critics should by no means generalize Mitchell’s ambitious “turn” of theory as necessarily prescriptive, succes-sive, or simply antimodernist. Vectors of power and interest that define the globalized regime of financial capital have produced a large enough num-ber of global spectacles to show that the cultural imagery of our age has inherited from its predecessor the same set of problems: banality, confor-mity, alienation, exploitation, and repressiveness. It would be more accu-rate to say, thus, that rather than a “turn,” models of visuality and spectator-ship in complicated ways have infiltrated the narrative and the discursive. In fact, advanced critics, sometimes contemporaries of Mitchell, sensed this problem and tried to deal with it.

Edward W. Said, for example, was already thinking about this image- narrative infiltration as both an historical fact within modern writing and as a task for critical investigation. In a deeply personal and sympathetic attempt to explain the defining features of Joseph Conrad’s style, Said finds in Conrad’s writings nothing less than the agony of the act of writ-ing—the novelist- writer’s almost impossible goal to use words.60 Extend-ing Benjamin’s distinction between the modern novel and the epic poem with regard to their different modes of production and consumption, Said attributes Conrad’s agony of writing to the colonial era’s “general loss of faith in the mimetic powers of language.”61 In place of words, then, the

logical Reproducibility,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 4:265.59. More than fifteen years ago, Stephen Melville sensed the importance of this consider-ation when he wrote, “Giving oneself to visibility and its coding is the hesitant means to freedom.” Stephen Melville, “Division of the Gaze, or, Remarks on the Color and Tenor of Contemporary ‘Theory,’” in Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, ed. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay (New York: Routledge, 1996), 106.60. Said sees that Conrad’s narratives “move towards the visible” to afford for the readers “the clarity of sight” to make them see by and in spite of the power of the written word. For Conrad, written language, writing, confines the imagination and poses problems on at least two levels. On the level of English’s being the de facto international language of power, it is a problem especially relevant to both Conrad and Said. They are English- language users who wrote in the Empire’s tongue because of, first, cultural imperial-ism and, later, economic globalization. On a more general level, this problem comes from modernity’s philosophical project, that is, the Enlightenment and its fascination with images as the new and competing medium of representation. Edward W. Said, “Conrad: The Presentation of Narrative,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 7, no. 2 (Winter 1974): 125, 119.61. “There are no words for the sort of things [Lord Jim] wanted to say” (Joseph Conrad,


modern writer considers the sense of “sight” the one closest to the “site” of truth.62 Concerned with not only the limits of the written word but also how the limits become for writers the condition of possibility of their accomplish-ments, Said is noticeably silent about the very site/sight that is at the heart of both his essay and Conrad’s narrative representation. This silence makes his essay far from finished and licenses us to speak less of Said’s “theory of vision” than of his struggle toward such a theory and toward the terms in which such a theory could be expressed. At the heart of this silence is the recognition that vision and visibility are asymmetrical. That is, if it is always someone who sees, it is not always by someone that one is seen or to someone that one is laid open.63 This asymmetry draws attention to the close affinity between image and moral imagination, on the one hand, and that between global spectacle, desire, and visual allure, on the other.

Said’s attempt to condition readers’ “sight” of the “native”—“the residue of imperialism”—upon an imaginative “(in)site” brought out by the uniquely human visual intelligence is tense with expectations. It has high expectations for us as readers who know how to “see” through our mind’s eye pictures- in- words in a consumer society that advocates a multiplicity of points of view yet somehow makes no attempt to open up the spectacle,

Lord Jim, quoted in Said, “Conrad: The Presentation of Narrative,” 116; see also 124). In his essay “The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” Benjamin points out how the decline of storytelling as “an artisanal form of [mouth- to- mouth] communica-tion” at the beginning of modern times coincided with the rise of the novel. He observes that the information- saturated age of modernity produces realist novels that dwell in the complexity of modern experience and psychology without being able to emerge intact from “the incommensurality” of the representation. In Benjamin’s words, “Every story . . . contains, openly or covertly, something useful. In one case, the usefulness may lie in a moral; in another, in some practical advice; in a third, in a proverb or maxim. In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers. But if today ‘having counsel’ is beginning to have an old- fashioned ring, this is because the communicability of experi-ence is decreasing.” “To write a novel is to take to the extreme that which is incommen-surable in the representation of human existence.” See Walter Benjamin: Selected Writ-ings, 3:149, 145, 146.62. These modern writers emphasize vision so heavily that readers could always con-sider Conrad’s written narratives as made up of a series of “rescued fragment[s]” held up “unquestioningly, without choice and without fear,” “before all eyes in the light of a sincere mood.” Joseph Conrad, preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1896), quoted in Said, “Conrad: The Presentation of Narrative,” 119.63. Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2000) and Nick Cohen’s You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (London: Fourth Estate, 2012) discuss this question from opposite sides.


or what I earlier called “the encompassing system of apparatuses.” To be a seer, for Said, is finally to be an imaginative perceiver with the full range of moral, ethical, and critical abilities. As his writing career was always pre-occupied with ethical questions of narrative permission and presentation, Conrad worked to compose and build narratives that are visually challeng-ing and provocative. His writing is visual to the extent that the “image” effec-tively confronts the “Western eyes” under which the “natives” are laid open.

One should, at this point, pay attention to the striking difference between the image in contemporary spectacles and the image in modernist narratives. The image- spectacle of our time has neither the narrative ethics nor the power to bring into being a morally conscious and ethical subject as the “image” in Conrad’s writing does. In the context of neoliberal capitalist world order, global spectacles are explicitly sensual, alluring, and literally visual. They are so because they assume an audience hungry for real sen-suality and receptive to all its possibilities—an audience with whom it would be a challenge to engage critically.

The best “site” of criticism is the one achieved out of sight. The power of image- in- imagination contains within it a world of psychological realties; and the close relationship between image and imagination is itself a long historical development. One of the most famous moments in that historical development took place in 1826 in John Stuart Mill’s life. Contemplating the image of a society in which the Benthamites had achieved all their desired socioeconomic reforms, Mill experienced a great mental crisis. He could not withstand the shock that came from the force and integrity of the image he conjured up: “‘Suppose that all . . . the changes in institutions and opin-ions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you,’ [Mill imagined being asked one day.] . . . An irrepressible self- consciousness distinctly answered, ‘No!’ At this my heart sank within me.”64 There are two issues here: first, image- representation and imagination operate in tandem to pro-duce ethics and knowledge—something that requires and has received its own (long) theorization; and second, the truth is revealed by the working of the image and achieves its own turn in philosophical belief.

Mill’s experience is a lesson for those who believe that aesthetic secular critics who fully attend to the particular and the practical assure a

64. This is from an autobiographical passage in which Mill wrote about his loss of faith in utilitarianism, which he had trusted since his father had taught him the ideas of Jeremy Bentham. John Stuart Mill, “Crisis in My Mental History, One Stage Onward,” chap. 5 in Autobiography (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 112–13.


role for a mysterious working of image- imagination different from the one feared by the Frankfurt School and others worried by the dominance of ideology and fantasy. Mill’s incident offers us a chance to understand that thought or imagination does not reflect or represent social and political reality independent of imagination’s own internal logic.65 In our society of the global spectacle, however, the visual image as the greatest reserve of imagination persistently creates the joy of interpretive possibilities that approximates “mental crises,” a joy that eventually restores rather than upsets the status quo. The effect of the endless and conflicting possibilities that the Beijing spectacle simultaneously creates is an ironic proof that any belief in “socioeconomic reforms,” or any attempt seriously to think about specific beliefs and practices of life, is an anachronism. In this light, Mill’s experience of the overwhelming ability of the summoned image to displace the real and reason’s own perceptions and understandings disappears, a potential for critical thought no longer available in our spectacular world.

Works of the imagination are potentially complete with their inde-pendent appearance, function, value, and syntax. In Mill’s experience, the image sends him to rediscover himself and recover his sense of a united self in romantic imagery.66 In our time, because “imagination” outside of global capital is already an anachronism, a background to habituated life models and forms, any oppressive power structures—whether in the jacket of a philosophical doctrinaire, a political ideologue, a megacorporation, or the state itself—can adopt the images. While these power structures pack-age self- interests into a system of thought replete with illustrative or exem-

65. Conservative critics of media representation such as Boorstin say that images and visual representations constitute reality. Already in 1962, when he was a lawyer and pro-fessor at the University of Chicago, Boorstin had asserted that contemporary media had created “a world where the image, more interesting than its original, has itself become the original. The shadow has become the substance.” Boorstin, The Image, 204. This is merely a descriptive account of how consumers of the mass and social media in part feel about their lives.66. In the same journal entry, Mill wrote, “This state of my thoughts and feelings made the fact of my reading Wordsworth for the first time (in the autumn of 1828), an important event of my life. . . . The famous Ode, falsely called Platonic, ‘Intimations of Immortality’: in which, along with more than his usual sweetness of melody and rhythm, and along with the two passages of grand imagery but bad philosophy . . . , I found that he too had had similar experience to mine; that he also had felt that the first freshness of youthful enjoy-ment of life was not lasting; but that he had sought for compensation, and found it, in the way in which he was now teaching me to find it. The result was that I gradually, but com-pletely, emerged from my habitual depression, and was never again subject to it.” Mill, Autobiography, 112–13; my emphasis.


plary images, the visuals could become so powerful that they exceed their status as form and become psychologically and materially content. Recall here Debord’s claim that the spectacle is not something added to the real world—“not a decorative element” but the terrain of everyday life, “the very heart of society’s unreality.”67 The enigmas of the image contain a structure and an inner logic that have come not just to aestheticize but altogether to replace the sociopolitical structure.

Taking together the verbal image- imagination in Said’s literary criti-cism and Conrad’s word- mediated narrative, on the one hand, and the sub-versive image in Mill’s imagination, on the other, contemporary criticism needs to commit to the critical and comparative historical task. It should regard the “pictorial turn” as producing results that continue, complicate, and add nuance to the conclusions reached by a long tradition of writings about viewing and vision. Since Aristotle,68 who knew Plato’s deep con-cerns, critics have been persistently and productively suspicious of the visual- image and the spectacle, a wariness that, despite differences of time, place, and medium, has continued to our time.

4. Spectacle Theater and Spectacle Politics

To trace the intellectual genealogy of a society in which people never directly experience life or the shock of its displacement but contemplate it via images constructed by others, we must call to mind the Poetics, espe-cially its rhetoric to deny spectacle an essential role in tragedy. Aristotle’s analyses of Sophoclean tragedy famously makes spectacle the least impor-

67. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, sec. 6.68. Since Plato, Aristotle and subsequent philosophers have assigned themselves the task of understanding the image’s role in subject and knowledge formation. For philoso-phers working within Hellenistic philosophy, there is a strong connection between the philosophical and the visual in the form of mind perception, with the latter being the conditio sine qua non of what Aristotle calls “phantasia.” Although in later Greek writ-ing, phantasia came to mean “imagination,” it was referred to as “presentation” in Hel-lenistic society’s Stoic and Epicurean epistemology. To “present” is “to see something” so as “to have a certain kind of thought generated in a certain way.” A couple of hundred years later, Longinus attributed to phantasia the function of generating and engender-ing speech: “inspired by strong emotion, you seem to see what you describe and bring it vividly before the eyes of your audience.” See Michael Frede, “Stoics and Skeptics on Clear and Distinct Impressions,” in The Skeptical Tradition (Berkeley: University of Califor-nia Press, 1983), 67; and Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. D. A. Russell (Oxford: Claren-don, 1964), 120.


tant element of tragedy, but, more tellingly, the Poetics expresses ethical and political concern about the effects of spectacle on the Athenian polity, effects that might distort the organic role of the Dionysian festival. Such moments in the critical tradition not only record certain critics’ concerns, they also create a vector of critique whose incorporation is essential to any theory of spectacle. Of course, no single essay offers the chance to treat even most of the major contributions to this critical task, but the Greeks and Aristotle give us both a sense of that tradition’s founding concerns and some categories for our work on the future of criticism.

Long ago, at one origin of the critical tradition, Aristotle was already worried about the manipulative emotional impact of the spectacle on Athens’s specific form of democracy. Cautioning against what he calls “aroused emotions,” Aristotle celebrated “the doctrine of the mean”69—a figure often misinterpreted as a preservation of a standing order, whereas the clear thinking of practical philosophy and the balance of tragic art achieve Aristotle’s goal, that is, “the mean.” Aristotle’s moral philosophy contains a marked preoccupation with recommending the social world’s practices; it reveals philosophy’s anxiety about the role poetry plays in sociopolitical representation and imagination. Thus, seemingly unexpect-edly, toward the end of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle touches on the contemplative and entangles himself in the web of the ascetics, displaying a marked indecisiveness between body and mind. He states that contem-plation is “in itself precious” and “happiness must be some form of contem-plation” (§X) apart from the rational emotional life of the world. “Happiness extends . . . just so far as contemplation does, and those to whom contem-plation more fully belongs are more truly happy, not as a mere concomitant but in virtue of the contemplation” (§X).

I want to locate this ambiguous moment as the beginning point of the long critical tradition concerned with the visual in the form of spectacle. I want to explore specifically the Poetics, in which Aristotle thinks about public spectacles within and through which the Greeks built and practiced democracy. Above all, I want to know why Aristotle raises questions about

69. The doctrine of the mean accommodates the possibility of a sustained imaginative vision that would bring about substantive change in both social feelings and conduct. It invites the polis of Athens to virtue in moderation rather than the already established moral routines of social stakeholders. Aristotle makes routine and tools, respectively, as strategy and as skills of habituation among the Athenians, represent an anthropological problem. He makes them exemplify the species’ failure to exercise its unique capability to imagine.


the spectacle as an element of tragedy and what the consequences are of moral philosophy’s making the effort to regulate the Athenians’ way of seeing. My premise is that Aristotle’s interest and effort in the Greek tragic spectacles are inseparable from the fact that classical Greek society’s two major institutions of democracy—the law- court and the Assembly—were essentially public institutions like the theater. This makes Aristotle a good source of pedagogical work not only for demystifying the politics and aes-thetics of the global spectacle but also for beginning to think ways of reedu-cating how subjects exercise the process of perception- imagination in the global spectacle.

Acknowledging the achievements of Aeschylus (524–456 BC) in bringing spectacle to tragic performance as an act of modernization, Aris-totle polices stage effects achieved by the spectacle. He argues that the spectacle is a kind of ornament and hence nonphilosophical, unethical, and away from “truth.” He goes on to claim that a tragedy does not need to be onstage to have its impact on the audience. Aristotelian tragedies are textually and literarily effective: “The Spectacle has . . . an emotional attraction of its own, but, of all parts, it is the least artistic, and connected least with the art of poetry. For the power of Tragedy, we may be sure, is felt even apart from representation and actors. Besides, the production of spectacular effects depends more on the art of stage machinist than that of the poet” (§VI).

While tragedians need “magnitude”70 to give their lessons an aura of authority and their heroes certain portentousness, “magnitude,” for Aris-totle, abhors spectacle. In Aristotle’s definition of tragedy, the drama should imitate actions that excite such “proper” emotions as pity and fear and do so “through . . . effecting the proper purgation of these emotions” (§VI). Aristotelian spectacles are effects, not thoughts; indeed, they eschew thoughts. While the spectacle is a means to arouse emotions, it is not inter-ested in the act of purging, creating “a sense not of the terrible but only of the monstrous” (Poetics §XIV). It does not imitate actions of magnitude but unleashes the sensual and sustains pleasure by leaving the aroused emo-tions viable in society. It is dramatic enactment and fictional representation pursued in their own right, that is, as the sole venue of poetry or “imagina-tion.” Neither illustration nor translation of ideas, it is itself with nothing imi-

70. Greek tragedies teach important lessons about the limits of the human, especially human beings’ freedom in the presence of God; tragedies are “an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude” (Aristotle, Poetics, book 1).


tating it.71 This impact of the spectacle on the human mind is, I argue, what really worries Aristotle—and so it has been and should remain a founding and defining concern of critical practice.

Aeschylus would have been precisely the person to show that tragedy is the near equivalent of the spectacle.72 One could not imagine Aristotle approving the pleasure afforded by the end of the Orestes, where the political community rejoiced in its becoming fascist authoritative. In the last scene of the play, empowered and enabled by unpurged emotions, the spectacle of Clytemnestra as a sublime and mystical figure—the Furies—rises above all laws of the polis to seek vengeance. Indeed, the spectacle is a historical concept and problem specifically relevant to Aristotle and the Athenians who were then attempting to rebuild the city and democracy after the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC). Aristotle’s attempt to make “spec-tacle” subservient to “poetry” should call attention to the circumstances that

71. Aristotle’s identification of spectacle’s place and function in tragedy reveals distrust of the realist effect achieved by visuals. The very formulation of the function and place of the spectacle in tragedies sustains a complete division between effects and contents, pre-senting the art form as an attenuated medium to explain and elaborate on moral thoughts and lessons. As a result, Aristotle plays out a doubled process of exclusion or “purgation,” expelling both the artistic effects in Greek tragedies and popular sentiments in society, especially unorthodox appetites of the bodily senses, to sustain the quest for “thought”—the much emphasized “serious” action or matter that is the object of the Greek tragedies.72. George Thomson, Aeschylus and Athens: A Study in the Social Origins of Drama (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1950), 183. The spectacle has not been a problem in the history and tradition of early ancient Greek performance culture. European differentia-tion between fiction and fact had not yet occurred in ancient Greek tragedy, in which the spectacular representation of the heroic and magical in a myth was a necessary feature inherent to the story. One important function of the spectacle in Aeschylian tragedies, for example, is the implanting of the narrative in the audience’s memory by painting the principle characters with a hint of the mythical. The furies of Clytemnestra in the Oresteia are so intensely emotional that they would not work as imitation or the expression of any special idea/thought. They are so thoroughly Furies that their most efficient appearance would be an appropriate image, with an immediacy serving as the seat of all that are in Clytemnestra by the end of the play: love, vengeance, and memory. In view of the power-ful visual effects of Aeschylian tragedies, classical scholars have thus assessed Aeschy-lus’s greatest achievement in Greek tragedy along the line of the spectacle: “By far the most spectacular dramatist . . . , Aeschylus is supposed to have astounded his spectators with exotic crowds and to have stunned them with huge and complex machines” (Oliver Taplin, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus [Oxford: Clarendon, 1977], 39). Even Aeschylus’s lan-guage is “explosive, volcanic” (Robert Fagles, “The Serpent and the Eagle,” in Aeschy-lus, The Oresteia, trans. Robert Fagles [New York: Penguin, 1979], 47). See also Gilbert Murray, Aeschylus, the Creator of Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962).


provided the frame for Aristotle’s theory of tragedy. Democracy and tragedy mutually define Athenian political culture. Assembly- theater enacted and sustained a structural relation of power in which free male Athenians par-ticipated in democracy in the form of public speaking, rhetorical debate, and collective decision making.73 In effect, the spectators of the theater are the same spectators of the law- court and the Assembly; tragedies performed at state- sponsored theater festivals were “politics,” matters of the polis, of the city- state. Defined by plot and characters and accompanied by audio and visual effects, they not only served the double function of providing entertainment and delivering moral lessons74 but also provided the context for practicing democracy. For one thing, the judges of the tragedies at the theater festivals were chosen at random from among the audience- citizens.

Before the contest the Council had drawn up a list of names from each of the ten tribes, though the dramatic contests were not orga-nized tribally. How the names were chosen is not known, but pre-sumably they were those of regular theater- goers. The names were put in ten urns, which were then sealed and lodged on the Akropolis. At the beginning of the contest the urns were brought to the theater and unsealed. The Arkhon drew one name from each. The ten men thus selected swore to vote honestly. At the end of the contest each judge wrote his order of merit on a tablet. The tablets were put in an urn. From it the Arkhon drew five at random, and thus the issue was decided.75

73. The Athenian kind of participatory democracy was most vividly expressed in the experience of collective spectatorship and adjudication in the theater, where the annual Dionysian drama contest brought together the largest single collection of citizens, seat-ing them according to their tribal divisions and sociopolitical standing. Simon Goldhill describes the Athenian theater thus: “Plays were funded by individuals who gained great political capital by their conspicuous beneficence before such a large audience. The per-formance of these [individuals] became a standard subject in the contests of the law- court, where citizens further competed for honor and position. In short, the theater was a space in which all the citizens were actors as the city itself and its leading citizens were put on display. Spectacular viewing.” Simon Goldhill, “Refracting Classical Vision: Chang-ing Cultures of Viewing,” in Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, ed. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay (New York: Routledge, 1996), 19.74. In the Poetics, Aristotle lays out six components in hierarchical order to describe the overall working of the tragedy. He describes the balance among the objects (character and plot), the medium (diction, thought, song), and the manner (spectacle) of imitation, and considers this balance as an example of a visual structure.75. J. W. Roberts, City of Sokrates (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 166.


The challenge before Aristotle, thus, was then to educate a polis of citizens and immigrants capable of judgment, the foundation of participa-tory democracy, in face of the imminent threat to Athenian democracy and the danger of the end of thinking imposed by the confusion of emotions that the spectacle arouses. This sameness between theater and politics quali-fies the classical Greek society as the coming “society of the spectacle,” whose full- blown, global form we are now living. Aristotle’s worries about the spectacle’s alienating effect and the citizens’ attraction to the spectacu-lar in the face of a political and humanitarian crisis resonate with our con-temporary situation. If for Aristotle the danger of the spectacle lies in its immense accumulation—a process in which the viewer finds delight, with-out thought, in the way representations layer atop representations, images atop images, the same danger challenges contemporary subjects in the global spectacle. Aristotle’s definition of the spectacle should evoke our memory of such recent events as the Bush administration’s “shock and awe” military strategy, the series of global spectacles in China, and, gen-erally, our “neomania” for portable image- carriers and image- generators. These forms of mass and social organization mediate experience to foster values. The politics of neoliberal global capitalism is such that life is worth living when the joy over the authoritarian values promoted by globalization denominates our judgment and values. It is when the complacent sense of a perpetual present, the endlessness of interpretative possibilities, and the impulsiveness of human subjectivities triumph over questions and facts about social injustice, human dignity, and the values of variability.

Aristotle has an early consistent theory that addresses the society of the spectacle’s crises and shortcomings along the lines I have suggested. The Aristotle who urges the “mean” for his fellow citizens is the same Aris-totle who objects to spectacle because it confounded the spectators about what happens in plain view. Even his contemplative moment in the Nico-machean Ethics would remove the image from the excess of spectacle and spectacular visuality. What is most important about Aristotle’s think-ing on the tragedy is his anxiety that spectacle might take on a life of its own and accumulate into an unanswerable circularity. Aristotle could not be clear, however, about what effects such spectacle circularity induces, and in what name. What happens in spectacle, in which one image wrecks upon another, is that it becomes a specter.

Aristotle’s worry becomes real when we see Debord struggling in the late 1980s to invent new terms to describe the situation in which there is no space free of spectacality. Corporate and state media convergence in


the age of global capital is the partial realization of what Aristotle came to call, much earlier, “the monstrous.”76 The global spectacle, like global capi-tal itself, confronts its audience- participants in their own space. Whatever it aggressively claims and purports to show, it soon denies in a perpetual circularity of the visual. It comes forward, imposing itself upon subjects and wills, but when the spectators reach out for it, it recedes into a spectral omnipresence—a kind of present absence—that in part defines so much the global spectacle. There in the spectral form, with effects haunting civili-zation and outside of the domain of reason, the spectacle aggrandizes the society of commodity and pleasure. In Debord’s words, “Spectacular power can . . . deny whatever it likes, once, or three times over, and change the subject; knowing full well there is no danger of any riposte, in its own space or any other.”77 Yet this adulation of spectacle power is not Debord’s final word, nor should it cause despair or paralyzing cynicism among contempo-rary critics. The productive energy and creative ability of early postmodern pastiche became an incessant titillation, flattening, and pacification. There-fore, we need to read Aristotle once more, this time against the prevailing disposition to consume in “one world” and seek reverie in “one dream.”

We can at this point recall Said’s efforts to think the agony of writing in Conrad as akin to Aristotle’s efforts to produce a clear sense of the risks and needs of his time and the species. If the spectacle in Greek dramas decisively unleashed and sustained in the population aroused/unpurged emotions that might as well become the fuel to popular revolution, how much more profoundly would it liberate the worldly citizens of the global spectacle from the memory of liberal capitalism’s vast- scale alienation, from Maoist communism, and from the memory of the Cold War? In addition, it is precisely here, at this liberating potential of the visual experience, that this essay lodges its claim about the “creative” function of the global spec-tacle. It has tried to show how the global spectacle serves as the medium through which the liberal market and authoritarian politics of the Cold War era mutate into new forms that enhance their potency to adapt to each other. More important, it examines the workings of the global spectacle and points to the danger of using the “pictorial turn” as the point of entry into

76. “Fear and pity may be aroused by spectacular means. . . . But to produce this effect by the mere spectacle is a less artistic method, and dependent on extraneous aids. Those who employ spectacular means to create a sense not of the terrible but only of the mon-strous, are strangers to the purpose of Tragedy; for we must not demand of Tragedy any and every kind of pleasure, but only that which is proper to it.” Aristotle, Poetics, book 14.77. Debord, Comments on “The Society of the Spectacle,” 6.


the examination. We must see the absurdity of setting the grand modernist narrative against the postmodern spectacle. These two modes of represen-tation confront each other because of Jamesonian “periodization”; they are not in concrete opposition to each other.

We cannot replicate, we know from Debord, Aristotle’s attempt to think us to a point that makes spectacle irrelevant and minor. We can, how-ever, learn from Aristotle that as critics we must not thoughtlessly dwell on the terrain of spectacality. The figure of the spectator has long been the subject of criticism, especially that of the realist novel of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, the spectator that I am concerned with is a citizen of the world rather than the lone flâneur. If the flâneur is a threatened species who strolls around Paris in a fin- de- siècle mind-set and as such is the ideal narrator- observer of the realist novel, the characteris-tic critical expression of the nineteenth century, the spectator- consumer of our time is in equilibrium with global capital’s technologies of power and techniques of domination. To think the future of criticism, then, is to think the necessary connection between the aesthetic and the sociopolitical via the immediacy of spectacle pleasure and imagination. In our age of global capital, the politics and aesthetics of the spectacle threaten to define the species itself. They not only permeate the bodies, minds, and intellect of the individuals who evaluate social systems of domination, but they also penetrate into the experience and thus define the memory of the post- 1980s generations. As Debord has said, the spectacle is a costly regime.

imagination sterilized: the workings of the global spectacle

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