Societal Backlash against the Images of the Spectacle Society

This was written in December during the beginning of the 99% protests but thought I would publish it now with no good reasoning.

Many Americans among the group that is currently being called “the 99%”--the group behind the widespread “Occupy” activities--have grown tired of not having power over their own lives. The Watts Riot in 1965 was similar to today’s Occupy movement in causation, but different in execution. Debord writes in the Decline and Fall of the Spectale-Commodity Economy, ““The Watts riot was not a racial conflict: the rioters left alone the whites who were in their path, attacking only the white policemen, while on the other hand black solidarity did not extend to black store-owners or even to black car-drivers.” Class separation has long been ignored in America, and class of wealth has now become a spectacle of its own. Those of us in the 99% are given to view the lifestyle of those in the 1% as a commodity, something to aspire to, something to aquire. However the lifestyle of the 1%--and the power that it represents--remains a spectacle for the 99%. The Watts riot and the 99% movement are both about tearing down the separation brought on by viewing the spectacle of the 1% class.

The Watts Riot was a backlash against the spectacle created by capitalism. The blacks in the riot had become frustrated with a system that would not help them, but flaunted, in a spectacular fashion, commodities in front of their eyes. They looted the 1%, taking items from stores. Debord again writes, “The Los Angeles blacks take modern capitalist propaganda, its publicity of abundance, literally. They want to possess now all the objects shown and abstractly accessible, because they want to use them. In this way they are challenging their exchange-value, the commodity reality which molds them and marshals them to its own ends, and which has preselected everything.” After being taunted to want commodities, they wanted to tear down the walls of spectacle and take what they wanted. 

Spectacle creates a schism for society. We experience life without having personal experiences. In an advertisement, we watch people use a vacuum cleaner, and they tell us how great it is; vicariously we understand how smooth and quiet it runs. Yet we have never used the vacuum. Debord writes in the Society of the Spectacle, “Separation is itself an integral part of the unity of this world, of a global social practice split into reality and image.”(3) The combination of separation and spectacle exists not only with commodities, but in all aspects of life. Government becomes a spectacle wherein many people feel that they can witness political events, but that they have no direct effect on them or their world. Tension builds and mounts until people have had enough and riot, or create movements.

The events of the Watts riot raised questions. Looters would take stolen fridges to homes without power. This is an example of the overwhelming desire for commodities. Debord continues in the Decline and Fall of the Spectale-Commodity Economy, “Once it is no longer bought, the commodity lies open to criticism and alteration, whatever particular form it may take. Only when it is paid for with money is it respected as an admirable fetish, as a symbol of status within the world of survival.” What is forgotten by the general population is that the images in advertisements and other forms of propaganda spectacle are nothing. As Debord says in the Society of the Spectacle, “The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.” What is an image but printed ink, or light reflected from a screen. We give meaning to the images; the images have no thought or real power but what society gives them. Steven Shaviro comments on Andy Warhol’s view of images, “Images are nothing like objects. When things retreat into their images, the way they do on TV, they lose their solidity, their palpability, their presence. Images have a weightlessness that is both mysterious and soothing. They haunt us, like ghosts; they empty out space, the better to flicker interminably in the void. Images are premised upon a visibility so extreme that it relegates the world to a state of almost transparency.”

We allow the spectacle of society to control and run our lives. However, it is not real, it has no true power. Yet our relations with those images give them power: power to separate our society into classes, power to make us desire commodities that have no use. They, in the end, are nothing. However, we want them to be something, and that is why they have power.

Sources:

¹ Debord, Guy. The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,The Situationist International Anthology, 2006; http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/10.Watts.htm

² Shapiro, Steven, 16 Andy Warhol, Doom Patrols, 2007, http://www.dhalgren.com/Doom/ch16.html