|
Por Douglas Kellner
Número 39
During the past
decades, the culture industries have multiplied media spectacles
in novel spaces and sites, and spectacle itself is becoming one
of the organizing principles of the economy, polity, society, and
everyday life. The Internet-based economy has been developing hi-tech
spectacle as a means of promotion, reproduction, and the circulation
and selling of commodities, using multi-media and increasingly sophisticated
technology to dazzle consumers. Media culture itself proliferates
ever more technologically sophisticated spectacles to seize audiences
and augment their power and profit. The forms of entertainment permeate
news and information, and a tablodized infotainment culture is more
and more popular. New multimedia that synthesize forms of radio,
film, TV news and entertainment, and the mushrooming domain of cyberspace,
become spectacles of technoculture, generating expanding sites of
information and entertainment, while intensifying the spectacle-form
of media culture.
Political and social life is also shaped more and more by media
spectacle. Social and political conflicts are increasingly played
out on the screens of media culture, which display spectacles like
sensational murder cases, terrorist bombings, celebrity and political
sex scandals, and the explosive violence of everyday life. Media
culture not only takes up expanding moments of contemporary experience,
but also provides ever more material for fantasy, dreaming, modeling
thought and behavior, and constructing identities.
Of course, there have been spectacles since premodern times. Classical
Greece had its Olympics, thespian and poetry festivals, its public
rhetorical battles, and bloody and violent wars. Ancient Rome had
its public offerings of bread and circuses, its orgies, its titanic
political battles, and the spectacle of Empire with parades and
monuments for triumphant Caesars and their armies, extravaganzas
put on display in the 2000 film Gladiator. And as Dutch
cultural historian Johan Huizinga (1986 and 1997) reminds us, medieval
life too had its important moments of display and spectacle.
The Eastern world also has its spectacles. In 2003, an exhibit on
Genghis Khan and His Legacies at the Los Angeles County Art Museum
displayed how Genghis Khan used military spectacle and power to
conquer large segments of what we now see as the eastern sphere
of globe and how four sons of Khan founded the Chinese Empire, what
is now Russia, Iranian civilization and the area of what are now
the Stans (i.e, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and so on). These Genghis
Khan Empires used military spectacle to advance their power and
had spectacles of great tents on display, art works, religious ceremonies,
and political spectacles of display of power.
Indeed, globalization itself expanded through military spectacle
and Empire, and premodern history involves the spectacle of the
rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the expansion and diffusion of
the Genghis Khan empires, the spread and triumph of Christianity
and Islam, and then the rise of modern nation states and empires.
In the early modern period, Machiavelli advised his modern prince
of the productive use of spectacle for government and social control,
and the emperors and kings of the modern states cultivated spectacles
as part of their rituals of governance and power. Popular entertainment
long had its roots in spectacle, while war, religion, sports, and
other domains of public life were fertile fields for the propagation
of spectacle for centuries. Yet with the development of new multimedia
and information technologies, technospectacles have been decisively
shaping the contours and trajectories of present-day societies and
cultures, at least in the advanced capitalist countries, while media
spectacle also becomes a defining feature of globalization.
In this study, I will provide an overview of the dissemination of
media spectacle throughout the major domains of the economy, polity,
society, culture and everyday life in the contemporary era and indicate
the theoretical approach that I deploy. This requires a brief presentation
of the influential analysis of spectacle by Guy Debord and the Situationist
International, and how I build upon this approach, followed by an
overview of contemporary spectacle culture and then analysis of
how my approach differs from that of Debord and attempts to sketch
contours of a critical theory of the contemporary moment.
Guy Debord and the Society
of the Spectacle
The concept of the "society of the spectacle" developed
by French theorist Guy Debord and his comrades in the Situationist
International has had major impact on a variety of contemporary
theories of society and culture1.
For Debord, spectacle "unifies and explains a great diversity
of apparent phenomena" (Debord 1967: #10). Debord's conception,
first developed in the 1960s, continues to circulate through the
Internet and other academic and subcultural sites today. It describes
a media and consumer society, organized around the production and
consumption of images, commodities, and staged events.
For Debord, spectacle constituted the overarching
concept to describe the media and consumer society, including the
packaging, promotion, and display of commodities and the production
and effects of all media. Using the term “media spectacle,”
I am largely focusing on various forms of technologically-constructed
media productions that are produced and disseminated through the
so-called mass media, ranging from radio and television to the Internet
and latest wireless gadgets. Every medium, from music to television,
from news to advertising, has its multitudinous forms of spectacle,
involving such things in the realm of music as the classical music
spectacle, the opera spectacle, the rock spectacle, and the hip
hop spectacle. Spectacle forms evolve over time and multiply with
new technological developments.
My main interest in Media Spectacle
(Kellner 2003), however, is in the megaspectacle form whereby certain
spectacles become defining events of their era. These range from
commodity spectacles such as the McDonald’s or Nike spectacle
to megaspectacle political extravaganzas that characterize a certain
period, involving such things as the 1991 Gulf war, the O.J. Simpson
trials, the Clinton sex and impeachment scandals, or the Terror
War that is defining the current era.
There are therefore many levels and categories
of spectacle. Megaspectacles are defined both quantatively and qualitatively.
The major media spectacles of the era dominate news, journalism,
and Internet buzz, and are highlighted and framed as the key events
of the age, as were, for instance, the Princess Diana wedding, death,
and funeral, the extremely close 2000 election and 36 Day Battle
for the White House, or the September 11 terror attacks and their
violent aftermath, including, currently, the spectacle of Iraq.
Megaspectacles are those phenomena of media culture which dramatize
its controversies and struggles, as well as its modes of conflict
resolution. They include media extravaganzas, sports events, political
happenings, and those attention-grabbing occurrences that we call
news -- a phenomena that itself has been subjected to the logic
of spectacle and tabloidization in the era of the media sensationalism,
political scandal and contestation, seemingly unending cultural
war, and the new phenomenon of Terror War. Megaspectacles, like
the O.J. Simpson trials, the Clinton sex and impeachment scandals,
or the ongoing Terror War dominate entire eras and encapsulate their
basic conflicts and contradictions, while taking over media culture.
More generally, on my conception, media spectacle
involves those media and artifacts that embody contemporary society's
basic values and serve to enculturate individuals into its way of
life (Kellner 1995, 2003). Thus, while Debord presents a rather
generalized and abstract notion of spectacle, I engage specific
examples of media spectacle and how they are produced, constructed,
circulated, and function in the present era. As we proceed into
a new millennium, the media are becoming more technologically dazzling
and are playing an ever-escalating role in everyday life. Under
the influence of a multimedia image culture, seductive spectacles
fascinate the denizens of the media and consumer society and involve
them in the semiotics of an ever-expanding world of entertainment,
information, and consumption, which deeply influence thought and
action. In Debord's words: "When the real world changes into
simple images, simple images become real beings and effective motivations
of a hypnotic behavior. The spectacle as a tendency to make one
see the world by means of various specialized mediations (it can
no longer be grasped directly), naturally finds vision to be the
privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs
(#18). According to Debord, sight, “the most abstract, the
most mystified sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction
of present day society" (ibid).
Experience and everyday life are thus shaped and
mediated by the spectacles of media culture and the consumer society.
For Debord, the spectacle is a tool of pacification and depoliticization;
it is a "permanent opium war" (#44) which stupefies social
subjects and distracts them from the most urgent task of real life
-- recovering the full range of their human powers through creative
practice. Debord’s concept of the spectacle is integrally
connected to the concept of separation and passivity, for in submissively
consuming spectacles, one is estranged from actively producing one's
life. Capitalist society separates workers from the products of
their labor, art from life, and consumption from human needs and
self-directing activity, as individuals inertly observe the spectacles
of social life from within the privacy of their homes (#25 and #26).
The Situationist project, by contrast, involved an overcoming of
all forms of separation, in which individuals would directly produce
their own life and modes of self-activity and collective practice.
The correlative to the spectacle
for Debord is thus the spectator, the reactive viewer and consumer
of a social system predicated on submission, conformity, and the
cultivation of marketable difference. The concept of the spectacle
therefore involves a distinction between passivity and activity
and consumption and production, condemning lifeless consumption
of spectacle as an alienation from human potentiality for creativity
and imagination. The spectacular society spreads its wares mainly
through the cultural mechanisms of leisure and consumption, services
and entertainment, ruled by the dictates of advertising and a commercialized
media culture. This structural shift to a society of the spectacle
involves a commodification of previously non-colonized sectors of
social life and the extension of bureaucratic control to the realms
of leisure, desire, and everyday life. Parallel to the Frankfurt
School conception of a "totally administered," or "one-dimensional,"
society (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972; Marcuse 1964), Debord states
that "The spectacle is the moment when the consumption has
attained the total occupation of social life" (#42).
Here exploitation is raised to a psychological level; basic physical
privation is augmented by "enriched privation" of pseudo-needs;
alienation is generalized, made comfortable, and alienated consumption
becomes "a duty supplementary to alienated production"
(#42).
Spectacle Economy and Politics
Since Debord's theorization
of the society of the spectacle in the 1960s and 1970s, spectacle
culture has expanded in every area of life. In the culture of the
spectacle, commercial enterprises have to be entertaining to prosper
and as Michael J. Wolf (1999) argues, in an "entertainment
economy," business and fun fuse, so that the E-factor is becoming
major aspect of business. Via the "entertainmentization"
of the economy, television, film, theme parks, video games, casinos,
and so forth become major sectors of the national economy. In the
U.S., the entertainment industry is now a $480 billion industry,
and consumers spend more on having fun than on clothes or health
care (Wolf 1999: 4).
To succeed in the ultracompetitive global marketplace,
corporations need to circulate their image and brand name so business
and advertising combine in the promotion of corporations as media
spectacles. Endless promotion circulates the McDonald’s Golden
Arches, Nike’s Swoosh, or the corporate symbols of Apple,
Intel, or Microsoft. In the brand wars between commodities, corporations
need to make their corporate logo a familiar signpost in contemporary
culture. Corporations place their defining brand images on their
products, in ads, in the spaces of everyday life, and in the midst
of media spectacles like important sports events, TV shows, movie
product placement, and wherever they can catch consumer eyeballs
to impress their brand name on a potential buyer. Consequently,
advertising, marketing, public relations and promotion are an essential
part of commodity spectacle in the global marketplace.
Celebrity too is manufactured and managed in the
world of media spectacle. Celebrities are the icons of media culture,
the gods and goddesses of everyday life. To become a celebrity requires
recognition as a star player in the field of media spectacle, be
it sports, entertainment, business, or politics. Celebrities have
their handlers and image managers to make sure that their stars
continue to be seen and positively perceived by publics. Just as
with corporate brand names, celebrities become products to sell
their Madonna, Michael Jordan, Tom Cruise, or Jennifer Lopez commodities
and image. In a media culture, however, celebrities are always prey
to scandal and thus must have at their disposal an entire public
relations apparatus to manage their spectacle fortunes, to make
sure their clients not only maintain high visibility but also keep
projecting a positive image. Of course, within limits, “bad”
and transgressions can also sell and so media spectacle always contains
celebrity dramas that attract public attention and can even define
an entire period, as when the O.J. Simpson murder trials and Bill
Clinton sex scandals dominated the media in the mid and late 1990s.
Indeed, contemporary politics is controlled by
the logic of media spectacle. The Gulf war of 1991 was arguably
the first event of the global village where the entire world watched
a build-up to war and then dramatic real-time military action against
Iraq after it invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990 (see Kellner
1992). The Clinton era featured sex and impeachment spectacles and
was capped by the most dramatic election spectacle in US history
as Al Gore and George W. Bush found themselves in a dead-heat election
night which was first leaning toward Gore, then called for Bush,
and then declared “too close to call,” leading to the
spectacle of a 35 day recount war in Florida, in which the US Supreme
Court declared the winner in a 5-4 vote that many see as illegitimate
and a stolen election (Kellner 2001). The torpor of the Bush presidency
was aroused by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and subsequent
Bush administration wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (Kellner 2003b).
In other parts of the world, media spectacle proved
to be a major factor in the Spanish March 2004 election where the
socialist party candidate upset the conservative party Prime Minister
predicted to win an easy victory, when Spain and the global village
experienced in horror the spectacle of a series of terrorist bombings
killing around 200 people days before the election. At first, the
government insisted that a Basque nationalist separatist group,
ETA, was responsible, but information leaked out that the bombing
actually had the signature of an Al Qaeda attack and that intelligence
was pointing in this direction. The Spanish people used the Internet,
cell phones and messaging, and other modes of communication to get
people out for massive antigovernment demonstrations to condemn
the alleged lies of the existing regime on the terrorism attacks
and denouncing their support of the Iraq invasion that in the minds
of many had made Spain an Islamic terrorist target. The spectacle
of a lying government, massive numbers of people demonstrating against
it, and the use of alternative modes of information and communication
developed a spike of support for the anti-government candidate.
Millions of young people and others who had never voted went to
the polls, and the spectacle emerged of a major political upset
–- that struck a blow against George W. Bush’s Iraq
occupation forces when the new Spanish Prime Minister withdrew Spanish
forces after spectacles of violence and chaos demonstrated the dangers
to Westerners in Iraq, who were seen as an occupying and oppressive
force by much of the population.
Around the same time in Taiwan in
late March 2004, another bizarre media spectacle erupted in a presidential
election. A couple of days before the election, there appeared to
be an assassination attempt on the Taiwan president Chen Shui-Bian,
who was a vocal supporter of Taiwan independence from China and
who had been behind in the polls. After a razor-thin upset victory
by Chen, opposition party leaders claimed that he had faked an assassination,
alleging that he had claimed before that his opponents had poisoned
him in a close election, that he went to a private hospital that
had allegedly been prepped to receive him and that would allow him
to produce effective pictures of a wound, operation, and medical
treatment. Opponents claimed that he had not gone to a public hospital
closer to the shooting, a site that would make it more difficult
to cover over pictures of a faked assassination2.
Global media culture is increasingly dominated
by giant megacorporations that combine entertainment, information,
and a vast array of media and consumer products. During the 1980s
and 1990s, television networks in the United States amalgamated
with other major sectors of the cultural industries and corporate
capital, including mergers between CBS and Westinghouse; MCA and
Seagram’s; Time Warner and Turner Communications; ABC, Capital
Cities, and Disney; and NBC, General Electric, and Microsoft. In
1999, CBS fused with the entertainment colossus Viacom in a $38
billion megamerger. Dwarfing all previous information/entertainment
corporation combinations, Time Warner and America On-Line (AOL)
proposed a $163.4 billion amalgamation in January 2000, which was
approved a year later. This union brought together two huge corporations
involved in TV, film, magazines, newspapers, books, information
databases, computers, and other media, suggesting a coming synthesis
of media and computer culture, of entertainment and information
in a new infotainment society.
The fact that “new media” Internet
service provider and portal AOL was the majority shareholder in
the deal seemed to point to the triumph of the new online Internet
culture over the old media culture. The merger itself called attention
to escalating synergy among information and entertainment industries
and old and new media in the form of the networked economy and cyberculture.
Yet the dramatic decline in the AOL/Time Warner stock price and
corporate battles for control of the giant corporation illustrated
the tensions between old and new media and the instabilities and
uncertainties at the heart of global capitalism, and the return
to dominance of the corporation by the Time Warner forces in 2003
seem to deflate some of the hype concerning “new media”
and the “new economy” (see Kellner, 2003a).
In Europe also there have been increasing
mergers of media corporations, the rise and decline of media giants
like Viviendi and Bertelsmann, and the ascendance of new conglomerates
to take the place of declining media empires. In France, the Dassault
group, headed by a rightwing politician who controlled a media empire
has taken over the weekly Express and 14 other acquisitions,
while another French rightwing group headed by Jean-Luc Lagardere,
an associated of Jacques Chirac is France’s biggest publisher,
controls the magazine market and is attempting to expand into telecommunications
(Ramonet, 2002). In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi owns the three main
private television channels and as prime minister now also controls
state television, while in Spain the Prisa company controls major
newspaper and other publications, as well as radio and television
networks.
These amalgamations bring together
corporations involved in TV, film, magazines, newspapers, books,
information data bases, computers, and other media, suggesting a
coming together of media and computer culture, of entertainment
and information in a new networked and multimedia infotainment society.
There have also been massive mergers in the telecommunications industry,
as well as between cable and satellite industries with major entertainment
and corporate conglomerates. By 2002, ten gigantic multinational
corporations, including AOL Time Warner, Disney-ABC, General Electric-NBC,
Viacom-CBS, News Corporation, Viviendi, Sony, Bertelsmann, AT&T,
and Liberty Media controlled most of the production of information
and entertainment throughout the globe3.
The result is less competition and diversity, and more corporate
control of newspapers and journalism, television, radio, film, and
other media of information and entertainment.
Entertainment has always been a
prime field of the spectacle, but in today's infotainment society,
entertainment and spectacle have entered into the domains of the
economy, politics, society, and everyday life in important new ways.
Building on the tradition of spectacle, contemporary forms of entertainment
from television to the stage are incorporating spectacle culture
into their enterprises, transforming film, television, music, drama,
and other domains of culture, as well as producing spectacular new
forms of culture such as cyberspace, multimedia, and virtual reality.
The Culture of the Spectacle
Sports has long been
a domain of the spectacle with events like the Olympics, World Series,
Super Bowl, World Soccer Cup, and NBA championships attracting massive
audiences, while generating sky-high advertising rates. These cultural
rituals celebrate society's deepest values (i.e. competition, winning,
success, and money), and corporations are willing to pay top dollar
to get their products associated with such events. Indeed, it appears
that the logic of the commodity spectacle is inexorably permeating
professional sports which can no longer be played without the accompaniment
of cheerleaders, giant mascots who clown with players and spectators,
and raffles, promotions, and contests that feature the products
of various sponsors.
Sports stadiums themselves contain electronic reproduction
of the action, as well as giant advertisements for various products
that rotate for maximum saturation -- previewing environmental advertising
in which entire urban sites are becoming scenes to boost consumption
spectacles. Arenas, like the United Center in Chicago, America West
Arena in Phoenix, or Enron Field in Houston are named after corporate
sponsors. Of course, after major corporate scandals or collapse,
like the Enron spectacle, the ballparks must be renamed!
Film has long been a fertile field
of the spectacle, with "Hollywood" connoting a world of
glamour, publicity, fashion, and excess. Hollywood film has exhibited
grand movie palaces, spectacular openings with searchlights and
camera-popping paparazzi, glamorous Oscars, and stylish hi-tech
film. While epic spectacle became a dominant genre of Hollywood
film from early versions of The Ten Commandments through
Cleopatra and 2001 in the 1960s, contemporary film has
incorporated the mechanics of spectacle into its form, style, and
special effects. Films are hyped into spectacle through advertising
and trailers which are ever louder, glitzier, and razzle-dazzle.
Some of the most popular films of the late 1990s were spectacle
films, including Titanic, Star Wars -- Phantom
Menace, Three Kings, and Austin Powers, a spoof of spectacle,
which became one of the most successful films of summer 1999.
The 2000 Academy Awards were dominated
by the spectacle Gladiator, a mediocre film whose garnishing
of best picture award and best acting award for Russell Crowe demonstrates
the extent to which the logic of the spectacle now dominates Hollywood
film. Some of the most critically acclaimed and popular films of
2001 were also hi-tech spectacle, such as Moulin Rouge,
a film spectacle that itself is a delirious ode to spectacle, from
cabaret and the brothel to can-can dancing, opera, musical comedy,
dance, theater, popular music, and film. A postmodern pastiche of
popular music styles and hits, the film used songs and music ranging
from Madonna and the Beatles to Dolly Parton and Kiss.
In 2002-2003, a series of comic
book hero spectacles were among the most popular films. Spiderman
(2002) was one of the most popular films ever and has spawned planned
sequels and a cycle of films presenting comic book heroes like Hulk,
another of the X-Men series, and the comic book-like Matrix
Revisited, Terminator 3, and Charlie’s Angels:
Full Throttle. These films embody fantasies of attained spectacular
powers that enable the protagonists to conquer enemies and prevail
in hi-tech environments. These cinematic spectacles are an expression
of a culture that generates ever-more fantastic visions as technology
and the society of the spectacle continues to evolve in novel and
surprising, sometimes frightening, forms.
Television has been from its introduction in the
1940s a promoter of consumption spectacle, selling cars, fashion,
home appliances, and other commodities along with consumer life-styles
and values. It is also the home of sports spectacle like the Super
Bowl or World Series, political spectacles like elections (or more
recently, scandals), entertainment spectacle like the Oscars or
Grammies, and its own events like breaking news or special events.
Following the logic of spectacle entertainment, contemporary television
exhibits more hi-tech glitter, faster and glitzier editing, computer
simulations, and with cable and satellite television, a fantastic
array of every conceivable type of show and genre.
TV is today a medium of spectacular
programs like The X-Files or Buffy, the Vampire Slayer,
and spectacles of everyday life such as MTV's The Real World
and Road Rules, or the globally popular Survivor
and Big Brother series. In 2002-4, there was a proliferation
of competitive reality shows in the U.S. involving sex, dating,
and marriage including The Bachelor, The Bachelorette,
Cupid, and the short-lived Are You Hot? In these
shows, men and women humiliate themselves, facing scorn and rejection,
as they compete for the favors of sexual competitors and their few
moments of media glory and reward. The most popular US TV show of
2004, The Apprentice, presented the spectacle of Donald
Trump, super capitalist firing young would-be corporate executives
in a harsh Darwinian competition to work for the eccentric and media-obsessed
mogul, The Donald. And Entertainment and spectacle are apotheosized
in American Idol, the breakaway hit of summer 2002 that
continues to be a TV ratings winner that rewards young want to-be
entertainers who perform well-known pop songs, while humiliating
those judged to be losers.
Theater is a fertile field of the
spectacle and contemporary plays have exploited its dramaturgical
and musical past to create current attractions for large audiences.
Plays like Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in da Funk,
Smokey Joe's Cafe, Fosse, Swing!, and
Contact draw on the history of music spectacle, bringing
some of the most spectacular moments of the traditions of jazz,
funk, blues, swing, country, rock, and other forms of pop entertainment
to contemporary thespian audiences. Many of the most popular plays
of recent years on a global scale have been spectacles including
Les Miserables, Phantom of the Opera, Rent,
The Lion King, Mama Mia, La Boheme, and
The Producers, a stunningly successful musical spectacle
that mocks the Nazis and show business. These theatrical spectacles
are often a pastiche of previous literature, opera, film, or theater
and reveal the lust for participation in cultural extravaganzas
of contemporary audiences for all types of culture.
Fashion is historically a central domain of the
spectacle, and today producers and models, as well as the actual
products of the industry, constitute an enticing sector of media
culture. Fashion designers are celebrities, such as the late Gianni
Versace, whose murder by an ex-gay lover in 1997 was a major spectacle
of its era. Versace brought together the worlds of fashion, design,
rock, entertainment, and royalty in his fashion shows and emporia.
When Yves Saint-Laurent retired in 2002, there was a veritable media
frenzy to celebrate his contributions to fashion, which included
bringing in the aesthetic and images of modern art and catering
to demands of contemporary liberated women as he developed new forms
of style and couture.
In fashion today, inherently a consumer spectacle,
laser-light shows, top rock and pop music performers, superstar
models, and endless hype publicize each new season's offerings,
generating highly elaborate and spectacular clothing displays. The
consumption spectacle is fundamentally interconnected with fashion
that demonstrates what is in and out, hot and cold, in the buzz
world of style and vogue. The stars of the entertainment industry
become fashion icons and models for imitation and emulation. In
a postmodern image culture, style and look become increasingly important
modes of identity and presentation of the self in everyday life,
and the spectacles of media culture show and tell people how to
appear and behave.
Bringing the spectacle into the
world of high art, the Guggenheim Museum's Thomas Krens organized
a retrospective on Giorgio Armani, the Italian fashion designer.
Earlier, Krens produced a Guggenheim show exhibiting motorcycles
and plans to open a Guggenheim gallery in the Venetian Resort Hotel
Casino in Las Vegas with a seven-story Guggenheim art museum next
to it. Not to be outdone, in October 2000, the Los Angeles County
Art Museum opened its largest show in history, a megaspectacle "Made
in California: Art, Image and identity, 1900-2000," featuring
multimedia exhibitions of everything from canonical California painting
and photography to Jefferson Airplane album covers, surf boards,
and a 1998 Playboy magazine with "The Babes of Baywatch"
on its cover. In 2001, the Los Angeles County Art Museum announced
that it would become a major spectacle itself, provisionally accepting
a design by Rem Koolhaas that would create a spectacular new architectural
cover for the museum complex. As described by the Los Angeles
Times architectural critic, the “design is a temple for
a mobile, post-industrial age…. Capped by an organic, tent-like
roof, its monumental form will serve as both a vibrant public forum
and a spectacular place to view art” (Dec. 7, 2001: F1).
Contemporary architecture too is
ruled by the logic of the spectacle and critics have noticed how
art museums are coming to trump the art collection by making the
building and setting more spectacular than the collections4.
The Frank Gehry Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, the Richard
Meier Getty Center in Los Angeles, the retrofitted power plant that
became the Tate Modern in London, Tadao Ando’s Pulitzer Foundation
building in Saint Louis, and Santiago Calatrava’s addition
to the Milwaukee Museum of Art all provide superspectacle environments
to display their art works and museum fare. Major architectural
projects for corporations and cities often provide postmodern spectacle
whereby the glass and steel structures of high modernism are replaced
by buildings and spaces adorned with signs of the consumer society
and complex structures that attest to the growing power of commerce
and technocapitalism.
Popular music is also colonized by the spectacle
with music-video television (MTV) becoming a major purveyor of music,
bringing spectacle into the core of musical production and distribution.
Madonna and Michael Jackson would have never become global superstars
of popular music without the spectacular production values of their
music videos and concert extravaganzas. Both also performed their
lives as media spectacle, generating maximum publicity and attention
(not always positive!). Michael Jackson attracted attention in 2001
in a TV spectacle where he reportedly paid hundreds of thousands
of dollars to digitally redo the concert footage he appeared in.
Jackson had his images retooled so that he would be free of sweat
and appear darker that the “real” image, in order to
better blend in with his family members performing with him and
to appear a cooler black to appeal to his fans. And one cannot fully
grasp the Madonna phenomenon without analyzing her marketing and
publicity strategies, her exploitation of spectacle, and her ability
to make herself a celebrity spectacle of the highest order (Kellner,
1995).
Musical concert extravaganzas are more and more
spectacular (and expensive!) and younger female pop music stars
and groups such as Mariah Carey, Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez,
or Destiny’s Child deploy the tools of the glamour industry
and media spectacle to make themselves spectacular icons of fashion,
beauty, style, and sexuality, as well as purveyors of music. Pop
male singers like Ricky Martin could double as fashion models and
male groups like ‘N Sync use hi-tech stage shows, music videos,
and PR to sell their wares. Moreover, hip-hop culture has cultivated
a whole range of spectacle, ranging from musical extravaganzas,
to life-style cultivation, to real life crime wars among its stars.
Eroticism has frequently permeated
the spectacles of Western culture, and is prominently on display
in Hollywood film, as well as popular forms such as burlesque, vaudeville,
and pornography. Long a major component of advertising, eroticized
sexuality has been used to sell every conceivable product. The spectacle
of sex is also one of the staples of media culture, permeating all
cultural forms and creating its own genres in pornography, one of
media culture’s highest grossing domains. In the culture of
the spectacle, sex becomes shockingly exotic and diverse, through
the media of porno videos, DVDs, and Internet sites that make available
everything from teen-animal sex to orgies of the most extravagant
sort. Technologies of cultural reproduction such as home video recorders
(VCRs) and computers bring sex more readily into the private recesses
of the home. And today the sex spectacle attains more and more exotic
forms with multimedia and multisensory sex, as envisaged in Huxley's
Brave New World, on the horizon.
The spectacle of video and computer
games has been a major source of youth entertainment and industry
profit. In 2001, the U.S. video game industry hit a record $9 billion
in sales and expects to do even better in the next couple of years
(Los Angeles Times, Jan. 1, 2002: C1). For decades now,
video and computer games have obsessed sectors of youth and provided
skills needed for the hi-tech dot.com economy, as well as fighting
postmodern war. These games are highly competitive, violent, and
provide allegories for life under corporate capitalism and Terror
War militarism. In the game Pac man, as in the corporate jungle,
it’s eat or be eaten, just as in air and ground war games,
its kill or be killed. Grand Theft Auto 3 and State of Emergency
were two of the most popular games in 2002, with the former involving
high-speed races through urban jungles and the latter involving
political riots and state repression! While some women and game
producers have tried to cultivate kinder, gentler, and more intelligent
gaming, the best-selling corporate games are spectacles for predatory
capitalism and macho militarism and not a more peaceful, playful,
and cooperative world.
The examples just provided suggest media spectacle
is invading every field of experience from the economy, to culture
and everyday life, to politics and war. Moreover, spectacle culture
is moving into new domains of cyberspace that will help to generate
future multimedia spectacle and networked infotainment societies.
My studies of media spectacle strive to contribute to illuminating
these developments and to developing a critical theory of the contemporary
moment.
Debord and the Spectacle: A Critical Engagement
In using the concept of spectacle, I am obviously
indebted to Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and the
ideas of the Situationist International, so acknowledging the debt,
I might also say that there are three major differences between
my engagement of the concept of the spectacle and Debord’s
model. First, while Debord develops a rather totalizing and monolithic
concept of the society of the spectacle, I engage specific spectacles,
like McDonald’s and the commodity spectacle, the Clinton sex
scandals and impeachment spectacle, or the 9/11 terrorist attacks
and Terror War spectacle (Kellner 2003a and 2003b).
I should also acknowledge the obvious point that
I’m reading the production, text and effects of various media
spectacles from the standpoint of U.S. society, and in an attempt
to theorize contemporary U.S. society and culture, and more broadly,
globalization and global culture, whereas Debord is analyzing a
specific stage of capitalist society, that of the media and consumer
society organized around spectacle. Moreover, Debord exhibits a
French radical intellectual and neo-Marxian perspective while I
have specific class, race, gender, and regional standpoints and
deploy a multiperspectivist model, using Frankfurt School critical
theory, British cultural studies, French postmodern theory, and
many other perspectives (Kellner 1995, 2003a and 2003b.
Secondly, my approach to these specific spectacles
is interpretive and interrogatory. That is, I try to interrogate
what major media spectacles tell us of contemporary U.S. and global
society. For example, what McDonald’s tells us about consumption
and the consumer society, or globalization; what Michael Jordan
and the Nike spectacle tells us about the sports spectacle and the
intersection of sports, entertainment, advertising, and commodification
in contemporary societies; what the OJ Simpson affair tells us about
race, class, celebrity, the media, sports, gender, the police and
legal system and so on in the U.S. and what the obsessive focus
on this event for months on end tells us about American media and
consumer society.
In my studies of media spectacle, I deploy cultural
studies as diagnostic critique, reading and interpreting various
spectacles to see what they tell us about the present age, whereas
Debord is more interested in a critique of capitalism and presenting
revolutionary alternatives. The “popular” often puts
on display major emotions, ideas, experiences, and conflicts of
the era, as well as indicating what corporations are marketing.
A critical cultural studies can thus help decipher dominant trends
of the era and contribute to developing critical theories of the
contemporary era (Kellner 1995 and 2003a; Best and Kellner 2001).
Thirdly, I analyze the contradictions
and reversals of the spectacle, whereas Debord has a fairly triumphant
notion of the society of the spectacle, although he and his comrades
sketched out various models of opposition and struggle and in fact
inspired in part the rather spectacular May ’68 events in
France. For an example of the reversal of the spectacle, or at least
its contradictions and contestation, take McDonald’s. When
I began my studies of media spectacle in the 1990s, McDonald’s
was a figure for a triumphant global capitalism. McDonald’s
was constantly expanding in the U.S. and globally; its profits were
high; and it was taken as a paradigm of a successful American and
then global capitalism. George Ritzer’s book The McDonaldization
of Society (1993, 1996) used McDonald’s as a model to
analyze contemporary production and consumption, while books like
Golden Arches East (Watson et al 1997) valorized McDonald’s
as bringing modernity itself to vast sectors of the world like Russia
and China and McDonald’s was praised for its efficient production
methods, its cleanliness and orderliness, and its bringing food
value and fast, convenient food to the masses.
Suddenly, however, McDonald’s became the
poster corporation for protest in the anti-corporate globalization
movement. The McDonald’s corporation had sued some British
Greenspeace activists who produced a pamphlet attacking McDonald’s
unhealthy food, its labor practices, its negative environmental
impact, and called for protests and boycotts. McDonald’s countered
with a lawsuit and an anti-McDonald’s campaign emerged with
a Web-site McSpotlight that became the most accessed Web-site in
history; global and local protests emerged; and whenever there was
an anticorporate globalization demonstration somewhere a McDonald’s
was trashed. Suddenly, therefore, McDonald’s expansion was
halted, profits were down almost everywhere for the first time,
and new McDonald’s were blocked by local struggles. Moreover,
in the U.S. and elsewhere, there were lawsuits for false advertising,
for promoting addictive substances and junk food, and a lot of bad
publicity and falling profits that continues to haunt McDonald’s
through the present.
Finally, I’m aware how Debord’s conception
of the society of the spectacle trumps my own analysis of the contradictions
of the spectacle, their reversal and overturning. A Debordian could
argue that despite the vicissitudes of the McDonald’s spectacle,
the Nike spectacle that involved attack of their labor practices,
and other contradictions and contestations of spectacles within
contemporary capitalist societies, nonetheless, capitalism itself
still exists more powerfully than ever, that the media and consumer
society continues to reproduce itself through spectacle, and that
a market society thrives upon the vicissitudes of spectacle, and
ups and downs of various corporations, personalities, and celebrities.
While this argument is hard to answer
in the face of the continued global hegemony of capital, I think
it is useful to analyze the contradictions and contestations of
media spectacle within specific societies and to counter the notion
that media and political spectacles are all-powerful and overwhelming.
For instance, I have a study in Media Spectacle of how
the U.S. Republican Party attempted to create the spectacle of the
Clinton sex scandals and of impeachment backfired and Clinton survived
the attempts of the Republicans to remove him from the presidency
through negative media politics.
There are, I believe, several reasons why Clinton
survived the spectacle of the sex scandal and impeachment. British
cultural studies has long affirmed an active audience that is not
totally manipulated by the media and it appears that there is residual
respect for the President, or was at the time, and that people did
not like and resisted the attacks on President Clinton and the exposure
in the national media of his personal and private life. Also, there
have been culture wars in the U.S. that had been going on since
the 1960s and the Republican impeachment spectacle backfired as
many saw it, correctly I think, as a rightwing attack to overthrow
an elected president. Hence, when Republicans attacked Clinton,
liberals and others saw it as an illicit attempt to use the media
to overthrow an elected president and resisted the spectacle and
came to Clinton’s support.
There were, to be sure, highly contradictory effects
from the Clinton spectacles. The Republican assault on the president
won sympathy and support for the beleaguered Clinton, but enabled
the Republicans to focus attention on the failings of the president.
They were also able to block his political agenda, and then to highlight
negatives of the Clinton/Gore presidency in the 2000 election that
made it difficult for Gore to emphasize the unparalleled peace and
prosperity of the past eight years, positives that quickly turned
to negatives with the highly destructive and incompetent economic
and foreign policy disasters of the Bush administration.
And yet in some ways, the impeachment political
spectacle backfired, proving, I would argue, that politics of the
spectacle is unpredictable and that spectacles do not always succeed
and manipulate the public, and may backfire. Celebrities too have
experienced the reversal of the spectacle. Michael Jackson famously
has had his ups and downs with media spectacle. After becoming one
of the most successful media spectacles in history in part due to
his spectacular music videos and concert extravaganzas supported
by a productive publicity machine, he was accused in the 1990s of
pedaphilia and in a 2003 BBC interview that he participated in to
help orchestrate a come-back made damning revelations about young
boys sleeping over at his ranch and was hit shortly thereafter with
charges of sexual molestation of a teenage boy, a negative spectacle
that could end his career (although the spectacle is unpredictable:
while those that prosper from the spectacle can be destroyed by
it, rebirth is also always possible in a celebrity spectacle culture).
While most of the examples I’ve
given of media spectacle are U.S.-based, I’m interrogating
the examples I know best, although most of these spectacles have
global impact, and I would also note that the spectacle itself is
becoming more and more global. For example, in summer 2003 the Harry
Potter spectacle is an amazing global literary spectacle, with the
best-selling books in history, a series of films, and Pottermania
this summer that just keeps expanding. Some years ago, the Princess
Diana spectacle was probably the most interrogated event within
global cultural studies. In spring and summer of 2003, the deadly
SARS disease and fear of a global epidemic was a major spectacle
in the global media, especially in the areas effected. And in summer
2003, the David Beckham spectacle became global as Beckham moved
from the Manchester United football team to Real Madrid, and that
summer there was a film, popular globally, Bend It Like Beckham.
During the period, the Beckham and Posh spectacle was on display
throughout media culture, featuring Beckman and his celebrity wife
Posh, formerly one of the Spice Girls, who is allegedly a fashion
maven and publicity hound. The Beckham-Posh combines media culture,
fashion, sports and the global spectacle, although there spectacle
turned tabloid in 2004 as Beckham was accused of having well-documented
affairs.
In terms of global spectacle, more
distressingly, the Al Qaeda global terrorism spectacle has been
dominant, a topic of my book From September 11 to Terror War:
The Dangers of the Bush Legacy (Kellner 2003b). The terror
spectacle of Fall 2001 revealed that familiar items of everyday
life like planes or mail could be transformed into instruments of
spectacular terror. The al Qaeda network hijacking of airplanes
turned ordinary instruments of transportation into weapons as they
crashed into the World Trade Center Towers and Pentagon on September
11, 2001. Mail became the delivery of disease, terror, and death,
as the anthrax scare of Fall and Winter 2001 made ordinary letters
threatening items. And rumors spread that the terror network was
seeking instruments of mass destruction such as chemical, biological,
and nuclear weapons to create spectacles of terror on a hitherto
unforeseen scope.
During 2004, the bloody aftermath of the Bush administration
invasion and occupation of Iraq produced an increasingly violent
and chaotic spectacle that alienated US allies, created numerous
enemies, and that threatened President Bush’s re-election.
The televising of 9/11 hearings in spring 2004, accompanied by best-selling
books questioning Bush administration terrorism policy and the Iraq
war, created negative spectacles of Bush administration bungling,
after a period in which Bush received generally positive media presentations
in the rush of patriotism after 9.11. The spectacle is always contradictory,
ambiguous, and subject to reversal and flip-flops so that a political
administration and celebrities can never be sure if they will be
beneficiaries or victims of the vagaries of spectacle politics.
Globalization, Technological
Revolution, and the Restructuring of Capitalism
Behind the genesis and ascendancy of the expansion of media
spectacle, the rise of megaspectacle, and of the new virtual spectacle
of cyberspace and an emerging virtual reality (VR) are the twin
phenomena of the global restructuring of capitalism and technological
revolution with the explosion of new forms of media and communication
technology, computer and information technology, and, on the horizon,
biotechnology. In earlier writings, I introduced a concept of technocapitalism
to describe a configuration of capitalist society in which technical
and scientific knowledge, computerization and automation of labor,
and intelligent technology plays a role in the process of production
analogous to the function of human labor power, mechanization of
the labor process, and machines in an earlier era of capitalism
(Kellner 1989). The technological revolution and global restructuring
of capital continues to generate new modes of societal organization,
polity, sovereignty, forms of culture and everyday life, and types
of contestation.
Thus, as developing countries move into the new
millennium, its inhabitants, and others throughout the globe, find
themselves in an ever-proliferating infotainment society, a globally
networked economy, and a Internet technoculture. Contemporary theorists
find themselves in a situation, I would suggest, parallel to the
Frankfurt school in the 1930s which theorized the emergent configurations
of economy, polity, society and culture brought about by the transition
from market to state monopoly capitalism. In their now classical
texts, the Frankfurt School theorists accordingly analyzed the novel
forms of social and economic organization, technology, and culture,
including the rise of giant corporations and cartels and the capitalist
state in "organized capitalism," in both its fascist or
"democratic" state capitalist forms. They also engaged
the culture industries and mass culture which served as new types
of social control, novel forms of ideology and domination, and a
potent configuration of culture and everyday life (Kellner 1989).
In terms of political economy, the
emerging postindustrial form of technocapitalism is characterized
by a decline of the state and increased power of the market, accompanied
by the growing strength of globalized transnational corporations
and governmental bodies and decreased force of the nation-state
and its institutions (Kellner 2002). To paraphrase Max Horkheimer,
whoever wants to talk about capitalism, must talk about globalization,
and it is impossible to theorize globalization without talking about
the restructuring of capitalism.
Globalization involves the flow
of goods, information, culture and entertainment, people, and capital
across a new networked economy, society, and culture (see the documentation
in Castells 1996, 1997, and 1998). Like the new technologies, it
is a complex phenomenon which involves positive and negative features,
costs and benefits, an up and down side. Yet, like theories of new
technologies, most theories of globalization are either primarily
negative, seeing it as a disaster for the human species, or as positive,
bringing new products, ideas, and wealth to a global arena. As with
technology, I propose a critical theory of globalization that
would dialectically appraise its positive and negative features,
its contradictions and ambiguities, that is sharply critical of
its negative effects, skeptical of legitimating ideological discourse,
but that also recognizes the centrality of the phenomenon in the
present and that affirms and develops its positive features (see
Best and Kellner 2001 and Kellner 2002).
To conclude: developing countries and the globalized
world is emerging into a culture of media spectacle that constitutes
a novel configuration of economy, society, politics, and everyday
life. It involves new cultural forms, social relations, and modes
of experience. It is producing an ever-expanding spectacle culture
with its proliferating media spectacle, megaspectacles, and interactive
spectacles. Critical social theory thus faces compelling challenges
in theoretically mapping and analyzing these emergent forms of culture
and society and the ways that they may contain novel forms of domination
and oppression as well as potential for democratization and social
justice.
Notas:
1
Debord's The Society of the Spectacle (1967) was published
in translation in a pirate edition by Black and Red (Detroit) in
1970 and reprinted many times; another edition appeared in 1983
and a new translation in 1994. Thus, in the following discussion,
I cite references to the numbered paragraphs of Debord's text to
make it easier for those with different editions to follow my reading.
The key texts of the Situationists and many interesting commentaries
are found on various Web sites, producing a curious afterlife for
Situationist ideas and practices. For further discussion of the
Situationists, see Best and Kellner 1997, Chapter 3; see also the
discussions of spectacle culture in Best and Kellner 2001 and my
book Media Spectacle (Kellner 2003a), upon which I draw
in this article.
2 As I write in April 2004, there
continue to be oppositional party demonstrations against the Chen
Taiwan nationalist party and demands for an election recount and
investigation of whether Chen staged his assassination; international
experts, including Henry Lee who attained national fame in the O.J.
Simpson trial, were investigating the assassination attempt; see
David Pierson, “Forensic Expert Hounded for News,” Los
Angeles Times, April 19, 2004: B01.
3 See the charts on media mergers
and concentration in Croteau and Hoynes 2001: 75ff. and in The
Nation (Jan. 7, 2002) with analysis by Mark Crispin Miller,
“What’s Wrong with This Picture?”
4 See Nicholai Ouroussoff, “Art
for Architecture’s Sake,” Los Angeles Times (March
31, 2002). I might note that economic downturn in the U.S. in 2003
forced postponement of the expansion of the Los Angeles County Art
Museum and other spectacular architectural projects.
Referencias:
Best,
Steven and Douglas Kellner (2001) The Postmodern Adventure.
Science Technology, and Cultural Studies at the Third Millennium.
New York and London: Guilford and Routledge.
Castells, Manuel (1996, 1997, 1998) The Networked Society.
Malden, Mass. and Oxford UK: Blackwell.
Croteau, David and Williams Hoynes (2001) The Business of Media.
Corporate Media and the Public Interest. Thousand Oaks, Cal.:
Pine Forge Press.
Debord, Guy (1967) Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black
and Red.
Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno (1972) Dialectic of Enlightenment.
New York: Continuum.
Huizinga, Johann (1986) Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element
in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press.
_____________ (1997) The Autumn of the Middle Ages. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Kellner, Douglas (1989) Critical Theory, Marxism, and Modernity.
Cambridge and Baltimore. Polity Press and John Hopkins University
Press.
______________ (1995) Media Culture. London and New York:
Routledge.
______________ (2001) Grand Theft 2000. Lanham, Md.: Rowman
and Littlefield.
________________ (2002) “Theorizing Globalization,”
Sociological Theory, Vol. 20, Nr. 3 (November): 285-305.
_______________ (2003a) Media Spectacle. London and New
York: Routledge.
_______________ (2003b) From September 11 to Terror War: The
Dangers of the Bush Legacy. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield.
Marcuse, Herbert (1964) One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon
Press.
Ritzer, George (1993; revised edition 1996) The McDonaldization
of Society. Thousand Oaks, Ca.: Pine Forge Press.
___________ (1999) Exchanting a Disenchanted World. Revolutionizing
the Means of Consumption. Thousand Oaks, Ca.: Pine Forge Press.
Watson, James L. (ed) (1997) Golden Arches East: McDonald's
in East Asia. Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Press.
Wolf, Michael J. (1999) Entertainment Economy: How Mega-Media
Forces are Transforming Our Lives. New York: Times Books
Dr.
Douglas Kellner
University of California Los Angeles,
USA |