Our recognition that the reproduction of advanced and advancing late capitalist societies often translates into the depletion of the earths human and biological-ecological resources should be an encouragement to develop Guy Debords critique of postmodern society in directions that allow us to conceptualize how its wasteful modes of reproduction transform both immanent and practical life into a nihilistic project while providing possibilities for the creation of concrete situations enabling us to overturn its destructive accumulative schemes. Debord has of course characterized ours as a society of the spectacle,# a social formation in which, through the circulation of symbols, the capitalist mode of production coordinates all areas of social life. Specifically, modern societies that have long been organized around the commodity form of exchange now have reached a higher level of subtlety in their power to base social organization on the circulation of representational norms embodied in commodities. Thus the commodity-image compels behaviors that reiterate power because a typical spectacular lifestyle is a consequence of the absorption of symbolic powers that are reified in that commodity-image but which also sustain the prevalent accumulative mechanisms. Indeed the spectacle represents an ideological system claiming that through the current dominant mode of production society has become a context in which making sense of ones life is ultimately within ones power though such a claim reposes on its successful release of a seductive flurry of commodities that actually predisposes us into vested modes of thought and behavior.
Our aim consists in figuring out how the spectacle represents a reactionary horizon that has transfigured our world but whose internal contradictions, experienced through a movement of fear, will cause us to confront its hegemony by seriously questioning our own spectacle-constituted subjectivities. Appropriately undertaking this goal will require us addressing the basic elements of the dialectical effects of spectacular fear in different parts of this paper: Part I will show that the power of the society of the spectacle to shape human perception and behavior mostly has to with its ability to convince its subjects that happiness and social meaning are a function of the commoditys power to adequately map both human desire and social relations, though ultimately the spectacular subjects sense of satisfaction represents a powerful means of integrating her into prevalent productive-accumulative systems. Part II argues that what spectacular subjects believe to be a satisfying way of life in an affluent society actually hides a state of deep spiritual impoverishment: the imagistic world-being released by the commodity represents a nihilistic world-being partly founded upon the baroque personality the system attributes to its subject. Part III will focus on fear as the crucial subterranean force that grounds the nihilistic horizon of spectacular subjects, who are aware of their alienating and inauthentic lifestyles but lack the courage to challenge the hegemony of the spectacle in ways that endanger their access to the representational powers of commodities that confer identity and social prestige. And part IV will show that the fear that has compelled them to cite the symbolic forms of the commodity as the main elements of self-understanding and practical existence eventually gives way to another fear about the destructive social effects of the irrationality of the spectacular order.
I.
Spectacular society equates happiness with its subjects ability to consume the symbols of wealth and power reified in the commodity. The spectacle is money for contemplation only, for here the totality of use has already been bartered for the totality of abstract representation. The spectacle is not just the servant of pseudo-use it is already, in itself, the pseudo-use of life (Debord, #49). Images now rule as the main socioeconomic, cultural, and political mediating forces owing to their power to determine, in an apriori fashion, use-value itself. That is, the representational content of commodity-symbols has surpassed the mere physical collection of commodity-things as one of the basic means for determining equivalencies in the peddling of social prestige. We detect a transcendental quality at work here because the commodity, which we see as an elemental thing, actually projects a formidable power whose dialectic exceeds its everydayness: its symbolic force opens up a deeply suggestive level of meaning that recreates us as individuals whose lives embody the best ideals of society. Debord reminds us that the present stage, in which social life is completely taken over by the accumulated products of the economy, entails a generalized shift from having to appearing: all effective having must now derive both its immediate prestige and its ultimate raison d etre from appearance (#17). This situation of course represents a basic feature of modern affluent society, in which high levels of material enjoyment normalize the idea that its members should expect the gratification of most of their needs since the powerful service base of the economy supposedly never fails in its capacity to satisfy everyones material needs. The financial side of the spectacle grants consumer credit in an often liberal fashion, the assumption being that consumers, portrayed as basically desiring-beings, always subsist in thrall of the movements of things, having succumbed to the advertising prowess of the system. The spectacle then displays a maddening rush to deliver as much as possible on the promise of quarterly or annual model changes on the commodity to guarantee belongingness. Ideologically suffused images, especially in our media and entertainment industries, have become a powerful means to satisfy our desire to act according to the moral order of things: to consume the image is to belong but also to affirm ones personal worth as a respectable member of society.
This movement of mystification and recognition, Debord believes, dissimulates a dynamic of socioeconomic predation that pervades many other areas of late modern society. What pushes for greater rationality is also what nourishes the irrationality of hierarchical exploitation and repression (Debord, #46). A parasitic social organization, based on surplus accumulation coerced through the symbolic powers of things, supplants an autonomously derived social, cultural and moral mode of reproduction based on the truly authentic needs of members of society. The consumers willingness to borrow, work, and spend, as a way to secure a place in society and avoid social invisibility among the ranks of the marginal underclass, helps secure surplus capital, for the spectacle basically extends the dominant productive systems thriving on the imposition of commercial solutions to most of our needs. The spectacular subject, fascinated by easy consumer credit, has become a serf since the constant pursuit of prestige through the commodity also guarantees its perennial indebtedness to spectacular finance capitalism.
This regressive process further deepens when there emerges a widespread cultural appeal for image-making, rather than critical dialogue, as an effective tool for formulating social policies; that is, our most important social institutions also see it as advantageous to peddle in symbols, rather than real progressive solutions, as a way of achieving desired social goods. Debord insists that the fetichistic appearance of pure objectivity in spectacular relationships conceals their true character as relationships between human beings and between classes; a second Nature thus seems to impose inescapable laws upon our environment (#24). In politics, religion, news transmission, etc., the managers of the system seek not to stimulate thoughtfully arrived at values but to cultivate passive social acquiescence through the occult powers of things, so that the basic mentalities that give determinations to the lives of spectacular subjects, handed down by their spectacular masters, prepare the former to actively assume their roles in the process of surplus accumulation in an otherwise nihilistic society.
II.
By the term nihilism we understand a modern condition whereby our mode of existence, as individuals persuaded by commonly accepted modern ethical and spiritual ideals, becomes destructive to our personal identity, our society, and our culture. For subjects subsisting in a society blighted by nihilistic practices, life under traditional values, according to Friedrich Nietzsche, has become aesthetically, morally, and physiologically regressive, for the modern subject has lost control over the process of autonomously solving lifes practical challenges; applying traditional values on current social conditions has produced negative results since new socio-cultural forces have emerged to disprove the efficacy of old norms, while most people have come to internalize their exclusion from the arena of value-making.# We face a situation in which our fascination for the symbols of spectacular society has turned into a fear-driven process that compels a masochistic outlook in us because incurring violence on our own sense of individuality ultimately follows from our submission to the commoditys mystical powers.#
But a much more specific elucidation of the spectacle as a nihilistic ouverture on the world requires that we grasp how, on the one hand, its symbolic forms mystify us owing to the baroque luster they attribute to our lifestyles but also how, on the other hand, these symbolic forms attempt to impose themselves, in a quasi-tyrannical fashion, as the only horizon that coincides with life itself is successful only to the extent that fear motivates our commitment to this regressive appropriation of our world that promotes a spiritually harmful lifestyle. Representing spectacular individuality as baroque points to the reality that this individuality is marked by personality qualities that hide the utter emptiness of the idols that shape it. Whereas in majestic seventeenth century Europe the exuberance, colorfulness, weightiness, dynamicity, and theatricality of artistic styles helped the masses find a place within an oppressive political and spiritual order that marks society in the wake of horrific religious wars, in spectacular society similar cultural features, acquired through the consumption of commodity-symbols, now serve as the main elements relied upon to fashion pleasurable personal identities and lifestyles. Through their absorption of commodity-symbols spectacular subjects find themselves in a situation in which their fetichistic fascination for the dramatic, sensual, and expansive qualities of commodities transforms their horizon into an imagistic Being that practically blind them from the depletion of the earths natural and human resources owing to a way of life that thrives on excess.
The power of commodities to give meaning to everyday existence therefore partly derives from their ability to inspire in consumers a sense of efficacy over most of the practical challenges that define everyday life. The commodity-image, in terms of its symbolic content and from the point of view of its consumers, offers a deeply suggestive account of personal existence: it provides a telos to personal existence, turns being-in-itself into an imagistic matrix that extends our sense experiences, while delivering possibility as a mode of living. Ones absorption of commodities provides to them an opportunity to weave for oneself a biographical sketch that dramatizes but also resolves the lifestyle challenges of mundane existence, now the object of cinematic artists and publicists, veritable magicians whose talents ground the advertising industrys ability to revolutionalize everyday life and serve a corporate project seeking to commodify life itself. Having turned to images as a means to recreate our lives, we also have allowed the system to set the symbolic parameters within which we can establish our life narratives. Part of the social prestige that follows from proving ones access to and ability to consume the latest favored commodities includes turning their symbolic contents into statements about oneself. Commodities serve as conduits for personally communicating the reality of social mobility, that is, ones ability to afford a lifestyle whose glitters prove its transcendence over the banal patterns of everyday life. The spectacle reveals powers in us that we could never have conceived by ourselves, unaided by commodity-images. The exciting innovations (in fashion, gadgetry, or behavioral style) that adorn everyday existence iterate important personal capabilities: the power to give life a spiritual context through images but also the power to display the positive qualities of our will and character. Meanwhile the systems directors, always interested in mobilizing the consciousnesses of the masses for the sake of economic reproduction but also as a way of disappearing social conflicts, have now found an effective opportunity for dissolving these conflicts through the unfolding of symbols, for conflicts related to lifestyle are proposed as life-death issues for society and manipulated to draw a veil over socio-economic issues that deeply (structurally) affect the lives of spectacular subjects. Whether a winner or a loser in the great debates of the culture wars, the participant in such a spectacular forum validates the systems moral and spiritual norms by tolerating those debates permeation of the discourses that inform most institutions and practices of the quotidian but also by allowing others to propose pseudo-issues as critical social challenges, while truly significant systemic issues are pushed out of the public sphere. A positive consequence of this disturbing cultural situation is the spectacles ability to unfold our personal lives within the context of a story that convinces us that our fears and aspirations are at the center of the larger conflicts that decide the fate of our society. The spectacular system unveils the individual who absorbs its idols as a polychromic and dignified being whose life story matters to the fate of society.
The embellished account of personal existence that follows from consuming commodities produces a noticeable intensity in the sensuous aspects of life. Spectacular subjects may reason through the potential effects of commodities on lifestyles before or after purchasing them, but much in the personal factors that compel consumption has to do with a spontaneous appropriation of objects sensuous and aesthetic qualities (fashion style, beauty, mass appeal, or message, as exquisitely executed by advertisers and marketers). A perpetual pursuit of the exciting attributes of objects has turned into a situation in which the sensualization of daily living has become the norm.# The consumption of the commodity represents a means for the subject to perpetuate its enjoyment of appearances but also a way of returning to a condition of self-control: keeping the senses busy but satisfied, as in the case of the addict who requires a daily dosage of drug to recover his sense of normality, has become a balanced life for many of us, the result being of course the production of even more commodities that sensualize life, especially when this also represents a learning process for a system always eager to discover and capitalize on patterns of popular needs, as suggested by the introduction of new commodities. Our consumption of commodities recreates them as organs of our sensual constitution: for example, TV, sports, and movie stars, some of the most culturally appealing products of the system, owe much of their mass appeal to their serving as conduits for our personal longings for good looks, wealth, physical valor, courage, political power, romantic love, etc.# We see a degree of interchangeability between the irrationality of the consumer and the rationality that governs the life narratives of star-commodities.
An immanent correlate of this sensualization of existence is an expansive outlook that structures the world according to the law of the commodity. What has begun as an effect of the commodity-images exchange value has now turned into a staunchly accumulative worldview. Such an imperialistic perspective on our world, now appropriated as a constant reservoir for material-symbolic self-renewal, parallels our absorption of spectacular forms. The cultural relevance of any elements in the multiplicity of our world becomes a function of the impressionistic dialectic that results from the spectacles transfiguration of that multiplicity: the complex features of the world acquire value only to the extent that they can serve the sensualistic determinations of our spectacular way of life. Life develops a dynamicity begotten by the logic of a social reality constantly seeking to reduce the fluxes of life to the processions of objects. While the managers of the system seek the commodification of that multiplicity, the spectacular subject mostly embraces it as an object of enjoyment, for being an extension of the norms of the commodity world, it has learned to internalize its spectacular identity, that is, its detachment from the multiplicity of becoming. Since it no longer sees itself as a continuity of that multiplicity, the latter ceases to be the object of its care and becomes the object of its excessive use, its degradation being never seen as a degradation of existence itself. The spectacular subject tends to arrange and rearrange the complexity of nature according to the pre-reflective, bodily dispositions of a self that values a pleasurable but wasteful lifestyle. Its contacts with nature, for example, reduce to prepackaged experiences related to visits to local parks and forest reserves, experiences that reiterate its mastery over nature but also gratify its constant curiosity for thrills. The more the spectacle reduces the scope of natures involvement with human existence to provide space for the processes of the commodity (i.e. suburbs, freeways, shopping centers, factories, etc.), the more what remains of nature is groomed and sold as commodities designed to feed the sensual longings of spectacular subjects. We detect a similar project of sensually colonizing being-in-itself in the spectacular subjects expectation of awesome and entertaining experiences in the areas of religious worship, politics, leisure, etc., where the discursively convincing reduces to what appeals to the senses, not to what uplifts through reason. The spectacular subject finds itself at home in a society whose every aspect customarily provides a space for its sensualizing determinations.
Therefore the spectacular system owes part of its success to the baroque appeal of its symbolic forms; it can confidently rely on the docility of its subjects owing to its ability to afford to them a deeply meaningful place within its ideological framework. Spectacular subjects consumption of the commodity-image transforms them into individuals whose practical needs and choices apparently matter to the order of things, for the narratives of their personal existences assume majestic qualities that identify them with the symbolico-cultural configurations of their world, while their sensual, idiosyncratic extensions of themselves into the imagistic being of the spectacle, a kingdom of needs and gratified desires, become a means to stamp the world with their individualities, one of whose main qualities, also gifts of the system of appearances, is an expansive tendency that equates life with possibility.
III.
Though ones ability to consume as many commodities as possible constitutes a crucial aspect of personal happiness in spectacular society, it is fear that ultimately explains how a nihilistic, spectacular way of life becomes our only horizon: we tolerate its alienating hegemony because we lack the courage to positively question and reverse its harmful project of securing material fulfillment for all of us. The spectacles threat to existence becomes clearer to us when we recognize our own role in the constitution of our spectacular identities. The subjects mundane life in spectacular society displays a paucity in its power to creatively contribute to societys well-being by engaging in social reform, political activism, and critical discourses about some of the pernicious aspects of culture since the logic of the commodity has almost completely colonized the public sphere. The subjects spectacular identity, whose self-making possibilities reduce to superficial engagements with often irrelevant culture wars issues, has become a way for it to divert itself from the recognition that it has lost the ability to shape the destiny of society, being left only with the right to passive consumption of spectacular directives from above. The admirable people who personify the system, writes Debord, are indeed well known for not being what they seem to be; they have achieved greatness by embracing a level of reality lower than that of the most insignificant individual life-and everyone knows it (#61). Spectacular subjects have become skilled at hiding from themselves the reality of the contrast between the spectacles promise of autonomy and their utterly heteronomous lifestyles in ways that threaten the health of our culture. Most of them refuse to dwell on the thought that their individualities, extensions of spectacular norms, represent vested constructs they must force upon themselves to belong. The constitution of spectacular subjecthood is not as straightforward as one may assume: it represents a work of dressage in which we actively cultivate our own passivity.
Debord deplores our toleration of an economic worldview grounded on the refusal to recognize and build on the healing powers of the human body. A state of lack basically characterizes spectacular life, for the promised state of material bliss in consumption remains eluding. Debord asks us to acknowledge that the sole real status attaching to a mediocre object of this kind is to have been placed, however briefly, at the very center of social life and hailed as the revelation of the goal of the production process. But even this spectacular prestige evaporates into vulgarity as soon as the object is taken home by a consumer and hence by all other consumers too (#69). Since we recognize the ephemeral nature of the objects ability to gratify, we can discern the difference between its limited powers to gratify and our desire for perpetual gratification. The commoditys fleeting powers of satisfaction suggest that it ultimately functions as a betrayal of desire: its distractions are very appealing, but their limited opiate qualities confound the self and perpetuate our lust for objects, while ultimately making it impossible to re-orientate desire toward the quest for progressive social practices that passionately focus on human well-being. For example, in the world of the spectacle the body has ceased to function as a positive subterranean event, a phenomenon whose forces serve as resources for creating the kind of knowledge, technologies, and lifestyle strategies that authentically advance our social and spiritual well-being: the human body, as appropriated by spectacular corporate processes, merely serves as a reservoir of forces useful for capital accumulation. Spectacular scientists conceptualize the body as a mechanical composite of organs that merely require shaping and molding. The body has ceased to be a totality that nourishes healthy social and cultural strategies; it is transformed into a body-machine manipulated through the splendors of commodity-symbols for the sake of profit. Needs are added, deemphasized, distorted, or eliminated whenever the logic of profit demands it, for the body is now appropriated as the spectacular body, a product of the dominant economic ideology, a process exemplified by powerful contemporary industries related to bodily aesthetics (i.e. gyms, diets, plastic surgery, etc.) in Western societies. The spectacular body no longer needs nature to sustain itself; it can subsist with synthetically and biotechnologically manufactured drugs, foods, physiological organs and compounds. Having substituted its artificial-capitalized forms for our real bodily-self, whose forces and connections with becoming should be the real power behind cultural progress, the spectacle has forced us into a state of alienation because we now face life as a distorted reality, whereby the dominant cultural norms are actually detrimental to a healthy practical life.
But most spectacular subjects find it hard to turn their state of alienation into a commitment to shed aside their spectacular lifestyles. Though the spectacles imagistic contexts constitute a higher abstraction of a social formation whose basic operative structure is corporate power, it makes sense to most spectacular subjects simply because it assumes an objective and reassuring guise; it is a reality purged of our common fear of being a casualty of scarcity, a more perfect level of social awareness blind to socioeconomic inequalities and in which there subsists a powerful hope for the satisfaction of most of our social aspirations. Again, what is peddled to consumers is not only means of fulfilling desire but also opportunities for securing social prestige. Through the commoditys symbolic content, the subject reassures itself that it has clearly achieved some higher level of mobility from societys leveling forces. The system of appearances has become the great avenue to self-recognition and recognition by other members of society, as ones level of material existence reaches a level seen as impressive by a society that values exuberant consumption as a mark of social success: within the realm of the spectacle the subjects life has apparently finally acquired its proper purpose. Furthermore spectacular practices represent a context in which the state operates one of its greatest functions: attributing reliable political identities to its citizens. Through consumption (whose converse feature is a widespread abuse of consumer credit) citizens show their willingness to support the social-economic institutions that sustain the economic viability of the state but which actually provide the framework for the concentration of power in the hands of a few. That is, through spending citizens assume all kinds of taxes, bonds, and payments that support the state but also fund the subsidies that guarantee the financial viability of corporations, in the last instance. Due to spectacular subjects basic preoccupation with consumption, work, and the perennial race to escape indebtedness not only is their attention deflected from issues of political and social reform, but also they otherwise come to fear making demands about socioeconomic and political changes that could remedy clear inequities because most them are convinced by the expert ideologues of the ruling order that demanding change actually could mean losing their comfortable social positions (or ability to consume.) So whereas for the state the spectacle represents the best instrument for maintaining its social hegemony, for the spectacular subject, which may yet recognize the inauthentic and socially unhealthy consequences of its lifestyle, there subsists a fear about the social and lifestyle consequences of revolutionizing its everyday practices in a manner that represents a material and ideological break from the spectacle.
A radical negation of the negation remains a deeply challenging undertaking because it would have to be an attack on both subjectivity and objectivity. It would be a painful process requiring an attack on ones self-interpretation as a social being and shedding aside ones social status, while potentially turning oneself into a political pariah since one has eventually attacked the roots of state power in spectacular individuality. Such a socially inflicted pain requires denying the system the use of ones body as a medium for power and provoking the practical transfiguration of ones lifestyle. Our refusal to consume, for example, represents a rejection of the commodity-images representational power over our bodies, but this would involve effecting violence on ourselves since we would probably deprive our bodies of long-relied upon, habitual means of gratifying its needs. The pain of dissecting ourselves from the spectacle also comports a spiritual aspect, with important moral, material, and political implications. Turning away from the spectacle involves removing ourselves from the capitalist moral sphere of exchange and contractual reciprocity, and the index of that type of marginalization would be a reduction in ones credit worthiness, a social reprimand one earns as a result of becoming an obstacle to capital accumulation since one could no longer be counted on to show a steady capacity to consume, take up debt, and remain financially dependent. The moral self-confidence that accrues to oneself as a result of rebelling against the system is followed by the system striking back and degrading ones status as a worthy member of a society governed by the commodity law. One of the social institutions most threatened by such an ascetic attitude toward the spectacle would have to be the state, which faces losses in fiscal revenues but also a newly proven inability to rely on the spectacle to insure politically safe behaviors among citizens: the anti-spectacle rebel who successfully minimizes the cycle of production, consumption, and material and spiritual bondage in her own self-made existence has given to herself a space in which she can contemplate a radically progressive social and political environment. Indeed the person who rejects the spectacle has given herself a powerful platform for reform since the social ills (waste, exploitation, violence, environmental degradation, etc.) that may have led her to reject the spectacle constitute the same mechanisms that ground the wealth and power of the managers of both the spectacle and the moloch state. In spectacular society alternate lifestyles also represent political statements.
Therefore the spectacular subject would rather focus on distracting itself with the processions of the commodity than critically face up to its own lack of courage. A hidden experience of personal agitation and anxiety marks its life, for it recognizes disturbing contradictory elements in its lifestyle and worldview: the reality of the social and cultural problems created by the imagistic system but also both its own fear about undertaking the kinds of resistant praxis needed to remedy the situation and its perennial quest for external mechanisms that would shield it from personally confronting the spectacles dismal effects. It welcomes the spectacles provision of the symbolic tools required to dissimulate that deeply unsettling experience, for the will to escape both fear and anxiety causes a moral and spiritual void that, it believes, could be filled by inscribing the radiance of the systems baroque rationality on its own body. It sees in the spectacle the institution of a deeper level of truth since the world of the commodity-image has proven its power to depict personal life in its most appealing aspects. The systems mastery of the technology of image making allows it to emphasize the beauty and wondrousness of the world while artificially exorcizing its nihilistic and ugly aspects.# The spectacle has become a successful hyperreal substitution to an existence of fear due to our longing for spiritual relevance but also because of its ability to rely on technology to transform the world into our personal, fabled sensual saturnalia.
Moreover the spectacle has successfully affirmed its spiritual superiority over the Real, that is, the world as the product of the authentic practical challenges that face us and the set of non-spectacular, autonomously derived solutions we apply to it. The Real has become something suspect and undesirable because it can potentially inspire defiance against (spectacular) normality since its practical authenticity may contradict the systems ideology of waste by suggesting that we operate a leap of conscience and take hold of a world in which our complicity with the forms of surplus accumulation cause harmful societal effects (some of us may not want to take responsibility for a world disfigured by greed, passivity, and hypocrisy.) Having given up on the idea of resisting the spectacle, in the face of a massive onslaught of technology and distractions and due to their desire for impressive lifestyles, most subjects of the spectacle have chosen not to take up a critical appropriation of their own lives, something they see as too stressful since a consequence of recognizing that the commodity poses several problems related to wastefulness, conflict, degradation, and misappropriation of social resources may shame them into undertaking radical remedial actions when for a long time they have learned to thrive on their own passivity. They are conscious of the Real, but it has ceased to be morally relevant. Having pushed the Real out of the moral sphere, the spectacular worldview no longer relies on it to legitimize its norms.
Moral relevance in such circumstances reduces to what the commodity realm conveys: the pseudo-social crises of the so-called culture wars that actually draw a veil over our moral-spiritual consciousnesses. In other words, most spectacular subjects avoid the issue of morally facing up to the ugly implications of their lifestyles by simply excluding it from their personal horizons and transferring their critical responsibility to agents of the spectacle. For example, rather than demanding that their government institutions and officials set up structures to police an economic sphere whose excesses have the potential of destroying the socioeconomic cohesion of our society, spectacular subjects prefer asking the spectacles corporate-financial institutions to show self-restraint and an ability to regulate themselves, a social policy that tremendously serve spectacular masters always adept at exploiting the gullibility and ignorance of the public to effect ever perverse transfers of wealth. Their passivity explains the role of the spectacle as the favored forum for resolving the great issues facing society, with experts (commodities in themselves) in ethics, sciences, politics, and religion displayed on the mediatic stage and allowed to broadcast pseudo-critical judgments on the very system that supports them and thrives on limiting any debates about social issues to an articulate few. In effect spectacular society commodifies the moral sphere itself, for our social conscience or the yearning we normally have for humane practical solutions for the issues that plague our society, is neutralized by reducing those issues to the opinions of these commodity-star-ideologues and by supplanting the viewers sense of practical responsibility with the idea that only the systems agents have what it takes to think through the great problems facing society. The spectacle trains its subjects to internalize their sense of practical powerlessness: one submits, for example, to the idea that our ecological and socioeconomic crises may be non-issues since they have immensely complex aspects, so that one should fear misinformation and bad judgment unless one surrenders the debate to spectacular technocrats, always eager to channel and diffuse moral outrage while discouraging the formation of progressive social reform movements by systematically portraying them as anti-social or immoral. In effect the commodity system sells to its consumers their own moral inactivity.
IV.
However some of us can still hope to weaken the spectacles hegemony to a level that suits a truly progressive modern society because the dialectic of spectacular fear offers the possibility for recovering life as an autonomous project in the process of iterating the idols of the system. Spectacular subjects would eventually find it hard not to commit to a program of negation of the system when, in times of social and economic crises, they confront the reality that their deteriorating socioeconomic situation contradicts the commodity-symbols claim to deliver happiness. We cannot fail to see an emancipatory dimension in the foundational fear of spectacular subjecthood because the contradictions of an economic system only driven by the profit motive and controlled by corporate administrators whose greed has led to a basic disregard of our rules of fair play and sense of communal good effectively reveal to its subjects that the commodities sought as a diversion from their lack of courage to challenge the system actually embody the values of an economic ideology that threatens social survival itself. Spectacular subjects practical lives, in the wake of such a revelation, would now have to involve finding ways to reverse this dangerous development in their socioeconomic conditions. Debord demands that we, spectacular subjects having recognized the need for a social and spiritual turn about, engage in a process of ideological resistance with concrete, progressive social implications, a strategy denoted by his concept of detournment and requiring a destabilization of existing ideological conditions through a re-inscription of their manifestations in both immanent and practical life (#203). Detournement, Debord tells us, includes in its positive use of existing concepts a simultaneous recognition of their rediscovered fluidity, of their inevitable destruction (#205). It suggests that our self-interpretations are not what they seem to us on a prima facie level and that through an attitude of care for the spiritual well-being of ourselves and our world, we can provoke the fall of the reigning idols by vigorously confronting their secret to the effect that they crumble when we deny them our bodies as the loci that ground their social hegemony. That is, the spectacular subject, a material and mental extension of the dominant mode of production, learns to confront the system within its own spiritual and practical constitution, substituting the systems ideology of excess with the more proper spirit of finitude that actually marks the becoming of our world.
Reversing the destructive aspects of the spectacles onslaught on life presupposes then that the subjects critical examination of its own practical constitution will turn into a critical deconstruction of the spectacular system. Indeed an individuals focus on its own self as the object of its desires, a first step toward escaping ideology, has the potential of provoking a clash of desires between itself and spectacular masters seeking a similar power over its subjectivity since that individual, an extension of the system, has for a long time mediated powers poetical appropriation of our world. As already noted, the spectacular subjects lack of confidence in its ability to wrestle from the system the power to remake the world, owing to its desire to maintain social acceptance in consumer society, causes it to seek the power of self-making in the imaginary world of the spectacle: it subsists in the belief that if it cannot reform the system, it can at least hope to fashion an acceptable individuality out of the systems baroque ideals. Such a quest for self-recognition compels then a strong personal preoccupation with the systems imagistic being, that is, a yearning for recognition from the spectacular world. As Hegel pointed out, concerning the slave who finds himself by turning nature into his own dominion, being-in-itself, the being of life, is no longer separate from the being-for-itself of consciousness; through labor, self-consciousness rises to its self-intuition in being.# The spectacular subject similarly wishes to recreate itself as an individual whose thoughts, choices, and actions can transfigure the world by imposing self-generated interpretive structures on it: the spectacle has become the context in which praxis recovers its status as a fundamental mode of existence. However choosing to assert its own perspectives on its own subjectivity by absorbing the commoditys symbolic powers also means that the subject has failed to transcend the being of the spectacle and can only subsist as an extension, a cybernetic conduit, of the spectacle, for, through both work and consumption, it has now totally immersed itself in spectacular forms as the necessary framework for everyday existence, especially when spectacular life reduces to a mere dependence on the availability of commodities. Spectacular subjects have in effect transformed themselves into the mediating force through which our world has become a boundless source of resources for the system since the subjects insatiable drive to mold personal life through a never ending circulation of commodities actually becomes the justification and the main guiding mechanism for flooding the world with commodities that constitute individuality.
If fear compels spectacular subjects to embrace the baroque rationality of the system, fear will also cause them to negate it through a philosophy of finitude. Their fear of social marginality establishes the power of the commodity to constitute their social identities as consumer-subjects, but this latent fear will turn into a powerful, open principle for action when it gives way to a sudden realization of the omnipresence of the threat of social nothingness. Indeed periods of serious economic crises show that the mundane drive to cope with fear through consumption has often caused spectacular subjects to overreach themselves and destroy their own viability as full members of spectacular society since their excess now threatens to end their ability to consume. The terrible angst that results from such depressive socioeconomic conditions not surprisingly compels some individuals to commit themselves to change. The relationship between the resulting social and political attitudes of contemporary US consumers, victims of the deceptive credit and investments practices of powerful financial institutions that rule our economic life, and the commodity markets best exemplifies this negative process. Many have learned, through the brutal reality of foreclosures, bankruptcy, homelessness, anxiety, personal guilt, a significant drop in living standard, etc., that their effort to realize happiness, embodied in the financial and symbolic benefits supposed to have accrued to them as homeowners (and quintessential American dream achievers), has turned into an economic crisis that actually threatens the economic health of both their society and the world, as the financial pathology that began as unsafe and sometimes fraudulent investments in local home mortgage markets has now infected world financial institutions. Many have chosen not only to cut down their levels of consumer spending but also the strategy of demanding a serious departure from a political order that historically had upheld a cannibalistic economic-financial order. Despite the spectacles perennial cult of excess, the subject has realized that his ability to mobilize commodities for the sake of self-making is finite: spectacular managers have an ultimate veto power over its access to them. Such a crisis then has the potential of considerably weakening important social values peddled by the spectacle, for the latters idols have proven their fundamental disconnection with reality when not efficiency, truth, and a sense of the communal good but ruinous greed and duplicity seem to govern the distribution of social prestige. Moreover the subject internalizes its helpless impotence in the face of a powerful spectacular system gathering on its sides all the ideological-police instruments that extend state and corporate infrastructures. Its internalization of fear has become an internalization of the limitless capacity of the system to overwhelm its aspirations for reforms and stifle its desire to overcome the limits of a confining life under the spectacle.
Our realization that the spectacular subject functions as a cybernetic extension of the system and that it may eventually recognize, through structurally-induced fear, that the systems excessive outlook endangers life itself, helps us understand why Debords idea of detournement requires weakening the cultural dominion of the spectacle by reshuffling the systems interpretive schemes within its subjects immanent and practical worlds. The device of detournement restores all their subversive qualities to past critical judgment that have congealed into respectable truths or, in other words, that have been transformed into lies (Debord, #206). It requires a hermeneutic overturning of the official codes to reveal the contradictions they dissimulate and cure ourselves from them. The subject who accepts this project of emancipation learns to blunt the impact of dangerous spectacular ideals and practices through the use of strategies akin to Michel Foucaults technologies of the self, whereby a subject occupies itself with its own moral and spiritual character, re-inscribing the purposes of the impulses of its spectacular personality, as a crucial step toward liberating being from regressive social practices. To cure itself from a chaos of empty but dangerous needs, a subject then requires modes of self-interpretation that replace those regressive needs with authentic, progressive ones. Detournement represents an autonomously arrived at discourse of self-control that circumvents the excesses of power when an individual reacts to its fear of the spectacles inherent threat to life by consciously learning to unfurl the discourses of control and exploitation that inscribe its practical being. Having repudiated the idea of an excessive consummation of the resources of our world, an experience of self-cannibalization since the world represents a concrete extension of ourselves, the subject demythicizes its own spectacular self, assuming personal strategies of self-alienation from a spectacular being-in-itself that cure the soul by recognizing the finitude that marks both the becoming of our world and subjectivity. Having grasped the finitude of the system, the individual seeking to escape the spectacular order learns to substitute its wasteful enjoyment of it, as promoted by the spectacle, with an attitude of care and moderation.
This requires the initial step of gaining a perspective over the plurality of needs that inscribes spectacular subjectivity. Detournement allows for a seizing up of being-for-itself via a critique of the totality (Debord, #204), so that engaging in a critical analysis, negation, and re-direction of ones lifestyle becomes a means to open up a new social possibility, especially when spectacular consciousness remains an extension of the system. Such a project, if we agree with Foucault that technologies of the self constitute a crucial step toward personal spiritual and practical rejuvenation, requires that one undergoes a process of self-discovery, for the soul cannot know itself except by looking at itself in a similar element, a mirror.# It learns to evaluate the real socio-cultural implications of its spectacular lifestyle whenever, in times of social crises, the system of appearances finds it difficult to hide the ugly consequences of that lifestyle. Having thus contemplated the ideological mirror, it will only see what terrifies it: the wasteful enjoyment of being-in-itself. The individual successfully completes such an act of taking hold of its whole self by first engaging in a dialogue with others about the real nature of the spectacle. For example, the forum for the trading of ideas provided by contemporary internet websites, especially those organized around blog exchanges, can serve as a basis for community consultations that invite enlightened individuals to examine themselves and effect positive internal change since such a dialogue in effect represents a dialogue with oneself through an exchange of thoughts about how best to end the systems nihilistic grip over personal existence. Moreover just having the experience of such dialogue constitutes an important progressive event in spectacular society even if no structural transformations take place because the experience itself will signal the existence of a will to resist or may motivate a movement toward a return to critical rationality as a mode of life. The subject learns to reject an ethos of life that threatens to destroy life itself through the maddening construction of an infinite number of needs that a world of scarcity and finiteness can never hope to gratify. Self-examination through the prism of a communal critique of the spectacle should provoke in the subject a will to cause progressive change: the aim is not so much to refine its own soul as it is to reform its lifestyle as a processuality within a quotidian constructed by the images of the spectacle. The discovery then of the self as a multiplicity of spectacular needs quickly gives way to a critical realization that such multiplicity cannot be fulfilled in a finite world unless one shows willingness to subsist in a morbid condition of utter melancholia resulting from the eventuality of a foolhardy descent into radical lack.
Detournement therefore involves a transfiguration of spectacular codes that promote a forgetting of the finitude of life while grounding practices threatening to destroy the earth and obliterate our ability to live as self-making beings. Foucault notes that in ancient Greek society taking care of oneself became linked to a constant writing activity. The self is something to write about, a theme or object (subject) of writing activity.# Transfiguring our spectacular subjectivities presupposes that we ideologically re-inscribe our baroque outlook since that outlook, a second nature to most of us, represents the subliminal manifestations of the accumulative intent of the spectacles bureaucratic masters. Debord insists that the meaning of words has a part in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress demands it. Staying close to an authors phrasing, plagiarism exploits his expression, erases false ideas, replaces them with correct ideas (#207). Securing freedom will require a successful confrontation with a reactionary group of political and economic decision-makers that believes that it can profit from an excessive and wasteful use of the earths resources, for through detournement one creates a distance from the official codes not only by pointing to their gaps, slippages and hidden aims but also by altering their signification through our substituting its baroque coherence with a discourse whose incoherence represents our own idiosyncratic (coherent) means of imposing new codes of social functioning that reflect our authentic needs. For example, after engaging in a serious critical meditation about the drastic effects of an ethos of unending consumption on the ecological and health conditions of society, one may make a series of decisions that changes the nature of the nihilistic practices our economic structure compels us to impose on earth: cutting down on wasteful discretionary spending, advocating for the production of commodities friendly to the earths resources, making constructive modifications on ones lifestyle, etc. These strategies can effectively overturn the hegemonic goals of the spectacle because they blunt its attitude of excess while constituting striking statements that encourage others to perceive the benefits of a new way of life that cares for the health and sustenance of the world. In other words, trough a critical analysis of how the spectacle constructs us as a multiplicity, one learns to reinterpret our way of life by repudiating superfluous and wasteful needs and elevating needs benevolent to life, while mainly relying on strategies that value self-control and caring.
However, although this movement of self-transfigurations represents the appropriate foundation for any positive change in our current alienating condition, it must be complemented by a democratic commitment to reclaim the state, the embodiment of communal purposes given rational forms, for government apparatuses probably represent some of our best instruments for overturning the unhealthy aims of the spectacle. We accept Nicos Poulantzass conceptualization of the state a crucible within which various forces in society confront each other, a strategic field configured by its condensation and reproduction of power relations among those forces.# And since power here expresses not only a mere monopoly of the states administrative and ideological instruments but also the ability of any social group to realize its interests in relation to other social groups,# those of us seeking to liberate ourselves from spectacular hegemony will have to come up with means to realize our progressive objectives within the social geography of the state: Debord demands that we organize in local grass-roots communities, whose reforming strategies permeate and interconnect the worlds of work, the family, school, the army, church, etc. from where we can confront and reverse the states effort to attribute to individuals their corporate-ideological positions (as consumer-subjects), a work of education and re-inscription that constitutes a first important step toward persuading government to appropriate our struggle against a worldview of waste and spiritual impoverishment. For Debord the direct democratic practices that characterize these grass-roots communities, best exemplified by the dynamics of workers councils, constitute the best location for achieving the transfiguration of the docile quality of our spectacular selves, for they are founded on the idea that all members equally participate in the decision-making process by relying on authentic, autonomous, self-generated values and lifestyles that constitute the best weapons against ideology and alienation (#87). Members of spectacular society seeking to escape its baroque yoke must accept the reality that an authentic, progressive transfiguration of their own subjectivities requires a transfiguration of their political world.
