The spectacle of judgment
In “Society of the Spectacle” Guy Debord emphasizes the passivity of the spectacle. People are awed into watching rather than acting- by TV, by mass media generally, by celebrity culture, and so on: “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.” he later adds: “The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance” and then: “The basically tautological character of the spectacle flows from the simple fact that its means are simultaneously its ends. It is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory.”
Since Guy Debord’s time, the spectacle hasn’t gone away, but it has moved into a new phase, which we could well call the active spectacle, enabled by the internet and other communication devices. People are invited to join in the spectacle, to help determine its direction, to help create it. But the spectacle still isn’t the real world, and so just as the previous ‘passive’ spectacle provided an alternative to acting, the new ‘active’ spectacle still provides an alternative to acting meaningfully. It invites us to join in the creation of representation as an alternative to action.
Apart from simply generating more content to look at, the main kind of representation this “active spectacle” invites us to participate in is the activity of judgment. We rate things, people, events, and so on good and bad- especially bad.
Judgment as an activity has a number of odd features. It is addictive in an unusual way- to stop judging things feels like the acceptance of what you have previously judged, thus to stop judging once you have begun feels morally compromised and dangerous. Once you have opened the eye of judgment, it is not so much that it feels righteous to judge as that it feels like the very lowest possible bar of moral decency. To not judge is only one step removed from doing the act yourself. Maybe not judging is a secret sign that you have previously done a wicked thing.
Moreover, judgment feels closer to action than any other form of representational activity, and maybe it really is in some contexts, but not this one.
Only those who are innocent of power can be harmed by judgment alone.
“The culture wars” are just an immense festival of judgment. That they have two mutually judging sides reflects many factors- the nature of politics, the need for absolute dichotomous clarity that the act of judgment presupposes…
The idea that complaining about things, people, etc. will, in and of itself, affect anything can be said, only half-jokingly, to reflect a belief in sympathetic magic. After all, sympathetic magic is the idea that affecting or creating representations will change things in themselves.
Furthermore, our (magical) activity is a highly individualized activity. Many have complained about the ‘mob mentality of the online world, but the truth is that online we only ever reach the lowest level of collectivity in support of a common goal- all doing the same thing at once. We swarm, rather than cooperate in any meaningful sense.
People have rightly identified the viciousness with which we behave online as unusual. One reason we behave so viciously here is that we are aware of the powerless character of our magic on some level. Illogically, we try to compensate by intensifying the futile activity. All we can do is judge even harder and harsher. To fall back on a cliche: in some ways, our predicament is not dissimilar to what Kissinger said of student politics: “The reason that university politics is so vicious is that the stakes are so small”.
Now that I’ve outlined the basic case, let me make a few concessions. First of all, the majority of internet users are still fairly passive. Their judgment may consist only of upvoting or liking things, or a share at the most. In some ways, they are almost still living in the old spectacle.
But for those who feel the need to act to do something the active spectacle is a new trap that they may not escape as easily as they would have escaped the passive spectacle. Instead, they become the posters. The medium-sized Twitter accounts. The Reddit thread makers and so on.
We should not delude ourselves into thinking we have more control even over the ‘active’ spectacle than we do. This dream realm ultimately belongs to capital, and everything we see in our feed is a choice of its self-serving algorithms. Still, arguing over whether we have 80% or 20% control over dust and ashes would miss the point.
I am not an anthropologist. My comparison to magic should be seen as a comparison to our popular image of sympathetic magic, rather than to the thing itself. I think there are probably real points of comparison here, but I’m not qualified to pursue this argument.
I will grant the active spectacle is not entirely powerless, it can educate, but that education doesn’t seem to lead to action, and its content is dry, abstract and dogmatic. Consciously and unconsciously our education via spectacle leads us to overestimate the power of judgment.
That said, even the concession that it can educate is only provisional, who can say how critical people would be of the system right now in a hypothetical alternative world like ours but without mass participatory media?
I concede that it is a possibility that the active spectacle will be subverted and overcome from within- perhaps by setting off a unionization wave-, though I think it is unlikely. Certainly, there are more or less useful ways of engaging with it, or else I wouldn’t be writing this online. However, At the margin, it’s clear we ought to log off more.
One of the interesting features of this active spectacle is that a sense of doom hangs over it. It seems like it’s going to collapse at any moment. In this regard, it is the opposite of Debord’s spectacle- liminal rather than eternal.
I’m not sure whether society is close to collapse or not. But whether we are, or are not close to collapse, I suspect that the widespread fatalism and sense of doom about the system, in a weird way, protects the system. This mode of life feels so doomed that nobody is bothering to give it a push. Even as I make it, I am suspicious of this conclusion- generally speaking, a sense of lingering doom helps destroy social formations rather than preserve them. However in this special case, maybe not.
One of our greatest mistakes starting in the 60s was contrasting apathy with action. Pathos does not guarantee action, indeed beyond a certain fever pitch, it works contrary to it.
While Marx’s insistence that he was beyond the moral judgment of capitalism was, philosophically, ridiculous, perhaps there was wisdom to it.
