Media Culture and the Triumph of the
Spectacle
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 ever-more sophisticated technology to dazzle consumers. Media
culture itself proliferates ever more technologically sophisticated spectacles
to seize audiences and increase their power and profit. The forms of
entertainment permeate news and information, and a tabloidized infotainment
culture is increasingly 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 orgies, its public offerings of bread and
circuses, 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.
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.
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 culture.[1] 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 major 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 OJ 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 major events of the
age, as were, for instance, the Princess Diana wedding 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. Megaspectacles are
those phenomena of media culture and 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 which 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
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).
In a competitive
business world, the "fun factor" can give one business the edge over
another. Hence, corporations seek to be more entertaining in their commercials,
their business environment, their commercial spaces, and their web sites.
Budweiser ads, for instance, feature talking frogs who tell us nothing about
the beer, but who catch the viewers' attention, while Taco Bell deploys a
talking dog, and Pepsi uses Star Wars characters. Buying, shopping, and dining
out are coded as an "experience," as businesses adopt a theme-park
style. Places like the Hard Rock Cafe and the House of Blues are not renowned
for their food, after all; people go there for the ambience, to buy clothing,
and to view music and media memorabilia. It is no longer good enough just to
have a web site, it has to be an interactive spectacle, featuring not only
products to buy, but music and videos to download, games to play, prizes to
win, travel information, and "links to other cool sites."
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 logos of Apple, Intel, or Microsoft. In
the brand wars between commodities, corporations need to make their corporate
logos a familiar signpost in contemporary culture. Corporations place their
logos 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 celebrities continue to be
seen and positively perceived by publics. Just as with corporate brand names,
celebrities become brands to sell their Madonna, Michael Jordan, Tom Cruise, or
Jennifer Lopez product 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 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.
The Culture of the
Spectacle
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. For Neil Gabler, in an era of media spectacle, life itself is becoming
like a movie and we create our own lives as a genre like film, or television,
in which we become "at once performance artists in and audiences for a
grand, ongoing show" (1998: 4). On Gabler's view, we star in our own
"lifies," making our lives into entertainment acted out for audiences
of our peers, following the scripts of media culture, adopting its role models
and fashion types, its style and look. Seeing our lives in cinematic terms,
entertainment becomes for Gabler "arguably the most pervasive, powerful
and ineluctable force of our time--a force so overwhelming that it has
metastasized into life" to such an extent that it is impossible to
distinguish between the two (1998: 9). As Gabler sees it, Ralph Lauren is our
fashion expert; Martha Stewart designs our sets; Jane Fonda models our shaping
of our bodies; and Oprah Winfrey advises us on our personal problems.[2]
Media spectacle is indeed a culture of
celebrity who provide dominant role models and icons of fashion, look, and
personality. In the world of spectacle, celebrity encompasses every major
social domain from entertainment to politics to sports to business. An
ever-expanding public relations industry hypes certain figures, elevating them
to celebrity status, and protects their positive image in the never-ending
image wars and dangers that a celebrity will fall prey to the machinations of
negative-image and thus lose celebrity status, and/or become figures of scandal
and approbation, as has indeed happened to some of the players and institutions
that I examine in Media Spectacle (Kellner 2003).
Indeed, sports celebrities have often been
caught in gambling or crime scandals including the infamous 1919 Chicago
so-called Black Sock baseball team accused of fixing the World Series to
superstars like baseball player Pete Rose and NBA icon Michael Jordan caught up
in gambling scandals. In July 2003, Los Angeles Laker superstar Kobe Byrant,
previously an icon of wholesomeness and virtue was accused of sexual abuse, a
fate that many star athletes have brought upon themselves. In a tabloid culture
of the spectacle, its stars and icons are particularly subject to scrutiny and
the publicity that their fame and salaries depend upon.
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!
The Texas Ranger
Ballpark in Arlington, Texas supplements its sports arena with a shopping mall,
office buildings, and a restaurant in which for a hefty price one can watch the
athletic events while eating and drinking. The architecture of the Texas
Rangers stadium is an example of the implosion of sports and entertainment and
postmodern spectacle. A man-made lake surrounds the stadium, the corridor
inside is modeled after Chartes Cathedral, and the structure is made of local
stone that provides the look of the Texas Capitol in Austin. Inside there are
Texas longhorn cattle carvings, panels of Texas and baseball history, and other
iconic signifiers of sports and Texas. The implosion of sports, entertainment,
and local spectacle is now typical in sports palaces. Tropicana Field in Tampa
Bay, Florida, for instance, "has a three-level mall that includes places
where 'fans can get a trim at the barber shop, do their banking and then grab a
cold one at the Budweiser brew pub, whose copper kettles rise three stories.
There is even a climbing wall for kids and showroom space for car
dealerships'" (Ritzer 1998: 229).
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, more glitzy, 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.
Other 2001 film spectacles include Pearl
Harbor, which re-enacts the Japanese attack on the U.S. that propelled the
country to enter World War II, and that provided a ready metaphor for the
September 11 terror attacks. The popular 2001 military film Black-Hawk Down
provided a spectacle of American military heroism which some critics believed
sugar-coated the actual problems with the U.S. military intervention in
Somalia, causing worries that a future U.S. adventure by the Bush
administration and Pentagon would meet similar problems. There were reports,
however, that in Somalian cinemas there were loud cheers as the Somalians in
the film shot down the U.S. helicopter, and pursued and killed American
soldiers, attesting to growing anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world
against Bush administration policies.
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 heros 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 2002-3, 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. And entertainment and spectacle are
apotheosized in American Idol, the breakaway hit of summer 2002, that rewards
young wanna-be entertainers who perform well-known pop songs, while humiliating
those judged to be losers.
Real life events,
however, took over TV spectacle during 2000-2001 in, first, an intense battle
for the White House in a dead-heat election, that arguably constitutes the
greatest political crime and scandal in U.S. history (see Kellner 2001). After
months of the Bush administration pushing the most hardright political agenda
in memory and then deadlocking as the Democrats took control of the Senate in a
dramatic party re-affiliation of Vermont's Jim Jeffords, the world was treated
to the most horrifying spectacle of the new millennium, the September 11 terror
attacks and unfolding Terror War. These events promise an unending series of
deadly spectacle for the foreseeable future and have so far unleashed Terror
War in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as Jihadist terrorist attack throughout
the world (see Kellner, 2003).
Theater is a fertile
field of the spectacle and contemporary theater has 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, Ragtime, The
Lion King, Mama Mia, 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 ageŠ. 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 collections.[3] 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 too is
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).
In a similar
fashion, younger female pop music stars and groups such as Mariah Carey,
Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez, or Destiny's Child also 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
ŒN 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.
Musical concert extravaganzas
are more and more spectacular (and expensive!) and the Internet is providing
free music and a new realm of sound through Napster, Kaaza, and other
technologies, although the state has been battling attempts at young people
utilizing P2P (peer to peer) technologies to decommodify culture. Indeed,
films, DVDs, sports events, and musical spectacles having been circulating
through the Internet in a gift economy that has generated the spectacle of the
state attacking those who violate copyright laws that some claim to be outdated
in the culture of hi-tech spectacle.
Food too is becoming
a spectacle in the consumer society with presentation as important in the
better restaurants as taste and substance. Best-selling books like Isabel
Allende's Aphrodite and Jeffrey Steingarten's The Man Who Ate Everything
celebrate the conjunction of eroticism and culinary delight. Magazines like Bon
Appetite and Saveur glorify the joys of good eating, and food sections of many
magazines and newspapers are among the most popular parts. Films like Babette's
Feast, Like Water, for Chocolate, Big Night, and Chocolate fetishize food and
eating, presenting food with the pornographic excess usually reserved for sex.
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 the highest grossing domains of
media spectacle. In the culture of the spectacle, sex becomes shockingly exotic
and diverse, through the media of porno videos, DVDs, and Internet sites which
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 Pacman, as in the corporate jungle, its 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 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. 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 (Kellner 2003b).
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 Marxism, 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 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, 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 Greenpeace 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 that
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 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. 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 is
global as Beckham moves from Manchester United to Real Madrid; this summer
there was a film, popular globally, Bend It Like Beckham; and there is the
Beckham and Posh spectacle which combines media culture, fashion, sports and
the global spectacle. BBC America featured the Beckham saga in summer 2003, as
did some U.S. television networks, and other media throughout the world. And,
in terms of global spectacle, more distressingly, there is the Al Qaeda global
terrorism spectacle that is the topic of my most recent book From September 11
to Terror War: The Dangers of the Bush Legacy (Kellner 2003b).
Globalizataion, 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 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, they
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 and Held, et al 1999). 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 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.
References
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.
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,
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___________ (1999) Exchanting a Disenchanted
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Notes
[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 Kellner 2003a,
upon which I draw in this article. Thanks to Geoff King for comments that
helped with the revision of this text.
[2] Gabler's book is a
synthesis of Daniel Boorstin, Dwight Macdonald, Neil Poster, Marshall McLuhan,
and other trendy theorists of media culture, but without the brilliance of a
Baudrillard, the incisive criticism of an Adorno, or the understanding of the
deeper utopian attraction of media culture of a Bloch or Jameson. Likewise,
Gabler does not, a la cultural studies, engage the politics of representation,
or its economics and political economy. He thus ignores mergers in the culture
industries, new technologies, the restructuring of capitalism, globalization,
and shifts in the economy that are driving the impetus toward entertainment.
Gabler does get discuss how new technologies are creating new spheres of
entertainment and forms of experience and in general describes rather than
theorizes the trends he is engaging.
[3] 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.