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အတိုချုံးပြောရရင်

Modern capitalism upholds social control through "the spectacle" — the use of mass communications to turn us into consumers and passive spectators of our own lives, history, and power.

Politics is that dimension of social life in which things become true if enough people believe them.

— David Graeber

အစများ

French philosopher and activist Guy Debord and the French Situationist movement of 1957-1972.

“Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation,” Guy Debord argued in his seminal work, The Society of the Spectacle (1967) argues. Consider how people who witness a catastrophic event often say the experience was “like a movie.” Or how as activists we often measure the success of our actions in media coverage alone. What we feel, what we believe, how we express desire, what we believe is possible — all are filtered through, and constrained by, the media we consume and produce. The political consequence of this separation from felt experience is key to understanding both how we experience the world and how we can change it.

We don’t strike, we strike poses.

Marx famously argued that under capitalism, the commodity becomes “fetishized” and reduced to its exchange value. Debord applied Marx’s ideas to mass communication, showing how capitalism has penetrated not just what we produce and consume, but how we communicate. The spectacle — as manifested in mass entertainment, news, and advertising — alienates us from ourselves and our desires in order to facilitate the accumulation of capital.

Increasingly, the spectacle serves as capitalism’s primary mechanism of social control. This is control by seduction and distraction, not force — but no less powerful and insidious for that fact. Debord argued that our lives have been degraded, first from being into having, then from having into merely appearing. (Think how much of our day-to-day “activist” behaviour is concerned simply with performing our identity as activists: Too often, we don’t strike, we strike poses.)

Seeking to free us from the power of the spectacle in order to mount a credible challenge to capitalism, the Situationists introduced the tactic of détournement, or culture jamming: an attempt to turn the powers of the spectacle against itself (see: TACTIC: Culture jamming). Whether the master’s tools can ever dismantle the master’s house, however, remains to be seen half a century later.

Originally published in Beautiful Trouble.