by Greil Marcus
As Debord drew the picture, these people were members of democratic societies: democracies of false desire. One could not intervene, but one did not want to, because as a mechanism of social control the spectacle dramatized an inner spectacle of participation, of choice. In the home, one chose between television programs; in the city, one chose between the countless variations of each product on the market. Like a piece of avant-garde performance art, the spectacle dramatized an ideology of freedom.
I am nothing and you are everything, the performance artist says to her audience. She leaves the stage, descends into the paying crowd, seals her mouth with tape, takes off her clothes. “Do what you will with me,” she mimes—she is turning herself into an object, empowering the members of the audience, discarding all the authority of the artist, and yet somehow that authority is retained. The naturally active artist imitates the natural passivity of the crowd: she lies on her back with her legs open, inviting the audience to fuck her, to set her on fire, to try to get her to talk, to piss on her, to ignore her, to argue and then to come to blows over what you or I or we should do next. All of these things have actually happened at avant-garde performances. But if where the self “is by proxy, it is not” these things have also actually not happened, because it is only the artist’s dispensation that has permitted the anonymous people in the crowd to seem to act. At the artist’s withdrawal of that dispensation (nothing so crude as “STOP!”, rather an assistant announcing, “The performance is over”), the counterfeit actors immediately return to their seats. They once again become spectators, and feel comfortable: like themselves.
Like TV fans with a satellite dish, who imagine that they create their own entertainment out of an infinity of channels, the members of the audience feel as if they have intervened in the spectacle of the artist’s performance, but they have not; they have played by the artist’s rules, where such putative intangibles as chance, risk, and violence were fixed from the start. The only true intervention would be for someone to step out of the crowd and shout, “No, no, I am now the artist, you must do what I tell you to do, you must play my game, which is . . .” Then the rest of the crowd, and the original artist, would be faced with a real choice, a choice containing all the intangibles of epistemology, aesthetics, politics, social life. It would be as if one of the fans who traditionally jumps from the stands during a World Series game then joined the contest, and got everyone playing a new game; as if a mad scientist with a crate of Aladdin’s lamps set up a table in Macy’s and by her very presence destroyed the value of every other available commodity—but, as with the intervention of the audience member claiming to be the artist, such things have never actually happened.
SO DID
So did the spectacle work on the most prosaic levels of everyday life, but Debord meant much more. As a theater the spectacle was also a church: “the material reconstruction of the religious illusion.” Modern mastery, the domination of nature by technology, the potential abolition of the domain of necessity in the modern society of abundance, had not “dispelled the religious clouds where men had placed their own powers, detached from themselves; it has only anchored them to an earthly base.”
This earthly base was modern capitalism, an economic mode of being that by the 1950s had expanded far beyond the mere production of obvious necessities and luxuries; having satisfied the needs of the body, capitalism as spectacle turned to the desires of the soul. It turned upon individual men and women, seized their subjective emotions and experiences, changed those once evanescent phenomena into objective, replicable commodities, placed them on the market, set their prices, and sold them back to those who had, once, brought emotions and experiences out of themselves—to people who, as prisoners of the spectacle, could now find such things only on the market.
It was these special commodities—items whose objective form served as a disguise for their subjective content (the suit that wore status, the lp that played identity)—which rose into the heaven of the spectacle. Here a miracle as strange as that claimed by any religion was repeated again and again, every day. What was, once, yourself, was now presented as an unreachable but irresistibly alluring image of what, in this best of all possible worlds, you could be.
In such a world, one finally consumed no ordinary sort of thing, but oneself—which, now removed into the material reconstruction of the religious illusion, where you had placed your own powers detached from yourself, was experienced as other: as a thing. Marxists located alienation in the workplace, where what the worker produced was taken from him. Debord believed that material abundance and technical mastery had for the first time in history permitted all people to consciously produce themselves, but in place of that radical freedom he found only its image, the spectacle, in which every act was alienated from itself. Here what one was was taken away. This was the modern world; to the degree that the real field of freedom had expanded, so had the epistemology, the aesthetics, the politics, and the social life of control.
In August 1980 the union Solidarity emerged out of the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk, Poland. As an idea and a fact of freedom, Solidarity soon spread across the country, from factories to farms, from clerks to intellectuals, infecting even the armed forces and the bureaucracy of the Soviet client state that had ruled Poland since 1944. “What we find in the people’s democracies,” Polish emigré Czeslaw Milosz wrote in 1953 in The Captive Mind, “is a conscious mass play . . . After long acquaintance with his role, a man grows into it so closely that he can no longer differentiate his true self from the self he simulates, so that even the most intimate of individuals speak to each other in Party slogans. To identify one’s self with the role one is obliged to play brings relief and permits a relaxation of one’s vigilance.” But if everyday life in Communist Poland was a play, then Solidarity, the clandestine Polish publisher Czeslaw Bielecki wrote in an essay smuggled out of prison in 1985, was “antitheater.” For the first time, countless men and women spoke in public, for themselves, and were listened to; they acted, and found themselves changed into new men and women, unwilling to go on as before. Against Solidarity’s affirmation of the right of all Polish citizens to reinvent their own society, the ruling clique was purged, replaced by a government promising reforms unthinkable only months earlier; suddenly almost anything seemed possible. Despite the threat of Soviet intervention, an air of good feeling rose out of the new milieu of danger and desire—and on the night of 16 December 1980, once more in Gdansk, the leaders of Solidarity, the new government, and the Catholic Church gathered with 150,000 new citizens to seal the moment.
The occasion was the dedication of a monument to the martyrs of December 1970: striking workers massacred by government troops. Until the birth of Solidarity those men had been excluded from the official history of their society, their names mentioned only in secret; now their names were read out by a movie star, and in three steel crosses, each 140 feet high, they were made to symbolize their society. “For those who watched the ceremony, it was all incredible, improbable,” Neal Ascherson wrote in The Polish August. “It was a moment in which one realized how much had taken place in Poland, and how rapidly.” And yet, he said, for
all its splendour, there was something alienating about the ceremony at Gdansk. Andrzej Wajda, the most famous film-maker in Eastern Europe, produced and directed it, with all its use of lighting, of sound, of music, of the solo human voice. It was, indeed, a spectacle: the ordinary people who had brought all these things about by asserting their right to be subjects as well as objects of history now stood in darkness and watched the show as if they were watching a film. Once they intervened: when Tadeusz Fiszbach, the Gdansk Party secretary, spoke of Poland’s liberation in 1944 by the Red Army, a soft breeze of whistles ran across the crowd. But for the rest they were passive.
Debord had been there long before, with words that were meant to describe the performance of a commute or a night of lovemaking as precisely as they anticipated such a broken public event as Gdansk o
n 16 December 1980. “The alienation of the spectator to the profit of the contemplated object”—one’s idealized self, or any piece of it—“can be summed up thusly,” he wrote in 1967: “the more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more he accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires. The externality of the spectacle in relation to the active man appears in the fact that his gestures are no longer his own, but those of another, who represents them to him,” and that “another” was the spectacle personified, the star of social life, be it Lech Walesa, the leader of Solidarity, or the martyrs of 1970, or Jesus Christ, or the face on the billboard as one made one’s commute, the face of the idealized self in one’s mind as one made love. As such the idealized self was always immediately present, always just out of reach. As a perversion of freedom it was, like any perversion, erotic; as alienation it carried the frisson of having just missed the brass ring, a sensation that always brought one back for more. If at bottom revolution was rooted in the desire to create one’s own life, a wish so deep and voracious its realization demanded the creation of a new society, then the spectacle took that wish into itself, and returned it as the wish to accept one’s life as it already existed, as it existed in the constantly renewing utopia of the spectacle.
SPECTACLE
“Spectacle” had become a fashionable critical commonplace by the early 1980s. It was a vague term, devoid of ideas. It simply meant that the image of a thing superseded the thing itself. Critics used the cliché not to think, or to imagine, but to complain: to complain that people seemed to believe that through Rambo movies the U.S.A. could win the Vietnam War backward, that consumers were being seduced by advertisements instead of choosing rationally among products, that citizens were voting for actors rather than issues. This was the theater, but Debord had insisted on the church: the spectacle was not merely advertising, or television, it was a world. “The spectacle is not a collection of images,” he wrote, dismissing in advance the obvious social critiques that would follow his book, “but a social relationship among people, mediated by images.”
It was a social world in which to be nothing was to be everything, and in which to be everything was to be nothing. “Sadat was a hero of the electronic revolution,” Mohamed Heikal wrote in Autumn of Fury: The Assassination of Sadat, “but also its victim. When his face was no longer to be seen on the television screen, it was as if the eleven years of his rule had vanished with a switch of the control knob.” The contradiction was a tautology, and the tautology was the prison: the spectacle defined reality in the modern world, and that definition defined unreality. When everything that was directly lived had moved away into a representation, there was no real life, yet no other life seemed real. The victory of the spectacle was that nothing seemed real until it had appeared in the spectacle, even if in the moment of its appearance it would lose whatever reality it held. “Every notion fixed in this way is ultimately based in its passage into its opposite,” Debord wrote. “The true is a moment of the false.”
A scream swept across a dusty field packed with teenagers bristling with black leather, chains and tortured hair. “Prohibit work; prohibit pay,” was the cry. “People are dying.”
Thus began the final concert of the Jarocin rock music festival, a celebration of loud guitars, exotic styles and aggressive alienation . . . Some 20,000 youth traveled here this month to party, camp, and cheer bands who sang of hopelessness, aimlessness and fear of nuclear war.
Such themes blared out from this small town in Poland’s rich midwestern farmlands for five long nights, to the bemusement of both Communist authorities and emissaries of the Roman Catholic Church. Bands performed under such names as Jail, Trial and Dead Scab Formation . . .
—San Francisco Chronicle, 28 August 1985
Debord had trumpeted “the spectacle” as a monster, a horror movie, a Godzilla of alienation. Twenty years after he set down his theory of modern society, its premises sound both familiar and weird, plain and paranoid, obvious and occult—and this is what it felt like to be part of the world of Michael Jackson in 1984. It was to be loosed from your moorings, to feel simultaneously humiliated and excited, to respond to the claim that even “the true is a moment of the false” with a shrug: “Well, why not? What else can you show me?” The spectacle produced its own opposition, and swallowed it: to reject one spectacle was to demand another.
What happened in the year of Michael Jackson? For the first few million who bought Thriller, form and content, subjectivity and objectivity, self and other, commodity and consumer, were one. Those few million bought a record they liked. Then Thriller became an image—an image, in the milieu of modern capitalism, in the heaven of the spectacle, of the good: an irresistible image of self-realization and public conquest. After that, form superseded content, which did not mean that Jackson’s message was lost in Thriller’s gloss—it meant that neither form nor content remained tied to the record itself. The content was no longer the sound of the music, and the form was no longer the manner in which the music was produced or functioned as genre. The content was now one’s response to the social event of Thriller, the form the mechanics of the event.
To Debord, the society of the spectacle was modern society itself, in no way natural, an interested construction but nonetheless implacably complete: “reality rises up within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real.” As it emerged out of the pop milieu, the symbol factory, one could see Thriller as a spectacle of the spectacle, a mediation between the pop spectacle and the greater spectacle that, Thriller seemed to prove, was social life. The Sex Pistols had forced people to choose—in the beginning, for or against the Sex Pistols, then, should one enter Johnny Rotten’s performances, to say yes or no to God and the state, work and leisure, the performer and oneself. The triumph of Michael Jackson was to allow people not to choose. Thriller enforced its own reality principle: it was there, part of every commute, a serenade to every errand, a referent to every purchase, a fact of every life. You didn’t have to like it. You only had to acknowledge it—but somehow, in the year of Michael Jackson, to acknowledge it was to like it.
IN 1982
In 1982 Elizabeth Taylor filed suit to stop the airing of an unauthorized TV movie about her life. “I am my own industry,” she said. “I am my own commodity.” A hundred and fifteen years before, Karl Marx anticipated this bizarre invocation in “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret,” the most bizarrely titled section of Capital. He wrote:
A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties . . . It is absolutely clear that, by his activity, man changes the forms of the materials of nature in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.
This is pure poetry, but the mystical echoes were not there for color. Marx’s allusion was to the Spiritualists, who in his time clasped hands around tables from Boston to Paris to Petrograd, waiting for the spirits of departed loved ones to make their presence known, to shake the tables, to make the tables dance. The Spiritualists had nothing to do with commodities, but the commodity had everything to do with magic—a magic in which the technical notion of transformation yielded to the metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties of transubstantiation. Still, if it is possible that in 1867 Marx could have foreseen a post-industrial Taylorism, it is hard to believe he would have been ready for Jacksonism.
The commodity was the agent of reification: Jackson’s
built its own heaven, and everyone reached for it. It was wonderful, in that year of Michael Jackson, just to get up in the morning, open the paper, and follow the dance: to discover that a clandestine Michael Jackson cult had formed within the Jehovah’s Witnesses (which, as everyone knew, counted Jackson as a devotee, and which, one was informed, was based on a belief in the return of the Archangel Michael); to learn that a teenager, his parents having refused him the money to correct his face so that it might more closely resemble Michael Jackson’s, had killed himself; or to read that American companies operating in Mexico “have begun to subsidize food and transportation and to pay workers above the Mexican minimum wage of $4.80 a day. One company is considering giving watches to workers with good attendance and longevity records. Another is giving out Michael Jackson albums.” But these were only teasers. Suddenly it was time to make the specter flesh: time for a tour, at $30 a head.
An Illinois woman has filed a $150 million paternity suit against pop star Michael Jackson, claiming that he is the father of her three children, she said yesterday.
“Michael is the father, Michael got me pregnant and I want Michael to pay for it,” Billie Jean Jackson, 39, said by telephone from a friend’s home in Hanover Park, a Chicago suburb . . .
