Anthro Capital Final

8/2/2019 Anthro Capital Final

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Christopher ClarkAnthropology of the Capital

Final PaperPrompt: What is at stake in Baudrillard's insistence on the regime of imagesand the production of

a world of simulacra? How is his framework differentfrom Guy Debord's and which one is more

convincing for you? Use the essaywe read in the class to substantiate.

Spectacle to Simulacrum and the (Im)Possibilities for Subversion

In order to understand Guy Debord's insistence on the spectacle as society and Jean

Baudrillard's notion of simulacrum beyond the surface level semantic differences of

explosion/implosion and dissimulation/simulation, Karl Marx's critique of commodities and the

commodification of social life as commonplace in industrialized capitalist societies is essential.

Both Debord and Baudrillard take Marx's theory, stretch it further, and imbue its very core

meaning into a modern capitalist society which witnessed a dramatic shift in its socialized

landscape through technology, media, and violent moments of (re)production of commodities and

images through these mediums. Guy Debord, in Society of the Spectacle (1967), examined the

move from a Marxist perspective of the proliferation of commodities in capitalism to using that

framework as it applies to a new society, beyond Marxist theory, which has manufactured sociallife to a nullifying extent of absurdity. For Debord and the thinkers or artists involved in the

Situationists International, social consensus became obtained through the blas attitude of

capitalism's cultural hegemony in the new 'society of the spectacle'. The proliferation of images,

commodities, and 'infotainment' into one's socialization created such an abstraction of every day

life that one's very expression of self came through this spectacle of consumer products and media

society. In speaking of Debord's theory of spectacle, Best wrote: ... the concept also refers to.. all

the means and methods power employs which subject individuals to societal manipulation, while

obscuring the nature and effects of capitalism's power and deprivation.1

1 Best, Steven and Douglas Keller. The Postmodern Turn. From the Society of the Spectacle to the Realm ofSimulation: Debord, Baudrillard, and Postmodernity.p89.


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Clark p2

This, in its most basic form, represents a pre-packaged consumable world which is constructed by

others as opposed to being produced by one's self.

Debord envisioned human agency as a means of radically shifting from the spectacle to a

fostering, or creation of, total subversion and revolution of the established society.2 Passive

spectators would become active subjects, attempting to understand and illuminate the depth behind

the hijinks of the reproducibility of images and spectacle. This very positivist idea motivated the

Situationists in pursuing social and cultural revolution through art, activism, and attempted

disambiguation from the spectacle. For Baudrillard, there was no point capitalism and the veryconcept of the spectacle had already achieved its superlative plans of simulation; even in Debord's

words - the total occupation of social life.3 There was no more agency for individuals to act with

in a radical fashion to subvert the spectacle. Reality is lost, modern capitalism catapulted society

unwillingly into postmodernity, which witnessed realities being infinitely extended and

multiplied, instituting the actualization of simulacrum a self-referential society of images

without a real behind the funhouse mirrors of the hyperreal spectacle. 4Baudrillard invokes

Marxism only to dismantle it as for him it no longer applies since the concept of postmodernity

takes Debord's theory of the spectacle and turns it on its head in which even the illusion of radical

subversion is already manufactured. Like a grinning Cheshire cat, Baudrillard's theory of

simulacrum at once acknowledges the society as spectacle but with the serious differentiation by

which dissimulation as a mask for reality is only the earliest stages of what unfolded as a

simulation of even that dissimulation; simulation, singular simulacrum, here and now for

Baudrillard.

2 Best, p80.3 Ibid., p85.4 Ibid., p101.


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Clark p3

The tensions between Debord's spectacle and Baudrillard's simulacrum lie not necessarily

at the substantive argument both thinkers present but more so in the theory of abstraction and

implosion of society which for Baudrillard is the (inevitable) transition from a neo-Marxist critique

of capitalism into postmodernity. Postmodernity for Baudrillard represents the spectacle as already

having eroded possibility for subversion projected within Debord's theory; it instead transcends

from being something which can be explodedto something which has already imploded, causing

simulacrum's hyperreality to become the organizing principles of society. Behind the illusion of a

dizzying contemporary capitalism of images and signs, there is a real to be found and brought tothe forefront of social, cultural, political resistance for Debord yet the same cannot be said for

Baudrillard. In his deconstructive radicalism, Baudrillard's theory is described in Best's essay as

when the real no longer directly represents and is artificially (re)produced, it becomes not

unreal or surreal, a myth or fantasy, but hyperreal, a hallucinatory resemblance of the real with

itself (Baudrillard, 1983a: 3), a reality replicated from a model, doubled or multiplied within

reproductive processes, volatilized from medium to medium, open to infinite multiplication.5 The

idea of infinite multiplication becomes important when understanding that the spectacle's

hyperreality becomes incommensurable to reality itself as it becomes duplicated, packaged,

consumed, and reproduced in myriad ways which is the context for Baudrillard's theory of the real

vanishing amongst capitalism's consumptive ability to implode meaning itself.

For me, the rather linear path Baudrillard takes through Marxism, turning it inside out,

while scurrying past Debord's notion of the spectacle, grabbing the most salient critiques and

bending them towards the pronouncement of the future hyper-spectacle is most convincing to me

Clark p4

5 Best, p102.


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for a number of reasons. At some level, I identify closely with Baudrillard's sense of

deconstruction; certainly as it is grounded within the American experience of a mid-20's-

something who was raised in a middle-class family from Connecticut. Charles Bukowski, famed

nihilist poet, once said about American culture and civilization: I think most talk is so boring. I

mean, 'Save this,' 'Do that,' 'Do this' we're all so boring saying everything... we don't even want to

save ourselves, we're so bored talking about it. There's nothing left to save. 6Baudrillard, in his

published book Simulacra and Simulation, spoke in a way to these thoughts of Bukowski in On

Nihilism where he elucidated on his dialectics of nihilism: The apocalypse is finished, today it is

the precession of the neutral, of forms of the neutral and of indifference. Melancholic andfascinated [by our disappearance], such is our general situation in an era of involuntary

transparency.7 This sense of 'involuntary transparency,' Baudrillard's claim that contemporary

nihilism is best seen through the lens of an irresolution [which] is indissolubly that of the

system,8 is present in Best's essay regarding simulacra and its devastating effects through

capitalism's rather miraculously indifferent recklessness as it whizzes past even the active

participant who merely gazes blas, deluged, enraptured by the images and signs of the

spectacle's postmodern hyperreality.

- - -

Consumer capitalism in its par excellence creation through mesmerizing images and

stupefying forms of entertainment inculcated the society of the spectacle, according to Guy

Debord.9 Debord, along with the Situationists, wanted to continue in a neo-Marxist tradition of

theoretical criticisms, choosing to focus on the importance of social revolution in an effort to

Clark p5

6 Bukowski, Charles.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHRcKjvX1xE.7 Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. On Nihilism. University of Michigan Press. p160.8 Best, p159.9 Ibid., p80.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHRcKjvX1xEhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHRcKjvX1xEhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHRcKjvX1xE


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emphasize the creation of liberated spaces intellectually, politically, socially, culturally. The

very facets of daily life had to be reclaimed, cracks in capitalism's veneer exploited, avenues of

expression opened, and a cultural revolution la the philosophies of human potential brought

forward by thinkers like Nietzsche and Sartre (both influences to the Situationists) had to foment in

order to craft a subversion to the spectacle. The 'permanent opium war' that Debord spoke of in

Society of the Spectacle focused on the abstraction of daily life as an inherent necessity to the

functioning of an all-encompassing consumer capitalism which pacifies, depoliticizes, and

separates. As Marx and many other theorists thoroughly elaborated on, capitalism at its most basic

level facilitates the separation of labor and commodity and yet for Debord, capitalism'sconsequences also traversed into the separation of art and life for instance.

Still further, as Best laconically explains: Unlike early capitalism, whose structural

exigences lay in the forceful exploitation of labor and nature and in defining the worker strictly as

producer, thesociety of the spectacle defines individuals as consumers and attempts to constitute

their desires and needs, first creating and then exploiting them.10 This is exemplified in the

bombardment of images and billboards on the highways, the use of language on a product's

packaging promising unfettered happiness if you only buy this brand over another, and the

construction of status according to the accumulation of commodities are essential to the

functioning of the spectacle's apparatus. Instead of the increasedphilosophization of reality,

Debord found the spectacle to converselyphilosophize reality. As I wrote in my essay on Georg

Simmel's The Metropolis and Mental Life and Marx's commodity fetishism, A formulaic fetishism

with commodities works in place of the rational self which disappears once inculcated with such a

desire to express one's self through a material existence. Debord's notion of the

Clark p6

10 Best, p85.


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spectacle not only takes this concept and exacerbates it tenfold, but it becomes the hyperreality of

the spectacle. The proliferation of images as signifiers of one's own existence and very language of

expression become the only medium with which reality seems to function. Capitalism, the

shadowy specter in the background, continues to produce these images and commodities for a

placated market eager to consume the illusion of the spectacle as more real than real itself.11

The personal liberation that Guy Debord and the Situationists advocated for from this

hyperreality was a process of self-reclamation, self-emancipation from the confines of the

spectacle. However, even Debord and his cohorts fell to the realization that in a frenetic modern

capitalist society, the tarnishing of sincere communication in the age of electronic media andinformation imploded opportunities for subversion and self-emancipation. Capitalism's growth

parallel to that of electronic media gave way to Baudrillard's truculence toward absolute

abstraction and ultimate consequences to the implosion of the spectacle. For Baudrillard, there are

no longer active participants and passive spectators we have become subsumed by the spectacle,

creating what I would propose as active spectators. The spectacle continues to operate in the

simulacra of images and signs, no longer denoting a referent which is tangible, but instead

continually duplicating and (re)producing the illusion as reality through this mass proliferation of

images. The spectacle is not simply an extension of the relationship between consumer/subject and

commodity/object but instead the simulation of social models and political economy of the sign.

There is an advanced state of abstraction in which the object is absorbed altogether into the image

and dematerializes in closed cycles of semiotic exchange representational of the subject being

absorbed into hyperreality in which the object becomes the signifier of all

Clark p7

11 Best, p91.


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meanings.12

Akin to Debord's invocation of Marx's earlier critiques of capitalism, Baudrillard takes a

step further and initiates an important distinction between Marx's concept ofuse value and that of

sign value. The objects themselves, engrossed by the spectacle, do not have their own use value as

attributed to their raw material according to physical use but instead, simulacrum developed a sign

value instantiated through the society of the spectacle's practice of organizing images into a

hierarchy of value. Semiological (re)processing, as it is described by Best, simply reasserts the loss

of an objective reality and lays claim to the sign value of images being the superseding force

behind a postmodern capitalist spectacle. Without a real to be uncovered behind the funhousemirrors of the spectacle, radical semiological reality becomes infinitely extended and multiplied

into which now anything can pass as meaning or reality according to Baudrillard. Bumper stickers

adorning nearly every car on the highway, Michael Jordan, 'reality' television shows, Disneyworld,

the deserts of California, mass (re)production of art, history itself these are examples of which

Baudrillard uses to contemplate the very abstraction each have gone through within the

hyperreality of simulacrum. For instance, the example of the phenomenon of bumper stickers on

automobiles in the United States, particularly the Coexist ones adorned with various religious

symbols. Not only does this bumper sticker become a total commodification of history and religion

but at the very least, it creates an a-historical and depoliticized image of these symbols themselves.

Religion certainly plays no small part in this simulation of reality as it has become a theatrical

performance of grandeur, televised for everyone to watch. Best aptly described religion's role in the

spectacle as being that which has always been a major representation of hyperreality and source of

capital, but also of the

Clark p8

12 Ibid, p96.


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commodification of the Pope himself; emblazoned on papal souvenirs from posters, sweatshirts,

cards, stuffed animals, and bottled (holy?) water the Pope; Christianity, and religion, is now fit

for consumption.13Cultural, political, historical incidents or situations are often made into a

sellable commodity then given a sign value as an image in turn reproduced ad nauseam until the

original 'story' or 'situation' is no longer coherent, no longer accessible, and the image or

commodity itselfis projected into a status of more real than real.

The crux of the argument, then, at this point is to elaborate on the notion that for

Baudrillard, the shift from modernity to postmodernity is seen at precisely the moment when the

spectacle undermined any possibility of dissimulation, where a fully processed simulatory,cybernetic, postmodern society where distinctions as those between subject and object, appearance

and reality, surface and depth, and so on, are obliterated14 came to absolute fruition. The spectacle

has introduced itself into postmodernity in endless ways. Internet users can watch live video feeds

from across the world of a safari in central Africa or of a beach in Greece without stepping foot

from their bedroom. At any moment, one could be both here and there; the separation between a

here and now and a there and then is masked, virtualized, actualized. Video games provide the

ultimate experience of war without ever leaving the comfort of your favorite chair. This sort of

experience is now famously used as a recruiting technique amongst the United States armed forces

divisions. This technique has transcended into practice for the Army so that soldiers can now fire

missiles from control centers based in the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq with (horrifying)

exact precision. What appears most frightening from this sort of implosion of reality is not only the

rather sickening look one gets on their face while

Clark p9

13 Best p107.14 Best, p106.


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playing these games drool trickling from the corners of their mouths, eyes frenzied, palms stuck

to the plastic controller with their own sweat, teeth gnarled like a wild animal ready to

strike but the very authentication that this this simulation is at some level constructed as

reality. An extension of this is war photography, or rather war pornography. The Gulf War in 1991,

most recent to Best at the publication date of that article, was a media sensation due to the very

ability of constructing facts on the ground; a common practice that is now inseparable from the

practice of the United States foreign policy. Essentially, the true enormity [of the effect on the

Iraqi people] was buried in the barrage of media images that coded it as the struggle of Good

against Evil and helped to mobilize the public in support of it which resonates particularlycacophonously now in our post-9/11 globalized world.

Most recently, the world witnessed the end of one of the longest contemporary moments of

the spectacle's multifaceted simulations. Since September 11 th 2001, Osama bin Laden was used by

the United States government as an alibi to mercilessly bomb, torture, maim, and occupy

Afghanistan with hundreds of thousands of United States troops stationed throughout the country.

Bin Laden was imbued with a sign value, labeled as a terrorist, and spent time circulating through

the front covers of newspapers, magazines, and television screens. The infotainment news stories

used the same photograph over and over again, ensuring that there could be no mistake what this

image in particular represented to the American psyche. Bin Laden was leveraged to such a

threadbare excess of rhetoric with an increasing sign value that even with the very passingof this

person created a physical nationalistic fervor at campuses and cities around the United States.

Hundreds took the streets, mobilizing in front of the White House, cheering and waving American

flags, singing songs of freedom and jubilation. This is the

Clark p10


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essence of a depoliticized and a-historical image which was part in parcel nurtured through the

spectacle of commodification of history, geography, and religion. The very conjuring up of the

name created a lull to any argument against the occupation in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq

that followed. In a level of stupefying, almost perverse, obsession, Osama bin Laden came to be

the meaning, the effigy, the ostentatious necessity for everything American strove to disavow and

yet ironically, at the very same time, everything which America strove to be. As Susan Sontag

wrote in her controversially-perceived New Yorker piece about September 11th, the media

infotainment that arose out of the lingering hours after the incident was intent upon the very goal to

infantilize the public.

15

Baudrillard was able to witness this fantastical event and wrote an essay in November of

2001 entitled The Spirit of Terrorism which articulated the action as globalization battling itself for

the first time the absolute event, the mother of events that never happened as an invisible target

with the goal of operational elimination16. It was merely a symbolic event, one that Baudrillard is

even humorously attracted to, for the sake of its abreaction as if an answer to the United States'

exertion of hegemonic global power would never receive a response to itself. The twin towers

themselves embodied this very particular power the two enormous metaphorical middle fingers

extended towards the world; symbols representational of U.S trade, capital, steadfastness. The

'suicidingly spectacular' event marked the shift from any tangible ideology or politics in relation to

this act to the very essence, the spirit, of terrorism in our postmodern hyper-spectacle: Death is

the key (to the game) not only the brutal irruption of death in direct, in real time, but also the

irruption of a more-than-real death: symbolic and sacrificial death - the

Clark p11

15 Sontag, Susan. September 2001. The New Yorker.http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2001/09/24/010924ta_talk_wtc.

16 Baudrillard, Jean. November 2001. The Spirit of Terrorism. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/the-spirit-of-terrorism/.
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2001/09/24/010924ta_talk_wtchttp://www.newyorker.com/archive/2001/09/24/010924ta_talk_wtchttp://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/the-spirit-of-terrorism/http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/the-spirit-of-terrorism/http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2001/09/24/010924ta_talk_wtchttp://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/the-spirit-of-terrorism/http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/the-spirit-of-terrorism/


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absolute, no appeal event.17 The towers symbolized a system of globalized capital with which

the United States remains the epicenter (but not the sole manifestation of) and the collective

suicide of those who flew the planes into the towers symbolized a provoking (or questioning) of

that power with the assumption that for Baudrillard (the only possibility) would be an answer

actualizing the eventual suicide of that system. Hence, the hegemonic system was unable to

dismiss itself from its responsibility of the role it plays amongst the symbolic order in the

spectacle. Baudrillard continues, terrorist actions are both the magnifying mirror of the system's

violence, and the model of a symbolic violence that it cannot access, the only violence it cannot

exert: that of its own death.

18

The barrage of media that came as interruptions of the videos repeating the towers

crumbling (suiciding) over and over again is what is most pertinent to explain how 9/11 was the

'absolute event' in relation to the further grounding of or even commitment to simulacrum.

September 11th signified the very resurrection of the image as event, and its inverse, for the rather

ambiguous role of images in our media is to capture the event (take it as hostage) at the same time

as they glorify it. They can be infinitely multiplied, and at the same time act as a diversion and a

neutralization (as happened for the events of May 68)... The image consumes the event, that is, it

absorbs the latter and gives it back as consumer goods.19The violence of this event institutes a

response of equal proportion but one of fascination with the image, the videos, the face behind the

chaos. For this reason, could we have possibly expected a different response from those cheering

on the illusion of freedom as Osama bin Laden was murdered? His image and the perverse

fascinations afforded to them could only be answered to as it 'passed' with total

Clark p12

17 Ibid.18 Ibid.19 Ibid.


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jubilation. Here, we witnessed the 'spectacle of terrorism' invoke the 'terrorism of the spectacle'.

Amongst the backdrop of non-referential images reproduced, replayed, and syndicated the event

of 9/11 is the absolute event which portrays the very hyperreality (and consequent fetishization of

such) behind the spectacle as a loss of reality.

What undergirds this very belief in the spectacle and fetishization of images is what

Margaret Morse describes as the fiction effect, or distraction, in her essay An Ontology of

Everyday Distraction. Using television, shopping malls, and the freeway as examples of these

everyday distractions, Morse illuminates her concept of semifiction as a loss of the 'here and now':

knowing a representation is not real, but nevertheless momentarily closing off the here and nowand sinking into another world.20 Television, shopping malls, and freeways all share a

simultaneous nonspace and temporalities of distraction, as Morse describes, between a distinction

ofspace andplace. Using Michel de Certeau's writing,space is defined as being composed of

intersections of mobile elements whileplace is a proper, stable, and distinct location.21

Distraction becomes confused as the representation of space within place and the inclusion of..

elsewheres and elsewhens in the here and now. The future becomes symbiotically bound with the

present through the techno-social realm of media, where representations of fictions are given

qualities of every day life thus not only facilitating but enchanting the loss of here and now toward

total distraction. The sinking into another world which Morse describes as liquidity is precisely the

point in which the viewer or participant slips into the elsewhere's and elsewhen's which is

Baudrillard's simulacrum. With the negation of 'referential anchorage' to the modern world and a

further creation of nonspace, the subject continues to feel a distraction from

Clark p13

20 Morse, Margaret.An Ontology of Everyday Distraction,p191.21 Ibid., p195.


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reality as a sort of dreamlike displacement. When Barthes speaks of the utter dismemberment from

reality that he feels while driving in an automobile, it can ultimately be related to the feeling one

experiences amidst today's society as spectacle. As reality continues to become mythologized for

Barthes, he describes his conscious attendance of grasping the presence of the glass and the

distance of the landscape but at once, simultaneously, not being able to ignore the transparency

of the glass and the depth of the landscape. This dizzying alteration between presence/distance

and transparency/depth is at the very heart of what's at stake for Baudrillard's claims toward the

simulacrum, the regime of images, and the subject's phantasmagoria of the interior. As Barthes

states, the glass is at once present to me, and the landscape is unreal and full.

22

The glass, servingas a window seemingly into the 'outside', offers a phantasmagoric view into the landscape just

beyond; the gaze of the subject is startled, misled, confused. The same can be said of looking

through the regime of images, the constructed spectacle that serves as our more-real-than-real

society where the 'landscape' is realized, acknowledged, even present but somehow unrealto us.

la Barthes, television provides not only another example of dreamlike displacement, but

what Morse describes as a 'double distance' which the viewer experiences in environments where

space andplace are separated; there is an out there which is reported through the television and

enforces the double distance of inside/outside. With images displayed on television screens both

everywhere and nowhere in particular, face-to-face contact is further eroded in a continual

disengagement with some level of actuality. The television viewer experiences the double distance

from the outside world's environment through the ambiguity and entanglement of space/place but

also a disengagement through the separation of temporal

Clark p14

and spatial elements in the host's one-way, recorded transmission to the masses. Hence, narration

22 Morse, p203.


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is dereferentialized; that is, lifted out of a spatio-temporal context (however real) into a symbolic

or affective realm... [for instance] the news... will be a simulacrum of an ultimately fictitious

situation of enunciation rather than a world outside.23The disjunctive flows of space, time, and

place represented through television creates the feeling of fragmentation and profound

disorientation for the viewer but at the same time that there is a feeling of freedom, or control,

quite literally through the remote. Hundreds of 'itineraries' give the viewer options, leading to what

could certainly be described as the zombie effect (or Simmel's blas attitude) contradictory

states of excitement enhanced to the point of overstimulation mixed with relaxation descending

into confusion and torpor.

24

Virtually constructed, this state of being is expressed through imagesand consumption via a banished, paramount reality.. recreated as a phantom within elsewhere25

allying seemingly incompatible cultural systems with specific exchange values (and sign values). A

common theme throughout Margaret Morse's work is precisely this idea of exchange values

through virtualities, precisely speaking to Baudrillard's society of simulacra where reality is fiction

and virtuality is merely just an extension of such. The Great Machine, a liquid convergence of

varying analogs into one, is a self-fulfilling prophecy where the outside world is being constructed

under multiple layers of representation, distanced from any objective reality, furthering a culture of

images whereby lines become blurred between real/not real, here/elsewhere, then/elsewhen

illusion/reality. Television (the freeway and shopping mall) became constructed place(s) of

presumed liberation from the spectacle, where one may attempt to somehow 'let go' of capitalism,

engage with the constructed

Clark p15

'comfort zone' away from the demands of labor, yet we are not able to because we are simply

23 Morse, p201.24 Ibid., p203.25 Ibid., p208.


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passing from one virtual-temporal world into another.

9/11, bin Laden, Morse's conception of those three distractions as inherent to the spectacle,

and video games still do not speak to perhaps the most fascinating fantasy of the virtual age the

Internet. The cyberworlds of today the limitless high-speed railways of information and images

create the Other as an ambiguous, malleable subject which is left entirely to your imagination.

Computer games allow you to literally create alternate realities where you no longer have to be

yourself and you escape an already constructed reality to construct another. Best describes the

transmogrification of techno-reality according to Baudrillard through video or computer games

are more fascinating and alluring than school, work, or politics; porno videos stimulate libido inabstraction from the problems of real relations with others and reduce complex gender identities to

mere sex puppets..26. Baudrillard's theory of the ecstasy of communication speaks to this further

annunciation of the spectacle, at the heart of his claim regarding simulacrum. The Internet is the

perfectly embodied manifestation of the dulling immediacy which media presents to the spectacle

as the fully actualized ability to live out our days in a cybernetic hyperreal the raison d'tre of

simulation. Where Morse posits the articulate summation of the effect malls have on one's

contemporary identity to shore up the boundaries of the self via commodities which beckon the

promise of perfection,27Best continues on this idea to speak of the virtual malls that have

exploded via the Internet. Beyond the separation Marx explains between the metropolitan

inhabitant and the production of commodities, the cyberspace interaction nexus of

commodity/subject is elevated to its extreme, nourishing a further commodification of images and

goods. Entire new lexicons and vocabularies had to be constructed to explain the new engendered

identities exposed through the proliferation of the Internet, most notably from The Cyborg

26 Best, p102.27 Morse, p198.


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Manifesto by Donna Haraway. A sort of Orwellian panopticon society has replaced Debord's

spectacle, the hyperreal is actualized in the very apparition of the Internet, and the loss of a

subjective realm of knowledge is transformed by the images and phantasmagoria of an objective

virtual reality.

Perhaps most compelling, though, is communication and the ways in which the Internet has

effaced interpersonal relationships; what Morse referred to as the paramount reality of face-to-face

conversation. Continuing on the idea of immediacy, Baudrillard offers his ideas behind the ecstasy

of communication being rendered nearly translucent by modern technology. No longer are there

secrets, a sense of patience or waiting for news, lies awaiting exposure, or even the sanctimoniouspeace in death. With the growth of the Internet, the curtains have been pulled to the side and the

spotlights have pervasively taken over to be exposed to the harsh and inexorable light of

information and communication.28 The spectacle has witnessed the obscene become ordinary

ranging from Facebook's colonization of social spaces, reality television shows like Jersey Shore

and Friends, talk shows like Jerry Springer and Maury, celebrityhood, and even the judicial process

is made into compelling television drama for hours throughout the day. With the growth of

YouTube, one can film themselves doing anything fathomable, post it to the Internet, and within

minutes receive views from all across the world. Privacy is nonexistent as the unparalleled

growth of communication technology, the Internet, and surveillance dominates social spaces not

only through a hierarchy of aesthetics but by using the spectacle to dictate the rules of engagement

with the spectacle. The Orwellian concentrated, dictatorial form with which the spectacle may have

sprung from according to Best and Debord has not only morphed but conjoinedin hybridity with a

libidinal and psychic control based upon seduction through simulacrum and commodities.29 This

28 Best, p111.29 Ibid., p118.


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banality is explained perfectly be

Best as subjects become lost in the funhouses of the hyperreal, the postmodern self dissolves in

the realm of ersatz experience, becoming itself a mutating set of signs.30

The documentary entitled We Live In Public hauntingly speaks to this, grounding the

theatricality of the Internet both in its infancy and after it had consumed daily life for a total

induction into the society of the spectacle. The film documents Josh Harris as he founded the first

Internet television site, Pseudo.com, in the early 1990's which combined live streaming video and

live chat. Harris, much like Baudrillard and Debord, predicted the growth of the Internet but what

made his case so profound that a documentary would be made of it was that he predicted the needwith which the Internet would be wound so closely to American cultural life; The Internet is like

this new human experience at first, everyone is going to like it but there will be a fundamental

change in the human condition.. Time goes by, and you're really becoming [sic] in these

constrained, virtual boxes.. Our every action will be counted. One day we're all going to wake up

and realize.. its captured us.31 What becomes the cornerstone to the film is in fact the portrayal of

Josh's life as it crumbles alongside his growing affinity and identification with the selves he creates

during his adventures with the Internet and technology. What is of use in speaking of Baudrillard

and We Live In Public is the installation piece, Quiet. A underground bunker in New York City

became transformed overnight into a breathing virtual city with its own church, police force, free

food, showers, etc. The only stipulation to the 100 plus volunteers that wanted to join Harris' social

experiment is that they would be filmed everywhere, doing everything, twenty four hours a day.

The bunks were set up, resembling concentration camps cells, with television monitors and

cameras in the corners with a remote so that each cell could

30 Ibid., p103.31 Harris, Josh. We Live in Public (film), http://www.megavideo.com/?v=FC4OKUBU.
http://www.megavideo.com/?v=FC4OKUBUhttp://www.megavideo.com/?v=FC4OKUBUhttp://www.megavideo.com/?v=FC4OKUBU


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watch what everybody else is doing, all of the time. In a way, this is exactly what Morse describes

in her analysis of modernity and television yet the channels are composed not of a pre-recorded

one-way broadcast anymore; they are the bunkmates of this cellular hotel, doing things that one

does every day. Reality television, created under a designed sociality, in the most absurd of

attempted flawless circumstances.

Harris' postulation that the volunteers may become more intimate, being so connected with

one another, entirely failed. What began to unfold in this very peculiar way was the disjuncture

between the apparent freedom of being in this everything-goes experiment but being consistently

chained to this experiment in a bizarre fashion because you were constantly being videotaped.Serving as a microcosm of what-was-to-come in this techno-social-political spectacle of

postmodernity, Quiet was able to illustrate the effects of the Internet and technology on subjects as

it miraculously infiltrates and takes over. Andy Warhol's notion of 15 minutes of fame in a lifetime

was blown to pieces by Harris' experiment which he claimed provided a solid basis to disprove

that claim as no longer true; instead, people want 15 minutes of fame everyday. The obscene

became normalized, melded into reality, filtered through the television screens and video cameras,

broadcasted from cell to cell through wires. The participants went hysterical. A continued erasure

of privacy, a melting of freedom under the circumstances of surveillance and simulation, and

ultimately the separation between self and the image of self deteriorated all faculties of those living

underground as the millennium dawned. Daily life became the spectacle that everyone tuned in to

see or gathered around the shower to watch as two people had intercourse with one another. The

subjects of the experiment became parasites in unto themselves, showing that as we willingly

trade our privacy for the connection and

Clark p19


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recognition we all deeply desire, but with every technological advancement such as MySpace,

Facebook and Twitter, [we] becomes more elusive.32 The film concludes with his last experiment

of being filmed twenty four hours a day in an apartment with a budding relationship broadcasted

live in the Internet. Perhaps his social experiment showcased an early manifestation of reality

television: people enacting their slow march towards total simulation of life. This, of course, begs

deeper questions about the separation between private/public social lives and really, a meaning to

life. It could even be argued that Quiet is reality it was a reality which was made by people, in

real time, unfolding without any sort of impediments. But even if one were to follow that faulty

line of thought all the way through, the end is evident: the experiment imploded (not exploded) onitself as the participants turned not only on themselves but each other. For someone like Debord,

the comfort of the possibilities in subversion are ever present they must be. There must be some

sort of hope towards living out this spectacle as it takes over each corner of our lives. But for

Baudrillard, there is nothing left to save or hope for which We Live in Public exhibited to its fullest

extent.

- - -

For Best, it is clear that Debord's analysis of society of the spectacle and its possibilities for

subversion are more convincing for him. The constant invocation that one needs to find the

fractures in the spectacle with which to engulf it by playing with the pieces of a moribund

culture not only through ironic commentary but the production of new cultural values is to

Baudrillard's claim that we must reach a point where one can live with what is left.. it is more a

survival among the ruins than anything else.33Even if one were to entertain Best and Debord in

Clark p20

32 We Live in Public,http://www.weliveinpublicthemovie.com/about-2/.33 Ibid, p117.
http://www.weliveinpublicthemovie.com/about-2/http://www.weliveinpublicthemovie.com/about-2/http://www.weliveinpublicthemovie.com/about-2/http://www.weliveinpublicthemovie.com/about-2/


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assuming that the spectacle has not yet presupposed modern society and subversion is a possibility,

the alternatives which have presented themselves as antitheses to the commodification of daily life

have already been consumedby the spectacle and sold back to society. Even provided as examples

within the essay comparing Debord and Baudrillard, Best makes note of Austin, Texas and the

ability both Whole Foods and Book People had to market even a supposed counterculture

approach to capitalism; the technique itself is a market strategy. Book People resembles the

metaphor of depoliticization of semiotics in the Coexist bumper stickers described earlier as the

bookstore coyly erects a Buddhist rock garden and meditation space next to a statue of Buddha

the mass-market god of commodified Western-appropriated spirituality. Whole Foods takes part inthe continued adoptive rhetoric of diversity and a politics of difference as part of a neoliberal

multiculturalist dogma which asserts itself in an ethnic commodification of sustainability, 'greening

the planet', and provider of micro loans for the developing Third World (for empowerment, of

course). Best describes the display of wares at Whole Foods as mesmerizing; yet if one has visited

the Austin Whole Foods, it is beyond mesmerizing it is the epicenter of globalized agricultural

capital and spectacle. Politically, too Best initiates a discourse which insinuates the modern

forms of revolutionary activism have been able to suppress dissimulation into a cultural or political

revolution of sorts. As he explains the essence of Debord and the Situationists International's goals

to reconstruct society and everyday life to overcome the apathy, deception, passivity, and

fragmentation induced by the spectacle merely by attempting to decolonize the spectacle through

destroying spectacular relations,34Best offers the revival of the Situationists spirit in politically

radical circles today as a curious afterlife which signifies a newly rejuvenated struggle to subvert

the spectacle! As hopeful,

Clark p21

34 Best, p92.


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altruistic, and utopian as Debord is unfortunately, many of the groups with which Best is

invoking here are merely attempts at subversion that are simply manifestations of the spectacle.

Organizations like CrimethInc35 are comprised of very affluent, predominantly white, apocalyptic

visionaries of vanguardist anarchism. Their literature resembles much of the theory behind the

Situationists and their (im)possibilities of exploding the spectacle through creating non-spectacular

relationships but essentially reinvent the spectacle's tropes in new ways. This, for me, is inherently

the problem with a cultural revolution rushing towards and advocating for a total subversion of the

spectacle we have moved from the possibilities into impossibilities.

Baudrillard envisioned the fantastic perfection of control, capital, and spectacle as beingthe most radical act of today:

Of course, today, the real terrorists are not so much us, as the events around us.

Situationist modes of radicalism have passed into things and into situations. Indeed,

there's no need now for Situationism, Debord, and so on. In a sense, all that is out of date.

The hyper-critical, radical, individual sensibility no longer exists. Events are the most

radical things today. Everything which happens today is radical. There's a great wealth of

radical events, and all one needs to do is entire into its interplay. Nowadays, reality isradical. Reality is Situationist, not us!36

He is absolutely right the spectacle is an absolute radical moment in history playing itself over

and over again that shows itself as mysteriously, somehow, not yet entirely collapsing. We are

already living amongst the ruins except that the ruins remain holographic and mirror-like. The

spectacle itself has bent as a manifestation of an inverse implosion, representing not only the

illusion itself as reality but that as illusion. The spectacle's hyperreality is radical, the very notion

Clark p22

35 CrimethInc, http://www.crimethinc.com/.36 Best, p104.


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that we live in simulated society is radical, and the hyperreal experiencing a theological death only

to be resurrected as a reproduced and representational Real is fanatical. Even as Best continues to

grasp for a plausible meaning in asserting that the hyperreal can always be contextualized,

deconstructed, and unasked to see what realities hide behind the illusion is absurd. As this essay

attempted to lay out, Baudrillard's concept of simulacrum illustrates that behind the very illusion

Best wanted Debord's theories to expose, the depth of the illusion, is shallow it is a manufactured

reality. It is like the tired old cinema scene of the opulent ballroom where the piano and strings

music fades out, the line of vision begins to blur, but the evening's partygoers continue to waltz in

their suits and dresses. There is no longer a Real to access, to find, to discover, or to create. Thevery attempt to find it is in and of itself a furthering of the spectacle. Even Debord agreed with this

idea towards the end of his life, stating the spectacle has... continued to gather strength... [and]

learnt new defensive techniques37 as it continued(s) to eclipse the possibilities of subversion. As

both Debord and Baudrillard have passed on, we continue to watch the slow, symbolic procession

of a self-imposed cultural death ceremonious weddings, graduations, birthdays; every chance to

celebrate the very existence of life itself is elevated to a platform of excess in an attempt to access

something real. Yet, still, everyday life is shit, and people know it.38 We are still lonely, still

isolated, still grasping for any kind of subjective meaning amongst the spectacle.

Las Vegas is a human-sized city, equipped with endless funhouse mirrors, peering into the

heart of the spectacle. Vapid indulgence and total distraction from reality is ever-present in the

streets lined with sparkiling lights, cut off from the surrounding desert... [with] darkened and

Clark p23

low-ceilinged casinos, spotted with islands of activity, from glowing tables to garden oases,39 as a

37 Best, p118.38 Ibid., p116.39 Morse, p211.


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total illusion presented as the ultimate real. The architecture of Las Vegas is radical there are

rivers flowing through hotels modeled after the Parisian streets in which you can actually ride a

boat, an exact replica to those in Paris' canals, through the hotel underneath a roof that changes

images (imaginary) according to the time of day. There are waterfalls, lush gardens with vines that

continue to wrap themselves around trusses, desert scenes with camels and exotic animals walking

across what appears to be a vast desert all this amongst a fully-functioning gambling casino. Joel

Sternfeld, a photographer, put together a book entitled iDubai40which features photographs from

Dubai's metropolis of malls which he took from his iPhone. In the fetishized object of the past

three years, Sternfeld achieves a unity of form and content; the object that encapsulates the spirit ofan era is used to document that era41. The images in this book are of bored teenagers, slumped in a

wooden chair, sipping on Starbucks lattes or of a Muslim woman dressed in a burqa with

stonewashed denim detailing on the back. It is the expression of the intrusion of commodities on

capitalist societies across the world, one which Baudrillard exclaims there is no escape from.

Indoor skiing pavilions and snowboarding trails are there in Dubai for the indulging while an

opportunity to merely gaze across the a/effected landscape with simulatory, holographic

destinations mirrored as spatial condensations is impossible to forego. It seems entirely possible

that Sternfeld could produce the same book while snapping photos on an iPhone in Las Vegas as

well, or is it perhaps that Dubai took some examples from the West's own simulated manufactured

landscape?

In America, Baudrillard documents his a road trip over the highways of the United States

Clark p24

and his observations of the unravelling topography of the U.S. He comes up with the term astral

40 http://www.daylightmagazine.org/podcast/november2010-0.41 http://www.steidlville.com/books/965-iDubai.html.
http://www.daylightmagazine.org/podcast/november2010-0http://www.steidlville.com/books/965-iDubai.htmlhttp://www.steidlville.com/books/965-iDubai.htmlhttp://www.daylightmagazine.org/podcast/november2010-0http://www.steidlville.com/books/965-iDubai.html


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america which for him describes the essence of what the United States' persona means to him: joy

in the collapse of metaphor... the exhilaration of obscenity, the obscenity of obviousness, the

obviousness of power, the power of simulation. As against our disappointed virginity, our chasms

of affection, the America which Baudrillard became familiar with created a feeling of being star-

blasted, horizontally by a car, altitudinally by plane, electronically by television, geologically by

deserts, stereolithically by megalopoloi, transpolitically by the power of the game, the power

museum that American has become for the whole world.42The power of the game, or the power

of the illusion, careened Baudrillard through these sensory environs as he witnessed the varying

ontological levels with which the spectacle in all its gloriousness has permeated. In reference toDebord and countering his narrative of subversion, Baudrillard writes more extensively about

Marxism and its criticisms toward not only capitalism but simulacrum in America, stating Not

only can history not be caught up, but it seems that in this 'capitalist' society capital can never

actually be grasped in its present reality. It is not that our Marxist critics have not tried to run after

it, but it always stays a length ahead of them. By the time one phase has been unmasked, capital

has already passed on to another.43 In a crude and brief summation of the points expressed

throughout, Baudrillard states it beautifully by simply noting that capital is always one step ahead,

passing on to other realms in order to gather all that is possible, and is at once also ready to move

on once it has been found gorging in the corner by itself.

These aren't the end times, as Best would make Baudrillard out to be explaining in his

published works. We aren't living out our last wishes amongst some apocalypse; rather,

Clark p25

everything comes in waves. But the act of subverting the spectacle by creating a counter-cultural

42 Baudrillard, Jean. America. Verso Press, 1988. p27.43 Ibid., p86.


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revolution is gone. We have to learn to 'live amongst the ruins', to document the spectacle, and

engage with it at the very least to understand and be conscious of the ways which simulacrum

works its intricacies and nuances. Carrying in the vein of progressive philosophy, it makes sense

that as the spectacle and capitalism continue grow and permeate, perhaps the goal isn't to try to

outstep its growth or determine a new future different than the confines of the spectacle (this re-

imagining, this project of projection, happens within the spectacle to reiterate from before) but to

merely be aware of its presence and affects/effects is a goal worthy of acknowledging. This doesn't

mean that one sits idly whilst amassing commodities and trinkets but that one is consistently

conscious of this spectacle and its invasions and pacifications into our daily lives. We must playwith the grinning Cheshire cat and get better at playing its game. In a way, I am advocating for a

sort of documentation ofthe spectacle because we can no longer disconnect. Morse prescribes in

her conclusion a similar idea in recognizing the extent and scope of an attenuated fiction effect in

everyday life... might already be a step toward bringing distraction within a controlled psychic

economy of disavowal.44 We have left the possibilities and have moved into the impossibilities.

We must remain, to some degree, these active spectators who live with the ruins to necessitate a

future in which every corner of the globe doesn't become introduced into the simulacrum.

Baudrillard doesn't collapse into an apathetic nihilism, crippling any possibility for a thoughtful

critique on capital and its impact on culture. Rather, Baudrillard entices a further engagement with

the spectacle to understand its abuses, its past, and the potential for its future(s). The deserts proved

so fascinating to Baudrillard because of their delivery from all depth there a brilliant, mobile,

superficial neutrality, a challenge to meaning

Clark p26

and profundity, a challenge to nature and culture, an outer hyperspace, with no origin, no

44 Morse, p213.


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reference-points. 45 Without prospects for subversion of a system which has created itself to

surmise the future 'here and now,' the last option is to take Baudrillard's advice of living amongst

the ruins and constantly attempting to understand it better.

45 America , p133.

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