Two weeks ago we started a discussion of the Situationists, an obscure movement spawned by fringe Marxism in 1950s Europe. As I commented at the time, that’s an unimpressive pedigree for any set of ideas, and it’s been rendered even more distasteful to a great many people worldwide just now by the recent demonstration of just how easily the mindset of leftist extremism motivates, excuses, and celebrates brutal savagery and mindless hate. Nonetheless I plan on continuing the discussion of Situationism here. Even a broken clock tells the right time twice a day, as the saying goes, and some ideas introduced by the Situationists in their attempt to fix the broken clock that is Marxism have a great deal to offer, once they’re pried loose from that failed system of ideas and put to work in the service of some less stultifying way of looking at the world.
That crowbar-work is going to require a little more discussion of the failings of Marxism, and in particular of its insistence on a wholly collective view of morality. You can see that view at work even in those milquetoast versions of Marxism that are common fare nowadays in European social democracies. In some European countries right now, for example, a woman who is raped by an immigrant faces more serious legal consequences if she mentions her rapist’s nationality on social media than the rapist will ever face for his crime. Why? Because within the worldview that governs these nations at the moment, individuals and their actions are irrelevant. All that matters is which group they belong to, because only groups have moral standing in Marxist thought; individuals do not, and therefore the severity of a crime—and even whether an act is a crime or not—depends entirely on the groups to which criminal and victim are assigned.
In classic Marxism, the groups that mattered were social classes, and in that scheme, the ruling class was by definition evil and the proletariat class was by definition good. That meant—and yes, you can find this in Marxist literature—that when Tsar Alexander II abolished serfdom in the Russian empire, that was an evil act, since by definition the ruling class can only do evil. It also meant—and you can also find this in Marxist literature—that when Communists commit mass murder, that’s a virtuous act, since the crimes were committed by the proletariat, and since the proletariat can do no wrong, the victims must have deserved it.
In the wake of the New Left of the 1960s, which established the theories that today’s leftist parties generally follow, the rhetoric of class was replaced by that of race and gender but the insistence on collective morality (and thus of collective guilt and punishment) remains fixed in place. It’s the same logic that was used to justify the massacre of Jews in the Middle Ages—a few Jews more than a millennium earlier played a role in the execution of Jesus of Nazareth, therefore all Jews everywhere were held to be guilty of deicide—and it’s just as brutal and stupid now as it was back then. Now as then, it’s a convenient bit of ideology if one happens to want to justify atrocities, and of course that’s exactly why it’s so popular.
This is highly relevant to our present conversation because the concept of the Spectacle, the aspect of Situationism that we’ll focus on in this week’s essay, is inevitably presented by Situationist authors within the framework of Marxist theory. Thus there is only one Spectacle, it’s a monolithic evil presence, it bears down on the proletariat with crushing weight, and it’s all manufactured by the bourgeoisie for the benefit of the ruling class. Read Guy Debord’s La Société du Spectacle or its English translation The Society of the Spectacle—and I strongly recommend that anyone interested in these ideas should buy a copy and do exactly that—and you’ll find everything in the book resting on that set of unquestioned assumptions.
This is ironically where another idea widely popular among today’s leftists, the concept of intersectionality, has a great deal to offer. The core principle of intersectionality is that your privilege in society, or lack of same, is not a product of class alone, or sex alone, or race alone, or ethnic background alone, or any other single factor. It’s the product of all these factors and many others, all intersecting to produce a complex texture of privilege. It’s a useful insight, though these days it’s too often been twisted into a justification for what gets dourly called the Oppression Olympics, the no-holds-barred struggle to claim the status of Most Oppressed Person Evah (a status, please note, that grants its holder considerable privilege in some contexts, such as American universities).
So power and privilege are always intersectional. They’re also always contextual. What this means is that the powers and privileges you have depend very much on where you are and who you’re interacting with. On American college campuses today, for example, white straight men are not a privileged class. Quite the contrary, they are expected to accept a permanent place in the back of the bus to atone for the sins committed by some white straight men in the past. (Again, the collective morality of the Left can be seen at work here.) Are there other contexts where white straight men have more privilege than members of other categories? You bet, and some of them have considerable power—but most white straight men aren’t US senators or corporate CEOs, you know, and so don’t have access to the contexts where their particular intersectional status might give them an advantage.
Thus power and privilege are always intersectional and contextual. That means that they’re always and irreducibly individual. Even in the same context, no two human beings have the same combination of intersectional factors defining their potentials for power and privilege, and the landscape of contexts through which each of us move varies just as widely. Success in life, in a very real way, consists of finding a context that makes it possible to use one’s specific powers and privileges to best advantage. That’s certainly true of me; as an autistic person, there are plenty of contexts where my background as a college-educated white straight man raised at the bottom edge of the middle class won’t do me any good at all. Fortunately I had the good sense to avoid the sort of corporate contexts where I can only fail, and found the sort of niche role that allowed me to make use of my talents and cover for my many limitations.
Yet the same point is equally true of, let’s say, a fourteen-year-old Hispanic kid in one of Rhode Island’s bleaker ghettos who efficiently leverages his very limited options by becoming a part of the local gang culture. There are plenty of contexts where I have privileges he can’t even dream of getting, but within the contexts that match his intersectional status, if he’s smart, tough, and lucky, he can rise very far and quite possibly gain the things he wants out of life. Does everyone in the same contexts achieve that? Of course not—but then plenty of college-educated white straight men raised in middle class families crash and burn catastrophically, too.
With that said, we can move from the Marxist underpinnings of Situationism to confront the Spectacle itself. What is the Spectacle? It is the world of appearances generated by any modern industrial society. Debord points out cogently that the Spectacle is not a collection of images, but rather a social relationship between people mediated by images. Because of that act of mediation, the Spectacle is always alienated and alienating: that is, it stands in the way of any authentic interaction between people, and it also stands in the way of any authentic perception of the actual realities of life in late industrial culture.
Here a concrete example will do much more than any amount of abstraction, so let’s imagine a couple sitting in their living room watching a sitcom on television. They may be sitting side by side on the sofa, but their interactions with each other will by and large be limited to whatever won’t distract them from the program. During the time they spend staring at the screen, they experience a world of fictitious images, full of people and places who don’t exist. At intervals the sitcom is broken off to make way for an even more fictitious world in which various consumer products pretend to satisfy this or that human desire, where everyone tipping back a beer in the bar is young, well-dressed, happy, and laughing, and where asking your doctor about the latest pharmaceutical will surely cure you of an illness you don’t know you have.
Now imagine the couple getting up and going to the kitchen table to have dinner—we’ll assume they’re unfashionable enough to do this, instead of simply gobbling down their food in the living room while the television drones on. Even when they’re not watching the screen, the images that played in front of their eyes retain their presence and power. That’s not accidental, of course. Huge corporations fork over millions of dollars to cover the considerable costs of producing those images and getting them onto the screens, and I trust none of my readers are so clueless as to think they have altruistic reasons for doing so. Quite the contrary, that money gets forked over because those images shape human thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Human beings are social primates, after all, and to a very great extent they follow the familiar rule of “monkey see, monkey do.” The behavior of characters in a sitcom, or actors in an advertisement, or talking heads on a news-and-views show, becomes part of the mental world, and thus the behavioral world, of the people who watch it. Thus our couple, as they have dinner and talk, are as likely as not to regurgitate thoughts suggested to them by their years of watching television, and the actions they take will be shaped by the same source.
This is an obvious expression of the Spectacle, which is why I used it as an example. There are many more expressions that are much less obvious. The choice of words a speechwriter puts into the mouth of a politician, the choice of events that appear on the evening news, the choice of colors used for products and their packaging, and many more such choices all contribute to the construction of the Spectacle. So, to at least as great an extent, do the words that are left out, the events that go unreported, and the products that are never manufactured or sold. All of these things and more flow together to create the artifact that is the Spectacle, a relation mediated by images that pretends to be the world.
Paying attention to advertising, on or off television, can be very helpful if you want to see the Spectacle at work. Notice, first of all, how little connection there is between whatever material reality might be behind the image—say, cheap yellow beer—and what’s actually being shown on the screen. Usually what you see has nothing to do with the product and everything to do with some basic human need that the product doesn’t actually address—say, the craving for status and companionship titillated by those young, attractive, expensively dressed people who laugh and talk as they guzzle cheap yellow beer. Watch the images of desire as they drift further and further away from whatever’s being marketed, and you can learn a great deal.
It’s at this point that things get complex, though. Debord and other authors of the Situationist International were of course devout Marxists, and so by and large interpreted the Spectacle as an instrument by which the capitalist system enforces alienation on everyone for its own benefit. There’s truth in that, but it’s a one-sided truth. The other side of the truth is that the Spectacle, this relationship mediated by images, is constantly being manipulated by all of its participants. Like every other expression of power, it is intersectional and contextual.
Debord and his peers had the misfortune of living at a time when the current technologies of image creation and distribution were new, expensive, and therefore highly centralized. Television, again, is the most obvious example, but several other forms of image production were nearly as recent. Mass-produced magazines with color photographs were a new introduction to the postwar world, and color movies with sound weren’t that much older. Furthermore, the entire science of propaganda that was deployed in the postwar years to transform the Spectacle into a commodity capable of mass production was also largely a creation of the war years, when all sides sunk as much money and resources as they could spare into the production of propaganda to rally their own populations and mislead their opponents.
All this was new and interesting in the 1950s, and it attracted audiences who had not yet learned to be critical of such things. It was thus easy enough for Debord et al. to fall into the trap of mistaking a temporary condition mediated by new and costly technologies for a state of affairs that had come to stay, at least until proletarian revolution overthrew the system. That trap was set for them by Marxism’s Christian roots; the belief that the world will just get worse and worse until the Second Coming miraculously solves all our problems—premillennialism, to give it its proper theological name—is a widespread Christian belief. Marx borrowed it and filed off the serial numbers, as he did with so many other Christian doctrines, to predict that the world would just get worse and worse until proletarian revolution miraculously solves all our problems.
If anything, though, belief in proletarian revolution is rather less plausible than belief in the Second Coming—the Christians at least have the common sense to found their belief in a future utopia on the intervention of an omnipotent deity, which is pretty much what it would take to get humans to behave in a utopian fashion—and the predictions Marx made have one and all been disproven by events. The Situationists, too, caught the awkward modern illness of futurus interruptus, and were left clutching their dogmas in pain as the ecstatic release they expected never got around to happening. The brief interval when the Spectacle was under a semblance of centralized control passed, as such intervals do, and we returned to the more normal state of Spectacular existence, in which the creation and distribution of images became a more widespread privilege.
At the moment, in fact, it’s become more widespread than usual. The rise of the internet meme is a good example of this spread. These unexpected side effects of internet culture have taken on a considerable power in the world of the spectacle—at least as powerful just now as the waning force of network television, for example—and memes, like so much of the current Spectacle, are the product of a free-for-all in which individuals have outsized roles as producers, distributors, and consumers. The Spectacle still exercises its familiar power, but it’s become incoherent, pulled this way and that by the efforts of competing factions and the vagaries of cultural and subcultural tastes. Much of the disintegration of American society into a patchwork of mutually hostile subcultures, in fact, can be traced to the shattering of the Spectacle into competing sub-Spectacles, each appealing to its own audience.
A vivid example of that process at work is playing out right now in the aftermath of the assassination of conservative speaker Charlie Kirk. So far, at least, the evidence indicates that he was murdered in cold blood by a young man radicalized by the extremist left. Since Kirk was hugely popular among centrists as well as on the right, his murder has turned into a public relations nightmare for the left, which builds its appeal on the dubious claim that it is more virtuous and compassionate than its rivals. Thus the left is frantically trying to stick the blame somewhere else. This blog has accordingly been spammed repeatedly over the last week with cookie-cutter comments from people (or nonpeople—some of the comments read like LLM product) that don’t normally try to comment here, insisting in tones of angry faux-certainty that Kirk’s murderer must have supported a rival conservative faction, or that Kirk was shot by agents of the Israeli government. No doubt they’d blame the killing on aliens from Zeta Reticuli if they thought they could get away with it.
A great deal of the current economic and political establishment is behind that push. Nonetheless it’s by no means certain that it’ll get much traction, because another substantial share of the current economic and political establishment is pushing back, and so are various groups outside the power structure who supported Kirk’s religious and cultural agenda. As a result, the mechanisms of the Spectacle are on display with a degree of nakedness verging on the obscene. To borrow a metaphor from The Wizard of Oz, there have always been a crowd of little men behind the curtain, all trying to get the giant floating head of Oz the Great and Powerful to say something supporting their own interests; the illusion can pass for reality so long as the crowd around the controls remains orderly, but once they start fighting, the noise and the occasional punch-drunk figure tumbling out through the gap in the curtains make it impossible to ignore what’s actually been going on all along.
Now of course this is also a passing stage, since we are in the middle of an elite replacement cycle. The bureaucratic-managerial elite that seized power in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, and has since become decadent and ineffectual in the usual way, is being shoved aside in the usual way by a rising entrepreneurial elite. (They’ll face the same fate in their turn, and be shoved aside by another class sometime around 2100.) Once that process has finished, the federal bureaucracy is trimmed down to whatever size the nation can afford once its global empire finishes going away, and decisions on most social issues devolve on the states as specified in the Constitution, doubtless a new unanimity will replace the current free-for all; it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the internet stopped being quite so accessible to individual memesmiths around then, too.
There’s a deeper context to all this, however. The Situationists believed, in their devout Marxist souls, that the Spectacle would remain welded in place until the proletarian revolution of their dreams brought about their pseudosecular equivalent of the Second Coming and permitted people to establish some less alienated and alienating social relationship among themselves. Fortunately—since Marxist proletarian revolution is as imaginary as a hippogriff, if a lot less attractive and interesting—there are other ways to accomplish the same thing. We’ll discuss those a little later in this sequence of posts.
In many ways, universities have always been the smokescreen. The greatest victory of the cultural left has been in corporations, especially those associated with the knowledge economy, not universities. This has largely been through the growth of the diversity training industry that saw its modern Genesis around 1968.
https://www.amazon.ca/Race-Experts-Etiquette-Sensitivity-Revolution/dp/074252759X
And they succeeded because, after all, the Enlightenment ideals of freedom of religion, conscience, and expression don’t apply in private companies.
https://books.google.ca/books/about/Private_Government.html?id=hXSYDwAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y
https://www.pivotalsolutions.com/can-some-discussions-be-banned-at-work-does-freedom-of-speech-protect-against-discipline-or-dismissal/
JMG,
So to tie this back to a set of comments in last weeks post discussing the 1990’s. Several of us expressed a preference for the 1990’s because the internet and social media had not yet significantly affected everyday life, human interactions and how we saw the world. But in todays post we learn that may have been because the 1990’s were the last time the spectacle was fully in place. It had yet to be fractured in the way that it has now.
Well done sir.
Gosh, you have a strong stomach. I’ve heard of these ideas second hand before, but I am still heavily reminded of the “toshers”, the Victorian era scavengers of London’s sewers sifting through the unfathomably awful for anything of value.
David, maybe so, but please note the contexts where I brought up universities — as places where being the Most Oppressed Person Evah gives you plenty of status. That remains true: more true than in the corporate world, where the upper echelons of power and wealth have only recently opened their doors to a carefully selected cohort of women and people of color.
Clay, good heavens. That hadn’t occurred to me, but it makes a great deal of sense.
James, thank you!
Synthase, Bruce Lee has good advice on this:
Aas long as you react emotionally to belief systems you dislike, you’re allowing the people who hold those beliefs to control you through those reactions. If you can study such belief systems without reacting to them, tracing out their weak points and their valid insights (for every belief system, no matter how stupid it is generally, includes at least a few valid insights), you gain power over the belief system, and thus over those who are dominated by it.
Log off now and avoid the rush.
Awesome essay. Thank you.
JMG,
As to the beach scene with the couple. I find it totally plausible. They obviously left their home in Tacoma, stopped by the brewery in Tumwater to pick up a case of Oly, then headed for the beaches of Southern California in their 1965 Ford Galaxy 500 Country Squire Station wagon ( the one with the wood grain paneling on the outside). They probably also stopped in Portland to grab a matching set of Jantzen swimwear. They were obviously not on the beach in Oregon or Washington because they would have been wearing sweatshirts due to the cold wind ( even in summer) that would have also knocked over their umbrella.
Thank you for explaining some of these Marxist phenomenon in terms I can understand. I believe it was William Blake who said “You become what you behold.” The Left is being shown in a very unflattering light in their reaction to Charlie Kirk. I can only imagine what commenters are trying to post here right now, most likely worked into a frenzy of projection, anything to avoid the ugly reflection being shown to all in the mirror. To my mind, this is the product of the deification of college and the illusion that one is always better for graduating college than he or she is for not going/graduating. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that some of the most vile comments about Kirk’s death are coming out of academia, whether it is a school in Barrington, Rhode Island or a college campus. Speaking of obnoxious midwits, does anyone remember that horrible TV pharmaceutical ad approximately 25 or 30 years ago, possibly more,that used James Brown’s “I Feel Good” as a backdrop for some yuppie speedwalking down the sidewalk back one speedwalking was actually a trend? I don’t even remember what the drug was for, I just remember being utterly disgusted with pharmaceutical ads. I guess in a perverse way I am grateful because that ad took the blinders off for me and I began to see how awful pharmaceutical companies are in everything they do.
Yes, but there is a difficulty scaling to that. Especially since political theorists tend do to words what bitcoin does to electricity.
Hello everybody, JMG and Kommentariat. I was waiting for this Wednesday John post because I knew John was going to write about Situationism, which it’s one of my favorite topics…Well, I’ve sit quietly in a public library with some popcorn to enjoy it (OK, imaginary popcorn, you all will understand me).
I’d say, after having reading this week post, that Situs of course were quite limited by their Marxist view of things; though they succeed in sayings some ugly and true things about Western reality, then and nowadays. Debord between them with his Spectacle idea. Time has passed since the first edition of his famous book, and of course Spectacle has changed, like John writes, it’s decentralised for example.
I’d like to say too, that in the years and decades after famous 1968 “French May” (in whose theory Situs were a big part of that Leftist riot), some authors we could name as “Post-Situationists”, have criticised in part and refined Situ analysis of modern reality: mainly (post)Marxists and Anarchists too.
I want to re-read JMG post to understand better its critical views on Situationism Spectacle. I can only write now John’s right when says Spectacle isn’t only a Capitalist trick for mesmerizing Marxist “beings of light”(proletarians) and avoid the Situs beloved Revolution; it’s true Spectacle has been “democratised” by Internet until a certain degree.
I don’t want to finish my comment without remembering you’all what wrote some weeks ago about nowadays use of Spectacle terms by some anarchists to criticise the “Bolivarian Revolution” in Venezuela. It’s ironic that a supposed Socialist regime like Chavez yesterday and Maduros today, can be blamed for playing fake Communism by some Far Leftists. However, Debordian Spectacle has strange ways to perform…the ways of Spectacle are mysterious don’t you think it too?
I won’t go on writing more about this topic by now, to not bore you…
https://sherwood.news/tech/google-faces-its-first-big-lawsuit-for-ai-summaries-rolling-stone-lawsuit/
That’s a graph for dropping traffic at news sites.
In related non-covered news there is rioting in Nepal and the “small” demonstration in England may have been bigger than reported. Was it 100,000 or 3 million?
But Melania’s and Kate’s hats were carefully covered.
I’m sure those comments are related.
Clay Dennis # 2:
I’ve read your comment about your reasons to prefer ‘90s era, and if I’ve understand you correctly (English isn’t my mothers language) you think the Spectacle wasn’t so fractured like today. Am I right?
Well, it could be a good reason to be fond of that Good Old Times. Why not?
Shoggoth, that’s one strategy. There are others, which we’ll get to.
Dennis, you’re welcome and thank you.
Clay, ha! Back in the day, they’d have trouble getting past the California border with a case of Oly — do you remember when cars were expected to pull over and let the fruit inspectors make sure they weren’t bringing fruit with them, on the excuse that the fruit might have pests? Out-of-state beers tended to get confiscated as well. My late brother-in-law used to make money in his late teens smuggling Coors from Coeur d’Alene to Spokane, for similar reasons. But the weather’s part of what I had in mind — I spent a lot of summers on the Washington coast at Grayland and Westport, where the sand, the sky, and the sea were all different shades of cast-iron gray, the wind whipped drizzle into your face with the force of a slap, and 50°F was a nice warm day. The other part is that Olympia may just be the worst beer I’ve ever tasted. There was a running joke in Seattle when I was younger that if you put Oly out in bowls in your garden to attract and drown the slugs, you could count on a delegation of slugs at your back door the next morning saying, “Look, if you’re going to kill us, could you at least give us something fit to drink?”
Kimberly, you’re welcome. With me the awakening came a little earlier, which is probably why I never saw that ad, and somehow missed “speedwalking” (whatever that might be). As for the current state of trollery, I’ve deleted a couple of insult-laden tirades, but nothing has come in yet that’s any more interesting than that.
Synthase, I’ve never found scaling up a difficulty in this context, but of course your mileage may vary.
Chuaquin, glad to hear you’re enjoying the popcorn. In due time, we’ll get to a Situationist analysis of Situationism, and discuss how it used détournement on the Marxist scene to create a Spectacle all its own. Stay tuned!
Siliconguy, these days, the Spectacle is much more a matter of what’s not reported, not seen, and not mentioned than it is of the imagery that exists. That’s one of the reasons why it’s fragmenting — you can only pretend that there isn’t an elephant in the room if it doesn’t defecate on you…
One thing i’ve noticed is how much the far left’s idea of revolution seems to be taking more and more religious tones. I think deep down they know its not coming and they’re growing more desperate. Why is the left so enamored with socialism/marxism? Is it because of the myth of progress? I think some sites made it more appealing to a sort of downwardly mobile atheistic middle class person. Just check out r/late stage capitalism or r/a boring dystopia to see that. Or tumblr.
By the way, the original sensibility of the “New Left” was not that “marginalized” races and genders would take the working class’ place as the “New Proletariat” (as per the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre or Herbert Marcuse). The term “New Left” was first coined by English socialist E.P. Thompson in 1959.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._P._Thompson
Its original centre of critique was not white males but rather Marxism-Leninism. Its genesis was in 1956 in the wake of the Soviet Union crushing the Hungarian Revolution that year. It critiqued what it called “bureaucratic socialism” (which they saw as the governing ideology East of the Iron Curtain) and “corporate liberalism” (which they saw as the governing ideology West of the Iron Curtain). They sought what they called a “participatory” socialism that wouldn’t require a totalitarian state and largely (in line with the “Young Marx”) attacked what they saw as hierarchical structures/divisions of labour generally pivoting away from the later Marxian obsession with dogmatic historical materialism in favour of a more sociological critique.
https://reason.com/1969/10/01/philosophical-origins-and-intellectual-h/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Left
I appreciate your discussion of intersectionality, and in particular your note “privilege” is always contextual. Years ago I suggested the same thing to Leftists, pointing out that whether or not a particular category is “privileged” varies widely depending on the context. It wasn’t just that they didn’t understand, it was also clear that they thought I was agreeing with them. Their minds simply couldn’t grasp an argument that was different from “Yes, you are right” or “No, you are wrong.”
Around the same time, I made the same case to some right-wingers. This was about a dozen years ago, and the right-wingers were members of what was then called the “mens rights” movement. I pointed out that men and women were variously privileged in some contexts and disadvantaged in others. Instead of not understanding, they simply became angry and insisted that I was repeating feminist propaganda and that “We must expose and confront the oppression of men.”
One thing I’d add is that the number of possible categories of “privilege” extends well beyond the usual ones. Here in the US, what we might call “regional” privilege is extremely important and always overlooked, as are the relative privileges of the suburban versus the rural and the urban (again, depending entirely on context). As are differences of religion beyond the obvious ones; differences of culture; and ethnic differences within the larger (fake) categories of “black,” “white,” and “Hispanic.” And, again, all these vary depending on circumstances. I was raised by grandparents who experienced prejudice for being Catholic or members of white-but-not-white-enough ethnic groups (Italian, Irish). On the other hand, I knew a guy raised in a particular neighborhood in Philadelphia who was given an Irish first name despite having one parent who was English, for his own protection.
The larger issue, to my mind, with “collective morality” is simply that collectives never act, and are, as such, never moral agents. The larger the collective, the truer this is: “White people” in the United States are 200 million individuals and are incapable of doing anything at all as a group. They are thus never culpable, as “white people,” for their offenses. Nor, for that matter, are they laudable for their virtues. Virtue and vice, praise and blame, are concepts only applicable to moral agents, which can only be either individuals or (at best) groups in which individuals are able to actively participate. And so the entire thing is a simple error of reasoning, not that different from adding 2+2 and getting ten, which would be funny if its consequences weren’t so deadly.
Kimberly @ #9: My favorite ads were the ones for crooked cucumbers. (Yes, I’ve always been sort of literal-minded.)
Also do you think this latest AI craze is just another form of spectacle? I’m looking forward to when the bubble pops.
I was late getting to the previous post in this sequence, as well as to last week’s sub-thread about the self-destructive tendencies of the left, so this has been churning for several days.
There’s another dimension to the present-day decline of the left (to misquote Spengler, and at the same time to invoke him) which also ties in nicely with the unconscious Marxist derivation from Christian tradition.
Christianity, as you may recall, takes as its central theme a purposeful act of divine self-destruction. Jesus not only submitted willingly to his own torture and death, the Gospels make it clear that he intentionally provoked his enemies into taking extreme measures against him. All of this was a conscious part of the divine plan for the redemption of humankind, of course.
One of the psychological legacies that followed from this was an obsession with martyrdom all through the history of Christianity. There are stories of medieval missionaries going into Islamic countries and acting up in various ways to provoke the local authorities into giving them the death penalty. The Crusades formalized this practice, and Christian missionaries during the years of colonization internationalized it. What the Marxists did in the twentieth century was to secularize it.
Like you, I hung out with left-wing radicals in my early twenties and was deeply impressed by their ineffectiveness, despite their being involved in a near-frenzy of political activities. Eventually I came to realize that everything they did and said publicly served the purpose not of political or organizational victories, but of glorious self-immolation. (Privately, they hosted great potlucks and house concerts, which is why they were fun to hang out with). At a certain level (not on a conscious level, that is) they actually wanted to go down in flames, but in a morally splendid fashion.
Apply POSIWID to their political efforts *as individuals,* rather than from the perspective of the state, and you arrive at the religious analogue from a different direction. The purpose of beta-marxism and its offspring (including the cult of woke, which derives from Jesus’ various formulations of ‘the last shall be first’, and is explicitly presented as such from the pulpits of left-leaning churches) is not to accomplish the revolution, but to accomplish glorious martyrdom. As a completely unconscious tendency, it has none of the divine grace of the original Atonement, needless to say. It’s one thing to consciously face death for something you believe in; it’s quite another to go around creating smoking craters with yourself at the centre.
Then we come to the Neopagans, who were the subject of a sub-thread on last week’s post. They too are unconsciously acting out the Christian/Marxist martyr script. Jesus said to love your enemies and do good to those who persecute you; a dominant strain in Neopaganism today seems to encourage hating your enemies and hexing those you perceive to be persecutors. This does not add up to a rejection of Christianity but an affirmation, since it’s a simple inversion. And unfortunately, as was mentioned last week, some in the Neopagan community are busy setting themselves up for another great round of witch hunts with all of their public demonstrations of malicious magic.
For an example of a truly different path, I would offer up an offhand remark you once made to the effect that you simply don’t have enemies. Or consider Buddhism and Hinduism, in which the great role models more often seem to be happy, calm, successful people rather than glorious victims. As has been said here before, there’s no one right answer here about how to be- it just helps to know more than one story.
I see two reasons for the rising phenomenon of assassinations and mass shootings. First is that the cruelties and uncertainties of late stage capitalism are literally making people insane. Very few of us are able to dance on chaos, and those who can are usually the least productive among us. Second is the use or overuse of pharmaceuticals to “treat”, you should excuse the expression, mental illnesses. I don’t say that chemical intervention might not have good effects in some cases, but they seem to be being prescribed in the same way antibiotics were being over prescribed a few decades ago.
I would like to say that, as a lifetime weirdo, now senior, I consider it no part of my duty to follow every aspect of popular culture. So, I know next to nothing about gaming, most sports except baseball, anime–that I regret as it seems like an interesting art form– or the late Mr. Kirk. My condolences to his family. It is doubly tragic when a young parent is killed, which, I might add, does happen daily on the mean ghetto streets of more than one of our cities. Naturally, whomever was bankrolling Mr. Kirk, the little men behind the curtain to whom our host referred, will accept no responsibility for putting their gifted protégé in danger. As I mentioned, I know almost nothing about Mr. Kirk, but I can’t help being reminded of a musician, Jimi Hendrix, who was plucked from a Greenwich club, escorted to Britian, helped to the fame and fortune which his talent deserved, and then died young, according to some accounts murdered by people he trusted.
I wonder, if someone were to approach you following on a performance, or something you might have written, and promise to make you famous and your ideas/music heard, it might not be the best part of valor to refuse the “favor”.
@siliconguy #12
Early in the day the BBC reported “thousands” which is true only to the extent that more than any more than 1999 people are thousands. A few hours later the police suggested 150,000 if memory serves, more or less at the same time the organisers were quoted as claiming 3 million. That’s quite a spread.
One commentator on the spot who seems to have some regard for truth suggested 600 thousand. That’s still more than enough to make any of Westminster’s inhabitants blench.
So in essence, we currently inhabit a kaleidoscope of post-modern Spectacularisms. Would that be a proper synopsis?
Tangentially, I just finished rewatching Robert Huges’s series “SHOCK of THE NEW” .. which I think tended to prove the rule, of just how much of the various ‘modern’ art movements of the past century had become nothing short of spectacle.
I must confess to having a fondness for contemporary meme art, punching directly to point .. often pointing sarcastic jabs at various illogical aspects of that agglomeration of ‘oppression olympics’ of which you mentioned above.
It’s gotten to the point that there are so many spectacles to behold in so many media formats that I think I’ve become innocculated to them or at least bored with every new fad or “hot take” that the internet spits out. I find myself more interested in something with some staying power in the sense of exercising my mind to behold and contemplate something for a while to truly understand it.
The Marxist belief as described above is a recipe for making total moral monsters. It rules out any way to be truly ethical at all! Completely apart from the Cold War catch phrase of “Godless Commies!”
There is one way, granted to some of our two-legged breed, to be immune to the Spectacle, because we are not social primates. On the lowest end of all is the common sociopath, but you can also achieve it through autism. Just my $0.02
JMG # 14:
OK, after reading your comment remembering the “Situationist analysis of Situationism”, I’m very curious waiting for your opinion about it…
Seeking, good! Yes, and that follows naturally from the origins of modern leftist radicalism in Christian eschatology. In Eric Voegelin’s neat phrase, the modern left seeks to “immanentize the eschaton” — that is, to turn the visionary promises of Christian faith into a mundane reality in this world, with the lion being forced to lie down with the lamb at gunpoint if necessary. As the mythology of progress collapses around us, the foundations of their belief system are cracking apart, and the left is on its way back to religion, whether it realizes this or not.
David, yes, and that’s specifically why I mentioned the New Left of the 1960s, not the very different scene that went by the same name in the 1950s. It does help if you pay attention to what I’m actually saying.
Steve, of course. I remember the men’s rights scene as it manifested in Seattle rather well, and not fondly; they’d simply taken feminist rhetoric and inverted it, and as a result, they’d become just as humorless and unpleasant as the feminists they hated. (cough, cough, what you contemplate you imitate, cough, cough…) As for categories of privilege, good heavens, yes, as far as I can tell, any factor that differentiates one human being from another functions as a privilege differential in at least some contexts.
Seeking, I’m probably going to have to talk about the LLM bubble sometime soon. I grant that the bursting of the bubble will be popcorn-worthy, but it’s likely to have tremendously destructive economic consequences; I hope you have some way to make a living that won’t be impacted.
Dylan, I think you’re quite correct; certainly that makes sense of what I’ve seen. I’m starting to wonder if the entire extremist scene in the US today, from one end of the political landscape to another, is full of Jesus wannabees who are behaving more and more outrageously in a frantic attempt to be crucified, and the problem they face is that most people just want them to go away and stop bothering everybody.
Mary, one of the last television shows I ever watched, back in the late 1970s, was an episode of Kung Fu, with David Carradine as a half-Chinese martial artist wandering through the Old West. In that episode a gunslinger tried to hire Carradine’s character, saying, “I could really use you in Mexico.” Carradine gave him a flat look and said, “I have no desire to be used in Mexico.” That line stuck with me, and it’s come to mind several times in my career. There were a couple of interactions back in the peak oil days that felt very much as though I was being sounded out for a starring role, and a few more recent ones as well — none as blatant as you suggest, but then I suspect they rarely are.
Polecat, that’s one way of phrasing it, though the term “post-modern” is pure Spectacle, and means exactly nothing.
WatchFlinger, and that boredom is something that the Situationist International never anticipated. It’s a potent force.
Patricia M, you’ll get no argument from me.
I’m not sure if my job will be affected when the bubble pops, I work in banking. But my ultimate plan is to ordain as a monk. Hopefully I will be able to do so soon.