All we can seemingly imagine is a world filled with unavoidable catastrophes, the source of which, we are told, remains beyond our grasp, thereby denying us any possibility for genuine systemic transformation in the order of things. How do we explain the current fetish for the doctrine of resilience if not through the need to adapt to the inevitability of catastrophe, and to simply partake in a world that is deemed to be “insecure by design”?36 Such adaptation both forces us to accept narratives of vulnerability as the authentic basis of political subjectivity, regardless of the oppressive conditions that produce vulnerable subjects, and neutralizes all meaningful qualitative differences in class, race, and gender.
The Seductions of Violence
Wilhelm Reich profoundly altered our understanding of oppression by drawing attention to its mass psychology.37 Focusing on the nature of twentieth-century fascism, he explained how predatory political and economic formations promote the disposability of entire populations as they indoctrinate the disadvantaged to desire what is patently oppressive. Reich showed how micro-specific questions of agency were intimately bound to imaginaries of threat and survivability such that the masses end up willfully accepting a suffocating and depoliticizing embrace. Notions of endangerment thus operate here affectively by appealing to concerns of the everyday.38 As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would explain, “Reich is at his profoundest as a thinker when he refuses to accept ignorance or illusion on part of the masses as an explanation of fascism, and demands an explanation that will take their desires into account, an explanation formulated in terms of desire: no, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under certain conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for.”39 Hence, as Reich understood, it is misguided to simply blame a handful of individuals for the “abuse of power” and their privilege. Rather than recoil in horror or exempt ourselves from deeper reflection, we must ask more searching questions about the normalization of violence and how it relates to the prevailing rationalities of the times. And we must do so while reflecting upon on our own shameful compromises, acknowledging the ways we are all being openly recruited into everyday forms of passivity, inactivism, subjugation, intolerance, and a denial of our humanity. Violence under such conditions becomes central to understanding a politics of desire and the production of subjectivities in the interest of their own oppression, but also how that politics functions as part of a struggle over agency itself.
It is impossible to comprehend the mass psychology of violence in the contemporary period without recognizing the centrality of commercial media that underpins its seductive potency.40 No longer peripheral to public life, constantly evolving, increasing mobile media technologies such as smart phones, tablets, and wearable devices have enacted a structural transformation of everyday life by fusing sophisticated networking technologies with a ubiquitous screen culture, while simultaneously expanding the range of cultural producers and recipients of information and images.41 The accelerating evolution of personal media technologies enables modes of spectatorship that seem to resist bundling users into a monolithic mass. Such technologies deploy unheard-of powers in the shaping of time, space, knowledge, values, identities, and social relations. They not only transform the relationships between the specificity of an event and its public display by making events accessible to a global audience, they also usher in an era of increasing awareness—the age of the spectacle—in which screen culture and visual politics create spectacular events just as much as they record them.42 Given that screen culture now dominates much of everyday life in privileged populations across the globe, the “audio-visual mode has become our primary way of coming in contact with the world and at the same time being detached (safe) from it.”43
Individuals’ capacity to create and globally distribute imagery, first-person accounts, and live video streams, however, are continually transforming relationships between politics, spectacular violence, and possibilities for community resistance to oppression, as has been the case in Ferguson, Missouri.
While individual and community access to state, national, and global audiences does open new vistas for organizing resistance, the same technology is also used by authorities to increase surveillance, and for employers to keep employees working all the time. As Brian Massumi has argued, such technology all too often can increase social control and act as “a workstation in the mass production line of fear.”44
While the association between mid-century fascism and aesthetics, and by implication its fetishistic spectacles, has been the subject of sustained critical analysis, the most promising work on the politics of the spectacle has been organized around its relationship with neoliberalism. Not, of course, to buy into the conceit here that fascism has been somehow defeated by neoliberal “conquerors,” or for that matter that neoliberalism is immune to fascistic ways of manipulating desires for political ends. Fascism remains as diverse as power. Indeed, as we shall explain, while philosophers and cultural critics have recognized in a prescient fashion the emergence of a new era of the spectacle under neoliberalism, and how such spectacles have wielded the potential to utterly transform the social order, what is particularly novel about the historical conjuncture in which we live is the ability to secure mass consent by shattering the familiar demarcations between inside/outside, friend/enemy, private/public, times of war/peace, that hallmark of ideological fascism in the twentieth century.
In our contemporary moment, we owe it to thinkers such as Guy Debord, Gilles Deleuze, Susan Sontag, Jean Baudrillard, François Debrix, and Douglas Kellner, among others, who have greatly extended our knowledge of how the spectacle has become a dominant mode of indoctrination that reinforces the foreclosure of civic agency once available to individuals and communities within capitalistic regimes of power. They have raised crucial questions about how the concepts and practices associated with the spectacle can lead to genuine civic advances and defiant acts of radical imagination, the very thought of which are increasingly considered with alarm by authorities who treat such non-market values as insurrectional, and see public displays of disobedience as gateways to crime and terrorism. That national anti-terrorism resources were marshalled to assist the surveillance and repression of the Occupy movement, leading to more than 7,000 arrests, is evidence of just how threatened the neoliberal order feels, and how drastically it reacts when sectors of society begins behaving off-message from the privatized grid of finance that dominates all aspects of society, culture, politics, and law.
Guy Debord’s pioneering work in The Society of the Spectacle45 provides a number of important theoretical insights for critically understanding the transformation of the spectacle and its role today. According to Debord, the spectacle that has emerged represents a new form of social control that is quite different from, but contains the political traces of, earlier forms of spectacle that were instrumental to fascism. Debord views the spectacle as a product of the market and a new form of cultural politics. He argues that the spectacle represents a “new stage in the accumulation of capital [in which] more and more facets of human activity and elements of everyday life were being brought under the control of the market.”46 The spectacle, in other words, is no longer put to use for the creation of a mythical unity of superior beings. It now operates for its own purpose—complete commercialization, commodification, and marketization. Indeed, in its willful manipulation of desires through the sophisticated deployment of mechanisms that prompt people to tolerate conditions that ordinarily would appear politically oppressive, the spectacle is in fact, a predatory strategy and politically fascistic. Such mechanisms resonate with Reich’s concerns about the ability to manipulate large sectors of society by inducing a form of mass psychosis of consent that manipulates reasoning and conscience and thus normalizes the most abhorrent form of subjugation and violence.
Under late capitalism, the spectacle has been reforged in the crucible of mass consumption and the mass media, producing new modes for power to advantage itself through the domination of everyday life. Although the spectacle is often viewed by the public as mere entertainment, disconnected from power and politics, Debord insists that “the spectacle is the self-portrait of power in the age of power’s totalitarian rule over the conditions of existence.”47 For Debord, new technological developments in communications now establish the mode of information as a category as important for reproducing social life as labor had been for