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Anarchy: a journal of desire armed. #36, Spring 1993
anticopyright - Anarchy may be reprinted at will for
non-profit purposes, except in the case of individual
copyrighted contributions.
ESSAYS
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The Fall of Communism,
the Society of the Spectacle
and Prostitution
By Peter S. Barker
``Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is the affirmation
of appearance and affirmation of all human life, namely social
life, as mere appearance. But the critique which reaches the truth
of the spectacle exposes it as the visible negation of life, as a
negation of life which has become visible.'' -Guy Debord, Society
of the Spectacle
January, 1992:
The Devil's Dictionary defines the state of being free as one in
which the price is concealed. For millions of Russians who woke on
New Year's morning of 1992 to discover the price of even the most
basic foodstuffs had tripled or quadrupled under the market system,
the hidden costs of socialist freedom, the freedom of the workers
to direct their own economy, were revealed in the concrete reality
of bread and cheese. Socialist freedom had been based on a lie
which had forced party bureaucrats to dress up as workers and play
the role of the proletariat directing a socialist revolution. With
the advent of capitalism, the old freedoms were momentarily exposed
as a massive theatrical performance.
A Russian widow interviewed by CNN reporters remarked that nothing
had changed. If she had formerly waited in line for days to buy a
piece of sausage from the bare shelves of the state?run butcher
shop, she would now wait at home until she had saved enough to buy
the same piece of sausage from a privately-owned shop. The queues
are gone and it is necessity - instead of bureaucratic
indifference - that keeps her waiting. But the reality of waiting
to be fed remains. She misses the conversations she had with her
neighbors while standing in line.
As presented by the western media, the Russian trauma took on the
character of a giant morality play or a modernized version of
Israelite historiography. The Russians had strayed to alien gods,
to Lenin and Stalin, and were suffering the wrath of Yahweh for
their apostasy. The mighty are fallen. The offices of the KGB are
ransacked by common citizens seeking the truth. Tearful mothers
wait in line for milk they can no longer afford and cry out against
the men who had their way with them and left them destitute with
hungry mouths to feed. The unemployed march on the streets
demanding bread.
To make these momentous events more accessible to the dull-witted
capitalist masses, the complexities of social change in Russia were
given a Manichean cast. Seth, the god of socialism, is cast down by
Amon-Ra, the god of capitalism. After an eclipse of eighty-five
years Ra's light shines again on the Russian Republic. During the
subsequent victory parade, the atrocities of the former regime are
paraded across the television screens of all nations.
The voice of the Russian widow is lost among the hoots and
whistles of western news commentators. The anomaly of her waiting
to be fed, regardless of the political system that holds sway in
Russia, inspires no analysis.
``The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance
which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing
without reply, by its monopoly of appearance.'' -Guy Debord
February, 1992:
In the month following, I rode to work on the streetcar watching
out the window at the Sherbourne stop as scruffy men trooped out of
the Salvation Army hostel each morning to line up at a temporary
employment agency in the hope of receiving work and cash at the end
of the day. Around the corner, both sexes wait in front of a church
offering free food and clothing. Their resemblance to the queues
for food in the Russian Republic is only superficial, I am told.
But it is near enough to leave me with the vague sense of d?j? vu
experienced while watching an old movie forgotten some twenty years
after the original viewing. The scenes are familiar, but I can't
remember how the story ends.
I am not disturbed by the content of the CNN report, but by my
readiness to accept the image of reality it presents and exclude
the evidence of my own senses. The knowledge that the CNN report is
being watched by thousands of other North Americans implies some
sort of consensus on its version of events. Was anyone but myself
bothered by the report? No one I knew raised a challenge to the
interpretations of CNN commentators. All the news sounded as if it
had been written by the same committee of ten. In the light of the
apparent consensus, my qualms about curiosities like the comments
of the Russian widow or the queues for food and work in Canada must
have been private, matters of merely personal opinion, having no
bearing on the objectivity of CNN's reporting.
The sense of d?j? vu persists, though, colored by Marshall
McLuhan's observation that freedom of speech, in a society where
the means of access to public opinion is in the hands of the few,
is a fool's freedom. It is the freedom to say whatever you like
within the confines of your own home but, in the public realm, it
amounts to no more than ``the freedom to put up and shut up.'' The
individual who relies upon his experience for knowledge about the
world knows that the odds are against him. Without thought or
analysis, he resigns himself unconsciously. Even the revelation of
deliberate campaigns of disinformation, such as that perpetrated by
the military during the Gulf War, does not alter his confidence in
the basic objectivity of the media. Hadn't the media honestly
reported that the truths they had been repeating throughout the war
had turned out, on closer examination, to be a pack of lies?
Lacking the means to compare reality and fiction, substance and
myth, true and false, the viewer has no choice but to accept an
occasional falsification as the price of freedom from the responsi-
bility of finding out for himself.
Where the spectator's personal experience provides no point of
comparison against which the validity of televised news can be
measured, the distinction between public information and public
entertainment vanishes like a coin in the hands of a conjurer. News
of the far-away and exotic, unlikely to affect any but the few,
is as significant as coverage of local events having a direct
bearing upon the life of each citizen. Clowns, geeks, dwarves,
bearded ladies, strongmen and other sideshow marvels flicker
across the screen while the machinations of entrepreneurial
bureaucrats enlarging their domains or the card tricks of
financial wizards flensing a company of assets needed for a plant
expansion go unreported. Throughout, the public assumes the
character, in the words of McLuhan, ``of a kept woman whose role
is expected to be one of submission and luxurious passivity.''
The recasting of public information as sideshow diversion is so
complete in the end that the selection of items for the network
news is made by the entertainment director. On a night when a
made-for-TV movie about child abuse is being aired, the number of
reports of child abuse shown on the evening news triples. The
blurring of the line between fiction and reality befuddles the
more stupid politicians. The Vice-President accuses television
character Murphy Brown of contributing to the Los Angeles riots.
Meanwhile, the program's heroine issues fictional news reports
about an imaginary Vice-President of the United States named Dan
Quayle. No dissenting voice, no merely private experience,
disturbs the spectacle of public debate long enough to initiate
a critical review of intelligence from the front.
``The spectacle, grasped in its totality, is both the result and
the project of the existing mode of production. It is not a
supplement to the real world, and additional decoration. It is the
heart of the unrealism of the real society.'' -Guy Debord
April, 1992:
The condition of chronic spectatorship develops when social
reality is accepted as a given rather than as the end result of
the efforts of particular social actors. Television viewers take
it as a given that `news' will not be information relevant to
their immediate lives - oblivious to the censorship imposed by
elite control of the media. Singles take their isolation from
meaningful human relationships for granted - unaware of their
power to change the situation. In both cases, the impulse towards
action is redirected, by the ostensible inflexibility of the
social world, into the realm of the imagination.
The feature which most differentiates the contemporary society
of the spectacle from human societies of the past is the margin-
alization of man the creator, and his idealization, God the
Creator, in the social drama. His place at center stage is usurped
by the narcissistic spectator, while God is withdrawn from the
play entirely and sits in the wings trying to pare his fingernails
out of existence.
The drama being enacted for the spectators gives the illusion
that the events of the drama have a life of their own. The autono-
mous economy expands and contracts, inflates and deflates, moves
form manufacture to services and back again, out of all control
of the workers, consumers and investors whose decisions it
represents. The autonomous political process sees voters select
one political party after another which, once in power, make the
same speeches about restraint and the need to stimulate investment
as their predecessors. All attempts of the electorate, every four
or eight years, to veto the process by switching to another party,
fail. The endless game of musical chairs played by the candidates
is shown on television year after year, while on the streets of
the nation, nothing changes.
As the spectacle invades the lives of all citizens in a democ-
racy, it melts their former rights and freedoms into air and
brings them face-to-face with their real powerlessness in relation
to their own kind. Freedom of speech and freedom of information
are made meaningless by the citizen's lack of access to the public
and by the absence of information relevant to the public's needs.
Freedom of choice in the marketplace is spurious when the consumer
is manipulated by advertising and limited to choosing between
fifty different brands of breakfast cereals, but not between the
production of breakfast cereal and the creation of housing for the
homeless. Freedom of association cannot be exercised in an
intellectual climate dominated by an ideology that discourages
anything but the individual pursuit of gain, an economy that
disrupts freely-associating communities and a morality that
provides no illustration of the principles which, at other times
in history, bound individuals together. The decline of unionism in
those industries, like the Post Office, where management has
deliberately moved the factory away from the neighborhoods and the
drinking establishments in which their workers congregate, is one
of countless examples of the calculated demolition of freely-
associating groups occurring throughout society.
A corollary to the undermining of individual freedoms is the
concentration of all power in the hands of those who alone claim
the right to wear the costume of the common citizen and play the
role of the people directing a free society. As Alexis de Tocque-
ville predicted, unrestrained individualism and passion for
equality has led to an administrative despotism of those who
govern on the strength of real or imagined political or economic
mandates. Whether appointed to their posts to carry out the will
of the people, or raised to them by the economic vote of consumers
in a free market, the professional administrators of state and
corporate bureaucracy have taken charge of all significant social
activity.
Market researchers and advertising executives manage consumer
demand and public opinion, human relations specialists direct the
lives of workers on and off the worksite, social welfare agencies
negotiate rights and duties within the family, the state allocates
jobs according to quotas set by interest groups, and urban
planners and developers turn public thoroughfares into shopping
malls the better to control - through floor layout and security
regulations - the movements of the public in public places.
When his own powers have been alienated and are represented back
to him as belonging to an autonomous spectacle, the individual has
no choice, if he is to retain his dignity, but to resign himself
and slip into interior monologue and fantasy. The tendency of
individual citizens to assert their desire for respect exclusively
in the realm of the imagination has made public image the main
commodity produced by the autonomous economy. Lifestyle
advertising has replaced usefulness, as a determinant of a
product's value, with signification. The value of a pair of jeans
or a bottle of shampoo is measured, on a ratio of ten-to-one, by
the designer label, or the elaborate packaging, over the product's
applicability to the task of covering the buyer's ass or washing
his hair. The preference for a million-dollar home or a Porsche
has little to do with anything but a desperate desire to possess
the respect normally accorded to images alone. Under these
conditions, the real consumer of products, or political policies,
is a consumer of images and illusion rather than one whose needs
are met by the goods being delivered.
In the society of the spectacle, daily life takes on the
character of an immense operatic performance. The audience takes
part by singing from a script in a foreign language none of them
understands. They are ignorant of the purpose of the performance
and have lost the directions that would have told them how to
return to the real world. They wander the stage aimlessly,
overhearing snatches of the arias sung by other characters in the
play. They exchange scripts only to find that the story line of
each character is much the same. A choir of workers with hammers
keeps the economic tempo of the performance going, while prima
donnas dressed in business suits or the polka-dot pants of
politicians shriek the lyric line over the heads of other singers.
All voices unite in a chorus of pathos and inevitability.
The occasional phrase heard in the cacophony of voices hints at
the sense of unreality being felt by all the actors. A traveller
at the Holiday Inn remarks, ``This is the life, eh?'' - more in
doubt than as an expression of enjoyment. The survivors of a plane
crash are interviewed on television telling how ``it was just like
in the movies.'' They know no other reference point to bring home
the reality of their personal tragedy but that provided by a
Hollywood film. For a moment, private life is revealed to be more
unreal than the life described in fiction. Somewhere, the audience
knows, hidden in the orchestra pit, or disguised as one of the
performers, lies the evil director who dreamt up this melodrama,
but to find him is more difficult than ridding the Beirut streets
of terrorists or the American Senate of adulterers. The crowd
accuses first one person and then another, and still the
performance continues as before, its tempo unabated.
``The spectacle does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes
reality. The concrete life of everyone has been degraded into a
speculative universe.''
-Guy Debord
May, 1992:
During the summer, I put the news on the back burner. My immediate
concern was for Cheryl, a streetkid who had returned home after
an absence of four months. Since she was fourteen, Cheryl had been
using my apartment, off and on, as a safe haven from pimps and
others to whom she owes money.
I dread her visits because of the demands she puts upon me. She
ties up the telephone, rarely picks up after herself and has
friends over at inconvenient hours. On her side of the fence, I
know, she would not be putting up with the constant nagging unless
the alternatives, offered by the Children's Aid Society or by her
pimps, were worse. Most adults with whom she has contact do not
tolerate her independence. She has made it fairly clear, though,
by repeatedly running from her mother or from the group homes in
which the C.A.S. regularly places her, that she values her
freedom. If she is to be influenced by an adult at all, it will
have to be by example and through the strengthening of her ability
to make rational choices of her own. She sees no point in obeying
rules simply because they are there.
We talk about her future. She would like to have her own
apartment and be able to travel. She has been promised these
things often enough by pimps who know more than her about travel
agencies, shuttle buses and allied subjects and who are old enough
to sign the leases. I point out that many people would be willing
to help her if she would only save her money long enough to pay
the rent at the end of the month. When I relate her failure to
save her own money to the fact she is leaving herself open to
manipulation by those doing the saving for her, she remembers
there is a program on television she wants to watch and cuts the
conversation short. To have survived on the street for years, she
had to be self-sufficient and tough and this reminder of her
dependent status tells her she is not tough enough. I'm glad she
is embarrassed, though, and wants to avoid the topic of her
boyfriends. In the past, she would simply have denied giving money
to anyone, or reasserted her illusion that these men really do
love her and mean to keep their promises. The frankness means I
have gained her respect.
She has quite a few bad habits: She is slovenly. She runs up the
telephone bill. She refuses to look for work or go to school. She
parties at after-hours clubs until six in the morning with hooker
friends. She borrows money without returning it and ruins my
sweaters or trades them with her girlfriends for other clothes.
Her male friends steal things from my home.
I am not paid to be a social worker and do not consider myself
terribly good at it. I suffer the aggravation of neighbors angry
at the noise, visits form the police and being met by strangers
when I come to the door - to say nothing of financial losses. My
friends think my actions are self-destructive or lunatic. They
worry about my `self-esteem'. Co-workers suspect me of sleeping
with the girl.
My neighbors, on the other hand, are more forgiving. The practice
of deferring immediate gain in order to achieve a higher quality
of community life comes more naturally. They ignore prices and
patronize local merchants, frequently personal friends, over the
chain stores downtown because the local merchants contribute to
their children's sports teams. They habitually pick up litter
found lying on the ground in local parks. They know the names of
their children's classmates and their parents. They take an
interest in local gossip and read the local weekly to find out
what acquaintances met at the bar are doing. They adhere to an
unspoken code of behavior, and idea, that holds the community
together but ostracizes those who consistently break it. Helping
out streetkids, even when it brings a dubious, and potentially
`criminal', element into their neighborhood, does not violate the
code.
I shouldn't make too much of small deviations from the general
rule, but I am encouraged that the community in which I live has
begun to extricate itself from the society of the spectacle. The
accessibility of the local paper and of gossip in neighborhood
pubs gives each one of its members access to a larger public than
that provided to those who rely on the established media for their
information. A tendency to take into account factors other than
price when shopping, such as benefits derived from keeping money
in the community, has generated a somewhat independent local
economy. With this support from their neighbors, local artists and
artisans make a living producing unconventional goods. A
cartoonist with a shop on the main street sketches greeting cards
for residents, paints signs for local businesses, makes wall
decorations and sells T-shirts in the local clothing outlets. In
any other part of the city, he would have to get a `real' job.
The critique that reaches the truth of the society of the
spectacle aligns itself, with Sir Philip Sidney and John Milton,
firmly on the side of man the artist. As artist, all his cre-
ations, from his tools to his relations with his kind, are
contrived. Man's unnaturalness arises from his ability to shape
the world in which he lives, from a vision of what could be and
should be, instead of surrendering to the natural would of
instinct and necessity.
The critique that reaches the heart of the spectacle rejects
fatality and the utilitarian view of man, rejects expediency and
economic efficiency, and reveals that no other power, but the
willingness of people to blindly follow their instincts and let
others make rational decisions for them, enslaves the citizenry of
the modern state. Such a critique recognizes that the
contemplation of images, illusions and ideologies alienates the
individual from his own powers when these are separated from
social action and human relationships. Nothing more is needed for
the individual to win back his freedom than a willingness to stop
trying to discover self-respect in images and objects and start
undertaking the creative action which gives man his dignity.
Failing to do so, the modern individual is nothing more than a
sophisticated rat in the behavioralist's maze. Unable to fend for
himself, reassured that he is free of the responsibility of making
his own decisions, taught to squeak in unison with the others,
``I'm an individual, yes I am,'' the trained rat is lead through
the social mazes created by his own stupidity on the promise of
a bit of cheese if he reaches his goal. In the light of his
voluntary compliance with the maze-maker's specifications, there
is little the social critic can say that will liberate him. Words
are not enough.
``To effectively destroy the society of the spectacle, what is
needed is men putting a practical force into action.''
-Guy Debord
June-August, 1992:
In total, Cheryl stayed with me for three more months, until her
eighteenth birthday. During that time, she continued much as
before, but took advantage of an offer by her mother of airfare
for a visit to the east coast where the mother had moved. It was
the first time in four years that she and her mother got along.
In Toronto, a month later, she was working the streets again. She
seemed more confident of herself than she had been in the past.
Her boyfriends were different. For one thing, they were not the
pimps with whom she usually went out. She had given up believing
in their phoney promises.
She asked me to save her money for her. Every night, at one or
two in the morning, I would meet her downtown and take the night's
earnings before her friends started pressuring her to buy them
drinks or loan them money. I could tell from the amount of police
surveillance I was attracting that I was coming perilously close
to being mistaken for a pimp myself. By the end of the month, she
had enough for her own apartment.
Cheryl shares the apartment with a girlfriend from her school
days. Because she is attractive and articulate, she found it
fairly easy to get a job as a receptionist in the east end of the
city. When I visit her, we talk about what she can do to free
herself from dependence on her employer and the rut of a nine-to-
five job. Her plan is to open a used furniture store to recycle
the furniture her boyfriend keeps bringing home on trash nights.
She may have to go back on the streets for a while to raise the
capital. Stupidly, on hearing this, I offered to lend her as much
as I could.
I just know I'm going to lose my shirt on this deal.