The Concept of the Spectacle

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establishment of Arcadia, and the spectacle in the form of mass media serves

urbanization, supporting its firmness by concealing conflicts and fabricating positive illusion. Burgher is the only character that refutes the spectacle through his

textual-flânerie, and I argue that Jim Crace makes textual-flânerie an opposition to all-encompassing control of the spectacle and a possibility to unveil the surface of illusion. It is Burgher’s writing that delineates the demise of the city: the prevailing separation in human relationship and social hierarchy, the suffocation of true needs and revolutionary expression, and the destruction of local community which contains the history and memory of a place. However, he also presents the rebirth of the city which is represented by Soap Two. He not only reveals the totalizing power that wants to define the city but also males known that urban space presents us with heterogeneity of practices and processes.

Ⅱ. The Concept of the Spectacle

Debord argues that modern people live in a world which is saturated by images and where alienation is total. The modern capitalist society is actually an organization of spectacles in which it is impossible to experience real life or to actively participate in the construction of the lived world. The spectacle on the one hand refers to

particular public events and urban spaces. On the other, the spectacle is associated with a theatrical presentation or controlled visual production. Debord relates it to the use of vision by capitalism in order to make people inactive spectators in the world of commodities, and such manipulation of sight is also employed by administrative power to control subjects. The spectacle has already become the dominant mode of life in contemporary society. “The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images” (Debord, Society of the Spectacle 7).

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The spectacle is a conceptual extension of the phenomenon of reification. That is, the objectification of social relations and products extends to the production and consumption of images. In this view, social life, saturated by an accumulation of spectacles, is so colonized by commodities and administrative techniques that people are more like passive spectators than active agents, accepting roles assigned to them in a state of contemplation.²³

In passively consuming spectacles and observing products of social life, the individual is alienated from reality and inner truth. The spectacle can subject people to societal manipulation while obscuring the effects and deprivations of capitalism. It does not appear in the form of direct force but functions as the tool of pacification. It is a “permanent opium war designed to force people to equate goods with

commodities and to equate satisfaction with a survival” (Debord, Society of the

Spectacle 22). The cultural mechanisms of leisure and consumption, services and

entertainment, are “narcotics” of the spectacular society (Best and Kellner

84-85).Thus, the commodification of social life and the extension of bureaucratic control to the realms of leisure and everyday life are made comfortable. However, the truth is that capitalist exploitation is raised from the physical privation to a

psychological level: although nowadays workers have salary raised and more leisure “Those who are always watching to see what happens next will never act: such must be the spectator’s condition” (Debord, Comments on

the Society of the Spectacle 22). What the spectacle demands is the passive

acceptance, and the spectacle “can never be questioned” because it keeps spreading the message: “What appears is good; what is good appears” (Debord, Society of the

Spectacle 9-10).

23 According to Best’s and Kellner’s explanation, Debord’s society of spectacle refers to “a media and consumer society” which is “organized around the consumption of images, commodities, and

spectacles” (The Postmodern Turn 84). Moreover, it is also related to “the vast institutional and

technical apparatus of contemporary capitalism,” to “all the means and methods power employs” (84).

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time, alienated consumption is generalized and becomes “a duty for the masses as alienated production” (21). It appears that a life of sumptuousness and happiness is promised for everyone, the poor who cannot afford their commodity fantasies are motivated to work harder and harder. They are not only captivated in the cage of capitalist exploitation but also distracted from their intuition and the most important task of real life: to rescue their human power through creative practices.

The concept of the spectacle is also connected with the concept of separation.

“The spectacle is the technological version of the exiling of human powers into ‘a world beyond’; the culmination of humanity’s internal separation” (Debord, Society

of the Spectacle 12). In the society of the spectacle, the reality becomes second-hand

because it is determined and overtaken by images. “Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation” (Debord, Society of the Spectacle 7). According to Best’s explanation, Debord means that “[t]he spectacle escalates abstraction to the point where we no longer live in the world per se…but in an abstract image of the world” (Baudrillard: A Critical Reader 48). He makes sense of the abstraction in terms of the philosophization of reality: “The spectacle does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality, reducing everyone’s concrete life to a universe of speculation”

(Society of the Spectacle 11).²⁴

24 Marx conceives that the realization of philosophy requires “the abolition of ‘philosophy’ – the destruction of an abstract ideology constituted above and against the concrete conditions of social existence (which none the less determine its form and content) – and the synthesis of theory and practice;” on the other hand, the philosophization of reality alienates thought from action when it

“idealizes and hypostatizes the world” (Baudrillard: A Critical Reader 48-49).

Direct experiences are replaced by a speculative world of images in which people do not actively constitute their lives but contemplate the attractive surface of commodities. “The more he contemplates, the less he lives;

the more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires” (Society of the Spectacle 16). Consumers are

hypnotized by the spectacle and thus separated from reality as well as their immediate

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The abstraction of the spectacle also causes a further degradation of human being’s existence. Debord’s theorization of the spectacle extends discussions of commodity fetishism with the Marxist tradition. He says that “[t]he present stage, in which social life has become completely dominated by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing” (Society

of the Spectacle 11).

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The world Jim Crace depicts in Arcadia is permeated by images and

information of commodities, where self-fulfillment, pleasure, and independence the spectacle promises are realizable only through consumption. It is represented by Joseph, a young countryman who works on one of Victor’s farms and very attracted toward city life. For him, city life equals to a good life. However, his impression of city life is not based on the practical experience in the city but from his own

imagination inflamed by a commodity catalogue. He is obsessed with a “cream and crumple suit” designed with the “light, summer style” which is marketed as “On the Town:”

That is to say, the material object has yielded to its

representation, and what people care about has veered to the “immediate prestige and [the] ultimate purpose from appearances” of their “having” (11). The appearance of the commodity which represents the “prestige” is more decisive than its use-value in the abstract system of the spectacle. Consequently, the production of objects has given way to the production of “image-objects” that functions as symbolic signs (10).

Subjects are so obsessed with all kinds of images and commodities that they are unconsciously imbued with the ideology and values which are represented.

25 Debord also claims that the first stage is what Marx speaks of “the degradation of being into having — human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed”

(Society of the Spectacle 10-11). In this stage, emotions are reduced to greed, and the creative practice is degraded to the possession of an object.

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The fashion model in the catalogue had been sitting on a bar stool with his sunglasses hooked inside the breast pocket of the jacket. One hand – the one with a single, gleaming ring – was resting on his knee, palm up. The other held the barmaid by the wrist. The gold watch on his arm showed the time as five to midnight, or five to midday. There was a bottle of muscatino on the bar and strangely, promisingly, three glasses, as if another woman had just left, or was expected soon. Or, perhaps, the glass was waiting there for Joseph…The model’s empty, upturned palm, the drama of the

barmaid’s wrist caught by the strong hand of the man, exactly matched Joseph’s notion of the casual spontaneity of city life where day and night were all the same, where drink and wealth and women were within easy reach. (Crace 34)

Joseph desires to buy this suit, not for its use-value, but for “the casual spontaneity of city life” implied by the advertisement. It seems that as long as he puts himself in this suit, he will be transformed into an attractive, wealthy, and powerful man who gets along well in the city. “Joseph had cut the picture from the catalogue and put it in the breast pocket as if to equip his clothing with a pedigree and, more than that, an aspiration” (34). However, identifying himself with the image, he has been trapped in the cage of contemplation in which reality is overtaken by illusion through vision.

Sun glasses, the gold watch, the gleaming ring, and the suit in the picture are commodities which represent prestige, social status, and individual fulfillment in modern society. Desiring to “appear” as the model, Joseph “worked, saved his wages, sent for his On the Town suit, and planned his escapade” to the city (36). He

unconsciously accepts the role set by capitalism as an innocent consumer, and his leisure time is exploited when he, contemplating “the casual spontaneity of city life,”

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works harder and harder in Victor’s farm in order to satisfy his desire. Although he takes the initiative to change his life-style, the act mediated by the commodity still fails to fulfill his dream to live a spontaneous life in the city.

Joseph’s city life proves to be a depressing one. The imagination that in the city

“he’d flourish in the privacy of crowds, in the monkish cells of tenements, in streets”

is never realized (Crace 37). His eyes are sharp for urban spectacles such as “tall and optimistic buildings…tall and optimistic girls…flashing neon light and fancy cars,”

and in the boutique street his steps are waylaid by “all the sorcery of Look, Don’t

touch” of glossy commodities (14, 38). It is the spectacle that makes Joseph believe

that the city is paved with hope and prosperity. He knows that the only thing that can help him to be the charming man in the catalogue is money. In order to attain it fast, he chooses the illegal way. Taking the crowd as the sanctuary of his crime, he steals from Con, a fruit trader, in the Soap Market but gets caught, beaten, and threatened to be locked in the prison if he refuses to rob Rook for Con of the bribe given by the traders of the market. Nevertheless, his attack on Rook is fought back. To earn a living, he has no choice but to work as a porter in the Soap Market where he feels familiar with the agricultural produce, atmosphere, and the work of labor, and sleeps with homeless people there. Later, he is purchased by Rook to set a fire on the Soap Market for Rook’s retaliative scheme against Victor. The end of Joseph is not the private cell of tenements but a cell in the prison. It seems that the city not only disallows him a spontaneous and wealthy life but also makes use of him and strikes him. “In any case, the truth of Joseph did not match the suit,” Burgher says (37).

Joseph’s contemplation stimulated by the commodity catalogue actually simplifies urban life, and his actions mediated by commodities and urban spectacles are

alienated from his individual reality. He can stride across the geographical boundary

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between the country and the city but can hardly break the exclusion of social class which dominates his life style and decides how he is treated in the city. Rook, with whom his only relation in the city is established, is not his partner but the one who buys and makes use of him. Their relationship is commodified under the exchange principle of capitalist society.

“The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images…a view of a world that has become objective,”

claimed by Debord (Society of the Spectacle 7). The abstract system of the spectacle has become the mode of social life. Human relationship is mediated by images with which unification seems to be attained. Nevertheless, “it is in reality the domain of delusion and false consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation” (7). The unification of social life is but an illusion:

emotions, feelings, and understandings are stimulated and formed by images which cover the absence of real social interactions. The phenomenon that people tend to identify themselves with images gives the illusion of unity because what they chase is the same. However, it is the obsession with images that overtakes their consciousness of reality and the motivation to create a communal relation. It is a world in which all communication flows in one direction, from the powerful to the powerless. “The relation between authors and spectators is only a transposition of the fundamental relation between directors and executants. It answers perfectly to the needs of a reified and alienated culture: the spectacle-spectator relation is in itself a staunch bearer of the capitalist order” (Situationist International Anthology 307-308).

Passivity is the means and the end of a hidden project of social control.

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