Engaging the spectator

Cyclopean Vision vs Poly-sensual Engagement (Part #7)

In pointing to the infotainment role of spectacles, Kellner effectively highlights their role in engaging people experientially in their external environment, whether real or virtual. The world is indeed then transformed into a TV or media show where the distinction between real and virtual may be experientially irrelevant. He notes Debord's recognition of the spectator as the reactive viewer and consumer of a social system predicated on submission, conformity, and the cultivation of marketable difference -- 'The spectacle is the moment when the consumption has attained the total occupation of social life' .

It is appropriate to note that the primary preoccupation of the advertising industry is to engage individuals in order to influence -- in a manner intimately related to the function of any spectacle. Individual advertisements might be understood as micro-spectacles -- possibly linked by sponsorship to media presentations of Kellner's spectacles (as with Hurricane Katrina and the invasion of Iraq). A bright future is now seen for a high order of personalization of advertising (Spencer Kelly, Technology lets ads get personal, BBC News, 25 August 2006). The possibilities of wrapping a person in advertisements might be seen as one future of the spectacle.

It is interesting that analyses of social systems speak readily of "actors" and "players" when referring to individuals and groups, and especially to their leaders. This terminology subtly reinforces a sense of contextual spectacle...

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.
William Shakespeare, As You Like It

Rather than the "extraterrestrials" of blockbuster science fiction and conspiracy theorists, individuals are transformed into "terrestrial extras" in spectacles.

Missing from such understanding is any possibility that, rather than being simply "actors", individuals may also choose to be "directors", "producers", "scriptwriters" and "casting directors" in their own spectacles. As scriptwriters, individuals and groups can then write their own story with their own interpretations of facts -- as many of them do -- freely framing real or imaginary people as "good guys" or "bad guys", "heros" or "villains". The plots may be configured as comedy, tragedy or otherwise. Such a possibility was widely publicized by the futuristic technology of the "holographic environment simulator" (holodeck) in the well-known Star Trek series.

This missing dimension from Kellner's analysis is what may offer a means of circumventing the invasive nature of spectacles as he so successfully portrays them. This dimension is notably evident in the many alternative interpretations of the "facts" of the spectacle of terrorism. It is equally evident in the alternative interpretations of globalization as being effectively a terrible spectacle -- not the universal panacea, as scripted by the World Bank and multinational corporations, and promoted by the World Economic Forum.

In this sense the option is less one of eliminating the "undesirable" spectacles scripted by the powerful few (with their media allies), and more one of offering wider facilities for spectacle production by the many, of which computer-enhanced gaming is one example (cf Playfully Changing the Prevailing Climate of Opinion, 2005) . The future may be a matter of "your spectacle or mine?" or "your story or mine?" -- connecting the factual dots according to aesthetic preferences varying from realism, through impressionism to surrealism (cf Dynamically Gated Conceptual Communities: emergent patterns of isolation within knowledge society, 2004).

More fundamentally, hope lies in the potential of personal responsibility for the design of happenings that may be capable of addressing the dilemmas of rural wholeness vs urban happenings, short-term vs long-term, complexity vs simplicity. This is closely related to the original Situationist project, as noted by Kellner, which "involved an overcoming of all forms of separation, in which individuals would directly produce their own life and modes of self-activity and collective practice". It is also related to the enactivist approach explored by Francisco Varela (Laying Down a Path in Walking: essays on enactive cognition, 1997) encapsulated in the Buddhist precept of "laying down a path through walking" (cf Walking Elven Pathways: enactivating the pattern that connects, 2006).

The enactivist approach to "laying down a path" may be usefully contrasted with a common practice of "lying about the path" one is walking -- whether to oneself or to others -- and exemplified by the pronouncements of world leaders with respect to WMD in Iraq. With respect to spectacle-making, both may be contrasted with a distinction now made between "faith-based" and "reality-based" decision-making at the highest level, as noted in a much-cited article by Ron Suskind (Without a Doubt, The New York Times, In The Magazine, 17 October 2004) regarding an exchange with an aide in the decision-making circle of President Bush:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

It is quite possible that this is the core issue of the sustaining psychology required for sustainable development and sustainable patterns of consumption (Psychology of Sustainability: Embodying cyclic environmental processes, 2002) .

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Engaging the spectator