Visual technologies that produce and circulate images are not unique to contemporary society or even to modernity. Neither is critical discourse about the nature or meaning of images. However, the concentrated proliferation of these phenomena during the industrial age has contributed to a uniquely modern experience of spectatorial distance from the real. The study of visual culture emerged in response to this unprecedented consolidation of the influence that images and mediation exert collectively upon everyday existence. Commentators on early industrial-era visuality identify the camera obscura —a room within which an isolated observer inspects projected images of the outside world—as emblematic of a distinctly modern paradigm for comprehending reality through rationalist separation and visual abstraction. Other developments in post-Enlightenment visual culture—such as the looking glass, the microscope, the refracting telescope, linear perspective in painting, the science of optics, documentary photographs, and popular visual entertainments such as the stereoscope, panorama and magic lantern—fundamentally transformed the modern individual’s encounter with reality by artificially reconstructing spatial depth, warping the scale of human perception and advancing claims to objectivity (Crary 1990; Jay 1993; Armstrong 1999).
A more contemporary emblem of this spectatorial model for interacting with reality is the screen. Beginning with the advent of cinema and now penetrating all sites of social interaction and solitude, screens make it possible for individuals to consume the wealth of images produced in our post-industrial culture. The science of image display strives for literality through increasingly larger screens of finer resolution, yielding 70-foot screens in IMAX theaters and 110-inch ultra-high-definition home television screens that dominate the physical scale of the viewer. At the same time, increasingly smaller screens facilitate the portability of images through the use of various pads and pods. All categories of screen-based interaction—including photography , cinema, television and interpersonal communication—have been amalgamated into hand-held devices that generate images and display an inexhaustible archive of films, shows, music videos, home movies, advertisements and other visual internet content. These devices are networked to social media channels that enable individuals to participate directly and continuously in the mass production, captioning and circulation of images. The crowd has been successfully sourced for an unceasing stream of representations.
The realist impulse materialized in mid-nineteenth-century fiction alongside this intensifying spectatorial distance from an increasingly objectified world. One witnesses at that moment a discernable shift in literary production toward unembellished depictions of contemporary, quotidian situations. Novelists sought to render lived experience with authentic social complexity and psychological depth, portraying the convergence of multiple individual perspectives against the context of the societal, political and economic conditions that would lead them to intersect in a particular manner. As such, realist novels typically reference extant social discourses, material culture and built environments with greater specificity than other literary forms. They are often set in cities (or in rural locales threatened by encroaching urbanity) and reflect the displacement of traditional agrarian and feudal social relationships within the alienated “mass” character of industrial society. Conceived of as an iconoclastic break from idealized literary conventions that falsify the real, realist narration sometimes theorizes its own validity relative to other acts of representation and at other times exhibits an ironic awareness of its limitations.
Realist fiction is thus uniquely capable of giving shape to the modern condition of spectatorship because it depicts a commonly inhabited material environment, various individual perceptions of that environment, and elements of industrialized visual culture that mediate those acts of perception. Heightening the capacity to recognize our own immersion within objectified representations of the real, literary realism remains a vital discourse in contemporary society, particularly one that is so deeply invested in visually reproducing and archiving lived experience. However, the persistence of realism’s critique of post-industrial visual culture in twentieth-century fiction has been largely obscured by the stylistic innovations of modernism and postmodernism . A post-war meta-fictional arms race has led some critics to engage in a presentist dismissal of classic realism. Such critics posit the naïve pursuit of pure verisimilitude by authors whose alleged confidence in the possibility of unmediated representation fueled their deluded attempts to reproduce the dimensionality of space and time through words.1 I share the view of those who reject such reductive caricatures of classic realism and who argue instead that a systematic critique of the limits of representation has always been a defining trait of realist fiction.2 I contend that literary realism is not fundamentally an aesthetic form, but an ethical gesture; that this gesture is motivated by and primarily expressed as a critique of the spectatorial distance from reality wrought by industrialization; and that this critique has evolved continuously since the classic realism of the nineteenth century and remains operative in contemporary fiction.
Articulating this ethical relationship between art and society has long preoccupied Marxist critics. Suggesting, however, that “aesthetics is Marx’s blind spot,” W.J.T. Mitchell points to the difficulty that Marx and his critical successors have experienced in applying the concept of commodity fetishism with sufficient nuance to the field of cultural production (1986, 202). In addition to Marx’s own tendency to idealize art and redirect his strongest critiques toward other sectors of capitalist transformation, the Marxist tradition has struggled in general to locate a middle ground between, on the one hand, allowing art to persist as a mystified rationalization for the contemporary image-making industry and, on the other, engaging in the dismissal of all aesthetic objects and mediated experiences as uniformly alienated false consciousness (203). Mitchell seeks a discourse in which the fetishized and commodified aspects of art and media are recognized alongside the reality that “the museum is (sometimes) the site of authentic aesthetic experience, the media (sometimes) the vehicle of real communication and enlightenment.” He uses the phrase “mutual embarrassment” to describe a productive relationship between Marxism and aesthetics that keeps both perspectives honest and prevents the “rhetoric of iconoclasm” from devolving into a one-note “rhetoric of exaggerated alienation.” This productive tension exists when Marxist criticism itself is rigorously historicized and self-critical, when “notions like fetishism and ideology” are understood to be “historically situated figures” and not deployed formulaically in what Mitchell describes as a “theoretical exercise, with all options predetermined” (204). Mitchell reminds us that Marx selected the term fetishism precisely to address an enlightened nineteenth-century audience bound up in imperial chauvinism, such that equating his readers with the primitive object-worshipers whom they were in the process of Westernizing was a poignant rhetorical move. What, then, is the paradigm that would best convey to contemporary society its same ironic act of forgetting—the same blindness to the fact that we have endowed objects with arbitrary value and allowed them to abstract our social relationships, our experience of time and the manner in which we organize and inhabit physical space?
Guy Debord’s theorization of a post-industrial Society of the Spectacle provides a particularly useful vocabulary and framework for understanding the uniquely modern visual culture to which literary realism responds and the source of the alienated false consciousness that realist fiction often depicts.3 As with Marx’s trope of fetishism, Debord reorients the concept of “spectacle ” to transform what could be popularly regarded as two defining achievements of our era—namely, the precipitous rise of media technologies and the democratization of mass consumer goods and entertainments—into the epitome of society’s blindness to its own utter disenfranchisement. He envisions the modern individual as “imprisoned in a flat universe bounded on all sides by the spectacle’s screen” and subjected by “figmentary interlocutors […] to a one-way discourse on their commodities” ([1967] 1995, 218). Debord traces the legacy of fetishism within celebrity worship, tourism , urban planning and the culture industry, while also turning the critique of ideology onto various fetishized manifestations of Marxist political thought that had themselves become iconic and ended in failed revolutions. In precisely the manner that Mitchell recommends, Debord continuously scrutinized his critical stance for signs of iconoclastic hypocrisy and abandoned his collective when he sensed that it was degenerating into a spectacle of intellectual chic.
Debord was a founding member in 1957 of the Situationist International, an organization of artists, social theorists and political revolutionaries that was heavily influenced by Marx, Dadaism, the Surrealists and the Frankfurt School and which played a significant role in the civil unrest in France of 1968. The group’s name refers to its development of experimental “situations” to facilitate the analysis of everyday life. The Situationist practice of dérive , for example, encourages an individual to “drift” through a city without recourse to the political, historical, commercial and touristic meanings that have been mapped onto it by various authorities, establishing instead an alternate “psychogeography ” that is informed only by individual encounter and personal associations. Through a process called détournement (which Debord describes as the “antithesis of quotation”), verbal and visual discourses that have taken on “theoretical authority” are restated in new contexts that allow alternate meanings to subvert canonical ones (Debord [1967] 1995, 208). Works of art, political slogans and corporate advertising have all served as fodder for these Situationist “pranks.” The Situationists intended that such exercises would bring the participants to a greater consciousness of their authentic desires and motivations, which had become suppressed by the alienated labor of producing and c...