Moral Claims in the Age of Spectacles

Shaping the Social Imaginary

Brian M. Lowe

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781137502407
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137502414
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Index: Social Sciences

Addresses some of the apparent successes and failures in spectacle production and reception 

Uses historical case studies to explore the phenomenon of the spectacle

Explores how the rise of polarizing political figures such as as Donald Trump have been bolstered by spectacle

© The Author(s) 2018

Brian M. LoweMoral Claims in the Age of Spectacleshttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50241-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Emergence of Spectacles

Brian M. Lowe¹

(1)

Sociology, SUNY College at Oneonta, Oneonta, New York, USA

End Abstract

This chapter introduces readers to some of the essential ideas regarding spectacles and their basic components. It also introduces the concept of “spectacular morality ”: how moral claims and understandings are carried and transmitted by spectacles. Through several case studies, it addresses some of the apparent successes and failures in spectacle production and reception.

Spectacular Morality

Television is the closest thing we’ve got to God in America, an all-present eye that creates the world, ceaselessly and seamlessly, twenty-four hours a day. A comic book bible made of light; they build their phony universe with pictures, pictures, pictures. (Cohen 2008: 3)

Stuart Archer Cohen’s 2008 The Army of the Republic is set in a near-future United States and comprises multiple first-person narratives, including a coalition of revolutionary groups, united in their disgust with the American corporate-dominated “Regime.” This collection of idealists, military veterans and the disillusioned struggle to assemble an alliance with larger, non-violent groups, leading to an explosive protest and street battle in Seattle, Washington (Cohen stated that his model for this was the 1999 protest in Seattle against the World Trade Organization; www.​adbusters.​org/​blogs/​blackspot-blog/​army-republic.​html). In addition to being a meditation on the role(s) of violence and politics, and on the expanding power of a police state whose primary interest is defending large corporations as they extend their powers into previously untouched areas (e.g. public water supplies), The Army of the Republic is a study of the roles of visuals and narratives in the struggle to dominate what Charles Taylor termed the social imaginary, which includes “the ways people imagine their social existence … and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations” (2004: 23). In Cohen’s book, the struggles between the revolutionaries and the corporate powers revolve around both the threat of violence and the deployment of favorable images and narratives of themselves, their actions and their visions for the future. All the significant players realize that the way in which real or imagined acts are portrayed in mass media has a significant impact on the outcome of their present and future struggles, regardless of the veracity of these “pictures” and “stories.” This conflict is viewed in part from the perspective of “Lando,” one of the founders of the revolutionary Army of the Republic, who conceals his identity as Joshua Sands, the son of one of the corporate executives whose business has been targeted by the Army of the Republic for its efforts to privatize municipal water supplies. At a dinner party in his parents’ home, Joshua (whose revolutionary alter ego remains concealed) confronts another corporate executive about the war between words and pictures:

“Think of it like this: Imagine America as a boxing match. Words are the skinny lightweight with glasses, spouting off logical propositions and complex thoughts, even after the round starts, when he should be swinging. Mr. Word can’t stop himself, because that’s his nature: Sentences propose ideas, paragraphs develop them. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident,’ ‘When, in the course of human events …’ Now, wading toward him you’ve got Pictures: big, beefy, good looking. Seeing is believing. Feeling is believing. Pure sensation. And in a knock-down drag-out between logic and sensation, guess who goes down?” (Cohen 2008: 101–102)

The dinner guest retorts that Americans continue to consume vast amounts of printed materials: “‘There’s magazines, newspapers, journals, novels. Publishing is a multibillion-dollar business.’” Joshua replies: “‘That’s true, but they’re losing. Pictures shape everything. Seventy percent of Americans use television as their primary news source. Look at any major political speech of the last ten years: It’s crafted to the television mind, with Freedom this, Liberty that. It’s show biz, not thought’” (Cohen 2008: 102).

Much of the conflict in The Army of the Republic can be viewed as a struggle over who dominates “the television mind” and to what ends. For “Lando” and his allies, this objective overshadows all their actions in fear of “Channel America” (a Fox News-esque television network that unflaggingly supports the current political and economic status quo). For James Sands, Joshua’s father and an executive at Water Solutions, a company targeted by the Army of the Republic because of its efforts to privatize municipal water supplies, this conflict over expanding corporate and political power goes much deeper than simply preventing unfavorable news coverage, public protests and even violent attacks. Sands learns this from a representative of McPhee/Collins, the public relations firm that was the one to call “when a company needed to correct all the media hype after a toxic release or criminal accusation”:

“you’re here because Water Solutions is a company at war. You’ve been picketed, you’ve been sued, you’ve been physically attacked, you’ve been bombed. That’s war by anyone’s definition. But the real war you’re engaged in is a very special kind of war. It’s a war of realities. And that’s the war we have to win….”

“Now–” He smiled. “Not to get too epistemological on you, Mr. Sands, but one thing about Reality is that the part we can directly experience, that we can know, is limited to a tiny fraction of a much bigger world. So the rest is going to be created, both by us, and for us.” He began to lose his formal tones and become more conversational. “For example: What do most people know about their water? They know it comes out of their faucet and they get a bill every month. That’s all. That’s the Reality of water systems for ninety-nine percent of the population. Any reality beyond that, such as water quality or relative costs, is whatever somebody tells them. It’s all created. And the picture created about things they can’t know is what shapes their thoughts about what they do know. The only question is, ‘Who’s going to create that picture? You? Or the other side?’” (Cohen 2008: 195)

The Army of the Republic and the questions it raises about conflicts over what groups define “reality” in some fashion is not unique in contemporary fiction. David Baldacchi’s best-selling The Whole Truth (2008) concerns how “perception management” is tasked to create public sentiment favorable to a war that will benefit a defense contractor called the Ares Corporation. What The Army of the Republic does brilliantly is to illustrate that very plausible near-future conflicts over economic, political, social and cultural issues will inevitably involve “players” (the term James M. Jasper uses in Getting Your Way to identify any individual, group, organization and/or coalition that is engaged in strategic action) whose actions are necessarily influenced by concern about some form of “perception management.” As Cohen’s novel suggests, there is considerable evidence that both large corporations and state apparatuses will be involved in these efforts through established public relations channels, as well as small, informal organizations, and that more established social movement organizations (SMOs) and other players must be involved in these efforts lest the “other side” have an advantage in defining “reality”. Moreover, many of these efforts, as Joshua/Lando feared, involve the visual in the hopes of reaching the “feeling television mind.”

Do these two points—claims and visual representations—inevitably lead to a “dumbing down” of public discourse and efforts to shape reality in some way? While evidence abounds that television news broadcasts have increasingly been truncated since the 1960s (thereby giving less time for detailed and nuanced reporting) and that newsrooms are increasingly expected to generate profits and not simply report—thus driving sensational reporting—does it follow that intelligent “words” will inevitably succumb to “feeling pictures”? Marsha McCreadie (2009) argues that we are witnessing a trend in which documentary films are being created to provide audiences with factual and emotionally charged narratives around controversial issues. For example, Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me (2004) illustrates the hazards of a diet based on fast food by following the filmmaker through a thirty-day McDonald’s diet, interspersed with interviews of experts testifying to the known but concealed hazards of fast food. Spurlock’s personal odyssey provided audiences with information and evidence (the nutritional hazards of a diet heavily skewed towards fast food) and an engaging emotional perspective (how Spurlock’s life was impacted by sudden weight gain and related physiological changes). Shortly after the release of the film, McDonald’s stopped offering “super-sized portions,” while denying that this decision had anything to do with Spurlock’s film (including the rule that he imposed on himself during filming that, if asked by a McDonald’s employee to “super-size” a portion, he was obligated to accept). Clearly, Super Size Me involves “feeling pictures,” but it also contains information and arguably a moral thesis: that the fast food industry has become a system that is effectively damaging the health of millions of Americans, and that the companies that make up this system are aware of these harms. More recent films, such as God Loves Uganda (2013) (exploring the relationship between the American Christian Right and the promotion of anti-gay and -lesbian beliefs and legislation in Uganda through American missionaries), continue on this trajectory of providing evocative information and a moralistic agenda. Similarly, Andrew Cooper’s Celebrity Diplomacy (2007) demonstrates that some of those who are intimately connected with “pictures,” such as celebrities famous for their work in film, television and/or music, deploy their celebrity status in an attempt to bring First World awareness to international crises and environmental problems.

This book is about the use of “words and pictures” by players in a variety of arenas as they struggle to communicate information and move audiences towards (or away from) a particular moral perspective—what will be termed here “spectacular morality.” This project is rooted in four interrelated ideas. The first is that spectacles are significant. Without delving into too much depth at this point, the concept of “spectacle” in modern sociological literature is often attributed to Guy Debord and his 1967 The Society of the Spectacle. Debord’s conception of spectacle states that illusions and deceptions generated by the powerful can serve to distract and pacify audiences. Debord and other scholars, such as Daniel J. Boorstin, provide a vision of the spectacle (what Boorstin calls the “pseudo-event”) as an effective vehicle for social control due to its pacifying effects. More recently, Stephen Duncombe has inverted this idea by arguing that spectacle has become the dominant means for communicating “truth and power,” and he chastises those who contend that merely providing audiences with factual information will sway them. While these positions are diametrically opposed, they do share a core assumption: spectacles matter.

This project is about spectacles—images, film, video, documentaries, television programs and YouTube videos as well as discursive narratives in print media including newspapers, pamphlets , novels and magazines—and how they influence our perceptions and understandings of ourselves and events and phenomena in the larger world. Social scientists have been investigating the perceived impact of media for decades. For example, the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School were among the first scholars to witness the emergence of actual “mass media”—visual images, texts and audio (both spoken words and music) that could be experienced by millions of people simultaneously. The term spectacle gained scholarly attention with the work of the French social and political thinker Guy Debord in The Society of The Spectacle (1967). Here Debord investigates how modern, capitalist societies are increasingly dominated by images and mediated representations . Debord and the Situationists (a movement of Marxist-influenced theorists and scholars) argued that the collective consequence of these mediated representations was a “permanent opium war” through which we were effectively pacified. Jean Baudrillard famously extended the trajectory of Debord’s argument by postulating that contemporary societies are dominated by the simulacra, appearances of social life that are more compelling and attractive than the corresponding reality.

Conversely, there is the alternative possibility: that spectacles provoke more than they pacify. Recent examples of efforts to engage viewers through social media, including the Nigerian “Bring Back Our Girls,” the “Ice Bucket Challenge ” and “It Gets Better,” have all been primarily online efforts intended to raise awareness of a given cause and (respectively) to encourage political and military action, to raise funds, and to support young Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender-Question...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Emergence of Spectacles
• 2. Spectacular Theory
• 3. Building Spectacles Through Bricolage
• 4. Spectacles of Power and the Power of Spectacles
• 5. Spectacular Locations
• 6. Spectacular Representations
• 7. Spectacular Animals
• 8. Conclusion
• 9. Coda: The Election of Donald J. Trump as Spectacle
• Backmatter