Spectacle

Bruce Magnusson, Zahi Zalloua, Bruce Magnusson, Zahi Zalloua

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780295806167
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politischer Prozess

Global media and advances in technology have profoundly affected the way people experience events. The essays in this volume explore the dimensions of contemporary spectacles from the Arab Spring to spectatorship in Hollywood. Questioning the effects that spectacles have on their observers, the authors ask: Are viewers robbed of their autonomy, transformed into depoliticized and passive consumers, or rather are they drawn in to cohesive communities? Does their participation in an event—as audiences, activists, victims, tourists, and critics—change and complicate the event itself? Spectacle looks closely at the permeable boundaries between the reality and fiction of such events, the methods of their construction, and the implications of those methods.

1

MEDIA SPECTACLE AND THE NORTH AFRICAN ARAB UPRISINGS

Some Critical Reflections

Douglas Kellner

With the development of capitalism, irreversible time is unified on a world scale. . . . Unified irreversible time is the time of the world market and, as a corollary, of the world spectacle.

—GUY DEBORD, The Society of the Spectacle

In the past decades, media spectacle has become a dominant form in which news and information, politics, war, entertainment, sports, and scandals are presented to the public and circulated through the matrix of old and new media and technologies.¹ By “media spectacles” I am referring to media constructs that present events that disrupt ordinary and habitual flows of information, become popular stories that capture the attention of the media and the public, and circulate through broadcasting networks, the Internet, social networking, smartphones, and other new media and communication technologies. In a global networked society, media spectacles proliferate instantaneously, become virtual and viral, and give rise to either sociopolitical transformation or mere moments of media hype and tabloidized sensationalism.

Dramatic news and events are presented as media spectacles and dominate certain news cycles. Stories like those of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 U.S. presidential election, the 2011 Arab Uprisings, the Libyan revolution, the U.K. riots, the Occupy movements, and other major media spectacles of the era cascaded through broadcasting, print, and digital media, seizing people’s attention and emotions and generating complex and multiple effects that may make 2011 as memorable a year in the history of social upheaval as 1968.

In today’s highly competitive media environment, “breaking news” of various sorts play out as media spectacle, including mega-events like wars and terrorist attacks; extreme weather disasters; or, in the spring of 2011, political insurrections and upheavals. These spectacles assume a narrative form and become focuses of attention during a specific temporal and historical period that may last only a few days, or come to dominate news and information for an extended period of time, as happened with the O.J. Simpson trial and the Clinton sex/impeachment scandal in the mid-1990s; the stolen election of 2000 in the Bush/Gore presidential campaign; or natural and other disasters that have significant destructive effects and political implications, such as Hurricane Katrina, the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, or the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe. Media spectacles can even become signature events of an entire epoch—as, arguably, were the 9/11 terrorist attacks that inaugurated a historical period that I describe as Terror War.²

During the spring of 2011, media spectacles of the North African Arab Uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya emerged, followed by uprisings throughout the Middle East, producing transformative events that continue to have major consequences. Al-Jazeera, the global Arab cable broadcasting channel and Internet site located in Doha, referred to these events collectively as “the Arab Awakening,” a description that suggested that a new era of political struggle and insurrection was emerging in parts of the world that had been ruled for decades by oppressive dictatorships often supported by Western neocolonial and imperialist powers. Indeed, the overthrow of dictatorial regimes in Tunisia and Egypt in the spring of 2011 inspired insurrectionary movements in Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria that are ongoing and taking dramatic and unpredictable forms. Further, the North African Arab Uprisings inspired the Occupy movements that erupted first in the United States, in September 2011, and then throughout the world.

The media spectacles of the Arab Uprisings thus generated tumultuous global spectacles of political struggle throughout the Middle East and other parts of the world, in which political upheaval and revolution were circulated, promoted, and took a multitude of forms. I argue that a significant dimension of globalization involves the circulation of images of popular political uprisings and insurrections. Of course, globalization continues to reproduce neoliberal market economics and intensifying global economic crisis, but globalization also has had a significant political and cultural dimension involving the circulation of discourses of human rights, international law, and democratic resistance—as well as of terrorism and other, darker phenomena. Globalization is thus highly contradictory and ambiguous, and it is increasingly a terrain of political and social struggle.³ This study looks at the North African Arab Uprisings through the prisms of their circulation as global media spectacles. After describing my concept of media spectacle, I draw some preliminary conclusions concerning the role of media spectacle in the Arab Uprisings and contemporary history. First, however, I want to establish a historical context for what I see as the emergence of media spectacle as a dominant form of culture, media, and now political struggle.

The Rise and Triumph of Media Spectacle

The emergence of media spectacle as a dominant form of “breaking news” that came to construct major news cycles arose as a central mode of news and information in the United States with the development of 24/7 cable and satellite news channels, which broadcast news and opinion twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. With the rise of global media based on cable and satellite television and the Internet, the spectacle has become global. Major examples include Gulf War 1, the first live TV war; the events of 9/11 and associated Al Qaeda terrorist attacks; the Iraq War of 2003; and, most recently, the Arab Awakening and Uprisings of 2011.⁴

The infrastructure of media spectacle that generates its proliferation is global cable and satellite television, which emerged in the 1980s era of neoliberalism, deregulation, and increased media monopoly and competition between different media corporations and media technologies. This period marked the rise of cable news networks that broadcast news 24/7 and used media spectacle to capture viewers. In the 1990s, new media and politicized forms of media proliferated, including talk radio, Fox News, CNN, and other explosive, partisan news and information outlets. Highly politicized mainstream media is exemplified today in the United States in the battles between the Fox News and MSNBC cable news channels, as well as on the Internet, which has become a contested terrain used by the Left, the Right, and everyone in between.

The epoch of neoliberalism also exhibited the rise of “infotainment,” with the implosion of news and entertainment (seen, for example, in the O.J. Simpson trial, the Clinton sex scandals, celebrity scandals, and the like). Fierce competition for ratings and advertising led information and news to become more visual and engaging, bringing codes of entertainment into journalism. News accordingly became more narrative and tabloid, with scandals and ever-multiplying segments on fashion, health, entertainment, and items of personal interest. In this media environment, hard politics and international news are now declining on the major U.S. television networks like ABC, CBS, and NBC, while the cable news networks are dominated by media spectacle and often partisan political talk shows.

The 1990s was an era in which media spectacle accelerated in the fields of sports, entertainment, fashion, and consumer culture, which were always domains of the spectacle. In addition, the 1990s witnessed the spectacle of globalization and anti-globalization movements and the spectacle of global commodities such as McDonald’s, Nike, NBA basketball, the World Cup, and other global sports phenomena. This was also a period, aptly known as the blockbuster era, in which spectacle came to play an even greater role in Hollywood film.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, blogs, Wikipedia, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, and other new media and social networking sites further extended the ubiquitous and omnipresent media matrix. Hence, the political economy and communications technology infrastructure of media spectacle have generated a proliferation of cable and satellite television, followed by the dramatic eruption of new technologies such as the Internet and social networking media. The Internet made it possible for more people to voice opinions and to circulate news and information through ever-expanding new media and social networking sites, and Facebook, MySpace, iPhones and iPads, and other new technologies enabled everyone to become part of the spectacle (if you can afford and know how to use the technology). Hence, today, everyone from Hollywood and political celebrities, to Internet activists in Egypt and Tunisia, to terrorists in groups like Al Qaeda can create their own media spectacles or participate in the media spectacle of the day—as the Occupy movements dramatically demonstrated on a global scale in 2011.

Media spectacles traditionally have an aesthetic dimension and often are dramatic and bound up with ritual events and competitions, such as the Olympics, the World Cup, the Super Bowl, or the Oscars. They feature compelling images, montage, and stories; engage mass audiences; and generate discussion and debate throughout the media.⁵ Spectacles have a theatrical dimension and dramatize the key issues and conflicts of a given society; for example, the O.J. Simpson murder trial and Clinton sex scandals in the 1990s were spectacles in which key battles concerning gender, sexuality, race, celebrity, power, and the justice and political system played out. Spectacles also take a narrative form, becoming stories around which society is constructed at a given moment, and they can be contested and used for various social and political ends (as the 9/11 terror attacks were in the ensuing Terror War). Hence, media spectacle in the contemporary era encompasses both news and information and sports and entertainment. In the discussion that follows, I focus on how news media, social networking and new media, and popular forms of entertainment and culture helped circulate the struggles in the North African Arab Uprisings.

The length, duration, and import of media spectacles, of course, varies. Certain media spectacles like the O.J. Simpson trial may dominate news cycles until they are replaced by a new media spectacle, such as the Clinton sex scandals. The September 11, 2001, spectacles of terror helped generate an era of Terror War, with global terror networks fighting local, national, and global security and military networks, and it may be that this historical era is coming to an end as the 2011 Arab Uprisings, Occupy movements, and other popular struggles proliferate (of course, it is likely that both cycles of media spectacle will continue and overlap for some time).

Hence, new forms of political struggle and insurrection are emerging as a potent and fecund field of media spectacle. In this chapter, I explore the emergence of the new forms and strategies of struggle that erupted in 2011 in the North African Arab Uprisings. But, first, let me further explicate and illustrate my concept of media spectacle, and how it differs from that of Guy Debord, whose book The Society of the Spectacle had a major impact on post-1960s critical theory and shaped my own work in multiple ways.

Guy Debord and The Society of the Spectacle

To clarify my concept of media spectacle, I will first indicate some differences between my use of the concept and French theorist Guy Debord’s concept of the “society of the spectacle,” which he developed with his comrades in the Situationist International, and which has had a major impact on a variety of contemporary theories of society and culture.⁶

Debord’s concept of the society of the spectacle, first developed in the 1960s, continues to circulate through the Internet and other academic and subcultural sites today. It describes a media and consumer society organized around the production and consumption of images, commodities, and staged events. For Debord, spectacle “unifies and explains a great diversity of apparent phenomena,” including media events and programming; advertising and the display of commodities; and stores, malls, and other sites of consumption.⁷

Hence, for Debord, spectacle constituted the overarching concept to describe the media and consumer society, including the packaging, promotion, and display of commodities and the production and effects of all media. Using the term “media spectacle,” I focus largely on various forms of productions that are technologically constructed and disseminated through the so-called mass media and now also through new media and social networking sites, ranging from radio and television to the Internet and the latest wireless gadgets and social networking. Every medium—from music to television, from news to advertising—features multitudinous forms of spectacle; in the realm of music, there is the classical music spectacle, the opera spectacle, the rock spectacle, and the hip hop spectacle. Spectacle forms evolve over time and multiply with new technological developments.

As we proceed into an era of ever-proliferating spectacle, multiple media are becoming more technologically dazzling and are playing expanding and intensifying roles in everyday life. Under the influence of a multimedia image culture, seductive spectacles fascinate the denizens of the media and consumer society and involve them in the semiotics of an ever-expanding world of entertainment, info...