He too fought under television for our place in the sun.
Robert Lowell on Lieutenant Calley, 1971
We begin from the moment in February 2003 when the tapestry copy of Picasso’s Guernica hung in the anteroom to the un Security Council Chamber was curtained over, at American insistence—not ‘an appropriate backdrop’, it was explained, for official statements to the world media on the forthcoming invasion of Iraq.footnote1 The episode became an emblem. Many a placard on Piccadilly or Market Street rang sardonic changes on Bush and the snorting bull. An emblem, yes—but, with the benefit of hindsight, emblematic of what? Of the state’s relentless will to control the minutiae of appearance, as part of—essential to—its drive to war? Well, certainly. But in this case, did it get its way? Did not the boorishness of the effort at censorship prove counterproductive, eliciting the very haunting—by an imagery still capable of putting a face on the brutal abstraction of ‘shock and awe’—that the velcro covering was meant to put a stop to? And did not the whole incident speak above all to the state’s anxiety as it tried to micro-manage the means of symbolic production—as if it feared that every last detail of the derealized decor it had built for its citizens had the potential, at a time of crisis, to turn utterly against it?
These are the ambiguities, generalized to the whole conduct of war and politics over the past three years, that this essay will explore. We start from the premise that certain concepts and descriptions put forward forty years ago by Guy Debord and the Situationist International, as part of their effort to comprehend the new forms of state control and social disintegration, still possess explanatory power—more so than ever, we suspect, in the poisonous epoch we are living through. In particular, the twinned notions of ‘the colonization of everyday life’ and ‘the society of the spectacle’—we think each concept needs the other if it is to do its proper work—strike us as having purchase on key aspects of what has happened since September 11, 2001. Our purpose, in a word, is to turn two central Situationist hypotheses back to the task for which they were always primarily intended—to make them instruments of political analysis again, directed to an understanding of the powers and vulnerabilities of the capitalist state. (We take it we are not alone in shuddering at the way ‘spectacle’ has taken its place in approved postmodern discourse over the past 15 years, as a vaguely millenarian accompaniment to ‘new media studies’ or to wishful thinking about freedom in cyberspace, with never a whisper that its original objects were the Watts Riots and the Proletarian Cultural Revolution.)
None of this means that we think we comprehend the whole shape and dynamic of the new state of affairs, or can offer a theory of its deepest determinations. We are not sectaries of the spectacle; no one concept, or cluster of concepts, seems to us to get the measure of the horror of the past three years. We even find it understandable, if in the end a mistake, that some on the Left have seen the recent wars in the desert and squabbles in the Security Council as open to analysis in classical Marxist terms, proudly unreconstructed—bringing on stage again the predictions and revulsions of Lenin’s and Hobson’s studies of imperialism—rather than in those of a new politics of ‘internal’, technologized social control.
The present dark circumstances call for fresh political thought. No attempt at such thinking can avoid three obvious, interlinked questions:
None of these questions, to repeat, can be answered in isolation. No one level of analysis—‘economic’ or ‘political’, global or local, focusing on the means of either material or symbolic production—will do justice to the current strange mixture of chaos and grand design. But one major aspect of the story—the struggle for mastery in the realm of the image—has so far barely been thought of as positively interacting with others more familiar and ‘material’. It is the first outline of this interaction that we aim to offer, for further debate.
The version of ‘spectacle’ with which we operate is minimal, pragmatic, matter of fact. No doubt the idea’s original author often gave it an exultant, world-historical force. But his tone is inimitable, as all efforts to duplicate it have proved; and in any case we are convinced that the age demands a different cadence—something closer (if we are lucky) to that of the lines from Paradise Lost we use as our pamphlet’s epigraph footnote2 than to anything from Lukács or Ducasse.