Disposable Futures. Brad Evans
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govern not just the economy but the whole of social life. On the back of a revamped liberal political and economic theory, its champions have constructed a vision and a new common sense that have permeated society. Market forces have begun to model institutional life and press deeply into our private lives, as well as dominating political discourse. They have shaped a popular culture that extols celebrity and success and promotes values of private gain and possessive individualism. They have thoroughly undermined the redistributive egalitarian consensus that underpinned the welfare state, with painful consequences for socially vulnerable groups such as women, old people, the young and ethnic minorities.61
Mark Poster suggests that as communication technologies today surpass the first media era in which “a small number of producers” in control of “film, radio, and television sent information to a larger number of consumers, an entirely new configuration of communication relations has emerged.”62 The second age of media, which Poster argues has developed in the last few decades, not only generates new modes of appropriation and production, but also radicalizes the conditions for creating critical forms of social agency and resistance. This has resulted in calls for more democratic and ethical use of knowledge, information, and images. New modes of communication, organizing, disruption, and resistance based on wireless technologies are on full display in the spontaneous emergence of social movements like Occupy, the global impact of whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden, the advance of citizens holding corporate and government powers more accountable through online reporting, and the sudden street protests that can unexpectedly erupt when a smart phone video circulates documenting state violence against civilians, as is increasingly the case of police brutality and killings of unarmed civilians in communities of color.63
As Stanley Aronowitz points out: “The excluded can use image-making as a weapon for laying hold and grasping cultural apparatuses . . . Placing old forms in new frameworks changes their significance.”64 In analyzing the opposition to the U.S. occupation of Iraq, for example, James Castonguay underscores the subversive potential of these new modes of agency. He writes: “Newer media of the Internet and the Web not only have afforded mainstream media such as WB and CNN new modes of representation but have also provided new opportunities for the expression of dissent, new avenues of distribution for audio and video, and alternative representations of war unavailable during previous major U.S. conflicts.”65 Multiple identities, values, desires, and knowledge are now formed through globally accessible imagery, offering up new modes of agency and possibilities for critique, resistance, and networking. While arguments suggesting that technologies such as the Internet constitute a new democratic public sphere may be vastly optimistic, the emerging media have not entirely defaulted on their potential both to multiply sites of cultural production and to offer “resources for challenging the state’s coordination of mass culture.”66
While we are no closer to the revolutionary liberation of everyday life that he imagined is both possible and necessary, Debord did not anticipate either the evolution of media along its current trajectories, with its multiple producers, distributors, and access, or the degree to which the forces of militarization would dominate all aspects of society, especially in the United States, where obsession with law enforcement, surveillance, and repression of dissent has at least equaled cultural emphasis on commercialization from 9/11 forward.67 The economic, political, and social safeguards of a past era, however limited, along with traditional spatial and temporal coordinates of experience, have been blown apart in the “second media age,” as the spectacularization of anxiety and fear and the increasing militarization of everyday life have become the principal cultural experiences shaping identities, values, and social relations.68 Debrix’s incisive commentary on the production of emergency cultures captures the mood of this shift perfectly:
A generalized, illogical, and often unspecified sense of panic is facilitated in this postmodern environment where all scenarios can [be] and often are played out. This generalized panic is no longer akin to the centralized fear which emanates from the power of the sovereign in the modern era. Rather, it is an evanescent sentiment that anything can happen anywhere to anybody at any time. This postmodern fear is not capable of yielding logical, reasonable outcomes. All it does instead is accelerate the spiralling vortex of media-produced information. All it does is give way to emergencies (which will only last until the next panic is unleashed). This panic, I believe, is the paroxysmic achievement of media power.69
Building on Debord’s pioneering critique, a number of theorists have developed a better understanding of how the spectacle itself has changed, particularly in light of the emergence of new mass and image-based media technologies.70 Douglas Kellner, in particular, has written extensively on the notion of the spectacle and concludes, in agreement with Debord, that the spectacle of late capitalism has essentially taken over the social order.71 Building on these important interventions, what concerns us today are the ways in which mainstream media and popular culture typically sensationalize violence (from the large-scale catastrophe to individual assault) in a way that drains from such events any viable ethical and political substance. It is precisely the alienating cultural, social, and political climate achieved through spectacle that normalizes violence, terror, and insecurity, while editing out the human realities of suffering in order to cauterize social conscience and incapacitate political responses that are in any way off-message from the ever-narrowing grid of tolerable responses to authority and its enforcement. This understanding of the problematic allows us to propose the following critical definition that will inform the rest of the book:
The spectacle of violence represents more than the public enactment and witnessing of human violation. It points to a highly mediated regime of suffering and misery, which brings together the discursive and the aesthetic such that the performative nature of the imagery functions in a politically contrived way. In the process of occluding and depoliticizing complex narratives of any given situation, it assaults our senses in order to hide things in plain sight. The spectacle works by turning human suffering into a spectacle, framing and editing the realities of violence, and in doing so renders some lives meaningful while dismissing others as disposable. It operates through a hidden structure of politics that colonizes the imagination, denies critical engagement, and preemptively represses alternative narratives. The spectacle harvests and sells our attention, while denying us the ability for properly engaged political reflection. It engages agency as a pedagogical practice in order to destroy its capacity for self-determination, autonomy, and self-reflection. It works precisely at the level of subjectivity by manipulating our desires such that we become cultured to consume and enjoy productions of violence, becoming entertained by the ways in which it is packaged, which divorce domination and suffering from ethical considerations, historical understanding and political contextualization. The spectacle immerses us, encouraging us to experience violence as pleasure such that we become positively invested in its occurrence, while attempting to render us incapable of either challenging the actual atrocities being perpetrated by the same system or steering our collective future in a different direction.
We must do more than concentrate on how the spectacle works to culture disillusionment, domination, and depoliticization. There is a need to specifically recognize the question of agency in ways that force us to look at the more uncomfortable issues of human desire and our own shameful compromises and complicity with the system. What is more, we must also be concerned with the internal contradictions that characterize spectacles, how to identify and sustain oppositional moments, and how to develop successful strategies for creative resistance and rethinking what the political might actually mean for us going forward.
All networks of power retain a capacity for resistance. Without this counter-force to domination, as Michel Foucault understood all too well, there would be no power relationship. Power by definition is relational, and thus is constituted by the capacity to resist. It is never totalizing. Having said this, we cannot stress enough how the intersection of violence, subjugation, and the media has produced yet another complicated twist in the drama of the spectacle—one that offers a distinctively different set of political registers for grasping its effects on both the contemporary and future shape of media and the broader global public sphere. Interrogating the spectacle of violence in our dystopian times demands a new pedagogical awareness that must open new