Summary of Chapter 14: The organisation of appearances
Vaneigem’s summary:
The organisation of appearances is a system for protecting the facts. A racket. It represents the facts in a mediated reality to prevent them emerging in unmediated form. Unitary power organised appearances as myth. Fragmentary power organises appearances as spectacle. Challenged, the coherence of myth became the myth of coherence. Magnified by history, the incoherence of the spectacle turns into the spectacle of incoherence (e.g., pop art, a contemporary form of consumable putrefaction, is also an expression of the contemporary putrefaction of consumption) (1). The poverty of ‘the drama’ as a literary genre goes hand in hand with the colonisation of social space by theatrical attitudes. Enfeebled on the stage, theatre battens on to everyday life and attempts to dramatise everyday behaviour. Lived experience is poured into the moulds of roles. The job of perfecting roles has been turned over to experts (2). (123)
He begins with a Nkee quote from Ecce Homo: the “ideal world is a lie invented to deprive reality of its value, its meaning, its truth...” V adds, “And it is true that man lies because in a world governed by lies he cannot do otherwise: he is falsehood himself, he is trapped in his own falsehood."
All the same, nobody lies groaning under the yoke of inauthenticity twenty-four hours a day. There are always a few radical thinkers in whom a truthful light shines briefly through the lie of words; and by the same token there are very few alienations which are not shattered every day for an instant, for an hour, for the space of a dream, by subjective refusal. Words are never completely in the thrall of Power, and no one is ever completely unaware of what is destroying him. When these moments of truth are extended they will turn out to have been the tip of the iceberg of subjectivity destined to sink the Titanic of the lie. (124)
The bourgeoisie killed God and myth, but the replacement they created, the lie of the ideal, is weak and unsustainable.
Revolution was the bourgeoisie’s finest invention. It is also the running noose which will help it take its leap into oblivion.
Fascism is in a way a consistent response to this hopeless predicament. It is like an aesthete dreaming of dragging the whole world down with him into the abyss, lucid as to the death of his class but a sophist when he announces the inevitability of universal annihilation. Today this mise en scẽne of death chosen and refused lies at the core of the spectacle of incoherence.
There is, however, an important difference between myth and its fragmented, desanctified avatar, the spectacle, with respect to the way each resists the criticism of facts. The varying importance assumed in unitary systems by artisans, merchants and bankers explains the continual oscillation in these societies between the coherence of myth and the myth of coherence. With the triumph of the bourgeoisie something very different happens: by introducing history into the armoury of appearances, the bourgeois revolution historicises appearance and thus makes the progression from the incoherence of the spectacle to the spectacle of incoherence inevitable. (124-5)
Thus, in the old unitary society there was an oscillation between the “coherence of myth” and the “myth of coherence;” this is replaced in the society of the spectacle with a progression from the “incoherence of the spectacle” to the “spectacle of incoherence.” V explains the first:
In unitary societies, whenever the merchant class, with its disrespect for tradition, threatened to deconsecrate values, the coherence of myth would give way to the myth of coherence. What does this mean? What had formerly been taken for granted had suddenly to be vigorously reasserted. Loud professions of faith were heard where previously faith was so automatic as to need no stating, and respect for the great had to be preserved through recourse to the principle of absolute monarchy.
Under pressure from the bourgeoisie, this oscillation finally pulls the unitary order apart:
There comes a time when the myth of coherence is so undermined by the criticism of facts that it cannot mutate back into a coherent myth. Appearance, that mirror in which men hide their own choices from themselves, shatters into a thousand pieces and falls into the public realm of individual supply and demand. The demise of appearances means the end of hierarchical power, that façade ‘with nothing behind it’.
None of the fragmentary ideologies of the spectacular era can more than momentarily replace this lost hierarchy, so “Eventually the decomposition of the spectacle entails the resort to the spectacle of decomposition” (126).
V now makes a very interesting argument about drama and technology:
The development of the drama as a literary genre cannot but throw light on the question of the organisation of appearances. After all, a play is the simplest form of the organisation of appearances, and a prototype for all more sophisticated forms. As religious plays designed to reveal the mystery of transcendence to men, the earliest theatrical forms were indeed the organisation of appearances of their time. And the process of secularisation of the theatre supplied the models for later, spectacular stage management. Aside from the machinery of war, all machines of ancient times originated in the needs of the theatre. The crane, the pulley and other hydraulic devices started out as theatrical paraphernalia; it was only much later that they revolutionised production relations. It is a striking fact that no matter how far we go back in time the domination of the earth and of men seems to depend on techniques which serve the purposes not only of work but also of illusion.
[This connects with the concept of “wonder” in the work of Aristotle, and the inventions of Hero of Alexandria; how unlike Vaneigem to have not included religion with theater and war as origins of illusion, on account of Hero’s hydraulic temple doors... though arguably, this was also “drama.”]
The birth of tragedy was already a narrowing of the arena in which primitive men and gods had held their cosmic dialogue. It meant a distancing, a putting in parentheses, of magical participation. This was now organised in accordance with a refraction of the principles of initiation, and no longer involved the rites themselves. What emerged was a spectaculum, a thing seen, while the gradual relegation of the gods to the role of mere props presaged their eventual eviction from the social scene as a whole.
Tragedy in turn is superseded by drama, and by comedy. In drama, “human society replaced the gods on stage” (127).
The cliché which likens life to a drama seems to evoke a fact so obvious as to need no discussion. So widespread is the confusion between play-acting and life that it does not even occur to us to wonder why it exists. Yet what is 'natural' about the fact that I stop being myself a hundred times a day and slip into the skin of people whose concerns and importance I have really not the slightest desire to know about?
This is not quite the same as being an actor in a play, because that actor retains a self to return to at the end of the performance.
The roles we play in everyday life, on the other hand, soak into the individual, preventing him from being what he really is and what really wants to be. They are nuclei of alienation embedded in the flesh of direct experience. The function of such stereotypes is to dictate to each person on an individual – even an ‘intimate’ – level the same things which ideology imposes collectively.
V talks about the increased personalization of the lies/spectacle (his example is television but obviously social media is an even better illustration). These do not work through the dissemination of ideas, but rather of gestures, portrayed on the screen and imitated by viewers.
What we have here is a school of gesture, a lesson in dramatic art in which a particular facial expression or motion of the hand supplies thousands of viewers with a supposedly adequate way of expressing particular feelings, wishes, and so on. Thus the still rudimentary technology of the image teaches the individual to model his existential attitudes on the complete portraits of him assembled by the psychosociologists. His most personal tics and idiosyncrasies become the means by which Power integrates him into its schemata. The poverty of everyday life reaches it nadir by being choreographed in this way. Just as the passivity of the consumer is an active passivity, so the passivity of the spectator lies in his ability to assimilate roles and play them according to official norms. (128)
Individuals acting out roles, personalities, mannerisms, etc. which they have consumed through media are thus being “choreographed” by the Spectacle.
We thus see the return of the original conception of theatre, of general participation in the mystery of divinity. But, thanks to technology, this now occurs on a higher level, and by the same token embodies possibilities of transcendence unavailable in ancient times.
As we have seen, the technical reproduction of magical relationships such as religious faith or identification resulted eventually in the dissolution of magic. Coupled with the demise of the great ideologies, this development precipitated the chaos of stereotypes and roles. Hence the new demands placed upon the spectacle. (129)
News stories are just assembled cliches, divided up into stereotypical categories (“Crimes of Passion, Political Affairs, Business Section, From the Police Blotter, Eating Out, etc., etc.”). There is the constant, meaningless juxtaposition of news items (cf. Latour): “The husband who kills his wife’s lover competes for attention with the Pope on his deathbed, and Mick Jagger’s underpants are on a par with Mao’s cap. It’s all one, everything is equivalent to everything else, in the perpetual spectacle of incoherence.” “The spectacle has to be everywhere, so it becomes diluted and self-contradictory.”
The spectacle’s degeneration is in the nature of things, and the dead weight which enforces passivity is bound to lighten. Roles are eroded by the resistance put up by lived experience, and spontaneity will eventually lance the abscess of inauthenticity and pseudo-activity. (130)
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