“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.” So wrote the French writer Guy Debord in the first thesis of his great work The Society of the Spectacle, written as a manifesto and published in 1967. As a celebrated practitioner of that art, Donald Trump’s spectacular victory makes Debord’s analysis relevant again.
A paraphrase of Karl Marx’s first sentence in Capital, published 100 years earlier, Debord’s book develops his analysis of alienation, reification and false consciousness in an age of mass consumption and advertising. Spectacles had become the form in which commodities – Marx’s principal subject – express themselves. As Debord puts it in his fourth thesis: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.”
In Debord’s spectacle, genuine human interactions are replaced by commodified experiences and passive consumption. This leads to a degradation of life, as individuals become isolated spectators in a world dominated by the market economy and media manipulation.
Debord was a member of the Situationist International, a group of artists and theorists founded in 1957 who influenced the 1968 French student and worker upheavals. They were devoted to upending spectacle society by subversive interventions in everyday life intended to reveal both its falsity and its potential to liberate. They dissolved in 1972 but their theoretical and political legacy lives on in the arts, film, punk music, media critique and social theory.
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Their tradition inspires analysts and activists trying to understand how spectacles function in advanced capitalist societies which are now far more penetrated by media imagery than in the 1960s. The social media revolution of the 1990s which brought the internet, smartphones, online algorithm-driven advertising, podcasts, branding and 24-hour broadcasting cycles to a new generation qualitatively deepened such changes and the spectacles associated with them.
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Donald Trump’s business and political career exemplifies the merger between business, advertising, entertainment, celebrity and politics involved. His background in speculative building, casinos, professional wrestling and his popular television show The Apprentice provided the perfect setting for a politics of spectacle when he sought out the Republican nomination 10 years ago. He could create dramatic events as media spectacles dominating news cycles, orchestrated by direct access to his followers via Twitter. Such a politics insulates him, moreover, from legal or criminal capture.
The political scientist Douglas Kellner says Trump is a “master of media spectacle”, having perfected the art initiated by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and developed in office by Barack Obama, as big tech companies matured and created profitable worldwide oligopolies with his support. Trump’s success combined these skills with racist, populist and sexist messaging against his opponent, Kamala Harris.
Kellner says Debord would be “astonished at the extent to which spectacle has come to dominate politics in high-tech supercapitalist societies.” He is involved in critical media literacy campaigns to help students and citizens navigate their way through it. Similar understanding and action is needed to consume visual media critically without letting it consume us, as Marine Tanguy argues in her book The Visual Detox.
Trump’s populism has a performative element in which he brings a popular ludic – or playful element – to his political stagecraft. The dark, reactionary, quasi-fascist sides to his policies are tempered in a message of change which saw him gain most white and non-college educated supporters, and most popular support. “I love the poorly educated”, he said in 2016.
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Opposing the political and media mainstream gives him a cultural appeal to working-class and left-behind communities who resent the US coastal liberal elites. These elites dominate the Democratic leadership – and the mainstream celebratory advertising and media spectacle competing with Trump’s darker one. This is despite the deep contradictions between Trump’s consistent policy to empower the super-rich and these class interests. You can’t make America great again if wealth inequalities continue to double as they have since 1980; but you can create a vicious authoritarianism. Nor can you sustain popular support if high tariffs push up domestic prices, reducing growth, while income and welfare gaps echo wealth ones. Falling domestic birth rates require immigrant labour power.
Trump’s discursive ability to ride such inconsistencies is exemplified in professional wrestling’s playful performative aggression. Sociologist Jorie Hofstra calls this a “ludic layering ... by which a single speaker simultaneously addresses audiences with conflicting interests. Dog whistles place a neutral-to-agreeable veneer over an intended message that would be disagreeable to many.”
In this contest between Trump’s performative spectacles and Kamala Harris’s less well presented issues, Harris lost because of her ambiguities between centrist policies with celebrity endorsement and more radical left-wing positions. Such are the realities of today’s spectacularised US politics.