Beyond Image and Reality: Critique and Resistance in the Age of Spectacle
We live in a difficult and troubled time — a time of affliction, argues RETORT (AP, 5). The world’s distinctive feature, the collective argues, is a “deep and perplexing doubleness,” in which atavistic forms of economic conquest and religious conflict are combined with a modern (if not hypermodern) apparatus that produces and circulates appearances. In this collision of “interests” and “imagery” we are witnessing “a bald-faced imperialism . . . crossed with a struggle for control of ‘information’ ” (AP, 14).
For RETORT, the great theoretical task for the Left is to “think this atavism and newfangledness together, as interrelated aspects of the world system now emerging.” Politics is changing and new concepts — or at least “old concepts reworked mercilessly in the light of the present” — are required. The theoretical resources RETORT turns to for comprehending “the contradictions of military neo-liberalism under conditions of spectacle” are those provided by Guy Debord and the Situationist International, particularly the idea of a “society of the spectacle” (AP, 15, 17).
While the double character of this era is the condition to be examined, many of the conceptual resources proceed in terms of dual perspective: interests and imagery, material and appearance, imperialism and information, capital and spectacle. RETORT is aware that being true to the nature of this political moment means that there is no easy dualism of materiality/capitalism/atavism versus imagery/spectacle/newfangledness (AP, 15). Nonetheless, as materialists, the dual perspective — involving “a struggle for crude, material dominance, but also (threaded ever closer into that struggle) . . . a battle for the control of appearances” — governs their approach to the present condition of politics (see AP, 31).
Given this, I would recast the great theoretical task a little differently: how can we theorize what appears as a perplexing doubleness in terms that do not depend on the priority of one side of the dual perspective over the other? To that end, this review of RETORT’s arguments poses a series of questions relevant to their approach. In practice, how far does RETORT take Debord’s thinking, and what are the political implications of the collective’s use of Debord vis-à-vis some of the geopolitical issues it raises (specifically, with regard to United States security policy and the Balkans)? What conclusions can be reached about the nature of resistance both within and to a society of spectacle?
Before proceeding along these lines, there is an important contextual point to make. Afflicted Powers needs to be read in terms of the spirit in which it is offered. It is an avowedly polemical contribution, collectively authored, and intended to be read in the tradition of Left pamphleteering. Its style is robust and authoritative — with what Julian Stallabrass observes is a “rhetorical certainty that we can be sure of knowing simulation from reality” — yet its shifting between a mood of expectancy and a sense of doom represents a welcome hesitancy about our time and the best critical relation to it.1
Forget Baudrillard
We can learn a lot about an argument’s theoretical and political commitments by seeing who is singled out as the conceptual other. To this end, it is interesting to note how much RETORT wants to inoculate the idea of the spectacle against Jean Baudrillard. The relationship between Debord and Baudrillard is a complex one, with commentators like Anselm Jappe resisting the idea that Debord was Baudrillard’s precursor. In Jappe’s reading, Baudrillard accepts the idea of the spectacle but “detaches” it from its material base, makes it self-referential, and sees signs as reality itself rather than “travesties” of reality. According to this argument, Baudrillard does not have to deal with truth, because it is now nonexistent, with resistance logically impossible because notions of content, meaning, and subject have become only signs themselves.2
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