Intensified Society: Heterotopias and the Spectacle
Both Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Foucault’s speech on Heterotopias were presented in Paris in 1967, a time and place of extreme political, economic, and social turmoil. The texts describe contrasting elements of society: one of the pervasive and corrupting nature of pop culture, and the other of isolated cultural structures. Guy Debord, self-proclaimed leader of the Situationists International, was an oft-disrepute artist, filmmaker, and poet. His ideas, with other members of the SI, reached cultish status within the 1970’s Parisian scene, but were never made (and purposefully so) mainstream. Largely defeatist, his texts concerning the Spectacle are less a call-to-arms than an arduous description of the Spectacle’s deep-rooted existence in our contemporary culture. Michel Foucault, a notable French philosopher and sociologist, wrote “mostly histories of medical and social sciences, [but whose] passions were literary and political” (Gutting). He “began from a relentless hatred of bourgeois society and culture and with a spontaneous sympathy for groups at the margins of the bourgeoisie (artists, homosexuals, prisoners, etc.)” which gave direction to his political activities and writing (Gutting).
Despite Foucualt’s and Debord’s reputed disdain for each other and pointed counter arguments (at least from Foucault’s end), I find continuity between their versions of intensified societies. Instead of two very different black and white scenarios, the ideas expressed by Debord and Foucault represent extremes of a continuous social spectrum (between pop culture and isolation) that help in defining and understanding each other.
The Situationists were a contradictory group: adamantly opposed to becoming a movement, they denied being “transformed into either another art world “ism” or a simplistic ideological “point of view” (On the Passage, vi) by limiting publication of their work, limiting work itself, and purposefully, ardently staying “underground” while still managing to create powerfully politically influential theories and texts. It is difficult to describe these artists and revolutionaries as “avant-garde” without offending their ideology and purpose. This group lies somewhere on the border between the “historic avant-garde” as described by Burger and the contemporary avant-garde, fitting into neither completely, but somehow embodying the quintessential characteristics of both. The Situationists were both a conclusion and introduction to two significantly different art eras. While it may be premature to claim this, the Situationist International (SI) seems to sit atop the schism between 20th century art and contemporary practice.
This schism may only be felt and may some day be disproved, but is intended to describe the loss of socio-political drive of the 20th century avant-garde. The Situationists were at the deathbed of the “historic avant-garde;” but whether in or beside it has yet to be determined. Despite this obviously grey area embodied by the Situationists, I find it most comfortable to include the SI in “historic avant-garde,” and even to argue that the SI was the most conclusive and most successful (or rather least unsuccessful?) of the avant-garde movements.
All of the elements for the SI to be “avant-garde” in the historical sense are there: the socio-political bent, the desire to bring ‘art into everyday life,’ and the advanced forms of artistic expression. The Situationists, and especially the likes of Guy Debord, took the developments of the previous century another great step forward by becoming sociologist philosophers, architects, and urban planners. Perhaps their success was due to the diversity of mediums used to express their ideology: film, poetry, literature, painting and collage, city planning, and activist / political involvement were all tools at the Situationists’ disposal, rather than the relatively limited development of traditional art forms (painting, performance, and sculpture) developed previously. The breadth of work and keen sense of truth behind The Spectacle allowed the “ideas articulated by the SI to penetrate urbanism, among artists and radical political groups, and during the short-lived eruption of punk” (On the Passage, 19).
However, understanding and commenting upon the importance of the SI is made difficult by the limited quantity of physical work: the second half of the group’s history was spent “actively refusing and negating the concept of art as a separate, exhibitable enterprise;” it is perhaps this point that makes the group both the most ‘successful’ avant-gardist group (in terms of staying true to their ideals) but also the most difficult to pin. By refusing to put into practice any of their concepts (especially surrounding architecture and urban planning), the group effectually legitimated ‘paper architecture,’ but also remained relatively unknown to the general public. “Like radio currents, the Situationist concepts have been emitted and remain alive but invisible until picked up by a receiver. Tuned to the right wavelength, the message can be transmitted” (On the Passage, 18). This decision on the part of the SI, vehemently enforced by devout members, is itself a counter to the Spectacle. As Debord describes, the Spectacle is a problem of commoditization, made possible through automation and mass production. Our desires, as consumers trapped in capitalist society, have thus shifted from the quality of products to mere quantity. “The quantitative is what the commodity-form develops, and it can develop only within the quantitative” (Debord, 38).
“This is the principle of commodity fetishism, the domination of society by the ‘intangible as well as tangible things,’ which reaches its absolute fulfillment in the spectacle, where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible par excellence” (Debord, 36).
The Spectacle, as I have come to understand, is the moment when the photo of Niagara Falls beats out your memory of the experience. It is the purchase of a knock-off designer handbag; it is the suburban home furnished solely from World Market and Pier One Imports. The Spectacle is anything that feeds us, the capitalist consumer, images and ideas about how society is, how life is, that become our ideal for what or how we should live and behave.
The Spectacle is created from a single flash moment of society or culture, frozen and intensified, and then spat back out in a way that suggests it is culture, all of it, the most important aspect. Debord writes, “the spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life. Not only is the relation to the commodity visible but it is all one sees: the world one sees is its world.” (42)
But, as Debord emphasizes repeatedly, “the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images” (4); the spectacle is more pervasive than just a single, flat representation. The difficulty lies in the fact that our understanding of the world is based off of these representations. The danger lies in the subconscious control and influence of the subtly communicated ideas; ideas that include, but are far beyond, a high school student’s need to wear what is in style, or a child to have the latest toy, or the housewife to keep a spotless name-brand kitchen. It is beyond consumerism, commoditization, or mass production. All assumptions contained by society are perpetuated by the Spectacle, even how a professional should act, or the correct path of “success” from college to businessman. It is the selling of life style. It is the perpetuation of both the bourgeois and technocracy.
“Life Style” is itself a commodity and is rarely concrete. It is easy to slip into the commodity fetish described by Debord, when money, tangible yet not so, speaks in the name of “economy.” Economy, alluded to by Debord, is an over-used and poorly understood concept. Division of labor as a result of industrialization has been paraded and accepted in the name of this unknown concept and turned it political. Domination, due to the division of labor, is now an aspect of economy, in reference to both cost and market, and is inherent to the commodity and therefore to the spectacle because of their reliance on economy (41).
“Modern economic production extends its dictatorship extensively and intensively. In the least industrialized places, its reign is already attested by a few star commodities and by the imperialist domination imposed by regions which are ahead in the development of productivity” (42). Those regions, like Europe and U.S. already controlled by commodifcation, spread their virus influence to less developed nations. The problem is both signified and perpetuated by our disconnect from the production of our goods; Debord describes it as “alienated consumption…[that leads to] alienated production” (42). Working in cubicles, sitting at a computer, we sell our labor abstractly, and in return get some small fragment back (through our wages which buy products), but they are not the things we have produced. We are “absolutely separated from the productive forces” (42) of our consumptive habits and therefore inescapably consumed by the Spectacle.
“With the pre-fabricated desires and choices presented by (capitalist) commercialism and government regimes, individual subjectivity recedes and converges into a singular commercial consciousness” (Harris). With capitalist commoditization and emphasis on quantity over quality, we only think we have a choice in choosing what we want or have, made possible by the excessive customer service of American shopgirls. This is, as Debord writes, the “humanism of the commodity” (43). The customer may be right, but the customer has no say in what they are right about. Our obsession with stuff, and buying stuff, and slaving to make money to buy even more stuff, can have only one possible end when considering the consumer’s understanding of the value of their newly acquired hoard: we no longer need things for their fundamental use, but for their newness.
He equates this to a shifting in our understanding of “survival.” Our desires are represented as needs, and therefore become “true” needs. Even the most basic elements of survival, like “food and lodging today exist only to the extent that they are imprisoned in the illusory wealth of increased survival. The real consumer becomes a consumer of illusions” (Debord 47). Indeed Thoreau said the same a century earlier:
“Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a house as their neighbors have… shall we always study to obtain more of these things and not sometimes to be content with less?” (Thoreau 43).
Fashion magazines offer a clear example of the Spectacle. A frozen moment of perfected life, an airbrushed model in designer clothing lounging in an architectural masterpiece; intended to convince the viewers of the value of this reality, “lived experience [is] transformed into spectacle, desire into consumption” (On the Passage, 4). However, the Spectacle, though produced and utterly consuming, does not necessarily include all escapist forms; those moments of wholly separate societal orders, like World of Warcraft and other role playing games, offer visions and versions of society that are too contrasted from ‘real’ life to retain the total influence of the Spectacle. “One cannot abstractly contrast the spectacle to actual social activity… The spectacle which inverts the real is in fact produced” (Debord, 8). These forms of contained society are more closely related to the Heterotopias described by Foucault. Indeed, Foucault defines Heterotopias within this inversion; they are “effectively enacted utopias” that exist with a very physical location and manage to “simultaneously represent, contest, and invert” “all the other real sites that can be found within the culture” (Foucault, 5).
Foucault’s lecture on Heterotopias, later published as a journal article, defines them as self contained societies within the broader social milieu. They are literal, physical places defined by isolation; worlds within themselves, they contain their own rule sets mimicking some version of society at large for hierarchy, function, and behavior. They are places that are both “absolutely real… and absolutely unreal” (Foucault, 6). His examples of a jail, a cemetery, and a boat help to illustrate his meaning.
Foucault describes heterotopias in relation to the ‘other’ type of places in society: they are sites that exist in every society, functionally in accordance “to the synchrony of the culture in which it occurs,” (7) but “that have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invent the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect” (5). That is to say these spaces have express purpose in society as shells for those elements outside the mainstream; they provide a sheltered location where separate and more appropriate cultures may be cultivated.
Additionally, “these spaces… linked with all the others, which however contradict all the other sites, are of two main types” (Foucault, 5).These two types are either Heterotopias or Utopias, “sites with no real place. [Utopias] are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces” (Foucault, 5). Utopias, I feel, represent Foucault’s version of the Spectacle.
A Heterotopia is experienced as “a sort of absolute break with traditional time” (9), while Debord describes the spectacle as “nothing other than the sense of the total practice of a social-economic formation, its use of time. It is the historical movement in which we are caught” (11). So, if we are to believe Foucault’s point at all, the Heterotopia may either represent the physical containers of oft-fringe spectacles, experienced as a break from the pop-spectacle, or the utter absence and removal from Debord’s Spectacle.
The line is between these two blurs as the isolation characteristic of a Heterotopia becomes less extreme. It is isolation that defines a Heterotopia; a breach of that isolation evidences the introduction of the Spectacle. However, it is possible that within the most isolated Heterotopias (like prisons), contained elements of the Spectacle may be introduced, and only further define or make obvious the isolation and disconnect of the Heterotopia. For example, the introduction of televisions to the private cells of prisoners “allows them to ‘monitor actuality,’” to glimpse ‘reality,’ while poignantly illustrating their total disconnect (Virilio, 65).
Where are the moments of gray between the Spectacle and Heterotopia? The Spectacle is effervescent; an intangible set of relationships, influence, and power perpetuated by physical things. The Heterotopia is decidedly physical; a set place with a location that contains a world of relationships. They are defined by their utter disconnect from the Society of the Spectacle. Heterotopias seem to have a range in their strength, dependent largely on this disconnect or seclusion. For instance, a high-security prison, with its extreme physical isolation, limited social interaction, and self contained hierarchy, ranks high on the Heterotopia scale, whereas an academic institution or university with a vibrant student life ranks low because of the continuous outside cultural influence. Heterotopias and the Spectacle may be seen as extremes on a gradated chart. Those less isolated Heterotopias lose their strength by opening up to the broader culture, and the spectacle as a result.
A difficult example that suggests another relationship, however, is the cinema. The cinema, described by Foucault as very characteristic of Heterotopias, is also a fundamental means for the distribution of the Spectacle. On one hand, the physical space and experience of a cinema is powerfully Heterotopia because the audience members lose track of time while watching a film, are relatively isolated as individuals experiencing the same thing, and the space provides a contrast of elements: audience members are seated “at the end of a very odd rectangular room, [facing] a two-dimensional screen, [on which] one sees the projection of a three-dimensional space”) (Foucault, 9). Yet a film, the purpose of the cinema, is epitomic manifestation of the Spectacle: images detached from life, “fused into a common stream that no longer resembles real life” (Debord, 2). This suggests the Heterotopia as a container and exemplar of the Spectacle. It is perhaps through our interactions with different Heterotopias that we are made aware of the Spectacle at large. It is the shift, the break in reality, which allows us the opportunity for a moment of reflection on the society we have just left.
“It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society… the spectacle (in all its forms) is the present model of socially dominant life” (Debord, 2). It is easy to see the incongruous nature of these two theories only when we consider society at large as a continuous, even thing. When we disregard the odd or fringe elements or deem them merely sub-elements gone awry. But when we consider those elements, moments in society outside of the “socially dominant” style, as unique societies in themselves (as Foucault describes Heterotopias), we can being to allow the possibility for simultaneous “spectacles” determined by the dominant culture of each sub-society.
While the SI was not successful in seeing their political dreams come true, their revolutionary ideas are still powerful. Like most other avant-garde movements that preceded them, the Situationists “sought a revolutionary society” of their own definition; it is perhaps a Heterotopia that would provide the necessary separation from pop-society to foster the development of such a revolutionary society. These are all just fancy words for a simple concept: innovation is possible when you remove yourself from the mainstream and invent your own world. This is the idea behind any fostered or intentional Heterotopia, like Arcosanti or an Amish Mennonite community. It is also perhaps from these points of isolation that we must look for the next revolutionaries, the next true avant-garde if it is even to exist.
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