The Spectacle Today: A Response to RETORT
The RETORT collective’s book, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, is an important critical intervention in the current discussions of the war in Iraq and the whole strategic vision of the so-called war on terror. The origin of this book was in the 2003 global demonstrations against the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, which remains a moment of spectacular optimism and defeat at one and the same time. A pamphlet the authors issued at that time, Neither Their War Nor Their Peace, was crucial in its insistence on identifying deeper structural issues than the isolated question of “peace versus war” in Iraq. It provided an important reminder that the so-called peace of the previous decade, the era of the “peace dividend” at the end of the Cold War, had been a low-level war leading inexorably to the outbreak of the war on terror. The sanctions against Iraq were not a “peace” in any sense of the word.
Afflicted Powers is also a deeply felt meditation on the increasingly marginal position of the Left as a political movement. The book is especially useful in its analysis of structures of overdetermination, as in the multilayered account of the “blood for oil” equation and the “future of the illusion” known as U.S. policy toward Israel. As a die-hard Blakean, I appreciate the identification with what Blake would call “the voice of the devil,” speaking from its downcast state on the burning lakes of hell — an all-too-prescient image of burning oil fields in the Middle East, as well as a reminder of Milton’s defeated rebel angels, convening to plot their next move and mobilize their “afflicted powers.” Needless to say, I am especially fascinated with the effort to link the contemporary problem of “the Image and Spectacle” to the present war on terror. I believe that it is essential to work through these concepts, from Marx’s figures of the commodity fetish and the camera obscura of ideology, to Walter Benjamin’s “exhibition value,” to Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s “culture industry,” to Guy Debord’s “spectacle” — the fundamental Imaginary structures of capitalist modernity.1
But I worry that Afflicted Powers has constructed another enemy, a straw enemy, not nearly as powerful as the military neoliberalism it correctly identifies as the major force for a new round of “primitive accumulation” and neocolonialism. This enemy bears a large burden of the blame the volume assigns to forces that present obstacles to the Left. It hovers around the fetish concepts Spectacle, Capital, the State, and Modernity. These concepts frame RETORT’s analysis of the contemporary political situation in what must be called highly spectacular terms, as the mobilizing of vast abstractions contending for power in a mythic struggle, a “Holy War” against “Mammon” and “Moses and his Law,” waged on the battlefield of a contemporary “hell on earth.” All of the terms (including Spectacle itself) should be capitalized. They are proper names. They are regularly personified, treated as agents with intentions, choices (or not), necessities, and actions. The State has “anxieties” and “obsession.”2 The Spectacle, as Debord always insisted, even has “plans” for “self development.” “Spectacular power can . . . deny whatever it wishes to.”3 But Afflicted Powers claims to argue substance against spectacle. What is really going on?
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Notes
I am deeply grateful to my colleague, Lauren Berlant, who dropped everything to perform a heroic editorial cleansing of the mess this essay amounted to in an earlier draft.
- Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in vol. 3 of Selected Writings, ed. Michael Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 101 – 33; Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1999); Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), 16.
- Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 20.
- Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 22.