Response: Debord and Baudrillard

This week I am responding to The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord and “Requiem for the Media” by Jean Baudrillard.

First, some informal reactions:

I could not help getting really annoyed with Debord. First of all, he started out saying all these things about “the spectacle” without defining what exactly he meant by the term. Although I was sort of able to piece it together and figure out what he meant, it would have been so much easier for me to read and internalize his thoughts if I knew what he was talking about in the first place. Perhaps this was intentional (using the textual form to reflect theme and all that jazz) but it was still irritating. Secondly, his prose was so purple, and he seemed to delight in reversals of language (“the science of domination becomes the domination of science” and so on) that really meant very little. He seemed to take an obnoxious, gleeful pleasure in his own wit and eloquence; I could just seem him, as he writes, muttering to himself, “God, I’m good.” Really, I found all his little language flourishes distracting and meaningless.

His form was kind of interesting though. Like Twitter, only longer.

I found Baudrillard much easier to read, although pessimistic. It was nice reading this piece at this point in the semester, because of how he tied in and analyzed other thinkers we have already read in this class. It was a good review, and a good insight into how these various thinkers dialogue with each other.

The prompt:
[…] The big difference between the Frenchmen and McLuhan is that the former appear to be quite critical of these changes, whereas McLuhan was considerably more sanguine. What is it about the modern electronic media that so disturbs Debord and Baudrillard?

Debord seems to be concerned with a society obsessed with appearances to the neglect of meaning or thought. The spectacle, he says, is comprised of “images detached from every aspect of life [merging] into a common stream” (12). These images lose “unity of life” and create a world where appearance is all: “te spectacle proclaims the predominance of appearances and asserts that all human life, which is to say all social life, is mere appearance” (14). The pervasiveness, disconnectedness, and appearance-centeredness of the electronic media, especially the modern manifestation of the electronic media, render it the sort of entity that could quite conceivably promote this “society of the spectacle” that Debord so detests. Take for example the television: it transmits to the viewer a series of disconnected images (commercials which break up programs, programs of different sources following each other, or showing simultaneously on different channels), which the viewer often enters into without context. Those programs depicting some aspect of human life give a generally unrealistic portrayal of true social interaction, instilling in the viewer a conception of human life based more upon these images than upon actual observation of actual humans. Moreover, as Baudrillard also points out, the viewer substitutes the viewing of these images for actual social interaction. Finally, the system of advertising, especially the advertising of commodities, by which television is funded fuels the “pseudo-needs” people create to sustain the economy and the reign of the commodity.

Baudrillard seems less worried about the imagistic, spectacular society that may result from the electronic media, and more concerned with how these technologies may degrade true communication. It essential that communication be recriprocal. It is not enough, for instance, that all political parties have a news channel where they may air their respective opinions, because television is inherently a one-way medium, in which the viewer listens to what the broadcaster says, without being able to respond. No matter the content of the program, or how many different programs and different viewpoints the viewer chooses to view, the communication is still always one way. It is also not enough for Baudrillard that the transmitter and receiver reverse roles, because this only results in a one-way communication going the opposite direction. Any communication or media that is to be truly revolutionary must break down these barriers. He poses graffiti as one of these media, as it is inherently transgressive.

I wonder what he would think of internet forums or the comment sections on blogs. Although they are not inherently transgressive media, they do allow for greater reciprocal communication, and they allow readers to give feedback directly to the author of a thought, video, etc. However, I think even such communal internet media still pose some of the problems Baudrillard identified with the electronic media. He says in regard to television, “ TV, by virtue of its mere presence, is a social control in itself … it is the certainty that people are no longer speaking to each other” (281). I think that same problem often proves true for the internet, even if many people mainly use the internet to “speak” to people. The problem with communications like e-mail, Facebook, and other social networks is that we are addressing ourselves to a cyber-persona of the person with whom we speak, in which such factors as body language, tone, and even oftentimes context are stripped away; we moreover present our own cyber-personas, consciously or not, to those with whom we speak. So by turning ourselves toward a screen and away from other flesh-and-blood humans, we engage in a type of social interaction that is built upon a great deal of illusion (hat tip to Debord). I think Baudrillard is quite prescient in his fear that the electronic media will stop people from actually talking to each other, whether it be because they are viewing various one-way media (TV, YouTube videos, internet articles, etc.) or they are only “speaking” with other people’s cyber-personas. It is not uncommon to hear statements like, “In an age where everything is so connected, why do we feel so isolated?” This degradation of human communication feared by Debord and Bauddrillard seems to have some foundation in reality.