Spectacles for the Gods

Heidegger’s essay on the Age of the World Picture remarks on the distinction between a time when man was a spectacle for the gods, the object of a perception which was itself beyond conception, and a modernity wherein man is fundamentally the perceiver of a world that offers itself to him as or is posited as a picture. Benjamin, in his Artwork essay, also alludes to man’s former status as an object or show for the gods. Fascism, he famously remarks turns humanity into a spectacle for itself. At the same time, the gigantism of this spectacle – the rallies, the giant screens, the massive advertisements careering towards the random city dweller from the sides of buildings, magnifies man to God-like proportions. The modern citizen is miniaturised before the Olympian powers of industrial society but also watches them, agog, and lives vicariously though them.

The older sense, of an inhuman presence watching humanity means that there is a dimension of existence which is incalculable, unknown, beyond your ownership or objectification. The subjective stance corresponding to this doctrine is, therefore, a kind of humility and receptivity to an Otherness which has preceded us both temporally and ontologically and which we can, so to speak, never get round the back of. If we are all, equally, objects for an inconceivable Other, we are less likely to become objects to onanother, so it goes. According to some, the place of non-human Other is supposed to be a kind of guarantee of humaneness.

It is important to stress the non-humanity of the observing gods. We are not speaking of some transcendental panopticon staffed by a familiar Patriarch, it is not the burning eyes of a peer, albeit one elevated above you in the Symbolic Order, watching your every move. The position occupied by the god-observer is outside your reach and the reach of the Symbolic. It is a non-position, beyond place. The ‘appearances’ performed by you on the world stage are submitted to it, and it is their custodian. It observes them without ego-rivalry, without envy, competition. It has affinities with the position said by Lacan to be occupied by the psychoanalyst, but which I suspect cannot be humanely occupied. The analysand delivers his incoherent stream of images to an anonymous inhuman place, the place of the analyst. An older world had faith that the incoherent appearances of mundane life were seen by and submitted to a non-human place.

But whereas formerly, the endless contradictory appearances of the human stage were submitted to the hidden gods, the contradictory spectacle of modern humanity is submitted to itself for entertainment. Some of you may remember an episode from John Berger’s way of seeing (the TV version) where he flicks through a Sunday Times magazine. Photos of starving refugees in Bangladesh, advertisements for aftershaves, life insurance, a grinning TV celebrity, back to the pictures of starving refugees. Incommensurate realities, co-existing on the same glossy visual plane. The culture that has produced this incoherent visual language, Berger declares, ‘is insane’. The ‘plane’ on which these images co-exist is inhuman, there is no human point of view where all these images converge. But the non-humanity is not of course that of the hidden gods, but the logic of spectacular society. It is this inhuman plane that the spectator is made to occupy. Here's that quote from Benjamin:

Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.

Comments

[Steve]

About John Berger's way of "seeing"...where you say, "Incommensurate realities, co-existing on the same glossy visual plane. The culture that has produced this incoherent visual language, Berger declares, ‘is insane.’"...

I think Foucault explained that "madness" uses the same logic that reason uses, except that someone mad actually believes that they are really made of these images. I can imagine being made of glass, but if I really believe and therefore act as though I were made of glass, then I am insane. So, I can think of different images and reason about them...but if I believe I am made of these images...I am nuts.

"No, young lady, you are actually mad, if you believe that you are truly a slut. Because it is only an image; you don't have to act that way in order to be loved."

Images are false representations...they contain error and are not simply truth...that doesn't mean that they are completely false either; but you can safely consider them as "untruth." Untruth is the grey area or a "non-duality."

Untruth is expression...and in expression there is always an "included middle" path one can walk...the "goodness" of which is not the resemblance or adherence to Truth, but the enlivening of a "sense" (i.e., "intelligibility, direction, and point of view") which forms the basis of perspective.

If we take these images for the truth, then we are insane. With untruth, there is room for interpretation or perspective...and room for possibility and critique.

The fact that John Berger critiques these images means that he sees error in them...he does not accept them as truth. The creation of these images is not insane...the culture that created them is not insane...because all of us can use their imagination to create these images...but the one who believes they are really true is insane.

[Matt]

That strikes me as a necessary distinction, as Agamben will go on (following WB) to posit a way of being-with/"wresting from" these images a certain 'passivity', one radically opposed to passiveness *lacking will* but also neither blind to, or in denial of such 'untruth.'

[David]

"I think Foucault explained that "madness" uses the same logic that reason uses, except that someone mad actually believes that they are really made of these images."

See also:
http://charlotte-street.blogspot.com/2005/04/you-cannot-be-serious-redux.html

[Jodi]

Agamben suggests that the space of the spectacle has in it in a negative form (the audience) the utopian aspiration of something like a commons or a community. This strikes me as a valuable insight.

[Mark]

Steve -

'Images are false representations'.Ok, there's a whole philosophical tradition that believes this. But, as you know, images are not simply 'representations' but have an efficacy of their own. One's 'self-image' (for eg) is in fact *part of* the self, not a representation like a photo that can be filed in a draw.

When Berger says (something like) 'the culture that has produced these images is mad', he's not talking about the individual images or the degree of credulity toward those images, but (i think) about the chaos and homogenization whereby incommensurate realities are, equally, reduced to the same consumable surface. The 'culture' he names is surely that of late capitalism. The plane of equivalence he describes has to do with the parcelling and commodification of every reality. Needless to say, I don't necessarily agree in toto w/ Berger's argument as formulated...

[Blip]

Mark, I'm very curious what you might single out for disagreement, were you so inclined. Anyway, great post. The archives of this blog are certainly great fun.