The Spectacle of War and the Struggle to Protest
October 7 and the decimation of Gaza brought unwavering images to screens around the world: hang gliders, women brutalized in the back of trucks, mutilated children, razed city blocks. The spectacle produced by the war in Iran is, for distant spectators, relatively familiar, almost generic. Similar images have appeared so often that it has become almost impossible for many of us to know whether it is rubble in Gaza, southern Lebanon, Syria or Tel Aviv. The similarity of what we are witnessing has, in America, reduced the political stakes of the war. Much of the public is still outraged by what is happening, but I fear that two and a half years of images from Gaza have developed a public immunity to the sight of broken concrete and blown-up humans.
What happens when the spectacle of war no longer captivates the public? What happens when we can’t even muster the illusions of shared separation?
Strangely, as social media has moved from text status updates and tweets to short videos, verbal comments have actually become more prominent and more viral. This is what led my friend and me to our futile accounting of new media experts. What’s appearing more and more in our feeds are tight shots of people’s faces as they angrily denounce one thing or another.
On this well-lit but distorted stage, the political act changes, but not always perceptibly. Recently, Joe Kent, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, who resigned earlier this month over opposition to the war, appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show. Anti-war liberals, who might not agree with much of what Kent has said in the past, might still come across snippets of this interview on social media and find themselves hoping that Kent does it well, so that he can provide a compelling counter-narrative to his fellow travelers who have a right to oppose further military action. One would imagine that this could help put pressure on lawmakers to turn against Trump.
What is striking about this train of thought, which is quite common among the terminally ill – a population that is growing every day – is that it involves no real action on the part of the person following this Rube Goldberg political process. Viral talkers have become the measure and expression of public outrage, mediated by social media algorithms.
These are horrible conditions for meaningful dissent. Trump’s party controls all three branches of government, but I suspect another reason Trump and his administration feel they can do whatever they want without consulting popular opinion — or even really informing the public — is because they recognize, consciously or unconsciously, that the American people, alienated and addicted to their phones, are currently incapable of organizing for meaningful political action. “Technology is based on isolation, and the technical process in turn isolates,” writes Debord. “From automobiles to television, all the goods selected by the spectacular system are also its weapons for a constant reinforcement of the conditions of isolation of “lonely crowds”. The show constantly rediscovers its own hypotheses more concretely.
One could easily characterize the actions of the No Kings as simply more spectacle: drone shots of large crowds to feed the social media machine. But I’m sure that most of the millions of people who protested last weekend weren’t just looking for more capital in the virus economy; they were looking for other faces and voices that would remind them that they are not alone. Perhaps that’s all the protests can accomplish right now. But nothing is more important than remembering that there is life outside of performance. ♦
