“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”
***
“This is the principle of commodity fetishism, the domination of society by ‘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.”
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Everything has become a spectacle (this piece is a spectacle, The Society of the Spectacle is a spectacle). A projection of two-dimensional images, obscuring the heft and substance behind them—i.e. us, the people, the human body—for easy, mindless digestion. It is a superimposition of the unreal onto the real, and we have fallen for the trick. If it looks pretty, then it must be good, so we tell ourselves. Why bother with the rugged, imperfect lines, the porous, pimple-scarred skin, and the un-curated muck of reality when we can wipe that all away—use OxiClean for all your stain-fighting needs—with the help of our smartphone screens? Swipe swipe swipe, like magic, and it’s gone. Experiences are evaluated by their potential to be documented, in an aesthetic1 enough way that is worthy of an Instagram post (I am loath to incorporate the Internet and social media into my fiction. It is too gauche, too nauseating. Even the arrangement of letters in words like “Instagram” and “TikTok” engenders a bad case of dyspepsia).2
Why waste time developing a personality when you can paste yourself with labels—experience the luxury of Louis Vuitton on the porcelain throne with LV-branded toilet paper. A limited release that can be yours for $1,000 a roll—and broadcast to everyone that you don’t need a personality if your surface is glossy enough? Yes, put on that waxy coat, polish it like you’re Mr. Miyagi until it's so reflective and so bright that no one can distinguish you from the flash of a camera.
Even the tennis world is not immune to the proliferation of images. The grass on the courts at Wimbledon is mown to fit the 1:1 aspect ratio for optimal digitization. Sometimes, if you’re patient enough and wait for those pesky players to finish the point of their silly, little game, you can catch a glimpse of the court in all its glory, so get your fingers ready and snap snap snap before the grunting, sweating barbarians ruin the view.
What happened to X for X’s sake? Art for art’s sake, experience for experience’s sake, life for life’s sake. There is no such thing as a purity of experience anymore. There is only the experience as a means to an end, not as an end in itself. One cannot go to a tennis tournament to simply watch tennis. One cannot travel the world to simply travel the world. One cannot go to a restaurant to simply enjoy a fine meal—start your morning off right with a heart-healthy bowl of Cheerios. These outings must be considered by their potential for Maximum Exposure. How many people will see me here (just as a television network must ask how many eyeballs they can attract to the screen)? How can I project that I am having an Experience, namely, an Experience that others are not having? How can I engender the most envy? How can I bolster the lie that a life mediated through a screen is preferable to and more real than a life lived in the tangible world?
When did we all get so mired in the idea of devouring stuff until we burst—don’t get heartburn, get Tums—and condensing life into a series of pixelated images that distance us further and further from the flesh encasing our skeletons, the plump give and downiness of our skin, the curves and lumps of the human form?
Do you remember when 3-D technology was first introduced to the cinema? On the way into the theatre, an usher would give you a pair of paper glasses with one blue and one red lens, and you would recline in those scratchy seats, witnessing the magic of a hand or an explosion bursting through the screen. The third dimension is no longer so fascinating. We are content with—addicted to—the second dimension, where everything is level and homogenous and our flaws disappear. Here we go, from 3D to 2D to a single line to a blip, until the Big Bang itself is reversed and we have achieved the culmination of this regression: nothingness.
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The last few months, I’ve been on a steady diet of Pavement. Perhaps “diet” is the wrong word—my listening habits have been more akin to gluttonous consumption. It began when a friend introduced me to Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks. It was spurred on by Malkmus. Maybe I’m soft on Malkmus because he’s a tennis player. Those of our species who enjoy dinking a fuzzy, yellow ball over the net share an innate bond. No, there are many qualities to admire in Malkmus. The nasally timbre of his voice, suspended between sarcasm and serenity. The absurdity and humor of his lyrics3 are fodder for any linguist and prose stylist. The slacker persona—out of all the curated personalities that one can adopt—may be the most intoxicating. How glorious it is to be care-free and mellow, to saunter instead of to hurry, to inhabit the low-toned, meditative current instead of the high-octane, eek eek eek frequency that accrues above our soldiers in an unctuous layer of stress. Malkmus’ and Pavement’s rejection, however performative, of the norm and of expectation, of fame and success, is to be admired. And it is, I think, our only hope at dislodging ourselves from the hypnotic grooves of the spectacle.
Is Pavement the most famous un-famous band of all time? If I’ve learned anything from my burgeoning foray into Pavement, it is that they seemed to wince at the prospect of fame. At every turn, they shirked the easy path to success that others would have latched onto, with dollar signs flaring in their eyes. Take, for instance, the release of their third album, Wowee Zowee. A four-sided LP with the fourth side left blank? How can one not admire that kind of sticking-it-to-the-man? Or, consider this clip from Pavements (Alex Ross Perry’s gleefully experimental documentary), in which Stephen Malkmus is offered a gig as the musical guest on SNL. “Five million viewers. That’s 10 million ears!” (Maximum Exposure!) Too easy. Too straightforward and mainstream to obtain success in such a manner. Not cool enough.
To be cool is to not care, but one cannot not care without trying not to care, so, by trying not to care in order to be cool, we are trying more than is permitted by the parameters of cool. Apathy (as a form of posturing), too, is impossible because it is a contrived state. Striving towards apathy is, paradoxically, a distancing from apathy. If you choose to be apathetic, you are doing too much. Even Malkmus admitted to being a poseur. But if we seek coolness, then poseurism is the only path to get there.
The poseurism of Pavement, though, seems to be an antidote to the spectacle. Our personalities and our appearances are, to an extent, manufactured—the mental energy we invest into primping our hair, purchasing a vintage band tee that simultaneously reflects our taste and conveys that our taste is underground (even if we admire the Beatles, wearing a t-shirt patched with their emblem would be a coolness faux-pas), and practicing jokes that we can quip in conversation (pretending, of course, that they are off-the-cuff) to impress our friends is comical, but we do it anyway.
How do we transcend this society of the spectacle, this replacement of reality by images? Where no one is real, nothing is real, everything is a series of illusions and commercials that compel us to further entrench ourselves in the fake, to dictate our lives on the basis of unfounded images thrust upon us by unfounded authorities? Take a page out of Pavement’s book and be in on the joke. Through their artistic and career choices, they are perpetually poking fun at themselves, at the music industry, at success, at the concept of selling out, at self-seriousness, at everything under the sun. They are in on the joke. They recognize the irony of themselves. That is the only chance at escaping the spectacle: to realize you are in it. Perhaps we are beyond the point of no return. But perhaps if we’re self-aware enough, we can afford to live life for life’s sake, while those not enlightened by the Tao of Pavement continue to scroll and swipe until their fingertips fuse to the screen, continue to replace the lenses of their eyes with the lenses of a phone camera, continue to buy their selves and commodify their personalities and feast on superficial advertisements, and we will finally—
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How can you know?
In the distance lies a grower
Née rude-off, king fame thrower
Son of groupie, bed-worn sexon
Spent his cash convincing us that the desert was a star-scape
Took our lives for a satellite so we could cry
“Naked, naked foul”
How ironic that a society so obsessed with aesthetics and surface-level appeal has become so un-aesthetic, so devoid of taste.
Where are the Nabokovs of the 21st century to condemn these vile habits?
“I’m checking out the asses, the assets that attract us,” for instance, is nothing short of brilliant. The rhythm and wordplay among “asses,” “assets,” and “attract us” are akin to poetry.