User:Eleanorg/RWR 1.1/Annotations/Spectacle to Simulacra

ANNOTATION: From the Society of the Spectacle to the Realm of Simulation: Debord, Baudrillard, and Postmodernity

Steven Best & Douglas Kellner

In this book chapter from 1997, the authors compare and contrast two key writers, Debord and Baudrillard, to sketch the transition from modernism to postmodernism as seen from the viewpoint of neo-Marxist political critique.

They describe how the Situationists (represented here by Debord) updated Marxism by adding to it an analysis of the psychology of consumption in the 'society of the spectacle', and a program for revolutionary subjectivity. Their notion of the capitalist commodity transformed into a spectacle, which obscured 'real' life, was initially shared by Baudrillard, who was working at the same time. However he went on to push this analysis further, claiming that it was impossible to distinguish now between the fake and the real, erasing the Situationists' modernist insistence on essential, founding realities which could be recovered by political critique.

What remains for Baudrillard is a world of simulacra; signifiers without a signified: "simulation devours the real and… leaves behind nothing but commutating signs, self-referring simulacra that feign a relation to an obsolete real" (Best & Kellner, p.101). Where for the Situationists this condition was a symptom of capitalism, for Baudrillard capitalism is merely one symptom of this wider cultural shift, "rooting the development of the commodity in the structural logic of the sign, rather than vice versa" (ibid, p.98).

While the authors accept that Baudrillard's contribution is important, challenging the Situationists' perhaps naive reference to an unblemished 'real' beyond the reach of the spectacle, they reject his nihilistic conclusions. They believe he has obscured (partly because of his own class privilege) the still-present driving force of capitalism, and advocate a "qualified use" of his later theory (ibid, p.105). While acknowledging his insightful analysis of the rise of hyperreality and simulacra, they insist on "a complex interplay of various mechanisms of social control" in which there are always "emergent, hegemonic and residual forms in a given social formation" - for example, in our own time, "Debordian spectacles, Foucaultian forms of surveillance, and Marxian forms of commodification" along with Baudrillard's simulacra (ibid, p.108).

The chapter closes with a blunt assertion of the need to continue the Situationist project of disentangling the spectacular from the real, as an indispensable part of any program for social change. Their closing thoughts reach beyond the disagreement between Debord and Baudrillard, and are relevant to the wider question of what to base political action on today, now that founding values appear to have been swept away by postmodernism. "The critique of the postmodern thesis is necessary," they say, "insofar as its extreme versions conjoin with capitalism to obscure the most vicious and banal aspects of a violence no less real for being 'media-tized'" (p.114). They conclude that "Baudrillard's error was a failure to distinguish between the social /mediation/ of needs and the social /construction/ of needs" (ibid, p.115), a key distinction for postmodernists which was still very much being grappled with at the time of writing in the mid-'90s (1).

1. See for example Butler's (1993) defense/ reworking of constructionism in response to critiques such as these.

Best, S. & Kellner, D. (1997) 'From the Society of the Spectacle to the Realm of Simulation: Debord, Baudrillard, and Postmodernity' in Best, S. & Kellner, D. The Postmodern Turn (New York/London: Guilford Press) pp.79-123.
Butler, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge).