The Spectacle of Entertainment
Part Four: The Suppression of Disorder
William Brown
We live in an age that pretends to believe that "information wants to be free" (though it privately regrets to announce that it can't be). This age loudly proclaims to have figured out how to "liberate" content ("the human mind") from its shackles and to allow it -- in the manner of the world economy -- to grow "without limits." All power to the imagination?! All imagination to power! The timing is curious, for it coincides with -- and thus seems to be a tacit admission that the economy is in -- yet another period in which the monopolized domestic market is saturated with shoddily-made commodities that it doesn't really need, and can't absorb any more, no matter how spectacular they are made to seem. Endo-colonialization must now become a truly world-wide condition to be successful locally. Not surprisingly, the tool that will allow the "liberation" of content turns out to be the computer, which is capable of integrating the culture and communications industries to the extent that these industries' respective products are forms of information and are thus capable of being computerized or being integrated into existing computer networks. In the name of promoting the "international competitiveness" of the products and services of American businesses, political economy now encourages and rewards the rapid vertical integration of the telecommunications and culture industries. "Companies are going vertical!" proclaims a recent USA Today article about the "media industry." Precisely because the last 15 years have seen the neutralization, evasion or outright repeal of many of the most important federal rules against and regulations of horizontal monopolizations of the "content" and "delivery" industries, the big "media firms" are braying about "competition" and "free trade" on the vertical level. They are ready for a "free" fight because they know they are already positioned to win it (example: Microsoft's entry into the on-line business through Windows 95 software). It is as if there never were any prohibitions against the vertical restraint of trade. Spectacular mergers, takeovers and buy-outs proliferate; the accumulation of wealth and the concentration of power in a few hands proceed undisturbed. A "big seven" will eventually control the global knowledge/culture/entertainment/information business, just as a group of big seven oil companies controls the global energy business. All the laws can do is say, "The days of the Republican are finished; today I sleep," for they were made for production techniques that were new in the 1930s and are now easily evaded in distribution by new types of "legal" agreements and arrangements. Judging from the provisions of the pending telecommunications deregulation bill (sure to be passed over Clinton's veto, if he's still President when it comes to his desk), soon there will be no way of reversing, not to mention preventing any further spectacular concentrations of ownership or monopolizations of discourse.
But rest assured, money will be made: note the recent, highly-publicized wave of spectacular increases in wages paid to such "stars" (providers of high-profile content) as professional athletes, TV personalities, supermodels, Hollywood actors, pop musicians, videoclip and advertising directors, software, user-interface and graphic designers, etc. The intent is obvious: to indicate that the spectacle is quite willing to bribe the groups most likely to be hostile to the intentions and methods of industry, so that they will happily plug into the information economy, rather than skirting or attempting to destroy it. (Significantly, the image of the implacably hostile, socially marginalized enemy of the spectacular order is not dispensed with, far from it. It is retained and made ever more attractive, as both a role to play in the spectacle and as a spectacular plot device.) Just as the workers of the 1930s and 1940s found themselves suddenly treated like grown-ups, with a great show of solicitude and politeness, by a capitalist society that had previously shown nothing but contempt for them and their humanity (but now wanted to sell them commodities as well as to have them produce commodities), so today are the "content people" given access to expensive, high-powered computers and state-of-the-art software, and are encouraged to let their imaginations run as wild as they like (so long as their imaginations produce commodities that enrich the people who own the computers and software applications).
The truly interesting thing about the attempt to integrate the so-called content people into the spectacle of information is that, precisely because the spectacle of information is a global one, the attempt will only work if "content people" all over the globe are successfully recuperated by it. Unintegrated pockets are and will continue to be dangerous to the world spectacle; none must be over-looked or allowed to exist for very long. And so it would be a tactical mistake to over-emphasize the differences in the methods by which the "content people" of the world are being solicited and recuperated in advance, that is, before they've shown any revolutionary inclinations. The similarities in the methods are significant indeed.
Today's new class of executives, managers and specialists -- the "knowledge workers," the "symbolic analysts," the "buccaneering breed of entrepeneurs and visionaries, men and women from the entertainment, communications, and computer industries, whose ambitions and influence have made America the one true superpower of the Information Age," the industry celebrities such as Rupert Murdoch, Michael Eisner, David Geffen, Ted Turner, Bill Gates and Jeffrey Katzenberg -- are inevitably drawn from the generation that came of age in the 1960s. Of course, the new rulers have brought with them their favorite cultural commodities, in particular and most famously, popular music. Because pop music (in all its forms) is still played by a few artists of real integrity, the appearance of the music (and the clothes, hairstyles, poses and gestures that are associated with it) in television ads and other spectacles bothers a lot of people. There is indeed something deeply disturbing about "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" being used to sell junk food (to pick one example from among a great many). But "cultural" commodity choices are not necessarily accurate indications of socio-political orientation, and this was as true in 1965 as it is in 1995. There is no reason to assume that any and every child of the 1960s was a rebel "back then" and has become a yuppie in the 1980s or '90s.
Whether or not they are former "hippies" (little "hipsters" or Beatniks), the new rulers have come into power trailing a tapestry of tattered leftist cliches about such presumably noncultural subjects as "self-governing structures," "chaos theories," "innovation" and "economic democracy." The use of 1960s-style political rhetoric to sell spectacular information (whether "ironic" or not) is even more disturbing and ominous than the use of socio-politically aware songs from the 1960s to sell junk foods and other nourishing spectacles: while 1960s protest songs still have their adherents and defenders, 1960s-style political rhetoric does not. There is something monstrous about the fact that the announced ideology of the Internet, the World Wide Web and other computer networks -- merely because their information flows are non-linear, rhizomatic and decentralized -- is "libertarian," even "anarchist." The Arpanet, predecessor of what is now called the Internet, was originally established and funded by the National Science Foundation, an arm of the state, because it was claimed that private companies would be unable to invest the amounts of capital needed to meet "consumer demand." Indeed, the NSF still subsidizes the Internet. If the Congress of the United States -- motivated by concerns about "cyber-porn" and so forth -- is now contemplating government regulation of the content of the information carried along the Net, it is not proposing to enter into "cyberspace" as an outsider: the state has always been on the "inside" of the Net, laying out public subsidies for the profit of private entities. Today, more than 80% of the Internet's users are white English-speaking males in North America, Europe and Australia; any of them would probably agree with Jay Kinney's observation that "the new political infrastructure of the Net is as handy to Shell Oil as it is to a bedroom publisher of politically incorrect 'zines." We live in an era in which the most visible adherents and defenders of "libertarianism" are right-wing politicans, capitalists and media personalities. We know that the spectacle depends upon turning revolutionaries into secret agents and secret agents into revolutionaries; thus it wouldn't necessarily be significant if the new rulers are "really" anarchists posing as members of the Culture Trust, or if they know that their "go-your-own-way" propaganda is an oppressive embarassment. What is significant is the difference in tactics between the new rulers and their predecessors, who were obsessed with cliches about order, control and tradition. This difference tells us in a fairly precise and comprehensive way what, henceforth, the spectacle will permit and what it will forbid. In a recent interview, info-politician and exemplary baby-boomer Newt Gingrich was asked, in regards to the Internet, how he would control "offensive behavior" while making sure to "maintain freedom." He responded that,
the rule of law has been the primary way: the self-governing capability to set rules. Your bias is always first in favor of freedom, and second focused fairly narrowly on the suppression of disorder rather than the establishment of order -- a very important distinction.Indeed, this is a very important distinction, for the simple truth of the matter is that order has already been imposed. The goal of the spectacular suppression of disorder is quite simply to keep things as they are.
Part Five: Buddhism
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