The Spectacle of Entertainment
Part One: That's Entertainment!
William Brown
We must begin with a series of banalities, the first being the observation that mass entertainment (television, movies, pop music, tabloid newspapers, paperbacks, video games and tapes, computer games, etc.) has recently undergone a spectacular transformation: it is no longer secondary to or relatively distinct from the general political economy of the United States; the production, distribution and consumption of mass entertainment is now central to American industrial capitalism. As the New York Times reported in an August 1995 Week-In-Review article,
Those who display a pronounced fascination (even obsession) with the images of mass entertainment include both the owners and managers of our society, as well as its "citizen-consumers." As Tom Frank has pointed out in a recent and symptomatic essay (to which we will return),
No longer can any serious executive regard TV, movies, magazines, and radio as simple "entertainment," as frivolous leisure-time fun. . . . Every leader of business knows that the nation's health is measured not by the production of cars and corn but by the strength of its culture industry. . . . The shift has been a gigantic one, altering the way we appreciate the world around us. . . . We have entered what the trade papers joyfully call the "Information Age," in which culture is the proper province of responsible executives, the minutiae that were once pondered by professors and garret- bound poets having become as closely scrutinized as daily stock prices.
Consequently, we are experiencing a profound world-wide crisis, because "entertainment" had been humanity's last refuge from oppression. In the words of Lawrence Wilkinson, director of the Global Business Network (now there's a name with a future!),
The ascension of mass entertainment (that is to say, the historical victory of the marketplace over humanity) has been a long time in coming; though the pace of its climb has been gradual, its progress has been relentless. The foundation for its conquest lies in the Great Depression (in the crisis of commodity over-production in the 1920s). Ever since then, but especially in the years following the end of World War II, political economy has been engaged in a campaign to produce markets where none existed before, and thereby to artificially create demand for commodities not yet needed, conceived of, nor developed. Precisely because of the ever-increasing over-development of the technical forces of the economy, it has been far easier, simpler, and more profitable to hastily produce shoddy new commodities in answer to falsified (artificially-created) needs, than it has been to sell shoddy new versions of basic commodities to people who already have what they need to survive. And, precisely because the face of the entire planet had already been seized and colonialized, political economy had no choice but to try to extend its reach inwards, into the mind and consciousness -- that is to say, into the domestic realm of everyday life, everything that had previously been outside of or irrelevant to the "serious business" of industrial capitalism. There was a certain "logic" to this endo-colonialization: everyday life is the realm, among other fleeting moments, of dreams, desires, wishes, fantasies, encounters, adventures, escapes and reversals of perspective; all of these "things" (provided that they could indeed be reduced to things) appealed to political economy because it is itself founded on the absolute condition that its subjects "willingly" suppress the potential of everyday life after they have "freely" sold their labor-power (their creativity and the time necessary to develop it) to employers and have begun to work. The double regime of social control engendered by endo-colonialization has thus permitted capitalism to gain in the sector of consumption what it loses in the sector of production; everything is now raw material, that is, capable of being commodified, distributed, and consumed -- even dreams of never working (just buy a ticket from some municipal corporation and win the lottery!). Mass entertainment was always intended to be an apparent escape from the alienation produced by industrial capitalism, and a sure-fire way of reproducing, fine-tuning and intensifying it on all levels -- that is to say, to be a supplement that would reproduce the lack it was originally said to fill, satisfy and negate.
The outcome of the campaign to create, maintain and expand a "culture industry" (defined as both commodified entertainment and popular knowledge) could be seen clearly in the 1960s, during the crisis of capitalist super-abundance. In his 1967 book, The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord declared that,
Even those who haven't seen the film "Waterworld" probably know that it is the costliest movie ever made and has been widely pronounced a flop despite opening-weekend box-office receipts of $21 million. Few Americans could say who runs General Motors, but no one needs a regular Monday night table at Morton's to be in on the feud between Michael Eisner, the chairman of the Walt Disney Company, and his once-trusted lieutenant, Jeffrey Katzenberg. . . . The airwaves are flooded with shows revealing the machinations behind various movie deals. Newspapers across the country, as well as CNN, routinely report the 10 highest-grossing movies of the weekend.
just as during the Enlightenment "the nation-state" took over from "the church" to become the dominant seat of action, so the nation-state is receding, yielding center stage to "the marketplace"; the action in the marketplace is, interestingly, everywhere: local, global, wherever. And "wherever" is increasingly dictated by "pure" economics and interests. . . .
Though he would no doubt disagree, Wilkinson's words are a thumbnail sketch of the history of slavery. After the Pope and the Republican comes the Capitalist, the most dangerous master of them all because s/he is heir to all the weaknesses and none of the strengths of her/his predecessors. A culture now wholly commodity was bound to become the star commodity of the society of the spectacle. Clark Kerr, an ideologue at the cutting edge of this trend, reckons that the whole complex system of production, distribution and consumption of knowledge is already equivalent to 29 percent of the annual gross national product of the United States, and he predicts that in the second half of this century culture will become the driving force of the American economy, so assuming the role of the automobile in the first half, or that of the railroads in the late nineteenth century.
Certainly the elections of Hollywood actor and television pitchman Ronald Reagan to the governorship of California (in 1966) and to the presidency of the United States (in 1980 and again in 1984) were clear signs of the speed and thoroughness with which the culture industry has been re-casting American political economy in its own image (and vice versa). Who knows what percentage of our GNP is now derived from the culture industry? The exact number, no doubt, is a state secret; perhaps it would be disinformative to speculate upon it. Part Two: Info-Tainment
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