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jane
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The word “spectacle” contains a prefix that is, naturally, found in a variety of other words: the unsubtle “spectacular,” the more tangible “spectacles,” the questioning “speculation,” and others such as “spectre,” “spectralism,” and “perspective.” What all of these have in common is the fact that they pertain to sight. This leads us into a bewildering path. Shouldn’t a spectacle involve all senses merging together in a synthesis of ecstasis and Heidegger’s poiesis, emerging up and out of ourselves?
Each author I have read has mainly focused on one type of artistic endeavor and its role in the process of ecstasis. For each, it seemed, a sort of cognitive dissonance arose from the experience of the artistic event. For Schopenhauer, it was music, for Foucault, painting, for Barthes, photography, for Benjamin, visual arts, for Nietzsche and Artaud, the theatrical. All, however, have theories that involve the effect these artistic spectacles have on a person.
In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin leads us through how the Greeks had only two ways of technically reproducing art, which were founding and stamping. Everything else had to be handmade. When mechanical reproduction came around, the copy of the piece may have been exact enough so that upon expert inspection, not one difference could be found. “Yet,” Benjamin writes, “the quality of its presence is always depreciated.” This occurs because the process detaches the object from the tradition and the cultural heritage.
Before mechanical reproduction, a work of art was revered for its originality, and perhaps the myth of it grew, the legend, as the story of its existence traveled through mouths and ears. Nothing was like it, and nothing would ever be like it. With the reproductions of famous works, the viewers must lower their standards of colors and textures to the inferior as on a mass-produced card or poster. We associate a painting like Starry Night with duller colors and less intense strokes (ironically, too, because Van Gogh painted this piece in the dark). We now correlate such a great painting with “get well soon” cards and baubles like night-lights. The reproduction’s ubiquity decreases its value as a once-rare item.
This theoretical river runs parallel to the Marxist view of work. Because of the use of machinery and the division and specialization of labor, Marx writes, “the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman.” Through mass production, both works of art and laborers are stripped of their cultural identity and heritage, their uniqueness (what Benjamin would call the aura). The last lines of Foucault’s This is Not a Pipe all but silently affirm this point. He writes, “Campbell, Campbell, Campbell, Campbell.” The reader is undoubtedly confused, so he turns to the notes and discovers that this is a reference to Foucault’s opinion on Andy Warhol’s work “…Foucault apparently sees as undermining any sense of the unique, indivisible identity of their ‘models.’”
Because the reproduced object looks more or less the same as the original, and yet carries no aura about it, a sort of cognitive dissonance arises within the viewer. Barthes in Camera Lucida writes of a kind of cognitive dissonance when looking at a photograph of someone who is deceased. His example is Alexander Gardener’s Portrait of Lewis Payne, taken in 1865. “He is dead and he is going to die...” The punctum is that he is going to die, which is controversial with the fact that he sees a photograph of a living man. This leads the viewer to introspection. Plato called these contradictions to the senses “summoners,” as they force the viewer to introspectively ponder.
Because of the dissonance in the spectacle, the viewer is left fragmented, and must resort to speculation, whether or not for him this dissolves the disharmonious conflict. Consequently from viewing a dissonant object (which is perhaps the underlying idea beneath the artistic spectacle), the viewer must himself become fragmented and indecisive, just as the object is. The spectator becomes the spectacle as he is projected into poiesis in an attempt to harmonize his internal and external (Joseph Campbell would call this the journey of the wounded hero).
So the cycle of the spectacle begins, or rather, perpetuates itself. It could be symbolized by the snake consuming its tail – the ouroboros. It seems as if an artistic spectacle is really a fractal of spectacles, expanding infinitely and developing with magnification. This seems most evident in Foucault’s This is Not a Pipe.
Foucault begins with a simplified explanation of the painting, and then its second version. He then parades into pages of explanations; perhaps this is what he meant, perhaps this…, drawing diagrams that only partially assist his reader in comprehending his long-winded attempt at a rationalization. Foucault offers countless explanations as to what is a pipe, what is not a pipe, what could be a pipe…and ends up with simply, “Nowhere is there a pipe.” This, interestingly, plays a large part in explaining Magritte’s second version of the painting. In this version, the confusion of is-there or isn’t-there is actually displayed in front of the viewer, so that their inner turmoil, their cognitive dissonance, is staring them in the face, saying, “Here I am.”
Because the process of the spectacle is cyclical, the spectator has an incredible significance. Depending on the kind of person who is viewing Magritte’s painting, for example, they will interpret it differently (of course, this epitomizes the magnitude of the painting itself). Furthermore, by viewing the artistic spectacle, the spectator passes through this confusion, this introspection, speculation, and emerges with elucidation. The passage from darkness to light is one that a person can do only alone, as a fragmented and isolated individual. Guy Debord, in The Society of the Spectacle, tackles this point by saying that the spectacle itself obliterates the boundary line between self and world and the lines dividing true and false. “The individual, though condemned to the passive acceptance of an alien everyday reality, is thus driven into a form of madness…” This madness to which he refers is ambiguous, but it becomes more evident that it is a form of ecstasis, because it is unrelated to everyday life and therefore must involve emerging from oneself.
Concurrently, Debord writes that this madness does not necessarily isolate the individual spectator; rather, it unifies him or her with other spectators. In “Separation Perfected,” clause 29, he writes that the spectacle is the center of one-way relationships to spectators; it also maintains their isolation. “The spectacle thus unites what is separate, but unites it only in its separateness.”
The madness referred to by Debord is perhaps what Sarah Kofman is writing about in Camera Obscura of Ideology when she uses the term “death drive.” The death drive occurs when one passes into consciousness, from negative to positive. In this case, the term negative is not used in the pejorative; rather, it is more associated with Freud’s concept of the unconscious. The metaphor of the camera obscura in the psyche reveals an aphorism of the end’s equivalence to the beginning. Developing film adds nothing to the film itself—instead, it “enables the darkness to be made light.”
Barthes also writes of a type of “death drive.” For him, each photograph represents a sort of “flat death,” where the moment has been captured and yet time has continued to pass. The subject of any photograph is in a kind of post-mortem, but this only remains within the photograph.
Almost invariably after taking a photograph, a person will eagerly await the results of the developed film. This is most likely because the photographer and/or subject can never be absolutely certain what has actually been captured on film. It is a minute intervention of ephemeral time by the creator (operator)/spectator, combining the discipline of photographic knowledge with uncontrollable natural moments.
The camera obscura is especially interesting when put into the context of memory. Barthes writes of a photograph that was taken of him, proof that he was in a specific moment and place; however, he had no recollection of being there. This proved frustrating for him, because his memory and his logic were at odds. He was unable to move from the negative to the positive in his own mind. This correlates with Nietzsche’s view of the camera obscura, that of a metaphor for forgetting. In the camera obscura, one can see only themselves through the pinhole in the darkness and its coexistence with their past. But this is limited, and selective remembering becomes imperative—recognizing which experiences are important for their attributions to the present.
Yet the camera obscura can also be understood as a filtering of reality. It prevents the spectator from seeing him or herself as a part of the representation as a whole. This relates to Debord’s theory on spectators and their inevitable fragmentation. It is further perpetuated by the idea of subjectivity; for example, there may be one memory shared by many people, but each person saw the event occur through different eyes. Each set of eyes had a different history, different experiences, different optical prescriptions. Though the observers are linked by the event they all saw and/or experienced, they are eternally disjointed by arbitrary factors of the event itself, and eventually which pieces of their memories slide away first. Eventually, the people cease to exist and the memory with them.
So, can a spectacle be preserved? Perhaps this is where photography and painting become superior forms of artistic spectacle (inappropriate as it may seem), because they preserve themselves in antiquing frames. Schopenhauer would say that music is the most superior, but for this case we would have to take into consideration only recorded music, because a live music spectacle would inevitably and eventually be forgotten.
It does, however, seem unfair to me to restrict value of spectacles to their ability to be documented. Perhaps this is where the age of mechanical reproduction resurfaces. Within the context of the age, there is a rift between what seems and does not seem to be a spectacle. Whereas a reproduction of a famous painting has no correlation with its history and tradition, a piece of recorded music can have a punctum, that is, some capricious wail in the middle of a guitar solo that was unplanned—ecstasis in stereo.
I believe the defining line becomes the intention of the piece. Mechanical reproduction itself does not seem to have Dionysian intentions; instead, it seems focused on lucrative-ness of Apollonian beautiful but illusory images. It is the convenience of the piece: as Benjamin mentions, it is much easier to carry around a bust than to carry around a statue that has a fixed place in a museum. The reproduction of a bust should not be a spectacle, but unfortunately, there are many “spectators” ruled by the fame of the piece, rather than the piece itself.
I personally have no limits as to the medium of an artistic spectacle. Perhaps it is because I am of the mindset where one person experiencing ecstasis (including the originator/creator of the spectacle himself) is enough to make something into a spectacle. Judging the worthiness of a potential spectacle seems to be Apollonian; then again, at least it invokes a thought process. No matter how abstract or obscure an artistic endeavor, I believe it’s spectacular based on its polemic value. The cycle of the spectacle returns, and now the passion about the event or artistic piece has become a spectacle. All roles are interchanged, and “spectacle” itself becomes an umbrella term for all it encompasses: creator, event, monument, poeisis, catharsis, spectator, punctum, and of course ecstasis. The role interplay undoubtedly sparks a confusion, and so the cycle of dissonance and harmonization replays itself, perpetuating endlessly until the moment is forgotten.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” p.221, from Illuminations.
Marx/Engels Selected Works, Vol. 1. trans. By Samuel Moore in cooperation with Frederick Engels, 1888.
Foucault, Michel. This is Not a Pipe, p.54
Ibid., p.63
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. p. 95
Foucault, Michel. This is Not a Pipe. p. 29
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle, p. 153
Ibid., p. 22
Kofman, Sarah. Camera Obscura of Ideology, p. 27
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