French Intellectuals — Aftermath Blog

This morning brings news that hermit crabs are making homes of bottle caps and other plastic receptacles washed up on beaches, including the detached heads of dolls. You can imagine the spectacle of these tiny human heads skittering along the tidelines, chasing screaming toddlers, colliding with other tiny heads, peering sightlessly up at the solitary dozing occupants of beach chairs, waiting hungrily for a toe to touch the sand.
A fair amount of digital ink has been spilled concerning Taylor Swift’s ability to get from a scheduled concert in Japan in time to watch boyfriend Travis Kelce in the Super Bowl. A potential holdup is a lack of parking space for private jets at the Las Vegas airport, forcing Swift to land hers at the Los Angeles airport and arrive in Las Vegas via helicopter, perhaps on the 50-yard line during warmups.
A fair amount of real ink was once spilled by social critics writing about Marilyn Monroe as a female impersonator. Social critics noticed the difference between Monroe and her previous identity as Norma Jean Baker, and postulated that female impersonation transformed her into something richer, lusher, and far more authentically female than the original. Current female icons Kim Kardashian, Taylor Swift, and Barbie are causing normal females to save up for surgeries or expensive medications, to either become more female or less.
Guy Debord, a French social critic, published The Society of the Spectacle in 1967. Debord pointed out that capitalist culture had replaced ritual—which tended to reinforce normalcy—with spectacle, which was more marketable than the normal, just as Marilyn was more marketable than Norma (Normal!) Jean.
Spectacle is used to heighten reality enough for most people to notice it. Spectacle is used to change public opinion. Spectacle is used to sell products. Spectacle is used to transform one reality into another. Donald Trump coming down the escalator is a spectacle. The World Trade Center towers collapsing is a spectacle. Marilyn Monroe standing over a sidewalk vent, holding her dress down, is a spectacle. The Super Bowl is a spectacle.
It’s a mistake to say a spectacle, once enacted, is anything but a spectacle, no matter how it started out. The destruction of Gaza was a spectacle that quickly superseded the spectacle of the Hamas attack on Israeli civilians. Netanyahu said it was revenge, and maybe in his mind it was, but the images from Gaza hospitals overpowered the images of Israeli bodies in burned kibbutzes. Netanyahu wrecked the moral authority of Israel in a few short weeks, moral authority that had been purchased at great price by the spectacles of millions of people walking into gas chambers and the smoke from crematoria chimneys darkening gray German skies.
Terrorists do not commit their spectacular crimes on Super Bowl Sunday unless they’re planning on terrorizing the Super Bowl itself. Even in the aftermath of a locker-room bombing or an obscene scoreboard hack, should the male impersonator Travis Kelce escort Taylor Swift to the aforementioned 50-yard line, kneel down, and ask her to marry him, that’s what people would remember about the Super Bowl.
Who won the Super Bowl? After a hyperreal Kelce-Swift proposal, who will care?
A B-1 bomber, taking off in the United States, on its way to Yemen, is a spectacle. Its bombs destroying a Houthi base in Yemen won’t be spectacle until the video is released.
The first time you see Joe Biden, wearing Ray-Bans and white and even teeth and driving his hunter-green ’67 Corvette, it’s a spectacle. But it’s a political ad. Once you’ve seen it, you’ll see it again, often enough that it will become ritual, spectacle’s opposite, which is the idea.
Ritual is anti-transcendent. Ritual turns down life’s volume and turns up its gravity. It turns the past into the present. It makes the spectacular seem flashy, shallow, ephemeral, hollow, grotesque. In our coming election, you’re going to see Biden’s simple automotive ritual arrayed against the presidential impersonator Trump’s overheated rallies, outrageous utterances, and verbal and legal transgressions. The Democrats’ gamble is that if people are tired of a president creating spectacle after spectacle, they will choose substance over flash, and a fallible but motorized Biden will win another four years of a predictable presidency. We can ease up on the hypervigilance, which will be a relief for some of us.
Ritual has a dark side. If an elder gets Alzheimer’s there is invariably a dispute between children who insist nothing is wrong and their siblings who insist something is terribly wrong. The children who insist nothing is wrong will have ritualized their relationship with their parent, and the parent, having memorized the ritual years before, will reenact it every time those children show up. Their visits will last just long enough for the ritual to be enacted. The result is a fossilized status quo and torment for the siblings who have to deal with a parent mindlessly starting the same old ritual, often alone in a darkened room. Dementia in a president is hard to diagnose unless you spend a lot of time with him. Who wants to do that?
The Russians and Ukrainians are engaged in a war of spectacle. The Russians are losing. A forty-mile line of tanks and trucks is a grand gesture. The absolute destruction of those tanks and trucks and everyone in them is grander. But if the war remains static, the destruction of Ukrainian cities will become ritual, as happened in Chechnya, and the Russians will win. If the Ukrainians spectacularly destroy the Kerch Bridge, sink another ten ships of the Russian Navy, set oil refineries and storage tanks aflame all over Russia, and burn St. Basil’s cathedral in the Kremlin, they will win by spectacle alone.
Basically, the Ukrainians have to become Marilyn Monroes to the Russians’ Norma Jean Bakers, Kim Kardashians to the Russians’ Caitlyn Jenners, Barbies to the Russians’ Cabbage Patch Kids, all of them serial-killer impersonators.
Something spectacular is happening in the southern hemisphere. It has to do with oceans at hot-tub temperatures, thousands and maybe millions of people dying of heat stroke, African famine refugees overwhelming national boundaries, power grids going down because of air-conditioning overload, forest fires in Chile, Argentina, and South Africa, continental-scale floods, whole species of wild animals dying from drought, endless reefs of dead white coral in the Pacific, Antarctic sea ice once again at record low levels by the end of this month.
The events in the global south are spectacular but not spectacle, because climate catastrophe has become ritual in the southern hemisphere. We northerners are used to it. It’s become a perverse comfort, at least until we stop believing that we’re the normal half of the planet.
Spectacle for us northern hemisphere folks will have to wait until at least the spring equinox, when people start dying in unairconditioned apartments in Chicago, St. Louis, New Orleans, and San Diego, and a Texas power grid failure sends an overheated Ted Cruz back to Canada where he came from, and a 400-mile-long mudslide covers the beaches and beach houses from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and brides start turning into human torches in their wedding dresses because their lakeside wedding bowers have been ignited by nearby burning forests. If one of them is Taylor Swift, the resulting Internet spectacle might finally achieve a level of intensity sufficient to get through to the consciousness of world leaders, an intensity somehow not reached by the spectacles of burning Vietnamese civilians or limbless, headless Palestinian children.
Guy Debord, rest his tormented soul, non-spectacularly shot himself in the heart in 1994. He was depressed and alcoholic. He had had the grim experience of watching his own political movement, Situationism—an attempt, as I understand it, to inject reality into politics by exposing the false constructs of late-stage capitalism—degenerate into performative meaninglessness after the Paris riots of 1968. His suicide may have been an attempt to bring back an authentic existence, but as is usual with suicide, it proved counterproductive.
The death of Diana, Princess Impersonator of Wales, was three years in Debord’s future, but he wouldn’t have been surprised by it. Death by paparazzi would have been devoid of meaning for a latter-day French revolutionary familiar with the ritual murder of royalty. Had he been alive, he would have pointed out that Diana would have died much more meaningfully by stepping on a land mine.
If all this seems a bit cryptic, as if I’ve glimpsed a fleeting meaning in current events and am trying to write it down before it fades—that’s about right. These things tend to happen when I read French intellectuals (FIs). I read, get intellectually excited, and then run head-on into a cognitive barricade. I don’t think it’s from lack of cognition on my part, or even from a bad translation. There is usually something there, but it dies due to some FI or another not being able to chart a middle way between ritual and spectacle, metaphor and literality, substance and spirit, performance and audience.
The usual reaction to reading FIs is to wish you were smarter, but now and then I wish they were smarter. At least smart enough not to shorten their lives in a world where geologic time gives us all the lifespans of mayflies, lives seldom long enough to bring liminal insights into focus.
Julie has announced that the afternoon is still sunny, and we can ski into Redfish on the groomed slush of the road. Conditions will be anything but spectacular, but we’ll get there with a little effort, and sit on the dock, and look at the Grand Mogul and Mount Heyburn above the far end of the lake. It’s a pretty good view, almost good enough to entertain the narcissistic fantasy that the material universe, or God, or The Great Spirit is putting on a show for us alone. It’s become a ritual for us this low-snow year, and we’re again and again enacting it in an effort to get in shape for the big, spectacular storm that will finally dump enough snow to invest our skiing—and by extension our lives—with an unthinking but spectacular ecstasy.