Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory Author(s) : Jonathan Crary Source: October, Vol. 50 (Autumn, 1989), Pp. 96-107 Published By: The MIT Press Accessed: 19-01-2019 20:06 UTC
Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory Author(s) : Jonathan Crary Source: October, Vol. 50 (Autumn, 1989), Pp. 96-107 Published By: The MIT Press Accessed: 19-01-2019 20:06 UTC
Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory Author(s) : Jonathan Crary Source: October, Vol. 50 (Autumn, 1989), Pp. 96-107 Published By: The MIT Press Accessed: 19-01-2019 20:06 UTC
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Spectacle, Attention,
Counter-Memory
JONATHAN CRARY
Whether or not the term spectacle was originally taken from Henri
Lefebvre's Critique de la vie quotidienne, its currency emerged from the activitie
in the late 1950s and early 1960s of the various configurations now designated as
presituationist or situationist.1 The product of a radical critique of modernist ar
practice, a politics of everyday life, and an analysis of contemporary capitalism, it
influence was obviously intensified with the publication of Guy Debord's Society o
the Spectacle in 1967.2 And twenty-two years later, the word spectacle not only
persists but has become a stock phrase in a wide range of critical and not-so-criti
cal discourses. But, assuming it has not become completely devalued or ex-
hausted as an explanation of the contemporary operation of power, does it still
mean today what it did in the early '60s? What constellation of forces and
institutions does it designate? And if these have mutated, what kind of practice
are required now to resist their effects?
One can still well ask if the notion of spectacle is the imposition of an
illusory unity onto a more heterogenous field. Is it a totalizing and monolithic
concept that inadequately represents a plurality of incommensurable institutions
and events? For some, a troubling aspect about the term spectacle is the almost
ubiquitous presence of the definite article in front of it, suggesting a single and
seamless global system of relations. For others, it is a mystification of the func
tioning of power, a new opiate-of-the-masses type of explanation, a vague cul-
tural-institutional formation with a suspicious structural autonomy. Or is a con-
cept such as spectacle a necessary tool for the figuration of a radical systemic shif
in the way power functions noncoercively within twentieth-century modernity?
it an indispensable means of revealing as related what would otherwise appear a
disparate and unconnected phenomena? Does it not show that a patchwork o
mosaic of techniques can still constitute a homogenous effect of power?
1. This paper was originally presented at the Sixth International Colloquium on Twentiet
Century French Studies, "Revolutions 1889-1989," at Columbia University, March 30-April 1,
1989.
2. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Detroit, Red and Black, 1977.
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98 OCTOBER
A striking
cal genealog
sense of the
tion that co
certain set o
first effect
For the term
one periodiz
depending o
late capitalis
than an up
chronologica
The "early
for what we
having disap
one of the
ideological f
equality and
century, fo
strate that
measurable
in terms of
written abo
terms of the transformation of the citizen into consumer. Baudrillard's account
of modernity is one of an increasing destabilization and mobility of signs begin-
ning in the Renaissance, signs which previously had been firmly rooted to rela
tively secure positions within fixed social hierarchies.4 Thus, for Baudrillard,
modernity is bound up in the struggle of newly empowered classes to overcom
this "exclusiveness of signs" and to initiate a "proliferation of signs on demand."
Imitations, copies, and counterfeits are all challenges to that exclusivity. The
problem of mimesis, then, is not one of aesthetics but one of social power, and
the emergence of the Italian theater and perspective painting are at the start o
this ever-increasing capacity to produce equivalences. But obviously, for
Baudrillard and many others, it is in the nineteenth century, alongside new
industrial techniques and forms of circulation, that a new kind of sign emerges:
3. Jean Baudrillard, La sociite de consommation: ses mythes, ses structures, Paris, Gallimard, 1970
p. 60. Emphasis in original.
4. A well-known passage from the "later" Baudrillard amplifies this: "There is no such thing as
fashion in a society of caste and rank since one is assigned a place irrevocably. Thus class-mobility i
non-existent. A prohibition protects the signs and assures them a total clarity; each sign refer
unequivocally to a status . .. In caste societies, feudal or archaic, the signs are limited in numbe
and are not widely diffused. . . . Each is a reciprocal obligation between castes, clans, or persons
(Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, New York, Semiotexte, 1983, p. 84).
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Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory 99
5. T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers, Princet
Princeton University Press, 1984, p. 9.
6. Ibid., p. 10.
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100 OCTOBER
listic forms
expression of
spectacle pos
ual from wit
to the make
position from
represented.
bility that s
subject, abou
transformat
spectacle mo
historical sp
crucial to th
kind of pow
assimilate a
consumption.
Guy Debord
the beginnin
writes that i
years old.7 N
1927, or rou
as to why he
have meant b
origin of the
fragmentary
been implicit
1. The first
nological per
can-trained e
system of a
photoemissiv
light intensit
awareness ar
tion and tran
of silver sal
7. Guy Debord,
p. 13.
8. The historian of science Franiois Dagognet cites the revolutionary nature of this development
in his Philosophie de l'image, Paris, J. Vrin, 1986, pp. 57-58.
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Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory 101
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Television transm
seated directly in
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102 OCTOBER
of production
gamation with
provided the c
television, the
was set in pla
Specifying so
reduced to an
perceptual co
additive form
formed the n
break that ma
of the late nin
with figure,
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enforcing a n
Lang's two M
proto-fascist
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character dom
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stimulus and a
How many sou
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whose position
the emergence
this was the w
Columbia Un
attention. Init
tion on attent
1910 hundred
the range of
Value of Periodical Advertisements," "Attention and the Effects of Size in Street
Car Advertisements," "Advertising and the Laws of Mental Attention," "Mea-
suring the Attention Value of Color in Advertising," the last a 1913 Columbia
dissertation).
9. See Steven Neale, Cinema and Technology: Image, Sound, Colour, Bloomington, Indiana, 1985,
pp. 62-102; and Douglas Gomery, "Toward an Economic History of the Cinema: The Coming of
Sound to Hollywood," in Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath, eds., The Cinematic Apparatus,
London, Macmillan, 1980, pp. 38-46.
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Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory 103
What Bergson sought to describe was the vitality of the moment when a con-
scious rift occurred between memory and perception, a moment in which mem-
ory had the capacity to rebuild the object of perception. Deleuze and Guattari
have described similar effects of the entry of memory into perception, for
example in the perception of a face: one can see a face in terms of a vast set of
micromemories and a rich proliferation of semiotic systems, or, what is far more
common, in terms of bleak redundancies of representations, which, they say, is
where connections can always be effected with the hierarchies of power forma-
tions." That kind of redundancy of representation, with its accompanying inhibi-
tion and impoverishment of memory, was what Benjamin saw as the standardiza-
tion of perception, or what we might call an effect of spectacle.
Although Benjamin called Matter and Memory a "towering and monu-
mental work," he reproached Bergson for circumscribing memory within the
isolated frame of an individual consciousness; the kind of afterimages that inter-
ested Benjamin were those of collective historical memory, haunting images of
10. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer, New York, Zone
Books, 1988, pp. 101-103.
11. See, for example, Felix Guattari, "Les machines concretes," in his La revolution moleculaire,
Paris, Encres, 1977, pp. 364-376.
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104 OCTOBER
the out-of-d
Benjamin's ap
a richly elabo
3. Given the content of Debord's work, we can also assume another crucial
development in the late 1920s: the rise of fascism and, soon after, Stalinism, and
the way in which they incarnated models of the spectacle. Important, for exam-
ple, was Goebbels's innovative and synergetic use of every available medium,
especially the development of sound/image propaganda, and his devaluation of
the written word, because reading implied time for reflection and thought. In
one election campaign in 1930, Goebbels mailed 50,000 phonograph records of
one of his own speeches to specially targeted voters. Goebbels also introduced the
airplane into politics, making Hitler the first political candidate to fly to several
different cities on the same day. Air travel thus functioned as a conveyor of the
image of the leader, providing a new sense of ubiquity.
As part of this mixed technology of attention, television was to have played
a crucial role. And as recent scholarship has shown, the development of television
in Germany was in advance of that of any other country.13 German TV broad-
casting on a regular basis began in 1935, four years ahead of the United States.
Clearly, as an instrument of social control, its effectiveness was never realized by
the Nazis, but its early history in Germany is instructive for the competing
models of spectacular organization that were proposed in the 1930s. A major
split emerged early on between the monopolistic corporate forces and the Nazi
Party with regard to the development of television in Germany. The Party
sought to have television centralized and accessible in public screening halls,
unlike the decentralized use of radio in private homes. Goebbels and Hitler had a
notion of group reception, believing that this was the most effective form of
reception. Public television halls, seating from 40 to 400, were designated, not
unlike the subsequent early development of television in the USSR, where a mass
viewing environment was also favored. According to the Nazi director of broad-
casting, writing in 1935, the "sacred mission" of television was "to plant indelibly
the image of the Filhrer in the hearts of the German people."'14 Corporate
12. "On the contrary he [Bergson] rejects any historical determination of memory. He thus
manages above all to stay clear of that experience from which his own philosophy evolved or, rather,
in reaction to which it arose. It was the inhospitable, blinding age of big-scale industrialism" (Walter
Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York, Schocken, 1969, pp. 156-157).
13. I have relied on the valuable research in William Uricchio, "Rituals of Reception, Patterns of
Neglect: Nazi Television and its Postwar Representation," Wide Angle, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 48-66. See
also Robert Edwin Herzstein, The War That Hitler Won: Goebbels and the Nazi Media Campaign, New
York, Paragon, 1978.
14. Quoted in Uricchio, p. 51.
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Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory 105
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106 OCTOBER
more sophist
arrangemen
1967 there w
he insists, th
over product
the past.
As much as any single feature, Debord sees the core of the spectacle as the
annihilation of historical knowledge -in particular the destruction of the recent
past. In its place there is the reign of a perpetual present. History, he writes, had
always been the measure by which novelty was assessed, but whoever is in the
business of selling novelty has an interest in destroying the means by which it
could be judged. Thus there is a ceaseless appearance of the important, and
almost immediately its annihilation and replacement: "That which the spectacle
ceases to speak of for three days no longer exists."20
In conclusion I want to note briefly two different responses to the new
texture of modernity taking shape in the 1920s. The painter Fernand LUger
writes, in a 1924 essay titled "The Spectacle," published soon after the making of
his film Ballet Micanique,
The rhythm of modern life is so dynamic that a slice of life seen from a
caf6 terrace is a spectacle. The most diverse elements collide and jostle
one another there. The interplay of contrasts is so violent that there is
always exaggeration in the effect that one glimpses. On the boulevard
two men are carrying some immense gilded letters in a hand cart: the
effect is so unexpected that everyone stops and looks. There is the
origin of the modern spectacle . . . in the shock of the surprise
effect.21
But then LUger goes on to detail how advertising and commercial forces
have taken the lead in the making of modern spectacle, and he cites the depart-
ment store, the world of fashion, and the rhythms of industrial production as
forms that have conquered the attention of the public. Lager's goal is the same:
wanting to win over that public. Of course, he is writing at a point of uncertainty
about the direction of his own art, facing the dilemma of what a public art might
mean, but the confused program he comes up with in this text is an early instance
of the ploys of all those -from Warhol to today's so-called simulation-
ists-who believe, or at least claim, they are outwitting the spectacle at its own
game. Lager summarizes this kind of ambition: "Let's push the system to the
extreme," he states, and offers vague suggestions for polychroming the exterior
of factories and apartment buildings, for using new materials and setting them in
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Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory 107
22. Walter Benjamin, One Way Street, trans. Edmund Jephcott and
Left Books, 1979, p. 239. Christopher Phillips suggested to me that
be crucial for Debord as the moment when surrealism became co
revolutionary potential was nullified in an early instance of spectac
23. On these strategies, see the documents in Ken Knabb, ed., Situa
Berkeley, Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981.
24. See my "Eclipse of the Spectacle," in Brian Wallis, ed., Art A
Godine, 1984, pp. 283-294.
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