The relationship between globalization and the society of spectacle

Over the last two decades we have been faced with an intense phrase of time-space compression facilitated by the all-encompassing mantra of the fin de siècle – globalization. In the time of postmodern condition, globalization can be possibly seen as a utopia resort to the process of cultural fragmentation and collapse of symbolic hierarchies for the heterogeneous interests to take forms. Postmodernists such as Jean- Francois Lyotard has crowned this postmodernity as an era of information and global society that strikes a balance between the conceptual insight and real-life situation1. Nonetheless, as Fredric Jameson writes, “in postmodern culture, ‘culture’ itself has become a product in its own right; the market has become a substitute for itself and fully as much a commodity as any of the items it includes within itself” (5). Globalization, in a postmodern fashion, is referred as “the cultural logic of late capitalism” (5), that Jameson’s code-phrase for it requires our attention to the effect of globalization in this modern period, which has often been characterized by rapid social change, rise of mass media, commodification and transnational consumerism. Hence, people who live in this so-called global village are gradually turned into spectators of a fake world, as Guy Debord diagnoses in “The Society of the Spectacle”:

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was lived directly has moved away into a representation. (1)

His description of these contemporary conditions has developed Marx’s analysis of commodification as “the becoming-world of the commodity and the becoming- commodity of the world’’ (Debord, 66). The society of the spectacle is still a commodified society, simply rooted in the globalized production and activities but of a more abstract level, where technical apparatus and mass media relegate spectacles passive to societal manipulation and blur the epistemological boundary between real and unreal, or to a delusional extreme – real is profane; unreal is sacred.

Roland Robertson conceptualizes globalization as both “the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole” (8), meaning that people should and have been more aware and conscious of globalization. The question of the consequences of this consciousness shared by people remains, however, unanswered. For Guy Debord, it is necessary to add a bit of negativity into the notion of consciousness, where he paints a sombre picture of a global society dominated by a mode of control that regulates the life of spectacle through the recurrent circulation of mediating and mediatized imagery. The theory of simulacra by Jean Baudrillard helps to understand the essence of the world of spectacle, pointing to the fact that the spectacle is the preservation of unconsciousness within the difference between illusion and reality. In other words, the authentic reality shared by a globalized praxis seems no longer tangible, and is replaced by a selection of of images which convert illusion into universal signs. To reinforce these abstract images, mass media is deliberately used to constitute an inexhaustible supply of a pseudo-reality that becomes for many impotent to consciously distinguish from reality. This is self-explanatory in The Truman Show (1998), where the whole plot turns on the situation of a real person, Truman Burbank, whose life has been controlled by TV industry and hidden cameras for a 24-hour TV soap opera dealing with an imaginary community. It opens with the following statement from the TV producer, Christof:

We’ve become bored with watching actors give us phony emotions. We’re tired of pyrotechnics and special effects. While the world he inhabits is, in some respects, counterfeit, there is nothing fake about Truman himself. No scripts, no cue cards. It isn’t always Shakespeare, but it’s genuine. It’s a life. (The Truman Show)

Christof, also referred to as “the architect”, seeks to create a pure simulacrum, where Truman perceives his fictional life as completely real, without knowing that he is the spectacle, “the autonomous movement of the non-living” (Debord, 2) consumed by and lived within the world of capital, commodities and media fantasies brought by globalization. His inability to recognize this controlled life signifies not only the obscureness of the real and artificial but the authentication of these created images as more real than the real itself (Baudrillard, 166). Tellingly, Truman is an authentic being whose life is not scripted, but the ‘mediascape’ in which the movie is set comes to be a sheer representation, where advertising, public affairs, celebrities and even the life of a real human being are made up of theatrical illusions. This kind of simulation bears no reference to the real world: the spectators feel that they are becoming increasingly conscious about a globalized world, but are left to “accept the reality with which [they] are presented” (The Truman Show). Similarly, in “Allegory of the Cave”, Plato introduces the idea that a few subjects are chained where all they can see are shadows of real objects on the wall. As a result, these subjects come to accept the shadows as ultimate reality. Mass media is manifested in the same idea in the world of Truman – merely as a lacking representation of the world, or a concealing attempt of the hyperreal over the real.

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In postmodern visual culture, the imposition of media, expanding through the time of globalization, opens up a much wider field of metanarratives for us to experience the world. But the potentiality of globalization is not wholly realized and its impact on public has been used to philosophize reality by diffusing individuals to move further away from their immediate emotional reality and quests for asking, and closer to the separation of truth, without consciousness.

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Globalization is an ongoing process in which the world appears to be converging economically and politically due to the increased free flow of capital as well as information, that hypostatize a connecting realm. Just as we think our lives are connected, we are subconsciously displayed with a set of fragmented images of schizophrenic experience – as Fredric Jameson puts it – “an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence” (119). This experience, Jameson continues, “does not know personal identity in our sense, since our feeling of identity depends on our sense of the persistence of the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ over time” (120). The information from others presents to us is overwhelmingly vivid and powerful, that the experience of the self has become fragmented as individual identity is dissolved into a series of disturbing and mutating guises. The Truman Show reveals this horrible dilemma to such an upbringing: Truman is forced to choose between himself or his objects. Marlon, Truman’s best friend, says, “if all this is false, then I’m false too”, even he knows that everything revolves around Truman is fake. The reinforcement of “truth” intends to oppress Truman’s desire to tilt the scales. And this constitution of alienation of truth within Truman’s emotional states – from exhilaration, hesitation to mania, is the result of the homogenous nature of globalization. His identity is based on the logic of the spectacle within the modern society: the capitalist model turns everything into a commodity, meaning the more we believe and the more we consume, the stronger we can identify ourselves to the unity of the society. Truman is thus part of the images, as his identity has been predetermined to become part of the speculated society. That is what Sylvia, the leader of “Free Truman” campaign, concludes: “He’s not a performer, he is a prisoner.” At the end, Truman is fragmented and wanting to leave when he starts questioning how real his world is.

Globalization that has reached the stage of spectacle is characterized by the schizophrenic experience, where the power of homogeneity has transcended national borders and stopped people from questioning their own identity and culture.

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The dominance of a world capitalist economic system and the invention of media have construed a world of spectacle for people to consume the fabricated ones rather than producing their own. According to Debord, our society is mediated by images that produce false consciousness and distorts human rationality (108). These images are the result of capitalist approach to glorify the labour production of the consumer culture and maintaining social conformity towards the capitalistic regimen by gazes.

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First, Christof uses Truman as the image, “a world vision which has become objectified” (Debord, 5) to construct a false representation of society, where audiences are being separated from the truth. Our rationality and desires are slowly developed as we consume the image, and over time, we visualize all mediated representations to be the reality through mass dissemination. Christof has wittily turned Truman into the corporealization of the panoptic object, which forms a “common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness” (Debord, 3) for people to consume. Truman is struck into double unawareness: he does not know that or how he is watched. He is admitted, as if a specimen to observe; he is incarcerated and enrolled, both in simulation and as an object under viewers’ gaze of constant surveillance. This gaze produces docility, discipline and normality. No one in the film seems paranoid by it – this is how globalization dehumanizes and homogenizes the audience to become passive audience.

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Not only are they passive, but they also project themselves into a phantasmagoric fantasy of deliberate separation. The spectators represent a noteworthy paradox within the movie’s perspective on globalization. On one hand, we see Truman struggling to escape from this globalized world, where one can move freely and cross borders without constraints. On the other, the global audience is presented, living in a world of hyperreality and consuming the nostalgic and deglobalized world of Truman. The television programme, demonstrating how Truman is a commodified object for entertaining purpose, presents an indifferent narrative that fanaticizes the fixation on his life over the moral cost of keeping Truman imprisoned, and thrives on the anxieties of the postmodern and deterritorialized communities. The spectators become the victims of media obsession but are unaware of it. The movie situated itself on to the viewers that “the belief that society [is] naturally organized around and under high centers” (Chaube, 31), therefore offering a stable, impervious grip to dismiss the decentering theory of postmodernism. Globalization is thus a centralized concept of one taking the full control of all. It is the result of a postmodern, dystopian vision of mediated masses we wield through the act of gazing, which allows the unstoppable circulation of representational images to sustain.

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With its incessant evolution of technology renewal, globalization enables the spectacle to be concentrated through the effect of mass media. It forms a great part for the dominant culture or groups such as multinational corporations to disseminate messages and cultural products so quickly and universally. Audience, if not being highly self-conscious, is hard to cope with the impasto of images presented in this digital era. The dramatic and disturbing impacts craves fantasy, ecstasy and illusion above all else, leading to the rise of a society of spectacle. The modern passivity of these spectators also demonstrates its role in brushing reality aside: the globalization of the false can also be the falsification of the globe.

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Towards the end, Truman has escaped from Christof, the image is temporarily gone. But what is next? Truman may perhaps become one of the spectators, craving for a world where boundaries were strict and communities were tight; or Christof may find another image to create another representation. This can arguably be the reason director Weir ends his film like this – for we can imagine what Truman will become: one of us, anxious people, out of our depth. We may consider ourselves, now as a true man, living in a true world, but how true are we when situated in this world dealing with real and more real? Or is it just, as Christoph says, “I have given Truman the chance to lead a normal life. The world, the place you live in, is the sick place,” that our real world is too “sick” that we are willing to take the simulated images, which seem to be more real than the real, the only accepted but delusional images, to deal with our own anxiety under globalization?