In 1967, Guy Debord wrote his seminal work, The Society of the Spectacle, in which he described how the majority of society has become alienated from their own lived experiences: The spectacle is not a series of images but a social relation among people, mediated by images. Basically, in the modern day it has become possible to manufacture the narrative that the average person uses as a lens to interpret the going-ons of daily life. The manufacturing process is some combination of mass media, socialization, careful PR management, biases, etc. in different proportions. I contend that it is much more enlightening to understand Ferguson, Missouri through Debords theory of Spectacle. One method of the spectacle was used in communist Russia (and is generally favored by totalitarian states), where the state would only allow the media to tell one carefully written narrative to make it the only game in town. Generally, research tells us that the media has agenda-setting and framing powers: meaning it can influence what John Q. Public discusses at the water cooler at work and roughly how we structure the sides in a debate. However, traditionally, America has used a different method of choice of Spectacles. In our society of niche marketing, we manufacture several Spectacles for different people to choose between. In Ferguson, we saw two major narratives created around the same event: the shooting of Michael Brown. One narrative belonged to authorities and defenders of Darren Wilson, and the other belonged to protesters and defenders of Michael Brown. What happened Monday night, with the vestiges of power choosing to not indict Darren Wilson, is the latter narrative was basically declared invalid by society, effectively switching us from the traditional American system of tolerating competing narratives to the other system where the state appears to officially endorse a Spectacle. Before passing judgement on the authorities or the rioters though, its important we stop and take note that both sides in this clash have engaged in wrestling over what has become the Spectacle of Michael Browns death. We must call it the spectacle instead of the event of Michael Browns death now because the image-mediated narratives that are competing with each other now dominate our discussion. On the heads of the authorities is their abhorrent conduct in the months leading up to Monday. They were, rightly,criticized for strategically leaking information, video, and photographs to effectively mediate how society came to know Michael Brown. They wanted us to see him as the menace, the robber, the black thug shot by police. Its what we call trying the case in the media. The authorities interested in defending Darren Wilson successfully exonerated him in trial by media, arguably helping to avert trial in court. The authorities went even further though by harrassing journalists to restrict their ability to capture images of whats arguably their greatest sin: the Orwellian policing of protesters by false assessment. In august, they seemed to be arbitrarily breaking up protests by declaring them no longer peaceful without regard to whether or not they actually were peaceful. Common complaints included being arrested on the sidewalk for blocking roads. Journalists were arrested for trespassing in a McDonalds (as customers) and denied the legally required information about their arrest.This served to completely undermine the credibility of the authorities as a narrator, as well as fed the common suspicion common in the black community: that police often only claim the people they shoot were trying to take their guns for expediency. Which leads into the protesters failures. They began their own PR campaign (arguably before the police began theirs) to represent Michael Brown as the gentle giant. The friends and family of Michael Brown went out to the media to effectively manufacture the image of Michael Brown as a son and a friend. They put their own relationships forward as a way to allow people to empathize with them and to let them experience Michael Brown as they experienced him. However, that in itself is the creation of the image of him as son and friend, not making him the actual son or the friend of the community. This media battle between black victim/aggressor has become so common in our media though that both sides essentially know the playbook. Thats why the police can take pre-emptive actions like isolating the media in a press pen to keep them from being able to videotape whether or not those protesters actually have become violent. Thats why the civil rights activists that intend to put up a fight around the symbolism of a black mans dubious death pre-emptively do their best to clean up the victims image. Its become a mediated, manufactured political battle rather than a true search for truth. It feeds and services the agenda and biases of the people that self-sort into camps. Thats why public perception of what happened is divided along racial grounds, because the Spectacles are constructed to service separate racial viewpoints with small defections. However, the judicial process does not have room to accommodate multiple spectacles. That is why the courtroom and legal process becomes the center of attention in these situations: to see which Spectacle will carry the day. Part of the protesters narrative was that the fix is in, the enduring belief that the authorities would protect themselves and deny the legitimacy of the communitys grievances. To be honest, that view is largely correct due to the tendency of White Spectacles to be privileged and advanced beyond what is truthfully warranted. Just another aspect of white privilege; because when confronted with competing information, the human tendency is to return to default and use our previous biases to evaluate the current situation, and the default status in our society is still white privilege. So when the judicial process put its stamp of approval, as expected, on the spectacle supported by the police in Ferguson, no one should have been surprised and few were. In the weeks before that decision, police and authorities continuously signaled the belief that Ferguson would riot in response to the expected non-indictment. They created the media expectation of violence and drew upon the mental image all Americans have of race riots to mediate our expectations for Monday night. They issued calls for peace instead of expectations of peace, and their calls effectively became expectations for violence. And those expectations were communicated through the medias framing power to the people, saying that there would be opportunity for criminal activity, and thus became a self-fulfilling prophecy when the authorities prepared to try to stop violence, and then did not deploy the full force of those preparations (the governors use of the national guard, again, appears late, begging the question why deploy them early at all?) Even here though, the protesters leadership cannot escape blame. They announced hours before the verdict the intent to mobilize their networks of peaceful, trained, non-violent protesters the next day, not overnight. Although the community organizers have traditionally understood their role as to give emotion a positive place to go, they inexplicably abdicated that role ahead of the 8pm announcement. During the violence, the pro-protesters took great pains to say to that it only takes one person to start a fire, to claim the traditional refrain that the looting and violence is by a small minority. There is a conscious effort to redirect attention in the media to the peaceful sympathy protests in other cities. But again, the images of the media interfere with that narrative and mediate our understanding. Theres plenty of video of crowds attacking police cars, what appeared to be a large coordinated smash and grab on copter-cam at an OReilys autoparts, surging crowds of people smiling, laughing, and almost reveling in the negative environment. The clear intent to control these images came out when, this time, it was the protesters and the community that harrassed the journalists. They threw rocks at reporters who tried to film the burning stores, and appeared to even be using gunfire to scare away and disperse the journalist encampment on West Florissant Avenue. The desire to hide ones flaws is universal even between the oppressed and the oppressor. So what now? I argue that we should not think we can take any real insight away from the Spectacle of the death of Michael Brown. Both sides are so involved in creating and controlling the appearance of the event that access to the truth is literally lost. The police gave up their credibility as a narrator by using Orwellian language to police the protesters in the early days after the shooting, harassing the media to attempt to hide their unlawful police tactics, and engaging in building up the Spectacle of Michael Brown the thug. However, the protesters have lost their credibility as a narrator as well for giving in to large scale community violence, harassing the media to attempt to hide that violence, and engaging in building up the Spectacle of Michael Brown the gentle giant. As a touchstone, Michael Browns death has been ground down by the friction between these two sides into dust in the wind. The issues remain, but the abdication of the moral high ground by both sides has left nowhere for a cavalry to moral witnesses to rush in (maybe with the notable exception of highway patrol Captain Ron Johnson, who had no involvement in the actual investigation of the death.) Instead, we should take a very different kind of insight out of this event. Here I think we should consider Audrey Lordes famous phrase, The Masters Tools will never dismantle the Masters House. There is a lot of debate in philosophy about how to interpret these words even in their original context because its a hot issue in philosophy how to approach The Masters Tools, AKA the mechanisms by which oppression occurs. Some philosophers implore us to use the Masters Tools against him, and some argue that you cant use those tools at all as oppression is (according to them) inevitable when they are in play. Audrey Lorde gave us an even more hauntingly skilled and subtle idea... (continued in comment) Those of us who stand outside the circle of this societys definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference -- those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older -- know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the masters tools will never dismantle the masters house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the masters house as their only source of support. In context, Lorde was criticizing a feminist conference for the homogeneity of its participants, and feminism in general for having coalesced around what I will here insinuate was the white, hetero-normative narrative that dominates society. However, the analysis she puts forth practically explodes with possibility. The differences among women became a major part of feminism called intersectionality for understanding the remaining knots of issues that create the remaining ideas of oppression. Beyond that, Lorde also argued that to not build upon these differences was to limit the possibilities to ones pre-approved: the so-called logical outcomes of The Masters Tools. That to rely on the structure and the order of the Masters House was to ensure that any change would be minimalist, if not completely superficial gamesmanship. I think thats exactly the case with, and the insight we should take from, the oppressed using a Tool of the Master we call The Spectacle. The protesters in Ferguson played by the house rules, and just like at the casino the house won. They attempted to construct their own Spectacle, and maintaining the Spectacle became more important than the truth of the matter and the issues the Spectacle was meant to help redress. Motivated reasoning propelled people to try and prevent journalists, even with more violence, from producing images that would damage the protesters. That loss of credibility gave enough doubt and shelter to allow average people to revert to their previous biases and avoid any critical self-examination. And those default biases favor white privilege: it was the natural outcome of that method for the judicial system to validate the Spectacle of Michael Brown the thug. However, even if this time they did beat the man at his own game, would that really have been justice? Would they really have confronted the oppressor with the truth, or with a Spectacle? Would Darren Wilson really have a fair hearing either way? I argue the answer is surely no; jurors are just average people with mailing addresses. They are not any more immune to the biases and narratives they bring in than the general community. Regardless of how the grand jury voted, there is still no credible narrator or informer to allow the public at large to see with confidence that justice was served instead of the Spectacles of the community. The rest of us would still largely rely on bias to interpret the outcome of the trial. And what, systematically, would have changed? So the insight we should take here is that in the fight for the black community to resist and reduce over-policing, police brutality, etc. it does no good to create their own Spectacle. Although you may win a game or two along the way, the rules are rigged so that the house always wins. That is the original reason for civil disobedience: threading the needle of refusing to play by the rules of orderly society without ceding the moral high ground. Because the Spectacle is a tool of oppression that obscures truth, and therefore cedes the moral high ground, it should be viewed as fundamentally incompatible with the spirit of Civil Disobedience. It brings out a dark side of humanity in the name of just cause, perverting the logic of that causes defenders to commit evil acts like stoning journalists in the name of justice. ~~ From the Philosophy board on Reddit
Posted on: Wed, 26 Nov 2014 02:35:48 +0000