The Cultural Politics of Public Spectacle in Rome and the Greek East, 167-166 BCE (original) (raw)

Comments on the Society of the Spectacle

VERSO CLASSICS The last few decades have seen an immense outpouring of works of theory and criticism, but, as the number of titles has increased dramatically, it has become more and more difficult to find one's way around this vast body of literature and to distinguish ...

Spectacle of what?

(of sorts) What is at stake in the Situationist critique of the spectacle is the idea of what the spectacle falsifies. For some philosophical critics of the spectacle, it is precisely this which reveals the theory's shortcomings. Guy Debord's elaboration, they argue, is merely an updated version of Plato's indictment of mimesis and poetry. Debord thus demonstrates his philosophical naivety by arguing that behind or beyond the false representations of the spectacle lies the possibility of recovering " true " life. However, this line of argument singularly fails to understand the critique of the spectacle on its own terms, instead reducing the critique to a merely philosophical problem. Debord is largely uninterested in the age old philosophical and religious problem of an ineffable " true world " and its material representations. Rather, he is concerned with the way falsehood is a moment of the truth of capitalist social relations, and, in particular, how this produced falsehood tends to develop under the impact of the technological refinement of material representations in the context of commodity production, exchange and consumption. Debord names 'spectacle' the metaphysical assumptions and concrete reality conjured by the commodity through its colonisation of everyday life. Contrary to his scholastic opponents, Debord does not oppose truth to the spectacle—indeed, such an opposition is already encompassed in the spectacle's reign. Rather he poses the possibility of fashioning a world that does not require the projection and alienation of human powers into an ethereal otherworld, whether secular or religious. In order to avoid certain pitfalls, some concepts can only be properly used if we understand how they have been philosophically refined. The Situationist concept of 'spectacle,' developed mainly by Guy Debord, is like this. However, to reduce our understanding of Debord's critique of contemporary society merely to a philosophical problem is to risk distortion. The term 'spectacle', or more accurately 'commodity-spectacle', does not refer to any supposed error of " Being " —an argument prominent in philosophy since Parmenides. The spectacle is not a perceptual fault in the makeup of the human animal. Rather, the spectacle refers to an historical and social process, by which error is materialised in social practice. What is metaphysical, then, is not the concept of the spectacle but rather of the social order that it criticises. At issue, metaphysically speaking, is the hierarchy of commodity value by which all life today is ordered and judged. Nonetheless, critics, opponents and falsifiers of Debord continue to accuse him of a philosophical naivety in this respect, as if in his rush to account for the historical emergence of a commodity-spectacle he fell back into ancient idealism. Here, to show how the concept of the spectacle is a valuable tool of social critique, we will set the record straight.

Spectacles in Late Antiquity: some observations

Antiquité Tardive, 2007

SPECTACLES IN LATE ANTIQUITY: SOME OBSERVATIONS Cn.qnr,orrn RouBcnf Les spectacles dans I'Antiquiti tardive : quelques obsetvations Au cours des derniires ddcennies, thddtre, sport et spectacles publics sont devenus le centre d'intdr€t croissant des historiens dtudiant les mondes hell4nistiques et romains ainsi que I'Antiquitd tardive. Le prdsent article souhaite simplement attirer l'attention sur un certain nombre de ddcouvertes et de nou' velles avancdes dans ce domaine. Les fouilles rdcentes meruies d Olympie ont not(tmment apportd une contribution importante : en rdvdlant que le site avait manifestement conservd son activitd normale en 385 de notre ire, elles pourraient bien en ffit remettre en question les circonstances dans lesquelles Olympie a disparu. Par ailleurs, l'abondante publication sur les jeux du cirque fournit une information nourill, et essentielle ; sont particuliirement remarquables les inscriptions dditdes par M. Rey-Coquais sur I'hippodrome de Tyr, qui amDnent cles tdmoignages suppl4mentaires sur laformation et I'organisation des factions des Bleus et des Verts. [Auteur, trad. de la R6daction']