N o i r S a u n a —

The Variety of the Spectacle

“One lives in a sense even worse, that is, with even less self, than one expects to have to live.”

                        -T. Adorno

I.

In Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, Peter Falk, sensing the presence of the angel, Damiel, extends his hand into the empty space between the two as an act of recognition. “Compañeros,” he says, as a way of disarming the eternal. The angel is caught off guard but ultimately shakes the actor’s hand, the two of them united across fields of perception. This moment signals a break between the material, political world and the transcendental, or that which exists outside the ideological range of the spectacle. Both characters are struggling with disillusionment, Falk with his luxuries as a famous actor and Damiel with the limitations of his intervention with the material world. Damiel can only bear witness, leaving very little in the interest of his own subjectivity, especially in regards to love. He is captive to the eternal. During their brief contact, the disillusionment is abated by the unimaginable. Damiel is reified by Falk’s acknowledgement and Falk is liberated by Damiel’s witnessing. Theirs is a dialectical framework for the seeing beyond the order in which society’s spectacle organizes our every experience from our personal sense of freedom, to our individuation, to our organizing principles of time. Peter Falk’s ability to trust his commiseration with the beyond, not knowing if it even took place but walking away no less fulfilled by the magnitude of his gesture, can perhaps offer us guidance to our own disillusionment. His is not a didactic approach and so we’re not here to proposition it that way. In fact, we hate didacticism in all ways. Abolish it. Take our hand if you’d like. Let’s take a walk around the block.

II.

The angels bitch about the eggs

            being undercooked.

A mountain yam weeps

            in the data field.

Legs of poultry sway

            in the carnival dungeon.

The god of marmalade

            and the god of sherbet are at it again.

Rainbow trout from the speakers            

            of a Dodge Ram.

Videos of paragliders eating shit

            on the doorman’s Android.

The angels bitch when cut off

            from bottomless mimosas.

A group of beleaguered bisexuals

            form a softball team.

Somewhere a future biologist

            is getting fingered to anime.

Red Hibiscus blooms            

            in a samovar.

Yetis harvest the meat

            of forgotten climbers.

A kerosene lamp lights

            the room of a suicide.

Out in the street, the angels spew forth

            all of our cheap and worldly materials.

A river of refuse lights the city,            

            noxious kiwi and necrotic yolk.

The new fools of conscription threaten           

            the suspects of Disney jail.

Rubicund cherubs stuff their pockets

            with confections.

The porch light flickers and paints            

            an apparition of negative space.

Callous men, drunk on whiskey, come home

            with something to prove.

Back at work, the angels bitch            

            about the sad state of the firmament.

A paltry king, a dirge in the harbor, a knock

            at the door, and then another knock.

III.

“What creates society’s abstract power,” Debord says in The Society of the Spectacle, “also creates its concrete unfreedom.”  Debord’s estimation of the spectacle is enormous and omnipresent, folded into every shift and shibboleth of cultural exchange, every most ineffectual and atomized commodity. It is indistinguishable from the material world, wrought by the structural authority of history, its potency rendered, altered, and adapted by the urgency of capital. There is no part of lived experience that is exempt from the fungible expression of the spectacle or its inevitable infections of our whole semiotic networks of “understanding”. In fact, it is because so much of our experience is semiotic that the spectacle is effective—our very signs are spaces to be commodified. This is the corporeal advance of capital, that it is transcendental against our theoretical defenses, coeval with every artifact of our existence, our immaterial selves reified as brands, our time organized around the producibility of labor, our freedom an artifice of that same producibility, and it shows up everywhere, in our language, in our art, in our language, and in our media. Debord’s line of causation between “abstract power” and its “concrete unfreedom” relies on the acceptance of the spectacle as a naturally occurring fact or condition rather than its manufacture. Its acceptance is the ultimate ideological destruction as it implies our complicity within our own incarceration. Debord and his Situationists employed subversive tactics they called détournement—a public defacement of the spectacle’s ostensibly seamless transcendence into the material of culture. The détournement creates a rupture into which we observe the mechanism of the spectacle, making the public aware of its cultural manufacture.

The anonymous collective Up Against The Wall Motherfucker would later deploy détournement as a more material praxis against members of the arts and entertainment scenes they deemed complicit with their own commodification. The Motherfuckers rioted at shows for the MC5 and the Velvet Underground demanding free entry or complete destruction of the venue, staged an “assassination” of Kenneth Koch, breached security measures at several concerts (including Woodstock) enabling masses to enter without tickets, broke into the Pentagon, and dumped garbage at various “cultural” centers all as a means to exploit the various modalities of the spectacle. “The device of détournement” Debord says, “restores all their subversive qualities to past critical judgments that have congealed into respectable truths—or, in other words, that have been transformed into lies.” The negation of a lie does not mean that a truth arrives in its place. Truths are tricky ideological tools. The goal of other avant-garde movements (such as Dada or Fluxus) was not to arrive at “truth” but to negate or subvert the myriad untruths, to expose the various hypocrites, illusionists, and snake oil salesmen pervading the landscape. It’s a bit of an ontological slippery-slope, the optical finger-pointing, the opportunistic hooliganism, the whole tautological questioning of who’s a “rich kid, or a fascist, or a charlatan,” to quote the downtown folk artist, Jeffrey Lewis, but the Motherfuckers were at least willing to get arrested, or, at the very least, their asses kicked. 

Today, the various methods of détournement have been fully appropriated by the culture industry. To create a subversive, ironic distance from the thing being advertised and the buyer is to create a deeper trust in the commodity’s value. That the marketing departments have learned the effect of self-effacement is unsurprising (many of their creative departments populated with gig-economy serfs trying to turn a net profit on their MFAs), but also signals a tremendous loss in the path of meaningful resistance, the ideology of the spectacle having been fully integrated through the erstwhile radical’s shift towards the bourgeois, which has long abandoned all of that messy material action for the affordability of the theoretical. “For obviously no idea could transcend the spectacle that exists—” Dubord acutely notes, “it could only transcend ideas that exist about the spectacle.” There is no thinking our way out of the spectacle since the spectacle, as previously mentioned, has been wrought deeply into every semiotic system of our engagement (which informs our very ideas). We are already thinking in the language of a product. Debord continues, “For the society of the spectacle to be destroyed, what is needed are people setting a practical force in motion.”

But what the fuck could that even mean at this point but total violence? And even political violence is subject to the spectacle. Look no further than Luigi Mangione, who became a fungible sex token for doing what no one else had the courage to do. Luigi who killed an evil man and got a meme. Luigi who wouldn’t be nearly as exchangeable if he had been poor, or ugly, or, god forbid, both. The fact that any human attempts to weaponize Luigi’s miniscule victory as their own is evidence of how the spectacle disarms us to the complicity of our own farce, our own memefied sources of “understanding,” our own destruction. Luigi will be ultimately destroyed by the same systems of power and influence we claim to hate while we scroll past another atrocity we can’t manage until we are inevitably distracted by any extent of cultural products we believe to be relevant to our attention.

If Debord had lived long enough to see any of this, he would have killed himself.

IV.

Stranded in the rotunda of redundant adjectives

each egress a misdirection into a new clause

 with a slippery pathos

Object reifies subject 

            like performing effigies in the piazza

                        who shift when your gaze approaches

                                    and suddenly you’re out five euro

                                                a fool who believed the real to be differently real

Erotic tirades ruined with fallacy

a clever mirror

a cake in the shape of a lexicon

            a lexicon filled with grunts and farts

Gauzy fillers obvious and inelegant

subtext glittering through a boring miasma

No one knows what anyone is talking about

but nods interrupt the vocal fry

and pray they not problematize the meaning

or its passive reception

It’s like a strip club politely named “Plasma Donation Center”

misnomer made in the mind of duplicity

or cruising the dives of Laredo, Texas,

everything coded as a vapid abstraction,

a subliminal negotiation of new material consequence

Everyone knows the first step to getting laid

            is to lie about crucial details

Everyone knows divorce is the interpellation

            of a truth that becomes unbearable

V.

Within the political ideology of the spectacle, “a lie that can no longer be challenged becomes a form of madness.” We are, unequivocally, living in the madness of a dying empire. Our every second is measured by our obsolescence rather than pure experience. A genocide continues in Gaza that we are expected to simply accept and continue in our production, which in turn, lines the pockets for these same atrocities to be perpetuated. The richest man in the world is Sieg Heiling on a national stage and journalists are concerned about its “nuance.” ICE, a Rumsfeldian wet dream in its draconian scope, is now operating with greater kafkaesque impunity culminating in the most recent detainment of Mahmoud Khalil. And this is still only the beginning. The spectacle of our “inalienable rights” is more threadbare than ever, not in the degree of its demographic disparity (one needn’t turn back time too far for prime examples of protection under the constitution, nor look any further than the prison system for how those disparities are still largely upheld), but in the mass retraction of those rights for anyone below a certain salary or who isn’t themselves a tax-deductible corporate entity. It feels like hyperbole to even type this out, but in the Žižekian order of operations these horrors of capitalism appear first as tragedy, then as farce. We are beyond farce. What can we even name it?

“Lies have long legs:” Adorno states in Minima Moralia, “they are told ahead of their time.” Our post-truth monument of American empire did not spring up overnight. It did not roll in with the first inauguration of Trump, nor with the second. It has been building for years. It was building with the sneaky subordinate clause of the 13th Amendment which rerouted slavery into an omnivalent carceral system. It was building with the neoliberal economic reforms signed into action by “everybody’s pal” Jimmy Carter at the end of his presidency and given full-steam by the Reagan Administration. It was building with the completely manufactured wars of Bushes Jr. and Sr. It was building with the delusional “progress” of the Obama years, who deported more than three million people, who authorized a total of 542 drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen (Jr. Bush only tallied 52, for comparison) all while keeping his affable public image. The lies aren’t new. Unfortunately, their madness has been fully integrated in the aquifer. We don’t even care to separate them anymore. We are simultaneously flesh and microplastic. We are simultaneously truth and untruth, and not by some cute metaphorical design, but in the pursuit of our complete obliteration for marginal profit.

In his examination of a post-truth America, Roger Reeves calls, a bit too neatly, for poetry’s parrhesia to address the moribund horrors of our decline. Reeves’ belief in the possibilities of the poem is so earnest and cogent he could easily be a proselyte. “What I am pointing to,” he says, “is the way in which the poetic line resists the smoothness of narrative and causality, a smoothness often seen in political rhetoric and nationalist notions of sovereignty.” And yes, that feels about right, and is good for, well, fuckall, from a symbolic distance. Nothing could benefit systems of supremacy more than the belief that writing a fucking poem is an answer in and of itself. Regardless of whatever spiritual shifts one believes could come from a nation who reads poetry, the fact is, we will never be that nation. We’re not trying to divest from diverse forms of hope or solidarity, we believe nihilism to be a social disease, but just look at this fucking place. We have to try to convince our local constituencies that people deserve to eat food first. It’s abysmal. Besides, we participate fully in the labor of poetry, so call us some dandy hypocrites. The polemic is a convenient mode of dissent. You don’t need anything more than a laptop and a few hours alone.

VI.

We are not the lesser evil

of this endless crucible.

Ran our mouths off in the prairie

of pigs, skinny-dipped too near

the chemical spill, hit the old man

with the estrangement slip.

Every triumph is also a lament.

You can either have it both ways

or neither. Infinity signifies the same

as zero.

Bludgeoned the news anchor with a pool noodle,

wrote the hermeneutics for Buick ownership,

split the atom to avoid taking the last bite.

The allegations of libel were insubstantial,

a rose gold pony cantered through a memory.

It’s not irrational that we would want a weapon.

It’s not cynical to expect a collapse.

We’re only here as a bleeding condition.

We’re not the eviler lesson of this crucial end.

VII.

Come back to us. We are reaching across the fields of data, of enterprise, of currency, of the spectacle. We are choosing to acknowledge the presence of the invisible in whatever desperate attempt at solidarity. We hardly know what day it is, forgive us, but we know we want to see tomorrow. Compañeros. Take our hand. Trust us. If every angel is terrible, what do we have to lose? A life we never wanted in the first place? A system of documentation and destruction? A necropolis of machinery? A charnel ground of calories? We cannot keep moving the dial of our threshold. Let us see you plain. What are you willing to do, if anything?

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