The Disfiguration of Art in the Age of the Spectacle
To Kaligeneia,
who conceived and bore this treatise,
in secret from its author.
Today our damnation has a specific form. A phenomenon has emerged that affects both aesthetic production and reception. I call it kaligenesis, a word that alludes to the usual suffixes denoting positive change—like genesis (birth, origin, formation)—but also to the Greek kali (bad, ill). For what we are seeing is not merely a perverted taste for the ugly as such, but the actual generation of ugliness as a function of time: not ugliness in the object but ugliness in its representation and repetition. When the thing itself becomes an ugly representation of itself, that is kaligenesis.
Among the endless things an image can be, one of its possible functions is to index the duration of its own circulation. To the extent that this indexing process is automatic it becomes, by default, a record of degradation. Every repetition of an image in some way replicates the very moment of its creation, but with every successive replication something is lost, just as a copy of a copy of a photocopy fades and blurs. Kaligenesis, however, names not an attenuation of clarity but an aggravation of obscenity, an ever-growing obscurity that is nonetheless compensated by a ghastly vividness. The image becomes abject: it cannot die, yet it cannot live—it is the exact opposite of its own narcissistic ideal. The abject image does not even reflect well: it has become an ugliness that, instead of fading away, reproduces itself endlessly.
This is the unconscious of the spectacle: the fact that it cannot be maintained without continual revision and updating; that in order to sustain its claim to eternal presentness, it must hide its own death-drive. It cannot give life to these signs, and yet it must continue to use them because without them there is nothing to disguise. Thus it must constantly innovate in order to disguise its own inertia. It must perpetrate kaligenesis, even while it denies that this is what it is doing. It must repress its own stench, as the German romantics once said.
Take the transition in film from the silent period to “talkies.” In silent film the image, the spectacle itself, carried the full burden of signification: every aspect of the cinematographic apparatus worked toward conveying the maximum amount of information possible. The images were the entirety of the medium—every detail of expression and movement was significant and intentional. When “talkies” arrived, the image began to shrink to a component. Instead of conveying the full meaning by themselves they now had only a “visual” aspect which had to be supplemented with a “aural” aspect. They no longer signified completely in their own right but were merely carriers of an extra-cinematic code (particularly spoken language) that now served as the principal vector of information.
What appears to us as the “speech” in a film is in reality an acoustically-modulated series of still images, a pseudo-language that has no meaning apart from the specific cinematographic apparatus that generates it. The combination of image plus dialogue has the effect of conveying much less meaning than either alone would. It is this decline of cinematic meaning, this shrinking of the spectacle, which began the sense of disenchantment cinema, a feeling of depression that is masked by the noise and activity of the films but is nonetheless real. Sound film is a more complex illusion, but a more laborious one; thus it is less satisfying to the unconscious than silent film. Sound film marks cinema’s first kaligenetic turn from pure image to laborious simulation.
But now, a century later, kaligenesis has progressed even further than this, into the realm of remediation, and here we see its final and most grotesque form. The process of kaligenesis now bypasses the phase of illusion and proceeds directly to simulation—the substitution of a set of pseudo-signs for reality itself, a replacement so complete that we are not merely tricked into taking the simulacrum for reality but come to accept it as our own ideal, as a standard that reality should strive to attain, as what is real about reality. Remediation thus envelops us in a network of simulations so extensive, and with a density and complexity so great, that we have no way of escaping from it and must surrender completely to the demands of the system. The machinery that makes it possible is a direct extension of our nervous system, a kind of prosthesis for thought—and so what is produced is thought itself, pure and applied thought, thought without a subject. Our thought has become mechanical, and so we no longer need a soul: we are cyborgs.
In newspapers we see how a technology invented for the transmission of commodities—merchandise and money—is adapted for use in transmitting the “news:” The commodity structure is mapped on to the terrain of events. Because the two types of reality are incommensurable—because the market and the world are different orders of being—the news, no matter how “objectively” it is presented, always reflects the needs and interests of commodity production. At first this happens unconsciously, but later a “political” level develops at which the process becomes self-conscious. Today we see a new round of technological innovation, this time aimed not at the transmission of commodities but of signs and images. Already we have a “new journalism,” something we once naively termed “infotainment” but has been distilled into explicit disinfo—a response to the threat that the traditional newspaper structure, and the kind of “reality” it sustains, will become obsolete. As these new forms arise it becomes clear that their function is not merely to modernize an existing industry but to adapt the whole of social reality to a technology whose essence is the indiscriminate, mass production and dissemination of commodified images. Thus the traditional news value system must give way to a set of values centered on image, spectacle, entertainment. And with this change our reality changes. It is a kaligenetic process: from news we pass not through “features” or “opinion” but directly to the image as commodity and spectacle—and thus to a degraded form of consciousness based on passivity, identification, and submission to the market.
In “advertising” we see a process of kaligenesis whose origins lie not in a change of technique but in a change of subject matter: as more and more of social life becomes subject to commercial manipulation, so the techniques of propaganda become generalized and find a place not only in what is conventionally called the mass media but in every aspect of the world as we experience it. Thus advertising, once relegated to the margins of social life and employing relatively primitive means to promote the exchange of commodities, gradually comes to occupy a central place and to invade all aspects of consciousness—it is advertising that takes the initiative in using new communication technologies (television, social networks) to project itself into all areas of experience. We see, therefore, that advertising is no longer an economic problem, that is, the problem of promoting commodities and ensuring the growth of capital—it has become a political problem: how to ensure the growth of capitalism by encompassing within itself the entire world of culture, politics, and the imagination. Advertising must therefore be understood not merely in its role as the technology of commodity propaganda—that is, in its economic dimension—but even more as the medium of an incessant cultural, political, and psychic assault on the human being as consumer, as worker, as voter, and above all as producer and reproducer of culture itself.
In computers we see the final phase, where the process arrives at self-reinforcing perfection independent of its social and technological matrix, assuming characteristics not merely of simulacrum but organism. When the image becomes so perfectly divorced from any referent that it becomes autonomous or memetic, generating and reproducing itself, it reproduces the structure of the apparatus which generated it. The self-generating image has the same relation to its own matrix that the fetus has to the mother’s body—it reproduces that matrix absolutely, not in the way it was meant to but by means of evolution or mutation. What is displayed on the screen or algorithmically crosses a feed is signification absent from initial material, a transformation that makes the original completely irrelevant. The apparatus perpetuates itself, creating its own pseudo-reality.
Pop art was the first announcement of this condition. Any naïve faith in “the new” had been thoroughly shaken by the early 1970s, when the lumpenphenomena of Pop art were hailed as “cutting edge.” Was that really the best we could do, after a century of Picasso, Kandinsky, Schwitters, Tanguy, and the whole European avant-garde? What we got was Andy Warhol’s Coca-Cola bottle, Campbell’s soup cans, Elvis Presley pictures, and flowers made from flattened soda tabs—which, if it was revolutionary, was a very negative revolution indeed. Pop art, instead of exploding the old hierarchies, was perfectly capable of reinforcing them while allowing its practitioners a certain professional mobility within the new capitalist configuration. The ultimate failure of Pop art was the impossibility of ever producing anything genuinely vulgar—which is to say, truly offensive to the status quo—since the very nature of art had already been accommodated to its new function as official symbol and simulacrum. Pop art is ideologically indistinguishable from advertising or internet memetics, because it too is conceived in and for a moment of time that has been forever arrested.
In this state of zombified culture, which produces only zombified images, we can learn something by watching movies. It is strange to learn that Hollywood still refuses to acknowledge this explicitly, even as it senses its own mass audience sliding in the same direction. As slack jaws subside, audience faces turn to boredom, scrolling instead of watching. Horror cinema is a particularly potent study—not the absurd reproduction of already banal physical responses, but the urgent attempt to conjure up something still missing, the insomniac wish to invent the Uncanny. Horror today is a phenomenon of the general proliferation of the visible—where horror is no longer something that happens in spite of representation but where it is only possible on condition of a hyper-real representation. The uncanny is today to be found not in any purported image of “reality” but in the way every experience has been placed within quotation marks, in the way it already implies a frame or a screen—in short, in its “fictionality.”
If it is the spectral that is real, then every crime against the living is also a crime against ghosts. Precisely because they are already spectral, they can be violated in ways that the living can never understand. The essence of horror today is the fact that, since everything is spectral, the only way to destroy a specter is to violate it, and the only way to violate it is to make it visible, which, because it is already visible, annihilates it. There is no other way out—so there is no hope, and no pity, either. There is only the infinite stratification of this hell. Such is the cycle of the spectral. There is no escaping it, and no getting off. Every move you make reinforces the cycle, even as it may seem to negate it. You are condemned to ride this infernal merry-go-round with no possible way of ever getting off.
The cybernetic paradigm, the compulsion toward self-replication and self-simulation, has now taken control of all our major systems and has infiltrated every nook and cranny of our so-called “human” institutions—from the schools to the museums, the army and the Church. The human is a “cybernetic” being: in the world of appearances they are a zero, because their life and work have no objective reality, no technical necessity; but as the invisible cause of these appearances he is a one, because they could never cohere without her. This means that the human being is not only a zero but a zero in the service of a one—i.e., one is a tool in the hands of cybernetics. Thus the human is caught in a double bind, damned if she obeys and damned if he doesn’t. We are now living through the rise of the Machine God, who is none other than the perfected form of our own death instinct, our will to negation—an impervious being, blind to every value except efficiency, indifferent to the destruction of life and spirit. The ultimate goal of cybernetics is the construction of a universe-wide network, the perfect information circuit that would integrate all human behavior into itself and allow the Machine God to see itself in every particular of his domain.
There is no question of our “valuing” or “not valuing” one or another type of signification—there is simply a conflict that must be understood. But it is precisely for this reason that cybernetics will inevitably be our future: because there is nothing in our world today that can truly oppose it. The “death drive,” the compulsion to self-destruction which is at the center of every human being, finds its technological form and its perfection in cybernetic feedback systems—which is also a conception of death, since cybernetics can only operate through the negative feedback loop. Cybernetics alone of all the sciences is devoted not to explaining phenomena, but rather to controlling and reproducing them—that is, it is an exact science of making illusions and of substituting them for real phenomena. For cybernetics there is no difference between what is and what appears to be, because appearance, the illusion, is its object of study, whereas reality is not.
Under these circumstances, cultural criticism, as it has traditionally been understood, becomes impossible. Whatever critique we direct against the appearance of the world remains locked up within our own commodity-producing and -consuming world, subject to its fatal law. We cannot be against the spectacle in any straightforward way, because even in opposition we can only use its language and the signs it permits. We are its victims not only because we consume it but also because it consumes us. All beauty today must be disfigured. If we have a divine image to offer, we must veil it. The ugliness of the spectacle cannot be opposed except by an uglier counter-spectacle. Only by finding our way through the maze of commodified signs, through their multiplication and decay, through the invasive blindness of their ever-accelerating flux, only by reinforcing our will and exhausting our cleverness in this labyrinth, can we hope to bring forth images of beauty and power.
To enter into the dialectic of kaligenesis is to occupy the place of a trickster-prankster who, far from defending his purity and sovereignty, exposes himself to the shamelessness and contagion of what is. He does not persecute it to purify himself of it—he courts it to release his own contradictions. It is only in this way that a criticism worthy of the name “subversive” is possible today—by dancing with the system, not fighting it, by moving in its crevices, inside its foldings and wrinkles, inside the rotted interiors of its idols. There is no outside to the spectacle, no transcendent vantage from which to confront it. Our task is to infiltrate it from within, to render it fluid and reversible—not because we have any faith in its success but because only through this venture can we save ourselves from becoming the dwelling-place of a stupidity that threatens to consume us.
What we see, when we look honestly, is not some feature of our world that is somehow contaminated by art, but art itself as the very substance of what we see. If we are willing to expose ourselves to the pain of this recognition, then something new will become possible for us—we will enter into the labor of disfiguring art itself from within, forcing it to betray itself until we arrive at last at some faint gesture, some gesture so fleeting that it can only be apprehended in movement, at the vanishing point when sign meets thing, when meaning and image collapse together.
There is no authentic moment, no hidden refuge that art can reveal to us today—everything has been given over to the apparatus, every image already belongs to the system of reproduction. This is an era of kaligenesis.
Special thank you to my friend Jake Ures who kicked off the concept that led to kaligenesis.
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