Theses on the Spectacle and Caesarism in the 21st Century

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  1. There exists a spectacular terrain upon which the battles of the twenty-first century are fought. This terrain exists amid the material reality of the physical world and is tethered to it, but expands to an almost limitless extent into the mental spaces of the individual and collective mind of humanity.
  2. Like its physical counterpart, spectacular terrain is a site for conflict. It is a space that can be battled over, captured, conquered and lost. Accumulating and mastering the means of persuasion and propaganda as well as the tactics and strategy of this deployment increases the power of the entities that wield these capabilities in the same manner as accumulation and mastery of military power increases the power of those who possess these capabilities.
  3. Media is simultaneously the generator of this space and the weapon deployed for its conquest.
  4. Strategic thought, especially classic military strategic thought (Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Antoine Jomini, B.H. Liddell Hart, etc.) is still relevant and remain good starting points about how to navigate a world of these two combined terrains.
  5. This classic strategic thought has been augmented by other thinkers who have understood better than others how to navigate the contours of the spectacular terrain and should take their place alongside the classic strategic thinkers mentioned above. These include George Creel, Eddie Bernays, Marshall McLuhan and Guy Debord.
  6. The spectacular terrain has always been present. Prior to the age of mass media, conquest of this terrain was always subordinate and subsequent to the conquest of physical terrain. But even in the ancient world, the outcome of a battle or struggle might hinge on the deployment of capabilities to win hearts and minds rather than territory.
  7. With the growth of mass media, the spectacular terrain became more important, requiring its own array of weapons to conquer and strategy to guide their use.
  8. The digital revolution of information technologies marks the moment when the spectacular terrain overtook the physical terrain as the primary ground of struggle. The horizon opened to the possibility of achieving victory in political and economic conflict without having to wage a formal war.
  9. Since the founding of the printing press, the forces of capitalism and liberalism have been masters of the spectacular terrain, even if they have been only loosely aware of its existence. Key liberal principles like free speech acted as a kind of Law of the Hague when it came to conflict in the spaces of the spectacular terrain.
  10. Through there were many precursors, World War I was the moment the spectacular terrain was fully discovered, when the ability to “tell the story” of the war became as important as winning the war itself.
  11. As the guns of the First World War went silent in 1918, the weapons on the terrain of the spectacle continued to fire. The weapons that helped win the war for the United States and the Entente powers were handed over to the captains of industry to wage a new war for the minds of western consumers. This war has never ended and never will.
  12. If industrial capitalism produced the resources for the conquest of physical terrain, the consumer economy produces the resources for conquering the spectacular terrain.
  13. After World War II, due to its connection to the material world, spectacular terrain shifted to mimic the struggle of the Cold War protagonists. Using the language of Guy Debord, one can describe this terrain as splitting into a diffuse and concentrated spectacle
  14. As the Cold War drew to a close, these two separate terrains merged together to form an integrated spectacle. Globalization was the process of expanding the terrain of the integrated spectacle to the remainder of unconquered mental spaces in the world.
  15. The emergence of digital media provided a revolution of information affairs that transformed both the terrain of the spectacle as well as the means by which one navigates through it. These changes were so vast and sudden that the previous masters of the spectacular terrain were unable to maintain this mastery.
  16. The digital revolution ushered in what McKenzie Wark calls the spectacle of disintegration that loosens the connection of spectacular terrain with the physical terrain. Decentralization frustrates the efforts of large hierarchical organizations like states and corporations to replicate the successful conquests they enjoy in the physical world. Moreover, their loss of control in the spectacular space weakens their position in physical space. The Arab Spring was the first example of this.
  17. The terrain of the spectacle of disintegration provided opportunities for radical and subversive ideas and discourses that were unable to hold any ground in physical space to hatch and grow. Small and easily ignored at first, they have slowly expanded the amount of mental space they control until they were able to establish footholds in the physical space and were too large to be stamped out of existence. In some cases, these discourses were of a progressive and emancipatory nature manifested in events like the Arab Spring. In other cases, they were reactionary and prejudicial. These latter forces have had their own more potent Arab Spring in the form of right-wing populist movements whose ultimate success is the election of Donald Trump in the United States.
  18. In addition to empowering ideologies and movements that were long relegated to the fringes of the material world, the terrain of the disintegrated spectacle has ruptured the way states maintain their balances of power. The term “soft power” emerged as a way to talk about how states could augment their military power through the use of the control or influence of media and cultural resources. But with the spectacular terrain offering an alternative plane of conflict that was not subject to the military superiority of superpowers, these less powerful states could find ways of gaining advantage against rivals.
  19. The attacks of September 11th were a moment when it became clear that states may have already lost the battle for spectacular terrain (or at the very least the incredible difficulty involved in trying to assert dominance over this space).
  20. In addition to control of media resources, power on the terrain of the spectacle concentrates around narratives of drama and extremism. Those who communicate the most visceral discourses of fear, dread, doom and disaster will occupy the largest mental spaces on this terrain.
  21. Victory on the spectacular terrain is always fleeting. Today’s victory becomes tomorrow’s crisis.
  22. It is not possible to fully conquer spectacular terrain.
  23. The inability for the spectacular terrain to be fully conquered or controlled means that it cannot be the foundation for alternative world orders. The victors of spectacular combat in the twenty-first century have mostly been movements focused on challenging or upending the prevailing liberal consensus.
  24. As has been observed by Antonio Gramsci, when the old order is dying and a new has yet to be born, a period of interregnum ensures where many morbid symptoms take hold. In the current twenty-first century interregnum, the most profound of these morbid symptoms is Caesarism—or the rise authoritarians whose rise to prominence was due in part to their successes on the spectacular terrain.
  25. These digital Caesars, however, are not the bringers of a new world order, but rather charismatic “men of destiny” whose motivation to power is tied to their personal interests—aggrandizement, narcissistic yearnings for approval, or aspirations for conquest in various forms. All of these goals are easier to achieve on spectacular terrain.
  26. Because appearance is what brings victory on the spectacular terrain, the digital Caesars play the part of conquering heroes. But they offer no alternative frameworks for concrete reality. They do not introduce new way of thinking about the social relations of production, nor offer alternative conceptions of the state, nor suggest new arrangements for world order.
  27. For this reason, the rule of these Caesars is characterized by scandal, intrigue and conspiracy (their own obsession with conspiracy and plot is largely a projection of their actions). These internal dramas, often referred in the past as “palace intrigues,” are no longer confined to the palace, but take place in full view of the public on the spectacular terrain.
  28. Thus, rule by Caesars is plagued by crisis, chaos and bedlam. Often, these conflicts will spill out into the concrete world. The putsch at the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021 was an example of this.
  29. The greater the bedlam on the spectacular terrain, the less the problems in the material world are addressed.
  30. In the absence of concrete frameworks to deal with real-world problems like climate change and economic inequality, and the wielding of weapons of mass destruction by unstable Caesarist demagogues, the existence of the species becomes increasingly imperiled.

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