One of the great ironies of the aftermath of the attacks of September 11th was the sudden fascination and celebration of the idea of American Empire. While the topic was occasionally kicked around by some—mostly on the far left side of western discourse—the moment when the United States was seemingly…

The recent controversy over the resignation of Secretary of Defense James Mattis amid Trump’s decision to withdraw US troops from Syria represents an interesting reshuffling of the rhetorical deck among thinkers, commentators and practitioners of US foreign policy. While debates and perspectives on key questions of US activity overseas have…

An interesting and troubling phenomenon is taking shape around the world as far-right populism and authoritarian ideologies make significant in-roads into national governments and the global apparatus of power. As these political forces take possession of more and more territory and occupy larger swathes of humanity’s collective mental space, western…

One of the more important concepts for Debord was the notion of celebrity. Some of the most crucial passages of in Society of the Spectacle deal with this phenomonen. Indeed, the distinction Debord makes between concentrated and diffuse spectacles comes immediately in the wake of two other concepts: the star of consumption and the…

Thus far, the discussion of power and strategy in the age of the spectacle has revealed three combinations: 1) lethal and coercive force deployed in a direct Clausewitzian manner, 2) lethal and coercive force deployed in an indirect manner in the tradition of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, and…

As the last few posts have argued, the dominant form of power in the world is coercive force deployed either through a Clausewitzian strategy of attacking a central focal point of an adversary or the approach of Sun Tzu, which argues such power can be deployed a number of different…

As argued in the previous post, Clausewitzian notions of power and strategy posit that a state realizes its interests by deploying lethal military force directly at the “center of gravity” of an adversary’s position. This focal point of power will often be well-defended, so the struggle to get at and…

  To understand how power and strategy work in an age of spectacle, one must first begin with traditional notions of these terms and their interaction. For states in the terrestrial material world, how does one accrue power and how does one apply this power to realize goals and interests?…

One of the insights the idea of the society of the spectacle reveals is the idea of a form of power in global politics that is not tied explicitly to military capability or state authority. This is not to say that these notions of power do not exist—just that they…

At the heart of the spectacle is the relentless need for innovation and novelty. Alberto Toscano put it best when he says: Create. Invent, Innovate, Network. Under the non-authoritarian hegemony of capitalist realism such ubiquitous imperatives have come to occupy the place of the seemingly exhausted, or unduly crass, industrial…