The recent turmoil at ESPN provides an interesting opportunity to see the spectacle of disintegration at work in a way that allows us to leave the bleak world of security and terrorism behind for a bit. Though even here, we are only leaving the more visible and direct world of…

It is now time to go back and revisit some of the earlier comments of this space with regards to the notion of the Trumpire. As some of the earlier entries attempted to show, the Trumpire is the name given to the merging of the power of the traditional military-industrial…

The last post discussed Mckenzie Wark’s notion of the spectacle of disintegration—a variation of the spectacle where the audience is invited to participate in the smothering of their own creativity by digitizing the banality of their lives on various social media platforms. Whereas the original intention of this evolution of…

There is one more evolution of the spectacle that needs mentioning. Interesting enough, there are two variations of this spectacle offered up by two different thinkers in the last decade: the Disintegrated Spectacle by Jeffrey Kinkle and the Spectacle of Disintegration by Mckenzie Wark. I want to give both concepts…

So far this space has introduced and briefly discussed the notion of “the spectacle” posited by the French radical thinker Guy Debord in the middle of twentieth century. Debord wrote The Society of the Spectacle as part of a larger political and intellectual wave of revolt and social renewal that…

The last post discussed the nature of the concentrated spectacle and how this incorporation of political and media capability helped cement together the strong but brittle totalitarian states of the middle and late twentieth century. The idea of the concentrated spectacle was important because it showed that the larger concept…

As previous posts have argued, the spectacle is an assemblage of power that emerges amid the transformation of the global economy from an early stage of industrialization and production to a later stage of financialization and consumerism. But this shift in economic priorities occurs with the political context of the…

When the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus recently announced they were closing down their traveling acts, more than a few articles observed the irony of the end of a classic American amusement coinciding with the beginning of the Trump presidency. In the society of the spectacle, a three-hour…

The Trumpire is the product of a particular assemblage of forces converging at a unique moment in history. It may be rhetorically useful to compare the Trump regime to past totalitarian or authoritarian governments, but such comparisons in the long run only distort and inhibit a genuine understanding of the…

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