Attention and Memory in the Age of the Disciplinary Spectacle
thefrailestthing.com
thefrailestthing.com
The age of the spectacle was roughly 1900-1970, the years during which there were World's Fairs that captured the world's attention. The 1964 New York World's Fair was probably the peak. The 1960s had the Apollo program, probably the biggest spectacle operation in history. "We choose to go to the moon... Not because it is easy, but because it is hard." - Kennedy.
Today, spectacle, such as it is, is on screens. Watching the CGI Marvel Overextended Universe doesn't really compare. We see some exuberance in Asia, with fantastic urban buildings. (What do we get in SF? The Salesforce Tower. Oh well.) Shenzen has a celebration going on where all the big buildings downtown are lit up with LEDs all controlled together. It's very Blade Runner.[1] The closest thing we have in the US is Elon Musk's Space-X stunts.
these stunts are basically the only thing going today in the direction of extensive development of our civilization. Almost everything else is in the intensive direction, towards the ultimate imploded state of comfortable absolutely connected ant colony. I mean many people already seriously doubt whether we need to go to Mars. (It is my pet theory why we don't see much of other civilizations - because most of them end up in that state of ant colony and stop development, and probably wiped out by any significant change as they loose the ability to adapt)
We have a fully functional survival machine down here on earth that we don’t seem capable of properly maintaining. Why would we do a better job inventing and maintaining an artificial survival machine from nothing on Mars?
Because it's there.
Sometimes the human spirit needs to be fed, too.
-- The background reading article [1]
Disciplinary surveillance . . . was simple: the prisoners would stay in line because they had to assume that they were always being watched. No violence was necessary, the internalized gaze of the surveillance apparatus disciplined the behavior of the prisoner.
So general FUD of the capabilities of nation states keeping citizens in line. This seems to align with current trends.
In Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord wrote, “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”
A society of spectacle is one where interactions are not with the people themselves, but with their public image/representation (facebook, Instagram, etc).
Following, a society of disciplinary spectacle is one where individuals interact through lossy representations that are subject to FUD+surveillance. So not only does representation effectively become the self, the representation is subject to an insidious type of control in the form of disciplinary surveillance--meaning the self is subject to this control as well.
-- The actual linked article
Memory, in the ways that historians tend to use it, refers to a group's perception of the past. The word memory is used because this perception does not necessarily represent historical truths--like individual memory does not always represent an individual's past.
Society of disciplinary surveillance is inherently at odds with actual historical truths. This is because of a need for representations to appear to be improving w.r.t. historical memory. This need is for keeping attention focused on the representation of individuals instead of individuals. So obviously the perception of improvement is easy if the memory is altered/controlled. This manipulation is done by individuals who want to show the merit of their representation w.r.t. peers and history.
This may not be the case if attention is controlled in ways other than the trap of representation hierarchy.
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These notes aren't particularly well written and might have missed the point. I haven't really finished playing with these ideas.
[1]: https://thefrailestthing.com/2018/06/26/eight-theses-regardi...