The "Woke" Olympics

The only path out of the Spectacle is to look at the material reality beyond the spectacles themselves.

“The modern spectacle … expresses what society can do, but in this expression the permitted is absolutely opposed to the possible. The spectacle is the preservation of unconsciousness within the practical change of the conditions of existence. It is its own product, and it has made its own rules: it is a pseudo-sacred entity.”

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

Early in the morning of the 26th of July, a small handful of people armed only with wire-cutters and blowtorches managed to completely shut down three of the four major train systems of France, just before the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games.

No credit has yet been claimed for these very simple — yet far-reaching — acts. It’s suspected the saboteurs were of the sort of far-left that doesn’t exist in the English-speaking world, the sort that cares more for fighting capitalism and the state than for arguing about social justice online. More than 800,000 people were affected, and no one’s yet been able to calculate the economic damage which resulted, but it’s certainly in the hundreds of millions.

Yet what were most leftists in the rest of the world focused on instead? Well, arguing against people who thought the ridiculous opening ceremony — which cost 130 million euros — was an insulting parody of the Last Supper.¹

Shaking my head at the absurdity of people’s reactions to all this, I finally decided to re-read Guy Debord’s much-referenced and rarely-understood book, Society of the Spectacle. When I first encountered it in my early 20’s, as with many other brilliant works which passed through my hands back then, I didn’t have nearly enough life experience to understand it.

Society of the Spectacle is brilliant, though large sections of it are quite hard to understand if you’re not well-versed in Marxist theory. That’s no doubt why I seemed to have missed its core argument and instead — like most who usually cite it — focused only on some of the secondary aspects of it.

The Spectacle is the social control mechanism which sustains capitalism. Note this is Spectacle singular, not plural, and has two meanings both in English and the original French. “Spectacle” is both a show or performance which draws our attention, and also an older word for the lens in glasses. That is, the Spectacle is both what we are compelled to see and also how we are shaped to see it.

So, consider the Olympics, an event engineered to draw in the attention of the world. The Spectacle is not just the event itself, but rather its gravitational hold over the consciousness of hundreds of millions of people, whether they are watching it or not. That’s how I know about the “controversy” over the opening ceremonies or the two boxers previously disqualified in other competitions: people I know are arguing about those things, and news journals and social media will make sure everyone else argues about it, too.

The actual portion of people who truly cared about clownish burlesque caricatures of Greek gods or about female boxers before the Olympics is vanishingly small. Now, however, having the correct opinion about each of these determines whether you are a good person or an uneducated fascist — your reaction to these events becomes a stand-in for virtue and a signal to others how they ought to classify you.

That’s the Spectacle. It is not just the hold these events have over our social relations, but also the apparent instinctual need we seem to have to react. However, those reactions are not instinctual at all, but rather the result of decades of fine-tuning the Spectacle’s hold over our consciousness.

In other words, our reactions, the internal mechanisms which trigger those reactions, and the compulsion to have a reaction at all have all been engineered into us. We are constantly drawn in, and feel we must be drawn in, and suddenly see each spectacle as the most urgent thing in the world.

Debord’s point is that this is how capitalism maintains itself, determines our social relationships, and makes itself seem natural, inevitable, and inescapable. And taken together with Walter Benjamin’s analysis of fascism as the aestheticization of politics — a situation where we are tricked into believing the “expression” of our desires is actual politics — the Spectacle looks a lot more like authoritarianism than anything Stalin or Hitler could have dreamed up.

The Spectacle is the machinery of both false consciousness and of false enlightenment. In false consciousness, we adopt beliefs and opinions that seem obvious to us because that’s how we were taught to think and believe, and we do not notice that we’ve never really truly tried to find out the truth of a thing.

False enlightenment is something much more sinister. Consider the earliest meaning of the word “woke,” meaning essentially that a person believed themself to have “awakened” to what was really happening and now saw things clearly. But that clarity is itself manufactured, and all the conclusions the woke reach about the world have come to them pre-packaged.

False enlightenment is seen perfectly both in those who obsessed over the “hidden” meaning of the Olympic opening ceremony and also those who argued that there was instead another meaning. Both sides believed themselves to be “woke” to the real nature of things, and saw it natural that they then needed to fight with those who saw it otherwise. Both the people who believed it was an obvious reference to the Last Supper and those who believed that others who saw it that way were uneducated fascists were participating in the Spectacle the only way the Spectacle permits.

The only path out of the Spectacle is to look at the material reality beyond the spectacles themselves.

There’s really no real resistance to the Spectacle to speak of, but if one did exist, it would not have been lost in the arguments about aesthetics of the opening ceremony. It would have instead noticed the extraordinary political power of a really simple act of sabotage just before those ceremonies, and sought to orient its politics towards organizing such power and showing others what is truly possible.

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1. 130 million euros could certainly go a long way towards doing other things, instead. For example, it could have paid a year’s worth rent of basic housing in Paris for 15,476 people. That’s almost 3,000 more than the amount of homeless people Paris forcibly relocated (12,545) in the last twelve months to “clean up” the city for the Olympics.