Power and the Uses of Spectacle

Why spectacle is good for power but bad for us

Power and the Uses of Spectacle

Today, The Times, the UK’s ‘newspaper of record’ did something genuinely stunning: it covered Seymour Hersh’s report about the US bombing of Nordstream 2. From one point of view this is a significant breach of regime message discipline, from another point of view it is an almighty flex using the spectacle of a bombed pipeline as an American reminder to European vassals of who is the boss. Remember: power wants to be seen.

From about the mid-70s to about a decade ago, Shakespeare studies was obsessed by theories of power and control. I have drawn on this in my own ideas, especially on containment. Three of my five books on Shakespeare involve a thoroughgoing analysis of the two principal schools that focused on power in Shakespeare’s plays: new historicism and cultural materialism. I was, in fact, and still am, opposed to both schools on the grounds that they ignore human nature and the scope for individuality. My work on Shakespeare from 2012 to 2018 could broadly be described as a humanist critique of anti-humanist (leftist) modes of thinking. We might say that they leave out the role of the Carlylean Great Man. Indeed, Carlyle saw Shakespeare himself as a Great Man, a genius, the Hero as Poet. In the hands of anti-humanist scholars, Shakespeare is not a Great Man or a genius or a hero, but simply a reflection of his time and place. Back then, I framed my arguments in broadly Darwinian terms, relying on science and empirical data and so on. Today, I would simply assert the aristocratic principle of quality and distinction against the reign of quantity. But the basic objection is the same. Still, this does not mean that nothing can be learned from those scholars I spent so long critiquing, especially in their treatment of power. I think many of us have come to see that the leftist treatment of the broad mass of humanity as being passive NPCs is basically correct.

The cultural materialists were more Marxist in orientation and concentrated on the scope of genuine dissidence and subversion. The new historicists were more Foucauldian and concentrated more on how power usually works to contain genuine dissidence and subversion. They highlighted the ways in which power can use ‘subversion’ for its own ends. This topic should be of interest to us as dissidents today for obvious reasons. That Antifa, BLM, extinction rebellion and so on are counter-revolutionaries posing as radicals in the service of the regime should be obvious received wisdom to almost everyone reading this by this point. However, there are still further lessons to learn from the intense new historicist study of power, specifically their study of spectacle and its uses for authority.

I will quote two relevant and lengthy passages from one of my books that demonstrate the uses of spectacle for power:

Let us turn briefly to Stephen Orgel’s The Illusion of Power (1975). This short book is a distillation of a much more substantial study: Inigo Jones: Theatre of the Stuart Court (1973). In writing it, Orgel collaborated with the famed art historian, Roy C. Strong. The hero of the book, and of The Illusion of Power, is the architect Inigo Jones, who designed many theatrical masques during the reign of James I. Orgel argues that, in order to understand Jacobean theatre, we must draw a distinction between public theatre – the theatre of The Globe, for example, and even of Blackfriars – and the private theatre of the court. Also, he says, we should remember that theatre is inextricably visual, as well as verbal. What particularly interests Orgel about Jones’ designs for these masques is the central and prominent position afforded to the monarch, which reflects ‘the ways in which the age saw the monarchy’. ‘Masques’, he argues, ‘were the festal embodiments of this concept of monarchy’. The crucial realization is that the members of the audience for these spectacles were not there to see the show, but rather to see the monarch themselves: ‘The king must not merely see the play, he must be seen to see it. The fact that the latter requirement interferes with the former is of no consequence […] What this audience has come to see is the king’. The performance of any given piece, then, in such a private court is completely indivisible from its immediate context: the ‘text’, as it were, is the specific event itself, ‘not simply the action of the play, but the interaction between the play and monarch’.[1]

The spectacle here is the figure of the king himself watching the play, while all eyes watch him. The architecture of the theatre is designed to make the king the focal point and legitimate his authority at all times. The entire act of putting on the performance, going to watch the play, and so on, is an exercise in power and control. Remember: power wants to be seen.

            Let us move on to the second passage. Here I have been discussing different readings of the play Measure for Measure and what follows is in the context of several other readings. But this is the part most relevant for us:

With Stephen Greenblatt’s reading, in 1988, we come down to earth with a Machiavellian thud. For Greenblatt, the play is less an argument for Divine Right than it is a representation of the ways in which James I used ‘the techniques of salutary anxiety’ to gain the popular support of his subjects. Here, there are two interrelated principles. The first is fairly straightforward: that elaborate displays of power such as torture, public executions or the age-old practice of sticking body parts on the city gates might arouse anxiety in those who witness such spectacles and so ensure their subordination. But this ‘may also go too far’, and if punishments are too harsh or indiscriminate the monarch might risk rebellion. And so the second principle is that selective clemency – that is, an act of mercy from the monarch in a situation in which he might not have been so lenient – turns ‘anxiety […] into gratitude’. Greenblatt’s example is James’ response to the Bye Plot: the first three conspirators, Watson, Clarke and Brooke, were executed; Brooke about a week after the first two and apparently to a stunned silence. But the final three, Grey, Cobham and Markham were assembled on the scaffold only to be reprieved at the last minute, and to much general cheering. ‘So too the audience may have cheered the flurry of pardons at the end of Measure for Measure’. This is, of course, a nuanced and clever version of Greenblatt’s containment thesis: here, power arouses anxiety only to quell it, in exchange for the ‘gratitude, obedience, and love’ of their subjects. This gives a cogent pretext for several of the Duke’s decisions that have long troubled critics: such as why he leads Claudio to believe that he is going to die, and Isabella to believe that he is dead – not to mention why he leaves the law in Angelo’s hands in the first place. For this reading to work, we would have to believe that the Duke deliberately engineered the scenario to cast himself in the best possible light at the end of the play with his litany of pardons. But Greenblatt does not see the Duke’s power as being perfect, and he walks us through several examples of his failing to shape anxiety in the way that he wants: it does not really work in the case of Juliet, in the case of Claudio, ‘the magnificent emblems of indifference […] the drunken Barnardine and the irrepressible Lucio’, or, indeed, ‘society at large’. In fact, ‘the duke’s strategy has not changed the structure of feeling or behaviour in Vienna in the slightest degree’. In the end, all it serves to do is give the audience pleasure, but Shakespeare himself remains committed to salutary anxiety ‘as a powerful theatrical technique’. Greenblatt is making two distinct points in this reading: on the one hand, he maintains that salutary anxiety and its subsequent transformation by mercy into gratitude, obedience and love is a powerful method of social control for rulers; on the other, he argues that Shakespeare treats the method ironically, and highlights the fact that it is fallible and subject to fail, even though he still favours using it – or at least a representation of it – in his own theatrical practice. Here, we can see Greenblatt making good in practice his own theoretical promise to move beyond the hard version of the containment thesis. He is always alert to the complexities of Shakespeare’s text and does not attempt to flatten it to serve his conclusions. At the same time, however, like Goldberg and Tennenhouse, he does detect a certain cultural logic – in this case the principle of anxiety – that Shakespeare’s play shares with the moment of its gestation.[2]

We have seen power in our own time use similar tactics. It has been said by figures as disparate as Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Adam Curtis, Paul Gottfried, and many others, that the regime likes to keep the public in a permanent state of low-level anxiety which can be dialled up or down as circumstances require. Most immediately, we think of Covid of course, but there are many other examples including climate change, the Islamic terrorist threat of the 2000s, and the threat of nuclear war during the Cold War. During Covid, we saw authorities use ‘salutary anxiety’ when they threatened a ‘new normal’ only then to relax the rules at key moments. Few will remember now, but Boris Johnson declared 19^th July 2021, ‘Freedom Day’ as he dropped the last of the Covid restrictions and life resumed ‘as normal’. We can debate whether this tactic worked, but the power dynamics are structurally similar to James I reprieving the conspirators of the Bye Plot at the final hour. The entire exercise of the pandemic, like the bombing of Nordstream 2, was a massive display of elite power on the populace, a not-so-gentle reminder of who runs things, and that it is your duty as a pleb to obey their authority. We all were made to see, once and for all, the extraordinary compliance and passivity of the masses, up close. We were made to see the reality of power. Few of us will ever forget it. And on this score, as an exercise in power and control through spectacle, it was a stunning success.

            Note how all these examples rely on two factors:

1. You must be a ruler to use spectacle as a means of displaying your power.

2. The ruled must acquiescence, comply and ultimately submit in gratitude to the ruled.

Now let me remind you of the unseemly carnival sideshow of Kanye West appearing in a ski mask on The Alex Jones Show. In case you’ve forgotten, here is a picture:

In case it is not obvious: Alex Jones is not in power. In fact, he had just been sued for over $1 billion and is arguably the most discredited man in American public life, from the point of view of official power. Kanye West was in the middle of being cancelled and torching his career through a direct assault on The Death Star. I said then, as I maintain now, to the braying of typically clueless zoomers, who would do well to remember that they are children, that this would amount to absolutely nothing and would be forgotten about in a month. That debacle happed on 11^th December 2022. It is now 8^th February 2023 and ‘Ye2024’ has amounted to absolutely nothing beyond total embarrassment for all concerned. The campaign attracted precisely ZERO donations. Business-as-usual has returned; nothing was damaged apart from the reputations of children who have inexplicably been elevated to the status of ‘Dissident Right commentators’, and who became wildly enthusiastic about it. Those of us who were sceptical of it from the get-go have been utterly vindicated; those who ‘went all in’ have been totally humiliated – or they would have been had they even a modicum of self-awareness. To make matters worse, at the end of November 2022, as I documented here, the ADL were making unforced errors left and right, and there were even question marks as to Jonathan Greenblatt’s continued leadership of the organisation. The idiot Ye and his idiot supporters jettisoned all of that almost overnight and the ADL now are stronger than they have ever been. This whole episode would only ever have the status of a carnival side attraction or freak show because spectacle is not a tool for the ruled, only the rulers. Whenever dissidents have tried to use spectacle to their advantage – this affair, the storming of the Capitol on 6^th January 2021, Charlottesville, and so on – it has backfired extraordinarily. This comes from a profound lack of understanding as to how power functions. The ruled, by virtue of the fact that they are ruled, are denied the tools of the rulers. To the extent to which dissidents have formed a counter-elite, they simply do not have the power or base of support to pull off spectacle in a way that might work to their own advantage. It does not help that dissidents have not been typically sensible and centred people, but rather comprise fantasists who live in an online hyper-reality that has totally lost the ability to parse reality. The ‘Ye2024’ crowd are only one group guilty of this, there is more than enough of it to go around, but until people start learning lessons – something of which they have been incapable to date – the regime will continue to dominate.

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[1] Neema Parvini, Shakespeare and New Historicist Theory (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 47-8.

[2] Ibid, pp. 83-5.