In an astute assessment of Stephen Colbert's White House Correspondents Association performance [1], Michael Scherer identifies Colbert and his contemporary and mentor Jon Stewart as the latest and most politically influential public figures in a lineage that stretches back to the French situationist Guy Debord:
Obviously, Colbert is not the first ironic warrior to train his sights on the powerful. What the insurgent culture jammers at Adbusters did for Madison Avenue, and the Barbie Liberation Organization did for children's toys, and Seinfeld did for the sitcom, and the Onion did for the small-town newspaper, Jon Stewart discovered he could do for television news. Now Colbert, Stewart's spawn, has taken on the right-wing message machine.
In the late 1960s, the Situationists in France called such ironic mockery "détournement," a word that roughly translates to "abduction" or "embezzlement." It was considered a revolutionary act, helping to channel the frustration of the Paris student riots of 1968. They co-opted and altered famous paintings, newspapers, books and documentary films, seeking subversive ideas in the found objects of popular culture. "Plagiarism is necessary," wrote Guy Debord, the famed Situationist, referring to his strategy of mockery and semiotic inversion. "Progress demands it. Staying close to an author's phrasing, plagiarism exploits his expressions, erases false ideas, replaces them with correct ideas." [2]
This analysis explains perfectly why Stewart and now Colbert have had such a significant impact on our political culture--and it also explains why I'm so annoyed by Stewart's shrugging, "Hey, I'm just a comedian" disclaimers.
As Scherer makes clear, Stewart essentially plagiarized the network news, and now Colbert's doing the same with talk-show pundits. They're taking an established cultural form and turning it against itself. And this plagiarism primarily serves to highlight the fundamental falsehood of the original. It's an intensely political act that can also be side-splittingly funny--although Colbert's White House Correspondents performance was over-long and poorly paced--but the humor can't be separated from the underlying critique. If Stewart really were just a comedian, he wouldn't be nearly as funny.
But Scherer's Salon piece doesn't follow through on the implications of invoking Debord, and it's worth taking a longer look at the man's profoundly unfunny ideas. Like many radical critics of contemporary society, Debord never came up with an alternative vision that could be implemented. And his pessimistic worldview was surely influenced by the depression and personal problems that led to his suicide in 1994. But these factors don't eliminate the analytical brilliance of many of his insights. From 1967's Society of the Spectacle:
1. In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles...
6. Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the goal of the dominant mode of production. It is not a mere decoration added to the real world. It is the very heart of this real society's unreality. In all of its particular manifestations--news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment--the spectacle represents the dominant model of life...
9. In a world that is really upside down, the true is a moment of the false. [3]
This says a lot to me about Stewart and Colbert's success and influence. Stewart was not a news anchor, of course, just as Colbert was not a pundit, but decades of immersion in the ultimate society of the spectacle have taught us that even "real" news anchors and pundits are acting out roles, and so Stewart and Colbert had license to do the same. And their actual message, well-understood by their audiences, is in direct opposition to what they appear to be saying. The true is a moment of the false. So by taking on these roles, Stewart and Colbert have become them.
No matter how much Stewart demurs, he is now a "real" anchor and Colbert is clearly on his way to becoming a "real" pundit. Some critics--and even Stewart himself--like to use the fact that an increasing number of people rely on Stewart's "Daily Show" as their primary source of news as an example of cultural decline. I think that's true, but it's not because people are stupid, which is the subtext of that argument; it's because people are smart. They're sufficiently smart and media-savvy to know that A) Stewart is an incisive political commentator, and B) the "real" broadcasts and talk shows are not only boring and patronizing, they're also at least part bullshit--they're spectacles.
Debord would probably see Stewart and Colbert's success as yet another spectacle, and I understand that logic. Stewart and Colbert aren't working on radical journals to circulate among a few dozen of their similarly disaffected friends. They're reaching millions of people through television and mass-market books and having a significant impact on the culture at large (and presumably making millions of dollars in the process.) They are, in fact, spectacles themselves.
If you inherently distrust the spectacle, as Debord did, this is probably a recipe for despair. Stewart and Colbert have embraced Debord's critical methods, but their successful use of those methods means that they've also embraced the apparatus of the spectacle. That success has come because of--not despite--their highly critical and politicized perspective, but the society of the spectacle has no trouble absorbing that critique, because it does nothing to challenge the spectacle itself.
Fair enough, but I can't help but take a more optimistic perspective. (Not that it's hard to have a sunnier worldview than Debord's.) Yes, we're all deeply embedded in the society of the spectacle, and that's never going to change. But Stewart and Colbert's success in employing the apparatus of the spectacle to mount substantive challenges to established political and media hierarchies suggests that the spectacle itself is inherently neutral. There's no tautology that will inevitably lead the society of the spectacle back into the dark heart of fascism--in fact, the spectacle can be an effective anti-fascist tool.
The spectacle is also, quite obviously, a source of great satisfaction and an object of intense fascination. We love spectacles; that's what makes them so successful. And if, as I do, you accept the idea that spectacles can be employed for salutary purposes as well as malign ones, then the issue boils down to one's view on consumer capitalism--which, I'd argue, will always triumph over competing worldviews largely because of its superior ability to create compelling spectacles.
Does consumer capitalism fundamentally respond to and fill--or manufacture and exploit--our individual desires? If you believe the latter, then you're back in the boat with Debord; consumer capitalism's mastery of the spectacle has turned us all into sheep waiting to be fleeced. If you believe the former, then life's not perfect, but it's a lot rosier; for better and for worse, we get the society/politics/culture we deserve.
I'm not naive about the influence of advertising or other tools at capitalism's command, but I'm firmly in the former camp. And so even though I disagree with a number of Stewart and Colbert's positions (and even though Stewart's disingenuous denials of political influence drive me nuts), I'm thrilled by their existence and success.
By putting Debord's critical methods into practice on some of the biggest stages our society has to offer, Stewart and Colbert are casting a harsh spotlight on the extent to which the object of their ridicule--not just news broadcasts and talk-show pundits, but our entire political and media culture--relies on insincerity, on falsehoods, and on the gullibility of the audience. In contrast, Stewart and Colbert are saying to their audience, "We're smart enough to know how smart you are, and together we're all going to have a laugh at those idiots' expense."
This thrills me primarily because my foundational belief is that people should be free to make choices for themselves, and if you believe that people are smart and not stupid, it's a short step from there to respecting their freedom. (That actually puts me at odds with any number of liberal supporters and conservative critics of Stewart and Colbert, but that's a post for another day.)
Many thanks to Michael Scherer for framing this discussion around Guy Debord. I've been intrigued by Stewart and Colbert and the success of their form of political discourse for some time now without being able to fully understand why, and seeing them as Debord's spiritual descendants is a brilliant insight.
Footnotes
[1] Stephen Colbert Roasts Bush at 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner (YouTube, 2006)
[2] The truthiness hurts (Michael Scherer, Salon, 2006)
[3] Society of the Spectacle (Guy Debord, 1967)
