The Media is the Mirror, Pt. 4

From the Ideal to the Mundane

A phenomenon of the spectacle is the presentation of material and conceptual constructs in ideal environments.  The phenomenon exists because, just as there is no space or distance in the spectacle, there is also no time.  “Ours is a brand new world of allatonceness”, as Marsall McLuhan put it in his book The Medium is the Massage.  The idealization of the mundane, then is accompanied by emotional attributes connected to the image at hand.  

In a society in which all opinions and social attributes are instantaneous and governed by the spectacle, acquisition of objects, goods, social status and emotional happiness are also connected umbilically to the spectacle.  Thus, an individual that does not have the au courant technological appliance, be it Tivo, a smartphone or an iPad, is considered a luddite or socially backward.  Middle class society, always tyrannical in its insistence on homogeneity, demands a lockstep adherence to the outward appearance and adhesion to the current social norm – whatever that may be.  Remember, the spectacle is tautological, it exists for its own sake and changes spontaneously to suit social convention, which is at the same time informed by the spectacle.  Thus, it is a social imperative to have a Facebook account, rather than a MySpace account, the former being the au courant flavor of the month in social networks, the other appearing middle-aged and staid by comparison.  

The transferral of the object from its ideal representation in the spectacle, to its palpable materialization in reality, however, brings with it the curious phenomenon of temporal relevance.  Once removed from the sphere of the ideal, the object immediately begins to lose appeal, to tarnish and age, and to be replaced in rapid succession by the next idealized image for consumption.  The iPhone is replaced by the iPhone 3GS, which, in turn is replaced by the iPhone 4 and the Android.  The Kindle is hailed as remarkable and revolutionary, only to be replaced by the iPad in relevance and social desirability, which, in turn, is rapidly replaced by the iPad 2.  Each new image is ideal, ageless and desirable – until it is materialized in the mundane world of real existence.  At once it loses relevance and becomes mere object waiting to be replaced in the spectacle by the next idealized image.  This is just as true for concepts as it is for objects.  The relevance of Stalin, as Debord put it, has receded to a trite parody, a cracked and broken image of a concept long forgotten and no longer applicable to the current age.  

This dichotomy is probably best described by French philosopher and social critic Maurice Merlau-Ponty in his criticism of the Cartesian bifurcation of the object and mind, with its “intertwining of the body-subject, le corps suject, and the world-as-lived”, affording a tangible, palpable relationship between the body and the object” – a relationship denied by the virtual, electronic reality that is rapidly replacing Merlau-Ponty’s world of “touching and being touched, seeing and being seen, hearing and being heard, of smelling and being smelled, of tasting and being tasted.”  (Maurice Merlau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible)  

To again quote McLuhan:  

“Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information. Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience coexist in a state of active interplay.”    – Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage