The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,40
now, when product ethics and media ethics have greater force than social ethics or justice.
We live in the Age of Spectacle. Spectacle promises to engage us, to mediate between us and objective reality in nonjudgmental ways. Very like the promise of nuclear energy: to be safe, clean, and cheap, but turned out to be dangerous, dirty (contaminated), and expensive. The promise made by the spectacle has been forfeited. Not only are we not engaged, we are profoundly distanced—unable to discriminate, edit, or measure shock or empathy. The “regime of visual authority [is a] coercive organization of images according to a stopwatch” and passes its organization off to us as a simulacrum of the real.
The news promises to inform us. Yet “the promiscuity of the nightly news—the jostling together of tornadoes in Pennsylvania, gunmen in Bosnia, striking teachers in Manchester…infant heart surgery in California—is dictated by the time constraints of the medium.” But the jumble of events is presented to the viewer as if it were a representation of the promiscuity of the external world, which we find, as a result, incoherent.
“Millions of people look to the screen for signs of their collective identity as a national society and as citizens of the world. The media now play the decisive role in constituting the ‘imagined community’ of nation and globe.” In this fashion “the news is validated as a system of authority, as a national institution with a privileged role as purveyor of the nation’s identity and taker of its pulse.”
Recent events, however, suggest something has gone wrong. The formula, the authority, the paradigm, the goals of the spectacle may not be working. The erstwhile “church of modern authority,” television once routinely presented news as sacred spectacle: the funeral of John F. Kennedy, the wedding of Prince Charles, presidential inaugurations, the death of Diana—all implying that what was on view was of grave national and international significance. But in the merging of news (which is not news unless pictorial) with spectacle at the service of profit-making entertainment, certain electronic narratives originally constructed as official or national stories revealed not the promised national identity but the fault lines within. War becomes a timed and shaped “story” where the electronic question becomes the political one: When will we get out? When will the troops come home? When will the despot be dead? In other national narratives—the Clarence Thomas hearing, the O.J. trial, the Whitewater investigation, the impeachment hearings—time and narrative shape as well as plot are all subject to televised programming needs. It is fascinating to recall that virtually all of these recent stories are highly inflected by race and/or sex and the power wielded or withheld by either one.
These national spectacles did not hide divisions as they wished, but exacerbated them. We cannot count on the spectacle to heal and distract completely. It is more likely to damage, alter, or distort time, language, the moral imagination, concepts of liberty, access to knowledge, as our consciousnesses are being reduced to self-commodification. We become “ads” for ourselves under the pressure of the spectacle that flattens our experience of the public/private dichotomy. The question becomes how and where can we experience the public in time, in language, as affect, and in context in order to participate fully in our own personal, singular, even invented life in relation to the life of the various communities to which we claim or wish to belong.
What is the source of this flattened perception of private and public? Part of the confusion may simply be the reckless use of the terms: there is private life and there is the privatization of prisons, health care, and so-called public schools. The first use emanates from constitutional guarantees as well as a personal claim. The second is a corporate investment publicly traded.
The first (personal claim to privacy) can be abandoned (on a talk show, for instance) or lost in the courts (by celebrities and “public” figures), but in any case such connotations of privacy are under surveillance at all times. The second (the privatization of formally public institutions) can be thwarted in the courts also, but are presented to us and represented to us as for the “public” good (encouraging competition and so forth, which ought to lower prices and increase quality for consumers). Public interest is often redefined as “special” interests.
The slippage in these definitions so erases the boundaries between an individual and his imagined community, we are not surprised or agitated by the fact that public life is