Visualizing ideology: Spectacle as a category of political theory
Abstract
<?Pub Inc> Reading spectacle as political theory contributes to our understanding of how cultural practices visualize ideology. Four theoretical traits characterize the spectacle. First, the spectacle organizes everyday life around ideological practices visualized through a stimulating network of images. By saturating public and personal spaces with ideological appearances and images, the spectacle colonizes everyday life. Second, spectators imagine a sense of symbolic stability by internalizing spectacular notions of identity. Third, heightened visual representation characterizes the society of the spectacle. Both the organization of everyday life around ideology and the imagination of identity occur under escalating mass mediated display. Finally, spectacle conceptualizes the network linking the characteristics of ideological representation as constricting democratic politics. Spectacle is ideological in that it preemptively situates the spectator into experiencing spectacular society as natural, rather than constructed. Experiencing the spectacle as natural, subjects are less likely to politicize socioeconomic alternatives to the status quo. As a result, the visual ideology of spectacle attempts to foreclose on the political diversity of democracy.
Subject Area
Political science
Recommended Citation
James A Buccellato,
"Visualizing ideology: Spectacle as a category of political theory"
(January 1, 2009).
ETD Collection for Wayne State University.
Paper AAI3366668.
http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/dissertations/AAI3366668
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