This week’s readings focus on the notion of the digital and the potentialities and pitfalls that they produce for political action and spectatorship at the dawn of the new millennium.
The Collective Arts Ensemble recognizes the digital’s revolutionary paradigm shift and how entire cosmologies shifted and modified our understanding knowledge and history and the nature of existence itself. The digital is especially influential in our way of consuming commodities, in that consumers now want products that are the same as everybody else’s but still unique and personalizable, juxtaposing digital practicality (replication) to analog aesthetics (artisanship). In an era of increased worker alienation through neoliberal hyperspecialization, recombinant theater—which include happenings and street theater practices—serve as bridges between the digital and the analog, bringing in alienated populations to the spectacle of the theater of everyday life, spurring spectators into critical assessment of social relationships.
In “Citizens, Digital Media, and Globalization”, Poster posits that social media and the digital age are reconfiguring our understanding and our practice of politics: “The conditions of globalization and networked media present a new register in which the human is recast and along with it the citizen” (70). There are ways of accessing a specific, normative type of citizenship through consumption, to buy green or rainbow, for example—citizenship becomes an extension of consumption” (73)—and in this sociopolitical climate, politics becomes a mode of consumption. Poster highlights the need for a planetary (as opposed to universal) democratic movement that takes into consideration the new ways of embodying citizenship in the digital age, including the intromission of machines and the ubiquity of consumption as an inescapable process.
In “The Politics of Passion”, while framing the differences between performatives and animatives, Taylor foregrounds the importance of the body that assembles and becomes one in a crowd for the mobilization of affects that produce mass mobilizations. In light of the digital, Taylor underscores the importance and the influence of physical space for the channeling of political affects, in the creation of the space of appearance in the front lines: “By gathering together, those in opposition identify themselves to themselves. By being there, they prove that people can become active participants; protest can happen; resistance is not only possible but it is being enacted”. Echoing Butler and the power of bodies assembled, huge swaths of bodies in protest invoke a more solid form of political identification and representation, an embodied democracy, more so than in traditional political performatives like elections which can be so easily robbed. In brief, Taylor purports that, even in the eve of the digital, we must not forget the body, because in this age, spectators “are simultaneously political agents, the objects of politics, and performers for other spectators watching events from a different vantage point”—like those watching protests from their phones and computer screens maybe thousands of miles away.
This changing notion of spectatorship is echoed in Arditi’s conceptions of insurgencies in contemporary massive demonstrations. First he highlights the political importance of insurgencies despite the misconception that they are less organized or doomed to failure because contemporary examples do not propose a specific political plan: by not prescribing themselves, the spectacle can be the end in itself, and does not close off its meanings or exclude populations like any other political goal: the ends of insurgencies remain open. Arditi also notes an interesting change in our conception of the spectator in the context of insurgencies: users of social media amplify insurgencies, “giving rise to a spactactor”, a subject who participates in the inauguration of a new space with every like and share. They act to multiply the space of resistance in ways different than simply spectators documenting: they are also holding the state accountable for misdeeds and join in the joy or dread of open rebellion.
These conceptions of the world of politics in the digital age coalesce in the figure of Donald Trump, which Edwards breaks down in “Trump from Reality TV to Twitter, or the Selfie-Determination of Nations”. By highlighting how our state political systems are facilitated (if not predetermined) by the technological advancements of the time (think printing press), Edwards suggests that the digital communication age, coupled with the ease of access of platforms like Twitter, are conducive towards figures like Trump—whose rhetoric reaches his base with ferocious speed. Similarly, Trump transforms the stage of American politics by incorporating the logics of mass media entertainment and reality television—pushing for ratings, reviews, roaring applause—as a real-time measure of his labor as POTUS. The digital age defines and facilitates new ways of forming social alliances and the individual’s place and response to them: by extrapolating the image of the reality TV show contestant, the WINNER, to social media, every existing user would be motivated to accrue the highest approval ratings quantifiably (through likes or reblogs, much like votes on reality competition shows). Therefore, thanks to the advent of the digital, politics in the US swerves more towards the idea of celebrity, of popularity, of approval ratings and consumption, rather historically predetermined notions of the political and of democratic participation.
I agree with Poster in that the Net does provide new ways of forming political alliances (like hashtags and crowdfunding), but what is meant to be put to test is the potential of these new configurations to subsume and substitute traditional forms of cohesive political practices. I would say that Trump’s ability to transform politics to reality TV, that is, consumerist entertainment, uses the Net to promote backwards, neoliberal, stagnant political spectacles that only reifies old political bonds and configurations.