Spectacle Capitalism

Festivalism is the metamorphosis of capitalism into festivalism, brought about by acts of carnivalesque resistance. Spectacle...

Spectacle is based on the work of Guy Debord (1967, Society of the Spectacle) and has something important to say about how spectacles of production and consumption could become more festive. By spectacle I mean Debord’s (1967) the Society of the Spectacle, the often violent and oppressive social control that masquerades as a celebration of betterment by recycling pseudo-reforms, false-desires, and selective sightings of progressive evolution, never devolution (Boje, 2001). Spectacle can be total manipulation of meaning-making processes through theatrical events to serve the production of power and managerial needs to control and spin a good story in the face of bad news. Spectacle is faciality and a performance of proficiency.

Digital Storytelling Theater is a Spectacle being used by corporate power

What is Business in the Entertainment World? The Entertainment World is changing the Business World. The Spectacle is an entertainment force that has a major impact on the economy, our business models, and societal culture. Business is becoming entertainment, more theatrical, and we live in the Society of Entertainment (Boje, 2002; Best & Kellner, 2001; Wolf, 1999). Business is becoming synonymous with entertainment; we are becoming actors in corporate theatre. Disney, for example, does not have workers, it has "cast members" and we are not customers, we are "spectators" in the show. Customers expect that they will be entertained; they buy spectacle-experiences, not commodities. McDonalds is a little spectacle, a place of corporate entertainment. Las Vegas is the Spectacle of Entertainment which veils the commodification of social addictions. Enron treated the stock market like entertainment, and forgot the difference between ethics and geed-economics (GREEDonomics) and putting on a show. Analysts believed the dog and pony presentations by Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling and were distracted from reading the bottom line. Company brands from Nike to GAP are promoted by movie and sports stars, so that consumers confuse corporate values with entertainer-PR-images.

The Entertainment World of Business is changing from passive to interactive involvement of consumers. For example, in "experience marketing" there is a sense of being "entertained" by making the customer an actor in the service being consumed. You do not purchase a river rafting ride, you become an actor in a Whitewater river rafting adventure, where the guide knows how to thrill you. You enter a McDonalds restaurant, knowing exactly what to say in that robotic theatre, where our lines our scripted (Leadership Theatre - Boje, 2001). Michael J. Wolf (1999) claims, "Locally, globally, internationally, we are living in an entertainment economy." Moreover, "...where America's entertainment economy goes, the rest of the world is not far behind."  Herbert Marcuse (1999) called it phantasmagoria. 

The Entertainment World is becoming a driving force in everyday business life. We live in what Guy Debord (1967) calls the Society of the Spectacle. The Entertainment Spectacle was a main topic of the keynote address by Professors Douglas Kellner and Steven Best at our 2001 IABD conference in Marina Del Rey. Corporations have to be entertaining to sell products and services. Business professors have to be entertaining to hold the attention of students raised on MTV.

The danger of the Entertainment World is that we become actors in spectacle controlled by a hostile and manipulative media seeking to change our self-concept into a marketing concept. Our opportunity is to understand the dynamic forces that are 'Entertainmentizing' business practices (Wolf, 1999).

The Michael Jackson Trial is quite the postmodern event. Terry Eagleton (May 25, 2005) wrote a piece about it in The Guardian.

"Celebrity trials, like those of OJ Simpson and Michael Jackson, are sometimes loosely called postmodern, meaning that they are media spectaculars thronged with characters who are only doubtfully real. But they are also postmodern in a more interesting sense. Courtrooms, like novels, blur the distinction between fact and fiction. They are self-enclosed spheres in which what matters is not so much what actually took place in the real world, but how it gets presented to the jury. The jury judge not on the facts, but between rival versions of them." More on postmodern spectacle

Books on this topic  include

Benjamin, Walter (1999). The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MASS: Harvard University Press.

Best, Steven & Douglas Kellner (2001). Postmodern Adventure. NY/London The Guilford Press.

Boje, David M. (2002). Theatres of Capitalism. San Francisco, CA Hampton Press. In press.  See Leadership Theatre. 

Debord Guy (1967). Society of the Spectacle. La Société du Spectacle was first published in 1967 by Editions, Buchet-Chastel (Paris); it was reprinted in 1971 by Champ Libre (Paris). The full text is available in English at http//www.nothingness.org/SI/debord/index.html It is customary to refer to paragraph numbers in citing this work.

Wolf, Michael J. (1999).  The Entertainment Economy How Mega-Media Forces Are Transforming Our Lives. NY Times Books. 

 

 

What is a Hosel? click and you fill find out Those of you who play golf may know. But Hosel it seems is an important prophylactic device, a way to keeping the spectacle theatrics going, a way for Tiger Woods never to see or hear the Thailand women that make his logo-productions.  Finally, a way for consumers never to meet producers, and most important, never to hear their personal experience stories. Now, when a consumer talks face to face with a woman worker in a sweatshop, that is festive experience.

Writing

  1. Boje writing about spectacle and festival in the athletic apparel industry http://cbae.nmsu.edu/~dboje/AA/academicsstudyingwriting.htm#bojewriting

  2. Boje, D. M. (2001l) "Global Theatrics of Capitalism." Contains examples of culture jamming art, missing absent referent photos, and analysis of relation between Athletic Apparel Industry spectacle of disinformation, and carnivalesque acts of street theater resistance. Appendix of 10 College of Business theatrics training experiential exercises.

  3. Boje, D. M. (2001b). Athletic Apparel Industry is Tamara-land. Tamara: Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science. Vol 1 (2), pp. 6-19. http://www.zianet.com/boje/tamara/

  4. Boje, D. M. (2001h) "Editorial: Athletic Apparel Industry is Tamara-land." SPECIAL ISSUE ON Corporate Predators and Nike, Tamara Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science. Vol 1 Issue 2 pp 6-19.

  5. Boje, D. M. (2001e). Carnivalesque Resistance to Global Spectacle: A critical postmodern theory of public administration. Accepted for Publication for September issue of  Administrative Theory and Praxis, special issue on Radical Organization Theory.

  6. Boje, D. M. (2001g). Antenarrating, Tamara, and Nike Storytelling. Paper prepared for presentation at “Storytelling Conference” at the School of Management; Imperial College, 53 Prince’s Gate, Exhibition Road, London, July 9th, 2001. http://cbae.nmsu.edu/~dboje/papers/ethnostorytelling.htm

  7. Festival, Spectacle & Carnival - presentation to 2000 Academy of Management by Boje & Rosile

  8. Figure 1: The Nested Frames of Spectacle, Festival, and Carnival (Boje, 2001)

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