Sarah Bonnemaison
We live in a society where life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles.
Guy Debord1
An appreciation of the transience of things, and the concern to redeem them for eternity, is one of the strongest impulses in allegory.
Walter Benjamin2
Spectacle
As we see in these two quotations from Guy Debord and Walter Benjamin, spectacles in the twentieth century have been interpreted in widely divergent ways. On the one hand, spectacle is seen as the ‘circuses’ in ‘bread and circuses’ for the masses, smokescreens which conceal the truth. On the other, spectacles are ephemera ‘redeemed for eternity’ because they serve the critical study of modern culture. But the most prevalent critique of spectacles, in particular the large state-sponsored world’s fairs and national commemorations, is based on the idea that spectacles misrepresent social and political realities.3 From Guy Debord’s criticism of the ‘society of the spectacle’ – and its influence on Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard – to David Harvey’s analysis of spectacular postmodern architecture,4 criticism of spectacle in the modern era has been an attempt ‘to theorize the implications for capitalist society of the progressive shift within production towards the provision of consumer goods and services, and the accompanying "colonization of everyday-life"’.5 For Henri Lefebvre, spectacle is set against its opposite – the spontaneous festival – where spectacle is an expression of the devious power of the state, hiding the grimy sides of social reality, while festival is seen as a real participatory and spontaneous expression of popular culture.6 In fact, Lefebvre’s opposition between spectacle and festival is based on a duality between opacity and transparency which can, in turn, be traced within French philosophy to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s advocacy of the simplicity of rural festival as a way to criticize the opacity and artificiality of the theatre.7 Today, the association between devious opacity and urban spectacle on the one hand, and transparency and the festivals of simple, authentic folk on the other (especially those in third world countries), persists in structuring much of the discussion surrounding spectacles. Such a duality does not recognize the repressive aspects of traditional festivals nor the potentially liberating aspects of spectacles, especially in terms of progressive images of intercultural national identity.
The work of Timothy Mitchell confronts head-on the conception of urban spectacle as a misrepresentation of reality. In his work on nineteenth – century European exhibitions and colonialism, Mitchell constructs a mode of analysis that focuses on the mechanisms of representation. He argues that Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism has led cultural critics to denigrate spectacle as misrepresentation, while neglecting to analyse the actual processes of representation.
To the mechanism of misrepresentation by which power operates, Marx opposed a representation of the way things intrinsically are, in their transparent and rational reality. The problem with such an explanation was that, in revealing power to work through misrepresentation, it left representation itself unquestioned.8
Mitchell argues that a spectacle, in fact, might promise the existence of that reality. The more conventional critique of spectacle – deeply rooted in a Marxist analysis of commodity fetishism and alienation – is now shifted into the nexus of power/knowledge. Spectacle is conceived as a way to make visible modern ways of knowing about history, science, nature and so on – with a conviction and assurance characteristic of Western cultures.
Along the lines developed earlier by Edward Said, Mitchell makes us aware how the world exhibitions, as cultural productions, were not simply displays of power and industrial progress but were also ways of seeing and implementing colonialism. Mitchell uses letters written by Egyptians visiting the Universal Exposition held in Paris in 1889 to read this spectacle against the grain. He makes strange what we would take for granted in such an ‘expo’: the city in miniature, the realism of a reconstructed street, and above all, the Western notion of spectacle. He calls this particular arrangement the ‘world-as-exhibition’. He does not refer to an exhibition of the world but to the world conceived and grasped as though it were an exhibition. One is left with the conviction that the great exhibitions of the nineteenth century were far more effective in imagining and implementing colonial rule than any other form of colonial propaganda.
I see Mitchell’s analysis of the mechanisms of representation as a crucial step in interpreting contemporary urban spectacles. Yet his insistence on the totality of the ‘world-as-an-exhibition’ carries certain shortcomings. For example, he conceives of colonizer and colonized as two distinct (and internally homogeneous) entities. So much so, one wonders how the ‘colonized’ Egyptians ever had the mental resources to succeed in their fight for independence. In fact, ‘it is striking’, Robert Young says, that
today the dominant models often stress separateness, passing by altogether the process of acculturation whereby groups are modified through intercultural exchange and socialization with other groups. Since Sartre, Fanon and Memmi, postcolonial criticism has constructed two antithetical groups, the colonizer and the colonized, self and Other, with the second only knowable through a necessarily false representation, Manichean division that threatens to reproduce the static, essentialist categories it seeks to undo.9
Here, Young, builds on the work of Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, each of whom have reworked the sharp distinction between colonizer and colonized and emphasized the colonial relationship as one which irremediably colours all of its participants in different ways.10 Feminist criticism as well, by questioning the use of feminine imagery for the state, has brought a greater complexity to the analysis of representations of nation present in commemorative sculptures and investigating the relation between gender and nation.11
Feminists have argued that national ideals depicted in female allegories such as liberty, and the painting and sculpting of national sentiments onto women’s bodies, in turn reflect on the positive actions of real women in the society. In the words of the art historian Marina Warner,
a symbolized female presence both gives and takes values and meaning in relation to actual women, and contains the potential for affirmation not only of women themselves but of the general good they might represent and in which as half of humanity they are deeply implicated.12
In other words, the gendered representation of nation during state spectacles plays a significant role in the development and shaping of the citizen’s identity that might be quite complex.13
In my own work on architecture and festivals I do not look at the ideologies of spectacles nor how they serve as government propaganda. Such investigations may be valuable in their own right, but would leave the mechanisms of representation unquestioned in their assumptions that spectacle is a misrepresentation of reality. The spectacle I look at here is the bicentennial of the French Revolution held in Paris in 1989. Planned entirely by the French government, this event was (like the centennial Mitchell analysed) a large- scale representation of nations historically related to new republican governments and a commemoration of the events of the 1789 revolution in France. Unlike the centennial however, the bicentennial presented nations as complex mosaics of cultural exchange and not the ‘pure types’ of 100 years earlier. The bicentennial Bastille Day parade in particular, attempted to rework essentialist categories by blurring genres, inverting traditional hierarchies of race and class and proposing alternative female images to represent the French nation, liberty and the republic. It included an exceptionally intricate array of images drawn from a global popular culture and local postcolonial references mixing races and genres into a postmodern carnival- esque montage of image and music (Figure 7.1) In this essay, I focus on the terminus of the parade, a large plaza called Place de la Concorde, for its rich interplay of meaning and multiple interpretations.