Spectacle. Bright lights at dusk

Not only because of its ephemeral and blazing nature, but also because it seems to want to be looked at, a ball of fire crossing the sky acts as a moving symbol to think about spectacle. 

Fireworks, that impostor of visual and sound effects, artificially illuminating the darkness, speaks to the human fascination with fictional devices. For some, it is a sort of ghostly evocation; for others, a complex creative act, generating meaning and building community.

From the Latin spectare, the word spectacle means to contemplate, and to contemplate means "to focus attention on something material or spiritual": that is, we can contemplate both the visible and the invisible.

Although spectacle is often conceived as mere entertainment, it can be linked to play or ritual. 

As Paul Valéry rightly said: “The stage is a metaphysical place, like the altar and the courtroom. Civilisation begins there.” 

Theatre, music, and dance are fundamentals of a life in society where, before becoming voyeurs, witnesses, observers, or spectators, we once played the leading role. 

If, as Georges Bataille says, nothing defines humanity like fiction, to what extent has it been able to replace reality, to create new times and spaces? 

In his iconic book The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord addresses the possibility that the consolidation of capitalism and the emergence of the media changed the way the spectacle operates, no longer as social articulation, but as mere representation: 

“The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation among people, mediated by images.” 

Thus considered, the spectacle separates observers, makes them passive, and introduces them into a false awareness of time.

Paralysis of history and memory as the world of the image has become autonomous, the real world is absent.

The "media" (technological bodies transmitting information), rather than establishing themselves as a spatio-temporal link between two entities,  (spectacle and spectator) have become protagonists: media production is the spectacle itself, and today everything has an exhibition value.

From newspapers to the internet, through radio and television, mediatization has drastically transformed not only the initial character of the spectacle but also the typology of its spectators.

Sports and music fans, insatiable observers of paparazzi harassment, cinephiles, consumers of the art industry that has finally shown itself, in all its perversity.

Citizens attached to the most elaborate political simulation or to that strange mix of melodramatic idiosyncrasy that inhabits soap operas, a place which, as Carlos Monsiváis said, is the institutional mirror of societies.

In contrast, in his Praise of the Spectacle, Régis Debray questions whether this alienation of the type of man who “the more he contemplates, the less he lives” really occurs.

If the questions posed by theatrophobes and technophobes, who deny the artifices of representation is real, if it is possible to live "without the need for simulation, costumes, scenography, play". 

Without the need to see anything but oneself, to see what one is or—if, on the contrary, one can think—the real is incapable of uniting men. 

They can only unite through an imaginary mediation. As if the union required rituals, ceremonies, representations...” 

The complexity of the spectacle forces us to pause halfway between the most radical criticism of its condition as representation and its apology as “live and direct” information. 

What is undeniable is that in our times, the most primitive rituals coexist simultaneously with the most intangible ones: whether due to their digital nature or because the roles of all participants have been exchanged. 

Today we find ourselves with spectator-spectacles or with Chinese boxes of the gaze that make us interested in looking at who looks while being looked at. 

Without intending to take paths back, perhaps it is time to ask ourselves if the spectacle is a great autonomous entity that forever lost the benefits of fiction as a means of communion rather than communication

or if the key lies in the extension of the type of spectators (witnesses, voyeurs, citizens, consumers, fans) in which we can position ourselves.