Translated by Tanja Ohlsen

With a bright smile, a woman mops the floor in a large, sunny living room—she mops under the sofa, over various surfaces and pieces of furniture. A close-up shows how dust motes are attracted to the white cloth at the end of the mop as if magnetised. The oversized dust motes try to escape, but finally they realise that they don’t stand a chance and flee from the flat. The woman sends them a triumphant look, and the next cut shows how she easily removes the cloth and throws it into a dustbin.

I remember vividly to have watched such advertisements on TV as a child. I was sitting in our living room and, as far as I can remember, every time I ran to my mother—who always seemed to have something or other to do in another room—telling her what I just had seen and trying to convince her to buy this—or any other—product. My mother would then tell me not to believe everything I saw on TV. I, however, was convinced that the advertisement was right. More than that, its influence was so great that—had I been allowed to do so—I had sprinted to the next supermarket to buy the product. What I actually did later, as soon as I was old enough and had my own money—resulting in more or less disappointment. After all, I only need a fraction of all the things I am tempted to buy. Still I find myself being voluntarily influenced again and again. Worse: I knowingly participate in various mechanisms with increasing influence—on our consumerism, on sociopolitical conditions and last but not least on subject constituting processes in general.

However, there is a big difference between “then” and “now”—between advertising that was shown on the classic mass media TV and our contemporary digital culture: since the emergence of internet and—even more decisively—the proliferation of smartphones coming with its flood of social-media apps and the increasing prevalence of purely image-based features online, a paradigmatic change in the patterns of our behaviour and the structures of our desire can be observed. This leads to a basic change in the kind of influence technical media nowadays exert. The increasing symbiotic and prosthetic connection between body and smartphone or with digital networks has the effect, that we produce and consume in a mediated way anytime and anywhere. Digital media and its images are an integral part of our everyday practises today, through which we act consciously and by means of which we create actively new, speculative futures. As medially networked individuals, we live in a post-digital and image-based reality, dominated by an endless flood of images via production, circulation and consumption. One characteristic of the new status of mass circulation and procession of images is the role of recipients and producers which has become much more fluid than it was in the age of classical mass media like TV and radio, where roles were still clearly delineated. In the 1060s, Guy Debord described how media worked in his book Die Gesellschaft des Spektakels (1967) by using the concept of the “spectacle”. For Debord, the spectacle is marked by a condition in late capitalism in which a “mutual alienation” takes place, which is “the essence and the support of existing society” (Debord 1996a: 6), and in which “everything that was directly experienced” became a remote “representation” (ibid. 3,9)ⁱ or rather, where everything becomes a mere representation. In his Kommentare zur Gesellschaft des Spektakels (1988), Debord himself describes how the spectacle developed over time, or rather, how its nature changed in order to permeate social life with a new intensity and completeness (cf. Debord 1966b: 189-280, Crary 2014: 64). For Debord, the essential change lay in the development from a “diffuse” (1960) toward an “integrated spectacle” (1980s), “seeking to assert itself globally” (Debor 1966b: 200). According to Debord, the integrated spectacular is at the same time “concentrated and diffuse” (ibid.), since only in this way it can control those parts of society which had hitherto escaped it. That is possible, because it has “integrated itself into reality”, thereby restructuring it from within. Thus, the spectacle is no longer “opposed to reality as something alien”, but it has “merged with reality and contaminated it radioactively” (ibid. 201). In the face of digital technologies and digital networks, the spectacle transformed once more—a change McKenzie Wark describes as “disintegrating spectacle” (Wark 2011: 1117). This means that the spectacle still exists, but now it is fragmented: “Social media and the internet made it microscopic—still centrally controlled, but diffuse, and reproduced and reiterated through fragments” (Wark/Jacques 2013). Within the contemporary digital platform economy, algorithmic systems generate circular spectacle bubbles in which we are no longer mere spectators and/or consumers, but at the same time active producers. And above all, we become objects of consumption. In other words, the self becomes a hybrid figure consisting of a desubjectivized, depersonalised consumer and consumption object, as Jonathan Crary puts it (Crary 2014: 87). He points out that in the context of digital networks we are confronted with a “systemic colonisation of the individual experience”, where it is not most important to “capture the attention by a specific object (a film, a TV-programme or music) […], but its (attention) transformation to repetitive processes and reactions that permanently overlap with viewing or listening” (ibid.: 48). My hypothesis is, that this colonisation does not affect experience alone, it begins already earlier, at the level of desire. The “transformation” Crary means—given a “systemic colonisation of the desire”—a reshaping of desires towards repetitive desire loops. This manifests itself already in the act of reaching for the smartphone which embeds us within a structure of desire. Here, desire does no longer work through the external projection onto unattainable commodities or ideals, but is rather permanently and circularly modulated through algorithmic anticipation. In the face of digital media, we are faced with a new economy of desire.

Every reach for the smartphone, every digital image practise, whether posting, liking (even not-liking), lingering longer on one image, scrolling (whether faster or slower), clicking, sharing and further processing of images (to name just a few), is in itself an expression for our embeddedness within a digital, circular structure of desire which is bound up with the gaze. The many shimmering screens determining our everyday life prevent us from perceiving our immediate reality by directing our gaze exclusively towards them. Thus, they work as literal “screens”, shielding our vision and preventing us from truly seeing. These screens reflect the view of the platform and present only those objects of our desire that have been algorithmically calculated. Psychoanalytically spoken, it is always ourselves who are the object of gaze on the screen, where our unconscious desires appear. Jacques Lacan said: “What I see is never what I want to see” (Lacan 2015: 109). But because it appears on the screen, it acquires the character of an image and demands to be processed. The digital technologies provide “real” screens that move the boundary between subjectivity as a part of social and cultural systems and the subconscious as pure subjectivity.

Today, I nearly never watch TV. I don`t even own one. But I use my smartphone more often than I would like—even more often than I am willing to admit to myself. I swipe, scroll, tap and post, I share and I like—sometimes without remembering the time that passes while I am in my spectacle loop screening out the reality around me. The essence of our visual culture today is that, in opposition to earlier mass media, the fact that we ourselves are increasingly actively involved: we participate in our own dazzlement. The TV was a window to a (somewhat distant, but not completely alien) world. We saw a clear image, a segment into which we were sucked. It was a controlled, passive kind of consumption that could be turned on or off. With digital media, however, we find ourselves within another register, controlled by different temporality and movement. There is no “off” any longer, only “on”. Anytime, anywhere “on”, whether conscious or subconscious, willingly or unwillingly—even regardless of whether it is good for us or not. We are always “on”. Everything and everybody instantly becomes an image and functions only within the image logics of likes, shares and viral circulation. The virtual space is no longer a place we visit sporadically, but the exclusive arena for action, where identity, social matters and politics are negotiated and decided. The border between inside (privacy) and outside (public) is no longer existent: everything is one. And I make my self a part of it. I turn myself into an image(object) and work as a “poor image”. I produce pictures without depth and images of an illusion which itself has no other origin than an image. Because my starting point is no longer a reality that can be represented, but I am imitating prefabricated images. Faster, ever faster. No time to see. And there is nothing more to see, no before, no behind. Only “now”. Everything is “now”. Thus we are in principle prevented from seeing and instead addressed through the gaze—that is, our desire. The like-button in particular (or other feedback functions and extended reaction systems), plays a major part in this, since it directly links the image to our desire. With the like-button we search for the gaze of others and orient ourselves by the number of likes—we allow ourselves be influenced and dazzled. In today’s economy of desire, the many shimmering screens hold us back in a virtual time of now—an imaginary—by redirecting our gaze solely towards themselves and returning an algorithmic gaze to us, so that we are no longer able to see reality (as also past and future) as a whole.

Crary, J. (2014). 24/7: Schlaflos im Spätkapitalismus. Berlin, Germany: Verso.

Debord, G. (1996a). Die Gesellschaft des Spektakels. Berlin, Germany: Edition Tiamat.

Debord, G. (1996b). Kommentare zur Gesellschaft des Spektakels. In G. Debord, Die Gesellschaft des Spektakels (pp. 189–280). Berlin, Germany: Edition Tiamat.

Lacan, J. (2015). Die vier Grundbegriffe der Psychoanalyse: Das Seminar. Buch XI (p. 109). Vienna & Berlin: Turia + Kant.

Wark, M. (2011). Spectacles of disintegration. Social Research, 78(4), 1115–1132.

Wark, M., & Jacques, J. (2013, 16 May). Spectacles of disintegration: An interview with McKenzie Wark. New Statesman. https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/05/spectacle-disintegration

Marie-France Rafael (Dr. phil) is a professor for "Art in Context" at the Zurich University of the Arts. She studied Art History and Film Studies in Berlin and Paris. From 2011 to 2015 she was a research associate at the Free University of Berlin and until 2019 at the Muthesius University Kiel, Department of Spatial Strategies/Curatorial Spaces. In her research, writing, and teaching, she seeks to theorise the role played by contemporary art in human agency and social practises. In work she explores how the entanglement of art with cultural and social practises is always reflective of a historical moment. This has led her to focus on how digitalisation in contemporary art has taken on a new kind of presence—it is no longer just a virtual sphere of sociality, but increasingly, a technological interface that structures our embodied experiences. Her research and teaching is guided by questions on art and cultural history, gender constructions, image and media theory. Her books include among others Raphaela Vogel: Outside Form (Floating Opera Press, 2023), Passing images: art in the post-digital age (Floating Opera Press, 2022) and Reisen ins Imaginativ: künstlerische Situationen und Displays (Walther König, 2017).

[1] In the German edition, the term “Vorstellung” is used as a translation of the French “représentation” (Debord, La Société du Spectacle, 15); however, in my opinion, the term “Repräsentation” seems more appropriate here, as it allows for a broader, both factual and conceptual, dimension of the realm of representation.