By Michael Templeton
A man walked into a local bank, right in the symbolic center of the city itself, and randomly opened fire on anyone he saw in the bank. He killed three people. This was one of numerous events just like it around the United States. Random shootings occur with such frequency that they pass with barely a notice. People react with a modicum of shock. Public officials make their pronouncements of sympathy and outrage. By now, there are internet memes mocking the obligatory “thoughts and prayers” offered by political leaders. Then there are symbolic calls for gun legislation. The defenders of the second amendment push back. All the same bullshit gets exchanged. It is a dull round that disappears from memory almost as soon as it happens.
Soon after this happened, everything went back to normal. The events of the day consisted of local crimes, a nod to the “important events of the nation,” and sports and weather. After devoting hours of airtime to the event, images of the event went to their websites where it stayed for months. Scroll through the day’s events and at the bottom of the page you find a replay of the horrible shooting. The event simultaneously disappears and remains suspended in perpetual image-time. The event of the horrible shooting faded quickly, but the images of the event remained suspended in cyber-time—remained suspended in a space that has no space and a time that is disconnected from the passing of real human time. The usual vapid feel-good stories of children who survive cancer and local churches doing great things for the community, etc. But the fact is, people forgot about the shooting. And yet, images of the shooting persisted on social media for weeks. The event was instantly superseded by the rush of other events, and the relative significance of events did not matter. Or rather, the significance of events was and is weighted according to criteria which may or may not have anything to do with the humane value of events or the impact events may have on everyday life. The event of the shooting simply got washed away in the flood of new events. However, the images persist online and on various other electronic media.
The time of events is fleeting. The time in which individuals can engage images of the event is different. There are two forms of time: the synchronic time of the image which remains constant, and diachronic time of everyday life which changes from day to day—even moment to moment. The synchronic time of the image is the time available for exchange; diachronic time belongs to individuals and has no exchange value. Yet, in both cases, the events are mediated by images. There is image-time in the present, and there is perpetual, or cyclical image-time. The immediacy of the event is unknowable except for a few people. Participation and consumption of images of the event unfolds in two different strata of time.
Shootings like this occur with regularity in the United States, and the fallout is precisely the same in just about every case. There is the event, the momentary media signification of the event—this includes the pollical stage-show, and then instant forgetting except for the images of the event which replay forever. Any and all knowledge of events is mediated by images. Symbolic participation happens via images. Immediacy is instantaneously overtaken and subsumed by mediation, and the force of events are instantaneously overtaken by the dislocated isolation of time that has no duration. Situating a mediated presence into the past of real events, individuals remove themselves from actual life. Mediation and consumption of the image become supplements to lived experience. Hashtags serve to insinuate words into online mediated participation and remove any and all substance. “#grief” takes the place of grief as a signifier for the complex set of lived emotions which constitute grief. Life becomes a system of empty signifiers in the no-time of mediated images of things which no longer exist.
Our modern experience of time is one in which everything takes place on an abstract plane of continuous play. The time of immediate events is immediately lost. Even those who lived the experience and horror of a random shooting are forgotten. The time of abstraction in the form of endless images remains eternal. The only thing which has meaning is the eternal time of the images of events. Like the abstract space of the highway, we live in the abstract time of the stream of images. We are no longer even contained by the images of a day; we now participate in an eternity of images in cyber-time where the images of the events can and do play on forever. Since few of us will ever experience the horror of a random shooting, but everyone needs to know that they are participants in such events. The masses are able to insinuate themselves into the spectaculum of the events via consumption of the images. We are now able to transform consumption into an interactive pseudo-experience with the use of hashtags on social media. The shooting in Cincinnati led to #cincinnatistrong. Sympathy and support are provided by proxy with the use of the hashtag. When others use or search the hashtag, those who used it will be recognized via their images as participants in the horrifying event. The event exists in image-time and individual participation in the event is created through the hashtag and places individual images into the image-time of the event. The hashtag guarantees that once we insert our own image-participation, it will become part of the grand flow of other image-participations.
At the same time, the insertion of signifiers into the stream of images guarantees eternal separation from actual events. I gain access to the stream of images which signify the event, and I am able to remove myself to a space of non-existence. I do not even need to be a real person in order to insinuate my participation in the stream of images which constitute my image-participation. “I” exist in the eternal time of separation and isolation. The mediation of the consumable of event forecloses any real contact between real people. Participation by proxy in the image-time of the event is paid for with complete isolation in the world of physical lived experience. Image-time is the time of the commodity. Images are commodities exchanged endlessly in the market of commodities. This is a time outside of time. It unfolds without regard for everyday life. Image-time takes place in the heaven of the commodity where exchange follows the cyclical time of eternity. Everything always comes back to where it was. Like the cyclical time of the pre-modern world in which time was nothing more than the endless cycles of nature and God, the time of commodities and the time of the image endlessly comes back to an eternal present tense so that each new day offers the same exchangeable image of the event.
This all comes to the schiz between human time, the time that is lived by bodies in the world, and pseudo-cyclical time, time-as-commodity. Lived time, the time of everyday life, has no value, has no meaning unless it is entered into the ledgers of exchange. The time of people’s lives is meaningless until it takes on the false form of objectification in spectacular form. Experience must be projected onto the screen of the spectacle in order to take on meaning and value. Time only has meaning and value to the extent that time has exchange value, to be precise. There is no time unless it can be exchangeable for either more time or something else of value. What I do is meaningless and insignificant-- remains unsignified-- except insofar as that time enters into the system of exchange as a commodity like all other commodities. Time measured by a clock which is calibrated against all other clocks, churning out regulated blocks of time each of which carries a specific value measured against other units of value, forever amen—this is the only time that is substantial. The great irony is that this “substantial” time is nothing but abstraction. The time of living bodies is material. It cannot be measured against any other standard other than itself. Time-as-commodity can be measured, quantified, and valued. It has no substance, but it is all that can be known. Time-as-commodity takes on the appearance of cyclical time because it is experienced as perpetually renewing itself with every new day the market finds value in the representations of time. It is pseudo-cyclical time to the extent that it “is in fact merely the consumable disguise of the time-as-commodity of the production system, and it exhibits the essential traits of time: homogeneous exchangeable units, and the suppression of any qualitative dimension” (Debord, 110). While the time of image-participation unfolds in the seemingly infinite duration of cyclical time, it is in fact discreetly measured units of time. The perception of a cyclical or eternal presence of the representation of events persists only as long as replaying these events constitutes marketable, consumable, and profitable units of time. We who experience this pseudo-cyclical time forfeit our lived experience in favor of participation in image-time, the time of the image which exists in pseudo-cyclical time. Isolation and separation become the fate of individuals as we hand over our experience to image-participation in pseudo-cyclical time. In the end, our failure to commit to time as commodity will de-value representations. At which point, representations of events and our vicarious position as participants will dissolve. We and the event will fade back into the anonymity of the unsignified, unknowable, and irrelevant ephemera.
As the time of lived experience fades into the illegible under the eternal time of time-as-commodity, the time marked by image-participation, lived experience becomes another commodity. Our real lived experience pales in comparison to the experience we gain by those experiences prescribed and offered by the spectacle. Waiting for experiences to be signified by the generators of images of experience, we simply find our external space of experience and insinuate ourselves into it. We become apparitions taking possession of the outward forms of experience, and lived experience is devalued and denatured:
The dominant trait of the spectacular-metropolitan ethos is the loss of experience, the most eloquent symptom of which is certainly the formation of that category of “experience”, in the limited sense that one has “experiences” (sexual, athletic, professional, artistic, sentimental, ludic, etc.). In the Bloom, everything results from this loss, or is synonymous with it. Within the Spectacle, as with the metropolis, men never experience concrete events, only conventions, rules, an entirely symbolic second nature, entirely constructed. It imposes there a radical schism between the insignificance of everyday life, called “private”, where nothing happens, and the transcendence of a history frozen in a sphere called “public”, to which no one has access. (Theory of the Bloom, 48)
Everyday life, private life—this is where nothing ever happens because “real” experience cannot be known or understood outside the performances constructed by the spectacle. Image time is constructed according to algorithms, SEO analysis, “hits” on social media accounts—these are the metrics of experience, and we are left behind in the day to day which takes place in a void. Time is an abstract formal eternity in the infinite space of the image-sphere.
Lived experience takes its meaning from an other scene, as it were. Something of an unconscious provide meaning for lived experience, but this unconscious is not within individual minds. It is now the projection of experience into the spectacular realm of image-time, or pseudo-cyclical time. The world of images is not subject to the passage of time. All images are simultaneous. All are old and new at the same time. Freud said that the unconscious has no time; it is always present, and every feature of the unconscious is always present. Our present world projects this into the heaven of images, and our own inner life and inner world withers from inanity. Everyday life is now the impoverished and banal content which exists to reveal the latent content of images. What is my life if I do not have followers on Instagram? And the Real of my life is of no consequence in comparison to the images which stand in for me. Everyday life is now an illusion.
Even as an event as horrifying as a mass shooting, a mass shooting at school, even—nothing can merit the status of a real event until it has been evacuated of its interior substance and rendered as a timeless event in the world of images, in the world that is the spectacle. My individual forgetting of the event, anyone’s individual forgetting of the event is perfectly acceptable because there is an external form of the internal memory in the form of image-time which remembers for us in the manner of a prayer wheel. We do not need to send thoughts and prayers, the heaven of images is perpetually sending thoughts and prayers for us.
The medieval Great Chain of Being sutured everyone to a specific place in the cosmos. At the center and circumference of everything, there was God. The orders of being descended from heaven to earth and the King occupied the place of God’s vice-regent in this fallen world which included the passage of time. At the level of the individual, nothing mattered because one’s place was ordained and guaranteed by this divine order. The passage of time was marked by the passage of the seasons and the days. What happened on one day was only distinguishable from what happened on another day to the extent that the events were either present or past. There was no causality to events because causality was in the hands of God. The cycles of time were performed in the holy offices of the Church and at local festivals which marked the passing of one season to the next. But all time would cycle back to the same thing. Time was cyclical. Knowledge of the passing of time was projected outward onto the heavens which directed the passing of time.
In the pseudo-cyclical time of the spectacle, time once again belongs elsewhere. The passing of time and the significance of time are marked by spectacular performances. The cycle is sustained in the manner of pre-modern cyclical time by spectacular performances which mark the passing of events. But pseudo-cyclical time, the time of images, lacks the guarantee of God and the Great Chain of Being. Its eternal status is sustained by the fact that it is eternally consumable. Every image is just as consumable as every other image and in precisely the same way. You can download Bach’s St. John Passion as easily as you can download a digital cum shot. So it is that the consumable images of the shooting at the bank take on the eternal cycle of cyclical time. All mass shootings take on this cyclical disguise, when in fact they are nothing more than consumable images generated for the sole purpose of being consumed. As we consume them, our sense that we are participating in the Great Chain of Modern Events allows us to extract ourselves from real events and remain in our isolated pockets of emptiness. Like the medieval serfs whose lives were immaterial non-events in pre-modern culture, we have taken an analogous position of insignificant peasants under the heaven of image-time.
As our individual relations to actual events are overtaken by our solitary relations to the images of events, so our relations to each other have kept pace. The singular events of our lives are made real to the extent that they are linked to the events in image-time. Everyone who posted a photograph, a quotation from a great thinker, a prayer, a remembrance, etc. who also linked these things with the hashtag #cincinnatistrong became participants in the series of images which mark the event of the shooting. Anyone who did not use the hashtag remained completely isolated. And yet, the linkages of the hashtag are only made manifest to the extent that they are linked in image-time. The isolation of individual participants remains, and the hollowness of the sentiments becomes more pronounced as these words and images are pulled into the swirl of spectacular time and the logic of the spectacle. The endlessly exchangeable status of images and image-participation is ultimately subject to the same logic as any other image or any other commodity. Professions of faith, sympathy, and commitment rise into the ether of the image. A prayer is an image of a prayer is an image and only an image: a thing of nothing. Any images which may have taken on a life beyond the image-time of the event took its value entirely from its status as an object of exchange. The use-value of the prayer, if there is such a thing, is rendered ephemeral at best in its becoming a form of exchange-value. Individuals, in the beginning and the end, remains isolated monads delinked from the validity and reality of events and each other. The purported bond of the hashtag serves only to distance and isolate. Individual monads participate in isolation together.
The net result of the loss of real experience is the fission between individuals which is an overall dissolution of community. In the grand suburban existence that is contemporary America, a new metropolitan existence has come to define life. As experience is given over to the formal display of experience in the heaven of pseudo-cyclical time, the inevitable isolation among individuals takes on the form of experience rather than experience. The modern metropolis is a form without substance and experience consists of the images of substance without form. “At which point the loss of experience and the loss of community are one and the same” (The Bloom, 52). We live the supplement of life in the image. The throbbing metropolis is the dystopic non-place of empty space and timeless time: “In the metropolis, man purely undertakes the trial of his negative condition. Finitude, solitude and display, which are the three fundamental coordinates of that condition, weave the decor of the existence of each within the grand village. Not the fixed decor, but the moving decor, the combinational decor of the grand village, for which everybody endures the icy stench of their non-places” (The Bloom, 50). Image-time, pseudo-cyclical time, the non-space of the interstate—all of this serves the sprawling non-place of the modern metropolis where nothing is, where isolation offset by meaningless display define the emptiness of everyday life.
With this isolation and emptiness comes the outward display of false commitment and performances of substance. The more lived life becomes devoid of anything which could be construed as intrinsically meaningful, the more the performance of values and commitments becomes important. It is only the mass of isolated individuals living in self-imposed exile of unwilling anonymity which partakes of the empty image-participation which serves only to further their isolation. The image takes over for life as it is actually lived, and everyday life is devalued and rendered meaningless:
Images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost forever. Apprehended in a partial way, reality unfolds in a new generality as a pseudo-world apart, solely as an object of contemplation. The tendency toward the specialization of the images-of-the-world finds its highest expression in the world of the autonomous image, where deceit deceives itself. (Debord, 12)
Images become the lie which stands in for real lived life, and the even the lie begins to believe itself. The reality of everyday life is supplanted by the image lodged in pseudo-cyclical time. In this way, the metropolis, or the suburban world in the United States, becomes the empty space of unreality where no meaningful connection can be established between individuals because the grid on which meaning and understanding can be established has been projected from the ground of life onto the non-life of the spectacle. Space and time no longer exist in the world of living individuals. Space and time are in the domain of images and commodity exchange. A projection of interior life which is in fact a performance of a pre-scripted form of life effectively negates interior life. The hashtags which constitute image-participation in the spectacular event of a mass shooting are the forms of belief which stand for an overall lack of belief. This is to say that individuals do not and cannot sustain real belief in anything like sympathy, grief, or even faith since these things have been evacuated of their content and replaced with images of sympathy, grief, and faith. Real people in the world cannot sustain these things in everyday life because everyday life has no content. Content is projected out into the formless spectacle, and the forms of life left to individuals have become devoid of content. It is under the dominance of image-time and the non-space created by the interstate that we arrive at our current state of contemporary life in the suburban metropolis where the logic of the Bloom takes shape:
The Bloom cannot take part in the world in an internal way. It never enters there except in the exception of itself. That is why it presents such a singular tendancy towards distraction, deja-vu, cliche, and above all, an atrophie of the memory which confines it inside an eternal present. And that is why it is so exclusively sensitive to music, which alone can offer it abstract sensations -- it would here be necessary to evoke velocity and “friction coefficient”, which are also bloomesque pleasures, but this time it is abstraction itself which appears to them as sensation. (The Theory of the Bloom, 54)
It is only a people devoid of faith who feel the need to declare their faith with grotesque gestures and monuments. Thoughts and prayers for the victims of random shootings come from a population whose thoughts come in prescribed images and for whom prayers are histrionic performances of a total lack of faith. There are no more compelling atheists than those who do tricks in the service of faith. Creation theme parks, grotesque statues of Jesus Christ, religion.com, and professional Christians abound in this metropolis of emptiness. In this suburban metropolis devoid of substance where all that remains is the form of life, a diabolical inversion of belief takes the place of belief. Even as the heartfelt declarations of horror and sympathy poured out for the victims of the mass shooting, the individuals who authored these sentiments betray the fact that they no longer have access to the very conditions on which such sentiments can be formed. Isolation and contempt for everyone else are the only real attributes of the suburban metropolis.
He who cannot do anything but play with life needs the gesture, so that his life may become more real than a game adjustable in all directions. In the world of merchandise, which is the world of generalized reversibility, where all things blend together and transform into one another, where everything is only ambiguity, transition, ephemerality and blending, only the gesture settles once and for all. In the flash of its necessary brutality it cuts out the “after” that is insoluble in its “before”, which the ONE will regretfully have to recognize as definitive.
Michael Templeton is an independent scholar, writer, and musician. He completed his Ph.D. in literary studies at Miami University of Ohio in 2005. He has published scholarly studies and written cultural analysis, creative non-fiction, and poetry published in small independent publications. He currently works as a freelance writer providing articles for a non-profit called the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition. He lives in Cincinnati, Ohio with his wife who is an artist.
References
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books,1995.
The Invisible Committee. Theory of the Bloom. Tr. Robert Hurley. Creative Commons. 2012.
