The Spectacle of Gender

In this GenderCraft essay I use philosopher Guy Debord's abstraction of "The Spectacle" to explain how mass ideological alignment around the nonsense of Gender Identity is accomplished

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

We exist within, and are in continuous interaction with, a system of political-economy we call market capitalism. It’s productive capacity and dynamism is incomparable to anything we’ve seen in history. Like any system with scale and longevity, it carries within it two contradictory tendencies: first, expanding itself along all available dimensions and second, maintaining its own legitimacy. The emergence of crises is an inevitable and expected result of capitalism’s tendency towards expansion and disruption. This naturally requires the constant innovation of mechanisms for the maintenance of stability and legitimacy.

With the expansion of the pursuit of profit to every nook and cranny of our lives - from the social fabric that is meant to binds us together all the way down to our individual psyches - one would guess that the nature and the scale of the resultant crises would manifest in unprecedented forms of destabilization. The reality is that the system is more stable than ever. A compelling model to explain this seeming contradiction is the abstraction that the philosopher Guy Debord describes as “The Spectacle”.

The spectacle grasped in its totality is both the result and the project of the existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corollary consumption. The spectacle’s form and content are identically the total justification of the existing system’s conditions and goals. The spectacle is also the permanent presence of this justification, since it occupies the main part of the time lived outside of modern production.
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

Simply put, the capitalist system neither asks for permission nor seeks forgiveness for its incursions into the viscera of our lives: economic, social or personal. Its current form of legitimation is an organic reflex of its constituent media and communication apparatus: it confidently and assertively shows us the world that we are becoming, that the economic system is willing us to become, in the most vivid and emotive forms possible. The Spectacle inescapable parade of sights and sounds that washes away the comparatively mundane reality of our experienced lives with a hyperreality that surrounds us and demands acceptance. The scale and synchronous nature of the Spectacle entrains and implicates all of us simultaneously. In its prevalence we intuit a social consensus which, given our social nature, reinforces its truth to us.

But seeing and believing isn’t enough - we need, in the end, to make some sort of sense of the world we believe is true. The “justification” that Debord mentions as being implicit in the Spectacle seeks to be given an explicit ideological form. This isn’t done by clever capitalists scheming in corporate boardrooms. The task is left to us, the parishioners in the church of market ideology. We so desperately need to make sense of what we see and feel that we seek or invent mysticisms to comprehend the incomprehensible.

This is a participatory project that plays out over time and operates under evolutionary rules. As reality furnished to us by the Spectacle changes, we are compelled to take the fictions that help us navigate society and evolve them to match our new realities. Our fictions are mutated and recombined with novel ones, plucked from the infinite buffet of random ideas churned out by society. We try them on, one after the other, and see which ones best reduce our cognitive dissonance. Most of these fictions are snuffed out of existence before we know about them; some have modest success before retreating back into non-relevance; very few pass the gauntlet of grinding ideological competition and achieve resonance with the prevailing social/political/economic forces. The successful fictions are then animated with feverish emotion and obsessive ritual until they rise like golems and get absorbed back into the Spectacle that first demanded their existence. In this way they become an indisputable part of the “unrealism of the real society”. Gender Identity is one such golem.

Concisely, what we are made to see in the Spectacle is what ultimately defines what we believe is real. What we believe to be real is what we construct fictions around, sometimes small and sometimes batshit crazy, in order to reconcile ourselves to this inescapable “realness”. Per this account, Gender Identity, in its widely adopted form, can be understood as a fiction that we needed to help us make sense of things that our we could not otherwise reconcile ourselves to. There is a significant number changes in the world, as we’ve come to believe it to be, which benefits from the existence of this mysticism.

One specific example: Westerners in the past decade started facing a novel reality within the Spectacle: their trusted institutions (medical and otherwise) were taking children with emotional distress and recommending that they reconfigure their bodies with hormones and surgery as a medically necessary intervention for that distress. That no logic that follows from a scientific/naturalist account of human psychological and physiological development could link the commonplace symptoms to the absurdist prescriptions was irrelevant. The “omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in production” (in this case drugs and surgery) meant that we start with unwavering faith in the conclusion; the task left to us is to simply to work back from there and make the impossible logic work. The fiction of an innate Gender Identity bridges that gap (shimmed with a constellations of ancillary justifications). It speaks of an immaterial mold within each of us, one that the cosmetic surgeons, endocrinologists and psychiatrists are simply working to reform our faulty bodies and social expression to adhere to. With the fiction of Gender Identity in hand, the world can make sense once more.

All that is solid ionizes into plasma

In a world dominated by the Spectacle, not only has the source for determining reality changed but so has the experience of it. As Debord says in the opening paragraph of his book: “everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.” More and more of our reality is made up by apparitions absent material correlates, symbolic abstractions for which we have no physical experience, references without resolvable referents.

Our descent into a world mediated by pure imagery does not mean that we no longer have a visceral experience of realness. What it means is that what is “directly lived” is no longer privileged in its ability to trigger that visceral sense. The evocative sights and sounds of the Spectacle come to mean as much and ultimately more in resolving truth and realness in the world.

Complex symbolic abstractions that were once thick with meaning have slowly severed the threads that bind them to the material world. At the same time their superficial dimensions, the ones that can be mediated by the Spectacle and the market imperatives it represents, become ascendent. A century or more of marketing that has bombard us with images of women as shallow visual adornments for products was just the start. The internet and the advent of social media has resulted in a transformation in our intuitive sense of the sexed form of the human mammal.

Atomized, alienated, endlessly scrolling through an infinite stream of influencers and pornography our experience of other human beings, and their sexed reality, is now informed overwhelmingly by impossible two-dimensional caricatures. The everyday encounters with men and women, as shaped through interpersonal relationships in the physical world, gave us a sense of them as varied and complex social creatures. Those ideas, of people possessing depth and nuance, have slowly been eclipsed by the endless stream of commodified images of depersonalized bodies adorned with products; parasocial bonds displacing the need for relationships. In such a world, the idea that the significance and meaning of the sexed categories is encoded entirely in their superficial presentation becomes incrementally more intuitive.

In the Society of the Spectacle, everything that is worthwhile about you is cosmetic and everything you wish to be is therefore accessible through cosmetic modification. A metaphysics that suggests that the superficial form (even a synthetically produced one) is what confers meaning to our sexed categories is, more and more every day, an easier pill to swallow. The religious conviction that your essence is prescribed by divine will is displaced by a conviction that our essence is defined by our consumer choices. The Spectacle not only ensures that the choice made in production is uncritically accepted, it naturalize the product itself.

Extrapolating Out

I’m fairly certain that the fiction of Gender Identity will slowly recede back into the shadows. Out of the many fictions we’ve allowed ourselves to entertain, this one seems especially at odds with the facts of the material world and the contradictions will ultimately reach the point of rupture. What its temporary success does illustrate to me are the unbounded horizons of unreality that we can be willingly nudged towards.

The ever accelerating nature of capitalism, especially in its attempts to mine our interiority for profit, means that what we will have to come to terms with ever more dramatic “choices already made in production”. Absent a capacity for simple skepticism towards the reality beamed into our eyes, these choices, and their individual and social impacts, will require ever more elaborate fictions to justify.

Put in simple terms, shit’s gonna get crazy.