Fear and Spectacle on the Planet of Slums

Abstract

This paper seeks to better understand the structure of feeling in Western liberal democracies following the spectacular terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Numerous commentators have made the case that the post-9/11 era is marked by a new form of political domination—one distinguished by fear. It’s argued that an “emerging spectacle of terrorism” has displaced older forms of fascist and consumer spectacles. Here, fear is viewed as a key “organizing principle” in a symbolic universe in which an abundance of the Real displaces simulacrum. Instead of the spectacular organization of the polity through consumerism, social domination is secured through the spectacle of terror and fear. This paper challenges this argument, and with it the suggestion that political communication be understood as post-representative. Following Raymond Williams, the paper investigates the production of global affect by asking what is dominant, what is residual and what is emergent about the spectacle of fear? In doing so it argues that the spectacle of commodity production remains firmly integrated with the state and the regime of capitalist globalization and renewed forms of primitive accumulation. Victims of spectacular forms of “accumulation by dispossession” in Western societies and the global South are now visible to each other, exposing the fearful terrain of the global affect of the Real.