The Stage of Power

Abstract

THE IMMEDIATELY NEGATIVE PERCEPTION of the word linked to the word has complex origins. It arises from a tradition as old as it is persistent, which can be located very precisely in Plato, where the notion of spectacle is associated with illusion, simulacrum, artifice (and as such, necessarily opposed to the exigency of truth). Further, the play of illusion, as a concern with appearances or as the of power, remains associated in our historical memory with a time of ostentatious luxury and the privileges of the powerful. Thus, it is associated with an era of striking inequalities that the social revolutions from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century have aimed to abolish. More recently, and more seriously, we cannot forget the way in which the Nazis and the Fascists elaborated a whole art of staging and managed to play on the fascinating effect of mass parades. The idea of a stage of power does indeed seem suspect. Today, however, the problem is very different: the most ordinary political activity is transformed, via audio-visual means, into a kind of collective game, reduced to being only a variant of the generalized spectacle of which even the daily news is a part. Hence there is an increasingly banal confusion between public space and private space, between the citizen and the consumer, between the political realm and that of the marketplace. This leads public representation to depend on an image that must be made as attractive as possible, in order to win the competition decided by the electors. Everything happens as if the principal duty of a political class, made up of paid professionals, was to occupy the so-called public stage, to play set parts as efficiently as possible, and to prepare themselves for the verdict of the citizens, on precise dates, based less on their platforms than on the quality of their performance in the media. One might underline the fact that such a game is inherent to the democratic system, which supposes a plurality of choices, and demands of those incarnating them to win public opinion. But must this be at the expense of confusing convincing with seducing? Surely not. However, one must immediately object: can one manage without this seduction? Is it not part and