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, The Society of The Spectacle (1967).

The social critic Theodor Adorno famously complained that a modern alliance of culture and entertainment both debased culture and elevated frivolous amusement.  It is unlikely he would have approved of Intelligence Squared, whose well-attended and very well-broadcast public talks promise “discussion, conversation, and sexy debate”. 

On 23 February the organisation put on a talk in the British Council’s Cadogan Hall in London in partnership with the BBC and Our Shared Europe.  The motion of the evening, chaired by the BBC’s efficient and statuesque presenter Zeinab Badawi, was “Europe is Failing Its Muslims” (how we love these violently reductive provocations).  Supporting the motion were Swiss scholar and writer Tariq Ramadan and Petra Stienen, formerly a Dutch diplomat in the Middle East, and a senior adviser in social development.  For the opposition was Douglas Murray, controversial neoconservative columnist and director at The Centre for Social Cohesion.  His second was the Danish illustrator and journalist Fleming Rose, who infamously commissioned the Jyllands-Posten cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, which fuelled violent condemnations and counter-condemnations across the globe in 2007.  Rose has not lived peacefully since, and his reputation was a reason for the neon column of police vans outside the building.

Intelligence Squared debates follow the “Oxford style”: each speaker is given six minutes to develop their case, after which there is a period of free argument across both sides and time for responses and questions from the floor.  The debates are recorded with a live audience and shortly afterwards the edited versions are launched with great efficacy onto Youtube, television, radio and iTunes.  The net the organisation casts is vast - an estimated 72 million have watched their debates on BBC World News alone.

That figure is a striking signal of how knowledge exchange and the political economy have changed and been re-codified in the age of mass communication.  The easy dissemination of visual material (persuasive by its mimetic qualities) has changed our relationship to information, so that our consumption of it is passive but total.  We read, download, watch, stream with the habituated assumption that these processes will be swift and untaxing.  However, when sight is elevated as the pre-eminent sense in a society and takes pride of place as the domain where knowledge can be consumed, its members are not activated as participants, but as spectators.  In this system, images and facts are deemed authentic and easily understood simply by their proliferation and accessibility.  The pseudo-proximity of a world mediated by images, however, conceals the fact that we are no longer engaged with genuine lived experience.

In Cadogan Hall, cameramen circled the speakers on their illuminated platform, and swept past the audience on wheels down the aisles.  Badawi trailed to the camera, and directed the affair with imposing telegenic authority.  It seemed that the event’s dominant objective - to be transmitted across the world as an arresting, topical piece of public broadcasting - was the main reason for its vague, unengaged atmosphere on the evening itself.

When public debate and political life meet as spectacles or performances –as this one did- the omniscience of the camera makes genuine interaction near-impossible.  There was a sense of profound self-doubt in the audience at “Europe is failing its Muslims”.  The camera lens wields a unique power and authority; when people are aware of it, their submissiveness is instinctive.  The prospect of being seen by the camera – known by it, seized in time by its gaze – engenders in the subject an extraordinary moderation and self-reflexivity.  Dissent is extinguished, complexity ironed out.

Here no embarrassment or slip-up can go unseen or be forgotten.  Once committed to the tape, failure exists forever, so it is best to avoid trouble altogether.  Everyone at the event understood that this piece existed for a mass audience, and that they were therefore implicated in its construction.  Thus the event was not really present at the point of its origin – caught in a limbo between everwhereness and nowhereness, it could never be grasped.

As the debate progressed, even the speakers became dispirited with the realisation that they were mired in little more than an empty simulation of exchange, that they had been lured into unholy reductionisms.  But then, this wasn’t a dialogue – it was a piece of theatre, straining with a sense of confusion and vagueness which the organisers had to conceal.  The potential for productive complexity in this exchange was crushed by the very fact that public debate now only exists in the virtual domain of mass media.

The work of the sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard considered how interactive technologies have supplanted political life and industrial production as the dominant principles that organise society.  In Simulacra and Simulation (1981), Baudrillard describes a transformation from society where the mode of production dominates to one where the main social principle is the code of production.  In this new condition, all of social life is structured by and mediated through signs, so that even labour no longer exists as an active force of production, but is simply a sign in the midst of a world of signs – an expression of one’s social position and incorporation into wider society.

For Baudrillard, the modern age is governed by an excess of representation and reproduction, and signs are now the primary determinants of social life.  However, where the representation of something begins to stand for that something - creates that thing’s reality and precedes it as a sign – it becomes increasingly difficult to discern “the real” from the symbolic copy. Thus, according to Baudrillard, we have no means to distinguish the authentic thing from its simulation.  The two have merged irreversibly so that the virtual is now also the real – a “hyperreal”.

Even the deployment of statistical data and opinion polls fits into the model of public life as spectacle.  With their simplified theatricality, produced in an atmosphere of sensory and informational excess, such quantitative abridgements exist with a samey dead-end meaninglessness.  Though statistics pack a dramatic and persuasive clout, and are consequently used and repeated with abandon, they are little more than instructive simulations: they announce that something is supposedly a certain way and people adjust their opinions, assumptions and social behaviour accordingly.  With the spectacle of media as the dominant mode, public televised debates like this one structure social space and determine people’s relationship to the world.

I’m sure that Intelligence Squared resist the idea that televised debate is homogenizing, and maintain that it is potentially enlightening, cohesive, dynamic - and in the public interest.  In their mission statement, they insist that there exists across the British public a “pent-up demand for participating in the intellectual struggles of the day”, and that its “hunger […] to be involved in such intellectual tournaments is undeniable”.  Many would argue – as Douglas Murray did – that such events are important and productive reflections of our society’s tendency to democracy.  Indeed, Murray rebutted the idea that Muslims were undervalued and demonised in Europe by claiming that the very existence of such a debate was proof of Europe’s tolerance, nay its “suicidal generosity”.  Although Murray dutifully played the role of the dashingly intolerant and intolerable quipper, the audience murmured their collective acquiescence on this point.

However, the idea that televised public debate or news is implicitly valuable is trotted out without much reflection.  This kind of event isn’t necessarily beneficial to everyday life and social attitudes at all.  It isn’t even informative, in the strictest sense of the word.  If anything, it is dis-informative.  Although the very fact that events like this debate are organised so frequently seems to tell us that our society is politically engaged, reflective and informed, this is not necessarily true.  This kind of exchange of information does not mobilise the social field – it deactivates it.  In fact, I would dare say that public debate’s overproduction in the media (through televisation, streaming, blogging) stands in direct proportion to the degree to which authentic public engagement has disappeared.  That which is absent in real life can always be generated in the auditorium, cutting room and interface. But when social relations are determined by the terms of media communications, the result is the growing erosion of social life.

The televised debate is now available on the Intelligence Squared website. However, the withdrawn, unengaged, apathetic nature that swam in Cadogan Hall that night is not apparent in the edited program: the tightly regulated lethargy is well-concealed by the sensuality of the spectacle. But then, no matter what happened in real life, “Europe is Failing its Muslims” was always destined to succeed as a broadcast. I fear we would not tolerate anything less.