Spectacle over substance | The Express Tribune

Among the misuses of technology, one is its use for publicity stunts and self-advertising gimmicks. People who are the anthropomorphic expressions of TS Eliot’s hollow men resort to self-exhibitionism, which is perpetrated today through the digital rectangle, advertising panaflexes and billboards. They also adopt the avatar of influencers on social media to warp the public opinion and gloss their own image. Every public service or private enterprise is enacted like a theatrical performance, whether it’s politics or education, business or talk shows. Aphoristic summation: we are living in the age of privileging spectacle over substance.

French theorist Guy Debord forewarned more than half a century ago that the modern world would end up becoming “the society of the spectacle”. In The Society of the Spectacle, he contends: “The spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by an accumulation of images that serve to alienate us from a genuinely lived life. The image is thus an historical mutation of the form of commodity fetishism.”

The performance of every department hinges on the images. The educational institutions advertise their top achievers. Parading a few toppers is a smokescreen, not a success story, while the slow learners get parked behind the stage. The disconnect between brochure and blackboard is the education sector’s original sin. Academic laurels are won at the cost of genuine talent, physical and mental health, and cerebral and visceral diversity. The stress on the facade has promoted binarism of human potential.

Parents don’t have the time, resources and expertise to gauge the quality of instruction at educational institutions on a daily basis, so they proxy quality with optics: English accent, white-collar uniform, campus aesthetics, state-of-the-art technology or cherry-picked calibrated outcomes.

All the walks, rallies and campaigns for public awareness end the moment they are clicked for embellishing the digital dashboards of public and private institutions. The country’s governance is gauged by visuals recording the choreography of public representatives. The recent superfloods in Punjab created ample opportunities for the situationists. The political thespians turned the whole calamity-stricken region into a theatre. A flour bag distributed on TV outweighs years of fiscal mismanagement and poor governance. “The spectacle presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned. Its sole message is: ‘What appears is good; what is good appears.'”

The people prioritising the spectacle suffer from incoherent cognition. In an attempt to play to the gallery, they fail to align their words and thoughts. Saying self-contradictions and sharing old images as new give away actual intentions. A video of a public representative boasting of the successful recovery of a cancer patient without any surgery and then enquiring in the same breath about the painless surgery of the patient shows the protruding gimmickery. And the recent display of optics: “Good work, good work, children,” and then, “Well, what work are you doing, actually?”

Pursuing the spectacle is a part of populist politics. Pictures of incumbent public representatives on textbooks and relief goods at the expense of public wealth show the politics in Pakistan hellbent upon spectacle than substance. What started with the incarcerated leader of a political party culminates in the present moment when the various NGOs and philanthropists were barred from distributing relief goods to the affectees of the superfloods in Punjab unless under the banner of the incumbent government.

The spectacle provides temptingly instant gratification in a country experiencing a famine of good news. It convinces donors, tempts voters and advertises institutions. But one thing is undeniable: optics never birth durable outcomes. Situationist politics is always myopic.

When people fail to verify governance optics and institutional theatrics, cynicism takes root, making parents hostile consumers and citizens silent spectators. All the attempts to gain electoral mileage through public services must never be photogenic because it will lower the ceiling on what we believe is possible.