Spectacle, Surveillance, and the Ironies of Visual Politics in the Age of Autonomous Images

• Published date: 01 October 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917231173442
• Author: Mark Reinhardt
• Date: 01 October 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917231173442

Political Theory

2023, Vol. 51(5) 814 –842

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917231173442

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Article

Spectacle, Surveillance,

and the Ironies of Visual

Politics in the Age of

Autonomous Images

Mark Reinhardt1

Abstract

Considering formative twentieth-century theories in relation to

contemporary technosocial developments, this article examines ideas of

spectacle and surveillance as ways of approaching visual politics. I argue that

the historically important relationship between the visual and political fields

is now intensifying and mutating. First discussing Guy Debord’s The Society of

the Spectacle, I show how his influential approach proves inadequate to the

politics of image-saturated societies. I next show how critics of imperial and

racial spectacles, from Michael Rogin to Claudia Rankine and Tina Campt,

provide better ways of engaging power and political contestation in the visual

field. Third, I examine how Michel Foucault deployed notions of spectacle in

his own work but argued for leaving the term behind, presenting surveillance

as not just a different modality of power but also spectacle’s temporal

successor. This account remains essential for both historical understanding

and reckoning with contemporary surveillance. Fourth, however, as Simone

Browne argues, Foucault’s separation between spectacle and surveillance

is too stark, his history too prone to occlude race. Furthermore, recent

surveillance technologies and practices have changed in ways that confound

his terms, while extending and also altering the racial dynamics explored

earlier in the essay. Today, even surveillance based on optical media

contributes to a “postvisual” image world in which algorithmic, machine-

machine communication abets forms of power neither tied to human

1Williams College, Williamstown, MA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Mark Reinhardt, Williams College, 24 Hopkins Hall Dr., Williamstown, MA 01267-2600, USA.

Email: mrein@williams.edu

1173442PTXXXX10.1177/00905917231173442Political TheoryReinhardt

research-article2023

Reinhardt 815

perception nor graspable as subject formation. With surprising assistance

from Debord, I end by discussing the significant theoretical and political

challenges posed by the ironies of postvisual visuality.

Keywords

visual politics, spectacle, surveillance, racialization, postvisual

“We are beings who are looked at in the spectacle of the world.”

—Jacques Lacan

“What senses, what organs will people grow to pick up invisible images?”

—Hito Steyerl

On May 25, 2020, seventeen-year-old Darnella Frazier used her cellphone to

capture George Floyd’s murder. Millions watched the video, and stills drawn

from it circulated globally in the press and on social media. Condensing per-

vasive experiences of anti-Black violence and imposed indignity, the sight of

a white officer’s knee on Floyd’s neck helped launch waves of protest. The

sight’s mobilizing power came not only from echoing other pictures of police

brutality past and present but also from rhyming with the kneeling figure of

Colin Kaepernick: the brutal act depicted was obviously crucial, but so, too,

was how the searing image of that brutality looked and traveled. Part of what

made the moment of racialized violence a flashpoint was its visual politics.1

But what does it mean to say that? How might we grasp the visual politics of

this moment, and those like it? What are the ways in which we might engage

with visual politics more broadly, and how might doing so matter for the

teaching and practice of political theory today?

I use the term “visual politics” to name how, across time and space, the

optical field of perceptibility and the political field of individual and collec-

tive action shape each other, as political structures and struggles create or

constrain ways of seeing and depicting, even as images and visual practices

in turn help produce the subjects, objects, activities, and contours of political

1. Saying that neither discounts prior organizing by M4BL nor makes the Floyd

murder the only act of police violence precipitating the protests—as if any one

video or set of still images could create a mass movement from nothing. I merely

aim to underscore some of what made the footage from that day both revealing

and important.