The Society of the Spectacle: The Association of Surfing Professionals and Corporations

The following article was written by Clifton Evers.
I was recently reading Guy Debord's book The Society of the Spectacle (1967). Debord was a French Marxist artist, filmmaker, thinker and activist. I also regularly visit Swellnet, and saw that a new year of the Association of Surfing Professional's tour is starting. The ASP Tour and Debord's ideas were stirred together and got me to thinking about what it would be like to view the ASP tour and the corporations (surfing and otherwise) who attach themselves to it through the lens of Debord's book.
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By the phrase "Society of the Spectacle" Debord was commenting on how we are immersed in an endless sea of images by which our world becomes primarily orientated toward entertainment and consumption. Debord writes:
When the real world changes into simple images, simple images become real beings and effective motivations of a hypnotic behavior. The spectacle as a tendency to make one see the world by means of various mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly), naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs; the most abstract, the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of the present day society .
Experience and everyday life are facilitated by the spectacle of a mediated culture that dramatizes social conflicts, celebrates dominant values, and projects particular hopes and fears (not necessarily ours but those we "should" have). For Debord, the spectacle is a tool for pacification and depoliticisation in a capitalist society. The spectacle is what we are asked to focus on and it diverts our attention away from how capitalism actually involves separating workers from the products of their labor, art from life, and consumption from human need. We are encouraged to be nothing but consumers – an act of submission, conformity – in our case, surfing as submission and conformity.
But we have so much choice now! Surfing is "richer" because of this tour and the corporations! Look at the innovations and products they have given us! Look at the lives they has given us! We wouldn't have this without them!
No, we would not have "this", but think about what is also blocked from emerging. We would have otherwise – other and different surfing lives, more difference (participants, equipment, experiences, practices, values); not better or worse but simply different. Were the ancient Hawai'ian and Tahitian cultures of surfing worse because of an absence of the surfing tour and commercialization and the corporations? No.
The society of the spectacle focuses on cultivating marketable difference. According to Debord this supposedly distracts us from the full range of our human powers that are available through creative praxis, distract us from actively producing our own lives – our own surfing(s). There are other lives and other surfing(s), often unable to emerge or hidden because of the hegemony (the hegemony needn't be the largest group but is, rather, the most influential). We are offered "choice" by the professional surfing tour and the corporations that attach themselves to it but it favours this marketable "difference" that can be materialised through a "new" commodity – this product is for "you" the "individual", this product will make you surf like "this", be like "this", act like "this", this product means you "belong".
Back to Debord:
The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life. Not only is the relation to the commodity visible but it is all one sees: the world one sees is its world.
Given this, it's suggested that we are now "modulated" by marketing. As the philosopher Gilles Deleuze postulates in his 1990 essay Postcript on Societies of Control:
The sales department becomes a business' center or "soul." We're told businesses have souls, which is surely the most terrifying news in the world. Marketing is now the instrument of social control and produces the arrogant breed who are our masters.
That modulation takes place with each click we make as we watch the surfing competition broadcast: our attention span, social media likes, online purchases, our commentary, all our online data are mined – there for market segmentation. We are not individuals but "dividuals" (Deleuze 1990). That is, digital translations of lived reality into searchable, networked, and usable data all instantaneously gathered to ensure the soul of capitalism – marketing – can keep giving us "what we want" or "what we need". We become the product. We become the corporate fuel. Who we are, what we are, where we are is tracked and coded. Marketing is no longer simply about producing behaviour but stealing from us, invading our privacy so as to predict new commodities and markets.
Consider this quote from the editor of Marketing Week (of October 14, 2010):
Marketing departments should never lose the instinct for the big idea. The brand essence that is universally understood by your managers, your staff and your customers alike often originates with some brave, snap decisions or intuitive creative that came from deep in your gut. But what underpins all that – and sometimes more importantly, what convinces your stakeholders to back you – is the customer data that you should hold dear. Your database contains the richest of insights into the needs of your customers. If you can spot those needs and meet them before your customers have even had a chance to figure out and articulate their own desires, then you'll be fulfilling marketing's limitless potential to grow a business through adding value. Those of you that already possess the right data and the system that works best for your business are way ahead.
It's easy when immersed within this society to come to believe in the society of the spectacle. This is especially the case of the young surfers who are corporatised (even the "free surfers", in fact, them most of all). Pro surfers are enlisted in the army of the service industry. As Guy Debord writes,
Reinforcing the troops responsible for distributing and glorifying the latest commodities; and in this it is serving a real need, in the sense that increasingly extensive campaigns are necessary to convince people to buy increasingly unnecessary commodities.
They become commodities: Instagramed, Tmblred, Facebooked, tweeted, YouTubed, Vimeoed – multiple selves – humans as corporate logos, as corporate data – results, numbers of front covers, number of followers, numbers of sales, numbers of hits, numbers of views, numbers of followers. Their bodies and their sense of self corporatised from a very young age. Yes, some professional surfers are paid well but at what expense for others? Anyway, perhaps it is the ethos that matters – an ethos of humanity as marketing, of only existing to generate profit.
And what of the human waste, those cast aside: ex-pro surfer, labourers in Bangladesh who stitch the "eco-boardshort", and ourselves whose surfing lives become colonised by a "reality" of consumption and of diversion and of homogeneity. Then there's the ecological impact, as well.
Each season of the professional surfing tour is a season of society of the spectacle re-affirming its hold over us and surfing.
Surfing: "creative" and "free" expression?
The professional surfing tour and coporations attached to it preach creativity and freedom in the slogans but it's possible to argue that they actually bury them, destroy them, make them only connote sales. The professional surfing tour can be argued to be surfing as control – an apparatus of capture. As the commentators and judges remark, he/she surf's "in control".
So what to do?
Is the answer simply to ignore it? Switch it off? To simply, "Do our own thing"? Do It Yourself? Surf differently and uniquely? Surf new ways, different ways – slip, slide, be out of control, capture the code of the wave – each one different, each one interpreted afresh? All of these are valid.
Yet, as Debord warns us:
Spectacular society is adept at recuperation i.e. assimilating would-be oppositional currents which by challenging only isolated aspects of the system end up unwittingly propping it up.
Think of the way independent and creative projects (e.g. films, websites, equipment, people) are swept up and captured by the marketing behemoth. "Rebellion" is packaged and sold back to us.
Debord was a member of the Situationist International group. Their answer to the dilemma was to endlessly call attention to the priority of a life which continually experiments, rather than any aimed at constant reiterating or reproducing – acts which lead to standardisation, homogenisation and fetishisation, and, in the end, more commodities to passively consume. The Situationists would rather have us create "situations" always anew where humans interact together as people, not mediated by commodities. Celebrate difference, creativity, no rules, being "out-of-control" and experimentation. However, they go further and suggest that each time you create a situation or something don't let it be captured. Make it unique. If it is captured for mass production then sabotage it, clog the machinery, detonate it.
"We have a world of pleasure to win"– The Situationists.// CLIF EVERS
Comments
All true. I often think that if I was a young person now surfing would utterly repel me. All that ego. All that conformity. The only true response is to find something better to do with your time such as.........well there's the problem.
Another nice piece Cliff.
What percentage of a corporations marketing dollars do you think is devoted to the 30+ bracket?
If you have made surfing your life, I think there is a period where you are very influenced by marketing and what ever 'image' you wish to portray.
Then, most tend to grow up and couldn't give a rats in terms of fashion or form over function.
In my situation, I and most of my peers just like to go surfing and are thankful for it.
Thanks for this.
The most important line of Society of the Spectacle is the first one:
"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".
I am relatively new to surfing and I often think about this first line in relation to surfing: the endless reproduction of magnificent looking surfers, who carve up the face of a wave, and then are scored on it. I am forever the chasing the feeling of riding a wave, however gawky I look doing it. Within the glamour of the surfing industry this is lost - and, in a way, thankfully incomprehensible. And yet, we are endless bombarded with - and our relationship to surfing, in way is mediated by - these images.
I find it difficult to relate to this surfing industry crap, and I am glad I am old enough now not to be sucked in by it - but as a teenager I remember the pull of a "surfing identity" and how this was something that could be bought, rather than felt in that moment when I stand on a board.
cheers
Speaking as a kneelo, I feel so left out.
Where can I enlist in the army of the service industry? How can I and my fellow cripples become the product, the corporate fuel; be tracked and coded?
Why are marketing people so unkind?
they think it is better to go shopping on your feet than to go surfing on your knees.
It's pretty hard to escape the world as marketing behemouth ... it's not just surfing. It suffuses everything, especially the interwebs. All our identities are "mediated" and "modulated" to some degree now - shit, every click we make is tracked - be careful what you click ;-)
As far as marketing to the 30+ crowd - I doubt the surfing companies want to but others know there is coin there. I also wonder what percentage of effort goes into them? Probably, 0.1% I think they know the "old" bastards are too tight or the money spent is going to the teen/tween pestering for the new boardies/wetsuit/tee/board/ etc. haha
Roadside: you seen this clip? http://vimeo.com/13023529 The Surfing Magazines Don't Talk About Lapsed Catholics. It sort of sums up your experience. It's a bloody good little clip.
As for kneelos, viva la resistance!
Now, I am going back into the lab with my existentialist kitty and stock of balaclavas and spray cans to plan my next insurrection. Be afraid ...
Leave that kitty alone!
Search engine that does not track!
https://startpage.com/
Search engine that does not track!
https://startpage.com/
Thanks Clif - that was amazing.
Keep up the good work.
Hey, Whaaaat, I market to the kneelos mate, 50% of my business is from kneelos at the moment, 2 sub-cultures meet and benefit. Kneeboarding and Australian manufacturing.
Jeebus, Krusty, good to know! Based in South Western Vicco, too. My favourite part of the world.
Hope you have a back-up plan, though. Our ranks are thinning fast. My local KindaKrippledKlub has its monthly get-together in a phone booth.
not one single act of trade ever happens unless both sides independently agree that it is in THEIR best interest to do so.
note to both authors,.. is not ideology, (being another form of bias),.. something that is sold too?...
yea now, good on you...
and drive thru.
"Not one single act of trade ever happens unless both sides independently agree that it is in THEIR best interest to do so"?!
Erm, Roller ole son, that's bollocks, even by your exalted standards.
Asymmetry. It exists.
Yeeeees, Whaaaaat. I do have a backup, it's called surfing, both my psychologist and accountant agree, it's not about the money.
My showrooms a phone booth.
Roller
People are not independent when they make a decision to trade. One also has to have something TO trade. And if one only has their labour to trade (to subsequently get access to money for food, health and shelter) it opens the potential for exploitation by those who own the means of production (a very few). And as Whaaaat points out, "Asymmetry. It exists". Also, ideology is far more than "bias" ...
Since you love Youtoob so much maybe David Harvey can help you out
http://www.youtube.com/user/readingcapital
I always enjoy your contributions, though. Roll on through ...
Clif I just watched that Vimeo clip. It is clearly part of the grand European tradition of finding something miserable at the heart of every experience. Surfing and angst? Doesn't work for me but it's a nice piece of craftsmanship.
@blindboy
I found it quite affirming, rather than angsty or miserable. Go figure. Interpretations. Oh, it was made in the U.S.of A.
.....it must have been the French, the whole language sounds like an ongoing complaint to me, but that's just a personal foible I suppose. I will look at it again with the sound off and see if I feel affirmed.
......no that didn't work. I just can't get from "humiliation" to "life affirming" but nice visuals anyway.
Merde. Que Dieu nous aide. Il n'y a pas de comptabilité pour un esprit faible ou l'ignorance.
"Un esprit faible ?" "L'ignorance?" Mais non Monsieur Whaat. C'est liberte d'opinion.
Blindboy, juste parce que vous tenez votre opinion ne permet pas sacré, ou de corriger, ni à l'abri du ridicule.
I await your ridicule. Weak minded and ignorant are simple insults. Ridicule is much more sophisticated. For example you would need to demonstrate some logical fallacy in my statement or explain how it leads to an unsustainable intellectual position.
In justification of my claim, in addition to the video, I offer you Michel Houellbecq, Jean-Paul Sartre, Marcel Proust etc etc. French is the language of complaint and dissatisfaction.
Some logical fallacy? An unsustainable intellectual position??
"French, the whole language sounds like an ongoing complaint to me".
Res ipsa loquitur.
Or, if you need some examples to counter the ones you've put up:
Rousseau and Voltaire or more recently, de Beauvoir and Foucault (Michael).
I was enjoying the banter when it was in French.
I can't understand a bloody word they're saying.
"French, the whole language sounds like an ongoing complaint to me".
This is a perfectly valid proposition as it refers to how I, and only I, perceive the sound of the French language. You may disagree but you cannot assert that my statement is fallacious since you are unaware of my personal consciousness. In other words whaat you are far up the creek in the middle of serious sewage overflow without the necessary means of propulsion.
J'ai besoin d'un vin et un bon sommeil. Au revoir pour le moment.
Interesting article and the conclusions drawn are hard to refute. I've recently read a couple of books that touch on the 'society of spectacle' - 'Amusing ourselves to death' by Neil Postman and 'The empire of illusion: the end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle'. Definitely recommend both of these books.
I'll read 'em, providing they have lots of pictures or embedded video clips.
yes, and therein lies the problem. i should have mentioned 'the empire of illusion' was written by chris hedges. my bad.