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THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN “EXCEPTION” AND “SPECTACLE” BY APPLYING THE CONCEPT OF AGAMBEN’S “STATE OF EXCEPTION” THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN “EXCEPTION” AND “SPECTACLE” BY APPLYING THE CONCEPT 1. INTRODUCTION: Art, Terror and The Spectacle. ……………………………… 2. CASE STUDY I: Christopher Buchel ‘Simply Botiful’. ………………….……… 3. CASE STUDY II: Santiago Sierra ‘Spraying of Polyurethane over 18 People’. 10-13 4. CONCLUSION: The Face and The Politics of The Spectacle. …………………. 14-15 5. REFERENCES. ………………………………………………………………………. 16-17 THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN “EXCEPTION” AND “SPECTACLE” BY APPLYING THE CONCEPT 1. INTRODUCTION: ART, TERROR AND THE SPECTACLE. The spectacle was born as a form of capitalism, referring to it as the profit over any kind of value object in our network society. Thus, ‘the spectacle is capital with such a level of accumulation that is has become image’ (Andreotti & Costa, 1997). Hence, its main purpose is to submit humans everyday life ‘—forms of recreation, patterns of speech, idioms of local solidarity, kinds of ethical or aesthetic insubordination, the endless capacities of human beings to evade or refuse the orders brought down to them from on high— to the deadly solicitations (the lifeless bright sameness) of the market.’ (Retort 2005, 19). Nevertheless, to colonize the everyday life of the human being; there is also a need to control our individual set of technologies too. However, the main interest of contemporary politics is to organize and produce modern societies with ‘their disposal to systematize and disseminate appearances, and to subject the texture of day-to-day living to a constant barrage of images, instructions, slogans, logos, false promises, virtual realities, miniature happiness- motifs. Batteries NOT included’. (Retort 2005, 20). Therefore, our lexicon, our linguistic, our codes are part of the built reality. Materiality is our capitalist society. Where the spectacle embodies the representation of this reality, the image-world. This reality is created through codes, lexicon and/or linguistic and the spectacle is the social power of politics; where art (and philosophy) holds a central position asking questions and seeking the new. According to Jacques Ranciere (1994), art is not political in the virtue of that, it communicates and fulfils the social and political into issues. It is not political enough to shape the invisible forms to visibility. In fact, there is a ‘politics of the aesthetics’. Meaning that politics and arts have to be connected. Both are a conditional reality which exist or not regarding the network of relationship in our modern society. Consequently, arts and politics are the two faces of the same coin. Pointing out the fact that if we separate art from its network of relationships, it would become something else. Arts should not occupy the space left by politics; instead art should ‘reshape it, at the risk of testing the limits of its own politics’. (2004, 16) Thus, the network of relationship in the modern society –the spectacle— is the potentiality of politics shaped through art vanishing both into ethics. Hence, there is a possibility of naivety in the artist and the philosopher in our modern society. While the artist and philosopher thinks her/him-self as outsider, as an exception of this spectacle circle in virtue of their role in society; they became part of the spectacle. In THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN “EXCEPTION” AND “SPECTACLE” BY APPLYING THE CONCEPT fact, they think that they are not participating in games of power. However, this thought is usual y what makes them participate. Special y, if we think critical y of something, which remains sometime ago, possibly, the spectacle has accommodated already and you think that you are escaping, but in fact you have been seduced and catched by the spectacle. Now, it is clear that the system does not want to be asked or to be criticized with its own social and political dynamics or performances (networks of relationships); the system wants you to buy. Consequently, the artist’s responsibility is not only aesthetic. It is also social, ethical and political. The capitalist system wants us to feed the spectacle adding value into its own network of relationships. Consequently, the artists (and philosophers) have to create new forms to reshape the networks of our modern society, which would blur the thresholds between the social, the political and the aesthetic. According to Guy Debord (2006), the spectacle force citizen to equate goods with commodities and satisfaction. Therefore, consumerism is expanded constantly to equate satisfaction with survival. Now, if the state wants to colonize the everyday life aspects of the human being, the state needs a weak citizenship. In this modern state, the market’s needs become the state’s obsession. Therefore, the new citizenship social structure reality is made up of consumer subjects locked in to Ikea catalogues and nuclearized families. So, the citizen of this new modern state created by the spectacle is powered by the over consuming imagination. Through unstopped gunfire of fashion, panics and images into a toxic simulacrum of community-commodity. Brian Massumi (2002) pinpoints that in our modern society; we do not get or buy something for a particular use; we get values as a new life-form style. Taking this assumption even further, the spectacle of the new modern society makes companies and brands form a relationship with their clients. Examples for that are the nectar points, the promises of software update and also the online communities. Thus, our life-form potentials are not separate from the new modern society. We became the product of the spectacle. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN “EXCEPTION” AND “SPECTACLE” BY APPLYING THE CONCEPT “- when you buy furniture, you tell yourself, that’s it that’s the last sofa I’ll need whatever happens, that sofa problem is handle. I had it all. I had a stereo that was very decent A wardrobe that was getting very respectable I was close to be complete. (…) - Right. We are consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty. These things don’t concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, …… television with 500 channels, … some guy’s name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra (…) So fuck off with your sofa units and green stripe patterns. I say never be completed. I say stop being perfect. Let the chips fall where they may. But that’s me, and I could be wrong. - My insurance is probably gonna cover it, so… - The thing you own end up owing you. Do what you like, man.” -- Dialogue extracted from ‘Fight Club’ (1999). Directed by David Fincher In David Fincher’s 1999 film, ‘Fight Club’, Tyler Durden –the main character in the movie— becomes critical over everything. That includes art, advertising, politics, media… Fincher’s film makes visible the network of modern society. The film criticises the consumerism but in the end the audience ends up consuming this anti-consumerism. The main character of the film believes that he is not participating in the social power game. However, he does not realize til the end of the movie that the spectacle has accommodated his reality already. He has become a spectacle product himself. Thus, his exception –this anti-consumerism— of Tyler Durden becomes part of the rule accommodated by the spectacle. Thus, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton become the part of the same reality where the spectacle incorporates the exception into the rule in Fincher’s film. Even when they fol ow opposite dialogues and their representations became independent; the spectacle generates and embodies them. Thus, Edward Norton performs as the consumerist while Brad Pitt performs as the critic citizen. Hence, in both cases, they are part of the same reality. They are the two faces of the same image-world, Tyler Durden; where the spectacle embodies the representation of its own Most of us think that the terror is the contemporary revolution against oppression and capitalism. However, according to Jean Baudril ard (2004), the airplanes, the computer networks, and the media are the tools in which the spectacle of terror is produced. He links THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN “EXCEPTION” AND “SPECTACLE” BY APPLYING THE CONCEPT globalization with technology. Pointing that we are in a ‘police state globalization, a total control, a terror based on law-and-order measures’. (Kel ner 2004, 3) Staking the fact that the circulation of any kind of image through the media constituted ‘electric shock to power’ and ‘humiliation inflicted on power’ owing to the network of relationships in our modern societies bad conscience and abjection sentiment. So, the media and our computer society makes visible our most personal intimacies as community-commodity into a critical engagement of our contemporary culture and history. Consequently, the state is vulnerable, while one cannot destroy the society of the spectacle by producing the spectacle of its own destruction. Seeing that, terror should not be the danger in our modern society. Terror should be the sign of danger for us to act upon the spectacle. The spectacle traps the ‘living-forms’ of ‘naked life’1 into simulation and virtuality. The society of production becomes simulation and production; the panoptic and the repressive power becomes cynical and seductive power of the media and information society; the sovereignty passes from subject to object and revolution and emancipation became logic systems where the individuals are trapped (2004, 6). Adding that the image is the key power over the network of relationship of today’s new modern society, where monuments, icons, logos… are the emptiness rule of our image-world. In our image-society, nothingness of the materialization of terror is what can turn the world upside down. On the one hand, after 9/11 the society of the spectacle becomes a territorial insecurity. That implies that fear is the common note in our new modern society; “with fear comes more checkpoint policing, more processing, more bottom up fed-back ‘control’ ” (Massumi 2002, 23). So power becomes affective rather than normative. In fact, the power of today’s modern society travels through the affective channels of the media to play its role in the spectacle of terror. So, the media does not produce more information or analysis; it uses its channels as affective amplifications through the daily broadcasting and changes the message of everyday living-forms of life. On the other hand, according to Giorgio Agamben (2005), modern society embeds the exception into the rule through a political strategy of sovereignty power cal ed ‘the state of exception’. Looking through the French tradition, German tradition and more contemporary American Bush politics, sovereignty uses security and economics in order to hold the exclusive power to blind the citizens by means of the law. A characteristic of the politics of twentieth century is the perfect conformity of the 1 According to Agamben; ‘Naked life’ is the living form of the camp –the state of exception—. ‘—Its state of exception that has now become the norm—is the naked life that in every context separates the form of life’. (Agamben 2000, 4). THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN “EXCEPTION” AND “SPECTACLE” BY APPLYING THE CONCEPT citizens between the military and the economic emergencies which embody the ‘state of exception’. Thus, the thresholds between democracy and absolutism end up blurring. In Fincher’s film (1999), Tyler Dunden creates a camp as strategy for his anti-consumer politics of anti-power. He creates a ‘nomos’2 over the ‘democratic’ political space where his absolutist power blinds his new warriors community. Using the broadcasting to spread his anti-consumerism terror politics. They became units of terror of the central absolutist power of Tyler Dunden in the image-world of the community-commodity represented in the film. In fact, the camps are spaces where the ‘state of exception’ starts to become the rule (Agamben 2000, 39). However, this concept is not new; different examples have been shaped through our modern history. It can be mentioned like the Spanish Camps in Cuba, the Nazi Concentration Camps and the most recently Guantanamo Bay. On these camps, the power suspends the normal rule of laws and the police acts as sovereignty. Thus, the police became the sovereign violence and no longer have administrative functions of law enforcement. They become the executer arm of a virtual criminal politics. Provoking the social abjection of the ‘naked life’, which have been separated from its ‘living-forms’ and their communities. Paradoxical y, this ‘naked life’ –the exception— is the bottom line in which politics place the rule. In other words, through the norm the spectacle in modern societies embeds the exception. Hence, the contemporary politics of the spectacle are empty institutions of beliefs, ideologies, religions, identities and communities. The spectacle is the false production which manipulates the col ective perception, the history and the social communication. Hence, the image-world of the spectacle tel s us that ‘what appears is good and what is good appears’ (Andreotti and Costa 1997, 14). Thus, our society of the spectacle has accomplished a permanent unreality where the globalization of the false has its falsification on the whole word. Consequently, our modern society gathers ‘life-forms’ patterns and tastes as data, which are the most valuable key for new societies to embed the exception of ‘life-forms’ into the spectacle. Defining ‘life-forms’ as behaviours, thoughts, human beings and any kind of ‘form’, which would add value to the false-image-world, 2 ‘According to the constitution of Greece the prefectures are mainly a second-degree organization of local self-government. They are not however hierarchically superior to the communities and municipalities of Greece. (www. reference.com/wiki/Prefectures_Of_Greece [Date: 13-02-2007]) THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN “EXCEPTION” AND “SPECTACLE” BY APPLYING THE CONCEPT 2. CASE STUDY I: CHRISTOPHER BUCHEL ‘SIMPLY BOTIFUL’. The first case study refers to a sprawling recycling camp situated at Hauser & Wirth Coppermil Gal ery in East London during October 11, 2006 and March 3, 2007 created by the Swedish artist Christopher Buchel 3. In this exhibition, Buchel reproduces a ‘camp’. It is not a kind of ‘camp’, which refers only to previous examples like the Spanish camps in Cuba or even Guantanamo Bay. It is referred in the most Agamben sense of a space located into our new modern society like ‘the new biopolitical nomos of the planet’ (Agamben 2000, 45). Buchel creates an untidy and busy space which is the exception of the emptiness col ective perception, history and communication of the image-world of the community-commodity of our modern society. This space is opened to the ‘state of exception’ for its temporal suspension of law and for its permanent awareness to be outside The visitor walks into the space; facing a squalid hotel and a temporary shop that leads an abandoned space-camp. Refrigerator parts, dismantled TVs, cables and computer components are piled everywhere, the waste of today’s modern society. Keeping through the exhibition, temporary workstations indicating the il egal workforces housed in its squalid condition in containers that make up the wasted il egal underground of the urban vil age. The living condition and the exploitation in which the people are subject in this recycling camp is told by the overpowering and imprisons mediated by endlessly repeated newsreels Buchel makes visible which is not visible and audible what is not wanted to be heard. It shows how political power separates the form-of-life of human beings into ‘naked life’. The ‘state of exception’ is where the subject is separated from its form-of-life and becomes social y abjected. Consequently, in this zone of nowhere there is not distinction ‘between the outside and the inside, the exception and the rule, the licit and the il icit, in which every juridical protection has disappeared’ (Agamben 2000, 40-41). The camp becomes the materialization of the ‘state of exception’ where the ‘naked life’ faces a virtual space. In fact, the political system of our modern society does not give more orders and/or norms on this virtual space rather; the camp is a hidden space inside the matrix of politics in which we live. 3 Within the following link, it can be seen an on-line Quicktime movie which introduces the exhibition at youtube broadcasting website (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1gZOjyzx3w) [Date: 09-06-02]. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN “EXCEPTION” AND “SPECTACLE” BY APPLYING THE CONCEPT Consequently, we must be aware of al the possible metamorphoses that the camp can appear in our modern social matrix. In fact, Buchel responds to it not only within an aesthetic proposition. He has created a new form which should reshape our image-world. He is blurring the social, the political and the aesthetic. He is proposing Ranciere ‘politics of aesthetics’. For this reason, the visitor contradicts his role as the voyeur of the black market economy which embodies the housing and internment of the people in the camp. The voyeur / visitor is confronting his own abjection of a virtual ‘naked-life’ form of life in the camp. It is through the discovering and experiencing of physical cramped corridors, claustrophobic chamber and dead-end which induces the feeling of panic and paranoia. Further discovery in the wasted camp is the unauthorised archaeological dig; where a mammoth rises in the gal ery floor. Buchel forces the viewer to participate in an image- scenario that is both physical y and psychological y unsettling. This is the final paradox to the spectacle in Buchel work. The tyranny embodied in an unauthorised archaeologist which owns the temporary shop and the camp. The archaeologist has created his own code of conduct for the camp. In other words, he sets the norms which establish the community rules and decides for them. According to Ranciere (2006), he is the ‘police order’. He structures the place in the camp that embodies his virtual society. Distributing through media – the newsreels in the camp—the experience of what each ‘naked life’ in the camp is and what they can do. He operates the affective channels –TVs newsreel close circuit— to operate his power that it is not normative anymore. It is affective in as much that through radical modulation it loses its sense of being informative and analytical. In respond to Buchel’s work and the spectacle, it can be said that our immersion in the spectacle is between the relationships with others through images. So, according to Debord, the spectacle’s main function in our modern society is made by alienation within Baudril ard triumph of the simulacra. Further analysis would take us to also consider that capitalism and in more concrete the spectacle aims the alienation of language, linguistic and communicative nature of human beings. For this reason, the spectacle of terror is so destructive. However, artists (and philosophers) have to deconstruct the destructive-image- of-the-spectacle-logo in order to act upon it. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN “EXCEPTION” AND “SPECTACLE” BY APPLYING THE CONCEPT 3. CASE STUDY II: SANTIAGO SIERRA ‘SPRAYING OF POLYURETHANE OVER 18 Now, if the artist’s main role in the spectacle is to deconstruct the simulacra image-world of today’s new modern society, blurring the potentiality of politics by reshaping arts through the vanishing of both into ethics. In that case, the artist should not only shape new forms in which his/her work would occupy the space left by politics. Rather, she/he should reshape and test their own work to the limit towards the audience’s reactions and/or expectations. Consequently, this new forms of reshaped work would provoke them an abjection which would enforce the audience towards the fight against the spectacle. In other words, the social abjection would be able to turn the image-world upside-down, powered with meaning and it would fulfil the ‘living-forms’, which form our modern western society. For this reason, it is important to mention the work of Santiago Sierra. While many of us think that his work engages shock with known accusations of manipulation and intimidation. The point of Sierra’s work is to dramatise the obscurity, emptiness, violence and painful evidence of the existing ‘naked life’ forms of life in our hidden matrix of social relations in the spectacle. Sierra like Buchel use the social abjections provoked by their work in order to produce a reaction in their audience which would make visible and audible which can not be heard or seen in our modern society. While in Ficher’s film (1999), there is a strong critic on how consumerism / anti-consumerism representations are embodied in the spectacle; Sierra and Buchel create their own ‘state of exception’ in which the ‘naked life’ forms can be materialized facing its virtual social space using public and/or exhibition spaces. Using their audience to act as voyeur of a reality which is hidden in a virtual matrix of social According to Agamben (2002), our century is immersed into a ‘state of emergency’4 where the global reality of our modern society is modulated according to politics of power. For this 4 A state of emergency is a governmental declaration that may suspend certain normal functions of government, may work to alert citizens to alter their normal behaviours, or may order government agencies to implement emergency preparedness plans. It can also be used as a rationale for suspending civil liberties. Such declarations usually come during a time of natural disaster, during periods of civil unrest, or following a declaration of war (therefore, in democratic countries many call this martial law, most with non-critical intent). In some countries, the state of emergency and its effects on civil liberties and governmental procedure are regulated by the constitution or a law that limits the powers that may be invoked during an emergency or rights suspended. It is also frequently illegal to modify the emergency law or Constitution during the emergency. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Emergency) [Date: 09-02-06]. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN “EXCEPTION” AND “SPECTACLE” BY APPLYING THE CONCEPT reason, new modern western societies use security and economics in order to hold the exclusive power to blind the citizens by means of the law. Thus, every social form of life has to be re-coded into social juridical forms. Hence, the spectacle would embed and eradicate the poor, the HIV-positive, the transvestite, the unemployed, the porn star, the elderly, the parent, the female and so on. Nevertheless, these re-coded forms of life that form the nomos –’state of exception’— of our modern society are where today’s modern democracies hold their laws in order to balance the disequilibrium between the public and the political. In other words, it would be in this way in which the exception became the rule in today’s modern society. On the other hand, the ‘state of exception’ are the nomos where the ‘naked forms’ –the exception- are outside the rule. Thus, the police-order would take the decision and would execute virtual-laws in these virtual spaces. Paradoxical y, these ‘naked forms’ are the foundation in which politics place the rule. Thus, the living forms of ‘naked life’ would be embedded into the rule by accumulating more images to the matrix- form of commodity-community that feeds the capitalist machine of our modern society. For this reason, Sierra’s work is important to be highlighted. His works emphasise the existence of those ‘naked life’ outside the rule. Not only in the ‘camp’ as such, he forces them outside the ‘camp’ in the virtue of those forms of life that are part of our constructed social-modern-reality. He places them into the matrix. Thus, they are not invisible anymore, as many of us believe; they are perfectly visible. In this sense, they coexist in our modern society within its own social relations. Now, taking one of his works as an example: in ‘Spraying of polyurethane over 18 people’ showed at the Church of San Mateo. Lucca, Italy in 2002. In this work eighteen prostitutes from Eastern Europe were placed in an empty medieval church. Dressed in their underwear and safeward with wool en and plastic where sprayed with polyurethane on their genitals. He chooses front and back positions for the performance. The result of it was shapeless forms of polyurethane masses and plastic al over the space with other belongings left like drink cans, food, clothes and empty Sierra blasts the prostitutes with polyurethane spray in their genitals in two implicit sexual postures. We can see the polyurethane spray as sperm. A substitute of pain or something which turns into stone. In this work, he makes visible the capitalist sexual exchange. Where men are both the purchaser and owners who manage and control the sex industry. 5 www.santiago-sierra.com/200204_1024.htm [Date: 09-02-2007]. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN “EXCEPTION” AND “SPECTACLE” BY APPLYING THE CONCEPT Pointing that, men are the ones who blast the sex-workers with polyurethane in the performance. One of the paradoxes in Sierra’s work is the space used for the performance, a church. Shaping into this hol y place the invisible into visible. He moves the ‘naked form’ - ‘the prostitutes’- into a virtual camp that is a church -‘state of exception’-. The fal ing woman, the social stigma is located in a place where the commodity-community prays to their God. He goes further within the end of this performance. Living the space with sculptures created by shapeless forms of polyurethane masses and plastic al over with left cans, food, clothes and empty polyurethane containers. He leaves the shapeless forms with waste. Creating abjection in the voyeur –the visitor- that gets into the sacred space ful of ‘capitalist sexual exchange’ and waste like a big orgy. On the other hand, his work would equate prostitution with waste. Saying that the forms leaved at the sacred space have to be recycled, re-coded and embedded in the spectacle adding more images to our commodity- community. Thus, the machinery of our modern society would be feed again with more According to Maggie O’Neil , female prostitution has socio-economic and historical contexts, which has been shifted into its social organization in our modern west society. Its ontology has a social-legal and feminist discourse towards violence, pornography and latterly into the rights and human liberties risking and disembodying social experiences, practices, processes and structures. In any case, Sierra’s work represents the myth around sex-workers. He makes visible the historical ‘social construction of sexuality, cathexis and desire; gender relations; masculinity; and capitalism exchange relations which increasingly commodify everything, even love’ (O’Neil 1996, 3). In any case, according to our discussion, Sierra’s works could be seeing as naïve in the virtue of the spectacle has embodied already the prostitution into its own economic machinery as O’Neil pinpoints. Knowing that prostitution has its own machinery, which feeds our modern society as everyone already knows. While, prostitution has a heritage where it is considered as a social stigma, paradoxical y it is social y accepted. Pointing for example, the 40,000 foreign prostitutes shipped to the ‘German World Cup’ in 2006. Therefore, there is a political blur in our modern society; where the weak-citizen is blind by the means of law. Consequently, they do not see further than the virtual-comfort provided THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN “EXCEPTION” AND “SPECTACLE” BY APPLYING THE CONCEPT On the other hand, it is important to highlight Buchel, Sierra and even Finchler’s film among other artists and filmmakers. Their work converts the spectator or visitor into a voyeur of the ‘Invisible’ in our modern society. The voyeur would become a ‘meme’6 machine. Spreading the reality of the nomos in our commodity-community society. They would highlight the reality of the ‘state of exception’ in our commodity-community society. In the virtue of they do not only subsist in the Nazis concentration camps or Guantanamo Bay; they also exist in our constructed matrix of relations in which our community-commodity is raised in our modern society, which is embedded by the spectacle. 6 ‘Term “meme” as the name for these cultural particles, which [they] presumed could replicate themselves as people exchange information’ (Pg 3) -- Auger, R. The Electronic Meme (2002). The Free Press. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN “EXCEPTION” AND “SPECTACLE” BY APPLYING THE CONCEPT 4. CONCLUSION: THE FACE AND THE POLITICS OF THE SPECTACLE. Summarizing, the artist and the philosopher hold a central position in today’s politics and social relations of our modern western societies. They have to take a social, ethical and political responsibility in order to chal enge the representation of what is delivered by the spectacle. For this reason, the work of David Fincher, Christopher Buchel and Santiago Sierra is raised in this paper. Through their work, they would provoke a reaction in their audience which would make visible and audible what modern society would like to erase. Their audience are the voyeurs of a reality, which is hidden in the matrix of politics and social relations embodied in the spectacle. In one hand, the purpose of the main modern western capitalist societies is not only the expropriation of productive activity -capitalism and globalization- or even to add profit over any kind of value object in our network society -the spectacle-. It is above al , the control and alienation of human everyday life through language and its communicative nature. As a consequence, language in this approach transforms nature into ‘face’. Thus, the dilemma raises when the naked life tries to locate the truth in the ‘face’. Thus, politicians, the media, the advertising and so on recognize the character of the ‘face’. Yet, they transform it into a secret and control at al cost. ‘State power today is no longer founded on the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence is a monopoly that states share increasingly wil ingly with other no sovereign organizations such as the United Nations and terrorist organizations; rather, it is founded above al on the control of appearance.’ (Agamben 2000, 95) On the other hand, Judith Butler in ‘Precarious Life’ (2004) pinpoints that the demand of truer images is embedded with more truer images. This would fulfil the horror and reality of the suffering of the naked life in our modern society through the erasure of its suffering. This erasure is through the prohibition of images and representations that defines the reality of our modern western society. In other words, the media would control what can be seen or what cannot be seen through the materialization of terror in which the meaningless image- world of our modern western reality is constructed. So, the chal enge in our society is the representation of our reality and what provides us with it, rather than trying to express or communicate what is represented in the image. Then, it is at this stage where artists and philosophers have to take part and compromise themselves. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN “EXCEPTION” AND “SPECTACLE” BY APPLYING THE CONCEPT Whilst, the living-forms of ‘naked life’ are separated towards its embedding into the rule through representations which erase their reality and within this mechanism takes part in the matrix of relations in our modern western society; politics also separate the ‘face’ from the world of the spectacle. Consequently, human communication is separated from itself. So values are accumulated into one meaningless image over another and control ed through a new class of bureaucrats anxiously in control through the media channels. Thus, our task is to interrogate and question the emergence and banishment of what the naked life can hear, see, know and sense. This would bring about a critique and would question the appreciation of the demands of information – or misinformation— in our social nomos, which operate as affective in the media channels. On this level, we would confront the control ed ‘face’ –where forms of life try to locate the truth—towards the matrix of social and political relations of our modern western society construction. Thus, these oppositional voices would not be feared, dismissed or erased from our reality through the demand of meaningless truer images over more meanless truer images. Those voices would be valuated hand-in-hand with artists and philosophers which would prompt the beginning of a new sensate modern state where images and messages would not be only embedded into the spectacle machinery, rather they would be the representation and the voice of what can be heard, seen, known and sensed in our reality. This opinion might appear as utopian. Nevertheless, the action upon it, it is to have a radical position here. We have to block and confront the process of control and alienation of our absolutist modern western society through the destruction of the remained image-logo-of-the-spectacle in which our modern western society is constructed. We have to break the affective channels in which this society operates and radical y modulate them into informative and analytical ones. Stepping our oppositional voices hand-in-hand with artists and philosophers towards to a new sensate western modern society where the ‘naked life’ and their nomos have a visible place THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN “EXCEPTION” AND “SPECTACLE” BY APPLYING THE CONCEPT Agamben, G (2000). Means Without End. The University of Minnesota Press. USA Agamben, G (2002). The State of Emergency. http://www.generation- online.org/p/fpagambenschmitt.htm [Printed: 23/01/07 16:59] Agamben, G (2005). State of Exception. The University of Chicago Press. USA Andreotti, L and Costa, X. (1997). Situationists Art, Politics, Urbanism. Published by Museu d’Art Contemporari de Barcelona. Barcelona. Spain. Butler, J (2004). Precarious Life. Verso: London. Debord, G (1994). The Society of The Spectacle. New York: Zone Books. Fight Club (1999). DVD-Disc1 chapter 6 00:13’ – 02:06’ Dir. David Fincher. Twentieth Kel ner, D (2004). Baudril ard, Globalization and Terrorism: Some Comments on Recent Adventures of the Image and Spectacle on the Occasion of Baudril ard’s 75th Birthday. http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kel ner/ [Printed: 28-01-07 23:30] Massumi, B (2002). Navigating Movements. http://www.brainmassumi.com/interviews/NAVIGATION%20MOVEMENTS.pdf Ranciere, J (2004). Jacques Ranciere: The Politics of Aesthetics. http://wiki.d-a-s- Ranciere, J (2006). Our Police Order: What can be said, seen, and done. http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2006-08-11-lieranciere-en.html [Printed: 17/02/07 12:10] Retort (2005). Afflicted Powers. Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War. Published by THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN “EXCEPTION” AND “SPECTACLE” BY APPLYING THE CONCEPT O’Neil , M (1996). Prostitution, Feminism and Critical Praxis: Profession Prostitution? http://www.staffs.ac.uk/schools/humanities_and_soc_sciencies/sociology/level3/prost3.htm

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