SHAUN HWANG
Spectacular Annihilation: On Contemporary Apocalyptic Aesthetics
This article argues that Debord’s concept of the spectacle is fundamentally a theory of time. The spectacle isn’t merely an accumulation of images but a social relation that reorganizes lived temporality, undermining historicity – the capacity to grasp the present as historically produced and, therefore, transformable. Under spectacular conditions, time is experienced as an oscillation between compulsive acceleration and the desire for closure, a temporal blockage that tends to generate apocalyptic imaginaries in which political change appears only as terminal rupture.
Drawing on Ilyenkov and Kosík, the article reconstructs how capitalist abstractions are lived as a pseudoconcrete world of self-evident appearances. Debord’s spectacle names the social organization of this pseudoconcreteness as the "paralysis of history and memory," where incessant renewal coincides with an eternal present. Debord’s distinction between diffuse and concentrated spectacle clarifies how liberal fragmentation and fascist pseudo-unification emerge as responses to the same production of lived abstraction. Benjamin shows how fascism radicalizes this logic through the aestheticization of politics and war as apocalyptic closure, while Jesi explains its mythic technology as a "vacation from history." Against this, Benjamin’s revolutionary interruption names an alternative arrest of time that reopens historicity.