Andrew Kalaidjian's "Spectacle Earth"

Andrew Kalaidjian is Associate Professor of English at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and the author of Exhausted Ecologies: Modernism and Environmental Recovery.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Spectacle Earth: Media for Planetary Change, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Spectacle Earth includes a discussion of one of the first works of climate fiction, Jules Vernes's 1889 novel Topsy Turvy, or The Purchase of the North Pole in relation to the manifesto of the London Psychogeophysics group published in 2010. It then turns to Guy Debord’s 1967 work The Society of the Spectacle and compares the theories of the Situationist International to those of Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard.

[Topsy Turvy] presents the scheme of the Barbicane Corporation to purchase territory in the Arctic and then use a massive gun to realign the earth’s axis to be horizontal, thereby melting the glaciers and exposing landmasses for coal mining.

A new, horizontal axis will usher in an epoch of the “earthly globe,” in which temperatures will be moderate and advantageous to all sorts of human activities for enrichment. The company enacts the scheme by boring a cannon into the cliff of Mount Kilimanjaro, but the explosion proves ineffective at altering the tilt of the earth’s axis. A mistake of calculation is cited as the culprit, and the real force would require a trillion such cannons. The story concludes with a note of reassurance, “the inhabitants of the earth may sleep in peace. To modify the conditions in which the earth is moving is beyond the efforts of humanity.” This basic argument is the premise of much climate change denial, and it is one that the Psychogeophysical Society repeats, if perhaps unintentionally. At the same time, the society is onto something in their desire to revisit and reevaluate Situationist practices in relation to anthropogenic changes.

The work of the Situationists emerged at a crucial juncture between urbanism and media, lending their theories of alienation and passivity lasting relevance for the digitally saturated present. It was serendipitous that new technologies of television, the personal computer, and the mobile smartphone arrived in quick succession to save the modern subject from the boredom of the perfectly controlled, hermetically sealed environment. The open, white-walled boxes of modern architecture find their ideal antidote in the black squares and rectangles of screens. The saturation of media in contemporary times separates individuals, creates a false sense of connection, and discourages community activism. Beyond urban environmental aesthetics, it is this interpersonal component that remains important for thinking about mediation.

While the SI may have exaggerated their involvement in the 1968 rebellion, their environmental theories were nevertheless tied to social activity. While McLuhan pursued a technodeterminist worldview where enlightened man might embrace his destiny, Guy Debord and the Situationists brought a Marxist analysis of materiality and class relations to analyze media’s role in promoting apathy and acceptance of capitalist ruling order. Debord seemed to both respect McLuhan’s technical analysis of media systems and at the same time scorn his steadfast agnosticism in the face of social issues. Debord’s wariness was inherited by Jean Baudrillard who developed a more robust critique of media’s social influence and its limits as revolutionary technology.

Page 99 actually gives a pretty good idea of the book as a whole! The idea for this book began around a decade ago as I was finishing my PhD. The idea was to do an environmental reading of Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle that could be a sequel of sorts to what would eventually become my first book, Exhausted Ecologies: Modernism and Environmental Recovery. Over the years, Spectacle Earth has grown into a larger consideration of how media helps and hinders engagement with ecological crisis. The technological changes during that time with the rise of artificial intelligence, remote conferencing, the metaverse, and social media made for an exciting challenge for thinking about key themes such as ecology, agency, and virtuality.

While this page presents something of the methodological center of the book, earlier chapters travel backward in time to consider a longer history of environmental aesthetics and natural sciences that have led to the concept of the Anthropocene in the 21st century. The book also moves forward from media theory of the 1960s and 1970s to consider new environmental challenges in the age of artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and virtual reality. While literary texts remain an important touchstone throughout the book, I also consider many different forms of media such as painting, theater, film, television, video games, augmented reality, and other digital projects.

Learn more about Spectacle Earth at the University of Virginia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue