In the ontology of Badiou’s Being and Event, presentation doubles up as representation, the “count of the count”. This doubling-up takes us from “the situation”, the presented multiplicity that there is, to “the state of the situation”, the secondary presentation of this multiplicity as a collection of parts. Between these two levels of structure there is a mediating term, “the encyclopedia”, which stands for the provision within a situation of a nomenclature - a set of names and rules for naming - that can be used to identify some of its parts. From the point of view of the encyclopedia only that which is nameable exists, and exists only at the level of representation (that is, as a part). But the name itself, and the power of naming which it summons, are drawn from the level of presentation: they belong to the situation. The encyclopedia thus braids the two levels of structure together, forming an infrastructure of power/knowledge: an “order of things” that is placed as a filter between presentation and re-presentation.

In Logics of Worlds, “appearance” is the name Badiou gives to the being-in-its-place of a being, and it is the “transcendental” of a world that orders the placement of everything that appears. Is there a term which might be to “appearance” as “representation” is to “presentation” - a name for the appearance of appearance? Might the transcendental indexing of a world, like the encyclopedia, act as a kind of ligament between two levels (of structure in the latter case, and of manifestation in the former)?

Let’s call the appearance of appearance “spectacle”, and define it as follows: the spectacle is the explicit manifestation, within an order of appearance, of the machinery of objectification which determines the visibility of everything within that order. In Badiou’s formulation, an “object” within a world is a Heyting-valued set (A, Id), consisting of a “support set” A and a function Id which “indexes” pairs of elements of A on the transcendental of that world. The spectacular restaging of this object may be represented in the following manner. For each (a ε A, b ε A) in AxA, construct the pair ((a, b), V) where V = Id(a, b). The set of these pairs may be considered the “graph” of the indexing function Id on the support set A, and can be written (A, Id)*. All that then remains is to “objectify” this graph, by taking it as the support set of a second object, ((A, Id)*, Id’). We call (A, Id) the “objectification of A”, and ((A, Id)*, Id’) the “spectacle of A”.

The spectacle of A is the worldly manifestation of A’s publicity, the visibility of its visibility. It is what appears when we take as an object of the world the very network of identifications through which the original being A was itself objectified. Thus, to take the obvious example of those who are “famous for being famous”, the celebrity is the spectacle of the famous person, the manifestation not of the person themselves but of their fame: the sum of their photo opportunities outside nightclubs, the degree of identity between one chatshow appearance and the next. Alternatively, we might consider the managerialist bureaucratisation of education, with its continually metastasising assessment exercises and league tables, as maintaining the spectacle of learning: the immediate (if often subtle) efficacy of teaching and research being subordinated to an apparatus for the measurement of “impact”.

The spectacle of a being gives away (some, but not all of) the secrets of its objectification, revealing (and perhaps also spoofing or exaggerating) the norms underlying its apparent consistency. Hypersexualised femininity tells us something about the primary objectification which governs the social visibility (and viability) of women qua “sex objects”. Celebrity tells us that fame is the “manufactured” product of industrialised publicity; the RAE tells us that the university is a factory. There is a kind of obscure affinity between managerialism and camp: each purports to turn a spotlight on the underlying performativity of its object, reproducing in spectacle its constitutive powers of manifestation, and in doing so robbing it of the ability to be taken at face value.

The “society of the spectacle” is a society which employs spectacularisation in defence against (or is it in defence of?) the relative weakness and mediocrity of its primary objects (the things it is ostensibly “about” as a society), dedicating more and more energy to rendering luminous and compelling the appearance of a vital “public sphere” whilst evacuating this space of anything really worth talking about. (Consider, for example, the popular science journalism which informs us breathlessly of the “significance” of discoveries without being able to render anything more than the most perfunctory caricature of what has actually been discovered. All it knows, and all it cares to report, is the impactfulness of that which is impactful).

It is misguided to try to violently puncture “the spectacle”: it is not a realm of illusion covering a more fundamental reality, but a worldly apparatus which shares its world with the very objects whose manifestation it re-objectifies. Its powers are not really so great: it flourishes where other powers wane. Finally, as a parasitic redoubling of objectification, it is unable to stand against the creative unfolding of a subject, the determined re-entanglement of formal innovation with the unobjectifiable real.