“WE ARE THE WORLD”: THE FLIGHT FROM IMPOTENCE IN THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Punctuating a recent music video we see, in his white glove and gold jacket, before his infamous face-whitening surgeries, the Michael Jackson of old. This video, for the song “We are the World 25,” is introduced, directly into camera, by a sincere Jamie Foxx, who implores viewers to give generously to help the recovery effort in Haiti. “Do more than just watch,”he says. “Take action.” Then, before the expected images of Haitians, and even before the singing celebrities themselves, we see a host of signatures unfolding on a black background.From the beginning, then, this video walks a very thin line: clearly banking on the reputations of singers who have made their careers as spectacles, as images, the video goes to some lengths to claim an authentic, and even superior, political position. “Give what you can,”Jamie Foxx says, “as I have.”The video’s repeated use of the image of Michael Jackson signifies this tenuous, if not contradictory, position. Who, after all, is more exemplary of the cultural logic of the societyof the spectacle than Michael Jackson? And who, in the pantheon of MTV singers, spent more time claiming authenticity and declaring our collective responsibility for a universal humanity? The video presents an excess of repetition and citation, in terms of its music and lyrics, the images Michael Jackson himself, as well as the chorus of Jackson-citing celebrity singers. But, despite the obvious point that these images and these performers are perhaps the most manufactured and least authentic imaginable, the video’s authenticity, as well as its anxiety over its own search for authenticity, is almost hyperbolically announced. My goal in this short essay is to read this video in relation to Agamben’s claims about the spectacle in his book The Coming Community. I will argue that it is precisely this citationality, this identity without essence—what is clearly a profoundly inauthentic announcement of authenticity—that Agamben sees as, potentially, the road out of the spectacle society. This video promiseswhat Agamben calls “whatever” politics (1), so–called politics, or, in Derrida’s terminology, a politics “under erasure” ( OG 23). At the same time, this video reveals the parallel logic,suggested in juridical terms in Agamben’s Homo Sacer, in which the anxiety of nonbelonging and inauthenticity leads to a more extreme and potentially violent search for essential group belonging and authentic political identity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.036 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".