Lycurgus seems to anticipate the entire problem of the spectacle–imaginary when he bans statues and imposing architecture from politics. According to Plutarch, Lycurgus believed that edifices and statues “were in no way conducive to sound deliberations, but instead harmful. They make those who assemble idiotic and give them silly, mindless notions, when at their meetings they can stare at statues and pictures, or the stages of theaters, or the richly decorated roofs of council chambers."
The political class is always most susceptible to confusing spectacle with reality. Perhaps becoming a politician demands the exchange of one for the other. Journalists are next in line in confusing spectacle with reality. Perhaps this demonstrates that politicians and journalists are always, despite their protests, secret members of the same class.
Confusing spectacle with reality is a subtype of hysteria. Contrary to what Freud asserted hysteria is not the exclusive domain of women. Men are often the most spectacular symptom carrier.
Nor is hysteria fundamentally an erotic symptom. It is much more an ontological or existential symptom. The hysteric suffers from a traumatic vision of the pure emptiness of the world. The hysterics suffers from the symptom of realizing all too acutely that the world wounds, that the body is easily wounded and never safe.
Hysteria is narcissism’s echo. We have John Boehner’s easily flowing tears, Bill Clinton’s lip trembling confessions, and Mitt Romney’s manic insincerity, to demonstrate the hysteria of the political class.
Imagine what a strange and twisted accomplishment it is, to convince oneself to believe in nothing, so that one can seem to believe.
