The Job

JVL Introduction

T.J. Clark a world authority on modernism and the visual arts was also an active member of the Situationist International in the 1960s with its critique of consumerism and modern capitalism.

Here he applies a perspective derived from Guy Debord 1967 “The Society of the Spectacle”, which argued that we live in a world of images created by the spectacle which separate us from reality, promoting conformity, isolation and mass consumption. Genuine experiences are replaced by images, and people become passive spectators rather than active participants.

Capitalism has become the form of life, its economy absolutely preponderant. Politicians have lost even the semblance of control over any of it. So what would a politics appropriate to it look like today, asks Clark.

Pretty like Trump, a poltics in which nothing is hidden.

Political hypocrisy, so central to the process of mystification, seems disposable as Trump goes behind the scenes to tell us that what the ‘lunatic left’ once dared to imagine is actually spot on.

“Suddenly the inner thoughts of power are projected onto the screen in everyone’s hand – all the drivelling banalities, the selfishness, the contempt for others, the lack of interest in anything the world has to offer except personal gain, the malice, the ignorance, the ludicrous certainties.”

Or, to quote again, as reality is rendered visible: “Gaza is what grown-ups with weapons …have always done.”

RK

This article was originally published by London Review of Books, Vol. 47 No. 22 on Sun 30 Nov 2025. Read the original here.