After watching Michelle Obama's address to the Democratic National Convention, I went back to reread some of Debord's The Society of the Spectacle. I was deeply moved by her speech, and from trends on Twitter and posts of friends on Facebook, I saw that many others had been similarly affected.
My reaction to the speech (which I watched after the fact through Youtube) reminded me of our discussion in class Tuesday on point number 4:
"The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images." (Debord, 12)
Obama is presenting a complex image to her audience. She manages to effectively unite sets of opposites, delicately balancing what is expected and demanded of a first lady in her situation. She appears physically powerful and yet feminine--I observed as many comments about her arm muscles as comments about her dress. She touched on several key political messages without directly attacking any of her political opponents. Her speech was as powerful and effective as any presidential candidate's, but she stays strictly in the realm of First Lady and extolls motherhood as her greatest achievement. She appears capable and intelligent but does not mention her own career as a lawyer.
These images and their combination is powerful, but it is the social relationship she constructs between herself and the audience that gives the speech its real resonance. When I watched the clip, I felt connected to Obama and her experiences, and as a result I felt emotion when her speech reached its peak in statements about the views of her husband and the path to the future. Maybe I reacted so strongly because her speech and the images that accompanied it created a specific social relationship between me and her. I associated myself with her experiences, and I looked up to her as someone who has achieved as I would like to achieve.
The national conventions and their accompaniments are spectacle on a large scale, and this speech is perhaps the strongest single spectacle within them, at least partly because it successfully uses image to create an affecting social relationship between speaker and audience.
This video came from the Washington Post via Youtube.
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