Note #7

The Spectacle

What a s***show. For the past few weeks, I have been texting and speaking with friends about Jason Arday. I have repeatedly considered writing something and then stopped myself. Partly because so much has already been said, and partly because, as a relatively young Black academic, I am conscious of the expectation that I should have something particular to contribute.

I keep thinking about this whole situation in relation to Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle. Debord’s concept of the spectacle is much broader than I can do justice to here: it critiques how social life under capitalism becomes organised through commodity relations, separation, and representation. But one part of his argument feels especially useful. For Debord, our relationships with one another are increasingly mediated through representations, to the point that what is directly lived can become displaced by what is represented. Arday had already been made representative before the recent controversy. His appointment could signify Black excellence, social mobility and institutional progress: ‘evidence’ of the changing face of a historically white and exclusionary profession.

Then the meanings changed. When questions emerged about aspects of his academic record and appointment, they required scrutiny. Obviously Black academics should not be exempt from the standards applied to anybody else, and Cambridge plainly has questions to answer about its own processes.

But very quickly, the story became about much more than one academic and one university. Arday could now signify declining academic standards, failed EDI initiatives, the death of meritocracy, racism or media cruelty. What matters, in Debord’s terms, is not simply that Arday became an image, but that people increasingly related to him and to one another through these competing representations of him. That is where the spectacular logic of this story becomes clearer. The same figure could organise entirely opposed readings of the world. Critics and defenders, commentators, journalists, and academics could all gather around Arday while disagreeing about what he represented. Arday became the common object around which these different political positions met.

The scale of the coverage matters too because it is difficult to imagine that questions about a professor's academic record would ordinarily sustain this level of national attention. The racial and political symbolism made the story irresistible. A Black academic became a surface onto which much larger arguments about universities, merit and diversity could be projected. And this cuts both ways. The same visibility that lets Black achievement be held up as evidence of progress can make individual failure seem like something much bigger. One person is asked to carry arguments about an entire category of people.

Perhaps that is also why I found myself identifying with the story. There is something human about seeing ourselves in others. But racialised representation intensifies that process. Once Arday is repeatedly encountered as a Black academic, rather than simply as Jason Arday, other Black academics are also invited to locate themselves in relation to that: to identify, defend, distance, explain. The spectacle gives us an image through which to understand our relationship to others.

By this point, Jason Arday seemed to mean something to everybody. So much meaning had accumulated around him that the person was increasingly obscured, perhaps overwhelmed, by what he had been made to represent.

The spectacle made him extraordinarily visible, while making the person increasingly difficult to see. That is a tragedy.

Rest in power, Jason.