The Spectacular Hunt: Security, Commodity, Fetishism

• In Event: Policing Capital: The Logic of Pacification

Abstract

This paper considers the “manhunt” as a central feature of capitalist spectacle. That is, the trope of the manhunt – police or military pursuing, capturing, or killing a fleeing or hiding subject – plays a vital role in the production of bourgeois ideology and its attendant fantasies of security, accumulation, and the threat of dangerous classes. The first part of the paper outlines the extent to which the state hunt for “disorderly” human prey is now a key symbolic trope of the culture industry, from television shows to Hollywood movies to documentary films to novels to investigative journalism to video games to media reporting on the hunts for “terrorists” and violent “criminals.” The second part of the paper unpacks the spectacular hunt as a “security fetish” by situating the cultural production of the hunt within a discussion of Debord’s famous treatment of spectacle and its relation to commodity fetishism. I argue that these cultural productions of pursuit and capture should not be taken lightly, as they “take effect” in the realm of ideology by normalizing the state’s actual hunting powers through a process of transforming spectators into a “captive audience.” The hunting spectacle – as one example of the fetish of security – plays an active role in the commodification of everyday life by mediating the social relations between people and between people and the security state. In conclusion, I argue that a particularly useful way of challenging the spectacular hunt is through an “anti-security” critique of security and capital.

Author

• Tyler Wall, Eastern Kentucky University