The Truman Show: Plato’s Cave Today

As in the cave of The Republic by Plato, the media system of the totally administered civilization proceeds according to a specific “one-way ‘distributive’ mode,” as McLuhan has defined it: the flow of information, by means of which manipulation is determined, is rigorously directed in a univocal way, according to the dichotomy of the transmitting pole and the receiving pole. It operates a permanent counter-revolution by prevention. Passivity, apraxia and inaction are the fundamental figures of the empire of techno-capitalist passivity, a globalized cavern in which the frantic and hypertrophic doing of production and consumption coexists, in the same temporal and spatial unit, with the absence of any utopian-redemptive project and the active implementation of any transformative dynamic. Also from this perspective, the intimately contradictory character of the global shelter of ignorance is revealed, which is based ambivalently on the maximum degree of unthinking technical action and the minimum degree of doing something that is transformative and part of a plan. Thanks to the performance of the spectacle of the globalized cavern, which sanctifies it from the outset, it celebrates the plural (lifestyles, ways of thinking and existing), provided that everyone moves within the single horizon of the cage, recognized in its ineluctability. With convergent movement, it praises the openness of all reality – from the imaginary to the frontiers—as long as that reality is confined within the open and borderless society of integral marketization.

The antrum platonicum of unhappy globalization seeks the passive and servile acceptance of what there is, or rather of what appears to be; and it obtains this result of docile observance through the very forms with which the spectacle unfolds, without admitting any right of reply, or any real plurality of that which has been made to appear. The very forms of non-alignment are always and only exhibited with a clear apotropaic function, with a view both to their permanent ridicule and to their apology for the benefit of the cavern of the masses, which in this way can hide its real totalitarian essence behind a falsely pluralist and tolerant appearance. The struggle against reification and alienation is permitted, as long as it is presented in forms that are themselves reified and alienated.

In this case, ideology as the science of idols and simulacra is shown in its double meaning. In fact, in the Marxian sense, it appears as the false consciousness necessary for those who are inevitably induced to superstructurally legitimize the real power relations within the globalized cavern. In the best-known sense, therefore, we are in the presence of the ideological device, because behind the main media actions there operates the conscious will to consolidate public opinion: and this with the specific intention, once again, of getting those chained in the globalized cavern to love their own chains, confusing them with the very essence of freedom (whose real consistency coincides, in fact, with that of flatus vocis). Hidden behind the wall of Platonic memory, the new Sophists who manage consensus in the global society of the glamorous totalitarianism of the markets decide what the shackled masses should think and want, so that the flows of consensus and dissent are organized in the interests of the ever-renewed confirmation of the existing order. Reading the newspapers, Hegel argued, is “a kind of realistic morning prayer.” Thanks to the current journalistic clergy of the press (in print, on television and online), it has become an “unreal” prayer because it turns a mediated reality upside down, a reality today almost completely devoid of contact with the “real reality” and redesigned ad hoc by the mediators of consensus and by the opinion makers of the superstructural culmination of the really existing power relations. Herein lies the essence of the media’s shaping of reality by the postmodern successors of Cartesian genius malignus.

The masters who hold private ownership of discourse and history are the same ones who standardize the collective imagination of peoples with a view to their complete integration into the new cosmopolitan class order, with a single permitted worldview (Weltanschauung), one that conceives of the world as a business network of financial flows for atoms in permanent competition and with an unlimited individual consumerist will to power within the iron cage of globalized capitalism. Following a strategy already anticipated by Diderot in his version of the Cave of Cavemen, the new Sophists induce subjects to abandon all class-based and conflictual perspectives, so that they adhere without unhappy conscience and without reasoned disobedience to the project of liberal-libertarian neocapitalism, to its founding conceptual categories and to its general imaginary. The managers of the superstructure, moreover, persuade the classes impoverished and defeated by liberal policies of the intrinsic goodness of market universalism and of the unquestionable truth of the identity theorem between freedom and globalization, between democracy and deregulated economy. In this way they guarantee the permanent consensus of those who should have every interest in revolting, transforming themselves and working for the exodus from that concentration camp reality, which imprisons minds even before bodies, about the structure of the oppressive cave of globalization.

In this respect, we must not overlook a further aspect that contributes to the fact that the current society of the spectacle is easily comparable to the model of the antrum platonicum. In the latter, the chained are in a state of aphasia. Each one looks at the screen of the gloomy cave of shadows, enthralled by the shadows that follow one another without stopping and by the noises that echo everywhere between the walls. A situation in many ways analogous characterizes the inmates of the current cosmopolitan cave of the broken community bond. Above all with regard to the digital sphere of the Internet, where cybernauts find themselves systematically confined to their virtual cells, connected to the digital and disconnected from the real: they break off relations with the real reality that surrounds them and assume the increasingly alienated status of citizens of the telematic reality that is everywhere and nowhere.

The digital world, as a whole, favors not so much the exits from the cave, but rather the “exits from the world,” as Elémire Zolla called them. It performs the hyperimmanent function of a new opium of the people, which generates disengagement and adaptation in the very act of promoting escapes to the virtual realm of online profiles, second life and dematerialized avatars. In other words, it allows us to better endure the cave of society, creating the illusion of a digital other place that never questions its bars. Promising simultaneous and real time connection with the entire planet, the Internet unabashedly promotes the permanent uprooting of individuals trapped in digital isolationism. In front of the screen they are abstractly connected to the whole world and really imprisoned in their own solitude.

Together with the breakdown of real relationships, the virtualization of the real operated by social networks also produces, una motu, the annihilation of the dimension of lived experience. The forced expropriation of the ability to create, consolidate and transmit experiences, in the age of real time and the frenetic instantaneousness of ever-shorter flashes, is a daily companion for the networked inhabitant of the global metropolitan cavern. This is what Debord meant when he said that the loss of lived experience is the most typical experience of the society of the spectacle: “all directly lived experience has been transferred into representation.” It is not only that the virtual deadens and domesticates the real, smoothing its thorny edges and falsely softening its contradictions and, in this way, making the société à la dérive, armored in its alienation and classism, more acceptable to all. A reflection of the accelerated accumulation of financial capital, the regime of Being without Time (mutilated of both the future and the past and crushed in the real time of the eternal present) is configured, simultaneously, as the realm of Being without Experience. The latter, according to the German word, alludes to a “journey” (Er-fahung) that takes place in time and space, to a iter of learning in which, as Hegel has shown, the relevance of the negative and its overcoming emerges. Plato’s own account of the Cave has as its object an “experience,” the Er-fahren, the “journey” of the fugitive who returns “formed” and enriched by the knowledge he has laboriously conquered, after having triumphed over the immense power of the negative that he has had the courage to face.

In the global space of the cavern real time and of communication without limits (and increasingly in the absence of the concrete object to communicate), there is no longer time for any experience, often not even for sleeping or for loving. In addition to the adventure of travel, the dimension of experience is connected to that of putting oneself to the test or, more fully, to that of a “trying out” that is, at the same time, a “being tried out”: and this according to the dual dynamic—effectively expressed by the Latin deponent verb experiri—of exposure to the real and the reflexive reaction that the subject activates in the face of such exposure. As in the antrum platonicum, in the global digitalized cavern experience has been supplanted by the virtual image, by the simulacrum that produces dependence and passivity, acceptance and accommodation. In the end, the Platonic myth of the cavern can also be re-read as the metaphorical narration of the Er-fahrung, of the “experiential journey” with which, freeing ourselves from the all-enveloping pressure of the society of images and of the digital, we must complete, like Socrates, the strenuous anabasis that leads us to the rediscovery of the real in all its richness and majesty. The ascent from the abyssal depths of the cave of the Socratic school could also be conceived as a reappropriation of the real and, consequently, as a liberation from the vision of the media spectacle that seeks to substitute the real.

An effective representation, albeit deliberately paroxysmal, of the mechanisms of control and alienation that are co-essential to the iron cage of the society of the spectacle is offered by The Truman Show, the 1998 film that unmasks the permanent spectacularization applied by technocapitalist power. The protagonist, thirty-something Truman Burbank, whose life is full and serene, is unaware that he is the star of a television program—The Truman Show, to be precise—followed in real time from all corners of the planet. The prisoner’s life itself thus becomes a spectacle broadcast to all corners of the world, exploiting energies and, moreover, consuming the very existence of the unconscious protagonist, the only one who does not know it and, therefore, the only one to live authentically – even in the spectacle. On the other hand, he owes his name to this, which refers directly to the true man, the “real man,” not falsified by the society of the spectacle.

Like Plato’s prisoner in chains, Truman has also been trapped since birth in a fictitious reality that he necessarily mistakes for the only reality that exists. In fact, when he came into the world, Truman was taken in after his mother’s unwanted pregnancy and, so to speak, “adopted” by a private television channel. The latter transformed him, immediately and without his consent, into the lead actor in a program broadcast on Worldvision as a reality show. Again, as in Plato’s Cave, also in the totally administered kingdom of Truman—the islet of Seahaven—everything exists in a fictitious and shadowy way: day and night are artificial, as are the sea and all atmospheric phenomena. Even the human beings with whom Truman establishes what he considers to be the most authentic relationships—such as his friend Marlon and his wife Meryl—are actors consciously playing a role, while at the same time, from time to time, they advertise dazzling merchandise that viewers are invited to buy.

Everything is meticulously managed by the operators of the colossal television studio which, in fact, is as big as the world of the unwary Truman Burbank. Inside the dome of the fake sky works the director Christof, heir to Plato’s sophist-puppeteer, who from behind the digital wall directs the show and strives to ensure that the deception is never revealed. Truman gradually discovers the truth: what there is is not the whole, because beyond what there is begins the real world, with which the protagonist has never had any relationship, except through the brief love affair with Sylvia, the young woman in love with him who, on occasion, had tried to show him the way out. The film triumphantly ends with Truman’s emergence from the show’s cave to which he had been condemned since birth: his very liberation, however, ends up being an integral part of the spectacle, since, to a mixture of shock and enthusiasm, it is followed on television on a global scale. The implicit moral is that nothing can escape the society of the spectacle. Even the escape from the cave itself is transformed into a media spectacle, through which the unlimited will to power of the consumer society is fed. Plato’s cave becomes merchandise among merchandise. And Truman, freeing himself from his everyday fictitious world, becomes an inhabitant of a new and greater cave.

Source: Posmodernia