Political movements that become media spectacles lose their real-world referent

Evidence

Most ironic in this context, however, is the very success of their failure: the representation — the model of this complex spatial dialectic — triumphantly survives in the form of a film and a book, but in the process of becoming an image and a spectacle, the referent seems to have disappeared, as so many people from Debord to Baudrillard always warned us it would. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 888

Categorization

• XREF: Directly evidences Debord’s spectacle thesis and Baudrillard’s simulacrum — connects to the reader’s existing frame on how representation displaces the real. — connects to: Consumer rebellion staged as shopping defuses actual political mobilization — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 394; Mass protests collapse open plurality into one narrow imposed meaning at the end — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 518; The MBL misappropriated the left’s protest repertoire and image — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 671 (+5 more)
• SEED: Angle: modern social movements (Occupy, BLM momentum, protest aesthetics) that achieve cultural visibility and thereby lose their local base — the Detroit league as template.