ABSTRACT
When the term “militainment” arrived in 2003, it was really only a late-coming symptom of trends already in motion. The 1991 Persian Gulf War made it abundantly clear that war has entered into the system of consumption. In the years following Operation Desert Storm, critics widely understood these processes to function as a mode of social control, as a way to dampen deliberation and dissent so that the polity better fell in line behind official pronouncements. Among these commentators, traditional propaganda no longer held its place as a dominant explanation for how this control worked. Scholars began to understand war discourse not in terms of attempts to change the citizen’s beliefs (either consciously or unconsciously) but rather in terms of the “spectacle,” a critical term meant to describe a political and media environment characterized by alienation and distraction. This perspective holds that a “spectacular war” does not work through appeals, explanations, and justifications to a citizen acknowledged to be in a decision-making position. Rather, the spectacle is a certain kind of discourse that dazzles the citizen subject into a submissive, politically disconnected, complacent, and deactivated audience member. The most insightful commentary on the period uses the critical language of the spectacle explicitly, though many others hold some implicit version of the spectacle at the center of their critique.
