35 Years Later...

spectacle - n. 1. A public display, esp. on a large scale.

Selected theses from the book 'The Society of the Spectacle' by Guy Debord, first published in 1967. After 35 years, does it still have relevance? Or is it fashionable gibberish, with no bearing on daily life? Decide for yourself. Read on...



'1. The whole of life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of <spectacles>. All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.'

'4. The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.'

'12. The spectacle manifests itself as an enormous positivity, out of reach and beyond dispute. All it says is: "Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear." The attitude it demands in principle is the same passive acceptance that it has already secured by means of its seeming incontrovertibility, and indeed by its monopolization of the realm of appearances.'

'14. The spectacular character of modern industrial society has nothing fortuitous or superficial about it; on the contrary, this society is based on the spectacle in the most fundamental way. For the spectacle, as the perfect image of the ruling economic order, ends are nothing and development is all - although the only thing into which the spectacle plans to develop is itself.'

'15. As the indespensible packaging for things produced as they are now produced, as the general gloss on the rationality of the system, and as the the advanced economic sector directly responsible for the manufacture of an ever-growing mass of image-objects, the spectacle is the <chief product> of present-day society.'

'17. An earlier stage in the economy's domination of social life entailed an obvious downgrading of <being> into <having> that left its stamp on all human endeavor. The present stage, in which social life is completely taken over by the accumulated products of the economy, entails a generalized shift from <having> to appearing: all effective "having" must now derive both its immediate prestige and its ultimate raison d' etre from appearances. At the same time all individual reality, being directly dependent on social power, has assumed a social character. Indeed, it is only inasmuch as individual reality <is not> that it is allowed to <appear>.'

'30. The spectator's alienation from and submission to the contemplated object (which is the outcome of of his unthinking activity) works like this: the more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more readily he recognizes his own needs in the images of need proposed by the dominant system, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires. The spectacle's externality with respect to the acting subject is demonstrated by the fact that the individual's own gestures are no longer his own, but rather those of someone else who represents them to him. The spectator feels at home nowhere, for the spectacle is everywhere.'

'33. Though separated from his product, man is more and more, and ever more powerfully, the producer of every detail of his world. The closer his life comes to being his own creation, the more drastically he is cut off from that life.'

'34. The spectacle is <capital> accumulated to the point where it becomes image.'

'42. The spectacle corresponds to the historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life. It is not just that the relationship to commodities is now plain to see - commodities are now <all> that there is to see; the world we see is the world of the commodity. The growth of the dictatorship of modern economic production is both extensive and intensive in character. In the least industrialized regions its presence is already felt in the form of imperialist domination by those areas that lead the world in productivity. In these advanced sectors themselves, social space is continually being blanketed by stratum after stratum of commodities. With the advent of the so-called second industrial revolution, alienated consumption is added to alienated production as an inescapable duty of the masses. The <entirety of labor sold> is transformed into the <total commodity>. A cycle is thus set in train that must be maintained at all costs: the total commodity must be returned in fragmentary form to a fragmentry individual completely cut off from the concerted action of the forces of production. To this end the already specialized science of domination is further broken down into specialties such as sociology, applied psychology, cybernetics, semiology and so on, which oversee the self-regulation of every phase of process.'

'51. The economy's triumph as an independent power also spells its doom, for it has unleashed forces that must eventually destroy the <economic necessity> that was the unchanging basis of earlier societies. Replacing that necessity by the necessity of boundless economic development can only mean replacing the satisfaction of primary human needs, now meet in the most summary manner, by a ceasless manufacture of pseudo-needs, all of which come down in the end to just one - namely, the pseudo-need for the reign of an autonomous economy to continue. Such an economy irrevocably breaks all ties with authentic needs to the precise degree that it emerges from a <social unconscious> that was dependent on it without knowing it. "Whatever is conscious wears out. Whatever is unconscious remains unalterable. Once freed, however, surely this too must fall into ruins?" (Freud).'

'59. Behind the glitter of the spectacle's distractions, modern society lies in thrall to the global domination of a <banalizing> trend that also dominates it at each point where the most advanced forms of commodity consumption have seemingly broadened the panoply of roles and objects available to choose from. The vestiges of religion and of the family (still chief mechanism for the passing on of class power), and thus too the vestiges of moral repression that these institutions ensure, can now be seamlessly combined with the rhetorical advocacy of pleasure <in this life>. The life in question is after all produced solely as a form of pseudo-gratification which still embodies repression. A smug acceptance of what exists is likewise quite compatible with a purely spectacular rebelliousness, for the simple reason that dissatisfaction itself becomes a commodity as soon as the economics of affluence finds a way of applying its production methods to this particular raw material.'

'65. The diffuse form of the spectacle is associated with the abundance of commodities, with the undisturbed development of modern capitalism. Here each commodity considered in isolation is justified by an appeal to the grandeur of commodity production in general - a production for which the spectacle is an apologetic catalog. The claims jostling for position on the stage of the affluent economy's integrated spectacle are not always compatible, however. Similarly, different star commodities simultaneously promote conflicting approaches to the organization of society; thus the spectacular logic of the automobile argues for a perfect traffic flow entailing the destruction of the old city centers, whereas the the spectacle of the city itself calls for these same ancient sections to be turned into museums. So the already questionable satisfaction allegedly derived from the <consumption of the whole> is adulterated from the outset because the real consumer can only get his hands on a succession of <fragments> of this commodity heaven - fragments each of which naturally lacks any of the <quality> of the whole.'

'68. It is doubtless impossible to contrast the pseudo-need imposed by the reign of modern consumerism with any authentic need or desire that is not itself equally determined by society and its history. But the commodity in the stage of its abundance attests to an absolute break in the organic development of social needs. The commodity's mechanical accumulation unleashes a <limitless artificialty> in the face of which all living desire is disarmed. The cumualtive power of this autonomous realm of artifice necessarily everywhere entails a <falsification of life>.'

'71. Whatever lays claim to permanence in the spectacle is founded on change, and must change as that foundation changes. The spectacle, though quintessentially dogmatic, can yet produce no solid dogma. Nothing is stable for it: this is its natural state, albeit the state most at odds with its natural inclination.'

'106. The ideological-totalitarian class in power is the power of a world turned on its head: the stronger the class, the more forcefully it proclaims that it does not exist, and its strength serves first an foremost to assert its nonexistence. This is a far as its modesty goes, however, for its official nonexistence is supposed to coincide with the <ne plus ultra> of historical development, which is indeed owed to its infallible leadership. Though everywhere in evidence, bureaucracy is obliged to be a class imperceptible to the consciousness, thus making the whole of social life unfathomable and insane. The social organization of the absolute lie reposes on this fundamental contradiction.'

'115. Signs of a new and growing tendency toward negation proliferate in the more economically advanced countries. The spectacular system reacts to these signs with incomprehension or attempts to misrepresent them, but they are suffiecient proof that a new period has begun. After the failure of the working class's first subversive assault on capitalism, we are now witness to <the failure of capitalist abundance>. On the one hand, we see anti-union struggles of Western workers that have to be repressed (and repressed primarily by the unions themselves); at the same time rebellious tendencies among the young generate a protest that is still tentative and amorphous, yet already clearly embodies a rejection of the specialized sphere of the old politics, as well as of art and everyday life. These are two sides of the same coin, both signaling a new spontaneous struggle emerging under the sign of <criminality>, both portents of a second proletarian onslaught on class society. When the <enfants perdus> of this as yet immobile horde enter once again upon the battlefield, which has changed yet remained the same, a new General Ludd will be at their head - leading them this time in an onslaught on the <machinery of permitted consumption>.'

'122. As capitalism's ever-intensifying imposition of alienation at all levels makes it increasingly hard for workers to recognize and name their own impoverishment, and eventually puts them in a position of having either to reject it in its totality or do nothing at all, the revolutionary organization must learn that it can no longer <combat alienation by means of alienated forms of struggle>.'

'147. The time of production, time-as-commodity, is an infinite accumulation of equivalent intervals. It is irreversible time made abstract: each segment must demonstrate by the clock its purely quantitative equality with all other segments. This time manifests nothing in its effective reality aside from its <exchangeability>. It is under the rule of time-as-commodity that "time is everything, man is nothing; he is at most time's carcass" (<The Poverty of Philosophy>). This is time devalued - the complete inversion of time as "the sphere of human development."'

'152. In its most advanced sectors, a highly concentrated capitalism has begun selling "fully equipped" blocks of time, each of which is a complete commodity combining a variety of other commodities. This is the logic behind the appearance, within an expanding economy of "services" and leisure activities, of the "all-inclusive" purchase of spectacular forms of housing, of collective pseudo-travel, of participation in cultural consumption and even of sociability itself, in the form of "exciting conversations," "meeting with celebrities" and suchlike. Spectacular commodities of this type could obviously not exist were it not for the increasing impoverishment of the realities they parody. And, not surprisingly, they are also paradigmatic of modern sales techniques in that they maybe bought on credit.'

'165. The capitalist production system has unified space, breaking down the boundaries between one society and the next. This unification is also a process, at once extensive and intensive, of <trivialization>. Just as the accumulation of commodities mass-produced for the abstract space of the market inevitebly shattered all regional and legal barriers, as well as all those corporative restrictions that served in the Middle Ages to preserve the quality of craft production, so too it was bound to dissipate the independence and quality of <places>. The power to homogenize is the heavy artillery that has battered down all Chinese walls.'

'169. A society that molds its entire surroundings has necessarily evolved its own techniques for working on the material basis of this set of tasks. That material basis is the society's actual <territory>. Urbanism is the mode of appropriation of the natural and human environment by capitalism, which, true to its logical development toward absolute domination, can (and now must) refashion the totality of space into <its own peculiar decor>.'

'193. A culture now wholly commodity was bound to become the star commodity of the society of the spectacle. Clark Kerr, an ideologue at the cutting edge of this trend, reckons that the whole complex system of production, distribution and consumption of <knowledge> is already equivalent to 29 percent of the annual gross national product of the United States, and he predicts that in the second half of of this century culture will become the driving force of the American economy, so assuming the role of the automobile in the first half, or that of the railroad in the late nineteenth century.'

'194. The task of the complex system of claims still evolving as <spectacular thought> is to justify a society that has no justification, and ultimately to establish itself as a general science of false consciousness. This thought is entirely determined by the fact that it cannot and does not wish to apprehend its own material foundation in the spectacular system.'