Society of the Spectacle

by Guy Debord

Debord shows how the image functions in modern capitalism. The spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by an accumulation of images that serve to alienate us from a genuinely lived life. The image is thus an historical mutation of the form of commodity fetishism.

‘Desire, the only motive of the world, desire, the only rigour humans must be acquainted with, where could I be better situated to adore it than on the inside of the cloud? The forms the clouds take, as they are seen from the ground, are in no way random; they are rather augural.’

‘Is history simply a matter of events that leave behind those things that can be weighed and measured...or is it the result of moments that seem to leave nothing behind, nothing but the mystery of spectral connections...’

The conjuncture of ‘68 (or any other period of revolutionary ferment) is a result of a necessary set of historical conditions for radical action but which are not sufficient in themselves to guarantee or deliver anything.

The actual events as they unfold in such a conjuncture are not predetermined but are the result of the concrete actions of those involved. The theory and practice they engage in, the tactics and strategies they employ, the alliances they forge all contribute to the outcome of the struggle. Unforeseen possibilities open up in the abyss of the present and history is made.

The consumer, supposedly sovereign, is nothing but the locus of a network of pseudo-choices; this is exemplified by the automated telephone answering systems that companies employ. We are guided through a pre-programmed set of options that reduce us to a mere linkage in a computerised system subject ultimately to the exigencies of the market.

The shareholder becomes the be-all and end-all of our domination by the market economy. All parties accept that companies must act in the ‘interest of their stockholders’ whatever the cost in alienation or exploitation. Indeed the logic of political economy is such that this is unavoidable once the ubiquity of the market is accepted. Only a radical questioning of capital will disrupt that logic.

The ideological function of celebrity (and lottery systems) is clear - like a modern ‘wheel of fortune’ the message is ‘all is luck; some are rich, some are poor, that is the way the world is...it could be you!’

Every action we undertake (our so-called ‘lifestyle’ - usually lacking both life and style) is subject to an injunction to calculate the effect on the social ‘ecology’ around us. In the name either of an ‘enlightened’ pragmatism or a pernicious moralism the pseudo-choices we are presented with come with an impossible burden of ‘responsibility’ for their consequences. These consequences are, of course, in reality beyond our control and merely serve to mask the anarchy of the marketplace.

Thus: every time we spend money we are expected to act as if we were a minister for the economy as a whole; every time we eat, drink or make love we are to act as if we are experts in nutrition, health etc. We must be constantly be aware of ‘the signals we send out’ lest they encourage anti-social behaviour, mislead children or frighten the horses. That is, we must not do anything that will upset things as they are.

“But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence . . . truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred. Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.”

In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.

The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.

The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.

In all of its particular manifestations — news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment — the spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. In both form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system. The spectacle also represents the constant presence of this justification since it monopolizes the majority of the time spent outside the production process.

In a world that is really upside down, the true is a moment of the false.

The spectacle presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned. Its sole message is: “What appears is good; what is good appears.” The passive acceptance it demands is already effectively imposed by its monopoly of appearances, its manner of appearing without allowing any reply.

The tautological character of the spectacle stems from the fact that its means and ends are identical. It is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity.

The spectacle is able to subject human beings to itself because the economy has already totally subjugated them.

The first stage of the economy’s domination of social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having — human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed.

Individual reality is allowed to appear only if it is not actually real.

Since the spectacle’s job is to use various specialized mediations in order to show us a world that can no longer be directly grasped, it naturally elevates the sense of sight to the special preeminence once occupied by touch: the most abstract and easily deceived sense is the most readily adaptable to the generalized abstraction of present-day society.

The spectacle does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality, reducing everyone’s concrete life to a universe of speculation.

The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion.

The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep.

The more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him. The spectator does not feel at home anywhere, because the spectacle is everywhere.

The real consumer has become a consumer of illusions. The commodity is this materialized illusion, and the spectacle is its general expression.

Consciousness of desire and desire for consciousness are the same project, the project that in its negative form seeks the abolition of classes and thus the workers’ direct possession of every aspect of their activity. The opposite of this project is the society of the spectacle, where the commodity contemplates itself in a world of its own making.

The admirable people who personify the system are well known for not being what they seem; they attain greatness by stooping below the reality of the most insignificant individual life, and everyone knows it.

Like the old religious fetishism, with its convulsionary raptures and miraculous cures, the fetishism of commodities generates its own moments of fervent exaltation. All this is useful for only one purpose: producing habitual submission.

Each new lie of the advertising industry is an admission of its previous lie. And with each downfall of a personification of totalitarian power, the illusory community that had unanimously approved him is exposed as a mere conglomeration of loners without illusions.

The fact that anarchists have seen the goal of proletarian revolution as immediately present represents both the strength and the weakness of collectivist anarchist struggles (the only forms of anarchism that can be taken seriously — the pretensions of the individualist forms of anarchism have always been ludicrous).

Furthermore, the anarchists’ refusal to take into account the great differences between the conditions of a minority banded together in present-day struggles and of a postrevolutionary society of free individuals has repeatedly led to the isolation of anarchists when the moment for collective decisionmaking actually arrives, as is shown by the countless anarchist insurrections in Spain that were contained and crushed at a local level.

The historical moment when Bolshevism triumphed for itself in Russia and social democracy fought victoriously for the old world marks the inauguration of the state of affairs that is at the heart of the modern spectacle’s domination: the representation of the working class has become an enemy of the working class.

By seizing a state monopoly as sole representative and defender of working-class power, the Bolshevik Party justified itself and became what it already was: the party of the owners of the proletariat, owners who essentially eliminated earlier forms of property.

The industrialization of the Stalin era revealed the bureaucracy’s ultimate function: continuing the reign of the economy by preserving the essence of market society: commodified labor.

This particular materialization of ideology did not transform the world economically, as did advanced capitalism; it simply used police-state methods to transform people’s perception of the world.

Each bureaucrat is thus totally dependent on the central seal of legitimacy provided by the ruling ideology, which validates the collective participation in its “socialist regime” of all the bureaucrats it does not liquidate.

It presents itself as what it is — a violent resurrection of myth calling for participation in a community defined by archaic pseudovalues: race, blood, leader. Fascism is a technologically equipped primitivism. Its factitious mythological rehashes are presented in the spectacular context of the most modern means of conditioning and illusion.

Man’s appropriation of his own nature is at the same time his grasp of the development of the universe. “History is itself a real part of natural history, of the transformation of nature into man” (Marx).

History has always existed, but not always in its historical form. The temporalization of humanity, brought about through the mediation of a society, amounts to a humanization of time.

Myth is the unitary mental construct which guarantees that the cosmic order conforms with the order that this society has in fact already established within its frontiers.

The power that establishes itself above the poverty of the society of cyclical time, the class that organizes this social labor and appropriates its limited surplus value, simultaneously appropriates the temporal surplus value resulting from its organization of social time: it alone possesses the irreversible time of the living.

The owners of this historical surplus value are the only ones in a position to know and enjoy real events. Separated from the collective organization of time associated with the repetitive production at the base of social life, this historical time flows independently above its own static community. This is the time of adventure and war, the time in which the masters of cyclical society pursue their personal histories; it is also the time that emerges in the clashes with foreign communities that disrupt the unchanging social order.

History thus arises as something alien to people, as something they never sought and from which they had thought themselves protected. But it also revives the negative human restlessness that had been at the very origin of this whole (temporarily suspended) development.

This irreversible time is the time of those who rule, and the dynasty is its first unit of measurement. Writing is the rulers’ weapon. In writing, language attains its complete independence as a mediation between consciousnesses.

“Writings are the thoughts of the state; archives are its memory” (Novalis).

The chronicle is the expression of the irreversible time of power. It also serves to inspire the continued progression of that time by recording the past out of which it has developed, since this orientation of time tends to collapse with the fall of each particular power and would otherwise sink back into the indifferent oblivion of cyclical time (the only time known to the peasant masses who, during the rise and fall of all the empires and their chronologies, never change).

The masters who used the protection of myth to make history their private property did so first of all in the realm of illusion.

Examining history amounts to examining the nature of power.