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Alternative lifestyles can be turned into commodities, safely recuperated and sold back to people, inducing a yearning for the past. For those bored with the possession of mere things, the Spectacle is capable of commodifying the possession of experiences in the form of package holidays, pop culture,
Attacks on the capitalist infrastructure, he writes, are attacks on ‘the machinery of permitted consumption’.[17]
We must remember that the spectacle only shows us what it wants us to see, and will attempt to reduce all the troubling complexity of an event to a representative image that works in the spectacle’s favour.
‘A revolt against the spectacle’, wrote the Situationists, ‘calls everything into question because it is a human protest against a dehumanized life’[22] . To assault the spectacle is to bring truths to light, to see things as they really are.
The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
This reciprocal alienation is the essence and the support of the existing society.
Damn so true. It's like proving them right.
To the extent that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessary. The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of sleep.
the more he contemplates the less he lives; the more he accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires. The externality of the spectacle in relation to the active man appears in the fact that his own gestures are no longer his but those of another who represents them to him. This is why the spectator feels at home nowhere, because the spectacle is everywhere.
Feeling at home nowhere but also feeling trapped everywhere
When economic necessity is replaced by the necessity for boundless economic development, the satisfaction of primary human needs is replaced by an uninterrupted fabrication of pseudo-needs which are reduced to the single pseudo-need of maintaining the reign of the autonomous economy.
“All that is conscious wears out. What is unconscious remains unalterable. But once freed, does it not fall to ruins in turn?”
The consciousness of desire and the desire for consciousness are identically the project which, in its negative form, seeks the abolition of classes, the workers’ direct possession of every aspect of their activity. Its opposite is the society of the spectacle, where the commodity contemplates itself in a world it has created.
It dominates them as the society of the spectacle. Even where the material base is still absent, modern society has already invaded the social surface of each continent by means of the spectacle. It defines the program of the ruling class and presides over its formation, just as it presents pseudo-goods to be coveted, it offers false models of revolution to local revolutionaries.
The remains of religion and of the family (the principal relic of the heritage of class power) and the moral repression they assure, merge whenever the enjoyment of this world is affirmed–this world being nothing other than repressive pseudo-enjoyment.
61. The agent of the spectacle placed on stage as a star is the opposite of the individual, the enemy of the individual in himself as well as in others.
Official differences between stars are wiped out by the official similarity which is the presupposition of their excellence in everything.
The admirable people in whom the system personifies itself are well known for not being what they are; they became great men by stooping below the reality of the smallest individual life, and everyone knows it.
the commodity the bureaucracy holds on to is the totality of social labor, and what it sells back to society is wholesale survival.
Therefore the already problematic satisfaction which is supposed to come from the consumption of the whole, is falsified immediately since the actual consumer can directly touch only a succession of fragments of this commodity happiness, fragments in which the quality attributed to the whole is obviously missing every time.
The satisfaction which no longer comes from the use of abundant commodities is now sought in the recognition of their value as commodities: the use of commodities becomes sufficient unto itself; the consumer is filled with religious fervor for the sovereign liberty of the commodities.
Fragmented happiness for not being able to enjoy one thing fully, hence enjoyment is sought in the recognition of the commodity's value.
The pseudo-need imposed by modern consumption clearly cannot be opposed by any genuine need or desire which is not itself shaped by society and its history.
The abundant commodity stands for the total breach in the organic development of social needs.
Pseudo-need
The cumulative power of independent artificiality sows everywhere the falsification of social life.
The fall of every figure with totalitarian power reveals the illusory community which had approved him unanimously, and which had been nothing more than an agglomeration of solitudes without illusions.
72. The unreal unity proclaimed by the spectacle masks the class division on which the real unity of the capitalist made of production rests. What obliges the producers to participate in the construction of the world is also what separates them from it. What brings together men liberated from their local and national boundaries is also what pulls them apart. What requires a more profound rationality is also what nourishes the irrationality of hierarchic exploitation and repression. What creates the abstract power of society creates its concrete unfreedom.
Even as a philosophy of the bourgeois revolution, it does not express the entire process of this revolution, but only its final conclusion.
The revolutionary viewpoint of a movement which thinks it can dominate current history by means of scientific knowledge remains bourgeois.
The scientific conception of the utopians did not extend to the knowledge that some social groups have interests in the existing situation, forces to maintain it, and also forms of false consciousness corresponding to such positions.
The linear schema loses sight of the fact that the bourgeoisie is the only revolutionary class that ever won; at the same time it is the only class for which the development of the economy was the cause and the consequence of its taking hold of society.
If the rising bourgeoisie seemed to liberate the economy from the State, this took place only to the extent that the former State was an instrument of class oppression in a static economy.
Here the socio-political foundations of the modern spectacle are already established, negatively defining the proletariat as the only pretender to historical life.
By neglecting the originality of the historical role of the bourgeoisie, one masks the concrete originality of the proletarian project, which can attain nothing unless it carries its own banners and knows the “immensity of its tasks.”
The growth of productive forces cannot guarantee such power, even by way of the increasing dispossession which it brings about.
Bonus demohraphy won't possess enough power to bring revolution.
The proletariat is objectively reinforced by the progressive disappearance of the peasantry and by the extension of the logic of factory labor to a large sector of “services” and intellectual professions.
Peasant used to be higher than proletariat
Nevertheless, when the proletariat discovers that its own externalized power collaborates in the constant reinforcement of capitalist society, not only in the form of its labor but also in the form of unions, of parties, or of the state power it had built to emancipate itself, it also discovers from concrete historical experience that it is the class totally opposed to all congealed externalization and all specialization of power. It carries the revolution which cannot let anything remain outside of itself, the demand for the permanent domination of the present over the past, and the total
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Proletarian revolution depends entirely on the condition that, for the first time, theory as intelligence of human practice be recognized and lived by the masses. It requires workers to become dialecticians and to inscribe their thought into practice. Thus it demands of men without quality more than the bourgeois revolution demanded of the qualified men which it delegated to carry out its tasks (since the partial ideological consciousness constructed by a part of the bourgeois class was based on the economy, this central part of social life in which this class was already in power).
A more complex society which finally becomes conscious of time devotes itself to negating it because it sees in time not what passes, but only what returns. A static society organizes time in terms of its immediate experience of nature, on the model of cyclical time.
The wealth that can be concentrated in the realm of power and materially used up in sumptuous feasts is also used up as a squandering of historical time at the surface of society.
And the bourgeoisie which suppresses all privilege, which recognizes no value that does not flow from the exploitation of labor, has justly identified with labor its own value as a dominant class, and has made the progress of labor its own progress.
Labour day
But the irreversible time of the bourgeois economy eradicates these vestiges on every corner of the globe. History, which until then had seemed to be only the movement of individuals of the ruling class, and thus was written as the history of events, is now understood as the general movement, and in this relentless movement individuals are sacrificed.
History of event vs general movement: histoy of individual of those on the ruling class and the background situation they control. Prols and peasant may have the illussion that they're the main characters of the history while they're just the objects.
The main product which economic development has transferred from luxurious scarcity to daily consumption is therefore history, but only in the form of the history of the abstract movement of things which dominates all qualitative use of life.
It's not as shallow as let say the history of technology development. The anthropology of the society follows the narrative.
The irreversible time of production is first of all the measure of commodities.
While cyclical time was the time of immobile illusion, really lived, spectacular time is the time of self-changing reality, lived in illusion.
Cyclical time ini maksudnya mundane consumption jadi berasa immobile illusion karena konstan ya?
The spectator’s consciousness, immobilized in the falsified center of the movement of its world, no longer experiences its life as a passage toward self-realization and toward death.
This social absence of death is identical to the social absence of life.
“With the present means of long-distance mass communication, sprawling isolation has proved an even more effective method of keeping a population under control,”
Proletarian revolution is the critique of human geography through which individuals and communities have to create places and events suitable for the appropriation, no longer just of their labor, but of their total history.
The greatest revolutionary idea concerning urbanism is not itself urbanistic, technological or esthetic. It is the decision to reconstruct the entire environment in accordance with the needs of the power of the Workers’ Councils, of the anti-statist dictatorship of the proletariat, of enforceable dialogue.
The real proletariat revolution will be action against current bourgeois urban policy. Hence space should be redesigned to cater the workers' need. The workers should not be limited to see the city as the place where they give their labour, but also where they participate in making the history.
speaking to others about what was lived without real dialogue,
When culture becomes nothing more than a commodity, it must also become the star commodity of the spectacular society.
The system’s thought, the thought of the social organization of appearance, is itself obscured by the generalized sub-communication which it defends.
