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The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social
relation between people that is mediated by images.
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.
Bars
the same time all individual reality has become social, in the sense that it is shaped by social forces and is directly dependent on
deceived sense is the most readily adaptable to the generalized abstraction
practical changes in their conditions of existence. Like a factitious
triumph of this separation-based economic system proletarianizes
But such inactivity is in no way liberated from productive activity.
The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender “lonely crowds.”
The abstractifying of all individual labor
and the general abstractness of what is produced are perfectly reflected in the spectacle,
whose manner of being concrete is precise...
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The alienation of the spectator, which reinforces the contemplated objects that result from his own unconscious activity, works like this: 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.
ultimately produced a level of abundance
sufficient to solve the initial problem of survival – but only in such a way that the same problem is continually regenerated at a higher
Economic growth has liberated societies from the natural pressures that forced them into an immediate struggle for survival; but they have not ...
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The abundance of commodities – that is, the abundance of commodity relations – amounts to nothing more than an augmented survival.
Once his workday is over, the worker is suddenly redeemed from the total contempt toward him that is so clearly implied by every aspect of the organization and surveillance of production, and finds himself seemingly treated like a grown-up, with a great show of politeness, in his new role as a consumer.
To this end the reserve army of the unemployed is enlisted into the tertiary or “service” sector, reinforcing the troops responsible for distributing and glorifying the latest commodities at a time when increasingly extensive campaigns are necessary to convince people to buy increasingly unnecessary commodities.
The real consumer has become a consumer of illusions. The commodity is this materialized illusion and the spectacle is its general expression.
dissatisfaction itself becomes a commodity
he renounces all autonomous qualities in order to identify himself with the general law of obedience to the flow of things.
Fallacious archaic oppositions are revived – regionalisms and racisms which serve to endow mundane rankings in the hierarchies of consumption with a magical ontological superiority
And a youthful transformation of what exists is in no way characteristic of those who are now young; it is present solely in the economic system, in the dynamism of capitalism. It is things that rule and that are young, vying with each other and constantly replacing each other.
The proliferation of faddish gadgets reflects the fact that as the mass of commodities becomes increasingly absurd, absurdity itself becomes a commodity.
Reified people proudly display the proofs of their intimacy with the commodity.
The cumulative power of this autonomous artificiality ends up by falsifying all social life.
The fraudulence of the satisfactions offered by the system is exposed by this continual replacement of products and of general conditions
What obliges the producers to participate in the construction of the world is also what excludes them from it. What brings people into relation with each other by liberating them from their local and national limitations is also what keeps them apart. What requires increased rationality is also what nourishes the irrationality of hierarchical exploitation and repression. What produces society’s abstract power also produces its concrete lack of freedom.
consists of that vast majority of workers who have lost all power over their lives and who, once they become aware of this, redefine themselves as the proletariat,
proletariat cannot truly recognize itself in any particular wrong it has suffered, nor in the righting of any particular wrong. It cannot recognize itself even in the righting of many such wrongs, but only in the righting of the absolute wrong of being excluded from any real life.
History, which until then had seemed to involve only the actions of individual members of the ruling class, and which had thus been recorded as a mere chronology of events, is now understood as a general movement – a relentless movement that crushes any individuals in its path.
This blind prehistory, this new fate that no one controls, is the only thing that the commodity economy has democratized.
for the social image of the consumption of time, it is exclusively dominated by leisure time and vacations – moments portrayed, like all spectacular commodities, at a distance and as desirable by definition.
These commodified moments are explicitly presented as moments of real life, whose cyclical return we are supposed to look forward to. But all that is really happening is that the spectacle is displaying and reproducing itself at a higher level of intensity.
Its vulgarized pseudo-festivals are parodies of real dialogue and gift-giving; they may incite waves of excessive economic spending, but they lead to nothing but disillusionments, which can be compensated only by the promise of some new disillusion to come.
Life insurance ads merely insinuate that he may be guilty of dying without having provided for the smooth continuation of the
system
This social absence of death coincides with the social absence of life.
Urbanism – “city planning” – is capitalism’s method for taking over the natural and human environment. Following its logical development toward total domination, capitalism now can and must refashion the totality of space into its own particular decor.
is the very technology of separation.
This reintegration into the system means bringing isolated individuals together as isolated individuals. Factories, cultural centers, tourist resorts and housing developments are specifically designed to foster this type of pseudo-community.
The same collective isolation prevails even within the family cell, where the omnipresent receivers of spectacular messages fill the isolation with the dominant images – images that derive their full power precisely from that isolation.
In all these areas the goal remains the same: to restructure society without community.
We can truly understand this society only by negating it.
This amounts to blaming the spectacle on modern man’s excessive inclination to be a spectator.
the overwhelming realities of present-day social existence prevent people from actually living events for themselves.
thoroughly caught up in their awestruck celebration of the existing system that they can do nothing
reduce all reality to the existence of that system.
“The need for money is thus the true need produced by the modern economic system, and it is the only need which the latter produces”
