In societies where modern conditions
of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation
of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away
into a representation.
2
The images detached from every
aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life
can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered
partially unfolds,
in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of
mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed
in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself.
The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous
movement of the non-living.
3
The spectacle presents itself simultaneously
as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification.
As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all
gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is
separate,
it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness,
and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of
generalized separation.
4
The spectacle is not a collection
of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
8
One cannot abstractly contrast
the spectacle to actual social activity: such a division is itself divided.
The spectacle which inverts the real is in fact produced. Lived reality
is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle while simultaneously
absorbing the spectacular order, giving it positive cohesiveness. Objective
reality is present on both sides. Every notion fixed this way has no other
basis than its passage into the opposite: reality rises up within the spectacle,
and the spectacle is real. This reciprocal alienation is the essence and
the support of the existing society.
9
In a world which really is topsy-turvy,
the true is a moment of the false.
12
The spectacle presents itself as
something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing
more than "that which appears is good, that which is good appears. The
attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact
it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly
of appearance.
13
The basically tautological character
of the spectacle flows from the simple fact that its means are simultaneously
its ends. It is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity.
It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own
glory.
18
Where the real world changes into
simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations
of hypnotic behavior. The spectacle, as a tendency to make one see
the world by means of various specialized mediations (it can no longer
be grasped directly), naturally finds vision to be the privileged human
sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs; the most abstract,
the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of
present-day society. But the spectacle is not identifiable with mere gazing,
even combined with hearing. It is that which escapes the activity of men,
that which escapes reconsideration and correction by their work. It is
the opposite of dialogue. Wherever there is independent
representation,
the spectacle reconstitutes itself.
25
Separation is the alpha
and omega of the spectacle. The institutionalization of the social division
of labor, the formation of classes, had given rise to a first sacred contemplation,
the mythical order with which every power shrouds itself from the beginning.
The sacred has justified the cosmic and ontological order which corresponded
to the interests of the masters; it has explained and embellished that
which society could not do. Thus all separate power has been spectacular,
but the adherence of all to an immobile image only signified the common
acceptance of an imaginary prolongation of the poverty of real social activity,
still largely felt as a unitary condition. The modern spectacle, on the
contrary, expresses what society can do, but in this expression the permitted
is absolutely opposed to the possible. The spectacle is the preservation
of unconsciousness within the practical change of the conditions of existence.
It is its own product, and it has made its own rules: it is a pseudo-sacred
entity. It shows what it is: separate power developing in itself,
in the growth of productivity by means of the incessant refinement of the
division of labor into a parcellization of gestures which are then dominated
by the independent movement of machines; and working for an ever-expanding
market. All community and all critical sense are dissolved during this
movement in which the forces that could grow by separating are not yet
reunited.
28
The economic system founded on
isolation is a circular production of isolation. The technology
is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn. From
the automobile to television, all the goods selected by the spectacular
system are also its weapons for a constant reinforcement of the conditions
of isolation of "lonely crowds." The spectacle constantly rediscovers its
own assumptions more concretely.
29
The spectacle originates in the
loss of the unity of the world, and the gigantic expansion of the modern
spectacle expresses the totality of this loss: the abstraction of all specific
labor and the general abstraction of the entirety of production are perfectly
rendered in the spectacle, whose mode of being concrete is precisely
abstraction. In the spectacle, one part of the world represents itself
to the world and is superior to it. The spectacle is nothing more than
the common language of this separation. What binds the spectators together
is no more than an irreversible relation at the very center which maintains
their isolation. The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as
separate.
30
The alienation of the spectator
to the profit of the contemplated object (which is the result of his own
unconscious activity) is expressed in the following way: 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.
Chapter Two
36
This is the principle of commodity
fetishism, the domination of society by "intangible as well as tangible
things," which reaches its absolute fulfillment in the spectacle, where
the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above
it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible par excellence.
37
The world at once present and absent
which the spectacle makes visible is the world of the commodity
dominating all that is lived. The world of the commodity is thus shown
for what it is, because its movement is identical to the estrangement
of men among themselves and in relation to their global product.
42
The spectacle is the moment when
the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life.
Not only is the relation to the commodity visible but it is all one sees:
the world one sees is its world. Modern economic production extends its
dictatorship extensively and intensively. In the least industrialized places,
its reign is already attested by a few star commodities and by the imperialist
domination imposed by regions which are ahead in the development of productivity.
In the advanced regions, social space is invaded by a continuous superimposition
of geological layers of commodities. At this point in the "second industrial
revolution," alienated consumption becomes for the masses a duty supplementary
to alienated production. It is all the sold labor of a society which
globally becomes the
total commodity for which the cycle must be
continued. For this to be done, the total commodity has to return as a
fragment to the fragmented individual, absolutely separated from the productive
forces operating as a whole. Thus it is here that the specialized science
of domination must in turn specialize: it fragments itself into sociology,
psychotechnics, cybernetics, semiology, etc., watching over the self-regulation
of every level of the process.
49
The spectacle is the other side
of money: it is the general abstract equivalent of all commodities. Money
dominated society as the representation of general equivalence, namely,
of the exchangeability of different goods whose uses could not be compared.
The spectacle is the developed modern complement of money where the totality
of the commodity world appears as a whole, as a general equivalence for
what the entire society can be and can do. The spectacle is the money which
one only looks at, because in the spectacle the totality of use
is already exchanged for the totality of abstract representation. The spectacle
is not only the servant of pseudo-use, it is already in itself the
pseudo-use of life.