“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.”
Feuerbach, Preface to the second
edition
of The Essence of Christianity
1
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.
2
The images detached from every aspect of life merge into
a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer
be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup
themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld
that can only be looked at. The specialization of images
of the world evolves into a world of autonomized images
where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is
a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of
the nonliving.
3
The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society
itself, as a part of society, and as a means of unification.
As a part of society, it is the focal point of all vision
and all consciousness. But due to the very fact that this
sector is separate, it is in reality the domain
of delusion and false consciousness: the unification it
achieves is nothing but an official language of universal
separation.
4
The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social
relation between people that is mediated by images.
5
The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual deception
produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that
has actually been materialized, a view of a world that has
become objective.
6
Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result
and the project of the dominant mode of production. It is
not a mere decoration added to the real world. It is the
very heart of this real societys unreality. 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.
7
Separation is itself an integral part of the unity of this
world, of a global social practice split into reality and
image. The social practice confronted by an autonomous spectacle
is at the same time the real totality which contains that
spectacle. But the split within this totality mutilates
it to the point that the spectacle seems to be its goal.
The language of the spectacle consists of signs of
the dominant system of production signs which are
at the same time the ultimate end-products of that system.
8
The spectacle cannot be abstractly contrasted to concrete
social activity. Each side of such a duality is itself divided.
The spectacle that falsifies reality is nevertheless a real
product of that reality. Conversely, real life is materially
invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle, and ends
up absorbing it and aligning itself with it. Objective reality
is present on both sides. Each of these seemingly fixed
concepts has no other basis than its transformation into
its opposite: reality emerges within the spectacle, and
the spectacle is real. This reciprocal alienation is the
essence and support of the existing society.
9
In a world that is really upside down, the true
is a moment of the false.
10
The concept of “the spectacle” interrelates and explains
a wide range of seemingly unconnected phenomena. The apparent
diversities and contrasts of these phenomena stem from the
social organization of appearances, whose essential nature
must itself be recognized. Considered in its own terms,
the spectacle is an affirmation of appearances and
an identification of all human social life with appearances.
But a critique that grasps the spectacles essential
character reveals it to be a visible negation of
life a negation that has taken on a visible form.
11
In order to describe the spectacle, its formation, its
functions, and the forces that work against it, it is necessary
to make some artificial distinctions. In analyzing
the spectacle we are obliged to a certain extent to use
the spectacles own language, in the sense that we
have to operate on the methodological terrain of the society
that expresses itself in the spectacle. For the spectacle
is both the meaning and the agenda of our
particular socio-economic formation. It is the historical
moment in which we are caught.
12
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.
13
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.
It covers the entire surface of the globe, endlessly basking
in its own glory.
14
The society based on modern industry is not accidentally
or superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally
spectaclist. In the spectacle the visual reflection
of the ruling economic order goals are nothing, development
is everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than
itself.
15
As indispensable embellishment of currently produced objects,
as general articulation of the systems rationales,
and as advanced economic sector that directly creates an
ever-increasing mass of image-objects, the spectacle is
the leading production of present-day society.
16
The spectacle is able to subject human beings to itself
because the economy has already totally subjugated them.
It is nothing other than the economy developing for itself.
It is at once a faithful reflection of the production of
things and a distorting objectification of the producers.
17
The first stage of the economys 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. The present
stage, in which social life has become completely dominated
by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing
about a general shift from having to appearing
— all having must now derive its immediate
prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances. At the
same time all individual reality has become social, in the
sense that it is shaped by social forces and is directly
dependent on them. Individual reality is allowed to appear
only if it is not actually real.
18
When the real world is transformed into mere images, mere
images become real beings dynamic figments that provide
the direct motivations for a hypnotic behavior. Since the
spectacles 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. But
the spectacle is not merely a matter of images, nor even
of images plus sounds. It is whatever escapes peoples
activity, whatever eludes their practical reconsideration
and correction. It is the opposite of dialogue. Wherever
representation becomes independent, the spectacle
regenerates itself.
19
The spectacle inherits the weakness of the Western
philosophical project, which attempted to understand activity
by means of the categories of vision, and it is
based on the relentless development of the particular technical
rationality that grew out of that form of thought. The spectacle
does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality, reducing
everyones concrete life to a universe of speculation.
20
Philosophy — the power of separate thought and the thought
of separate power — was never by itself able to supersede
theology. The spectacle is the material reconstruction of
the religious illusion. Spectacular technology has not dispersed
the religious mists into which human beings had projected
their own alienated powers, it has merely brought those
mists down to earth, to the point that even the most mundane
aspects of life have become impenetrable and unbreathable.
The illusory paradise that represented a total denial of
earthly life is no longer projected into the heavens, it
is embedded in earthly life itself. The spectacle is the
technological version of the exiling of human powers into
a world beyond; the culmination of humanitys
internal separation.
21
As long as necessity is socially dreamed, dreaming will
remain a social necessity. 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.
22
The fact that the practical power of modern society has
detached itself from that society and established an independent
realm in the spectacle can be explained only by the additional
fact that that powerful practice continued to lack cohesion
and had remained in contradiction with itself.
23
The root of the spectacle is that oldest of all social
specializations, the specialization of power. The
spectacle plays the specialized role of speaking in the
name of all the other activities. It is hierarchical societys
ambassador to itself, delivering its official messages at
a court where no one else is allowed to speak. The most
modern aspect of the spectacle is thus also the most archaic.
24
The spectacle is the ruling orders nonstop discourse
about itself, its never-ending monologue of self-praise,
its self-portrait at the stage of totalitarian domination
of all aspects of life. The fetishistic appearance of pure
objectivity in spectacular relations conceals their true
character as relations between people and between classes:
a second Nature, with its own inescapable laws, seems to
dominate our environment. But the spectacle is not the inevitable
consequence of some supposedly natural technological development.
On the contrary, the society of the spectacle is a form
that chooses its own technological content. If the spectacle,
considered in the limited sense of the mass media
that are its most glaring superficial manifestation, seems
to be invading society in the form of a mere technical apparatus,
it should be understood that this apparatus is in no way
neutral and that it has been developed in accordance with
the spectacles internal dynamics. If the social needs
of the age in which such technologies are developed can
be met only through their mediation, if the administration
of this society and all contact between people has become
totally dependent on these means of instantaneous communication,
it is because this communication is essentially
unilateral. The concentration of these media thus
amounts to concentrating in the hands of the administrators
of the existing system the means that enable them to carry
on this particular form of administration. The social separation
reflected in the spectacle is inseparable from the modern
state the product of the social division of
labor that is both the chief instrument of class rule and
the concentrated expression of all social divisions.
25
Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle.
The institutionalization of the social division of labor
in the form of class divisions had given rise to an earlier,
religious form of contemplation: the mythical order with
which every power has always camouflaged itself. Religion
justified the cosmic and ontological order that corresponded
to the interests of the masters, expounding and embellishing
everything their societies could not deliver. In
this sense, all separate power has been spectacular. But
this earlier universal devotion to a fixed religious imagery
was only a shared acknowledgment of loss, an imaginary compensation
for the poverty of a concrete social activity that was still
generally experienced as a unitary condition. In contrast,
the modern spectacle depicts what society could deliver,
but in so doing it rigidly separates what is possible
from what is permitted. The spectacle keeps people
in a state of unconsciousness as they pass through practical
changes in their conditions of existence. Like a factitious
god, it engenders itself and makes its own rules. It reveals
itself for what it is: an autonomously developing
separate power, based on the increasing productivity resulting
from an increasingly refined division of labor into parcelized
gestures dictated by the independent movement of machines,
and working for an ever-expanding market. In the course
of this development, all community and all critical awareness
have disintegrated; and the forces that were able to grow
by separating from each other have not yet been reunited.
26
The general separation of worker and product tends to eliminate
any direct personal communication between the producers
and any comprehensive sense of what they are producing.
With the increasing accumulation of separate products and
the increasing concentration of the productive process,
communication and comprehension are monopolized by the managers
of the system. The triumph of this separation-based economic
system proletarianizes the whole world.
27
Due to the very success of this separate production of
separation, the fundamental experience that in earlier societies
was associated with peoples primary work is in the
process of being replaced (in sectors near the cutting edge
of the systems evolution) by an identification of
life with nonworking time, with inactivity. But such inactivity
is in no way liberated from productive activity. It remains
dependent on it, in an uneasy and admiring submission to
the requirements and consequences of the production system.
It is itself one of the consequences of that system. There
can be no freedom apart from activity, and within the spectacle
activity is nullified — all real activity having
been forcibly channeled into the global construction of
the spectacle. Thus, what is referred to as a liberation
from work, namely the modern increase in leisure time,
is neither a liberation of work itself nor a liberation
from the world shaped by this kind of work. None of the
activity stolen by work can be regained by submitting to
what that work has produced.
28
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.
With ever-increasing concreteness the spectacle recreates
its own presuppositions.
29
The spectacle was born from the worlds loss of unity,
and the immense expansion of the modern spectacle reveals
the enormity of this loss. 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 precisely abstraction. In the
spectacle, a part of the world presents itself to
the world and is superior to it. The spectacle is simply
the common language of this separation. Spectators are linked
solely by their one-way relationship to the very center
that keeps them isolated from each other. The spectacle
thus reunites the separated, but it reunites them only
in their separateness.
30
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 spectacles estrangement from the acting subject
is expressed by the fact that the individuals 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.
31
Workers do not produce themselves, they produce a power
independent of themselves. The success of this production,
the abundance it generates, is experienced by the producers
as an abundance of dispossession. As their alienated
products accumulate, all time and space become foreign
to them. The spectacle is the map of this new world, a map
that is identical to the territory it represents. The forces
that have escaped us display themselves to us in
all their power.
32
The spectacles social function is the concrete manufacture
of alienation. Economic expansion consists primarily of
the expansion of this particular sector of industrial production.
The growth generated by an economy developing
for its own sake can be nothing other than a growth of the
very alienation that was at its origin.
33
Though separated from what they produce, people nevertheless
produce every detail of their world with ever-increasing
power. They thus also find themselves increasingly separated
from that world. The closer their life comes to being their
own creation, the more they are excluded from that life.
34
The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point
that it becomes images.
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