Chapter 1 "Separation
Perfected"
But
certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified,
the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the
essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness
is 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 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.
5
The spectacle cannot be understood as an abuse of the
world of vision, as a product of the techniques of mass dissemination of
images. It is, rather, a Weltanschauung which
has become actual, materially translated. It is a
world vision which has become objectified.
6
The spectacle grasped in
its totality is both the result and the project of the existing mode of
production. It is not a supplement to
the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of
the real society. In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as
advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present
model of socially dominant life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the
choice already made in production and its corollary consumption. The
spectacle's form and content are identically the total justification of the
existing system's conditions and goals. The spectacle is also the permanent
presence of this justification, since it occupies the main part of the time
lived outside of modern production.
7
Separation is itself part
of the unity of the world, of the global social praxis split up into reality
and image. The social practice which the autonomous spectacle confronts is also
the real totality which contains the spectacle. But the split within this
totality mutilates it to the point of making the spectacle appear as its goal.
The language of the spectacle consists of signs of the ruling production,
which at the same time are the ultimate goal of this production.
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.
10
The concept of spectacle
unifies and explains a great diversity of apparent phenomena. The diversity and
the contrasts are appearances of a socially organized appearance, the general
truth of which must itself be recognized. Considered in its own terms, the
spectacle is affirmation of appearance and affirmation of all human
life, namely social life, as mere appearance. But the critique which reaches
the truth of the spectacle exposes it as the visible negation of life,
as a negation of life which has become visible.
11
To describe the spectacle,
its formation, its functions and the forces which tend to dissolve it, one must
artificially distinguish certain inseparable elements. When analyzing
the spectacle one speaks, to some extent, the language of the spectacular
itself in the sense that one moves through the methodological terrain of the
very society which expresses itself in the spectacle. But the spectacle is nothing other than the sense of the total practice
of a social-economic formation, its use of time. It is the historical
movement in which we are caught.
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.
14
The society which rests on
modern industry is not accidentally or superficially spectacular, it is
fundamentally spectaclist. In the
spectacle, which is the image of the ruling economy, the goal is nothing,
development everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself.
15
As the indispensable
decoration of the objects produced today, as the general exposé of the
rationality of the system, as the advanced economic sector which directly
shapes a growing multitude of image-objects, the spectacle is the main
production of present-day society.
16
The spectacle subjugates
living men to itself to the extent that the economy has totally subjugated
them. It is no more than the economy developing for itself.
It is the true reflection of the production of things, and the false
objectification of the producers.
17
The first phase of the
domination of the economy over social life brought into the definition of all
human realization the obvious degradation of being into having.
The present phase of total occupation of social life by the accumulated results
of the economy leads to a generalized sliding of having into appearing,
from which all actual "having" must draw its immediate prestige and
its ultimate function. At the same time all individual reality has become
social reality directly dependent on social power and shaped by it. It is
allowed to appear only to the extent that it is not.
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.
19
The spectacle inherits all
the weaknesses of the Western philosophical project which undertook to
comprehend activity in terms of the categories of seeing; furthermore,
it is based on the incessant spread of the precise technical rationality which
grew out of this thought. The spectacle does not realize philosophy, it
philosophizes reality. The concrete life of everyone has been degraded into a speculative
universe.
20
Philosophy, the power of
separate thought and the thought of separate power, could never by itself
supersede theology. The spectacle is the
material reconstruction of the religious illusion. Spectacular technology
has not dispelled the religious clouds where men had placed their own powers
detached from themselves; it has only tied them to an earthly base. The most
earthly life thus becomes opaque and unbreathable. It no longer projects into
the sky but shelters within itself its absolute denial, its fallacious
paradise. The spectacle is the technical realization of the exile of human
powers into a beyond; it is separation perfected within the interior of man.
21
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.
22
The fact that the practical
power of modern society detached itself and built an independent empire in the
spectacle can be explained only by the fact that this practical power continued
to lack cohesion and remained in contradiction with itself.
23
The oldest social
specialization, the specialization of power, is at the root of the spectacle.
The spectacle is thus a specialized activity which speaks for all the others.
It is the diplomatic representation of hierarchic society to itself, where all
other expression is banned. Here the most modern is also the most archaic.
24
The spectacle is the
existing order's uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue.
It is the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of
the conditions of existence. The fetishistic, purely
objective appearance of spectacular relations conceals the fact that they are
relations among men and classes: a second nature with its fatal laws seems to
dominate our environment. But the spectacle is not the necessary product of
technical development seen as a natural development. The society of the
spectacle is on the contrary the form which chooses its own technical content.
If the spectacle, taken in the limited sense of "mass media" which
are its most glaring superficial manifestation, seems to invade society as mere
equipment, this equipment is in no way neutral but is the very means suited to
its total self-movement. If the social needs of the epoch in which such
techniques are developed can only be satisfied through their mediation, if the
administration of this society and all contact among men can no longer take
place except through the intermediary of this power of instantaneous
communication, it is because this "communication" is essentially unilateral.
The concentration of "communication" is thus an accumulation, in the
hands of the existing system s administration, of the means which allow it to
carry on this particular administration. The generalized cleavage of the
spectacle is inseparable from the modern State, namely from the general
form of cleavage within society, the product of the division of social labor and the organ of class domination.
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.
26
With the generalized
separation of the worker and his products, every unitary view of accomplished
activity and all direct personal communication among producers are lost.
Accompanying the progress of accumulation of separate products and the
concentration of the productive process, unity and communication become the
exclusive attribute of the system's management. The success of the economic
system of separation is the proletarianization
of the world.
27
Due to the success of
separate production as production of the separate, the fundamental experience
which in primitive societies is attached to a central task is in the process of
being displaced, at the crest of the system's development. by
non-work, by inactivity. But this inactivity is in no way liberated from
productive activity: it depends on productive activity and is an uneasy and
admiring submission to the necessities and results of production; it is itself
a product of its rationality. There can be no freedom outside of activity, and
in the context of the spectacle all activity is negated. just
as real activity has been captured in its entirety for the global construction
of this result. Thus the present "liberation from labor,"
the increase of leisure, is in no way a liberation
within labor, nor a liberation from the world shaped
by this labor. None of the activity lost in labor can be regained in the submission to its result.
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.
31
The worker does not produce
himself; he produces an independent power. The success of this
production, its abundance, returns to the producer as an abundance of
dispossession. All the time and space of his world become foreign to
him with the accumulation of his alienated products. The spectacle is the map
of this new world, a map which exactly covers its territory. The very powers
which escaped us show themselves to us in all their force.
32
The spectacle within
society corresponds to a concrete manufacture of alienation. Economic expansion
is mainly the expansion of this specific industrial production. What grows with
the economy in motion for itself can only be the very alienation which was at
its origin.
33
Separated from his product,
man himself produces all the details of his world with ever increasing power,
and thus finds himself ever more separated from his world. The more his life is
now his product, the more lie is separated from his life.
34
The spectacle is capital
to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image