“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 seen as 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, 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 pseudo-world
that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world has
culminated
in 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 ostensibly 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 excess produced by
mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized,
that has become an objective reality.
6
Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the project of
the present mode of production. It is not a mere supplement or decoration added to the real
world, it is the heart of this real societys unreality. In all
of its
particular manifestations news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment the
spectacle is the model of the prevailing way 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 is also the constant
presence of this justification since it monopolizes the majority of the time
spent outside the modern production process.
7
Separation is itself an integral part of the unity of this world, of a global
social praxis 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, while lived reality 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 has really been turned 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 multitude 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 occupied 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 insofar
as it
is not actually real.
18
When the real world is transformed into mere images, mere images become real
beings 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 representing 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
necessary. 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 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 that 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
belief in 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 products 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 within work itself nor a
liberation from the world shaped by this kind of work. None of the activity
stolen through 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 represents 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.
Comments