Notes on Society of the Spectacle

1. Spectacle makes the concrete abstract and the abstract concrete: the world is pure surface, where anything can be possessed, but only as an image. That is to say, passive contemplation replaces activity: only pseudo-consumption is really possible, since one cannot do anything in a totally reified world.

Here, Debord reveals his debt to Lukacs.

2. "The true is a moment of the false" (sec. 9): The totality can only be grasped negatively, as the sum of that which has been occluded by the spectacle and the spectacle itself.

3. The spectacle steals work and non-work (rest): work moves away from life and toward the construction of the spectacle; leisure time is the opportunity to be subjected to the spectacle (to one's own alienated labor); leisure is a spectacular simulacrum of concrete freedom.

But what is the wholeness of which spectacle has robbed us?

4. "The spectacle is the map of this new world, a map that is identical to the territory it represents." (sec. 31)

5. The spectacle is at once a confirmation of already achieved abundance and the denial of its practical realization: the liberation of humanity from alienation and need.

6. The economy, as second nature, liberates humanity only to impose a new, equally permanent and equally impersonal (though voluntary!) compulsion.

7. The conquest of abundance necessitated the opening of a new sphere of production - that of desire. The economy's most important product is consumption (cf. sec. 40-43).

8. The use-value of a commodity in the age of pseudo-activity lies in its exchange-value (cf. sec. 46).

9. "The spectacle is money one can only look at." (sec. 49)

10. The function of civilization is now the support and reproduction of the economy.

11. The "economy loses all connection with authentic needs insofar as it emerges from the social unconscious that unknowingly depended on it" (sec. 51). Are authentic needs not social? Or is the support of the spectacle a false sociality which is slowly emerging?

Economy is the social subconscious. It must be made conscious and subjected to the reality principle.

12. Stars live exemplary lives as representations of society's unfulfilled promise - but they also turn the byproducts of social labor into the most desirable things: "power and vacations" (sec. 60).

The public figure is always-already spectacular, i.e. not real, nonliving.

13. The commodity economy breeds spectacular rivalries and antagonisms which are themselves commodities. The infantilization of society creates inter-generational conflict; homogenization produces cliques, fads, subcultures; radical otherness is effaced in the world of pure apprehensibility. Everything can be acquired - but only as image, only as object of contemplation. Radical otherness - the Real - recedes as noumenon. Kantian philosophy becomes intuitive (cf. sec. 62).

14. Youth itself is a commodity - the correlate of endless production and necessary obsolescence; ideal youth becomes eternal and endlessly the same - a demographic through which one passes.

15. Concentrated spectacle is totalitarianism, culminating in the cult of personality as surrogate for the existence of the masses.

16. Diffuse spectacle: capitalism celebrating itself as inaccessible totality.

17. Self-conscious hipsterism and the phenomenon of 'it's so bad it's good' are tacit admissions that there can be no talk of quality in a cultural sphere approximating Borges's Library of Babel. All demographics are provided for, and one must choose from the superabundance which makes its absurdity undeniable: stupidity, corniness, gimmickry - all become commodities; the undesirability of bad things made in bad taste makes them desirable.

18. The collection - the most idiosyncratic thing possible - is manufactured en masse. This is because idiosyncrasy is also manufactured.

19. Marxism is non-teleological insofar as its goal as theory is to make historical development conscious of itself. After that? Total openness as against the false choices of capitalism and the mechanical determinism of idealist misunderstandings.

20. The bourgeoisie are the only revolutionary class that has ever won (sec. 87); they are the class of the economy. The proletariat must become the class of consciousness - that is the necessary condition for a new society.

21. The wake of the October Revolution revealed the survival of the economy above all - the bourgeois economy could exist without a bourgeoisie: the bureaucracy with its goal of primitive accumulation would serve in its place.

22. Stalinist totalitarianism is a sort of surrogate for the capitalist spectacle - but rather than transforming reality like the latter, it only forces (with the direct application of violence) a transformation in the subjected population's perception.

23. The power of totalitarian bureaucracy is directed first and foremost to the denial of its own existence. (sec. 106)

24. Judeo-Christian religion marks a temporal revolution - a universal, unidirectional movement of time - a temporality affecting everyone and everything. It was not a complete revolution, however, and its telos was merely the beginning of the Real - the kingdom of God outside of time; but it was a definitive break with cyclical time nonetheless. (sec. 137).

25. The bourgeoisie introduce the concept of work as the transformation of history; work becomes a value in itself because it makes the world, and is not merely a condition of life. (sec. 140)

26. Global capitalism introduces universal history, but only as the temporality of the economic process, as universal reification: history is given to all just as it is taken away again.

27. The reified time of life under capitalism acquires a pseudo-cyclicity: nights/days, weekdays/weekends, vacations: it is itself a resource for temporal commodification - ultimately for the lifestyle-commodity itself.

28. "The spectacle, whose function is to use culture to bury all historical memory" (sec. 192) - the random juxtaposition of fragments which have become illegible, the construction of a false unity (as a spectacle) of a fragmented world in a fully integrated present which communicates the totality of fragmentation and the impossibility of communication: diagnosis of the postmodern condition.

29. sec. 196: structuralism as apology for the spectacle.

30. The charge that capitalism creates false desires does not necessitate the existence of true desires - merely the gratuitousness of what exists and the possibility of something better.