

Unity and Division Within Appearances

  A lively new polemic about the concepts "one divides into two" and "two
  fuse into one" is unfolding on the philosophical front in this country.
  This debate is a struggle between those who are for and those who are
  against the materialist dialectic, a struggle between two conceptions of
  the world: the proletarian conception and the bourgeois conception. Those
  who maintain that "one divides into two" is the fundamental law of things
  are on the side of the materialist dialectic; those who maintain that the
  fundamental law of things is that "two fuse into one" are against the
  materialist dialectic. The two sides have drawn a clear line of
  demarcation between them, and their arguments are diametrically opposed.
  This polemic is a reflection, on the ideological level, of the acute and
  complex class struggle taking place in China and in the world. 

Red Flag, (Peking), 21 September 1964 


54 
   Like modern society itself, the spectacle is at once united and divided. In
   both, unity is grounded in a split. As it emerges in the spectacle, however,
   this contradiction is itself contradicted by virtue of a reversal of its
   meaning: division is presented as unity, and unity as division. 

55 
   Struggles between forces, all of which have been established for the purpose
   of running the same socioeconomic system, are thus officially passed off as
   real antagonisms. In actuality these struggles partake of a real unity, and
   this on the world stage as well as within each nation. 

56 
   This is not to say that the spectacle's sham battles between competing
   versions of alienated power are not also real; they do express the system's
   uneven and conflict-ridden development, as well as the relatively
   contradictory interests of those classes or fractions of classes that
   recognize the system and strive in this way to carve out a role for
   themselves in it. Just as the development of the most advanced economies
   involves clashes between different agendas, so totalitarian economic
   management by a state bureaucracy and the condition of those countries living
   under colonialism or semi-colonialism are likewise highly differentiated with
   respect to modes of production and power. By pointing up these great
   differences, while appealing to criteria of quite a different order, the
   spectacle is able to portray them as markers of radically distinct social
   systems. But from the standpoint of their actual reality as mere sectors, it
   is clear that the specificity of each is subsumed under a universal system as
   functions of a single tendency that has taken the planet for its field of
   operations. That tendency is capitalism. 

57 
   The society that brings the spectacle into being does not dominate
   underdeveloped regions solely through the exercise of economic hegemony. It
   also dominates them in its capacity as the society of the spectacle. Modern
   society has thus already invested the social surface of every continent --
   even where the material basis of economic exploitation is still lacking -- by
   spectacular means. It can frame the agenda of a ruling class and preside over
   that class's constitution. And, much as it proposes pseudo-goods to be
   coveted, it may also offer false models of revolution to local
   revolutionaries. As for the bureaucratic power that rules in a number of
   industrialized countries, it certainly has its own peculiar spectacle, but
   this plays an integral part in the overarching spectacle as general
   pseudo-negation -- and hence as vital support. So even if in its local
   manifestations the spectacle may embody totalitarian varieties of social
   communication and control, when viewed from the standpoint of the system's
   global functioning these are seen to be merely different aspects of a 
   worldwide division of spectacular tasks. 

58 
   Though designed to maintain the existing order as a whole, the division of
   spectacular tasks is chiefly oriented toward the actively developing pole of
   that order. The spectacle has its roots in the fertile field of the economy,
   and it is the produce of that field which must in the end come to dominate
   the spectacular market, whatever ideological or police-state barriers of a
   protectionist kind may be set up by local spectacles with dreams of autarky. 

59 
   Behind the glitter of the spectacle's distractions, modern society lies in
   thrall to the global domination of a banalizing trend that also dominates it
   at each point where the most advanced forms of commodity consumption have
   seemingly broadened the panoply of roles and objects available to choose
   from. The vestiges of religion and of the family (still the chief mechanism
   for the passing on of class power), and thus too the vestiges of the moral
   repression that these institutions ensure, can now be seamlessly combined
   with the rhetorical advocacy of pleasure in this life. The life in question
   is after all produced solely as a form of pseudo-gratification which still
   embodies repression. A smug acceptance of what exists is likewise quite
   compatible with a purely spectacular rebelliousness, for the simple reason
   that dissatisfaction itself becomes a commodity as soon as the economics of
   affluence finds a way of applying its production methods to this particular
   raw material. 

60 
   Media stars are spectacular representations of living human beings,
   distilling the essence of the spectacle's banality into images of possible
   roles. Stardom is a diversification in the semblance of life -- the object of
   an identification with mere appearance which is intended to compensate for
   the crumbling of directly experienced diversifications of productive
   activity. Celebrities figure various styles of life and various views of
   society which anyone is supposedly free to embrace and pursue in a global
   manner. Themselves incarnations of the inaccessible results of social labor,
   they mimic by-products of that labor, and project these above labor so that
   they appear as its goal. The by-products in question are power and leisure --
   the power to decide and the leisure to consume which are the alpha and the
   omega of a process that is never questioned. In the former case, government
   power assumes the personified form of the pseudo-star; in the second, stars
   of consumption canvas for votes as pseudo-power over life lived. But, just as
   none of these celestial activities are truly global, neither do they offer
   any real choices. 

61 
   The individual who in the service of the spectacle is placed in stardom's
   spotlight is in fact the opposite of an individual, and as clearly the enemy
   of the individual in himself as of the individual in others. In entering the
   spectacle as a model to be identified with, he renounces all autonomy in
   order himself to identify with the general law of obedience to the course of
   things. Stars of consumption, though outwardly representing different
   personality types, actually show each of these types enjoying an equal access
   to the whole realm of consumption and deriving exactly the same satisfaction
   therefrom. Stars of decision, meanwhile, must possess the full range of
   accepted human qualities; all official differences between them are thus
   canceled out by the official similarity which is an inescapable implication
   of their supposed excellence in every sphere. Khrushchev had to become a
   general in order to have been responsible for the outcome of the battle of
   Kursk -- not on the battlefield but twenty years later, as master of the
   State. And Kennedy the orator survived himself, so to speak, and even
   delivered his own funeral oration, in the sense that Theodore Sorenson still
   wrote speeches for Kennedy's successor in the very style that had done so
   much to create the dead man's persona. The admirable people who personify the
   system are indeed well known for not being what they seem to be; they have
   achieved greatness by embracing a level of reality lower than that of the
   most insignificant individual life -- and everyone knows it. 

62 
   The false choice offered by spectacular abundance, based on the
   juxtaposition, on the one hand, of competing yet mutually reinforcing
   spectacles and, on the other hand, of roles -- for the most part signified by
   and embodied in objects -- that are at once exclusive and interconnected,
   evolves into a contest among phantom qualities meant to elicit devotion to
   quantitative triviality. Thus false conflicts of ancient vintage tend to be
   resuscitated -- regionalisms or racisms whose job it now is to invest vulgar
   rankings in the hierarchies of consumption with a magical ontological
   superiority. Hence too the never-ending succession of paltry contests -- from
   competitive sports to elections -- that are utterly incapable of arousing any
   truly playful feelings. Wherever the consumption of abundance has established
   itself, there is one spectacular antagonism which is always at the forefront
   of the range of illusory roles: the antagonism between youth and adulthood.
   For here an adult in the sense of someone who is master of his own life is
   nowhere to be found. And youth -- implying change in what exists -- is by no
   means proper to people who are young. Rather, it characterizes only the
   economic system, the dynamism of capitalism: it is things that rule, that are
   young -- things themselves that vie with each other and usurp one another's
   places. 

63 
   What spectacular antagonisms conceal is the unity of poverty. Differing forms
   of a single alienation contend in the masquerade of total freedom of choice
   by virtue of the fact that they are all founded on real repressed
   contradictions. Depending on the needs of the particular stage of poverty
   that it is supposed at once to deny and sustain, the spectacle may be 
   concentrated or diffuse in form. In either case, it is no more than an image
   of harmony set amidst desolation and dread, at the still center of
   misfortune. 

64 
   The concentrated form of the spectacle normally characterizes bureaucratic
   capitalism, though it may on occasion be borrowed as a technique for
   buttressing state power over more backward mixed economies, and even the most
   advanced capitalism may call on it in moments of crisis. Bureaucratic
   property is itself concentrated, in that the individual bureaucrat's relation
   to the ownership of the economy as a whole is invariably mediated by the
   community of bureaucrats, by his membership in that community. And commodity
   production, less well developed in bureaucratic systems, is also concentrated
   in form: the commodity the bureaucracy appropriates is the totality of social
   labor, and what it sells back to society -- en bloc -- is society's survival.
   The dictatorship of the bureaucratic economy cannot leave the exploited
   masses any significant margin of choice because it has had to make all the
   choices itself, and because any choice made independently of it, even the
   most trivial -- concerning food, say, or music -- amounts to a declaration of
   war to the death on the bureaucracy. This dictatorship must therefore be
   attended by permanent violence. Its spectacle imposes an image of the good
   which is a resume of everything that exists officially, and this is usually
   concentrated in a single individual, the guarantor of the system's
   totalitarian cohesiveness. Everyone must identify magically with this
   absolute celebrity -- or disappear. For this figure is the master of
   not-being-consumed, and the heroic image appropriate to the absolute
   exploitation constituted by primitive accumulation accelerated by terror. If
   every Chinese has to study Mao, and in effect be Mao, this is because there
   is nothing else to be. The dominion of the spectacle in its concentrated form
   means the dominion, too, of the police. 

65 
   The diffuse form of the spectacle is associated with the abundance of
   commodities, with the undisturbed development of modern capitalism. Here each
   commodity considered in isolation is justified by an appeal to the grandeur
   of commodity production in general -- a production for which the spectacle is
   an apologetic catalog. The claims jostling for position on the stage of the
   affluent economy's integrated spectacle are not always compatible, however.
   Similarly, different star commodities simultaneously promote conflicting
   approaches to the organization of society; thus the spectacular logic of the
   automobile argues for a perfect traffic flow entailing the destruction of the
   old city centers, whereas the spectacle of the city itself calls for these
   same ancient sections to be turned into museums. So the already questionable
   satisfaction allegedly derived from the consumption of the whole is
   adulterated from the outset because the real consumer can only get his hands
   on a succession of fragments of this commodity heaven -- fragments each of
   which naturally lacks any of the quality ascribed to the whole. 

66 
   Each individual commodity fights for itself, cannot acknowledge the others
   and aspires to impose its presence everywhere as though it were alone. The
   spectacle is the epic poem of this strife -- a strife that no fall of Ilium
   can bring to an end. Of arms and the man the spectacle does not sing, but
   rather of passions and the commodity. Within this blind struggle each
   commodity, following where passion leads, unconsciously actualizes something
   of a higher order than itself: the commodity's becoming worldly coincides
   with the world's being transformed into commodities. So it is that, thanks to
   the cunning of the commodity, whereas all particular commodities wear
   themselves out in the fight, the commodity as abstract form continues on its
   way to absolute self-realization. 

67 
   The satisfaction that the commodity in its abundance can no longer supply by
   virtue of its use value is now sought in an acknowledgment of its value qua
   commodity. A use of the commodity arises that is sufficient unto itself; what
   this means for the consumer is an outpouring of religious zeal in honor of
   the commodity's sovereign freedom. Waves of enthusiasm for particular
   products, fueled and boosted by the communications media, are propagated with
   lightning speed. A film sparks a fashion craze, or a magazine launches a
   chain of clubs that in turn spins off a line of products. The sheer fad item
   perfectly expresses the fact that, as the mass of commodities become more and
   more absurd, absurdity becomes a commodity in its own right. Keychains that
   are not paid for but come as free gifts with the purchase of some luxury
   product, or are then traded back and forth in a sphere far removed from that
   of their original use, bear eloquent witness to a mystical self-abandonment
   to the transcendent spirit of the commodity. Someone who collects keychains
   that have recently been manufactured for the sole purpose of being collected
   might be said to be accumulating the commodity's indulgences -- the glorious
   tokens of the commodity's immanent presence among the faithful. In this way
   reified man proclaims his intimacy with the commodity. Following in the
   footsteps of the old religious fetishism, with its transported
   convulsionaries and miraculous cures, the fetishism of the commodity also
   achieves its moment of acute fervor. The only use still in evidence here,
   meanwhile, is the basic use of submission. 

68 
   It is doubtless impossible to contrast the pseudo-need imposed by the reign
   of modern consumerism with any authentic need or desire that is not itself
   equally determined by society and its history. But the commodity in the stage
   of its abundance attests to an absolute break in the organic development of
   social needs. The commodity's mechanical accumulation unleashes a limitless
   artificiality in face of which all living desire is disarmed. The cumulative
   power of this autonomous realm of artifice necessarily everywhere entails a 
   falsification of life. 

69 
   The image of the blissful unification of society through consumption suspends
   disbelief with regard to the reality of division only until the next
   disillusionment occurs in the sphere of actual consumption. Each and every
   new product is supposed to offer a dramatic shortcut to the long-awaited
   promised land of total consumption. As such it is ceremoniously presented as
   the unique and ultimate product. But, as with the fashionable adoption of
   seemingly rare aristocratic first names which turn out in the end to be borne
   by a whole generation, so the would-be singularity of an object can be
   offered to the eager hordes only if it has been mass-produced. The sole real
   status attaching to a mediocre object of this kind is to have been placed,
   however briefly, at the very center of social life and hailed as the
   revelation of the goal of the production process. But even this spectacular
   prestige evaporates into vulgarity as soon as the object is taken home by a
   consumer -- and hence by all other consumers too. At this point its essential
   poverty, the natural outcome of the poverty of its production, stands
   revealed -- too late. For by this time another product will have been
   assigned to supply the system with its justification, and will in turn be
   demanding its moment of acclaim. 

70 
   This continual process of replacement means that fake gratification cannot
   help but be exposed as products change, and as changes occur in the general
   conditions of production. Something that can assert its own unchanging
   excellence with uncontested arrogance changes nonetheless. This is as true of
   the concentrated as of the diffuse version of the spectacle, and only the 
   system endures: Stalin, just like any obsolete product, can be cast aside by
   the very forces that promoted his rise. Each new lie of the advertising
   industry implicitly acknowledges the one before. Likewise every time a
   personification of totalitarian power is eclipsed, the illusion of community
   that has guaranteed that figure unanimous support is exposed as a mere sum of
   solitudes without illusions. 

71 
   Whatever lays claim to permanence in the spectacle is founded on change, and
   must change as that foundation changes. The spectacle, though
   quintessentially dogmatic, can yet produce no solid dogma. Nothing is stable
   for it: this is its natural state, albeit the state most at odds with its
   natural inclination. 

72 
   The unreal unity the spectacle proclaims masks the class division on which
   the real unity of the capitalist mode of production is based. What obliges
   the producers to participate in the construction of the world is also what
   separates them from it. What brings together men liberated from local and
   national limitations is also what keeps them apart. What pushes for greater
   rationality is also what nourishes the irrationality of hierarchical
   exploitation and repression. What creates society's abstract power also
   creates its concrete unfreedom. 


   From the Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord
