
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 
   The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production
   prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that
   once was directly lived has become mere representation. 

2 
   Images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the
   former unity of life is lost forever. Apprehended in a partial way, reality
   unfolds in a new generality as a pseudo-world apart, solely as an object of
   contemplation. The tendency toward the specialization of images-of-the-world
   finds its highest expression in the world of the autonomous image, where
   deceit deceives itself. The spectacle in its generality is a concrete
   inversion of life, and, as such, the autonomous movement of non-life. 

3 
   The spectacle appears at once as society itself, as a part of society and as
   a means of unification. As a part of society, it is that sector where all
   attention, all consciousness, converges. Being isolated -- and precisely for
   that reason -- this sector is the locus of illusion and false consciousness;
   the unity it imposes is merely the official language of generalized
   separation.

4 
   The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social
   relationship between people that is mediated by images.

5 
   The spectacle cannot be understood either as a deliberate distortion of the
   visual world or as a product of the technology of the mass dissemination of
   images. It is far better viewed as a weltanschauung that has been actualized,
   translated into the material realm -- a world view transformed into an
   objective force.

6 
   Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the outcome and the goal of
   the dominant mode of production. It is not something added to the real world
   -- not a decorative element, so to speak. On the contrary, it is the very
   heart of society's real unreality. In all its specific manifestations -- news
   or propaganda, advertising or the actual consumption of entertainment -- the
   spectacle epitomizes the prevailing model of social life. It is the
   omnipresent celebration of a choice already made in the sphere of production,
   and the consummate result of that choice. In form as in content the spectacle
   serves as total justification for the conditions and aims of the existing
   system. It further ensures the permanent presence of that justification, for
   it governs almost all time spent outside the production process itself.

7 
   The phenomenon of separation is part and parcel of the unity of the world, of
   a global social praxis that has split up into reality on the one hand and
   image on the other. Social practice, which the spectacle's autonomy
   challenges, is also the real totality to which the spectacle is subordinate.
   So deep is the rift in this totality, however, that the spectacle is able to
   emerge as its apparent goal. The language of the spectacle is composed of 
   signs of the dominant organization of production -- signs which are at the
   same time the ultimate end-products of that organization. 

8 
   The spectacle cannot be set in abstract opposition to concrete social
   activity, for the dichotomy between reality and image will survive on either
   side of any such distinction. Thus the spectacle, though it turns reality on
   its head, is itself a product of real activity. Likewise, lived reality
   suffers the material assaults of the spectacle's mechanisms of contemplation,
   incorporating the spectacular order and lending that order positive support.
   Each side therefore has its share of objective reality. And every concept, as
   it takes its place on one side or the other, has no foundation apart from its
   transformation into its opposite: reality erupts within the spectacle, and
   the spectacle is real. This reciprocal alienation is the essence and
   underpinning of society as it exists.

9 
   In a world that really has been turned on its head, truth is a moment of
   falsehood.

10 
   The concept of the spectacle brings together and explains a wide range of
   apparently disparate phenomena. Diversities and contrasts among such
   phenomena are the appearances of the spectacle -- the appearances of a social
   organization of appearances that needs to be grasped in its general truth.
   Understood on its own terms, the spectacle proclaims the predominance of
   appearances and asserts that all human life, which is to say all social life,
   is mere appearance. But any critique capable of apprehending the spectacle's
   essential character must expose it as a visible negation of life -- and as a
   negation of life that has invented a visual form for itself.

11 
   In order to describe the spectacle, its formation, its functions and whatever
   forces may hasten its demise, a few artificial distinctions are called for.
   To analyze the spectacle means talking its language to some degree -- to the
   degree, in fact, that we are obliged to engage the methodology of the society
   to which the spectacle gives expression. For what the spectacle expresses is
   the total practice of one particular economic and social formation; it is, so
   to speak, that formation's agenda. It is also the historical moment by which
   we happen to be governed.

12 
   The spectacle manifests itself as an enormous positivity, out of reach and
   beyond dispute. All it says is: "Everything that appears is good; whatever is
   good will appear." The attitude that it demands in principle is the same
   passive acceptance that it has already secured by means of its seeming
   incontrovertibility, and indeed by its monopolization of the realm of
   appearances.

13 
   The spectacle is essentially tautological, for the simple reason that its
   means and its ends are identical. It is the sun that never sets on the empire
   of modern passivity. It covers the entire globe, basking in the perpetual
   warmth of its own glory.

14 
   The spectacular character of modern industrial society has nothing fortuitous
   or superficial about it; on the contrary, this society is based on the
   spectacle in the most fundamental way. For the spectacle, as the perfect
   image of the ruling economic order, ends are nothing and development is all
   -- although the only thing into which the spectacle plans to develop is
   itself.

15 
   As the indlspensable packaging for things produced as they are now produced,
   as a general gloss on the rationality of the system, and as the advanced
   economic sector directly responsible for the manufacture of an ever-growing
   mass of image-objects, the spectacle is the chief product of present-day
   society.

16 
   The spectacle subjects living human beings to its will to the extent that the
   economy has brought them under its sway. For the spectacle is simply the
   economic realm developing for itself -- at once a faithful mirror held up to
   the production of things and a distorting objectification of the producers.

17 
   An earlier stage in the economy's domination of social life entailed an
   obvious downgrading of being into having that left its stamp on all human
   endeavor. The present stage, in which social life is completely taken over by
   the accumulated products of the economy, entails a generalized shift from 
   having to appearing: all effective "having" must now derive both its
   immediate prestige and its ultimate raison d'etre from appearances. At the
   same time all individual reality, being directly dependent on social power
   and completely shaped by that power, has assumed a social character. Indeed,
   it is only inasmuch as individual reality is not that it is allowed to 
   appear.

18 
   For one to whom the real world becomes real images, mere images are
   transformed into real beings -- tangible figments which are the efficient
   motor of trancelike behavior. Since the spectacle's job is to cause a world
   that is no longer directly perceptible to be seen via different specialized
   mediations, it is inevitable that it should elevate the human sense of sight
   to the special place once occupied by touch; the most abstract of the senses,
   and the most easily deceived, sight is naturally the most readily adaptable
   to present-day society's generalized abstraction. This is not to say,
   however, that the spectacle itself is perceptible to the naked eye -- even if
   that eye is assisted by the ear. The spectacle is by definition immune from
   human activity, inaccessible to any projected review or correction. It is the
   opposite of dialogue. Wherever representation takes on an independent
   existence, the spectacle reestablishes its rule.

19 
   The spectacle is heir to all the weakness of the project of Western
   philosophy, which was an attempt to understand activity by means of the
   categories of vision. Indeed the spectacle reposes on an incessant deployment
   of the very technical rationality to which that philosophical tradition gave
   rise. So far from realizing philosophy, the spectacle philosophizes reality,
   and turns the material life of everyone into a universe of speculation.

20 
   Philosophy is at once the power of alienated thought and the thought of
   alienated power, and as such it has never been able to emancipate itself from
   theology. The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious
   illusion. Not that its techniques have dispelled those religious mists in
   which human beings once located their own powers, the very powers that had
   been wrenched from them -- but those cloud-enshrouded entities have now been
   brought down to earth. It is thus the most earthbound aspects of life that
   have become the most impenetrable and rarefied. The absolute denial of life,
   in the shape of a fallacious paradise, is no longer projected onto the
   heavens, but finds its place instead within material life itself. The
   spectacle is hence a technological version of the exiling of human powers in
   a "world beyond" -- and the perfection of separation within human beings.

21 
   So long as the realm of necessity remains a social dream, dreaming will
   remain a social necessity. The spectacle is the bad dream of modem society in
   chains, expressing 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
   itself and established itself in the spectacle as an independent realm can
   only be explained by the self-cleavage and self-contradictoriness already
   present in that powerful practice.

23 
   At the root of the spectacle lies that oldest of all social divisions of
   labor, the specialization of power. The specialized role played by the
   spectacle is that of spokesman for all other activities, a sort of diplomatic
   representative of hierarchical society at its own court, and the source of
   the only discourse which that society allows itself to hear. Thus the most
   modern aspect of the spectacle is also at bottom the most archaic.

24 
   By means of the spectacle the ruling order discourses endlessly upon itself
   in an uninterrupted monologue of self-praise. The spectacle is the
   self-portrait of power in the age of power's totalitarian rule over the
   conditions of existence. The fetishistic appearance of pure objectivity in
   spectacular relationships conceals their true character as relationships
   between human beings and between classes; a second Nature thus seems to
   impose inescapable laws upon our environment. But the spectacle is by no
   means the inevitable outcome of a technical development perceived as natural;
   on the contrary, the society of the spectacle is a form that chooses its own
   technical content. If the spectacle -- understood in the limited sense of
   those "mass media" that are its most stultifying superficial manifestation --
   seems at times to be invading society in the shape of a mere apparatus, it
   should be remembered that this apparatus has nothing neutral about it, and
   that it answers precisely to the needs of the spectacle's internal dynamics.
   If the social requirements of the age which develops such techniques can be
   met only through their mediation, if the administration of society and all
   contact between people now depends on the intervention of such "instant"
   communication, it is because this "communication" is essentially one-way; the
   concentration of the media thus amounts to the monopolization by the
   administrators of the existing system of the means to pursue their particular
   form of administration. The social cleavage that the spectacle expresses is
   inseparable from the modern State, which, as the product of the social
   division of labor and the organ of class rule, is the general form of all
   social division.

25 
   Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle. Religious contemplation
   in its earliest form was the outcome of the establishment of the social
   division of labor and the formation of classes. Power draped itself in the
   outward garb of a mythical order from the beginning. In former times the
   category of the sacred justified the cosmic and ontological ordering of
   things that best served the interests of the masters, expounding upon and
   embellishing what society could not deliver. Thus power as a separate realm
   has always had a spectacular aspect, but mass allegiance to frozen religious
   imagery was originally a shared acknowledgment of loss, an imaginary
   compensation for a poverty of real social activity that was still widely felt
   to be a universal fact of life. The modern spectacle, by contrast, depicts
   what society can deliver, but within this depiction what is permitted is
   rigidly distinguished from what is possible. The spectacle preserves
   unconsciousness as practical changes in the conditions of existence proceed.
   The spectacle is self-generated, and it makes up its own rules: it is a
   specious form of the sacred. And it makes no secret of what it is, namely,
   hierarchical power evolving on its own, in its separateness, thanks to an
   increasing productivity based on an ever more refined division of labor, an
   ever greater comminution of machine-governed gestures, and an ever-widening
   market. In the course of this development all community and critical
   awareness have ceased to be; nor have those forces, which were able -- by
   separating -- to grow enormously in strength, yet found a way to reunite.

26 
   The generalized separation of worker and product has spelled the end of any
   comprehensive view of the job done, as well as the end of direct personal
   communication between producers. As the accumulation of alienated products
   proceeds, and as the productive process gets more concentrated, consistency
   and communication become the exclusive assets of the system's managers. The
   triumph of an economic system founded on separation leads to the 
   proletarianization of the world.

27 
   Owing to the very success of this separated system of production, whose
   product is separation itself, that fundamental area of experience which was
   associated in earlier societies with an individual's principal work is being
   transformed -- at least at the leading edge of the system's evolution -- into
   a realm of non-work, of inactivity. Such inactivity, however, is by no means
   emancipated from productive activity: it remains in thrall to that activity,
   in an uneasy and worshipful subjection to production's needs and results;
   indeed it is itself a product of the rationality of production. There can be
   no freedom apart from activity, and within the spectacle all activity is
   banned -- a corollary of the fact that all real activity has been forcibly
   channeled into the global construction of the spectacle. So what is referred
   to as "liberation from work," that is, increased leisure time, is a
   liberation neither within labor itself nor from the world labor has brought
   into being.

28 
   The reigning economic system is founded on isolation; at the same time it is
   a circular process designed to produce isolation. Isolation underpins
   technology, and technology isolates in its turn; all goods proposed by the
   spectacular system, from cars to televisions, also serve as weapons for that
   system as it strives to reinforce the isolation of "the lonely crowd." The
   spectacle is continually rediscovering its own basic assumptions -- and each
   time in a more concrete manner.

29 
   The origin of the spectacle lies in the world's loss of unity, and its
   massive expansion in the modern period demonstrates how total this loss has
   been: the abstract nature of all individual work, as of production in
   general, finds perfect expression in the spectacle, whose very manner of
   being concrete is, precisely, abstraction. The spectacle divides the world
   into two parts, one of which is held up as a self-representation to the
   world, and is superior to the world. The spectacle is simply the common
   language that bridges this division. Spectators are linked only by a one-way
   relationship to the very center that maintains their isolation from one
   another. The spectacle thus unites what is separate, but it unites it only in
   its separateness.

30 
   The spectator's alienation from and submission to the contemplated object
   (which is the outcome of his unthinking activity) works like this: the more
   he contemplates, the less he lives; the more readily he recognizes his own
   needs in the images of need proposed by the dominant system, the less he
   understands his own existence and his own desires. The spectacle's
   externality with respect to the acting subject is demonstrated by the fact
   that the individual's own gestures are no longer his own, but rather those of
   someone else who represents them to him. The spectator feels at home nowhere,
   for the spectacle is everywhere.

31 
   Workers do not produce themselves: they produce a force independent of
   themselves. The success of this production, that is, the abundance it
   generates, is experienced by its producers only as an abundance of
   dispossession. All time, all space, becomes foreign to them as their own
   alienated products accumulate. The spectacle is a map of this new worldÑa map
   drawn to the scale of the territory itself. In this way the very powers that
   have been snatched from us reveal themselves to us in their full force.

32 
   The spectacle's function in society is the concrete manufacture of
   alienation. Economic growth corresponds almost entirely to the growth of this
   particular sector of industrial production. If something grows along with the
   self-movement of the economy, it can only be the alienation that has
   inhabited the core of the economic sphere from its inception.

33 
   Though separated from his product, man is more and more, and ever more
   powerfully, the producer of every detail of his world. The closer his life
   comes to being his own creation, the more drastically is he cut off from that
   life.

34 
   The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image. 


   From the Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord
