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The Society of the Spectacle QUOTES

The Society of the Spectacle QUOTES

1 " The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist. "

― Guy Debord , The Society of the Spectacle

2 " The story of terrorism is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive… compared with terrorism, everything else must be acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic. "

― Guy Debord , The Society of the Spectacle

3 " The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him. "

― Guy Debord , The Society of the Spectacle

4 " Partout où il y a représentation indépendante, le spectacle se reconstitue. "

― Guy Debord , The Society of the Spectacle

5 " Like lost children we live our unfinished adventures. "

― Guy Debord , The Society of the Spectacle

6 " The loss of quality that is so evident at every level of spectacular language, from the objects it glorifies to the behavior it regulates, stems from the basic nature of a production system that shuns reality. The commodity form reduces everything to quantitative equivalence. The quantitative is what it develops, and it can develop only within the quantitative. "

― Guy Debord , The Society of the Spectacle

7 " This society eliminates geographical distance only to produce a new internal separation. "

― Guy Debord , The Society of the Spectacle

8 " Spectacle is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity "

― Guy Debord , The Society of the Spectacle

9 " The status of celebrity offers the promise of being showered with ‘all good things’ that capitalism has to offer. The grotesque display of celebrity lives (and deaths) is the contemporary form of the cult of personality; those ‘famous for being famous’ hold out the spectacular promise of the complete erosion of a autonomously lived life in return for an apotheosis as an image.

- From Martin Jenkins' Introduction "

― Guy Debord , The Society of the Spectacle

10 " Pirmoji ekonomikos viešpatavimo socialiniame gyve- nime fazė į bet kokios žmogaus veiklos apibrėžtį įnešė aki- vaizdų nuopuolį, nurodantį perėjimą iš būti į turėti. Dabartinė fazė, nusakanti visišką socialinio gyvenimo užgrobimą remian- tis ekonomikos pasiekimais, stumia į visuotinę kaitą nuo turėti į atrodyti, iš kurios bet koks veiksmingas „turėti“ privalo būti išreikštas visuotiniu prestižu ir aukščiausiomis pareigomis. Tuo pačiu metu bet kokia asmeninė tikrovė tampa socialine, tiesiogiai priklausančia nuo visuomeninės valdžios, kurią ji ir suformavo. Vien dėl to, kad jos nėra, jai leista pasirodyti. "

― Guy Debord , The Society of the Spectacle

11 " Le tourisme, se ramène fondamentalement au loisir d'aller voir ce qui est devenu banal. "

― Guy Debord , The Society of the Spectacle

12 " Economic growth has liberated societies from the natural pressures that forced them into an immediate struggle for survival; but they have not yet been liberated from their liberator. The commodity’s independence has spread to the entire economy it now dominates. This economy has transformed the world, but it has merely transformed it into a world dominated by the economy. "

― Guy Debord , The Society of the Spectacle

13 " Those in middle class occupations are reduced to selling their labour power just like the working class. Rounds of redundancies, longer unpaid working hours and the concomitant anxieties of employment in a 'flexible' and 'competitive' labour market tend to reduce all to the misery of wage slavery. "

― Martin Jenkins, , The Society of the Spectacle

14 " Once his workday is over, the worker is suddenly redeemed from the total contempt toward him that is so clearly implied by every aspect of the organization and surveillance of production, and finds himself seemingly treated like a grownup, with a great show of politeness, in his new role as a consumer. "

― Guy Debord , The Society of the Spectacle

15 " La réalité du temps a été remplacée par la publicité du temps. "

― Guy Debord , The Society of the Spectacle

16 " Les force qu'elle a déchaînées suppriment la nécessité economique qui a été la base immuable des sociétés anciennes. Quand elle la remplace par la nécessité du développement economique infini, elle ne peut que remplacer la satisfatction des premiers besoins humains sommairement reconnus, par une fabrication ininterrompue de pseudo-besoins qui se ramènent au seul pseudo-besoin du maintien de son règne. "

― Guy Debord , The Society of the Spectacle

17 " Les pseudo-événements qui se pressent dans la dramatisation spectaculaire n'ont pas été vécus par ceux qui en sont informés ; et de plus ils se perdent dans l'inflation de leur remplacement précipité, à chaque pulsion de la machinerie spectaulaire. D'autre part, ce qui a été réellement vécu est sans relation avec le temps irréversible officiel de la société, et en opposition directe au rythme pseudo-cyclique du sous-produit consommable de ce temps. Ce vécu individuel de la vie quotidienne séparée reste sans langage, sans concept, sans accès critique à son propre passé qui n'est consigné nulle part. Il ne se communique pas. Il est incompris et oublié au profit de la fausse mémoire spectaculaire du non-mémorable. "

― Guy Debord , The Society of the Spectacle

18 " Every given commodity fights for itself, cannot acknowledge the others, and attempts to impose itself everywhere as if it were the only one. The spectacle, then is the epic poem of this struggle, an epic which cannot be concluded by the fall of any Troy. The spectacle does not sign the praises of men and their weapons, but of commodities and their passions. In this blind struggle every commodity, pursuing its passion, unconsciously realizes something higher: the becoming-world of the commodity, which is also the becoming-commodity of the world. Thus, by means of a ruse of commodity logic, what's specific in the commodity wears itself out in the fight while the commodity-form moves toward its absolute realization. "

― Guy Debord , The Society of the Spectacle

19 " The society whose modernisation has reached the stage of integrated spectacle
is characterised by the combined effect of five principal factors: incessant technological renewal, integration of state and economy, generalised secrecy, unanswerable lies, and eternal present . . .
— The Society of the Spectacle "

― Guy Debord , The Society of the Spectacle

20 " 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. "

― Guy Debord , The Society of the Spectacle