I. Separation Perfected
1. The entire life of societies in which modern conditions of production reign announces itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Every thing that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
17. The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life had brought into the definition of all human realization an obvious degradation of being into having. The present phase of total occupation of social life by the accumulated results of the economy leads to the generalized sliding of having into appearing, from which all actual “having” must draw its immediate prestige and its ultimate function.
II. The Commodity as Spectacle
37. The world at once present and absent which the spectacle makes visible is the world of the commodity dominating all that is lived. And the world of the commodity is thus shown as it is, because its movement is identical to the estrangement of men among themselves and vis-a-vis their global product.
42. The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life. The relation to the commodity is not only visible, but one no longer sees anything about it: the world one sees is its world. […]
43. […] The humanism of the commodity takes charge of the “leisure and humanity” of the worker, simply because political economy can and must now dominate these spheres as political economy. Thus the “perfected denial of man” has taken charge of the totality of human existence.
47. […] The reality of this blackmail lies in the fact that use in its most impoverished form (eating, inhabiting) exists only to the extent that it is imprisoned within the illusory wealth of augmented survival, the real basis for the acceptance of illusion in general in the consumption of modern commodities. The real consumer becomes a consumer of illusions. The commodity is this factually real illusion, and the spectacle is its general manifestation.
51. […] When economic necessity is replaced by the necessity for boundless economic development, the satisfaction of primary human needs is replaced by an uninterrupted fabrication of pseudo-needs which are reduced to the single pseudo-need of maintaining the reign of the autonomous economy. […]
IV. Unity and Division Within Appearance
52. When society discovers that it depends on the economy, the economy, in effect depends on it. This subterranean power, which has grown to the point of seeming to be sovereign, has lost its power. That which was the economic “it” must become the “I.” The subject can only emerge from society, namely from the struggle within it. The subject’s possible existence hangs on the outcome of the class struggle which shows itself to be the product and the producer of the economic foundation of history.
53. The consciousness of desire and the desire for consciousness are identically the project which, in its negative form, seeks the abolition of classes, that is, the direct possession by the workers over all the moments of their activity. Its opposite is the society of the spectacle, where the commodity contemplates itself in a world which it has created.
59. The movement of banalization, under the shimmering diversions of the spectacle, dominates modern society the world over and at every point where the developed consumption of commodities has multiplied the roles and the objects to choose from in appearance. The relics of religion and of the family (which remain the principal form of the heritage of class power) and the moral repression which they assure, can be combined into one with the repeated affirmation of the joy of this world–this world only being produced precisely as a pseudo-joy which contains repression within it. […]
60. By concentrating in himself or herself the image of a possible role, the celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living human being, concentrates this banality. The condition of the star is the specialization of the seemingly lived, the object of identification with apparent life without depth, which must compensate for the fragments of productive specializations which are really lived. Celebrities exist in order to represent varied types of life styles and styles of comprehending society, free to express themselves globally. They incarnate the inaccessible result of social labor by miming the sub-products of this labor which are magically transferred above it as its goal: power and vacations, decision and consumption, which are at the beginning and at the end of an undiscussed process. There it’s the governmental power which personalizes itself in a pseudo-celebrity; here i’s the star of consumption which popularizes itself as a pseudo-power over the experienced. But just as the activities of the star are not really global, they are not really varied.
61. The agent of the spectacle, put on stage as a star, is the opposite of the individual; he is the enemy of the individual in himself as obviously as in others. Passing into the spectacle as a model for identification, the agent has renounced all autonomous qualities in order to identify himself with the general law of obedience to the course of things. […] The celebrity of decision must possess a complete stock of recognized human qualities. Thus between stars, official differences are wiped out by official similarity, the presupposition of their excellence in everything.
Works Cited
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red, 1970. Print. 1-72.
The Treachery of Words 