Notes on Some Comments on the Society of the Spectacle

_Some Comments on the Society of the Spectacle_ by Guy DeBord
London, New York: Verso, 1988, 1990
ISBN 0-86091-520-4

(4) And since the spectacle today is certainly more powerful than it was before, what is it doing with this additional power? What point has it reached, that it had not reached previously? What, in short, are its present _lines of advance_? The vague feeling that there has been a rapid invasion, which has forced people to lead their lives in an entirely different way, is now widespread; but this is experienced, rather like some inexplicable change in the climate, or in some other natural equilibrium, a change faced with which ignorance knows only that it has nothing to say. What is more, many see it as a civilizing invasion, as something inevitable, and even want to collaborate. Such people would rather not know the precise purpose of this conquest, and how it is advancing.

(6) The empty debate on the spectacle – that is, on the activities of the world's owners – is thus organized by the spectacle itself: everything is said about the extensive means at its disposal, to ensure that nothing is said about their extensive deployment. Rather than talk of the spectacle, people often prefer to use the term “media". And by this they mean to describe a mirror instrument, a kind of public service which, with impartial “professionalism," would facilitate the new wealth of mass communication through mass media – a form of communication, which has at last attained a unilateral purity, whereby decisions already taken are presented for passive admiration. For what is communicated are _orders_; and with perfect harmony, those who give them are also those who tell us what they think of them.

(9-10) The integrated spectacle shows itself to be simultaneously concentrated and diffuse, and ever since the fruitful union of the two has learned to employ both of these qualities on a grander scale. Their former mode of application has changed considerably. As regards concentration, the controlling center has now become occult: never to be occupied by a known leader, or clear ideology. And on the diffuse side, the spectacle has never before put its mark to such a degree on almost a full range of socially produced behavior and objects. For the final sense of the integrated spectacle is this – but it has integrated itself into reality to the same extent as it was describing it, and that it was reconstructing it as it was describing it. As a result, this reality no longer confronts the integrated spectacle as something alien. When the spectacle was concentrated, the greater part of surrounding society escaped it; when diffuse, a small part; today, no part. The spectacle has spread itself to the point where it now permeates all reality. It was easy to predict in theory what has been quickly and university demonstrated by practical experience of economic reason's relentless accomplishments: that the globalization of the false was also the falsification of the globe. Beyond the legacy of old books and old buildings, still of some significance but destined to continue a reduction and, moreover, increasingly highlighted and classified to suit the spectacle's requirements, there remains nothing, in culture or in nature, which has not been transformed, and polluted, according to the means and interests of modern industry. Even genetics has become readily accessible to the dominant social forces.

(11-12) The society whose modernization has reached the stage of integrated spectacle is characterized by the combined effect of five principal features: incessant technological renewal; integration of state and economy; generalized secrecy; unanswerable lies; an eternal present.

(15) History’s domain was the memorable, the totality of events, whose consequences would be lastingly apparent. And thus, inseparably, history with knowledge that should endure and aid in understanding, at least, in part, what was to come: "an everlasting possession," according to Thucydides. In this way, history was the measure of genuine novelty. It is in the interest of those who sell novelty at any price to eradicate the means of measuring it. When social significance is attributed only to what is immediate, and what will be immediate immediately afterwards, always replacing another, identical, immediacy, it can be seen that the uses of the media guarantee, a kind of a eternity of noisy insignificance.

(18-19) Thus, it is no longer possible to believe anything about anyone that you have not learned for yourself, directly.

(19) For the agora, the general community, has gone, along with communities restricted to intermediary bodies, or to independent institutions, to salons, or cafés, or to workers in a single company. There is no place left where people can discuss the realities which concern them, because they can never lastingly free themselves from the crushing presence of media discourse, and of the various forces organized it to relay it.

(20) ... men resemble their times more than their fathers. [An Arab proverb from the 14th century]

... We believe we know that in Greece history and democracy entered the world at the same time. We can prove that their disappearances have also been simultaneous.

To this list of the triumphs of power we should, however, add one result which has proved negative: once the running of a state involves a permanent and massive shortage of historical knowledge, that state can no longer be lead strategically.

(21) Once it attains the stage of the integrated spectacle, self-proclaimed democratic society seems to be generally excepted as the realization of a fragile perfection. So that it must no longer be exposed to attacks, being fragile; and, indeed, is no longer open to attack, being perfect, as no other society before it. It is a fragile society because it has great difficulty managing its dangerous technological expansion. But it is a perfect society for governing; and the proof is that all those aspire to govern want to govern this one, in the same way, changing hardly a thing. For the first time in contemporary Europe no party or fraction of a party even tries to pretend that they wish to change anything significant. The commodity is beyond criticism: as a general system and even as the particular forms of junk which heads of industry choose to put on the market at any given time.

(24) Such a perfect democracy constructs its own inconceivable foe, terrorism. Its wish is _to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results_. The story of terrorism is written by the state, and it is, therefore, a highly instructive. The spectators must certainly never know everything about terrorism, but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else must be acceptable, or in any case, more rational and democratic.

(26-27) Nowadays there is a pretense of wishing to preserve a purely political crime, like some inexpensive luxury, a crime which,doubtless no one will ever have the occasion to commit again, since no one is interested in the subject anymore; except for the professional politicians themselves, whose crimes are rarely pursued, nor for that matter called political. All crimes and offenses are effectively social. But of all social crimes, none must be seen as worse than the impertinent claim to still want to change something in a society which has so far been only too kind and patient; but has had enough of being blamed.

(29-30) The primary cause of the decadence of contemporary thought evidently lies in the fact that spectacular discourse leaves no room for any reply; while logic was only socially constructed through dialogue. Furthermore, when respect for those who speak through the spectacle is so widespread, when they are held to be rich, important, prestigious, to be _authority itself_, the spectators tend to want to be just as illogical as the spectacle, thereby proudly displaying an individual reflection of this authority. And finally, logic is not easy, and no one has tried to teach it. Drug addicts do not study logic; they no longer need it, nor are they capable of it. The spectator's laziness is shared by all intellectual functionaries and overnight specialists, all of whom do their best to conceal the narrow limits of their knowledge by the dogmatic repetition of arguments with illogical authority.

(31) The individual who has been more deeply marked by this impoverished spectacular thought than by _any other aspect of his experience_ puts himself at the service of the established order right from the start, even though subjectively he may have had quite the opposite intention. He will essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one he is familiar with; the one in which he learn to speak. No doubt he would like to be regarded as an enemy of its rhetoric; but he will use its syntax. This is one of the most important aspects of spectacular domination's success.

(33-34) McLuhan himself, the spectacle's first apologist, who had seemed to be the most convinced imbecile of the century, changed his mind when he finally discovered in 1976 that "the pressure of the mass media leads to irrationality," and that it was becoming urgent to modify their usage. The sage of Toronto had formally spent several decades marveling at the numerous freedoms,created by a "global village" instantly and effortlessly accessible to all. Villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom, and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Which is a precise enough description of the global spectacle's present vulgarity, in which it has become impossible to distinguish the Grimaldi-Monaco or Bourbon-Franco dynasties from those who succeeded the Stuarts. However, McLuhan's ungrateful modern disciples are now trying to make people forget him, hoping to establish their own careers in media celebration of all these new freedoms to “choose" at random from ephemera. And no doubt they will retract their claims even faster than the man who inspired them.

(34) The spectacle makes no secret of the fact that certain dangers surround the wonderful order it has established. Ocean pollution and the destruction of equatorial forests threaten oxygen renewal; the earth's ozone layer is menaced by industrial growth; nuclear radiation accumulates irreversibly. It merely concludes that none of these things matter. It will only talk about dates and measures. And on this alone, it is successfully reassuring – something which a pre-spectacular mind would have thought impossible.

(36-36) The nuclear industry, both military and civil, demands a far higher dose of secrecy than in other fields – which already have plenty, as we know. To make life – that is to say, lying - easier for the sages chosen by the system's masters, it has been found useful also to change measurements, to vary them, according to a large number of criteria, and refine them, so as to be able to juggle as necessary with a range of figures which are hard to convert. Hence to measure radioactivity levels, one can choose from a range of units of measurement: curies, becquerels, roentgens, rads alias centigrays, and rems, not forgetting, the humble millirads, and sieverts, which are worth 100 rems. It reminds one of the old subdivisions of British currency which foreigners found so confusing, back in the days when Sellafield was still called Windscale.

(37) In June 1987, Pierre Bacher, deputy director of installations at Electricité de France, revealed the latest safety doctrine for nuclear power stations. By installing valves and filters it becomes much easier to avoid major catastrophes, like cracks or explosions in the reactors, which would affect a whole “region." Such catastrophes are produced by excessive containment. Whenever the plant looks like blowing, it is better to decompress gently, showering only a restricted area of a few kilometers, an area which on each occasion will be differently and haphazardly extended depending on the wind. He discloses that in the past two years discrete experiments carried out at Cadarache in the Drôme, "clearly showed that waste – essentially gas – is infinitesimal, representing at worst 1% of the radioactivity in the power station itself." That's a very moderate worst case: 1%. Formerly, we were assured there was no risk at all, except in the case of accidents, which were logically impossible. The experience of the first few years changed this reasoning as follows: since accidents can always happen, what must be avoided is their reaching a catastrophic threshold, and that is easy. All that is necessary is to contaminate little by little, in moderation. Who would not agree that it is infinitely healthier to limit yourself to an intake of 140 centilitres of vodka per day for several years, rather than getting drunk right right away like the Poles?

(38) At the international conference of experts held in Geneva in December 1986 the question was quite simply whether to introduce a worldwide ban on the production of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), the gases, which have recently and rapidly started to destroy the thin layer of ozone, which – as will be recalled - protects this planet against the harmful effects of solar rays. Daniel Verilhe, representing Elf-Aquitaine's chemical subsidiary, and in this capacity part of a French delegation firmly opposed to any ban made a sensible point: “It will take at least three years to develop substitutes, and the cost will be quadrupled." As we know, this fugitive ozone layer, so high up, belongs to no one has no market value. This industrial strategist could thus show his opponents the extent of their inexplicable disregard for economics: “It is highly dangerous to base an industrial strategy on environmental imperatives.”

(39) When an all-powerful economy lost its reason - _and that is precisely what defines these spectacular times_ – it suppressed the last vestiges of scientific autonomy, both in methodology, and, by the same token, in the practical working conditions of its “researchers.”

(40-41) The science of lying justifications naturally occurred with the first symptoms of bourgeois society's decadence, with the cancerous proliferation of those pseudo-sciences known as “human"; yet modern medicine, for example, had once been able to pass as useful, and those who eradicated smallpox or leprosy were very different from those who contemptibly capitulated in the face of nuclear radiation or chemical farming. It can readily be seen, of course, that medicine today no longer has the right to defend public health against a pathogenic environment, for that would be to challenge the state, or at least the pharmaceuticals industry. But it is not only by its obligation to keep quiet that contemporary science acknowledges what it has become. It is also by its frequent and artless outbursts. In November 1985, professors Even and Andreiu at Laënnac hospital announced that they had perhaps found an effective cure for Aids, following an experiment on four patients which had lasted a week. Two days later the patients having died, several other doctors, whose research was not so far advanced, or who were perhaps jealous, expressed certain reservations as to the professors' precipitate haste in broadcasting what was merely the misleading appearance of victory – a few hours before the patients' condition finally deteriorated. Even and Andreiu defending themselves nonchalantly, arguing that, after all, false hopes are better than no hope at all. Their ignorance was too great for them to recognize this argument as a precise and complete disavowal of the spirit of science; as the one which had historically always served to endorse the profitable daydreams of charlatans and sorcerers, long before such people were put in charge of hospitals.

(44-45) The relatively new concept of _disinformation_ was recently imported from Russia, along with another number of other inventions useful in the running of modern states. It is openly employed by particular powers, or, consequently, by people who hold fragments of economic or political authority, in order to maintain what is established; and always in a _counter-offensive_ role. Whatever can oppose a single official truth must necessarily be disinformation emanating from hostile, or at least rival powers, and would have been intentionally and malevolently falsified. Disinformation would not be simple negation of a fact which suits the authorities, or the simple affirmation of a fact which does not suit them: this is called psychosis. Unlike the straightforward lie, disinformation must inevitably contain a degree of truth, but one deliberately manipulated by an artful enemy. This is what makes it so attractive to the defenders of the dominant society. The power which speaks of disinformation does not believe itself to be absolutely faultless, but knows that it can attribute to any precise criticism the excessive insignificance which characterizes disinformation; with the result that it will never have to admit to any particular fault.

(48) If occasionally a kind of unregulated, disinformation threatens to appear, in the service of particular interest temporarily in conflict, and threatens to be believed, getting out of control, and thus clashing with the concerted work of a less irresponsible disinformation, there is no reason to fear that the former involves other manipulators, who are more subtle or more skilled: it is simply because disinformation now spreads _in a world where there is no room for verification_.

(50-51) What is false creates taste, and reinforces itself by knowingly eliminating any possible reference to the authentic. And what is genuine is _reconstructed_ as quickly as possible, to resemble the false. Being the richest and the most modern, the Americans have been the main dupes of this traffic in false art. And they are exactly the same people who pay for restoration work at Versailles or in the Sistine Chapel. This is why Michelangelo's frescoes will acquire the fresh, bright colors of a cartoon strip, and the genuine furniture at Versailles, the sparkling gilt which will make them resemble the fake Louis XIV suites imported by Texans at such great expense.

(56) It has most certainly been almost universally accepted that the geological explorations for oil-beds in the subsoil of the city of Paris, so noisily conducted in the autumn of 1986, had no other serious purpose than to measure the inhabitants' current level of stupid, stupid faction and submission; by showing them supposed research, so obviously devoid of economic reasons.
NB: The Madwoman of Chaillot

... More profoundly, in this world, which is officially so respectful of economic necessities, no one ever knows the real cost of anything which is produced. In fact, the major part of the real cost _is never calculated; and the rest is kept secret_.

(58) Far from being a peculiarly Panamanian phenomenom, this General Noriega, who _sells everything and fakes everything_, in a world which does precisely the same thing, was altogether a perfect representative of the integrated spectacle, and of the success is it allows the assorted managers of its internal and external politics: a sort of statesman. In a sort of state, a sort of general, a capitalist. He is the very model of _our modern prince_, and of those destined to come to power and stay there, the most able resemble him closely. It is not Panama, which produces such marvels, it is our times.

(59-60) When television has shown a fine picture and explained it with a brazen lie, idiots believe that everything is clear. The demi-elite is content to know that almost everything is obscure, ambivalent, “constructed" by unknown codes. A more exclusive elite would like to know what is true, hard as it is to distinguish in each particular case despite all their access to special knowledge, and confidences. Which is why they would like to get to know the method of truth, though their love usually remains unrequited.

(61) In his Discourse sur la servitude volontaire, La Boétie showed how a tyrant's power will be considerably reinforced by the concentric circles of individuals who believe, rightly, or wrongly, that it is in their interest to support it. In the same way many politicians and media professionals who are flattered not to be suspected of being _irresponsible_, learn a lot through their connections and confidences. Someone who is happy to be given confidential information is hardly likely to criticize it; nor to notice that in all that is confided to him, the principal part of reality is invariably hidden. Thanks to the benevolent protection of his deceivers, he sees a few more of the cards, false though they may be; he never learns the rules of the game. Thus he immediately identifies with a manipulators and scorns an ignorance which in fact he shares. For the titbits of information tossed to the familiars of a lying tyranny are usually poisoned with lies, manipulated and uncheckable. Yet they gratify those who get them, for they feel themselves superior to those who know nothing. Their only role is to make domination more respectable, never to make it comprehensible. They are the privilege of _front-row spectators_ who are stupid enough to believe they can understand something, not by making use of what is hidden from them, but _by believing what is revealed!_

(63) But Edgar Allan Poe had already discovered the real path to truth, in a well-known argument in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”:
“It appears to me that this mystery is considered insoluble, for the very reason which should cause it to be regarded as easy of solution – I mean for the outré character of its features… In investigations such as we are now pursuing, it should not be so much asked 'what has occurred', as 'what has occurred that has never occurred before’.”

(67) It is always a mistake to try to explain something by opposing Mafia and state: they are never rivals. Theory easily verifies what all the rumors in practical life of all too easily shown. The Mafia is not an outsider in this world; it is perfectly at home. Indeed, in the integrated spectacle, it stands as the _model_ of all advanced commercial enterprises.

NB: The revolution is over. The mafia has won. Tom Thompson, 1967

(69) The ubiquitous growth of secret societies and networks of influence answers the imperative demand of the new conditions for profitable management of economic affairs, at a time when the state holds a hegemonic role in the direction of production and when demand for all commodities depend strictly on the centralization achieved by spectacular information/promotion, to which forms of distribution must also adapt. It is therefore only a natural product of the concentration of capital, production, and distribution. Whatever does not grow, must disappear; and no business can grow without adopting the values, techniques and methods of today's industry, spectacle and state. In the final analysis, it is the particular form of development chosen by the economy of our epoch which _dictates the widespread creation of new personal bonds of dependency and protection_.

(69-70) It is precisely here that we can see the profound truth of the Sicilian Mafia's maxim, so well appreciated throughout Italy: “when you've got money and friends, you can laugh at the law." In the integrated spectacle, the laws are asleep; because they were not made for the new production techniques, and because they are evaded in distribution by new types of agreement. With the public thinks, or prefers, is of no importance. This is what is hidden by the spectacle of all these opinion polls, elections, modernizing restructurings. No matter who are the winners are, the faithful customers _will get the worst of it_, because that is exactly what has been produced for them.

(74) Networks of promotion/control slide imperceptibly into networks of surveillance/disinformation. Formerly one only conspired against an established order. Today, _conspiring in its favor_ is a new and flourishing profession. Under spectacular domination people conspire to maintain it, and to guarantee what it alone would call its well-being. This conspiracy _is a part_ of it's very functioning.

(76-78) to this kind of counter-journalistic false critique can be added the organized practice of rumor which we know to be originally a sort of uncontrollable byproduct of spectacular information, since everyone, however vaguely, perceives something misleading about the latter and trusts it as little as it deserves. Rumor began as something superstitious, naïve, self-deluding. More recently, however, surveillance has begun introducing into the population people capable of starting rumors which suit it at the very first signal. It has been decided here to apply in practice the observations of a theory formulated some 30 years ago, whose origins origins lie in American sociology of advertising – the theory of individuals known as “pacemakers," that is, those whom others in their milieu come to follow and imitate – but this time moving from spontaneity to control. Budgetary, or extra-budgetary, means have also been released to find numerous auxiliaries; beside the former specialists of the recent past, academics and media professionals, sociologists and police. To believe in the continuing mechanical application of past models leads to,just as many errors as the general ignorance of the past. "Rome is no longer Rome," and the Mafia are no longer thieves. And the surveillance and disinformation services are as far removed from the police and informers of former times – for example, from the roussins and mouchards of the Second Empire – as the present special services in all countries are from the officers of the army,general staff’s Deuxième Bureau in 1914.

Since art is dead, it has evidently become extremely easy to disguise police as artists. When the latest imitations of a recuperated neo-dadaism are allowed to pontificate proudly in the media, and thus also to tinker with the decor of official palaces, like court jesters to the kings of junk, it is evident that by the same process a cultural cover is guaranteed for every agent or auxiliary of the state's networks of persuasion. Empty pseudo-museums, or pseudo-research centers on the work of nonexistent personalities, can be opened just as fast as reputations are made for journalist-cops, historian-cops, or novelist-cops. No doubt Arthur Cravan foresaw this world when he wrote in Maintenant: “Soon we will we will only see artists in the streets, and it will take no end of effort to find a single man." This is, indeed the sense of the revived form of an old quip of Parisian loafers: “Hello there, artists! Too bad if I've got it wrong.”

(79) The whole history of spectacular society called for the secret services to play the pivotal role; for it is in them that the features and force of such a society are concentrated to the highest degree. Moreover, they are always also the arbiters of that society's general interests, despite their modest title of “services." There is no corruption here, for they faithfully express the common morals of the spectacular century. Thus do watchers and watched sail forth on a boundless ocean. The spectacle has brought the secret to victory, and must be more and more controlled by _specialists in secrecy_ who are certainly not only officials who who have to different degrees managed to free themselves from state control; who are not only officials.

(79-80) A general working rule of the integrated spectacle, at least for those who manage its affairs, is that in this framework, _everything which can be done, must be done_. This means that every new instrument must be employed, whatever the cost. New machinery everywhere becomes the goal and the driving force of the system, and is the only thing which can significantly modify its progress, every time its use is imposed without further reflection. Society's owners indeed want above all to keep a certain "social relation between people," but they may must also maintain continual technological innovation; for that was one of the obligations that came with their inheritance. This law must also thus apply to the services which safeguard domination. When an instrument has been perfected it must be used, and its use will reinforce the very conditions that favor this use. Thus it is that emergency procedures become standard procedures.

(82-83) So it is that thousands of plots in favor of the established order tangle and clash, almost everywhere, as the overlap of secret networks and secret issues or activities grows ever more dense along with their rapid integration into every sector of economics, politics and culture. In all areas of social life the degree of intermingling in surveillance, disinformation and security activities gets greater and greater. The plot having thickened to the point where it is almost out in the open, each part of it now starts to interfere with, or worry, the others, for all these professional conspirators are spying on each other without really knowing why, are colliding by chance yet not identifying each other with any certainty. Who is observing whom? On whose behalf, apparently? And actually? The real influences remain hidden, and the ultimate aims can barely be suspected and almost never understood. So that while no one can be sure he is not being tricked or manipulated, it is rare for the string-puller to know he has succeeded. And in any case, to be on the winning side of manipulation does not mean that one has chosen the right strategic perspective. Tactical successes can thus lead great powers down dangerous roads.

(84-85) It is in these circumstances that we can speak of domination's falling rate of profit, as it spreads to almost the whole social space, and consequently increases both its personnel, and its means. For now, each means aspires, and labors, to become an end. Surveillance spies on itself, and plots against itself.

Its principle present contradiction, finally, is that it is spying on, infiltrating, and pressurizing _an absent entity_: that which is supposed to be trying to subvert the social order. But where can it actually be seen at work? Certainly conditions have never been so seriously revolutionary, but it is only governments who think so. Negation has been so thoroughly deprived of its thought that it was dispersed long ago. Because of this, it remains only a big, yet highly disturbing threat, and surveillance in its turn, has been deprived of its preferred field of activity. Surveillance and intervention are thus rightly led by the present exigencies, determining their terms of engagement to operate on the very terrain of this threat in order to combat it _in advance_. This is why surveillance has an interest in organizing poles of negation itself, which it can instruct with more than the discredited means of the spectacle, so as to manipulate, not terrorists this time, but theories.

(85) The French revolution brought great changes in the art of war. It was from that experience that Clausewitz could draw the distinction between tactics, as the use of forces in battle to obtain victory, and strategy, as the use of victories in battle to attain the goals of a war.

(87-88) Not only are the subjective led to believe that to all intents and purposes they are still living in a world which in fact has been eliminated, but the rulers themselves sometimes suffer from the absurd belief that in some respects they do too. They come to believe in a part of what they have suppressed, as if it remained a reality and had still to be included in their calculations. This backwardness will not last long. Those who have achieved so much so easily must necessarily go further. It should not be thought that those who have been too slow to appreciate the pliability of the new rules of their game and its form of barbaric grandeur, will last forever like some archaism in proximity to real power. It is certainly not the spectacle's destiny to end up as enlightened despotism.

We must conclude that a changeover is imminent, and ineluctable in the coopted cast who serve the interests of domination, and above all manage the protection of the domination. In such an affair, innovation will surely not be displayed on the spectacle's stage. It appears instead like lightning, which we know only when it strikes. This changeover, which will conclude decisively the work of these spectacular times, will occur discreetly, and conspiratorially, even though it concerns those within the inner circles of power. It will select those who will share the central exigency: that they clearly see what obstacles they have overcome, and of what they are capable.

NB: My notes on DeBord's The Society of the Spectacle are at https://hubeventsnotes.blogspot.com/2017/04/notes-from-society-of-spectacle.html