抄書 vol.6: the society of the spectacle, guy debord
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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.
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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.
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128. the social appropriation of time and the production of man by means of human labor were developments that awaited the advent of a society divided into classes. the power that built itself up on the basis of the penury of the society of cyclical time -- the power, in other words, of the class which organized social labor therein and appropriated the limited surplus value to be extracted, also appropriated the temporal surplus value that resulted from its organization of social time; this class thus had sole possession of the irreversible time of the living. [...] for ordinary men, therefore, history sprang forth as an alien factor, as something they had not sought and against whose occurrence they had thought themselves secure. yet this turning point also made possible the return of that negative human restlessness which had been at the origin of the whole (temporarily arrested) development.
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147. the time of production, time-as-commodity, is an infinite accumulation of equivalent intervals. it is irreversible time made abstract: each segment must demonstrate by the clock its purely quantitative equality with all other segments. this time manifests nothing in its effective reality aside from its exchangeability. it is under the rule of time-as-commodity that "time is everything, man is nothing; he is at the most time's carcass" (the poverty of philosophy). this is time devalued --- the complete inversion of time as "the sphere of human development."
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150. pseudo-cyclical time typifies the consumption of modern economic survival --- of that augmented survival in which daily lived experience embodies no free choices and is subject, no longer to the natural order, but to a pseudo-nature constructed by means of alienated labor. it is therefore quite "natural" that pseudo-cyclical time should echo the old cyclical rhythms that governed survival in pre-industrial societies. it builds, in fact, on the natural vestiges of cyclical time, while also using these as models on which to base new but homologous variants: day and night, weekly work and weekly rest, the cycle of vacations and so on.
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169. a society that molds its entire surroundings has necessarily evolved its own techniques for working on the material basis of this set of tasks. that material basis is the society's actual territory. urbanism is the mode of appropriation of the natural and human environment by capitalism, which, true to its logical development toward absolute domination, can (and now must) refashion the totality of space into its own peculiar decor.
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174.we already live in the era of the self-destruction of the urban environment. the explosion of cities into the countryside, covering it with what Mumford calls "formless masses" of urban debris, is presided over in unmediated fashion by the requirments of comsumption. [...] the technical organization of consumption is thus merely the herald of that general process of dissolution which brings the city to the point where it consumes itself.
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215. the spectacle is the acme of ideology, for in its full flower it exposes and manifests the essence of all ideological systems: the impoverishment, enslavement and negation of real life. materially, the spectacle is "the expression of estrangement, of alienation between man and man." the "new potentiality of fraud" concentrated within it has its basis in that form of production whereby "with the mass of objects grows the mass of alien powers to which man is subjected." this is the supreme stage of an expansion that has turned need against life. "the need for money is for that reason the real need created by the modern economic system, and the only need it creates" (economic and philosophical manuscripts). the principle which Hegel enunciated in the jenenser realphilosophie as that of money --- "the life, moving of itself, of that which is dead" --- has now been extended by the spectacle to the entirety of social 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.
----------------------------------------------------------------
[...]
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.
----------------------------------------------------------------
[...]
128. the social appropriation of time and the production of man by means of human labor were developments that awaited the advent of a society divided into classes. the power that built itself up on the basis of the penury of the society of cyclical time -- the power, in other words, of the class which organized social labor therein and appropriated the limited surplus value to be extracted, also appropriated the temporal surplus value that resulted from its organization of social time; this class thus had sole possession of the irreversible time of the living. [...] for ordinary men, therefore, history sprang forth as an alien factor, as something they had not sought and against whose occurrence they had thought themselves secure. yet this turning point also made possible the return of that negative human restlessness which had been at the origin of the whole (temporarily arrested) development.
----------------------------------------------------------------
[...]
147. the time of production, time-as-commodity, is an infinite accumulation of equivalent intervals. it is irreversible time made abstract: each segment must demonstrate by the clock its purely quantitative equality with all other segments. this time manifests nothing in its effective reality aside from its exchangeability. it is under the rule of time-as-commodity that "time is everything, man is nothing; he is at the most time's carcass" (the poverty of philosophy). this is time devalued --- the complete inversion of time as "the sphere of human development."
----------------------------------------------------------------
[...]
150. pseudo-cyclical time typifies the consumption of modern economic survival --- of that augmented survival in which daily lived experience embodies no free choices and is subject, no longer to the natural order, but to a pseudo-nature constructed by means of alienated labor. it is therefore quite "natural" that pseudo-cyclical time should echo the old cyclical rhythms that governed survival in pre-industrial societies. it builds, in fact, on the natural vestiges of cyclical time, while also using these as models on which to base new but homologous variants: day and night, weekly work and weekly rest, the cycle of vacations and so on.
----------------------------------------------------------------
[...]
169. a society that molds its entire surroundings has necessarily evolved its own techniques for working on the material basis of this set of tasks. that material basis is the society's actual territory. urbanism is the mode of appropriation of the natural and human environment by capitalism, which, true to its logical development toward absolute domination, can (and now must) refashion the totality of space into its own peculiar decor.
----------------------------------------------------------------
[...]
174.we already live in the era of the self-destruction of the urban environment. the explosion of cities into the countryside, covering it with what Mumford calls "formless masses" of urban debris, is presided over in unmediated fashion by the requirments of comsumption. [...] the technical organization of consumption is thus merely the herald of that general process of dissolution which brings the city to the point where it consumes itself.
----------------------------------------------------------------
[...]
215. the spectacle is the acme of ideology, for in its full flower it exposes and manifests the essence of all ideological systems: the impoverishment, enslavement and negation of real life. materially, the spectacle is "the expression of estrangement, of alienation between man and man." the "new potentiality of fraud" concentrated within it has its basis in that form of production whereby "with the mass of objects grows the mass of alien powers to which man is subjected." this is the supreme stage of an expansion that has turned need against life. "the need for money is for that reason the real need created by the modern economic system, and the only need it creates" (economic and philosophical manuscripts). the principle which Hegel enunciated in the jenenser realphilosophie as that of money --- "the life, moving of itself, of that which is dead" --- has now been extended by the spectacle to the entirety of social life.
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