Extended excerpt from Guy Debord's "Society of the Spectacle", published in 1967, in direct response to an emerging general strike in France.
The latter subsequently led to the fall of the DeGaulle regime.
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Those who denounce the affluent society’s incitement to wastefulness as absurd or dangerous do not understand the purpose of this wastefulness. In the name of economic rationality, they ungratefully condemn the faithful irrational guardians that keep the power of this economic rationality from collapsing. Daniel Boorstin, for example, whose book "The Image" describes spectacle-commodity consumption in the United States, never arrives at the concept of the spectacle because he thinks he can treat private life and “honest commodities” as separate from the “excesses” he deplores.
He fails to understand that the commodity itself made the laws whose “honest” application leads both to the distinct reality of private life and to its subsequent reconquest by the social consumption of images.
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Boorstin describes the excesses of a world that has become foreign to us as if they were excesses foreign to our world.
When, like a moral or psychological prophet, he denounces the superficial reign of images as a product of “our extravagant expectations,” he is implicitly contrasting these excesses to a “normal” life that has no reality in either his book or his era. Because the real human life that Boorstin evokes is located for him in the past, including the past that was dominated by religious resignation, he has no way of comprehending the true extent of the present society’s domination by images. We can truly understand this society only by negating it.
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A sociology that believes that a separately functioning industrial rationality can be isolated from social life as a whole may go on to view the techniques of reproduction and communication as independent of general industrial development.
Thus Boorstin concludes that the situation he describes is caused by an unfortunate but almost fortuitous encounter of an excessive technology of image-diffusion with an excessive appetite for sensationalism on the part of today’s public.
This amounts to blaming the spectacle on modern man’s excessive inclination to be a spectator.
Boorstin fails to see that the proliferation of the prefabricated “pseudo-events” he denounces flows from the simple fact that the overwhelming realities of present-day social existence prevent people from actually living events for themselves. Because history itself haunts modern society like a specter, pseudo histories have to be concocted at every level in order to preserve the threatened equilibrium of the present frozen time.
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The current tendency toward structuralist systematization is based on the explicit or implicit assumption that this brief freezing of historical time will last forever.
The antihistorical thought of structuralism believes in the eternal presence of a system that was never created and that will never come to an end.
Its illusion that all social practice is unconsciously determined by preexisting structures is based on illegitimate analogies with structural models developed by linguistics and anthropology (or even on models used for analyzing the functioning of capitalism) — models that were already inaccurate even in their original contexts.
This fallacious reasoning stems from the limited intellectual capacity of the academic functionaries hired to expound this thought, who are so thoroughly caught up in their awestruck celebration of the existing system that they can do nothing but reduce all reality to the existence of that system.
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In order to understand “structuralist” categories, one must bear in mind that such categories, like those of any other historical social science, reflect forms and conditions of existence.
Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, one cannot judge or admire this particular society by assuming that the language it speaks to itself is necessarily true.
“We cannot judge such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, that consciousness must be explained in the light of the contradictions of material life...”
Structures are the progeny of established powers.
Structuralism is thought underwritten by the state;
a form of thought that regards the present conditions of spectacular “communication” as an absolute.
Its method of studying code in isolation from content is merely a reflection of a taken-for-granted society, where communication takes the form of a cascade of hierarchical signals.
Structuralism does not prove the transhistorical validity of the society of the spectacle;
on the contrary, it is the society of the spectacle, imposing itself in its overwhelming reality, that validates the frigid dream of structuralism.
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The critical concept of “the spectacle” can also undoubtedly be turned into one more hollow formula of sociologic-political rhetoric used to explain and denounce everything in the abstract, thus serving to reinforce the spectacular system.
It is obvious that ideas alone cannot lead beyond the existing spectacle; at most, they can only lead beyond existing ideas about the spectacle.
To actually destroy the society of the spectacle, people must set a practical force into motion.
A critical theory of the spectacle cannot be true unless it unites with the practical current of negation in society; and that negation, the resumption of revolutionary class struggle, can for its part only become conscious of itself by developing the critique of the spectacle, which is the theory of its real conditions — the concrete conditions of present-day oppression — and which also reveals its hidden potential.
This theory does not expect miracles from the working classes.
It envisages the reformulation and fulfillment of such demands as a long-term task.
To make an artificial distinction between theoretical and practical struggle (for the formulation and communication of the type of theory envisaged here is already inconceivable without a rigorous practice), it is certain that the obscure and difficult path of critical theory must also be the fate of the practical movement acting on the scale of society.