Comments on the Society of the Spectacle
by Guy Debord
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“The erasure of the personality is the fatal accompaniment to an existence which is concretely submissive to the spectacle’s rules, ever more removed from the possibility of authentic experience and thus from the discovery of individual preferences. Paradoxically, permanent self-denial is the price the individual pays for the tiniest bit of social status. Such an existence demands a fluid fidelity, a succession of continually disappointing commitments to false products. It is a matter of running hard to keep up with the inflation of devalued signs of life. Drugs help one to come to terms with this state of affairs, while madness allows one to escape from it.”
“The spectacle's instruction and the spectators' ignorance are wrongly seen as antagonistic factors when in fact they give birth to each other. In the same way, the computer's binary language is an irresistible inducement to the continual and unreserved acceptance of what has been programmed according to the wishes of someone else and passes for the timeless source of a superior, impartial and total logic. Such progress, such speed, such breadth of vocabulary! Political? Social? Make your choice. You cannot have both. My own choice is inescapable. They are jeering at us, and we know whom these programs are for. Thus it is hardly surprising that children should enthusiastically start their education at an early age with the Absolute Knowledge of computer science; while they are still unable to read, for reading demands making judgements at every line; and is the only access to the wealth of pre-spectacular human experience. Conversation is almost dead, and soon so too will be those who knew how to speak.”
“Viviremos en un mundo sin memoria donde, como en la superficie del agua, la imagen hace desaparecer indefinidamente la imagen.”
“Así, en una época en que puede existir arte contemporáneo se hace difícil juzgar las artes clásicas. Aquí, como en todas partes, la ignorancia sólo se produce para ser explotada. Al mismo tiempo que se pierden simultáneamente el sentido de la historia y el gusto, se organizan redes de falsificación. Basta con tener a los expertos y a los tasadores, lo que es bastante fácil, y colarlo todo, porque, tanto en los asuntos de esta naturaleza como en definitiva en todos los demás, la venta es la que autentifica cualquier valor. Después son los coleccionistas o los museos, sobre todo americanos, quienes, atiborrados de falso, tendrán interés en mantener la buena reputación, al igual que el Fondo Monetario Internacional mantiene la ficción del valor positivo de las inmensas deudas de cien naciones.”
“Il faut conclure qu’une relève est imminente et inéluctable dans la caste cooptée qui gère la domination, et notamment dirige la protection de cette domination. En une telle matière, la nouveauté, bien sûr, ne sera jamais exposée sur la scène du spectacle.Elle apparaît seulement comme la foudre, qu’on ne reconnaît qu’à ses coups. Cette relève, qui va décisivement parachever l’œuvre des temps spectaculaires, s’opère discrètement, et quoique concernant des gens déjà installés tous dans la sphère même du pouvoir, conspirativement.”
