Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord

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Re: Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord

Postby admin » Sat Jun 24, 2017 9:18 pm

XX

FOR any intelligence service, following Clausewitz's accurate theory of war, knowledge must become power. From this these services derive their contemporary prestige, their peculiarly poetic quality. Whilst intelligence itself has been so thoroughly expelled from the spectacle, which prohibits action and says very little about the actions of others, it seems to have taken refuge with those who analyse certain realities, and act secretly on certain realities. The recent revelations that Margaret Thatcher tried in vain to suppress, and in fact confirmed by the attempt, have shown that in Britain these services have already been capable of bringing down a prime minister whose politics they deemed dangerous. The general contempt created by the spectacle thus, for new reasons, restored the fascination of what in Kipling's day was called 'the great game'.

'The conspiracy theory of history' was in the nineteenth century a reactionary and ridiculous belief, at a time when so many powerful social movements were stirring up the masses. Today's pseudo-rebels are well aware of this, thanks to hearsay or a few books, and believe that it remains true for eternity. They refuse to recognise the real praxis of their time; it is too sad for their cold hopes. The state notes this fact, and plays on it.

When almost every aspect of international political life and ever more important aspects of internal politics are conducted and displayed in the style of the secret services, with decoys, disinformation and double explanations (one may conceal another, or may only seem to) the spectacle confines itself to revealing a wearisome world of necessary incomprehensibility. This tedious series of lifeless, inconclusive crime novels has all the dramatic interest of a realistically staged fight between blacks, at night, in a tunnel.

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.
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Re: Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord

Postby admin » Sat Jun 24, 2017 9:18 pm

XXI

SECRECY dominates this world, and first and foremost as the secret of domination. According to the spectacle, secrecy would only be a necessary exception to the rule of freely available, abundant information, just as domination in the integrated spectacle's 'free world' would be restricted to a mere executive body in the service of democracy. But no one really believes the spectacle. How then do spectators accept the existence of secrecy which alone rules out any chance of their running a world of whose principal realities they know nothing, in the unlikely event that they were to be asked how to set about it? The fact is that almost no one sees secrecy in its inaccessible purity and its functional universality. Everyone accepts that there are inevitably little areas of secrecy reserved for specialists; as regards things in general, many believe they are in on the secret.

In his Discours sur la servitude volontaire, La Boetie 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 interests 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 criticise 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 the 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!

Domination has at least sufficient lucidity to expect that its free and unhindered reign will very shortly lead to a significant number of major catastrophes, both ecological (chemical, for example) and economic (in banking, for example). It has for some time been ensuring it is in a position to deal with these exceptional misfortunes by other means than its usual gentle use of disinformation.
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Re: Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord

Postby admin » Sat Jun 24, 2017 9:18 pm

XXII

AS TO the rising number of assassinations over the last two decades (Kennedy, Aldo Moro, Olaf Palme, ministers and bankers, a pope or two, some others who were worth more than all of them) which have remained completely unsolved - for while the odd supernumerary has been sacrificed there has never been any question of apprehending those who hold the purse strings - their serial character shows a common hallmark: the blatant, and variable, lies of official statements. The syndrome of this newly established social disease has quickly spread, as if, following the first documented cases, it moved down from the summits of the state (the traditional sphere for such crimes) and at the same time moved up from the lower depths, the other traditional locale for trafficking and protection rackets, where this kind of war has always gone on, between professionals. These activities tend to meet up in the middle of social affairs, a place which the state was prepared to frequent and which the Mafia was pleased to reach; thus a kind of confluence begins.

There has been no shortage of attempts to explain these new mysteries in terms of accidents: police incompetence, stupid magistrates, untimely press revelations, crisis of growth in the secret services, malevolent witnesses, or police spies suddenly deciding to go on strike. 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 outre 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'.
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Re: Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord

Postby admin » Sat Jun 24, 2017 9:19 pm

XXIII

IN January 1988 the Colombian drug Mafia issued a communique aimed at correcting public opinion about its supposed existence. Now the first requirement of any Mafia, wherever it may be, is naturally to prove that it does not exist, or that it has been the victim of unscientific calumnies; and that is the first thing it has in common with capitalism. But in these particular circumstances, this Mafia was so irritated at being the only one placed under the spotlight that it went so far as to give details of the other groupings who were trying to cover themselves by illegitimately using it as a scapegoat. It declared: 'We ourselves don't belong to the Mafia of politicians and bureaucrats, bankers, financiers or millionaires, nor to the Mafia of fraudulent contracts, monopolies or oil, nor to the media Mafia.'

We can doubtless assume that the authors of this statement have, like all the rest, an interest in diverting their own activities into that vast river of troubled water whose course irrigates the whole of present society, a river of crime and more banal illegalities. But it is also correct to assume that here we have people who by their very profession know better than most what they are talking about. The Mafia flourishes in the soil of contemporary society. Its expansion is as rapid as that of all the other products of the labour by which integrated spectacular society shapes its world. The Mafia grows along with the swift development of information technology and industrial food processing. along with urban redevelopment and shanty-towns, secret services and illiteracy.
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Re: Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord

Postby admin » Sat Jun 24, 2017 9:19 pm

XXIV

WHEN it was first brought to the United States by migrant Sicilian workers, the Mafia was nothing but an uprooted archaism; just like the gang wars between Chinese secret societies which appeared at the same time on the West Coast. Born out of obscurantism and poverty, the Mafia at that time was not even able to put down roots in Northern Italy. It seemed condemned to vanish with the progress of the modern state. For it was a form of organised crime which could only prosper through the 'protection' of backward minorities, outside the urban world, where the laws of the bourgeoisie and a rational police force could not penetrate. In its defence, the Mafia could only eliminate witnesses, to neutralise the police and judiciary, and to maintain necessary secrecy in its sphere of activity. But subsequently it found fresh scope in the new obscurantism first of diffuse spectacular society. then of its integrated form: with the total victory of secrecy, the general resignation of the populace, the complete loss of logic, the universal progress of venality and cowardice, all the conditions were in place for it to become a modern, and offensive, power.

Prohibition in America (one of the finest examples this century of the state's pretension to be able to exercise authoritarian control over everything, and of the results which ensue) handed over the trade in alcohol to organised crime for more than a decade. From there the Mafia, with its new wealth and experience, moved into electoral politics, commerce, the development of the market in professional killers, and certain aspects of international politics. During the Second world War it received favours from the US government, to help with the invasion of Sicily. Legalised alcohol was replaced by drugs, now the leading commodity in illegal consumption. Next the Mafia became closely involved in property dealing, in banking and in high-level politics and affairs of state, and then in the spectacular industries: television, films and publishing. And already, in the United States at least, it is involved in the music industry, as in every other activity where promotion depends on a relatively concentrated group of people. It is easy to apply pressure to them, with bribes and intimidation, since there is no shortage of capital or of untouchable, anonymous hitmen. By corrupting the disc-jockeys one can choose what will succeed, from equally wretched commodities.

But it is undoubtedly in Italy that the Mafia has acquired the greatest strength, in the wake of its experience and conquests in America. Since the period of its historic compromise with the parallel government it has been able to kill magistrates and police chiefs with impunity - a practice it inaugurated through its participation in the displays of political 'terrorism'. The similar evolution of the Mafia's Japanese equivalent, in relatively independent conditions, well illustrates the unity of the epoch.

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 rumours in practical life have 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.
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Re: Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord

Postby admin » Sat Jun 24, 2017 9:19 pm

XXV

WITH the new conditions which now predominate in a society crushed under the spectacle's iron heel, we know, for example, that a political assassination can be presented in another light, can in a sense be screened. Everywhere the mad are more numerous than before, but what is infinitely more useful is that they can be talked about madly. And it is not some kind of reign of terror which forces such explanations on the media. On the contrary, it is the peaceful existence of such explanations which should cause terror.

When in 1914 with war on the horizon Villain assassinated Jaures, no one doubted that Villain, though certainly a somewhat unbalanced man, had believed he had to kill Jaures because in the eyes of the extremists of the patriotic right who had deeply influenced him, Jaures seemed certain to have a detrimental effect on the country's defence. These extremists had merely underestimated the tremendous strength of patriotic commitment within the Socialist Party, which would immediately lead them into the union sacree, whether or not Jaures was assassinated or allowed to hold to his internationalist position in rejecting war. If such an event happened today, journalists/police and pundits on 'social issues' and 'terrorism', would quickly explain that Villain was well known for having planned several attempted murders, whose intended victims were always men who, despite the variety of their political opinions, all by chance looked and dressed rather like Jaures. Psychiatrists would confirm this, and the media, merely confirming in their turn what the psychiatrists had said, would thus confirm their own competence and impartiality as uniquely authoritative experts. The official police investigation would immediately come up with several reputable people ready to bear witness to the fact that this same Villain, considering he had been rudely served at the 'Chope du Croissant', had in their presence loudly threatened to take revenge on its proprietor by publicly murdering on the premises one of his best customers.

This is not to say that in the past truth was revealed often or quickly; for Villain was eventually acquitted by the French courts. He was not shot until 1936, at the start of the Spanish revolution, having been imprudent enough to move to the Balearic Islands.
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Re: Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord

Postby admin » Sat Jun 24, 2017 9:19 pm

XXVI

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 depends strictly on the centralisation 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.

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. What the public thinks, or prefers, is of no importance. This is what is hidden by the spectacle of all these opinion polls, elections, modernising restructurings. No matter who the winners are, the faithful customers will get the worst of it, because that is exactly what has been produced for them.

The widespread talk of a 'legal state' only dates from the moment when the modern, so-called democratic state generally ceased to be one. The fact that the expression was only popularised shortly after 1970 and, appropriately, in Italy is far from accidental. In many fields, laws are even made precisely so that they may be evaded, by those who have the means to do so. Illegality in some circumstances - for example, around the world trade in all sorts of weaponry, especially the most technologically sophisticated products - is simply a kind of back-up for the economic operation, which will be all the more profitable because of it. Today many business deals are necessarily as dishonest as the century, and not like those once made within a strictly limited range by people who had chosen the paths of dishonesty.

With the growth of promotion/control networks to mark out and maintain exploitable sectors of the market, there is also an increase in the number of personal services which must be provided to those in the know, who have willingly provided their help; and these are not always the police or guardians of the state's interests and security. Functional complicities operate across time and distance, for their networks command all the means to impose those sentiments of gratitude and fidelity which were unfortunately so rare in the free activity of the bourgeois epoch.

One always learns something from one's adversary. We should not doubt that statesmen, too, came to read the young Lilies' remarks on the concepts of legality and illegality, at the time when they had to deal with the brief passage of a new generation of negativity - as Homer said, 'Men in their generations are like the leaves of the trees.' Since then statesmen, like us, have ceased to trouble themselves with any kind of ideology on the question; and indeed the practices of spectacular society no longer encourage ideological illusions of this kind. And finally it could be said of all of us that what has stopped us from devoting ourselves to one particular illegal activity is the fact that we have had several.
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Re: Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord

Postby admin » Sat Jun 24, 2017 9:20 pm

XXVII

IN book VIII, chapter 5 of The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides wrote something about the operations of another oligarchic conspiracy which closely relates to the situation in which we find ourselves:

Nevertheless the Assembly and the Council chosen by lot still continued to hold meetings. However, they took no decisions that were not approved by the party of the revolution; in fact all the speakers were from this party. and what they were going to say had been considered by the party beforehand. People were a&aid when they saw their numbers, and no one now dared to speak in opposition to them. If anyone did venture to do so, some appropriate method was soon found for having him killed, and no one tried to investigate such crimes or take action against those suspected of them. Instead the people kept quiet, and were in such a state of terror that they thought themselves lucky enough to be left unmolested even if they had said nothing at all. They imagined that the revolutionary party was much bigger than it really was, and they lost all confidence in themselves, being unable to find out the facts because of the size of the city and because they had insufficient knowledge of each other. For the same reason it was impossible for anyone who felt himself ill-treated to complain of it to someone else so as to take measures in his own defence; he would either have had to speak to someone he did not know or to someone he knew but could not rely upon. Throughout the democratic party people approached each other suspiciously, everyone thinking that the next man had something to do with what was going on. And there were in fact among the revolutionaries some people whom no one could ever have imagined would have joined in an oligarchy. It was these who were mainly responsible for making the general mass of people so mistrustful of each other and who were of the greatest help in keeping the minority safe, since they made mutual suspicion an established thing in the popular assemblies.


If history should return to us after this eclipse, something which depends on factors still in play and thus on an outcome which no one can definitely exclude, these Comments may one day serve in the writing of a history of the spectacle; without any doubt the most important event to have occurred this century. and the one for which the fewest explanations have been ventured. In other circumstances, I think I could have considered myself altogether satisfied with my first work on this subject, and left others to consider future developments. But in the present situation, it seemed unlikely that anyone else would do it.
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Re: Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord

Postby admin » Sat Jun 24, 2017 9:20 pm

XXVIII

NETWORKS of promotion/control slide imperceptibly into networks of surveillance/ disinformation. Formerly one only conspired against an established order. Today, conspiring in its favour 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 its very functioning.

Provisions for a kind of preventive civil war are already being made, adapted to variously calculated future projections. These are the 'special squads' responsible for local interventions according to the needs of the integrated spectacle. Thus, for the worst scenarios, a tactic has been planned under the name 'Three Cultures', a witty reference to a square in Mexico City in October 1968 - though this time the gloves would be off and the tactic applied before the revolt occurred. Such extreme cases apart, to be a useful tool of government unexplained assassinations only need to be widely influential or relatively frequent simply knowing that they are possible complicates calculations in many different fields. Nor is there any need to be intelligently selective, a d hominem. The entirely random application of the procedure may well be more productive.

The composition of certain fragments of a social critique of rearing has also been arranged, something which is no longer entrusted to academics or media professionals, whom it is now preferable to keep apart from excessively traditional lies in this debate: a new critique is required, advanced and exploited in a new way, controlled by another, better trained, sort of professional. In a relatively confidential manner, lucid texts are beginning to appear, anonymously, or signed by unknown authors - a tactic helped by everyone's concentration on the downs of the spectacle, which in turn makes unknowns justly seem the most admirable - texts not only on subjects never touched on in the spectacle but also containing arguments whose force is made more striking by a calculable originality deriving from the fact that however evident, they are never used. This practice may serve as at least a first stage in initiation to recruit more alert intellects, who will later be told more about the possible consequences, should they seem suitable. What for some will be the first step in a career will be for others - with lower grades - the first step into the trap prepared for them.

In some cases, with issues that threaten to become controversial, another pseudo-critique can be created; and between the two opinions which will thus be put forward - both outside the impoverished conventions of the spectacle - unsophisticated judgement can oscillate indefinitely, while discussion around them can be renewed whenever necessary. Most often this concerns a general discussion of what is hidden by the media, and this discussion can be strongly critical, and on some points quite evidently intelligent, yet always curiously decentred. Topics and words have been artificially chosen, with the aid of computers programmed in critical thought. These texts always contain certain gaps, which are quite hard to spot but nonetheless remarkable: the vanishing point of perspective is always abnormally absent. They resemble those facsimiles of famous weapons, which only lack the firing-pin. This is inevitably a lateral critique, which perceives many things with considerable candour and accuracy. but places itself to one side. Not because it affects some sort of impartiality, for on the contrary it must seem to find much fault, yet without ever apparently feeling the need to reveal its cause, to state, even implicitly, where it is coming from and where it wants to go.

To this kind of counter-journalistic false critique can be added the organised practice of rumour 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 trust it as little as it deserves. Rumour began as something superstitious, naive, self-deluding. More recently, however, surveillance has begun introducing into the population people capable of starting rumours which suit it at the very first signal. It has been decided here to apply in practice the observations of a theory formulated some thirty years ago, whose 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 fund 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 in 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 Deuxieme 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 centres 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 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.'

Things having become what they are, we can now witness the use of collective authorship by the most modern publishing houses, that is to say, the ones with the best commercial distribution. Since their pseudonyms are only authenticated by the newspapers, they can swop them around, collaborate, replace each other, take on new artificial brains. Their task is to express the ideas and lifestyles of the epoch, not because of their personalities, but because they are ordered to. Those who believe that they are truly independent, individual literary entrepreneurs can knowingly vouch for the fact that Ducasse has had a row with the Comte de Lautreamont, that Dumas isn't Maquet, that we must never confuse Erckmann with Chatrian; that Censier and Daubenton are no longer on speaking terms. It might be best to say that this type of modem author was a follower of Rimbaud, at least in so far as 'I is someone else.'

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 have to different degrees managed to free themselves from state control; who are not only officials.
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Re: Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord

Postby admin » Sat Jun 24, 2017 9:20 pm

XXIX

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 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 favour this use. Thus it is that emergency procedures become standard procedures.

In a certain sense the coherence of spectacular society proves revolutionaries right, since it is evident that one cannot reform the most trifling detail without taking the whole thing apart. But at the same time this coherence has eliminated every organised revolutionary tendency by eliminating those social terrains where it had more or less effectively been able to find expression: from trade unions to newspapers, towns to books. In a single movement, it has been possible to illuminate the incompetence and thoughtlessness of which this tendency was quite naturally the bearer. And on an individual level, the reigning coherence is quite capable of eliminating, or buying off such exceptions as may arise.
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