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Chapter 3:
Unity and Division Within Appearances
“A lively new polemic
about the concepts ‘one divides into two’ and ‘two fuse
into one’ is unfolding on the philosophical front in this country.
This debate is a struggle between those who are for and those who are
against the materialist dialectic, a struggle between two conceptions
of the world: the proletarian conception and the bourgeois conception.
Those who maintain that ‘one divides into two’ is the fundamental
law of things are on the side of the materialist dialectic; those who
maintain that the fundamental law of things is that ‘two fuse into
one’ are against the materialist dialectic. The two sides have
drawn a clear line of demarcation between them, and their arguments
are diametrically opposed. This polemic is a reflection, on the ideological
level, of the acute and complex class struggle taking place in China
and in the world.”
—Red
Flag (Beijing), 21 September 1964
54
The spectacle, like modern
society itself, is at once united and divided. The unity of each is based
on violent divisions. But when this contradiction emerges in the spectacle,
it is itself contradicted by a reversal of its meaning: the division it
presents is unitary, while the unity it presents is actually divided.
55
Although the struggles between
different powers for control of the same socio-economic system are officially
presented as irreconcilable antagonisms, they actually reflect that system’s
fundamental unity, both internationally and within each nation.
56
The sham spectacular struggles
between rival forms of separate power are at the same time real, in that
they express the system’s uneven and conflictual development and
the more or less contradictory interests of the classes or sections of
classes that accept that system and strive to carve out a role for themselves
within it. Just as the development of the most advanced economies involves
clashes between different priorities, totalitarian
state-bureaucratic forms of economic management and countries under colonialism
or semicolonialism also exhibit highly divergent types of production and
power. By invoking any number of different criteria, the spectacle can
present these oppositions as totally distinct social systems. But in reality
they are nothing but particular sectors whose fundamental essence lies
in the global system that contains them, the single movement that has
turned the whole planet into its field of operation: capitalism.
57
The society that bears the
spectacle does not dominate underdeveloped regions solely by its economic
hegemony. It also dominates them as the society of the spectacle.
Even where the material base is still absent, modern society has already
invaded the social surface of every continent by means of the spectacle.
It sets the stage for the formation of indigenous ruling classes and frames
their agendas. Just as it presents pseudogoods to be coveted, it offers
false models of revolution to local revolutionaries. The bureaucratic
regimes in power in certain industrialized countries have their own particular
type of spectacle, but it is an integral part of the total spectacle,
serving as its pseudo-opposition and actual support. Even if local manifestations
of the spectacle include certain totalitarian specializations of social
communication and control, from the standpoint of the overall functioning
of the system those specializations are simply playing their allotted
role within a global division of spectacular tasks.
58
Although this division of spectacular
tasks preserves the existing order as a whole, it is primarily oriented
toward protecting its dominant pole of development. The spectacle is rooted
in the economy of abundance, and the products of that economy ultimately
tend to dominate the spectacular market and override the ideological or
police-state protectionist barriers set up by local spectacles aspiring
to independence.
59
Behind the glitter of spectacular
distractions, a tendency toward banalization dominates modern
society the world over, even where the more advanced forms of commodity
consumption have seemingly multiplied the variety of roles and objects
to choose from. The vestiges of religion and of the family (the latter
is still the primary mechanism for transferring class power from one generation
to the next), along with the vestiges of moral repression imposed by those
two institutions, can be blended with ostentatious pretensions of worldly
gratification precisely because life in this particular world remains
repressive and offers nothing but pseudogratifications. Complacent acceptance
of the status quo may also coexist with purely spectacular rebelliousness:
dissatisfaction itself becomes a commodity as soon as the economy of affluence
develops the capacity to process that particular raw material.
60
Media stars are spectacular
representations of living human beings, projections of the general banality
into images of possible roles. As specialists in apparent life,
stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order
to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations that they
actually live. The role of these celebrities is to act out various lifestyles
and sociopolitical viewpoints in a totally free manner. They embody
the inaccessible results of social labor by dramatizing the by-products
of that labor which are magically projected above it as its ultimate goals:
power and vacations, the decisionmaking and consumption
that are at the beginning and the end of a process that is never questioned.
In the former case, a governmental power may personalize itself as a pseudostar;
in the latter, stars of consumption campaign for public recognition as
pseudopowers over living experience. But the activities of these stars
are not really free, and they offer no real
choices.
61
The agent of the spectacle
who is put on stage as a star is the opposite of an individual; he is
as clearly the enemy of his own individuality as of the individuality
of others. Entering the spectacle as a model to be identified with, he
renounces all autonomous qualities in order to identify himself with the
general law of obedience to the course of things. The stars of consumption,
though outwardly representing different personality types, actually show
each of these types enjoying equal access to, and deriving equal happiness
from, the entire realm of consumption. The stars of decisionmaking must
possess the full range of admired human qualities; official differences
between them are thus canceled out by the official similarity implied
by their supposed excellence in every field of endeavor. As head of state,
Khrushchev retrospectively became a general so as to take credit for the
victory of the battle of Kursk twenty years after it happened. And Kennedy
survived as an orator to the point of delivering his own funeral oration,
since Theodore Sorenson continued to write speeches
for his successor in the same style that had contributed so much toward
the dead man’s public persona. The admirable people who personify
the system are well known for not being what they seem; they attain greatness
by stooping below the reality of the most insignificant individual life,
and everyone knows it.
62
The false choices offered by
spectacular abundance, choices based on the juxtaposition of competing
yet mutually reinforcing spectacles and of distinct yet interconnected
roles (signified and embodied primarily by objects), develop into struggles
between illusory qualities designed to generate fervent allegiance to
quantitative trivialities. Fallacious archaic oppositions are revived
— regionalisms and racisms that serve to endow mundane rankings in
the hierarchies of consumption with a magical ontological superiority
— and a never-ending succession of paltry contests, from competitive
sports to elections, arouses pseudoplayful enthusiasms. Wherever abundant
consumption is established, one particular spectacular opposition is always
in the forefront of illusory roles: the antagonism between youth and adults.
Real adults — people who are masters of their own lives — are
in fact nowhere to be found. And a youthful transformation of what exists
is in no way characteristic of those who are now young; it is present
solely in the economic system, in the dynamism of capitalism. It is things
that rule and that are young, vying with each other and constantly replacing
each another.
63
Spectacular oppositions conceal
the unity of poverty. If different forms of the same alienation
struggle against each other in the guise of irreconcilable antagonisms,
this is because they are all based on real contradictions that are repressed.
The spectacle exists in a concentrated form and a diffuse
form, depending on the requirements of the particular stage of poverty
it denies and supports. In both cases, it is nothing more than an image
of happy harmony surrounded by desolation and
horror, at the calm center of misery.
64
The concentrated spectacle
is primarily associated with bureaucratic capitalism, though it may also
be imported as a technique for reinforcing state power in more backward
mixed economies or even adopted by advanced capitalism during certain
moments of crisis. Bureaucratic property is itself concentrated, in that
the individual bureaucrat takes part in the ownership of the total economy
only insofar as he is a member of the community of bureaucrats. And since
commodity production is less developed under bureaucratic capitalism,
it too takes on a concentrated form: the commodity the bureaucracy appropriates
is the total social labor, and what it sells back to the society is that
society’s wholesale survival. The dictatorship of the bureaucratic
economy cannot leave the exploited masses any significant margin of choice
because it has had to make all the choices itself, and any choice made
independently of it, whether regarding food or music or anything else,
thus amounts to a declaration of war against it. This dictatorship must
be enforced by permanent violence. Its spectacle imposes an image of the
good that subsumes everything that officially exists, an image that is
usually concentrated in a single individual, the guarantor of the system’s
totalitarian cohesion. Everyone must magically identify with this absolute
star or disappear. This master of everyone else’s nonconsumption
is the heroic image that disguises the absolute exploitation entailed
by the system of primitive accumulation accelerated by terror. If the
entire Chinese population has to study Mao to the point of identifying
with Mao, this is because there is nothing else they can be. The
dominion of the concentrated spectacle is a police state.
65
The diffuse spectacle is associated
with commodity abundance, with the undisturbed development of modern capitalism.
Here each individual commodity is justified in the name of the grandeur
of the total commodity production, of which the spectacle is a laudatory
catalog. Irreconcilable claims jockey for position on the stage of the
affluent economy’s unified spectacle, and different star commodities
simultaneously promote conflicting social policies. The automobile spectacle,
for example, strives for a perfect traffic flow entailing the destruction
of old urban districts, while the city spectacle wants to preserve those
districts as tourist attractions. The already dubious satisfaction allegedly
to be obtained from the consumption of the whole is thus constantly
being disappointed because the actual consumer can directly access only
a succession of fragments of this commodity heaven, fragments that invariably
lack the quality attributed to the whole.
66
Each individual commodity fights
for itself. It avoids acknowledging any others and attempts to impose
itself everywhere as if it were the only one in existence. The spectacle
is the epic poem of this struggle, a struggle that no fall of Troy can
bring to an end. The spectacle does not sing of men and their arms, but
of commodities and their passions. Within this blind struggle each commodity,
by pursuing its own passion, unconsciously generates something beyond
itself: the globalization of the commodity, which coincides
with the commodification of the globe. Thus, as a result of the
cunning of the commodity, while each particular commodity
wears itself out fighting, the general commodity-form continues on toward
its absolute realization.
67
The satisfaction that no longer
comes from using the commodities produced in abundance is now sought
through recognition of their value as commodities. Consumers are
filled with religious fervor for the sovereign freedom of commodities
whose use has become an end in itself. Waves of enthusiasm for particular
products are promoted and rapidly propagated by all the communications
media. A film sparks a fashion craze; a magazine publicizes night spots
which in turn spin off different lines of products. The proliferation
of faddish gimmicks reflects the fact that as the mass of commodities
becomes increasingly absurd, absurdity itself becomes a commodity. Trinkets
such as key chains which come as free bonuses with the purchase of some
luxury product, but which end up being traded back and forth as valued
collectibles in their own right, reflect a mystical self-abandonment to
commodity transcendence. Those who collect the trinkets that have been
manufactured for the sole purpose of being collected are accumulating
commodity indulgences — glorious tokens of the commodity’s
real presence among the faithful. Reified people proudly display the proofs
of their intimacy with the commodity. Like the old religious fetishism,
with its convulsionary raptures and miraculous cures, the fetishism of
commodities generates its own moments of fervent exaltation. All this
is useful for only one purpose: producing habitual submission.
68
The pseudoneeds imposed by
modern consumerism cannot be opposed by any genuine needs or desires that
are not themselves equally shaped by society and its history. But commodity
abundance represents a total break in the organic development of social
needs. Its mechanical accumulation unleashes a limitless artificiality
that overpowers any living desire. The cumulative power of this autonomous
artificiality ends up falsifying all social life.
69
The image of blissful social
unification through consumption merely postpones the consumer’s
awareness of the actual divisions until his next disillusionment with
some particular commodity. Each and every new product is ceremoniously
acclaimed as a unique creation offering a dramatic shortcut to the long-awaited
promised land of total consumption. But as with the fashionable adoption
of seemingly aristocratic first names which end up being given to almost
all individuals of the same age, the objects that promise uniqueness can
be offered up for mass consumption only if they have been mass-produced.
The prestigiousness of mediocre objects of this kind is solely due to
the fact that they have been placed, however briefly, at the center of
social life and hailed as a revelation of the unfathomable purposes of
production. But the object that was prestigious in the spectacle becomes
mundane as soon as it is taken home by its consumer — and by all
its other consumers. Too late, it reveals its essential poverty, a poverty
that stems from the poverty of its production. Meanwhile some other object
is already replacing it as representative of the system and demanding
its own moment of acclaim.
70
The sham character of the satisfactions
offered by the system is exposed by this continual replacement of products
and of general conditions of production. Entities that brazenly assert
their definitive perfection nevertheless end up changing, both in the
diffuse and the concentrated spectacle, and only the system endures. Stalin,
like any other outmoded commodity, is denounced by the very forces that
originally promoted him. Each new lie of the advertising industry
is an implicit acknowledgment of the previous lie. And with each downfall
of a personification of totalitarian power, the illusory community
that had unanimously approved him is exposed as a mere conglomeration
of loners without illusions.
71
The things the spectacle presents
as eternal are based on change, and must change as their foundations change.
The spectacle is totally dogmatic, yet it is incapable of arriving at
any really solid dogma. Nothing stands still for it. This instability
is the spectacle’s natural condition, but it is completely contrary
to its natural inclination.
72
The unreal unity proclaimed
by the spectacle masks the class division underlying the real unity of
the capitalist mode of production. What obliges the producers to participate
in the construction of the world is also what separates them from it.
What brings together people liberated from local and national limitations
is also what keeps them apart. What requires increased rationality is
also what nourishes the irrationality of hierarchical exploitation and
repression. What creates society’s abstract power also creates its
concrete nonfreedom.
Chapter 3 of Guy Debord’s The Society
of the Spectacle (Paris, 1967). Translated by Ken Knabb.
This translation is not copyrighted.
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