“But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence… illusion only is sacred, truth profane.”
“Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.”
“Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity”
“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles.”
“Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”
“The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished.”
“The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.”
“The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness.”
“the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation.”
“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”
“The spectacle cannot be understood as an abuse of the world of vision, as a product of the techniques of mass dissemination of images. It is, rather, a Weltanschauung which has become actual, materially translated. It is a world vision which has become objectified.”
“The spectacle grasped in its totality is both the result and the project of the existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society.”
“In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life.”
“It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corollary consumption.”
“The spectacle’s form and content are identically the total justification of the existing system’s conditions and goals.”
“The spectacle is also the permanent presence of this justification, since it occupies the main part of the time lived outside of modern production.”
“The language of the spectacle consists of signs of the ruling production, which at the same time are the ultimate goal of this production.”
“Lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle while simultaneously absorbing the spectacular order, giving it positive cohesiveness.”
“Objective reality is present on both sides. Every notion fixed this way has no other basis than its passage into the opposite: reality rises up within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real. This reciprocal alienation is the essence and the support of the existing society.”
“Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is affirmation of appearance and affirmation of all human life, namely social life, as mere appearance.”
“But the critique which reaches the truth of the spectacle exposes it as the visible negation of life, as a negation of life which has become visible.”
“the spectacle is nothing other than the sense of the total practice of a social-economic formation, its use of time. It is the historical movement in which we are caught.”
“The basically tautological character of the spectacle flows from the simple fact that its means are simultaneously its ends. It is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory.”
“The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself.”
“the spectacle is the main production of present-day society.”
“The spectacle subjugates living men to itself to the extent that the economy has totally subjugated them. It is no more than the economy developing for itself. It is the true reflection of the production of things, and the false objectification of the producers.”
“The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life brought into the definition of all human realization the obvious degradation of being into having.”
“The present phase of total occupation of social life by the accumulated results of the economy leads to a generalized sliding of having into appearing, from which all actual “having” must draw its immediate prestige and its ultimate function.”
“At the same time all individual reality has become social reality directly dependent on social power and shaped by it. It is allowed to appear only to the extent that it is not.”
“The spectacle, as a tendency to make one see the world by means of various specialized mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly), naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs; the most abstract, the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present-day society.”
“But the spectacle is not identifiable with mere gazing, even combined with hearing. It is that which escapes the activity of men, that which escapes reconsideration and correction by their work.”
“It is the opposite of dialogue. Wherever there is independent representation, the spectacle reconstitutes itself.”
“The spectacle inherits all the weaknesses of the Western philosophical project which undertook to comprehend activity in terms of the categories of seeing; furthermore, it is based on the incessant spread of the precise technical rationality which grew out of this thought.”
“Philosophy, the power of separate thought and the thought of separate power, could never by itself supersede theology. The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion.”
“The spectacle is the technical realization of the exile of human powers into a beyond; it is separation perfected within the interior of man.”
“To the extent that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessary.”
“The spectacle is the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue. It is the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence.”
“Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle. The institutionalization of the social division of labor, the formation of classes, had given rise to a first sacred contemplation, the mythical order with which every power shrouds itself from the beginning. The sacred has justified the cosmic and ontological order which corresponded to the interests of the masters; it has explained and embellished that which society could not do. Thus all separate power has been spectacular, but the adherence of all to an immobile image only signified the common acceptance of an imaginary prolongation of the poverty of real social activity, still largely felt as a unitary condition.”
“The modern spectacle, on the contrary, expresses what society can do, but in this expression the permitted is absolutely opposed to the possible.”
“The spectacle is the preservation of unconsciousness within the practical change of the conditions of existence. It is its own product, and it has made its own rules: it is a pseudo-sacred entity.”
“It shows what it is: separate power developing in itself, in the growth of productivity by means of the incessant refinement of the division of labor into a parcellization of gestures which are then dominated by the independent movement of machines; and working for an ever-expanding market.”
“All community and all critical sense are dissolved during this movement in which the forces that could grow by separating are not yet reunited.”