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Description edit
Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative as Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960s up to the present, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of... read more
Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit
Quotes edit
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“Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.”
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“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.”
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“... just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.”
- Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
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The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.
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The first stage of the economy’s domination of social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having — human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed.
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The spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by an accumulation of images that serve to alienate us from a genuinely lived life. The image is thus an historical mutation of the form of commodity fetishism.
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The alienation of the spectator, which reinforces the contemplated objects that result from his own unconscious activity, works like this: The more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires.
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Spectators are linked solely by their one-way relationship to the very center that keeps them isolated from each other. The spectacle thus reunites the separated, but it reunites them only in their separateness.
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Once his workday is over, the worker is suddenly redeemed from the total contempt toward him that is so clearly implied by every aspect of the organization and surveillance of production, and finds himself seemingly treated like a grownup, with a great show of politeness, in his new role as a consumer.
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The spectacle is the ruling order’s nonstop discourse about itself, its never-ending monologue of self-praise, its self-portrait at the stage of totalitarian domination of all aspects of life.
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In contrast, the modern spectacle depicts what society could deliver, but in so doing it rigidly separates what is possible from what is permitted. The spectacle keeps people in a state of unconsciousness as they pass through practical changes in their conditions of existence.
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Each new lie of the advertising industry is an admission of its previous lie.
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Rounds of redundancies, longer unpaid working hours and the concomitant anxieties of employment in a ‘flexible’ and ‘competitive’ labour market tend to reduce all to the misery of wage slavery.
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First Sentence edit
IN SOCIETIES dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles.
Table of Contents edit
1. The Culmination of Separation
2. The Commodity as Spectacle
3. Unity and Division Within Appearances
4. The Proletariat as Subject and Representation
5. Time and History
6. Spectacular Time
7. Territorial Domination
8. Negation and Consumption Within Culture
9. Ideology Materialized
Themes & Symbolism edit
Authors & Contributors edit
- Guy Debord (Author)
Classification edit
- Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
- Dewey: 791
Subjects edit
Popular Tags
Links to Supplemental Material edit
- Bureu of Public Secrets: Full text
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