9. Reality rises up within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real. This
reciprocal alienation is the essence and the support of the existing
society.
14. In the spectacle, which is the image of the ruling economy, the goal
is nothing, development everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other
than itself.
16. 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.
17. The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life
brought into the definition of all human realisation the obvious
degradation of being in having.
33. Separated from his product, man himself produces all the details of
his world with ever increasing power, and thus finds himself ever more
separated form his world. The more his life is now his product, the more
he is separated from his life.
59. Under the shimmering diversions of the spectacle, analyzation
dominates modern society the world over and at every point where the
developed consumption of commodities has seemingly multiplied the roles
and objects to choose from.
64. :the commodity the bureaucracy holds on to is the totality of social
labor, and what it sells back to society is wholesale survival.
68. The pseudo-need imposed by modern consumption clearly cannot be
opposed by any genuine need or desire which is not itself shaped by
society and tis history. The abundant commodity stands for the total
breach in the organic development of social needs. Its mechanical
accumulation liberates unlimited artificiality, in the face of which
living desire is helplesss. The cumulative power of independent
artificiality sows everywhere the falsification of social life.
87. The linear schema loses sight of the fact that the bourgeoisie is the
only revolutionary class that ever won;
92. Thus Bakunin could write in 1873, when he left the Fédération
Jurassiene: “During the past nine years, more ideas have been developed
within the International than would be needed to save the world, if ideas
alone could save it, and I challenge anyone to invent a new one. It is no
longer the time for ideas, but for facts and acts.”
104. The industrialisation of the Stalin epoch revealed the reality behind
the bureaucracy: the continuation of the power the economy and the
preservation of the essence of the market society—commodity labor. …Which
is to say that the bourgeoisie created an autonomous power which, so long
as its autonomy lasts, can even do without a bourgeoisie. The totalitarian
bureaucracy is not “the last owning class in history” int he sense of
Bruno Rizzi; it is only a substitute ruling class for the commodity
economy.
105. At that point ideology is no longer a weapon, but a goal. The lie
which is no longer challenged becomes lunacy. Reality as well as the goal
dissolve in the totalitarian ideological proclamation: all it says is all
there is.
113. This is an artificial bourgeoisie which is not able to accumulate,
but which simply squanders the share of surplus value from local labor
which reaches it as well as the foreign subsidies from the States or
monopolies which protect it.
122. When constantly growing capitalist alienation at all levels makes it
increasingly difficult for workers to recognise and name their own misery,
forcing them to face the alternative of rejecting the totality of their
misery or nothing, the revolutionary organisation has to learn that it can
no longer combat alienation with alienated forms.
132. The masters who make history their private property, under the
protection of myth, possess first of all a private ownership of the mode
of illusion:
153. Consumable pseudo-cyclical time is spectacular time, both as the time
of consumption of images in the narrow sense, and as the image of
consumption of time in the broad sense.
190. As a negative movement which seeks the supersession of art in a
historical society where history is not yet lived, art in the epoch of its
dissolution is simultaneously an art of change and the pure expression of
impossible change. The more grandiose its reach, the more its true
realisation is beyond it. This art is perforce avant-garde, and it is not.
Its avant-garde is its disappearance.
207. Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement.
Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author’s
phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it
with the right idea.
217. The parallel between ideology and schizophrenia, established by Gabel
(La Faust Conscience) must be placed in this economic process of
materialisation of ideology. Society has become what ideology already was.
The removal of praxis and the anti-dialectical false consciousness which
accompanies it are imposed during every hour of daily life subjected to
the spectacle; …: the false consciousness of encounter, the “illusion of
encounter.” In a society where no one can any longer be recognised by
others, every individual becomes unable to recognise his own reality.
Ideology is at home; separation has built its world.
219. The spectacle obliterates the boundaries between self and world by
crushing the self besieged by the presence-absence of the world and it
obliterates the boundaries between true and false by driving all lived
truth below the real presence of fraud ensured by the organisation of
appearance. One who passively accepts his alien daily fate is thus pushed
toward a madness that reacts in an illusory way to this fate by resorting
to magical techniques. …In the terms applied by Gabel to a completely
different pathological level, “the abnormal need for representation here
compensates for a tortuous feeling of being on the margin of existence.”