comments on the society of the spectacle pdf

Once it attains the stage of the integrated spectacular, self-proclaimed democratic society seems to be generally accepted as the realization of a fragile perfection. Where it exists, it is not named. These extremists had only underestimated the tremendous strength of patriotic consent within the Socialist Party, which would immediately push it into "the sacred union," whether or not Jaures was assassinated or allowed the occasion to hold to his internationalist position in rejecting the war. After the exposure of “The Rose of the Winds” group in 1974 (footnote [4]), P2 took up the burden of maintaining NATO’s “Operation Stay Behind” in Italy.

The present comments are not concerned with moralizing.

The nature of political crime could not be separated from the diverse intentions of social critique. At a stroke it is truth which has almost everywhere ceased to exist or, at best, has been reduced to the status of pure hypothesis that can never be demonstrated. Nevertheless, despite its frequent intentions and its clumsy means to highlight the full stature of supposedly remarkable personalities, current society more often shows quite the opposite, and not merely in what has today replaced the arts, or discussion of the arts: one total incompetent will collide with another; panic ensues and it is then simply a matter of who will fall apart first. When, for example, the new conditions of the society of the integrated spectacular have forced its critique to remain really clandestine, not because it hides itself but because it is hidden by the heavy stage-management of the thought of diversion, those who are nonetheless charged with surveilling this critique and, if necessary, for denying it, can now employ traditional methods in the milieu of clandestinity: provocation, infiltrations, and various forms of elimination of authentic critique to the profit of a false one which will have been put in place for this purpose. No opposition manifested itself among the remainder of the citizens, who were frightened by the number of conspirators. To the jealousy of Washington, his chief security advisor was the best on the market: Michael Harari, a former officer with Mossad, the Israeli secret service. The Mafia flourishes in the soil of modern society. [54] Empty pseudo-museums, or pseudo-research centers on the complete works of nonexistent personalities, can be opened just as fast as reputations are made for journalist-cops, historian-cops, or novelist-cops. 'The police conception of history' was, in the nineteenth century, a reactionary and ridiculous explanation, at a time when so many powerful social movements agitated the masses. There must be disinformation, and it must be something fluid and potentially ubiquitous. Translated into English by NOT BORED! One can remark that interpretations of the mysteries of terrorism appear to have introduced a symmetry between contradictory views, as if there were two schools of philosophy professing absolutely incompatible metaphysical systems. Furthermore, when respect for those who speak in the spectacle is so widespread, when they are supposed to be rich, important, prestigious, to be authority itself, the spectators tend to want to be just as illogical as the spectacle, so as to display an individual reflection of this authority.

What is important in this sort of commodity is the packaging, or the labeling: the price codes.

One can imagine the rigor and precision which would have been achieved in the nineteenth century by military history, and consequently by theorists of strategy, if, so as not to give too much confidential information to neutral commentators or enemy historians, one habitually reported a campaign in these terms: “The preliminary phase involved a series of engagements in which, from our side, a strong advance force made up of four generals and the units under their command, met an enemy force of 13,000 bayonets.

Meanwhile news of what is genuinely important, of what is actually changing, comes rarely, and then in fits and starts.

New equipment becomes the goal and the driving force of the entire system, and will be the only thing which can notably modify its progress, each time its use is imposed without further reflection. At the same time the meaning of history and taste are lost, one organizes networks of falsification. Debord is playing on a famous line from Racine's Andromache, Act V, Scene 3: Pour qui sont ces serpents qui sifflent sur vos tetes? It is because of the new conditions of a profitable handling of economic affairs, at the moment when the State holds a hegemonic part in the orientation of production and when the demand for all of the commodities depends strictly on the centralization achieved by spectacular information/promotion, to which all forms of distribution must also adapt, that one sees the imperative demand that networks of influence or secret societies constitute themselves everywhere.

[9] On the rewriting of a person's past, after he or she has been assassinated, see Guy Debord, Considerations on the Assassination of Gerard Lebovici, and Jean-Francois Martos, Words and Bullets: the Condemned of the Lebovici Affair.

[14] Among those who "see terrorism as simply a number of acts of blatant manipulation on the part of the secret services," Debord would include Gianfranco Sanguinetti, author of On Terrorism and the State, which Debord criticized in his 23 February 1981 letter to Jaap Kloosterman. An anti-spectacular notoriety is becoming something extremely rare. It is all that is obscure and threatens to oppose the unprecedented happiness that this society offers to those who trust it, a happiness that is worth more than various insignificant risks and disappointments. Today, conspiring in its favor is a new and rapidly developing trade. Generalised secrecy stands behind the spectacle, as the decisive complement of all it displays and, in the last analysis, as its most important operation.

For more on Lebovici, see footnote [1]. Each particular industry’s security service combats sabotage, and needs to organize it against their rivals: a company with important interests in undersea tunnels will be favorably disposed to the insecurity of ferry-boats [English in original] and may bribe newspapers in financial trouble to ensure they mention it on the first possible occasion and without too much reflection; a company competing with Sandoz will be indifferent to ground water in the Rhine valley. [46] To pick two examples among many: Luigi Calabresi, the Police Inspector in charge of investigating various terrorist bombings that took place in 1969, was killed on 17 May 1972; and Vittorio Occorsio, the judge investigating the Italicus train bombing of 1974, was killed on 14 June 1976.

The allusion is to Victor Hugo's description of Waterloo in his poem "L'Expiation": seeing the battle was going badly for the French, Napoleon summoned the Imperial Guard to enter the fray. If these were not based on a natural affection for the new prince, but rather on discontent with the existing government, he will retain their friendship only with considerable difficulty and exertion, because it will be impossible for him in his turn to satisfy them.”.

Spectacular authority can similarly deny whatever it likes, once, or three times over, and say that it will no longer speak of it and speak of something else instead, knowing full well there is no danger of any other riposte, on its own terrain or any other. No arrests were ever made. What is more, many see it as a civilizing invasion, as something inevitable, and even want to collaborate. Thus, in an era when contemporary art can no longer exist, it becomes difficult to judge the classical arts. Fallacious [fallacieux], from the Latin fallaciosus, skillful at or accustomed to deception, full of deceit: the termination of this adjective is equivalent to the superlative of deceptive [trompeur]. At the time, the lodge counted among its members more than 2,400 people, including former-Prime Minister Giulo Andreotti, the “senior Italian statesman” to whom Debord refers.

With the new conditions that now predominate in the society crushed under the iron heel of the spectacle, one knows, for example, that a political assassination finds itself placed in another light; can in a sense be sifted.

This law thus applies equally to the services that safeguard domination. Power is becoming so mysterious that after the affair of the illegal arms sales to Iran by the US presidency[36], one might wonder who was really commanding the United States, the strongest power in the so-called democratic world.

Formerly, one only ever conspired against an established order. Here one has decided to apply in practice the observations of a theory formulated some thirty years ago, and of which the origins lie in American sociology of advertising: the theory of individuals known as ‘trend-setters,’ that is, those whom others in their milieu come to follow and imitate; but in passing this time from spontaneity to well-rehearsed.

Today, conspiring in its favor is a new and rapidly developing trade. Other “special [death] squads” include the Bolivian group of ex-Nazis called “The Fiances of Death,” and Stefano Delle Chiaie’s international network, “The Black Orchestra.”.

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