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The Commodity as Spectacle

  The commodity can only be understood in its undistorted essence when it
  becomes the universal category of society as a whole. Only in this context
  does the reification produced by commodity relations assume decisive
  importance both for the objective evolution of society and for the stance
  adopted by men towards it. Only then does the commodity become crucial for
  the subjugation of men's consciousness to the forms in which this
  reification finds expression.... As labor is progressively rationalized
  and mechanized man's lack of will is reinforced by the way in which his
  activity becomes less and less active and more and more contemplative. 

Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness 


35 
   The self-movement of the spectacle consists in this: it arrogates to itself
   everything that in human activity exists in a fluid state so as to possess it
   in a congealed form -- as things that, being the negative expression of
   living value, have become exclusively abstract value. In these signs we
   recognize our old enemy the commodity, which appears at first sight a very
   trivial thing, and easily understood, yet which is in reality a very queer
   thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties. 

36 
   Here we have the principle of commodity fetishism, the domination of society
   by things whose qualities are "at the same time perceptible and imperceptible
   by the senses." This principle is absolutely fulfilled in the spectacle,
   where the perceptible world is replaced by a set of images that are superior
   to that world yet at the same time impose themselves as eminently
   perceptible. 

37 
   The world the spectacle holds up to view is at once here and elsewhere; it is
   the world of the commodity ruling over all lived experience. The commodity
   world is thus shown as it really is, for its logic is one with men's
   estrangement from one another and from the sum total of what they produce. 

38 
   The loss of quality so obvious at every level of the language of the
   spectacle, from the objects it lauds to the behavior it regulates, merely
   echoes the basic traits of a real production process that shuns reality. The
   commodity form is characterized exclusively by self-equivalence -- it is
   exclusively quantitative in nature: the quantitative is what it develops, and
   it can only develop within the quantitative . 

39 
   Despite the fact that it excludes quality, this development is still subject,
   qua development, to the qualitative. Thus the spectacle betrays the fact that
   it must eventually break the bounds of its own abundance. Though this is not
   true locally, except here and there, it is already true at the universal
   level which was the commodity's original standard -- a standard that it has
   been able to live up to by turning the whole planet into a single world
   market. 

40 
   The development of the forces of production is the real unconscious history
   that has built and modified the conditions of existence of human groups
   (understood as the conditions of survival and their extension): this
   development has been the basis of all human enterprise. The realm of
   commodities has meant the constitution, within a natural economy, of a
   surplus survival. The production of commodities, which implies the exchange
   of a variety of products among independent producers, was long able to retain
   an artisanal aspect embodied in a marginal economic activity where its
   quantitative essence was masked. Wherever it encountered the social
   conditions of large-scale trade and capital accumulation, however, such
   production successfully established total hegemony over the economy. The
   entire economy then became what the commodity, throughout this campaign of
   conquest, had shown itself to be -- namely, a process of quantitative
   development. The unceasing deployment of economic power in the shape of
   commodities has transfigured human labor into labor-as-commodity, into
   wage-labor, and eventually given rise to an abundance thanks to which the
   basic problem of survival, though solved, is solved in such a way that it is
   not disposed of, but is rather forever cropping up again at a higher level.
   Economic growth liberates societies from the natural pressures occasioned by
   their struggle for survival, but they still must be liberated from their
   liberators. The independence of the commodity has spread to the entire
   economy over which the commodity now reigns. The economy transforms the
   world, but it transforms it into a world of the economy. The pseudo-nature in
   which labor has become alienated demands that such labor remain in its
   service indefinitely, and inasmuch as this estranged activity is answerable
   only to itself it is able in turn to enroll all socially permissible efforts
   and projects under its banner. In these circumstances an abundance of
   commodities, which is to say an abundance of commodity relations, can be no
   more than an augmented survival. 

41 
   The commodity's dominion over the economy was at first exercised in a covert
   manner. The economy itself, the material basis of social life, was neither
   perceived nor understood -- not properly known precisely because of its
   "familiarity." In a society where concrete commodities were few and far
   between, it was the dominance of money that seemed to play the role of
   emissary, invested with full authority by an unknown power. With the coming
   of the industrial revolution, the division of labor specific to that
   revolution's manufacturing system, and mass production for a world market,
   the commodity emerged in its full-fledged form as a force aspiring to the
   complete colonization of social life. It was at this moment too that
   political economy established itself as at once the dominant science and the
   science of domination. 

42 
   The spectacle corresponds to the historical moment at which the commodity
   completes its colonization of social life. It is not just that the
   relationship to commodities is now plain to see -- commodities are now all
   that there is to see; the world we see is the world of the commodity. The
   growth of the dictatorship of modern economic production is both extensive
   and intensive in character. In the least industrialized regions its presence
   is already felt in the form of imperialist domination by those areas that
   lead the world in productivity. In these advanced sectors themselves, social
   space is continually being blanketed by stratum after stratum of commodities.
   With the advent of the so-called second industrial revolution, alienated
   consumption is added to alienated production as an inescapable duty of the
   masses. The entirety of labor sold is transformed overall into the total
   commodity. A cycle is thus set in train that must be maintained at all costs:
   the total commodity must be returned in fragmentary form to a fragmentary
   individual completely cut off from the concerted action of the forces of
   production. To this end the already specialized science of domination is
   further broken down into specialties such as sociology, applied psychology,
   cybernetics, semiology and so on, which oversee the self-regulation of every
   phase of the process. 

43 
   Whereas at the primitive stage of capitalist accumulation "political economy
   treats the proletarian as a mere worker" who must receive only the minimum
   necessary to guarantee his labor-power, and never considers him "in his
   leisure, in his humanity," these ideas of the ruling class are revised just
   as soon as so great an abundance of commodities begins to be produced that a
   surplus "collaboration" is required of the workers. All of a sudden the
   workers in question discover that they are no longer invariably subject to
   the total contempt so clearly built into every aspect of the organization and
   management of production; instead they find that every day, once work is
   over, they are treated like grown-ups, with a great show of solicitude and
   politeness, in their new role as consumers. The humanity of the commodity
   finally attends to the workers' "leisure and humanity" for the simple reason
   that political economy as such now can -- and must -- bring these spheres
   under its sway. Thus it is that the totality of human existence falls under
   the regime of the "perfected denial of man." 

44 
   The spectacle is a permanent opium war waged to make it impossible to
   distinguish goods from commodities, or true satisfaction from a survival that
   increases according to its own logic. Consumable survival must increase, in
   fact, because it continues to enshrine deprivation. The reason there is
   nothing beyond augmented survival, and no end to its growth, is that survival
   itself belongs to the realm of dispossession: it may gild poverty, but it
   cannot transcend it. 

45 
   Automation, which is at once the most advanced sector of modern industry and
   the epitome of its practice, confronts the world of the commodity with a
   contradiction that it must somehow resolve: the same technical infrastructure
   that is capable of abolishing labor must at the same time preserve labor as a
   commodity -- and indeed as the sole generator of commodities. If automation,
   or for that matter any mechanisms, even less radical ones, that can increase
   productivity, are to be prevented from reducing socially necessary labor-time
   to an unacceptably low level, new forms of employment have to be created. A
   happy solution presents itself in the growth of the tertiary or service
   sector in response to the immense strain on the supply lines of the army
   responsible for distributing and hyping the commodities of the moment. The
   coincidence is neat: on the one hand, the system is faced with the necessity
   of reintegrating newly redundant labor; on the other, the very factitiousness
   of the needs associated with the commodities on offer calls out a whole
   battery of reserve forces. 

46 
   Exchange value could only have arisen as the proxy of use value, but the
   victory it eventually won with its own weapons created the preconditions for
   its establishment as an autonomous power. By activating all human use value
   and monopolizing that value's fulfillment, exchange value eventually gained
   the upper hand. The process of exchange became indistinguishable from any
   conceivable utility, thereby placing use value at its mercy. Starting out as
   the condottiere of use value, exchange value ended up waging a war that was
   entirely its own. 

47 
   The falling rate of use value, which is a constant of the capitalist economy,
   gives rise to a new form of privation within the realm of augmented survival;
   this is not to say that this realm is emancipated from the old poverty: on
   the contrary, it requires the vast majority to take part as wage workers in
   the unending pursuit of its ends -- a requirement to which, as everyone
   knows, one must either submit or die. It is the reality of this situation --
   the fact that, even in its most impoverished form (food, shelter), use value
   has no existence outside the illusory riches of augmented survival -- that is
   the real basis for the general acceptance of illusion in the consumption of
   modern commodities. The real consumer thus becomes a consumer of illusion.
   The commodity is this illusion, which is in fact real, and the spectacle is
   its most general form. 

48 
   Use value was formerly implicit in exchange value. In terms of the
   spectacle's topsy-turvy logic, however, it has to be explicit -- for the very
   reason that its own effective existence has been eroded by the
   overdevelopment of the commodity economy, and that a counterfeit life calls
   for a pseudojustification. 

49 
   The spectacle is another facet of money, which is the abstract general
   equivalent of all commodities. But whereas money in its familiar form has
   dominated society as the representation of universal equivalence, that is, of
   the exchangeability of diverse goods whose uses are not otherwise compatible,
   the spectacle in its full development is money's modern aspect; in the
   spectacle the totality of the commodity world is visible in one piece, as the
   general equivalent of whatever society as a whole can be and do. The
   spectacle is money for contemplation only, for here the totality of use has
   already been bartered for the totality of abstract representation. The
   spectacle is not just the servant of pseudo-use -- it is already, in itself,
   the pseudo-use of life. 

50 
   With the achievement of a purely economic abundance, the concentrated result
   of social labor becomes visible, subjecting all reality to an appearance that
   is in effect that labor's product. Capital is no longer the invisible center
   determining the mode of production. As it accumulates, capital spreads out to
   the periphery, where it assumes the form of tangible objects. Society in its
   length and breadth becomes capital's faithful portrait. 

51 
   The economy's triumph as an independent power inevitably also spells its
   doom, for it has unleashed forces that must eventually destroy the economic
   necessity that was the unchanging basis of earlier societies. Replacing that
   necessity by the necessity of boundless economic development can only mean
   replacing the satisfaction of primary human needs, now met in the most
   summary manner, by a ceaseless manufacture of pseudo-needs, all of which come
   down in the end to just one -- namely, the pseudo-need for the reign of an
   autonomous economy to continue. Such an economy irrevocably breaks all ties
   with authentic needs to the precise degree that it emerges from a social
   unconscious that was dependent on it without knowing it. "Whatever is
   conscious wears out. Whatever is unconscious remains unalterable. Once freed,
   however, surely this too must fall into ruins?" (Freud). 

52 
   By the time society discovers that it is contingent on the economy, the
   economy has in point of fact become contingent on society. Having grown as a
   subterranean force until it could emerge sovereign, the economy proceeds to
   lose its power. Where economic id was, there ego shall be. The subject can
   only arise out of society -- that is, out of the struggle that society
   embodies. The possibility of a subject's existing depends on the outcome of
   the class struggle which turns out to be the product and the producer of
   history's economic foundation. 

53 
   Consciousness of desire and the desire for consciousness together and
   indissolubly constitute that project which in its negative form has as its
   goal the abolition of classes and the direct possession by the workers of
   every aspect of their activity. The opposite of this project is the society
   of the spectacle, where the commodity contemplates itself in a world of its
   own making. 


   From the Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord