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But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence, ...in these days 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 2nd edition of _The Essence of Christianity_
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/essence/ec00.htm
Life in societies ruled by modern conditions of production appears as an immense accumulation of _spectacles_. Everything that was directly experienced has receded into a representation.
Images detached from their own part of everyday life have become fused together, where their uniqueness can no longer be recovered. These parts of reality, in their own general unification, force a _separate_ pseudo-world into being, that can only be viewed, not experienced. This specialisation of world-images has become an autonomous image-world, which even lies to itself. As a whole, the spectacle, as an inversion of life, is an autonomous anti-life movement.
The spectacle simultaneously presents as though it were society itself, as another part of life, and as the _means of their unification_. As part of society, it is that which concentrates all seeing and and awareness. At the same time, because it is _separate_, it is the domain of deceit and false consciousness. The unification it accomplishes is nothing but the official language of widespread separation.
The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relationship between people, mediated by images.
The spectacle is not simply a mistaken view of the world, caused by the massive diffusion of images. It is better understood as a completely powerful and material _Weltanschauung_ (world-view). It is a vision of the world made actually real.
The spectacle, understood as a whole, is at once the cause and effect of our mode of production. It is not an add-on to the real world; it is the very heart of the unreality of actual society. In all its particular forms, information or propaganda, advertisements or actual entertainment, the spectacle is the _model_ of the dominant form of social life. It is an omnipresent proof of production choices _already made_, and the consumption that those imply. The spectacle's form and content are at once the justification for present conditions, and the ends of the existing system. The spectacle is also the _permanent presence_ of this justification, since it occupies most of the time spent outside modern production.
Separation itself is a part of the unity of this world, of the global social praxis, which is split into reality and image. Social practices, which an autonomous spectacle confronts, are also the total wholeness that contains the spectacle itself. However, the division of this wholeness damages it so much that the spectacle seems to the the point. The language of spectacle is made of _signs_ of the ruling production system, which are at the same time the endpoints of that production.
One cannot contrast the spectacle and social activity against each other in the abstract; each part of this split is itself divided. The spectacle that inverts reality produces itself. Meanwhile, the spectacle invades lived reality, and brings it into a spectacular order. There is objective reality on both sides. Each of these notions is based on nothing but interaction with its opposite: reality appears as a spectacle, and the spectacle is real. This reciprocal alienation is the essence and foundation of existing society.
In this _truly topsy-turvy world_, the true is a moment of the false.
The concept of spectacle unites and explains a great diversity of surface phenomena. Their diversities and contrasts are appearances, of this social organisation of appearances, which must be generally, truthfully, recognised. Considered on its own terms the spectacle is _affirmation_ of this appearance, and affirmation of human, which is to say social, life, as appearances. But to critique the truth of the spectacle is to realise that it is the visible _negation_ of life; the negation of life which has _become visible_.
To describe the spectacle, its formation, its functions, and the forces which tend to destroy it, we must make artificial distinctions, amongst parts which are not really separable. In _analysing_ the spectacle, we have to use somewhat spectacular language, to the extent we go over methodological ground of this society that reveals itself in the spectacle. But the spectacle is nothing other than the _meaning_ of a totalising economic-social system, its advance agenda. We are caught in its historical moment.
The spectacle presents itself as an enormous certainty, beyond discussion, inaccessible. It declares nothing more than 'what appears is good, what is good appears'. The attitude it demands is passive acceptance, which it gets, by its way of existing beyond reply, enjoying a monopoly on appearances.
The spectacle has a tautological character; its means are its goals. It is the sun that never sets on the Empire of modern passivity. It covers the whole world and forever basks in its own glory.
Modern industrial society is not accidentally or superficially spectacular, it is _spectaclist_ to its core. In the spectacle, the image of our economic system, the goal is nothing, development is everything. The spectacle never wants to become anything other than itself.
As necessary decoration to commodities, as a rationale for the system itself, and as itself a sector that makes an increasing multitude of image-objects, the spectacle is our society's real _principal production_.
The spectacle subjects living people to the extent that they are totally subject to the economy. It is nothing but the economy proceeding by itself. It is the clear reflection of the production of things, and an unfaithful objectification of the producers.
The first phase of economic domination over our society involved degrading all human achievements from _being_ to _having_. The current phase, in which accumulations of economics totally occupy society, is an ongoing shift from _having_ to _appearing_, in which _having_ draws its immediate status from the latter. At the same time individual reality is socially created, dependent on social power, and formed by it. It is only thus in _not being real_ is individual reality allowed to appear.
Where the real world becomes mere images, these images become themselves real beings, and give motive to hypnotic behaviour. The spectacle, which tends to make the world, which is now incomprehensible directly, come into being through specialised intermediaries. We find the sense of vision privileged, in a way older epochs privileged the sense of touch; the most abstract sense, and the most easily fooled, corresponds to our society's general level of abstraction. But the spectacle cannot be simply viewed, not even viewed and heard. It is that which slips from our grasps, when we reconsider and change our minds. It is the opposite of dialogue. The spectacle reconstitutes itself wherever there exists independent _representation_.
The spectacle is heir to the whole _weakness_ of the Western philosophical project which tried to understand activity through sight; and which at heart was the deployment of reasoning techniques with this project in mind. It doesn't realise philosophy, rather it philosophises reality. Our concrete lives are degraded into a world of _speculation_.
Philosophy, as a power of separate thought, and of thinking about power, has never surpassed theology by itself. The spectacle is a material reconstruction of religious illusions. Spectacular technique has not blown away the smoke of religion, behind which people placed powers detached from themselves: it has simply made them worldly. Indeed, the spectacle makes the most earthy parts of life opaque and stifling. The spectacle doesn't reject or replace Heaven, rather, it lives wherever there is withdrawal from earthly concerns, in a fool's paradise. Spectacle is a mechanism of exiling of human powers to the other-side; and this complete division is inside us.
For as long as we socially dream our needs, we will need to dream. The spectacle is the nightmare of a modern society in chains, which expresses nothing but its desire to go to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep.
The fact that practical power in modern society is divorced from itself, and is built into an independent Empire in the form of the spectacle, does not explain on the other hand that this practical power still lacks cohesion, and is mired in contradiction with itself.
The root of the spectacle is specialisation of power, the oldest social specialisation. The spectacle is thus a specialised activity which speaks on behalf of all other activities. It is a diplomatic embassy of hierarchical society to itself, in which all other discussion is forbidden. It is at once most modern and most archaic.
The spectacle is the uninterrupted conversation that the present order has with itself, its own eulogy in monologue. It is a self-portrait of power in our age, of our totally managed conditions of life. Fetishistic appearances of objectivity in spectacular relations are characterised by class relations between people: a second life appears to dominate our environment of mortal laws. But the spectacle is not a necessary outcome of technical progress, thought of as a _natural_ development. The society of the spectacle is, on the contrary, a form which chooses its own techniques. If the spectacle, in the sole sense of the 'mass media' which is its most superficially overwhelming manifestation, seems to invade society as a mere set of technologies, these are not in fact neutral, for these technologies exist to suit its own agenda. If our present social needs and wants, where they develop from these techniques, cannot be satisfied except through the mediation of these techniques, if the running of a society and all contact between people cannot happen but by the intermediation of instant communication, it is because this 'communication' is _unilateral_; of a kind that its concentration continues to accumulate, in the hands of those who run the system, the means of allowing this kind of system to continue. The general division of the spectacle is inseparable from the modern _state_, which is to say, that general form of division in society, product of social division and class domination.
Separation is the spectacle's alpha and omega. The institutionalisation of work's social divisions, and class formation, have always created an original sacred mystery for themselves, a mythical order which was a cloak for power. The sacred justified a cosmic and ontological order, which corresponded to the masters' interests, explaining and embellishing all the things their society _could not do_. All separate power has thus been spectacular, but their adherence to idols meant nothing but a lengthy, shared, sensation of the poverty of real social activity, experienced as a unitary condition. Modern spectacle, conversely, reveals all the things society _can deliver_, but this expression of _what could be_ is absolutely opposed to _what is allowed_. The spectacle is the unconsciousness we have of practical changes in our material existence. It is its own result, it itself sets its own rules; it is a pseudo-idol. It reveals itself in what it _is_: separated power develops in it, in an awareness of productivity from division of labour, constantly refining itself, parcelled into gestures, and working toward an ever-expanding market. This process dissolves our community, and our critical senses, and the forces which were able to grow through having been separated, have not yet been _brought back together_.
With the separation of workers from their products, we utterly lose any unitary point of view about activities being done, or personal communion between producers. Following the progressive accumulation of separated products, and of the concentration of productive processes, unity and mutual communication become exclusive attributes of the workings of the economic system. Successful economic separation _proletarianises_ the world.
Through the very success of separated production, as well as the production of separation, the fundamental experience which in earlier societies was had in primary work, is now being replaced, from the central axes around which the system progresses, by non-work, inactivity. But this inactivity is no kind of freedom from productive activity: one depends on the other, and is an unhappy submission to the resulting demands of production; it is a conclusion of its logic. There can be no freedom outside activity, and in the spectacle, all activity is denied, just as real activity has also been captured by the global construction of this arrangement. Actual 'time off work', in increased leisure time, is no kind of liberation from work, nor liberation from a world made by work. None of the activity stolen though work can be recovered by submitting to the world work has made.
The economic system founded on isolation is a _vicious circle of isolation_. Isolation makes our techniques, and these technical processes, in return, isolate us. From the car to the television, all the _goods chosen_ by the spectacular system serve as weapons to constantly reinforce the isolating conditions of 'lonely crowds'. The spectacle only ever reinforces its own presuppositions.
The loss of the world's unity is the origin of the spectacle, at the gigantic expansion of the modern spectacle is the expression of that loss: the abstraction of specific work tasks, and the generally abstract nature of production as a whole, translates perfectly into the spectacle, wherein the _mode of being_ is, simply, abstraction. In the spectacle, one part of the world _represents_ itself before the world, and outranks it. The spectacle is nothing but the common tongue of this separation. Spectators are linked to each other only by a one-way connection to the same centre that keeps them isolated. The spectacle unites separated people, but only by uniting them in separation.
The alienation of the spectator from the object they view (the outcome of their own unconscious activity) reveals itself thus: the more one watches, the less one lives; and the more one discovers one's needs and wants in images, the less one can understand one's own existence and real desires. The exteriority of the spectacle, in relation to individuals, shows itself in that their gestures are not their own, but those of another who represents them. This is why the spectator feels comfortable nowhere, because the spectacle is everywhere.
Workers do not make themselves, but make a power independent of themselves. The _success_ of this production, its abundance, returns abundantly to the producer in the form of _dispossession_. All the time and space in the world become _estranged_ to them, with the accumulation of these alienated products. The spectacle is the map of this new world, a map that precisely reveals the territory. The same forces that have escaped us, also bind us, with all their power.
Spectacle in society corresponds to how alienation is actually made. Economic expansion is principally the expansion of these exact industrial productions. Economic growth for its own sake grows nothing but the alienation which was there in its kernel.
People, separated from their products, more and more powerfully make all the details of their world, and find themselves more and more separated from their world. To the extent their life is their own creation, they are separated from that life.
Spectacle is _capital_ accumulated to the point of becoming images.