The Society of the Spectacle

constantly seeking to “save” by increasing transportation speeds or using packaged soups ends up being spent by the American population in watching television three to six hours a day.

Pseudocyclical time is a time that has been transformed by industry. The time based on commodity production is itself a consumable commodity, one that recombines everything that the disintegration of the old unitary societies had differentiated into private life, economic life, political life. The entire consumable time of modern society ends up be

“Static societies” are societies that have reduced their historical movement to a minimum, that have managed to maintain their internal conflicts and their conflicts with the natural and human environment in a constant equilibrium. Although the extraordinary diversity of the institutions established for this purpose bears eloquent testimony to the

For it is one thing to recognize that something is inevitable, and quite another to put oneself in the service of that inevitability”

Philosophy, in the process of being superseded by historical thought, has thus arrived at the point where it can glorify its world only by denying it, since in order to speak it must presuppose that the total history to which it has relegated everything has already come to an end, and that the only tribunal where truth could be judged is closed.

But the object that was prestigious in the spectacle becomes mundane as soon as it is taken home by its consumer—at the same time as by all its other consumers. Too late it reveals its essential poverty, a poverty that inevitably reflects the poverty of its production. Meanwhile, some other object is already replacing it as justification of the sys

The spectacle is rooted in the economy of abundance, and the products of that economy ultimately tend to dominate the spectacular market and override the ideological or police-state protectionist barriers set up by local spectacles with pretensions of independence.

The real consumer has become a consumer of illusions. The commodity is this materialized illusion and the spectacle is its general expression.

The spectacle is the stage at which the commodity has succeeded in totally colonizing social life.