Guy Debord Quotes & Sayings

Basketball is not a collection of jams, but a social relation among players, mediated by Michael Jordan. — Guy Debord

Everyone accepts that there are inevitably little areas of secrecy reserved for specialists; as regards things in general, many believe they are in on the secret. — Guy Debord

Art ... can become the direct organisation of more highly evolved sensations. — Guy Debord

The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle's estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual's gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him. — Guy Debord

The spectacle is nothing more than the common language of this separation. What binds the spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation at the very center which maintains their isolation. The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate. — Guy Debord

Like lost children we live our unfinished adventures. — Guy Debord

This society eliminates geographical distance only to produce a new internal separation. — Guy Debord

The status of celebrity offers the promise of being showered with 'all good things' that capitalism has to offer. The grotesque display of celebrity lives (and deaths) is the contemporary form of the cult of personality; those 'famous for being famous' hold out the spectacular promise of the complete erosion of a autonomously lived life in return for an apotheosis as an image. The ideological function of celebrity (and lottery systems) is clear - like a modern 'wheel of fortune' the message is 'all is luck; some are rich, some are poor, that is the way the world is...it could be you! — Guy Debord

In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation. — Guy Debord

Stars - spectacular representations of living human beings - project this general banality into images of permitted roles. As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations that they actually live. The function of these celebrities is to act out various lifestyles or sociopolitical viewpoints in a full, totally free manner. They embody the inaccessible results of social labor by dramatizing the by-products of that labor which are magically projected above it as its ultimate goals: power and vacations - the decisionmaking and consumption that are at the beginning and the end of a process that is never questioned. On one hand, a governmental power may personalize itself as a pseudostar; on the other, a star of consumption may campaign for recognition as a pseudopower over life. But the activities of these stars are not really free, and they offer no real choices. — Guy Debord

In our society now, we prefer to see ourselves living than living. — Guy Debord

Conversely, real life is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle, and ends up absorbing it and aligning itself with it. — Guy Debord

With the generalized separation of the worker and his products, every unitary view of accomplished activity and all direct personal communication among producers are lost. — Guy Debord

Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it — Guy Debord

As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specialisations that they actually live. — Guy Debord

Just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing. — Guy Debord

Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state's monopoly of armed violence. — Guy Debord

Separation is itself an integral part of the unity of this world, of a global social practice split into reality and image. The social practice confronted by an autonomous spectacle is at the same time the real totality which contains that spectacle. But the split within this totality mutilates it to the point that the spectacle seems to be its goal. — Guy Debord

The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images. — Guy Debord

Capital is no longer the invisible center governing the production process; as it accumulates, it spreads to the ends of the earth in the form of tangible objects. The entire expanse of society is its portrait. — Guy Debord

As long as necessity is socially dreamed, dreaming will remain a social necessity. The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep. — Guy Debord

Work is only justified by leisure time. To admit the emptiness of leisure time is to admit the impossibility of life. — Guy Debord

The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender lonely crowds. — Guy Debord

I have written much less than most people who write; I have drunk much more than most people who drink. — Guy Debord

The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist. — Guy Debord

Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always. — Guy Debord

Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal. — Guy Debord

System, as the advanced economic sector which directly shapes a growing multitude of image-objects, the spectacle is the main production of present-day society. — Guy Debord

... in the case where the self is merely represented and ideally presented (vorgestellt), there it is not actual: where it is by proxy, it is not. -Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind — Guy Debord

But real adults - people who are masters of their own lives - are in fact nowhere to be found. And a youthful transformation of what exists is in no way characteristic of those who are now young; it is present solely in the economic system, in the dynamism of capitalism. It is things that rule and that are young, vying with each other and constantly replacing each other. — Guy Debord

The worker does not produce himself; he produces an independent power. The success of this production, its abundance, returns to the producer as an abundance of dispossession. All the time and space of his world become foreign to him with the accumulation of his alienated products. The spectacle is the map of this new world, a map which exactly covers its territory. The very powers which escaped us show themselves to us in all their force. — Guy Debord

In the spectacle - the visual reflection of the ruling economic order - goals are nothing, development is everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself. — Guy Debord

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation. — Guy Debord

People who personify the system are indeed well known for not being what they seem to be; they have achieved greatness by embracing a level of reality lower than that of the most insignificant individual life- and everyone knows it. — Guy Debord

The loss of quality that is so evident at every level of spectacular language, from the objects it glorifies to the behavior it regulates, stems from the basic nature of a production system that shuns reality. The commodity form reduces everything to quantitative equivalence. The quantitative is what it develops, and it can develop only within the quantitative. — Guy Debord

The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living. — Guy Debord

Revolution is not 'showing' life to people, but making them live. A revolutionary organization must always remember that its objective is not getting its adherents to listen to convincing talks by expert leaders, but getting them to speak for themselves, in order to achieve, or at least strive toward, an equal degree of participation. — Guy Debord

What appears is good; what is good appears. — Guy Debord

Economic growth has liberated societies from the natural pressures that forced them into an immediate struggle for survival; but they have not yet been liberated from their liberator. The commodity's independence has spread to the entire economy it now dominates. This economy has transformed the world, but it has merely transformed it into a world dominated by the economy. — Guy Debord

All that was once directly lived has become mere representation. — Guy Debord

The spectacle thus unites what is separate, but it unites it only in its separateness. — Guy Debord

Whereas during the primitive stage of capitalist accumulation "political economy considers the proletarian only as a worker," who only needs to be allotted the indispensable minimum for maintaining his labor power, and never considers him "in his leisure and humanity," this ruling-class perspective is revised as soon as commodity abundance reaches a level that requires an additional collaboration from him. Once his workday is over, the worker is suddenly redeemed from the total contempt toward him that is so clearly implied by every aspect of the organization and surveillance of production, and finds himself seemingly treated like a grownup, with a great show of politeness, in his new role as a consumer. — Guy Debord

The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image. — Guy Debord

The story of terrorism is written by the state and it is therefore highly instructive ... compared with terrorism, everything else must be acceptable, or in any case more rational and democratic. — Guy Debord

The spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by an accumulation of images that serve to alienate us from a genuinely lived life. The image is thus an historical mutation of the form of commodity fetishism. — Guy Debord

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. — Guy Debord

He will essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one he is familiar with. — Guy Debord

In the zone of perdition where my youth went as if to complete its education, one would have said that the portents of an imminent collapse of the whole edifice of civilization had made an appointment. — Guy Debord

The spectacle cannot be understood as an abuse of the world of vision, as a product of the techniques of mass dissemination of images. It is, rather, a Weltanschauung which has become actual, materially translated. It is a world vision which has become objectified. 6. The spectacle grasped in its totality is both the result and the project of the existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. — Guy Debord

No longer is science asked to understand the world, or to improve any part of it. It is asked instead to immediately justify everything that happens ... spectacular domination has cut down the vast tree of scientific knowledge in order to make itself a truncheon. — Guy Debord

What is false creates taste, and reinforces itself by knowingly eliminating any possible reference to the authentic. And what is genuine is reconstructed as quickly as possible, to resemble the false. — Guy Debord

It is hardly surprising that children should enthusiastically start their education at an early age with the Absolute Knowledge of computer science; while they are unable to read, for reading demands making judgments at every line. Conversation is almost dead, and soon so too will be those who knew how to speak. — Guy Debord

We still have some time to take advantage of the fact that radio and television stations are not yet guarded by the army. — Guy Debord

Behind the masks of total choice, different forms of the same alienation confront each other. — Guy Debord

Spectacle is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity — Guy Debord

Images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost forever. Apprehended in a partial way, reality unfolds in a new generality as a pseudo-world apart, solely as an object of contemplation. The tendency toward the specialization of images-of-the-world finds its highest expression in the world of the autonomous image, where deceit deceives itself. The spectacle in its generality is a concrete inversion of life, and, as such the autonomous movement of non-life. — Guy Debord

Of the small number of things which I have liked and done well, drinking is by far the thing I have done best. Although I have read a lot, I have drunk more. I have written much less than most people who write; but I have drunk more than the majority of the people who drink. — Guy Debord

the spectacle is an affirmation of appearances and an identification of all human social life with appearances. But a critique that grasps the spectacle's essential character reveals it to be a visible negation of life - a negation that has taken on a visible form. — Guy Debord

With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning. — Guy Debord

The power to homogenize is the heavy artillery that has battered down all Chinese walls. — Guy Debord

I have written less than most writers. But I have drunk far more than most drinkers. — Guy Debord

The Sage of Toronto ... spent several decades marveling at the numerous freedoms created by a "global village" instantly and effortlessly accessible to all. Villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Which is a precise enough description of the global spectacle's present vulgarity. — Guy Debord

An organization must always remember that its objective is not getting
people to listen to speeches by experts, but getting them to speak for
themselves. — Guy Debord

The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of sleep. — Guy Debord

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs. — Guy Debord

Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit. — Guy Debord

The language of the spectacle consists of signs of the dominant system of production - signs which are at the same time the ultimate end-products of that system. — Guy Debord

None of the activity stolen by work can be regained by submitting to what work has produced. - The Society of The Spectacle — Guy Debord

The first stage of the economy's domination of social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having - human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed. The present stage, in which social life has become completely dominated by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing - all "having" must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances. At the same time all individual reality has become social, in the sense that it is shaped by social forces and is directly dependent on them. Individual reality is allowed to appear only if it is not actually real. — Guy Debord

But a lie that can no longer be challenged becomes insane. — Guy Debord

The advertisements during intermissions are the truest reflection of an intermission from life. — Guy Debord

Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior. — Guy Debord

The spectacle presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned. Its sole message is: "What appears is good; what is good appears." The passive acceptance it demands is already effectively imposed by its monopoly of appearances, its manner of appearing without allowing any reply. — Guy Debord

So far from realizing philosophy, the spectacle philosophizes reality, and turns the material life of everyone into a universe of speculation. — Guy Debord

In a world that has REALLY been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood. — Guy Debord

The passions have been sufficiently interpreted; the point now is to discover new ones. — Guy Debord

There is nothing more natural than to consider everything as starting from oneself, chosen as the center of the world; one finds oneself thus capable of condemning the world without even wanting to hear its deceitful chatter. — Guy Debord

Every given commodity fights for itself, cannot acknowledge the others, and attempts to impose itself everywhere as if it were the only one. The spectacle, then is the epic poem of this struggle, an epic which cannot be concluded by the fall of any Troy. The spectacle does not sign the praises of men and their weapons, but of commodities and their passions. In this blind struggle every commodity, pursuing its passion, unconsciously realizes something higher: the becoming-world of the commodity, which is also the becoming-commodity of the world. Thus, by means of a ruse of commodity logic, what's specific in the commodity wears itself out in the fight while the commodity-form moves toward its absolute realization. — Guy Debord

The society whose modernisation has reached the stage of integrated spectacle
is characterised by the combined effect of five principal factors: incessant technological renewal, integration of state and economy, generalised secrecy, unanswerable lies, and eternal present ...
- The Society of the Spectacle — Guy Debord