The Society of the Spectacle // Guy Debord

Chapter 1: The Culmination of Separation

I have recently went to New York and visited Time Square. Many fragments of the chapter 1 of The Society of the Spectacle reminded me of Times Square:
1: "In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles."
2: "Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at."
20: "The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion."

Olaffur Eliasson's Double Sunset (1999) also came to my mind:

13- "It is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the globe, endlessly basking in its own glory."



11: - "In analyzing the spectacle we are obliged to a certain extent to use the spectacle’s own language, in the sense that we have to operate on the methodological terrain of the society that expresses itself in the spectacle. "

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Chapter 5: Time and History

Cyclical time:
126 -"Knowledge is carried on only by the living, never going beyond the memory of the society’s oldest members. Neither death nor procreation is understood as a law of time. Time remains motionless, like an enclosed space. When a more complex society finally becomes conscious of time, it tries to negate it — it views time not as something that passes, but as something that returns. This static type of society organizes time in a cyclical manner, in accordance with its own direct experience of nature. "
127 - "Cyclical time is already dominant among the nomadic peoples because they find the same conditions repeated at each stage of their journey. "
"The agrarian mode of production, governed by the rhythm of the seasons, is the basis for fully developed cyclical time."

Irreversible time:
128 - "The power that establishes itself above the poverty of the society of cyclical time, the class that organizes this social labor and appropriates its limited surplus value, simultaneously appropriates the temporal surplus value resulting from its organization of social time: it alone possesses the irreversible time of the living."
132 - "The chronicle is the expression of the irreversible time of power. "
"The owners of history have given time a direction, a direction which is also a meaning."
"The masters who used the protection of myth to make history their private property did so first of all in the realm of illusion. In China and Egypt, for example, they long held a monopoly on the immortality of the soul; and their earliest officially recognized dynasties were nothing but imaginary reconstructions of the past."
142 - "The triumph of irreversible time is also its metamorphosis into a time of things, because the weapon that brought about its victory was the mass production of objects in accordance with the laws of the commodity. The main product that economic development has transformed from a luxurious rarity to a commonly consumed item is thus history itself ..."

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Chapter 6: Spectacular Time

147 - "The time of production — commodified time — is an infinite accumulation of equivalent intervals. It is irreversible time made abstract, in which each segment need only demonstrate by the clock its purely quantitative equality with all the others."

152 - "In its most advanced sectors, concentrated capitalism is increasingly tending to market “fully equipped” blocks of time, each functioning as a unified commodity combining a variety of other commodities."

153 -"Consumable pseudocyclical time is spectacular time, both in the narrow sense as time spent consuming images and in the broader sense as image of the consumption of time."

155 - "Spectacular time is the illusorily lived time of a constantly changing reality."

160 - "On all the other fronts of advertising bombardment it is strictly forbidden to grow old. Everybody is urged to economize on their “youth-capital,” though such capital, however carefully managed, has little prospect of attaining the durable and cumulative properties of economic capital. This social absence of death coincides with the social absence of life."

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