Quotes from 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.

Nel mezzo del cammin della vera vita, eravamo circondati da una malinconia oscura, che tante parole tristi e beffarde hanno espresso, nel caffè della gioventù perduta.

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

History has always existed, but not always in a historical form.

Ma la merce abbondante sta a dire la rottura assoluta di uno sviluppo organico dei bisogni sociali. La sua accumulazione meccanica libera un artificiale illimitato, di fronte al quale il DESIDERIO VIVENTE resta disarmato.

Imprisoned in a flattened universe bounded by the screen of the spectacle that has enthralled him, the spectator knows no one but the fictitious speakers who subject him to a one-way monologue about their commodities and the politics of their commodities. The spectacle as a whole serves as his looking glass. What he sees there are dramatizations of illusory escapes from a universal autism.

Existen distintas clases de libros. Muchos hay que ni siquiera se los abre; y pocos que se copian en los muros.

Qui regardent la pauvrete de leur vie comprend bien la pauvrete de leur discours.

The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist, and its power is employed above all to enforce this claim.

the spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production. In both form and content the spectacle serves

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.

The economic system founded on isolation is a circular production of isolation. The technology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn. From the automobile to television, all the goods selected by the spectacular system are also its weapons for a constant reinforcement of the conditions of isolation of 'lonely crowds.' The spectacle constantly discovers its own assumptions more concretely.

A sociedade modernizada até o estágio do espetacular integrado se caracteriza pela combinação de cinco aspectos principais: a incessante renovação tecnológica, a fusão econômico-estatal, o segredo generalizado, a mentira sem contestação e o presente perpétuo.

The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life brought into the definition of all human realization the obvious degradation of being into having.

spectacolul este visul urat al societatii moderne incatusate, care nu e, in cele din urma, decat expresia dorintei sale de a dormi. spectacolul e paznicul acestui somn.

The fact that the practical power of modern society has detached itself from that society and established an independent realm in the spectacle can be explained only by the additional fact that that powerful practice continued to lack cohesion and had remained in contradiction with itself.

In contrast, the modern spectacle depicts what society could deliver, but in so doing it rigidly separates what is possible from what is permitted.

Le monde possède déjà le rêve d'un temps dont il doit maintenant posséder la conscience pour le vivre réellement.

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.

At the halfway point of the journey making up real life, we were surrounded by a gloomy melancholy, one expressed by so many derisive and sorrowful words in the café of lost youth.

Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.' Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation.

Die Gesellschaft, die auf der modernen Industrie beruht, ist nicht zufällig oder oberflächlich spektakulär, sie ist zutiefst spektaklistisch. Im Spektakel, dem Bild der herrschenden Wirtschaft, ist das Endziel nichts, die Entwicklung alles. Das Spektakel will es zu nichts anderem bringen als zu sich selbst.