Guy Debord Refutation of all judgments, whether for or against, that have been brought to date on the film 'Society of the Spectacle' The critiques most particularly evoked in the present film appeared in 1974 in Le Nouvel Observateur of 29 April, Le Quotidien de Paris of 2 may, Le Monde of 9 May, Telerama of 11 May, Le Nouvel Observateur of 15 May, Charlie-Hebdo of 15 May, Le Point of 20 May, Cinema 74 of the month of June. "There are times when one should dispense contempt with the greatest economy only, because of the great number of persons in need thereof." Chateaubriand. The spectacular organization of modern class society brings with it two consequences recognizable everywhere: on the one hand, the generalized falsification of products as well as of reasoning; on the other hand, the obligation -- for those who pretend to find their happiness therein, of always maintaining themselves at a great distance from that which they pretend to love, for they never possess the means, whether intellectual or otherwise, by which they might accede to direct and profound knowledge, a complete praxis and authentic taste. What is already clearly visible -- when it is a question of living conditions, wine, cultural consumption or the liberation of morals -- should naturally be only the more marked when it is a matter of revolutionary theory, and of the redoubtable language that they [those who pretend to find happiness] attach to a condemned world. This naive falsification and this incompetent approbation -- which are like the specific smell of the spectacle -- have hardly failed to illustrate the commentaries, variously incomprehensible, that have responded to the film entitled Society of the Spectacle. Incomprehension, in this case, imposes itself for just a bit longer. The spectacle is a poverty, even more than it is a conspiracy. And those who write in the newspapers of our epoch have hidden nothing of their intelligence from us. What could they say of pertinence about a film that attacks their habits and their ideas in their entirety, and that attacks them at the moment when these people begin to feel themselves caving in, in every detail? The debility of their reactions accompanies the decadence of their worlds. Those who say that they love this film have loved too many other things to be able to love it; and those who say they do not love it have themselves accepted too many other things for their judgment to carry any weight. One who looks at the poverty of their [these writers'] lives understands quite well the poverty of their discourse. It is enough to see their set decorations and their occupations, their commodities and their ceremonies -- which are spread out everywhere. It is enough to hear their imbecilic voices, which tell you -- every hour of the day -- that you have become alienated, a fact of which they inform you with contempt. Spectators do not find what they desire; they desire what they find. The spectacle does not debase men to the point of making them love it, but many are paid to pretend that they do. Now that these people can no longer go as far as making assurances that this society is fully satisfactory, they hurry first to declare themselves dissatisfied with all critique of that which exists. All dissatisfied individuals believe that they deserve better. But did they imagine, then, that someone was trying to convince them? Did they believe that there would still be time for them to ally themselves with such a critique if -- all of a sudden -- it carried off their adherence? Did they -- these ill-lodged inhabitants of the territory of approbation -- believe themselves able to speak, while causing it to be forgotten from whence they speak? This would be a subject for astonishment: if, in a future more free and more truthful, those employed as writers in the system of spectacular lies could be capable of believing themselves qualified to render their opinions, and to tranquilly weigh the pros and cons of a film that is a negation of the spectacle, as if the dissolution of this system was an affair of opinions. Their system is now attacked in reality; it defends itself by force. The counterfeit coins of the writers' arguments has no currency, and so unemployment currently threatens a good numbers of the managers of falsification. The most tenacious among these discomfited liars still feigns to wonder whether this "society of the spectacle" does in fact exist, or whether I am not, by chance, its inventor. However -- because for the last few years the forest of history has begun to encroach upon their castle made of false cards, and continues at this very moment to close up its ranks against the investment -- nearly all of these commentators currently possess the baseness to hail the excellence of my book as if they were capable of reading it and as if they had welcomed its publication in 1967 with such respect. However, they generally find that I abuse their indulgence by bringing this book to the screen. And the blow is the more painful in that they had in no way imagined that such an excess was even possible in the first place. Their anger confirms the fact that the appearance of such a critique in the cinema disturbs them even more than its appearance in a book. There [on the terrain of the cinema], as elsewhere, these people find themselves constrained to fight in retreat, a long a second line of defense. Many blame this film for being difficult to understand. According to several commentators, the images prevent the words from being understood, if it's not the other way around. In saying that this film exhausts them, and in proudly arrogating to their personal exhaustion the general criterion of communication, these commentators would like first to give the impression that they understand without difficulty and nearly approve of the theory of the spectacle when it is given expression in a book. And so they attempt to disguise as a simple disagreement over a conception of the cinema that which is in truth both a conflict over a conception of society and an open war in society as it actually exists. But why, then, should they understand -- and any better than a film that surpasses them -- all the rest that escapes them in a society that has perfectly conditioned them to mental exhaustion? How then should their weakness find itself in any better posture to discern, amidst the uninterrupted noise of so many simultaneous messages of advertising and government, all the crude solipsisms that tend to make them accept their work and their leisure pursuits, the thought of President Giscard and the taste of amyloids? The difficulty is not in my film, but in their prostrated heads. No film is more difficult than its epoch. For example, there are people who understand, and others who do not understand, that -- when the French were offered, according to a very old recipe of power, a new minister called the Minister of the Quality of Life -- it was simply "in order that they should retain at least the name of that which they had lost," as Machiavelli says. There are those who understand, and others who do not understand, that the class struggle in Portugal was principally and from the beginning dominated by the direct contention between the revolutionary workers organized into autonomous assemblies and the Stalinist bureaucracy enriched by generals in flight from defeat. Those who understand this are the same people who are able to understand my film; and I am not making a film for those who do not understand or who feign not to understand even this. Though all the commentaries come from the same zone polluted by the industry of the spectacular, they are, like today's commodities, apparently varied. Several have affirmed that they have been filled by enthusiasm by this film, and that they have sought in vain to say why. Each time I find myself approved of by those who should be my enemies, I ask myself what error have they themselves committed in their reasonings. It is generally easy to find. Encountering a strange quantity of novelties, and an insolence that they cannot even understand, some consumers of the avant-garde seek here to approach an impossible approbation by reconstructing some pretty novelties with an individual lyricism that was not there. Thus, one tries to find and admire "a lyricism of rage" in my film; another has discovered by watching it that the passage of an historical epoch brings with it a certain melancholy; others, who assuredly overestimate the refinements of current social life, attribute to me a certain dandyism. In all this, the old scoundrel from yesteryear pursues "his mania for denying what is, and for explaining what is not." The critical theory that accompanies the dissolution of a society does not give itself up to rage, and it should have even less to do with showing the simple image of it. Critical theory understands, describes and employs itself to precipitate a movement that actually unreels in front of our very eyes. As for those who present us with their pseudo-rage as a sort of artistic material come into the world, one knows well that they seek by those means only to compensate for the pliability, the compromises and the humiliations of their daily life as it really is -- [these are people] with whom spectators will find little difficulty identifying themselves. The hostility is naturally greater each time that those who are politically reactionary express themselves on the subject of my film. Thus an apprentice bureaucrat seeks to offer his approbation of my audacity in "making a political film, not by telling a story, but by filming theory directly." However, he does not like my theory at all. He sniffs out that, in the guise of a "left without concessions," I will instead slide to the right, and this because I systematically attack "the men of the united left." These are precisely the exaggerated words with which the mouth of this cretin is full. What union? What left? What men? The "united left" is merely and quite notoriously the union of Stalinists with other enemies of the proletariat. Each of the partners knows the other well; they plot awkwardly amongst themselves; and they raise a great hue and cry by criticizing each other every week. But they still hope to be able to plot together against all the revolutionary initiatives of the workers, in order to maintain -- as is convenient for them -- the essentials of capitalism, even if they don't manage to rescue all the details. It is they who repress in Portugal -- as they did but a short while ago in Budapest -- the "counter-revolutionary strikes" of the workers. They are the same ones who aspire to make themselves "compromise historically" in Italy; the same ones who called themselves "the Popular Front" when they broke the strikes of 1936 and the Spanish Revolution. The socialist Roger Salengro, Minister of the Interior of the Popular Front: "Order, we will uphold in leading the working class to understand that its duty and its interest command it to hear our appeals, and to prevent us from having recourse to means of constraint. No, the Popular Front will not be anarchy! The Popular Front will live, the Popular Front will triumph only insofar as it is able to ensure order. It is necessary for the working class to be capable of understanding that its duty and its interests require that it do nothing that will set against it the middle class and the peasant class. The day after tomorrow, in a great procession, the three colors of the nation and the red flag of labor will be united. This 14 July, the Day of the Republic, the day of the proletariat, we will ask the people of Paris to watch over its victory of April and May. We will ask the people of France to maintain its confidence in the government, in a government that only lives through the people, in a government that only lives for the people and that will only triumph to the extent that the People of France help it to do so." Four months later, an extreme right would push to suicide -- through several slanders -- this man who had only the strength to scorn his electors. The united left is but the trivial defensive mystification of spectacular society, because the system makes use of it only occasionally. I evoked it only in passing in my film, but, of course, I attacked the "united left" with the contempt that it merits -- as we have, since then, attacked it in Portugal, and on a more attractive and vast terrain. A journalist near to that same "left" -- who, since his review came out, achieved a certain notoriety by justifying his publication of an improbable and false document by invoking the freedom of the press -- was engaged in an equally abject forgery when he insinuated that I would not have attacked the bureaucrats of Peking as clearly as I did that of the other ruling classes. In addition, he deplores the fact that a mind of my quality should content itself with "ghetto cinema," which the masses will have little occasion to see. The argument will not convince me: I prefer to remain in the shadows, with the masses, rather than to agree to harangue them with the artificial lighting that their hypnotists manipulate. Another equally modestly gifted Jesuit pretends, on the contrary, to wonder whether denouncing the spectacle would not be entering into the spectacle. One may easily see what such an extraordinary purity would like to obtain: that no one should ever appear in the spectacle as an enemy. Those who do not have even a subaltern post to lose in spectacular society, but only their ambitious hope to act as the most juvenile comic relief to it, have displayed more frankly and more furiously their discontent and even their jealousy. An extremely representative, anonymous individual has for quite some time promulgated theses of the most recent conformism, in their natural place -- that is to say, in the weekly published by the humorists of the old guard of the Mitterandist electorate. This anonymous individual finds that it would have been very well to film my book in 1967, but that in 1973 it was too late. He offers in proof the fact that it seems urgent to him to stop talking about everything of which he is ignorant: Marx, Hegel, books in general because they cannot be an adequate instrument of emancipation, any employment of the cinema, theory more so than all the rest, and even history itself, from which he rejoices to have anonymously departed. A thought so decomposed could, obviously, only have oozed forth from the desolate walls of Vincennes. Within living memory, one has never seen a single theory born from a student at Vincennes. And it is precisely there that one finds advocated -- at least provisionally, so it seems -- anti-theory. What else but anti-theory should they sell in exchange for an assistant professorship in the neo-University? Not that they content themselves with that -- these least- well-endowed, degree candidate-recuperators who today go everywhere, ringing doorbells, thinking to become the editor of a collection at a publishing house at least, and, if possible, a film director. The anonymous individual of whom I speak, moreover, does not hide his envy of what, in his eyes, are the ostentatious profits of the cinema. One may rest assured that not one of these anti-theories will easily attain the silence that is its only authentic accomplishment, because then its purveyors would be no more than employees without qualifications. This anonymous individual in fact lays his cards on the table at the end of his commentary. The impostor wished to dissolve history only in order to choose another. And this death's head advances, armed with the names of [Jean Francois] Lyotard, [Cornelius] Castoriadis and other crumb-gatherers -- that is to say, with people who had given their best 15 years ago without managing to particularly dazzle their century. No loser ever loves history. And, on the other hand -- when one denies history at home -- why should the most resolutely "modern" careerism be troubled by kissing up to recuperated theorists in their 50s? Why should one see that it is contradictory for someone who has remained utterly silent since 1968 to give himself out as anonymous, and, at the same time, to admit that one has not even arrived at the point of despising one's professors? This anonymous individual has the merit of having illustrated better than the others the ineptitude of the anti-historical reflection by which he advertizes himself and the real intentions of the false contempt that the powerless oppose to reality. In postulating that it was too late to undertake a cinematic adaptation of Society of the Spectacle six years after the appearance of the book, this individual neglects, first of all, the fact that there certainly haven't been three books of social critique of such importance published in the last hundred years. He furthermore forgets that I had myself written the book. All terms of comparison are lacking to evaluate whether I was slow or fast in making the film, since it is patently obvious that the best of my detractors do not make use of the cinema. So, I must admit that I found it very good to be the first to realize this sort of exploit. The defenders of the spectacle will come to recognize this new employment of the cinema in the spectacle as slowly as they came to recognize the fact that a new epoch of revolutionary struggle saps their society, but they will be constrained to recognize this fact just as inevitably. Following the same course, at first they remained silent; then they spoke around their subject. The commentators on my film have reached this second stage. The specialists of the cinema said that my film's revolutionary politics were bad; the politicians among the left wing illusionists said that the film was bad cinema. But when one is at once a revolutionary and a filmmaker, one may easily demonstrate that the general bitterness concerning it derives from the obvious fact that the film in question is the exact critique of the society that these people did not know how to combat, and a first example of the cinema that they do not know how to make.