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Guy Debord

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Famous Guy Debord Quotes

“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. What is a policeman? He is the active servant of the commodity, the man in complete submission to the commodity, whose job it is to ensure that a given product of human labor remains a commodity, with the magical property of having to be paid for, instead of becoming a mere refrigerator or rifle — a passive, inanimate object, subject to anyone who comes along to make use of it. In rejecting the humiliation of being subject to police, black people are at the same time rejecting the humiliation of being subject to commodities.”

PovertyCapitalismMarxismAnti State
Book:Internationale situationniste
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“The spectacle is a permanent opium war designed to force people to equate goods with commodities and to equate satisfaction with a survival that expands according to its own laws. Consumable survival must constantly expand because it never ceases to include privation. If augmented survival never comes to a resolution, if there is no point where it might stop expanding this is because it is itself stuck in the realm of privation. It may gild poverty, but it cannot transcend it.”

PovertyCapitalismConsumerism
Book:The Society of the Spectacle
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“Спектакль досконало опанував цю техніку: спершу суспільство втрачає будь-яке уявлення про теперішнє, а згодом забувається все, що хоч якось, нехай і неповно, було осмислено про минуле.”

PastSocietyMediaFuturePropagandaPerformance
Book:Comments on the Society of the Spectacle
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“Those who wish to write quickly a piece about nothing that no one will read through even once, whether in a newspaper or a book, extol with much conviction the style of the spoken language, because they find it much more modern, direct, facile. They themselves do not know how to speak. Neither do their readers, the language actually spoken under modern conditions of life being socially reduced to its indirect representation through the suffrage of the media, and including around six or eight turns of phrase repeated at every moment and fewer than two hundred words, most of them neologisms, with the whole thing submitted to replacement by one third every six months. All this favours a certain rapid solidarity. On the contrary, I for my part am going to write without affectation or fatigue, as if it were the most natural and easiest thing in the world, the language that I have learned and, in most circumstances, spoken. It’s not up to me to change it. The Gypsies rightly contend that one is never compelled to speak the truth except in one’s own language; in the enemy’s language, the lie must reign.”

WritingLanguageVernacular
Book:Panegyric: Books 1 & 2
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“The consumption celebrity superficially represents different types of personality and shows each of these types having equal access to the totality of consumption and finding similar happiness there. The decision celebrity must possess a complete stock of accepted human qualities. Official differences between stars are wiped out by the official similarity which is the presupposition of their excellence in everything.”

TheoryCapitalismConsumptionConsumerismMarxismCelebritiesSpectacleCommodity FetishismSituationism
Book:The Society of the Spectacle
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“The word psychogeography, suggested by an illiterate Kabyle as a general term for the phenomena a few of us were investigating around the summer of 1953, is not too inappropriate. It does not contradict the materialist perspective of the conditioning of life and thought by objective nature. Geography, for example, deals with the determinant action of general natural forces, such as soil composition or climatic conditions, on the economic structures of a society, and thus on the corresponding conception that such a society can have of the world. Psychogeography could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. The charmingly vague adjective psychogeographicalcan be applied to the findings arrived at by this type of investigation, to their influence on human feelings, and more generally to any situation or conduct that seems to reflect the same spirit of discovery. It has long been said that the desert is monotheistic. Is it illogical or devoid of interest to observe that the district in Paris between Place de la Contrescarpe and Rue de l’Arbalète conduces rather to atheism, to oblivion and to the disorientation of habitual reflexes?”

SpaceCitiesUrbanismPsychogeographyDebord
Author:Guy Debord
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“Les forces qu'elle a déchaînées suppriment la nécessité économie qui a été la base immuable des sociétés anciennes. Quand elle la remplace par la nécessité du développement économie infini, elle ne peut que remplacer la satisfaction des premiers besoins humains sommairement reconnus, par une fabrication ininterrompue de pseudo-besoins qui se ramènent au seul pseudo-besoin du maintien de son règne.”

CritiqueSociétééConomie
Book:The Society of the Spectacle
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“Les pseudo-événements qui se pressent dans la dramatisation spectaculaire n'ont pas été vécus par ceux qui en sont informés ; et de plus ils se perdent dans l'inflation de leur remplacement précipité, à chaque pulsion de la machinerie spectaulaire. D'autre part, ce qui a été réellement vécu est sans relation avec le temps irréversible officiel de la société, et en opposition directe au rythme pseudo-cyclique du sous-produit consommable de ce temps. Ce vécu individuel de la vie quotidienne séparée reste sans langage, sans concept, sans accès critique à son propre passé qui n'est consigné nulle part. Il ne se communique pas. Il est incompris et oublié au profit de la fausse mémoire spectaculaire du non-mémorable.”

CritiqueSociété
Book:The Society of the Spectacle
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“Although fascism rallies to the defense of the main points of bourgeois ideology which has become conservative (the family, property, the moral order, the nation), reuniting the petty-bourgeoisie and the unemployed routed by crisis or deceived by the impotence of socialist revolution, it is not itself fundamentally ideological. It presents itself as it is: a violent resurrection of myth which demands participation in a community defined by archaic pseudo-values: race, blood, the leader. Fascism is technically-equipped archaism. Its decomposed ersatz of myth is revived in the spectacular context of the most modern means of conditioning and illusion. Thus it is one of the factors in the formation of the modern spectacle, and its role in the destruction of the old workers’ movement makes it one of the fundamental forces of present-day society.”

CapitalismFascismSpectacleCommodity Production
Book:Society Of The Spectacle
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“The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world evolves into a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.”

RealityIllusion
Book:The Society of the Spectacle
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“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.”

EnoughTownsDecadesBoredomIsolationDescriptionGossipVillagePreciseSagePettySurveillanceTorontoVulgarityRepetitiveMaliciousGlobal VillageMarvelingMalicious Gossip
Author:Guy Debord
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“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.”

WorldWayRealityLife IsLostCommonForeverMovementObjectsExpressionHighestAspectUnityTendenciesFormerContemplationStreamsDeceitConcreteDeceivingDetachedPseudoAutonomousAspects Of LifeGeneralitiesSpecializationWorlds ApartInversions
Book:The Society of the Spectacle
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“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.”

RealityFormLanguageLossLevelsQualityObjectsBehaviorProductionsStemCommodityEvidentSpectacularGlorify
Author:Guy Debord
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“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.”

PeopleRememberOrderSpeakLeaderAchieveRevolutionEqualDegreesOrganizationStriveObjectivesRevolutionaryExpertsParticipationConvincing
Author:Guy Debord
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