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Spectacular Time

  We have nothing that is ours except time, which even those without a roof
  can enjoy. 

Baltasar Gracián, Oráculo manual y Arte de prudencia 


147 
   The time of production, time-as-commodity, is an infinite accumulation of
   equivalent intervals. It is irreversible time made abstract: each segment
   must demonstrate by the clock its purely quantitative equality with all other
   segments. This time manifests nothing in its effective reality aside from its
   exchangeability. It is under the rule of time-as-commodity that "time is
   everything, man is nothing; he is at the most time's carcass" (The Poverty of
   Philosophy). This is time devalued -- the complete inversion of time as "the
   sphere of human development." 

148 
   The general time of human non-development also has a complementary aspect,
   that of a consumable time which, on the basis of a determinate form of
   production, presents itself in the everyday life of society as a 
   pseudo-cyclical time. 

149 
   Pseudo-cyclical time is in fact merely the consumable disguise of the
   time-as-commodity of the production system, and it exhibits the essential
   traits of that time: homogeneous and exchangeable units, and the suppression
   of any qualitative dimension. But as a by-product of time-as-commodity
   intended to promote and maintain the backwardness of everyday life it
   necessarily finds itself laden with false attributions of value, and it must
   manifest itself as a succession of artificially distinct moments. 

150 
   Pseudo-cyclical time typifies the consumption of modern economic survival --
   of that augmented survival in which daily lived experience embodies no free
   choices and is subject, no longer to the natural order, but to a
   pseudo-nature constructed by means of alienated labor. It is therefore quite
   "natural" that pseudo-cyclical time should echo the old cyclical rhythms that
   governed survival in pre-industrial societies. It builds, in fact, on the
   natural vestiges of cyclical time, while also using these as models on which
   to base new but homologous variants: day and night, weekly work and weekly
   rest, the cycle of vacations and so on. 

151 
   Pseudo-cyclical time is a time transformed by industry. The time founded on
   commodity production is itself a consumable commodity, recombining everything
   which, during the period of the old unitary society's disintegration, had
   become distinct: private life, economic life, political life. The entirety of
   the consumable time of modern society ends up being treated as raw material
   for the production of a diversity of new products to be put on the market as
   socially controlled uses of time. "A product, though ready for immediate
   consumption, may nevertheless serve as raw material for a further product" (
   Capital). 

152 
   In its most advanced sectors, a highly concentrated capitalism has begun
   selling "fully equipped" blocks of time, each of which is a complete
   commodity combining a variety of other commodities. This is the logic behind
   the appearance, within an expanding economy of "services" and leisure
   activities, of the "all-inclusive" purchase of spectacular forms of housing,
   of collective pseudo-travel, of participation in cultural consumption and
   even of sociability itself, in the form of "exciting conversations,"
   "meetings with celebrities" and suchlike. Spectacular commodities of this
   type could obviously not exist were it not for the increasing impoverishment
   of the realities they parody. And, not surprisingly, they are also
   paradigmatic of modern sales techniques in that they may be bought on credit.

153 
   Consumable pseudo-cyclical time is the time of the spectacle: in the narrow
   sense, as the time appropriate to the consumption of images, and, in the
   broadest sense, as the image of the consumption of time. The time appropriate
   to the consumption of images, the medium of all commodities, is at once the
   chosen field of operations of the mechanisms of the spectacle and the goal
   that these mechanisms hold up overall as the locus and central representation
   of every individual act of consumption; as we know, modern society's
   obsession with saving time, whether by means of faster transport or by means
   of powdered soup, has the positive result that the average American spends
   three to six hours daily watching television. The social image of the
   consumption of time is for its part exclusively dominated by leisure time and
   vacations -- moments portrayed, like all spectacular commodities, at a
   distance, and as desirable by definition. This particular commodity is
   explicitly presented as a moment of authentic life whose cyclical return we
   are supposed to look forward to. Yet even in such special moments, ostensibly
   moments of life, the only thing being generated, the only thing to be seen
   and reproduced, is the spectacle -- albeit at a higher-than-usual level of
   intensity. And what has been passed off as authentic life turns out to be
   merely a life more authentically spectacular. 

154 
   Our epoch, which presents its time to itself as essentially made up of many
   frequently recurring festivities, is actually an epoch without festival.
   Those moments when, under the reign of cyclical time, the community would
   participate in a luxurious expenditure of life, are strictly unavailable to a
   society where neither community nor luxury exists. Mass pseudo-festivals,
   with their travesty of dialogue and their parody of the gift, may incite
   people to excessive spending, but they produce only a disillusion -- which is
   invariably in turn offset by further false promises. The self-approbation of
   the time of modern survival can only be reinforced, in the spectacle, by
   reduction in its use value. The reality of time has been replaced by its 
   publicity. 

155 
   In ancient societies the consumption of cyclical time was consistent with the
   actual labor of those societies. By contrast, the consumption of
   pseudo-cyclical time in developed economies is at odds with the abstract
   irreversible time implicit in their system of production. Cyclical time was
   the time of a motionless illusion authentically experienced; spectacular time
   is the time of a real transformation experienced as illusion. 

156 
   Innovation is ever present in the process of the production of things. This
   is not true of consumption, which is never anything but more of the same.
   Because dead labor continues to dominate living labor, in spectacular time
   the past continues to dominate the present. 

157 
   Another aspect of the lack of historical life in general is that the
   individual life is still not historical. The pseudo-events that vie for
   attention in the spectacle's dramatizations have not been lived by those who
   are thus informed about them. In any case they are quickly forgotten, thanks
   to the precipitation with which the spectacle's pulsing machinery replaces
   one by the next. At the same time, everything really lived has no relation to
   society's official version of irreversible time, and is directly opposed to
   the pseudo-cyclical rhythm of that time's consumable by-products. Such
   individual lived experience of a cut-off everyday life remains bereft of
   language or concept, and it lacks any critical access to its own antecedents,
   which are nowhere recorded. It cannot be communicated. And it is
   misunderstood and forgotten to the benefit of the spectacle's false memory of
   the unmemorable. 

158 
   The spectacle, being the reigning social organization of a paralyzed history,
   of a paralyzed memory, of an abandonment of any history founded in historical
   time, is in effect a false consciousness of time. 

159 
   A prerequisite to the enrollment of the workers as "free" producers and
   consumers of time-as-commodity was the violent expropriation of their time.
   The spectacular restoration of time was only possible on the basis of this
   initial dispossession of the producers. 

160 
   The irreducibly biological element that labor retains -- evident as much in
   our dependence on the natural cycle of sleeping and waking as in the marks of
   a lifetime's wear and tear, which attest to the irreversible time of the
   individual -- is treated by the modern production system as a strictly
   secondary consideration. Such factors are consequently ignored in the
   official discourse of this system as it advances, and as it generates the
   consumable trophies that translate its triumphant forward march into
   accessible terms. Immobilized at the distorted center of the movement of its
   world, the consciousness of the spectator can have no sense of an individual
   life moving toward self-realization, or toward death. Someone who has given
   up the idea of living life will surely never be able to embrace death.
   Promoters of life insurance merely intimate that it is reprehensible to die
   without first arranging for the system's adjustment to the economic loss
   one's death will incur; and the promoters of the "American way of death"
   dwell solely on how much of the appearance of life can be maintained in the
   individual's encounter with death. Elsewhere under advertising's bombardments
   it is simply forbidden to get old. Anybody and everybody is urged to
   economize on an alleged "capital of youth" -- which, though it is unlikely to
   have suffered much in the way of dilapidation, has scant prospect of ever
   attaining the durable and cumulative properties of capital tout court. This
   social absence of death is one with the social absence of life. 

161 
   As Hegel showed, time is a necessary alienation, being the medium in which
   the subject realizes himself while losing himself, becomes other in order to
   become truly himself. The opposite obtains in the case of the alienation that
   now holds sway -- the alienation suffered by the producers of an estranged
   present. This is a spatial alienation, whereby a society which radically
   severs the subject from the activity that it steals from him separates him in
   the first place from his own time. Social alienation, though in principle
   surmountable, is nevertheless the alienation that has forbidden and petrified
   the possibilities and risks of a living alienation within time. 

162 
   In contrast to the passing fashions that clash and fuse on the frivolous
   surface of a contemplated pseudo-cyclical time, the grand style of our era
   can ever be recognized in whatever is governed by the obvious yet carefully
   concealed necessity for revolution. 

163 
   Time's natural basis, the sensory data of its passage, becomes human and
   social inasmuch as it exists for human beings. The limitations of human
   practice, and the various stages of labor -- these are what until now have
   humanized (and also dehumanized) time, both cyclical time and the separated
   irreversible time of the economic system of production. The revolutionary
   project of a classless society, of a generalized historical life, is also the
   project of a withering away of the social measurement of time in favor of an
   individual and collective irreversible time which is playful in character and
   which encompasses, simultaneously present within it, a variety of autonomous
   yet effectively federated times -- the complete realization, in short, within
   the medium of time, of that communism which "abolishes everything that exists
   independently of individuals." 

164 
   The world already has the dream of a such a time; it has yet to come into
   possession of the consciousness that will allow it to experience its reality.


   From the Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord