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Refutation of All the Judgments,
Pro or Con,
Thus Far Rendered on the Film
“The Society of the Spectacle”
(film soundtrack)
The spectacular organization of the present class society has
led to two widely evident consequences. The first is a general deterioration in
the quality of both products and rationales. The second is the fact that those
who claim to find happiness in this society are obliged to maintain a careful
distance from the things they pretend to like — because they invariably lack the
intellectual or other means that would enable them to attain a direct in-depth
knowledge of them, or to incorporate them into a coherent practice, or to
develop any genuine taste regarding them.
These consequences, which are already so evident when it is a
matter of housing conditions, cultural consumption, sexual liberation, or the
quality of wine, are naturally all the more pronounced when we come to
revolutionary theory and to the formidable language with which that theory
denounces our terminally ill world.
It is thus hardly surprising that this combination of naïve
falsification and ignorant approval, so characteristic of the modern spectacle,
is reflected in the diversely uncomprehending responses to the film entitled
The Society of the Spectacle.
This particular incomprehension is inevitable, and will continue
to be so for some time to come. The spectacle is an infirmity more than a
conspiracy. Those who write for the newspapers and magazines of our time are not
concealing their intelligence: what we see is all they’ve got. What could they
possibly say of any pertinence about a film which attacks their habits and ideas
en bloc, and which does so at a time when they themselves are beginning to sense
the collapse of every one of them? The stupidity of their reactions stems from
the breakdown of their world.
Those who claim to like my film have liked too many other things
to be capable of liking it; and those who say they don’t like it have also
accepted too many other things for their judgment to have the slightest
significance.
The poverty of their discourse reflects the poverty of their
lives. You need only look at their surroundings and their occupations, their
commodities and their ceremonies, which are on view everywhere. You need only
listen to those imbecilic voices giving you contemptuous hourly updates on the
current state of your alienation.
Spectators do not find what they desire; they desire what they
find.
The spectacle does not debase people to the point of making them
love it, but many are paid to pretend that they do. Now that such people can no
longer get away with assuring us that this society is completely satisfactory,
they hasten to declare themselves dissatisfied with any critique of it. These
dissatisfied people all feel they deserved something better. But do they really
imagine that anyone is trying to win them over? Do they really believe there is
still time for them to rally to such a critique, supposing that they suddenly
became convinced of its truth? Do these ill-lodged inhabitants of the land of
approbation suppose that they can continue to speak without it being noticed
where they’re speaking from?
In a freer and more truthful future people will look back in
amazement at the idea that pen-pushers hired by the system of spectacular lies
could imagine themselves qualified to offer their smug opinions on the merits
and defects of a film that is a negation of the spectacle — as if the
dissolution of this system was a matter of opinion. Their system is now being
attacked in reality and it is defending itself by force. Their counterfeit
arguments are no longer accepted, which is why so many of these professional
agents of falsification are facing the prospect of unemployment.
The most stubborn of these endangered liars still pretend to
wonder whether the society of the spectacle actually exists or whether it is
perhaps just an imaginary notion that I thought up. But since the woods of
history have for the last few years begun to march against their castle of false
cards and are continuing at this very moment to close ranks and move in for the
kill, most of these commentators are now fawningly praising the excellence of my
book, as if they were capable of reading it and as if they had already welcomed
its publication in 1967 with the same respect. They generally complain, however,
that I have abused their indulgence by bringing the book to the screen. The blow
is all the more painful because they had never dreamed that such an extravagance
was possible. Their anger confirms the fact that the appearance of such a
critique in a film upsets them even more than in a book. Here, as elsewhere,
they are being forced into a defensive struggle, on a second front.
Many complain that the film is hard to understand. Some say that
the images prevent them from understanding the words; others that the words
distract from the images. By telling us that they find the film exhausting, and
by proudly elevating their individual fatigue into a general criterion of
communication, these critics are trying to give the impression that they have no
problem understanding — or even perhaps largely agreeing with — the same theory
when its exposition is limited to a book. They are attempting to disguise as a
mere disagreement between different conceptions of cinema what is actually a
conflict between different conceptions of society, and an open war within the
existing society.
But if my film is so far beyond them, how can we suppose they
are any more capable of understanding everything else that falls to their lot in
a society that has so thoroughly conditioned them to mental exhaustion? How
could such easily fatigued people find themselves in any better position, amid
the incessant cacophony of so many simultaneous commercial and political
messages, to see through the crude sophisms designed to make them accept their
work and their leisure, or the wisdom of President Giscard, or the taste of food
additives? The difficulty is not in my film, but in their servile minds.
No film is more difficult than its era. For example, there are
people who understand, and others who do not understand, that when the French
were presented with a new ministry called the “Quality-of-Life Department,” this
was nothing but an age-old ruling-class ploy, designed, as Machiavelli put it,
“to allow them to retain at least the name of what they have already lost.”
There are people who understand, and others who do not understand, that the
class struggle in Portugal has from the very beginning been dominated by a
direct confrontation between the revolutionary workers organized in autonomous
assemblies and the Stalinist bureaucracy allied with a few defeated generals.
Those who understand such things will understand my film; and I don’t make films
for those who don’t understand such things, or who make it their business to
prevent others from understanding.
Though all the reviews come from the same zone of
spectacle-generated pollution, they are as apparently varied as any other
present-day commodities. Several of the reviewers claimed that my film filled
them with enthusiasm, but none were able to explain why. Whenever I find myself
approved of by those who should be my enemies, I ask myself what error have they
have made in their reasoning. It’s usually easy to find. Faced with an unusual
number of innovations and an insolence that is utterly beyond their
comprehension, these avant-garde consumers vainly try to rationalize a ground
for approval by attributing these fascinating eccentricities to a nonexistent
individual lyricism.
One of them, for example, admires my film for its supposed
“lyricism of rage”; another discovered by watching it that the passing of a
historical epoch produces a certain melancholy; others, who greatly overestimate
the refinements of present-day social life, attribute to me a certain dandyism.
These are nothing but different forms of the perennial tactic of all ruling
apologetics: Deny what exists and explain what does not. A critical
theory that accompanies the dissolution of a society does not concern itself
with expressing rage, much less with presenting mere images of rage. It seeks to
understand, to describe, and to precipitate a movement that is developing before
our very eyes. As for those who present us with their own pseudo-rage as a sort
of newly fashionable artistic content, it is obvious that this is merely their
way of compensating for the spinelessness, compromises, and humiliations of
their actual life — which is why spectators so readily identify with them.
Political reactionaries are naturally even more hostile to my
film. Thus an apprentice bureaucrat claims to admire my audacity in “making a
political film not by telling a story, but by directly filming a theory.”
Unfortunately, he does not like my theory. He senses that despite my apparent
“uncompromising leftism,” I am actually shifting toward the right because I
systematically attack “the men of the United Left.” The cretin’s mouth is full
of such inflated terminology. What union? What Left? What men?
The “United Left” is, of course, nothing other than the current
alliance of the Stalinists with other enemies of the proletariat. Each of the
partners knows the others well. They clumsily plot against each other and
stridently denounce each other every week. But they have now come together in an
effort to sabotage the revolutionary initiatives of the workers, in order — as
they themselves admit — to maintain at least the essentials of capitalism if
they can’t save all the details. They are the same type of bureaucrats as those
who are repressing workers’ “counterrevolutionary strikes” in Portugal, just as
they did in Budapest not so long ago; the same as those who aspire to take part
in a “Historic Compromise” in Italy; the same as those who called themselves
“Popular Front governments” when they broke the French strikes of 1936 and
sabotaged the Spanish revolution.
The United Left is only a minor defensive hoax of spectacular
society, a temporary expedient that the system only occasionally needs to resort
to. I only evoked it in passing in my film, though I naturally attacked it with
all the contempt it deserves — just as we have since attacked it in Portugal on
a broader and more beautiful terrain.
A journalist close to that same Left, who has since achieved a
certain notoriety by invoking “freedom of the press” in order to defend his
publication of an implausibly faked document, exhibited a similarly clumsy
falsification by insinuating that I failed to attack the bureaucrats of Beijing
as sharply as the other ruling classes. He also regrets that a mind of my
quality has limited its expression to a “cinema ghetto” where the masses will
have little chance to see it. This argument does not convince me. I prefer to
remain in obscurity with these masses, rather than to consent to harangue them
under the artificial floodlights manipulated by their hypnotizers.
Another sophist of similarly limited mental capacity presents a
contrary argument: By publicly denouncing the spectacle, am I not thereby
entering the spectacle? This sort of purism, which sounds particularly strange
coming from a journalist, is obviously invoked in the hope of convincing people
that no one should ever appear in the spectacle as an enemy of it.
Those who do not have even a subordinate post in spectacular
society, and who thus have nothing to lose but their ambitious hope of
eventually serving in one of its juvenile relief corps, have given a more frank
and furious expression of their discontent and even of their jealousy. An
anonymous individual of this sort has for some time been expounding the latest
trendy ideas in a most appropriate forum: the weekly magazine of the laughable
foot soldiers of Mitterand’s electoral constituency.
This anonymous individual concludes that it would have been fine
to film my book in 1967, but that in 1973 it was too late. The reason he gives
for this conclusion is that it seems crucial to him that from now on everybody
should stop talking about everything of which he himself is ignorant — Marx;
Hegel; books in general (because they cannot be an adequate means of
liberation); any use of film (because it is merely film); theory, above all; and
even history itself, which he congratulates himself for having anonymously
abandoned.
Such decomposed thought could obviously have oozed forth only
from the desolate walls of Vincennes University. Within living memory no
Vincennes student has ever come up with a single theory. This is no doubt why we
are currently seeing some of them advocate “antitheory.” What else could they
parlay into an assistant professorship in that neo-university? Not that they
content themselves with that — even the most talentless candidate-coopters are
ringing every doorbell, applying for the position of film director or at least
of series editor at some publishing house (the anonymous individual of whom I
have been speaking does not hide his envy of what he imagines to be the lavish
rewards of cinema work). We can therefore confidently predict that these
antitheories will not easily be reduced to the silence that would seem to be
their only logical implication, because in that case their authors would be
deprived of the sole “qualification” that elevates them above the ranks of
unskilled labor.
Our anonymous imposter gives away his real aim at the end of his
review. The reason he wants to dissolve history is so he can elect another, so
that he himself can designate the thinkers of the future. And with a straight
face this blockhead nominates for that role Lyotard, Castoriadis, and other
crumb-grubbers — people who had already shot their bolt more than fifteen years
ago without managing to particularly dazzle their century.
No loser loves history. Moreover, once they have gone so far as
to collectively repudiate history, it is hardly surprising to see these
resolutely ultramodern careerists urging us to read coopted thinkers in their
fifties. It’s no more contradictory than it is for someone to pride himself on
having remained anonymously silent since 1968 while admitting that he has not
even reached the point of scorning his professors. Our anonymous critic
nevertheless has the merit of having illustrated better than the others the
utter ineptitude of the antihistorical perspective he advocates and the real
motivations behind these impotent people’s pretended disdain for reality. In
postulating that it was too late to undertake a cinematic adaptation of The
Society of the Spectacle six years after the appearance of the book, he
overlooks the fact that there have not been three books of social critique of
such importance published in the last hundred years. He also fails to consider
the fact that I myself had written the book. There is no standard of comparison
for judging whether I was relatively slow or fast in making the film since it is
obvious that the best of my predecessors had no access to the film medium.
Everything considered, I must admit that I found it very gratifying to be the
first person to carry out this sort of exploit.
The defenders of the spectacle will be as slow to recognize this
new use of film as they were in recognizing the fact that a new era of
revolutionary opposition was undermining their society; but they will be obliged
to recognize it just as inevitably. And they will follow the same sequence:
first remaining silent, then speaking beside the point. The reviewers of my film
have reached the latter stage.
The specialists of the cinema have said that my film’s revolutionary politics
were bad; the left-wing political illusionists have said that it was bad cinema.
But when one is both a revolutionary and a filmmaker, it is easy to demonstrate
that their shared bitterness stems from the fact that the film in question is a
precise critique of the society they do not know how to combat; and the first
example of a kind of film they do not know how to make.
New translation by Ken Knabb of the main voice-over soundtrack
of Guy Debord’s fifth film, Réfutation de
tous les jugements, tant élogieux qu’hostiles, qui ont été jusqu’ici portés sur
le film “La Société du Spectacle” (1975).
The complete script of this film, with
illustrations, detailed descriptions of the images, and extensive annotations, is included in
Debord’s Complete Cinematic Works (AK Press, 2003). For further
information, see Guy Debord’s Films.
Translation copyright 2003 by Ken Knabb. (This copyright
will not be enforced against personal or noncommercial use.)
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