Réfutation de tous les jugements, tant élogieux qu'hostiles, qui ont été jusqu'ici portés sur le film 'La société du spectacle' (1975) - full transcript
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 na?ve 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 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,
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
re 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.
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 na?ve 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 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,
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
re 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.