The current destruction of the city

Universal history was born in cities, and it reached maturity with the city's decisive victory over the country. For Marx, one of the greatest merits of the bourgeoisie as a revolutionary class was the fact that it "subjected the country to the city," whose "very air is liberating." but if the history of the city is a history of freedom, it is also a history of tyranny – a history of state administrations controlling not only the countryside but the cities themselves. The city has served as the historical battleground for the struggle for freedom without yet having been able to win it. The city is the focal point of history because it embodies both a concentration of social power, which is what makes historical enterprises possible, and a consciousness of the past. The current destruction of the city is thus merely one more reflection of humanity's failure, thus far, to subordinate the economy to historical consciousness; of society's failure to unify itself by reappropriating the powers that have been alienated from it.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Soul Bay Press, 2012) pp. 125-126

Pseudocommunity and collective isolation

Urbanism is the modern method for solving the ongoing problem of safeguarding class power by atomizing the workers who have been dangerously brought together by the conditions of urban production. The constant struggle that has had to be waged against anything that might lead to such coming together has found urbanism to be its most effective field of operation. The efforts of all the established powers since the French Revolution to increase the means of maintaining law and order in the streets have finally culminated in the suppression of the street itself. Describing what he terms "a one-way system," Lewis Mumford points out that "with the present means of long-distance mass communication, sprawling isolation has proved an even more effective method of keeping a population under control" (The City in History). But the general trend toward isolation, which is the underlying essence of urbanism, must also include a controlled reintegration of the workers based on the planned needs of production and consumption. This reintegration into the system means bringing isolated individuals together as isolated individuals. Factories, cultural centers, tourist resorts and housing developments are specifically designed to foster this kind of pseudocommunity. The same collective isolation prevails even within the family cell, where the omnipresent receivers of spectacular messages fill the isolation with the ruling images – images that derive their full pwer precisely from that isolation.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Soul Bay Press, 2012) pp. 123-124

An intrahistorical rejection of history

With the development of capitalism, irreversible time has become globally unified. Universal history becomes a reality because the entire world is brought under the sway of this time's development. But this history that us everywhere simultaneously the same is as yet nothing but an intrahistorical rejection of history. What appears the world over as the same day is merely the time of economic production, time cut up into equal abstract fragments. This unified irreversible time belongs to the global market, and this also to the global spectacle.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Soul Bay Press, 2012) p. 111

The victory of a profoundly historical time

The victory of the bourgeoisie is the victory of a profoundly historical time, because it is the time corresponding to an economic production that continuously transforms society from top to bottom. So long as agrarian production remains the predominant form of labor, the cyclical time that remains at the base of society reinforces the joint forces of tradition, which tend to hold back any historical movement. But the irreversible time of the bourgeois economy eradicates those vestiges throughout the world. History, which until then had seemed to involve only the actions of individual members of the ruling class, and which had thus been recorded as a mere chronology of events, is now understood as a general movement – a relentless movement that crushes any individuals in its path. By discovering its basis in political economy, history becomes aware of what had previously been unconscious; but this basis remains unconscious because it cannot be brought to light. This blind prehistory, this new fate that no one controls, is the only thing that the commodity economy has democratized.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Soul Bay Press, 2012) p. 109

History has always existed, but not always in its historical form

Man, "the negative being who is solely to the extent that he suppresses Being," is one with time. Man's appropriation of his own nature is at the same time his grasp of the development of the universe. "History is itself a real part of natural history, of the transformation of nature into man" (Marx). Conversely, this "natural history" has no real existence other than through the process of human history, the only vantage point from which one can take in that historical totality (like the modern telescope whose power enables one to look back in time at the receding nebulas at the periphery of the universe). History has always existed, but not always in its historical form. The temporalization of humanity, brought about through the mediation of a society, amounts to a humanization of time. The unconscious movement of time becomes manifest and true within historical consciousness.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Soul Bay Press, 2012) p. 100

Fascism is a technologically equipped primitivism

Although fascism rallies to the defense of the main icons of a bourgeois ideology that has become conservative (family, private property, moral order, patriotism), while mobilizing the petty bourgeoisie and the unemployed workers who are panic-stricken by economic crisis or disillusioned by the socialist movement's failure to bring about a revolution, it is not itself fundamentally ideological. It presents itself as what it is – a violent resurrection of myth calling for participation in a community defined by archaic pseudovalues: race, blood, leader. Fascism is a technologically equipped primitivism. Its factitious mythological rehashes are presented in the spectacular context of the most modern means of conditioning and illusion. it is thus a significant factor in the formation of the modern spectacle, and its role in the destruction of the old working-class movement also makes it one of the founding forces of present-day society. But since it is also the most costly method of preserving the capitalist order, it has generally ended up being replaced by the major capitalist states, which represent stronger and more rational forms of that order.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Soul Bay Press, 2012) p. 88

The modern increase in leisure time

There can be no freedom apart from activity, and within the spectacle activity is nullified – all real activity having been forcibly channeled into the global construction of the spectacle. Thus, what is referred to as a "liberation from work," namely the modern increase in leisure time, is neither a liberation of work itself not a liberation from the world shaped by this kind of work. None of the activity stolen by work can be regained by submitting to what that work has produced.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Soul Bay Press, 2012) pp. 39-40

Fundamentally spectaclist

The society based on modern industry is not accidentally or superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally spectaclist. In the spectacle – the visual reflection of the ruling economic order – goals are nothing, development is everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Soul Bay Press, 2012) p. 35

A machine is merely a supplementary limb

Man, he said, was a machinate mammal. The lower animals keep all their limbs at home in their own bodies, but many of man's are loose, and lie about detached, now here and now there, in various parts of the world – some being kept always handy for contingent use, and others being occasionally hundreds of miles away. A machine is merely a supplementary limb; this is the be all and end all of machinery. We do not use our own limbs other than as machines; and a leg is only a much better wooden leg than any one can manufacture.

Samuel Butler, Erewhon (Penguin Books, 1970) p. 223

Perhaps we should not be even able to distinguish time at all

We do not generally admit this, because we do not know the whole nature of any one, not the whole of the forces that act upon him. We see but a part, and being thus unable to generalise human conduct, except very roughly, we deny that it is subject to any fixed laws at all, and ascribe much both of a man's character and actions to chance, or luck, or fortune; but these are only words whereby we escape the admission of our own ignorance; and a little reflection will teach us that the most daring flight of the imagination or the most subtle exercise of the reason is as much the thing that must arise, and the only thing that can by any possibility arise, at the moment of its arising, as the falling of a dead leaf when the wind shakes it from the tree.

For the future depends upon the present, and the present (whose existence is only one of those minor compromises of which human life is full – for it lives only on sufferance of the past and the future) depends upon the past, and the past is unalterable. The only reason why we cannot see the future as plainly as the past, is because we know too little of the actual past and the actual present; these things are too great for us, otherwise the future, in its minutest details would lie spread out before our eyes, and we should lose our sense of time present by reason of the clearness with which we should see the past and the future; perhaps we should not be even able to distinguish time at all; but that is foreign.

Samuel Butler, Erewhon (Penguin Books, 1970) p. 216

Man's soul is a machine-made thing

Man's very soul is due to the machines; it is a machine-made thing: he thinks as he thinks, and feels as he feels, through the work that machines have wrought upon him, and their existence is quite as much as sine quâ non for his, as his for theirs. This fact precludes us from proposing the complete annihilation of machinery, but surely it indicates that we should destroy as many of them as we can possibly dispense with, lest they should tyrannise over us even more completely.

Samuel Butler, Erewhon (Penguin Books, 1970) p. 207

Sympathise with a potato

We find it difficult to sympathise with the emotions of a potato; so we do with those of an oyster. Neither of these things makes a noise on being boiled or opened, and noise appeals to us more strongly than anything else, because we make so much about our own sufferings. Since, then, they do not annoy us by any expression of pain we call them emotionless; and so quâ mankind they are; but mankind is not everybody.

Samuel Butler, Erewhon (Penguin Books, 1970) p. 201

The manifold phases of consciousness

Consciousness, in anything like the present acceptation of the term, having been once a new thing – a thing, as far as we can see, subsequent even to an individual centre of action and to a reproductive system (which we see existing in plants without apparent consciousness) – why may not there arise some new phase of mind which shall be as different form all present known phases, as the mind of animals is from that of vegetables?

It would be absurd to attempt to define such a mental state (or whatever it may be called), inasmuch as it must be something so foreign to man that his experience can give him no help towards conceiving its nature; but surely when we reflect upon the manifold phases of life and consciousness which have been evolved already, it would be rash to say that no others can be developed, and that animal life is the end of all things. There was a time when fire was the end of all things: another when rocks and water were so.

Samuel Butler, Erewhon (Penguin Books, 1970) pp. 198-199