The Anti-Spectacle DNP Pledge

AaronMk
Lunar Supporter - Helped forge New Lunar Republic's freedom in the face of the Solar Empire's oppressive tyrannical regime (April Fools 2023).
Flower Trio - Helped others get their OC into the 2023 Derpibooru Collab.
Crystal Roseluck - Had their OC in the 2023 Derpibooru Collab.
Tree of Harmony - Drew someone's OC for the 2022 Community Collab
Elements of Harmony - Had an OC in the 2022 Community Collab
Non-Fungible Trixie -
Verified Pegasus - Show us your gorgeous wings!
Preenhub - We all know what you were up to this evening~
Philomena - For helping others attend the 2021 community collab
Twinkling Balloon - Took part in the 2021 community collab.

Sky funeral
But for the present age, which prefers the sign
to the thing signified, the copy to the original,
representation to reality, appearance to essence,
… truth is considered profane, and only illusion is
sacred. Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in
proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases,
so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be seen
as the highest degree of sacredness.
 
-Feuerbach, Preface to the Second Edition of  
The Essence of Christianity
 
1  
In societies where modern conditions of production  
prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of  
spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into  
a representation.  
2  
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 pseudo-world that  
can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the  
world has culminated in a world of autonomized images  
where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a  
concrete inversion oflife, an autonomous movement of the  
nonliving.  
3  
The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself,  
as a part of society, and as a means of unification. As a part  
of society, it is ostensibly the focal point of all vision and  
all consciousness: But due to the very fact that this sector  
is separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false  
consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an  
official language of universal separation.  
4  
The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social  
relation between people that is mediated by images.  
5  
The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual excess  
produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview  
that has actually been materialized, that has become an  
objective reality.  
6  
Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result  
and the project of the present mode of production. It is not  
a mere supplement or decoration added to the real world,  
it is the heart of this real society’s unreality. In all of its  
particular manifestations-news, propaganda, advertising,  
entertainment-the spectacle is the model of the prevailing  
way of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices  
that have already been made in the sphere of production and  
in the consumption implied by that production. In both  
form and content the spectacle serves as a total justification  
of the conditions and goals of the existing system. The  
spectacle is also the constant presence of this justification  
since it monopolizes the majority of the time spent outside  
the modern production process.  
7  
Separation is itself an integral part of the unity of this world,  
of a global social praxis split into reality and image. The  
social practice confronted by an autonomous spectacle is  
at the same time the real totality which contains that spectacle. But the split within this totality mutilates it to the  
point that the spectacle seems to be its goal. The language  
of the spectacle consists of signs of the dominant system of  
production-signs which are at the same time the ultimate  
end-products of that system.  
8  
The spectacle cannot be abstractly contrasted to concrete  
social activity. Each side of such a duality is itself divided.  
The spectacle that falsifies reality is nevertheless a real product of that reality, while lived reality is materially invaded by  
the contemplation of the spectacle and ends up absorbing  
it and aligning itself with it. Objective reality is present on  
both sides. Each of these seemingly fixed concepts has no  
other basis than its transformation into its opposite: reality  
emerges within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real. This  
reciprocal alienation is the essence and support of the  
existing society.  
9  
In a world that has really been turned upside down, the true is  
a moment of the false.  
10  
The concept of “the spectacle” interrelates and explains  
a wide range of seemingly unconnected phenomena. The  
apparent diversities and contrasts of these phenomena  
stem from the social organization of appearances, whose  
essential nature must itself be recognized. Considered in its  
own terms, the spectacle is an affirmation of appearances and  
an identification of all human social life with appearances.  
But a critique that grasps the spectacle’s essential character  
reveals it to be a visible negation of life-a negation that has  
taken on a visible form.  
11  
In order to describe the spectacle, its formation, its functions,  
and the forces that work against it, it is necessary to make  
some artificial distinctions. In analyzing the spectacle we  
are obliged to a certain extent to use the spectacle’s own  
language, in the sense that we have to operate on the  
methodological terrain of the society that expresses itself in  
the spectacle. For the spectacle is both the meaning and the  
agenda of our particular socio-economic formation. It is the  
historical moment in which we are caught.  
12  
The spectacle presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality that  
can never be questioned. Its sole message is: “What appears  
is good; what is good appears.” The passive acceptance it  
demands is already effectively imposed by its monopoly of  
appearances, its manner of appearing without allowing any  
reply.  
13  
The tautological character of the spectacle stems from the  
fact that its means and ends are identical. It is the sun that  
never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers  
the entire surface of the globe, endlessly basking in its own  
glory.  
14  
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.  
15  
As indispensable embellishment of currently produced objects, as general articulation of the system’s rationales, and  
as advanced economic sector that directly creates an everincreasing multitude of image-objects, the spectacle is the  
leading production of present-day society.  
16  
The spectacle is able to subject human beings to itself  
because the economy has already totally subjugated them.  
It is nothing other than the economy developing for itself.  
It is at once a faithful reflection of the production of things  
and a distorting objectification of the producers.  
17  
The first stage of the economy’s domination of social life  
brought about an evident degradation of being into havinghuman fulfillment was no longer equated with what one  
was, but with what one possessed. The present stage, in  
which social life has become completely occupied by the  
accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing  
about a general shift from having to appearing-all “having”  
must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate  
purpose from appearances. At the same time all individual  
reality has become social, in the sense that it is shaped by  
social forces and is directly dependent on them. Individual  
reality is allowed to appear only insofar as it is not actually  
real.  
18  
When the real world is transformed into mere images, mere  
images become real beings-figments that provide the direct  
motivations for a hypnotic behavior. Since the spectacle’s  
job is to use various specialized mediations in order to show  
us a world that can no longer be directly grasped, it naturally  
elevates the sense of sight to the special preeminence once  
occupied by touch: the most abstract and easily deceived  
sense is the most readily adaptable to the generalized abstraction of present-day society. But the spectacle is not  
merely a matter of images, nor even of images plus sounds.  
It is whatever escapes people’s activity, whatever eludes their  
practical reconsideration and correction. It is the opposite  
of dialogue. Wherever representation becomes independent,  
the spectacle regenerates itself.  
19  
The spectacle inherits the weakness of the Western philosophical project, which attempted to understand activity  
by means of the categories of vision, and it is based on the  
relentless development of the particular technical rationality  
that grew out of that form of thought. The spectacle does  
not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality, reducing  
everyone’s concrete life to a universe of speculation.  
20  
Philosophy-the power of separate thought and the thought  
of separate power-was never by itself able to supersede  
theology. The spectacle is the material reconstruction  
of the religious illusion. Spectacular technology has not  
dispersed the religious mists into which human beings had  
projected their own alienated powers, it has merely brought  
those mists down to earth, to the point that even the most  
mundane aspects of life have become impenetrable and  
unbreathable. The illusory paradise representing a total  
denial of earthly life is no longer projected into the heavens,  
it is embedded in earthly life itself. The spectacle is the  
technological version of the exiling of human powers into  
a “world beyond”; the culmination of humanity’s internal  
separation.  
21  
As long as necessity is socially dreamed, dreaming will  
remain necessary. The spectacle is the bad dream of a  
modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing  
more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian  
of that sleep.  
22  
The fact that the practical power of modern society has  
detached itself from that society and established an independent realm in the spectacle can be explained only by  
the additional fact that that powerful practice continued  
to lack cohesion and had remained in contradiction with  
itself. The root of the spectacle is that oldest of all social specializations, the specialization of power. The spectacle plays the specialized role of speaking in the name of all the other  
activities. It is hierarchical society’s ambassador to itself,  
delivering its messages at a court where no one else is  
allowed to speak. The most modern aspect of the spectacle  
is thus also the most archaic.The spectacle is the ruling order’s nonstop discourse  
about itself, its never-ending monologue of self-praise, its  
self-portrait at the stage of totalitarian domination of all  
aspects of life. The fetishistic appearance of pure objectivity  
in spectacular relations conceals their true character as relations between people and between classes: a second  
Nature, with its own inescapable laws, seems to dominate  
our environment. But the spectacle is not the inevitable  
consequence of some supposedly natural technological  
development. On the contrary, the society of the spectacle  
is a form that chooses its own technological content. If  
the spectacle, considered in the limited sense of the “mass  
media” that are its most glaring superficial manifestation,  
seems to be invading society in the form of a mere technical  
apparatus, it should be understood that this apparatus is in  
no way neutral and that it has been developed in accordance  
with the spectacle’s internal dynamics. If the social needs  
of the age in which such technologies are developed can be  
met only through their mediation, if the administration  
of this society and all contact between people has become  
totally dependent on these means of  
instantaneous communication, it is because this “communication” is essentially  
unilateral. The concentration of these media thus amounts  
to concentrating in the hands of the administrators of the  
existing system the means that enable them to carry on this  
particular form of administration. The social separation  
reflected in the spectacle is inseparable from the modern  
state-that product of the social division of labor that is  
both the chief instrument of class rule and the concentrated  
expression of all social divisions.  
Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle. The  
institutionalization of the social division of labor in the  
form of class divisions had given rise to an earlier, religious  
form of contemplation: the mythical order with which every  
power has always camouflaged itself. Religion justified the  
cosmic and ontological order that corresponded to the  
interests of the masters, expounding and embellishing  
everything their societies could not deliver. In this sense,  
all separate power has been spectacular. But this earlier  
universal devotion to a fixed religious imagery was only  
a shared belief in an imaginary compensation for the poverty of a concrete social activity that was still generally  
experienced as a unitary condition. In contrast, the modern  
spectacle depicts what society could deliver, but in so doing  
it rigidly separates what is possible from what is permitted.  
The spectacle keeps people in a state of unconsciousness  
as they pass through practical changes in their conditions  
of existence. Like a factitious god, it engenders itself and  
makes its own rules. It reveals itself for what it is: an autonomously developing separate power, based on the increasing productivity resulting from an increasingly refined division  
of labor into parcelized gestures dictated by the independent  
movement of machines and working for an ever-expanding  
market. In the course of this development, all community  
and all critical awareness have disintegrated; and the forces  
that were able to grow by separating from each other have  
not yet been reunited.  
26  
The general separation of worker and product tends to  
eliminate any direct personal communication between  
the producers and any comprehensive sense of what  
they are producing. With the increasing accumulation of  
separate products and the increasing concentration of the  
productive process, communication and comprehension are  
monopolized by the managers of the system. The triumph  
of this separation-based economic system proletarianizes the  
whole world.  
27  
Due to the very success of this separate production of  
separation, the fundamental experience that in earlier  
societies was associated with people’s primary work is in  
the process of being replaced (in sectors near the cutting  
edge of the system’s evolution) by an identification of life  
with nonworking time, with inactivity. But such inactivity  
is in no way liberated from productive activity. It remains  
dependent on it, in an uneasy and admiring submission  
to the requirements and consequences of the production  
system. It is itself one of the products of that system.  
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 within work itself nor a liberation from  
the world shaped by this kind of work. None of the activity  
stolen through work can be regained by submitting to what  
that work has produced.  
28  
The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation.  
Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute  
to that same isolation. From automobiles to television, the  
goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also  
serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender “lonely crowds.” With ever-increasing  
concreteness the spectacle recreates its own presuppositions.  
29  
The spectacle was born from the world’s loss of unity, and  
the immense expansion of the modern spectacle reveals the  
enormity of this loss. The abstractifying of all individual  
labor and the general abstractness of what is produced are  
perfectly reflected in the spectacle, whose manner of being  
concrete is precisely abstraction. In the spectacle, a part of the  
world represents itself to the world and is superior to it. The  
spectacle is simply the common language of this separation.  
Spectators are linked solely by their one-way relationship to  
the very center that keeps them isolated from each other.  
The spectacle thus reunites the separated, but it reunites  
them only in their separateness.  
30  
The alienation of the spectator, which reinforces the contemplated objects that result from his own unconscious  
activity, works like this: the more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more he identifies with the dominant images  
of need, the less he understands his own life and his own  
desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures  
are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else  
who represents them to him. The spectator does not feel at  
home anywhere, because the spectacle is everywhere.  
31  
Workers do not produce themselves, they produce a power  
independent of themselves. The success of this production,  
the abundance it generates, is experienced by the producers  
as an abundance of dispossession. As their alienated products  
accumulate, all time and space become foreign to them.  
The spectacle is the map of this new world, a map that is  
identical to the territory it represents. The forces that have  
escaped us display themselves to us in all their power.  
32  
The spectacle’s social function is the concrete manufacture  
of alienation. Economic expansion consists primarily of the  
expansion of this particular sector of industrial production.  
The “growth” generated by an economy developing for its  
own sake can be nothing other than a growth of the very  
alienation that was at its origin.  
33  
Though separated from what they produce, people nevertheless produce every detail of their world with ever-increasing power. They thus also find themselves increasingly  
separated from that world. The closer their life comes to  
being their own creation, the more they are excluded from  
that life.  
34  
The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it  
becomes images.
AaronMk
Lunar Supporter - Helped forge New Lunar Republic's freedom in the face of the Solar Empire's oppressive tyrannical regime (April Fools 2023).
Flower Trio - Helped others get their OC into the 2023 Derpibooru Collab.
Crystal Roseluck - Had their OC in the 2023 Derpibooru Collab.
Tree of Harmony - Drew someone's OC for the 2022 Community Collab
Elements of Harmony - Had an OC in the 2022 Community Collab
Non-Fungible Trixie -
Verified Pegasus - Show us your gorgeous wings!
Preenhub - We all know what you were up to this evening~
Philomena - For helping others attend the 2021 community collab
Twinkling Balloon - Took part in the 2021 community collab.

Sky funeral
So what’s this about, then?
 
A French wino who lived from 1931 to 1994 who is known for the fantastic photo of him where he leans around a corner with a knife.
Background Pony #C38C
When it comes to continental philosophers bemoaning the modern world and its degradation I find that Evola and Guénon are much more apt and grounded in their beliefs than Feuerbach. Although I disagree with them on many points I do find their descriptions of the Kali Yuga and the cyclical nature of history to be applicable across the world. It does take a lot of reading to suitably grasp their philosophy, however.
AaronMk
Lunar Supporter - Helped forge New Lunar Republic's freedom in the face of the Solar Empire's oppressive tyrannical regime (April Fools 2023).
Flower Trio - Helped others get their OC into the 2023 Derpibooru Collab.
Crystal Roseluck - Had their OC in the 2023 Derpibooru Collab.
Tree of Harmony - Drew someone's OC for the 2022 Community Collab
Elements of Harmony - Had an OC in the 2022 Community Collab
Non-Fungible Trixie -
Verified Pegasus - Show us your gorgeous wings!
Preenhub - We all know what you were up to this evening~
Philomena - For helping others attend the 2021 community collab
Twinkling Balloon - Took part in the 2021 community collab.

Sky funeral
When it comes to continental philosophers bemoaning the modern world and its degradation I find that Evola and Guénon are much more apt and grounded in their beliefs than Feuerbach. Although I disagree with them on many points I do find their descriptions of the Kali Yuga and the cyclical nature of history to be applicable across the world. It does take a lot of reading to suitably grasp their philosophy, however.
 
>Bringing Evola and Guénon into this
 
This is why Derpibooru needs to fix the mistake known as Background Ponies. All BP ponies need to be drowned in mercury.
Background Pony #C38C
@AaronMk  
You post philosophy quotes under “Site and Policy,” expect philosophy you don’t like to be thrown your way.
Background Pony #74D4
“The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”
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