In the final lines of Separation Perfected, Guy Debord delivers the most direct form of the spectacle: “the spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.” It is localized in the capitalist mode of production—but it reaches everywhere and touches everything. Not only does it touch, it becomes the image of everywhere and everything, destroying the originals. The one-way relationship that Debord mentions is the primary unit of isolation, the spectator’s mediation through the commodity as direct link to and reproduction of the spectacle. This one-way relationship that walls him off from all else is the means by which he “makes his own life” that he can never inhabit. The one-way disjunction of the spectacle does not define him because the spectator is not himself—he does not have a self—he is only a producer operating within the limits of the spectacle. The world’s loss of unity and the essential isolation are the foundations of the fragmented visual forms of simulated life. The spectacle is a dense and amorphous contortion of means and ends—it is the dream that supports the insupportable reality; it is the unsupportable reality that supports itself. The title of Guy Debord’s first chapter is the heart of the spectacle: separation. The spectacle is not a thing, but a way of social mediation through images. The image is the central phenomena between people, power and the population that cannot usurp it, reality and unreality.
The spectator’s one-way relationship to the center of the spectacle is its primary action. It is at once his only connection to other spectators as well as the core reinforcement of isolation. This is understood concretely as the phenomenon of the commodity fetish. The spectator produces his labor force, his thoughts, and his environment that are completely mediated through objects. The fetish of his mis-reality is an exclusionary device that alienates him further with every movement: “[t]he spectacle subjects living human beings to its will… For the spectacle is simply the economic realm developing for itself” (3). Human life is morphed into an economic function that alienates the producer from himself. The producer does not produce himself, only his labor force. Through his labor force, he produces—or is produced through the economic realm—a commodified value of life; purchasing power. To the extent that he cannot connect to his own life, the spectacle is the apparatus that monitors his relation to it. The spectator circulates indirectly via the spectacle in the commodity market. This pervasive relationship is not reversible: man will never live in it.
The spectacle is not power, rather the simulation of power against the simulation of society. Power, something long since dead, long since needed, must only shimmer on the distant horizon as a ghost. The most archaic and modern quality of power resides in social cleavage; power exploits itself for an image of reproduction. But this specialization and reproduction is not power at all, but the tautological image of it. “The spectacle is the self-portrait of power in the age of power’s totalitarian rule over the conditions of existence” (5). At once, the spectacle exercises complete rule over human and material existence and yet it continually reasserts an image of its utilitarian necessity, benevolence, and dominance. The spectacle chooses its own mode of discourse and locks the spectator in all of its recreations. Here again, the one-way communication from spectator to spectacle emerges: there is not any discourse outside of the spectacle, the spectacle is the discourse of social cleavage, of power. Its own laudatory praises are not separate from the spectacle, which highlights the primary paradox: the spectacle’s power is rooted in nothing more than the appearance of it.
Imaginary power constitutes the spectacle—and this power is localized in the bad dream of unreality. “The spectacle is the bad dream of modern society in chains, expressing nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep” (4). The image of discourse, when the spectacle has limited that discourse to the specific signs and shadows of its own portrait extends the real means and ends of capitalist production through its accumulated ideology of the commodity. Applying Lacan’s interpretation of Freud’s example from The Interpretation of Dreams, the anonymous father and candle dream, the notion of the spectacle’s unreality is supported. The dream (as it is used in Freud’s analysis) is not the construction that extends the father’s rest but one that recognizes the terror of his real desire. The father awakens and masks the real of his desire through reality—the spectacle is that unreal reality that transfixes the “impossible kernel” (Zizek 45). Debord portrays the spectacle as the ideology of capital.
Separation Perfected traces the fragmented artificial life of the spectacle. This movement seems to circulate and slide over itself, spinning out further and further into the outer-reaches of simulated space. The structure of Debord’s writing reflects the spectacle: multi-faceted, unified, isolated. The image of reality mediates all human relations, since all human relations are really commodity relations. The spectacle is the accumulation of capital to the point that it creates an image, which signifies the origin or subordination of the spectacle to one thing, and one thing only, the capitalist mode of production; the needs of capital dictate the simulations of the spectacle.
