Their ability to falsify is unlimited ...

 

WITH the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning. For every imbecility presented by the spectacle, there are only the media's professionals to give an answer, with a few respectful rectifications or remonstrations. And they are hardly extravagant, even with these, for besides their extreme ignorance, their personal and professional solidarity with the spectacle's overall authority and the society it expresses makes it their duty, and their pleasure, never to diverge from that authority whose majesty must not be threatened. It must not be forgotten that every media professional is bound by wages and other rewards and recompenses to a master, and sometimes to several; and that every one of them knows he is dispensable.

All experts serve the state and the media and only in that way do they achieve their status. Every expert follows his master, for all former possibilities for independence have been gradually reduced to nil by present society's mode of organisation. The most useful expert, of course, is the one who can lie. With their different motives, those who need experts are falsifiers and fools. Whenever individuals lose the capacity to see things for themselves, the expert is there to offer an absolute reassurance. Once there were experts in Etruscan art, and competent ones, for Etruscan art was not for sale. But a period which, for example, finds it profitable to fake by chemical means various famous wines, can only sell them if it has created wine experts able to con connoisseurs into admiring their new, more distinctive, flavours. Cervantes remarks that 'under a poor cloak you commonly find a good drinker'. Someone who knows his wine may often understand nothing about the rules of the nuclear industry; but spectacular power calculates that if one expert can make a fool of him with nuclear energy, another can easily do the same with wine. And it is well known, for example, that media meteorologists, forecasting temperature or rainfall for the next forty­ eight hours, are severely limited in what they say by the obligation to maintain certain economic, touristic and regional balances, when so many people make so many journeys on so many roads, between so many equally desolate places; thus they can only try to make their names as entertainers.

One aspect of the disappearance of all ob jective historical knowledge can be seen in the way that indi­vidual reputations have become malleable and alter­able at will by those who control all information: information which is gathered and also - an entirely different matter - information which is broadcast.

Their ability to falsify is thus unlimited. Historical evidence which the spectacle does not need to know ceases to be evidence. When the only fame is that bestowed by the grace and favour of a spectacular Court, disgrace may swifdy follow. An anti-spectac­ular notoriety has become something extremely rare. I myself am one of the last people to retain one, having never had any other. But it has also become extraordi­narily suspect. Society has officially declared itself to be spectacular. To be known outside spectacular relations is already to be known as an enemy of society.

A person's past can be entirely rewritten, radically altered, recreated in the manner of the Moscow trials - and without even having to bother with anything as dumsy as a trial. Killing comes cheaper these days.

Those who run the spectacle, or their friends, surely have no lack of false witnesses, though they may be unskilled - and how could the spectators who witness the exploits of these false witnesses ever recognise their blunders? - or false documents , which are always highly effective. Thus it is no longer possible to believe anytying about anyone that you have not learned for yourself, directly. But in fact false accus­ations are rarely necessary. Once one controls the mechanism which operates the only form of socialverification to be fully and universally recognised, one can say what one likes. The spectacle proves its argu­ments simply by going round in circles: by coming back to the start, by repetiton, by constant reaffirrma­tion in the only space left where anytting can be publicly affirmed, and believed, precisely because that is the only thing to which everyone is witness. Spec­tacular power can similarly deny whatever it likes, once, or three times over, and change the subject; knowing full well there is no danger of any riposte, in it s own space or any other.

For the agora, the general community, has gone, along with communites restricted to intermediary bodies or to independent institutions, to salons or cafes, or to workers in a single company. There is no place left where people can discuss the realities which concern them, because they can never lastingly free themselves from the crushing presence of media discourse and of the various forces organised to relay it. Nothing remains of the relatively independent judgement of those who once made up the world of learning; of those, for example, who used to base their self-respect on thieir ability to verify, to come close to an impartial history of facts, or at least to believe that such a history deserved to be known. There is no longer even any incontestable bibliographical truth , and the computerised catalogues of national libraries are well-equipped to remove any residual traces. It is disorienting to consider what it meant to be a judge, a doctor or a historian not so long ago, and to recall the obligations and imperatives they often accepted, within the limits of their competence: men resemble their times more than their fathers.

When the spectacle stops talking about something for three days, it is as if it did not exist. For it has then gone on to talk about something else, and it is that which henceforth, in short, exists. The practical consequences, as we see, are enormous.

We believe we know that in Greece history and democracy entered the world at the same rime. We can prove that their disappearances have also been simultaneous. To this list of the triumphs of power we should, however, add one result which has  proved negative:

once th e running of a state involves a permanent and massive shortage of historical knowledge, that state can no longer be led strategically.

From Comments on the Societ y of the Spectacle
GUY DEBORD