The Society of the Spectacle
Chapter 7:
Territorial Management
“Whoever becomes the ruler of a city that is accustomed to freedom and does not destroy it can expect to be destroyed by it, for it can always find a pretext for rebellion in the name of its former freedom and age-old customs, which are never forgotten despite the passage of time or any benefits it has received. No matter what the ruler does or what precautions he takes, the inhabitants will never forget that freedom or those customs — unless they are separated or dispersed . . .”
—Machiavelli, The Prince
165
Capitalist production has unified space, breaking down the boundaries between one society and the next. This unification is at the same time an extensive and intensive process of banalization. Just as the accumulation of commodities mass-produced for the abstract space of the market shattered all regional and legal barriers and all the Medieval guild restrictions that maintained the quality of craft production, it also undermined the autonomy and quality of places. This homogenizing power is the heavy artillery that has battered down all the walls of China.
166
The free space of commodities is constantly being modified and rebuilt in order to become ever more identical to itself, to get as close as possible to motionless monotony.
167
While eliminating geographical distance, this society produces a new internal distance in the form of spectacular separation.
168
Tourism — human circulation packaged for consumption, a by-product of the circulation of commodities — is the opportunity to go and see what has been banalized. The economic organization of travel to different places already guarantees their equivalence. The modernization that has eliminated the time involved in travel has simultaneously eliminated any real space from it.
169
The society that reshapes its entire surroundings has evolved its own special technique for molding its very territory, which constitutes the material underpinning for all the facets of this project. Urbanism — “city planning” — is capitalism’s method for taking over the natural and human environment. Following its logical development toward total domination, capitalism now can and must refashion the totality of space into its own particular decor.
170
The capitalist need that is satisfied by urbanism’s conspicuous petrification of life can be described in Hegelian terms as a total predominance of a “peaceful coexistence within space” over “the restless becoming that takes place in the progression of time.”
171
While all the technical forces of capitalism contribute toward various forms of separation, urbanism provides the material foundation for those forces and prepares the ground for their deployment. It is the very technology of separation.
172
Urbanism is the modern method for solving the ongoing problem of safeguarding class power by atomizing the workers, who had 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 experiences of the French Revolution to increase the means of maintaining law and order in the streets have finally culminated in the suppression of the streets. 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 in accordance with 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 type of pseudo-community. The same collective isolation prevails even within the family cell, where the omnipresent receivers of spectacular messages fill the isolation with the dominant images — images that derive their full power precisely from that isolation.
173
In all previous periods architectural innovations were designed exclusively for the ruling classes. Now for the first time a new architecture has been designed specifically for the poor. The aesthetic poverty and vast proliferation of this new experience in habitation stem from its mass character, which character in turn stems both from its function and from the modern conditions of construction. The obvious core of these conditions is the authoritarian decision-making which abstractly converts the environment into an environment of abstraction. The same architecture appears everywhere as soon as industrialization has begun, even in the countries that are furthest behind in this regard, as an essential foundation for implanting the new type of social existence. The contradiction between the growth of society’s material powers and the continued lack of progress toward any conscious control of those powers is revealed as glaringly by the developments of urbanism as by the issues of thermonuclear weapons or genetic modification (where the possibility of manipulating heredity is already on the horizon).
174
The self-destruction of the urban environment is already well under way. The explosion of cities into the countryside, covering it with what Mumford calls “a formless mass of thinly spread semi-urban tissue,” is directly governed by the imperatives of consumption. The dictatorship of the automobile — the pilot product of the first stage of commodity abundance — has left its mark on the landscape with the dominance of freeways, which tear up the old urban centers and promote an ever wider dispersal. Within this process various forms of partially reconstituted urban fabric fleetingly crystallize around “distribution factories” — giant shopping centers erected in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by acres of parking space. These temples of frenetic consumption are subject to the same irresistible centrifugal momentum, which casts them aside as soon as they have engendered enough surrounding development to become overburdened secondary centers in their turn. But the technical organization of consumption is only the most visible aspect of the general process of decomposition that has brought the city to the point of consuming itself.
175
Economic history, whose entire previous development centered around the opposition between city and country, has now progressed to the point of nullifying both. As a result of the current paralysis of any historical development apart from the independent movement of the economy, the incipient disappearance of city and country does not represent a transcendence of their separation, but their simultaneous collapse. The mutual erosion of city and country, resulting from the failure of the historical movement through which existing urban reality could have been overcome, is reflected in the eclectic mixture of their decomposed fragments that blanket the most industrialized regions of the world.
176
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 revolutionary merits of the bourgeoisie 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 been the historical battleground of the struggle for freedom, but it has yet to host its victory. 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.
177
“The country represents the complete opposite: isolation and separation” (The German Ideology). As urbanism destroys the cities, it recreates a pseudo-countryside devoid both of the natural relations of the traditional countryside and of the direct (and directly challenged) social relations of the historical city. The conditions of habitation and spectacular control in today’s “planned environments” have created an artificial neopeasantry. The geographical dispersal and the narrow-mindedness that have always prevented the peasantry from undertaking independent action and becoming a creative historical force are equally characteristic of these modern producers, for whom a world of their own making is as inaccessible as were the natural rhythms of work in agrarian societies. The peasantry was the steadfast foundation of “Oriental despotism,” in that its inherent fragmentation gave rise to a natural tendency toward bureaucratic centralization. The neopeasantry produced by the increasing bureaucratization of the modern state differs from the old peasantry in that its apathy must now be historically manufactured and maintained; natural ignorance has been replaced by the organized spectacle of falsifications. The “new cities” inhabited by this technological pseudo-peasantry are a glaring expression of the repression of historical time on which they have been built. Their motto could be: “Nothing will ever happen here, and nothing ever has.” The forces of historical absence have begun to create their own landscape because historical liberation, which must take place in the cities, has not yet occurred.
178
The history that threatens this twilight world could potentially subject space to a directly experienced time. Proletarian revolution is this critique of human geography through which individuals and communities will be able to create places and events commensurate with the appropriation no longer just of their work, but of their entire history. The ever-changing playing field of this new world and the freely chosen variations in the rules of the game will regenerate a diversity of local scenes that are independent without being insular, thereby reviving the possibility of authentic journeys — journeys within an authentic life that is itself understood as a journey containing its whole meaning within itself.
179
The most revolutionary idea concerning urbanism is not itself urbanistic, technological, or aesthetic. It is the project of reconstructing the entire environment in accordance with the needs of the power of workers councils, of the antistate dictatorship of the proletariat, of executory dialogue. Such councils, which can be effective only if they transform existing conditions in their entirety, cannot set themselves any lesser task if they wish to be recognized and to recognize themselves in a world of their own making.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTES
Chapter 7 epigraph: The Machiavelli quotation is from chapter 5 of The Prince.
165. This homogenizing power . . . walls of China: Cf. the Communist Manifesto (Part 1): “The cheapness of its commodities is the heavy artillery that batters down all the walls of China.”
169. Urbanism — “city planning”: The French word urbanisme means “city planning,” but it has a more impersonal and bureaucratic connotation.
170. “peaceful coexistence within space” . . . “the restless becoming that takes place in the progression of time”: Cf. Hegel’s The Philosophical Propadeutic (translated by A.V. Miller, Blackwell, 1986, pp. 66, 92, 144, 151): “Space is the connection of the quiescent asunderness and side-by-sideness of things; Time is the connection of their vanishing or alteration. . . . In the spatial world the question is not of succession but of coexistence. . . . As a restless Becoming [Time] is not an element of a synthetic whole. . . . The Object . . . is partly the quiescent side-by-sideness of space, partly a restless becoming in the successive moments of time.”
172. “one-way system . . . keeping a population under control”: quotations from Lewis Mumford’s The City in History (chap. 16.8).
174. “a formless mass . . . semi-urban tissue”: quotation from Mumford’s The City in History (chap. 16.6).
176. “subjected the country to the city”: quotation from the Communist Manifesto (Part 1). “very air is liberating”: “Stadtluft macht frei” (“Urban air makes one free”) was a medieval German saying, expressing that fact that serfs could free themselves by escaping to the towns.
177. “the country . . . isolation and separation”: quotation from Marx and Engels’s The German Ideology (Part I, chap. 4, section 2). “Oriental despotism”: See Karl Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (1957), which examines the social structure of the empires that Marx had referred to as the “Asiatic mode of production.” A brief critique of Wittfogel’s book can be found in Internationale Situationniste #10, pp. 72-73.
178. critique of human geography: For some of the early “psychogeographical” explorations and visions that laid the groundwork for Debord’s analysis, see SI Anthology, pp. 1-8, 50-54, 65-67; Expanded Edition, pp. 1-14, 62-66, 69-73, 86-89.
179. antistate dictatorship of the proletariat:
Although Marx and Engels’s notion of a “dictatorship of the proletariat”
was totally different from the Stalinist state dictatorships over the
proletariat that emerged in the following century, some ambiguities remained
regarding its nature and duration which enabled the latter to pretend to have
some connection with the former. Debord’s phrase cuts through those ambiguities,
making it clear that he is envisaging a distinctly nonstate form of social
organization, what the situationists elsewhere referred to as “generalized
self-management.”
I have examined some of the problems and possibilities of such a
society in Chapter 4 of
The Joy of Revolution.
Chapter 7 of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (Paris, 1967). This translation by Ken Knabb is from the annotated edition published by PM Press (2024).
Table of Contents
Translator’s Notes
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