26. With the generalized separation of the worker and his products,

151.

Pseudo-cyclical time is a time transformed by industry. The time which has its
basis in the production of commodities is itself a consumable commodity which
includes everything that previously (during the phase of dissolution of the old
unitary society) was differentiated into private life, economic life, political
life. All the consumable time of modern society comes to be treated as a raw
material for varied new products which impose themselves on the market as uses
of socially organized time. “A product which already exists in a form which
makes it suitable for consumption can nevertheless in its turn become a raw
material for another product” (Capital).

148.

The general time of human non-development also exists in the complementary form
of consumable time which returns as pseudo-cyclical time to the daily life of
the society based on this determined production.

I smell a nerd

215.

The spectacle is ideology par excellence, because it exposes and manifests in
its fullness the essence of all ideological systems: the impoverishment,
servitude and negation of real life. The spectacle is materially “the
expression of the separation and estrangement between man and man.” Through the
“new power of fraud,” concentrated at the base of the spectacle in this
production, “the new domain of alien beings to whom man is subservient... grows
coextensively with the mass of objects.” It is the highest stage of an
expansion which has turned need against life. “The need for money is thus the
real need produced by political economy, and the only need it produces”
(Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts). The spectacle extends to all social
life the principle which Hegel (in the Realphilosophie of Jena) conceives as
the principle of money: it is “the life of what is dead, moving within itself.”

20.

Philosophy, the power of separate thought and the thought of separate power,
could never by itself supersede theology. The spectacle is the material
reconstruction of the religious illusion. Spectacular technology has not
dispelled the religious clouds where men had placed their own powers detached
from themselves; it has only tied them to an earthly base. The most earthly
life thus becomes opaque and unbreathable. It no longer projects into the sky
but shelters within itself its absolute denial, its fallacious paradise. The
spectacle is the technical realization of the exile of human powers into a
beyond; it is separation perfected within the interior of man.

154.

The epoch which displays its time to itself as essentially the sudden return of
multiple festivities is also an epoch without festivals. What was, in cyclical
time, the moment of a community’s participation in the luxurious expenditure of
life is impossible for the society without community or luxury. When its
vulgarized pseudo-festivals, parodies of the dialogue and the gift, incite a
surplus of economic expenditure, they lead only to deception always compensated
by the promise of a new deception. In the spectacle, the lower the use value of
modern survival-time, the more highly it is exalted. The reality of time has
been replaced by the advertisement of time.

77.

When the proletariat demonstrates by its own existence, through acts, that this
thought of history is not forgotten, the exposure of the conclusion is at the
same time the confirmation of the method.

71.

What the spectacle offers as eternal is based on change and must change with
its base. The spectacle is absolutely dogmatic and at the same time cannot
really achieve any solid dogma. Nothing stops for the spectacle; this condition
is natural to it, yet completely opposed to its inclination.

186.

When society loses the community of the society of myth, it must lose all the
references of a really common language until the time when the rifts within the
inactive community can be surmounted by the inauguration of the real historical
community. When art, which was the common language of social inaction, becomes
independent art in the modern sense, emerging from its original religious
universe and becoming individual production of separate works, it too
experiences the movement that dominates the history of the entirety of separate
culture. The affirmation of its independence is the beginning of its
disintegration.

152.

In its most advanced sector, concentrated capitalism orients itself towards the
sale of “completely equipped” blocks of time, each one constituting a single
unified commodity which integrates a number of diverse commodities. In the
expanding economy of “services” and leisure, this gives rise to the formula of
calculated payment in which “everything’s included”: spectacular environment,
the collective pseudo-displacement of vacations, subscriptions to cultural
consumption, and the sale of sociability itself in the form of “passionate
conversations” and “meetings with personalities.” This sort of spectacular
commodity, which can obviously circulate only because of the increased poverty
of the corresponding realities, just as obviously fits among the pilot-articles
of modernized sales techniques by being payable on credit.

155.

While the consumption of cyclical time in ancient societies was consistent with
the real labor of those societies, the pseudo-cyclical consumption of the
developed economy is in contradiction with the abstract irreversible time of
its production. While cyclical time was the time of immobile illusion, really
lived, spectacular time is the time of self-changing reality, lived in
illusion.

66.

Every given commodity fights for itself, cannot acknowledge the others, and
attempts to impose itself everywhere as if it were the only one. The spectacle,
then, is the epic poem of this struggle, an epic which cannot be concluded by
the fall of any Troy. The spectacle does not sing the praises of men and their
weapons, but of commodities and their passions. In this blind struggle every
commodity, pursuing its passion, unconsciously realizes something higher: the
becoming-world of the commodity, which is also the becoming-commodity of the
world. Thus, by means of a ruse of commodity logic, what’s specific in the
commodity wears itself out in the fight while the commodity-form moves toward
its absolute realization.

198.

Those who denounce the absurdity or the perils of incitement to waste in the
society of economic abundance do not understand the purpose of waste. They
condemn with ingratitude, in the name of economic rationality, the good
irrational guardians without whom the power of this economic rationality would
collapse. For example, Boorstin, in L’Image, describes the commercial
consumption of the American spectacle but never reaches the concept of
spectacle because he thinks he can exempt private life, or the notion of “the
honest commodity,” from this disastrous exaggeration. He does not understand
that the commodity itself made the laws whose “honest” application leads to the
distinct reality of private life and to its subsequent reconquest by the social
consumption of images.