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All of this took place in what situationist Guy Debord had called "the heaven of the spectacle." "I am nothing and I should be everything," a young Karl Marx had written, defining the revolutionary impulse. "the spectacle," as Debord developed the concept through the 1950s and 1960s, was at once the kidnapping of that impulse and its prison. It was a wonderful prison, where all of life was staged as a permanent show - a show, Debord wrote, where "everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation," a beautiful work of art. The only problem was absolute: "in the case where the self is merely represented and ideally presented," ran a quote from Hegel on the first page of La socit du spectacle, a book of critical theory Debord published in 1967, "there it is not actual: where it is by proxy, it is not." "The spectacle," Debord said, was "capital accumulated until it becomes an image." A never-ending accumulation of spectacles - advertisements, entertainments, traffic, skyscrapers, political campaigns, department stores, sports events, newscasts, art tours, foreign wars, space launchings - made a modern world, a world in which all communication flowed in one direction, from the powerful to the powerless. One could not respond, or talk back, or intervene, but one did not want to. In the spectacle, passivity was simultaneously the means and the end of a great hidden project, a project of social control. On the terms of its particular form of hegemony the spectacle naturally produced not actors but spectators: modern men and women, the citizens of the most advanced societies on earth, who were thrilled to watch whatever it was they were given to watch. As Debord drew the picture, these people were members of democratic societies: democracies of false desire. One could not intervene, but one did not want to, because as a mechanism of social control the spectacle dramatized an inner spectacle of participation, of choice. In the home, one chose between television programs; in the city, one chose between the countless variations of each product on the market. Like a piece of avant-garde performance art, the spectacle dramatized an ideology of freedom.
--Lipstick Traces: a secret history of the 20th century, by Greil Marcus
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