STEFANOS GEROULANOScommodity capitalism and the reduction to representation of ‘‘all that was once directly
lived’’?^82 Anselm Jappe writes that, for Debord:
The spectacle is the heir of religion... the old religion projected man’s own power
into the heavens where it took on the appearance of a god opposed to man, a foreign
entity. The spectacle performs the same operation on earth. The greater the power
that man attributed to gods of his own creation, the more powerless he himself felt;
humanity behaves similarly with respect to powers that it has created and allowed to
escape and that now ‘‘reveal themselves to us in full force.’’^83While I am not convinced by Jappe’s heavens/earth dichotomy, he is correct in presenting
the spectacle/religion connection as one of analogy and historical derivation.^84 Indeed, it
should be clear from the few quotes used above that, without speaking the language of
religion, Debord’s thought invokes theology both in terms of the derivation (the histori-
cal/genealogical descent) of the spectacle out of a medieval religious world and in terms
of an isomorphism between past theocracies and the spectacular present.
But there is more to Debord’s understanding of the connections between theology
and spectacular domination. On the one hand, Debord’s notion of the spectacle carries
in it a theory of representation and idolatry that fundamentally defines his idea of modern
life as a bastardized experience of the religious. On the other, his theory of time and
history answers why one must take the spectacle not merely as the expression of a disen-
chanted, secularized, reified society with a religious past but also as the perfection and
visualized realization of the potentials of such a past. Debord’s version of theoscopy coim-
plicates these two approaches in constructing an anaesthetized subject dominated by a
regime wherein the visual corrupts any sort of pure engagement or interaction and forces
relations simulating faith to mask this effect.^85
Spectacle
Debord insists that the power of the spectacle today retains and redeploys the religious
aspect that it had possessed in earlier ages.^86 What it doesnotdo is permit all that this
aspect can claim to deliver—unlike the unified ‘‘mythical order’’ that masters arranged in
prespectacular times.^87 While the sacred,in its totality, used to deliver a certain sort of
existence and to promise other possibilities, the spectacle, in its ambiguous modernity,
‘‘depicts what society can deliver, but within this depiction what is permitted is rigidly
distinguished from what is possible.’’^88 What one faces in the spectacle is nothing less
than a false god, a poor parallel to promises of another age that today no longer hinge on
their religious foundation or ideology.^89 Raised in the form of the commodity, such false
gods offer only a present of illusion and consequently serve the very power that ‘‘creates
[society’s] concrete unfreedom.’’^90
PAGE 644644.................16224$ CH32 10-13-06 12:37:27 PS