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THEOSCOPY

It is thus not entirely out of place to interpret many of Debord’s critiques of the
spectacle (and of spectacles—cinema, advertising, etc.) under the rubric of a critique of
representation, more specifically, of a sort ofBilderverbot. Representation in and through
the spectacle involves a critique of its false, illusive mask covering over a relation between
individuals and things that would otherwise remain independent and largely unmedi-
ated—transparent—or at least mediated by value and not by its abstraction.^91 Other
thinkers, notably Adorno—whoseMinima MoraliaDebord evokes, along with Marx’s
Capital, at the very beginning of hisSociety of the Spectacle^92 —have been discussed exten-
sively in light of the thematic of the prohibition on images and its implications for repre-
sentation.^93 Debord has not. Yet how else can one read Debord’s elision between spectacle
and spectacles,^94 his rejection of the imagist character of spectacles and of the spectacle in
general qua nonlife,^95 if not as a rejection of idolatry mapped onto a terrain defined by
the abstraction and false representation of capital, alienation, and merchandise?^96 More-
over, given Debord’s rampant use of the opposition between the apparent and the real, is
this conception of the spectacle anything but an aggressive conception of the immanence
of modernity as universalized capitalist idolatry?

For one to whom the real world becomes real images, mere images are transformed

into real beings... since the spectacle’s job is to cause a world that is no longer

directly perceptible to be seen via different specialized mediations, it is inevitable that

it should elevate the human sense of sight to the special place once occupied by

touch; the most abstract of the senses, and the most easily deceived, sight is naturally

the most readily adaptable to present-day society’s generalized abstraction. The spec-

tacle is by definition immune from human activity, inaccessible to any projected

review or correction.^97

Through these operations, gods of the past have evolved into the form and structural
force of images, have become nothing but images; these images in turn serve pseudo-
gratification and social separation, adulating the socio-economically oppressive and pro-
viding a ‘‘world beyond’’ throughout the spectacle that turns human power against it-
self—the very ‘‘world beyond’’ that once served as the residing place of the gods, ‘‘those
cloud-enshrouded entities’’ that ‘‘have now been brought down to earth.’’^98 More impor-
tant than this ‘‘down to earth’’ is the idea that, once it has been brought down to earth,
once it has become a part of the spectacle, the divine has lost itself and become recoded
in the spectacle’s power to dominate man and distance itself from him.^99 In the reinscrip-
tion of idolatry, of the spectacle as a ‘‘specious form of the sacred,’’^100 the critique of
representation (as erasure of the real/apparent distinction and as destruction of a suppos-
edly transparent relation of man to things) specifically reconstructs the subject (viewer,
consumer) as an anaesthetized victim of images and economic power.^101

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