STEFANOS GEROULANOSIn Debord, the consumer is thus a component of the spectacle insofar as he sees and
almost automatically agrees with what he is shown—in other words, insofar as he fails to
distinguish between the layers of capitalist exchange and domination that formulate and
found the spectacle as the modern mode of being par excellence. The consumer is by no
means a privileged viewer, indeed, any claim to capacious spectatorship is but a laughable
effort to take upon oneself an impossible ideality, especially insofar as complete self-
distantiation from the spectacle is not possible. Is it possible to say, then, that there is a
spectacle without a proper, privileged spectator (except for Debord himself)?^102 Does the
spectacle, in its very tautology, serve as the sole organizer of forces ‘‘in’’ it? Is it possible
that the symbolism of ‘‘the sun that never sets on the empire of modern passivity... that
covers the entire globe,baskingin the perpetual warmth of its own glory’’ involves only
the spectacle itself as the system that recognizes and can traverse the relations between
men and things it sets up?^103
I will return to this problem; it is important to suggest provisionally, nevertheless,
that in its lack of epistemological tools to determine the status of seeing, the spectacular
subject that fails to see and see through the spectacle reinforces the capitalist idolatry for
which the epistemologically unavailable God of the spectacle is the spectacle itself, in its
sublime position at once doomed and undefeatable.
Time and History
In sections 5 and 6 ofSociety of the Spectacle, Debord not only explains his notions of
influence and historical derivation but, more significantly, answers why one must take
the spectacle to be a world whose operational bases remain irreducibly religious.
In an elaborate and highly personal theorization of time and the meaning of history,
which, due to its idiosyncrasy, has gone unnoticed, Debord conceives of time as funda-
mentally independent of man. The first sort of time that human societies experienced was
cyclical(day/night, the seasons, etc.)—an era in which humans were incapable of control-
ling nature’s repetitions in any way. The humanization of time (which, for Debord, is also
the ‘‘temporalization of man’’^104 ) was effected only through the intervention of society.
Rejecting and overcoming cyclical time, the ruling classes of masters separated themselves
from other men and initiated the imposition of history. This overcoming cultivated kin-
ship bonds and invented myth as a historical basis for the protection of mastery, but these
changes combined to make rulership dependent on the construction of time and history
it thought it had overcome. History (for Debord the masters’ imposition of a temporal-
ized archive) served in this sense to instituteirreversibletime, as well as, on certain occa-
sions, to found separation at varying levels and to enforce conceptions of the present as
radically distinguished from both past and future.
At this point in the development of man, semi-historical and monotheistic religions
began to operate as ‘‘a compromise between myth and history, between the cyclical time
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