THEOSCOPYwhich still dominated the sphere of production and the irreversible time which was the
theater of conflicts and realignments between peoples.’’^105 Semi-historicalreligion pre-
sented itself in opposition to history by postulating an eternity based on cyclical time but
superior to it, separated from it, which could be located in the future. Debord extends
this to argue that religion, a radical opposition to historical time through the invention
offinality,^106 served as a revolutionary turn to eternity qua promise of nonmastery, of
return to a prehistorical, quasi-mythical past. As such, religion was revolutionary rather
than cooperative, with classes representing mastery. The promise of an alternative sort of
time was repeated in the early modern peasant revolts: ‘‘a millenarian utopianism aspiring
tobuild heaven on earthbrought back to the forefront an idea that had been at the
origin of semi-historical religion, when the early Christian communities, like the Judaic
messianism from which they sprang, responded to the troubles and misfortunes of their
time by announcing the imminent realization of God’s Kingdom, and so added an ele-
ment of disquiet and subversion to ancient society.’’^107 But in each case the promise of a
postapocalyptic fulfillment, first in the restoration of a prehistorical world, thenin the
historical one, turned to aid the oppressive regulation of society through irreversible his-
torical time, engendering a society that could find temporary relief only in afestival.In
their hopes and even their failures, Debord continues, ‘‘modern revolutionary hopes are
not an irrational sequel to the religious passion of millenarianism.’’^108 The subsequent
‘‘victory of the bourgeoisie’’ brought about the instauration of two more types of tempo-
rality,pseudo-cyclicaltime andreifiedorspectaculartime.^109 Pseudo-cyclical time is the
investment of ‘‘false variants’’ (like the work day or vacations) with ‘‘the natural vestiges
of cyclical time.’’^110 This final nail in the coffin of prehistorical time, Debord says, is time
as we understand it today, a time of ‘‘homogeneous and exchangeable units’’ without
‘‘any qualitative dimension.’’^111
With the reifying effect of commodities on culture, society living under pseudo-
cyclical time has instituted the era of the spectacle, a time in which masters (and the
world that has escaped them to produce a false order of its own) are able to organizethe
entirety of human life, even in the spheres of privacy and consumption. It is an era when
the promise of a postapocalyptic time has become reality, even though it has become the
reality of an empire of boredom, an era in which time is synonymous with the spectacle’s
antihistorical, unchanging, everlasting present.^112 In the spectacle, what has gone terribly
wrong is that the humanization of time has collapsed into dehumanized reification, break-
ing the direct connection, even the equivalence, between man and time that supposedly
existed in the past. With the rise of the commodity came the suppression of all that is
human in humanized time and the transformation of time into the prime means of cen-
tral, false promises.^113 If we are to drive Debord’s consideration of millenarianism to its
extreme, the spectacle is at once the time-epoch that cannot be saved and the preparatory
era of an apocalyptic time: rather than a secular, atheist modernity dominated by images,
the present is the culmination of the whole history of religious and temporal metaphysics,
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