Guy Debord Quotes

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyper real.

In societies where modern conditions of productions prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation. The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be re-established. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation . . . The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.

... the age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials - worse: by their artificial resurrection in systems of signs, a more ductile material than meaning... It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself.

The pictures have a reality for me that the people don't. It is through the photographs that I know them.

The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

None of the activity stolen by work can be regained by submitting to what work has produced. - The Society of The Spectacle

In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

What I want to show in my work is the idea which hides itself behind so-called reality.

Movies are different from real life.

If a man went simply by what he saw, he might be tempted to affirm that the essence of democracy is melodrama.

In many respects, theater is still grappling with problems of reality and representation that the visual art movement realized were unimportant many years ago.

Photography does deal with 'truth' or a kind of superficial reality better than any of the other arts, but it never questions the nature of reality - it simply reproduces reality. And what good is that when the things of real value in life are invisible?

It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive.

I know that some filmmakers strive for a kind of naturalistic approach, but you're never going to capture something that's really natural - just the simple fact that you choose to put a frame around something means that you've already chosen one particular thing to put more attention on.

The present age ... prefers the sign to the thing signified … for in these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane.

The world you perceive is a drastically simplified model of the real world.

The transparency of a metaphor displays the glint of truth. But if a metaphor is taken for a reality, it then becomes dense and masks the truth it is meant to display.

You don't know reality until someone makes a fiction of it. Reality needs the completion of fiction.

We have to reflect the world that we live in.

I'm predisposed to believe we live in a complicated, enmeshed reality. There's no authentic or organic.

Film has to reflect the real world.

Both individuals and societies tell themselves stories to simplify and make sense of the messy chaos of reality.

Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.