Unity and Division in Appearances

> A new, animated polemic has spread through the countryside, on the philosophical front, between the concepts 'one divides into two' and 'two become one'. The debate is a struggle between those for, and those against, the materialist dialectic, a struggle between conceptions of the world: the proletarian and the bourgeois conception. Those who maintain that 'one divides into two' is the fundamental law of things have grasped the point of materialist dialectics; those who maintain that the fundamental law of things is that 'two become one' are against dialectical materialism. The two sides have drawn a demarcation line between them, and are fundamentally opposed. This polemic is reflected, at the ideological level, of the sharp and complex class conflict which is playing out in China and in the world.

--- _Red Flag_, Peking, 21 September 1964

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The spectacle, like modern society, is at once united and divided. Like it, it builds unification upon demolition. But the contradiction, once it emerges in the form of the spectacle, is in turn contradicted by an inversion of meaning; in which it is division that is united, at the same time as apparent unity that is divided.

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This struggle between powers which are created by the birth of the same socio-economic system, takes the form of official contradiction, and is a form of real unity; true of world affairs as it is internally to every country.

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The phoney spectacular struggles between rival forms of separated power are, simultaneously, real, in that they express the inequalities and conflict of the system, contradictory class interests, and the class sub-divisions which abide by that system, and which define their participation within its jurisdiction. In the same way that advanced economic development involves different priorities confronting each other, so also totalitarian economies controlled by State bureaucracies, and countries in a state of colonisation or semi-colonisation, are defined by their own peculiar circumstances of production and power. These differences and conflicts, measured against different criteria, in the spectacle, can be seen as absolutely distinct societies. In reality, though, these particulars are merely particular sectors in the overall universal system: in capitalism, the single unitary movement which has made the planet its battlefield.

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Spectacular societies do not just dominate under-developed regions by way of their economic hegemony. They dominate them _as the society of the spectacle_. Where the material base is absent, modern society has still spectacularly invaded the surface society of every continent. It defines the local ruling classes' program and makeup. In the same way it provides pseudo-goods to consume, it offers false revolutionary models to revolutionaries. The real spectacle of bureaucratic power that lays hold over industrialised countries is simply part of a total spectacle, and is its own general opposition and support. If the spectacle, in all its local diversities, can be seen as evidence of local administrative specialisations, that is because at heart, at the working level of the global system, there is a _global allocation of spectacular tasks_.

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In the first instance, the allocation of spectacular tasks, that protects the whole order, protects the dominant pole of its overall development. The spectacle's rationale is on the grounds of economic abundance, and it is from there that comes the rewards, of dominating the spectacular marketplace, despite ideological protectionist barriers, and local pretensions to autarky.

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Despite the chameleon-like properties of the spectacle, an overall _banalisation_ dominates it, despite the multiplication, in the form of highly developed consumption of commodities, of apparent goods and services to choose from. The relics of religion and family---in which survive the principal forms of inheriting class power---and the moral repression inherent in them, can also be part of an ostentatious enjoyment of _this_ world, since this world produces nothing but pseudo-enjoyment, containing repression within it. As well as complacent acceptance of the status quo, we can also find a similar, purely spectacular revolt: this is from the simple fact that dissatisfaction itself becomes a commodity, once economic abundance is capable of dealing with that raw material.

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Celebrities, the spectacular representations of living human beings, concentrate this banality in the form of images of possibilities. The point of a celebrity is to show _an apparent lived experience_, with which people can identify superficially, which must compensate for the erosion of their own actual productive lives. Celebrities exist to show various types of lifestyle, and of ways of understanding society, free to enjoy them _completely_. They embody the inaccessible end-result of social _labour_, displaying the by-products of that labour, which are magically transformed into their point; _power_ and _holidays_, the decision, and consumption, which are at the beginning and end of a process that is never discussed. Over here, governmental power can become a kind of pseudo-celebrity, over there, a celebrity may demand pseudo-power over consumption or life. However, since the celebrity's activities are not really completely free, neither are they actually choices.

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The agent of the spectacle who takes the stage as a celebrity is the opposite of an individual, the enemy of their own individuality as well as the individuality of others. Taking on the spectacle as a model to identify with, they renounce every autonomous quality they had, in order to obey the overall laws of the status quo. The celebrity of consumption, who at face value represents different types of personality, shows each of these types having equal access to full consumption, and enjoying in full its benefits. The decision-making celebrity must possess a complete stock of admirable human qualities. Amongst these, an official diversity is cancelled out by the official mutual resemblance, which is a presupposed excellence in everything. Khrushchev was made a general for winning the Battle of Kursk, not on the battlefield, but on its twentieth anniversary, when he was made Head of State. Kennedy remained an orator to the point of giving his own eulogy, because Theodore Sorensen kept writing for his successor in the style that had made the dead man so recognisable. Admirable men, in which the system is personified, are well known for not being what they seem, they become great men by lowering themselves beneath the reality of the meanest individual life, and we all know it.

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Spectacular abundance's false choices, choices residing in the juxtaposition of different competitive and collaborative spectacles, just as in the the juxtaposition of exclusive and interlinked roles (principally signified and carried by objects), become a struggle over illusory qualities, meant to create passion over what are actually trivialities. Thus, archaic false oppositions are being reborn, in regionalisms and racisms, which transfigure vulgar kinds of hierarchy in consumption, into superior ontologies. Thus, an unending series of derisory contests takes place, which mobilise a sense of the world as a game, from competitive sport, to elections. Wherever there is abundant consumption, the youth and the grown-up are spectacularly opposed to each other, in the most obvious form of false roles; since there is no such thing as an adult or a youth who is master of their own life. Youthfulness, and the changeability of existing things, is not even a property of those people who are young, but rather of the economic system, the dynamism of capitalism. It is _things_ that rule and which are young; which act on and replace themselves.

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