'There is no place left where people can discuss the realities which concern them, because they can never lastingly free themselves from the crushing presence of media discourse and of the various forces organized to relay it . . . Unanswerable lies have succeeded in eliminating public opinion, which first lost the ability to make itself heard and then very quickly dissolved altogether . . . Once one controls the mechanism which operates the only form of social verification to be fully and universally recognized, one can say what one likes . . . Spectacular power can similarly deny whatever it wishes to, once, or three times over, and change the subject: knowing full well there is no danger of riposte, in its own space or any other.'
Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle [1988], trans. Malcolm Imrie, London 1998, pp. 13–19 , Quoted in:
T.J. Clark etc, “The State, the Spectacle and September 11”, from which comes this neat encapsulation of the Spectacle:
“The notion ‘spectacle’ was intended, then, as a first stab at characterizing a new form of, or stage in, the accumulation of capital. What it named preeminently was the submission of more and more facets of human sociability—areas of everyday life, forms of recreation, patterns of speech, idioms of local solidarity, kinds of ethical or aesthetic insubordination, the endless capacities of human beings to evade or refuse the orders brought down to them from on high—to the deadly solicitations (the lifeless bright sameness) of the market.”