“Everything that was…has receded”. From the beginning, “The Society of the Spectacle” is marked by an ontological thesis, and from the beginning this thesis is vitalist in tenor. That which lives is a living unity, an integral whole. It composes a world. That which carries on its non-life in representation, however, is fragmented and separate. It accumulates, a heap of broken images; and the sum of its accumulation is a pseudo-world. The unity of the spectacle is a “concrete inversion” of the unity of the living, a substitute One.

The supplementary One of the spectacle usurps the place of “everything that was directly lived”, pushing it into the background. It is, simultaneously, a product of life, an affirmation of all that life makes appear, and a “visible negation” of life itself. While the essence of life is co-existence, the integrity of social experience, the essence of the spectacle is separation, the “autonomous movement of the nonliving”. It is thus at the level of nomos and essence that life and the spectacle are opposed. The struggle between them goes to the very heart of things.

How does the nonliving move, and move “autonomously”? It borrows life from the living, materiality from the material. Two theses: i) “the spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images”; ii) “[the spectacle] is a worldview that has actually been materialized, a view of a world that has become objective”. The nonliving mediates the social relations of the living, and is materialized by their active “production” of its “particular manifestations - news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment”. The spectacle is spectral, an apparition clothing itself in newsprint. It becomes objective.

What is “a social relation…that is mediated”? One thing it is not is “directly lived”. Mediation diminishes life, causes it to recede: to become attached to goals that are not immediately its own, to defer gratification and permit desire to be inveigled into “the convolutions of your simple wish”. The spectacle’s fantasies of unhindered fulfillment, the tropical vacations and zipless fucks promoted by its star-commodities, are negative images of the dissatisfaction that it itself engenders by seducing people into relations with things rather than with each other - or with each other as things. Life directed towards its own unmediated goals would circumvent or ignore the pseudo-goods posited by the spectacle.

On the face of it, then, “The Society of the Spectacle” is a vitalist, affirmationist text. Its thorough-going rejection of existing society, inasmuch as it is a society of the spectacle, is a rejection of everything that diminishes life, that “falsifies” or misdirects the social process and mires it in the slough of mediation. It is a condemnation of whatever separates itself from life and moves autonomously among the living, seducing them into following somnambulistically in its wake. The great question of the text is thus: is there any power that can shatter the false One of the spectacle and recall the sleepers to their waking lives?