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For the first time in history it is possible to govern without the slightest understanding of art or of what is authentic and what is impossible.
Guy Debord, Commentaires sur la société du spectacle
As for the subject of history, it can be nothing other than the self-production of the living—living people becoming masters and possessors of their own historical world and of their own fully conscious adventures.
Guy Debord, La société du spectacle §74
“Once there was history, but not any more,” because the class of owners of the economy, which is inextricably tied to economic history, must repress every other irreversible use of time because it is directly threatened by them all.
Guy Debord, La société du spectacle §143
Universal history was born in cities, and it reached maturity with the city’s decisive victory over the country.
Guy Debord, La société du spectacle §176
The history that threatens this twilight world could potentially subject space to a directly experienced time.
Guy Debord, La société du spectacle §178
The end of the history of culture manifests itself in two opposing forms: the project of culture’s self-transcendence within total history, and its preservation as a dead object for spectacular contemplation. The first tendency has linked its fate to social critique, the second to the defense of class power.
Guy Debord, La société du spectacle §184
Because history itself haunts modern society like a specter, pseudo-histories have to be concocted at every level of life-consumption in order to preserve the threatened equilibrium of the present frozen time.
Guy Debord, La société du spectacle §200
No loser loves history.
Guy Debord, Réfutation de tous les jugements
History (the transformation of reality) cannot presently be used in everyday life because the people who live that everyday life are the product of a history over which they have no control. It is of course they themselves who make this history, but they do not make it freely or consciously.
Internationale situationniste #6