10 quotes
A celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961)
A sign of a celebrity is often that his name is worth more than his services.
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961)
We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in their place.
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961)
The news leak is a pseudo‑event par excellence. In its origin and growth, the leak illustrates another axiom of the world of pseudo‑events: pseudo‑events produce more pseudo‑events.
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961)
The image, more interesting than its original, has become the original. The shadow has become the substance.
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961)
By a diabolical irony the very facsimiles of the world which we make on purpose to bring it within our grasp, to make it less elusive, have transported us into a new world of blurs.
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961)
As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism. The beloved Echo of our ancestors, the virgin America. has been abandoned. We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves.
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961)
In the age of pseudo‑events it is less the artificial simplification than the artificial complication of experience that confuses us. Whenever in the public mind a pseudo‑event competes for attention with a spontaneous event in the same field, the pseudo‑event will tend to dominate. What happens on television will overshadow what happens off television.
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961)
Pseudo‑events spawn other pseudo‑events in geometric progression. This is partly because every kind of pseudo-event (being planned) tends to become ritualized, with a protocol and a rigidity all its own. As each type of pseudo-event acquires this rigidity, pressures arise to produce other, derivative, forms of pseudo‑event which are more fluid, more tantalizing, and more interestingly ambiguous.
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961)
Pseudo‑events do, of course, increase our illusion of grasp on the world, what some have called the American illusion of omnipotence. Perhaps, we come to think, the world’s problems can really be settled by “statements,” by “Summit” meetings, by a competition of “prestige,” by overshadowing images, and by political quiz shows.
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961)