The Revolution of Everyday Life/ Fragments

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Chapter 2 § 4

Instead of basing our lives on our sovereignty, we try to base our sovereignty on other people's lives.

Chapter 4 § 3

Another word about the alibis of power. Suppose that a tyrant took pleasure in throwing prisoners who had been flayed alive into a small cell; suppose that to hear their screams and see them scramble each time they brushed against one another amused him a lot, at the same time causing him to meditate on human nature and the curious behaviour of men. Suppose that at the same time and in the same country there were philosophers and wise men who explained to the worlds of science and art that suffering had to do with the collective life of men, the inevitable presence of Others, society as such -- wouldn't we be right to consider these men the tyrant's watchdogs?

Chapter 5 §1

The duty to produce alienates the passion for creation. Productive labour is part and parcel of the technology of law and order. The working day grows shorter as the empire of conditioning extends. ....

The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry. Already the front against forced labour is being formed; its gestures of refusal are moulding the consciousness of the future. Every call for productivity in the conditions chosen by capitalist and Soviet economy is a call to slavery....

The bourgeoisie does not dominate, it exploits. It does not need to be master, it prefers to use. Why has nobody seen that the principle of productivity simply replaced the principle of feudal authority? Why has nobody wanted to understand?

Is it because work ameliorates the human condition and saves the poor, at least in illusion, from eternal damnation? Undoubtedly, but today it seems that the carrot of happier tomorrows has smoothly replaced the carrot of salvation in the next world. In both cases the present is always under the heel of oppression.

Chapter 6 § 1

From this moment, the point of contact between the two powers becomes the point of decompression. To identify the enemy with Evil and crown one’s own side with the halo of Good has the strategic advantage of ensuring unity of action by channelling the energy of the combatants. But this manoeuvre demands the annihilation of the enemy. (Balance) hesitate before such a prospect; for the radical destruction of the enemy would include the destruction of what their own side has in common with the enemy.

As soon as the leader of the game turns into a Leader. the principle of hierarchy is saved, and the Revolution sits down to preside over the execution of the revolutionaries. We must never forget that the revolutionary project belongs to the masses alone; leaders help it, Leaders betray it. To begin with, the real struggle takes place between the leader of the game and the Leader.

The temporal masters of Christianity were resolved that only they should be entitled to treat of the difference between the master of Good and the master of Evil. They were the great intermediaries through which the choice of one side or the other had to pass; they controlled the paths to salvation and damnation, and this control was more important to them than salvation and damnation themselves.

Individualism, alcoholism, collectivism, activism... the variety of ideologies shows that there are a hundred ways of being on the side of power. There is only one way to be radical. The wall that must be knocked down is immense, but it has been cracked so many times that soon a single cry will be enough to bring it crashing to the ground. Let the formidable reality of the third force emerge at last from the mists of history, with all the individual passions that have fuelled the insurrections of the past! Soon we shall find that an energy is locked up in everyday life which can move mountains and abolish distances.

Chapter 7 § 2

In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy: equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, and freedom through consumption. The dictatorship of consumer goods has finally destroyed the barriers of blood, lineage and race; this would be good cause for celebration were it not that consumption, by its logic of things, forbids all qualitative difference and recognizes only differences of quantity between values and between men. The distance has not changed between those who possess a lot and those who possess a small but ever-increasing amount; but the intermediate stages have multiplied, and have, so to speak, brought the two extremes, rulers and ruled, closer to the same centre of mediocrity. To be rich nowadays merely means to possess a large number of poor objects.

Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume, the hellish cycle is complete. In the realm of economism, survival is both necessary and sufficient. This is the fundamental truth of bourgeois society. But it is also true that a historical period based on such an antihuman truth can only be a period of transition, an intermediate stage between the unenlightened life that was lived by the feudal masters and the life that will be constructed rationally and passionately by the masters without slaves.

Chapter 8 § 2

In order to consume, the specialist makes others consume according to a cybernetic programme whose hyperrationality of exchange will abolish sacrifice... and man. If pure exchange ever comes to regulate the modes of existence of the robot-citizens of the cybernetic democracy, sacrifice will cease to exist. Objects need no justification to make them obedient. Sacrifice forms no part of the programme of machines, than it is of a quite opposite project, the project of the whole human being.

Chapter 9 § 2

Technological organisation can't be destroyed from the outside. It's collapse is the result of internal decay. Far from being punished for its Promethean aspirations, it is dying because it never escaped from the dialectic of master and slave. Even if the cybernauts did come to power they'd have a hard time staying there. The very best they can offer has already been turned down in these words from a black worker to a white boss (Presence Africaine, 1956): "When we first saw your trucks and planes we thought that you were gods. Then, after a few years we learned how to drive your trucks, as we shall soon learn how to fly your planes, and we understood that what interested you most was manufacturing trucks and planes and making money. For our part, what we are interested in is using them. Now, you are just our metal-workers."

Chapter 10 § 1

Any excitement that could still be found in the pursuit of pleasure is fast disintegrating into a panting succession of mechanical gestures, and one hopes in vain that their rhythm will speed up enought to reach even the semblance of orgasm. The quantitative Eros of speed, novelty, love-against-the-clock is disfiguring the real face of pleasure everywhere.

Chapter 11 § 1

The historical crisis of language indicates the possibility of superseding it towards the poetry of action, towards the great game with signs.

§ 2

The protection provided by masters has lost its justification since the mechanical solicitude of gadgets theoretically ended the necessity for slaves. From now on, the ultima ratio of the rulers is the deliberately maintained terror of a thermonuclear apocalypse. Peaceful coexistence guarantees their existence. Power no longer protects the people; it protects itself against the people. Today, this inhumanity spontaneously created by men has become simply the inhuman prohibition of all creation.

§ 4

In this Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Marx writes:

Theory becomes a material force once it has got hold of the masses. Theory is capable of getting hold of men once it demonstrates its truth with regard to man, once it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp something at its roots. But for man the root is man himself.

In short, radical theory gets hold of the masses because it comes from them in the first place. It is the repository of spontaneous creativity, and its job is to ensure the striking power of this creativity. It is revolutionary technique at the service of poetry.

Whenever the powers-that-be get their hands on theory, it turns into ideology: an argument ad hominem against man in general. Radical theory comes out of the individual, being-as-subject: it penetrates the masses through what is most creative in each person, through subjectivity and the desire for realisation. Ideological conditioning is quite the opposite: the technical management of the inhuman, the weight of things. It turns men into objects which have no meaning apart from the Order in which they have their place. It assembles them in order to isolate them, making the crowd into a multiplicity of solitudes.

In a general way, the fight for language is the fight for the freedom to live, for the reversal of perspective. The battle is between metaphysical facts and the reality of facts: I mean between facts conceived statistically as part of a system of interpretation of the world and facts understood in their development by the praxis which transforms them.

Power can't be overthrown like a government. The united front against authority covers the whole extent of everyday life and engages the vast majority of men. To know how to live is to know how to fight against renunciation without ever giving an inch. Let nobody underestimate power's skill in stuffing its slaves with words to the point of making them the slaves of its words.

What weapons do we have to secure our freedom? We can mention three:

  • 1. Information should be corrected in the direction of poetry, news deciphered, official terms translated (so that "society", in the perspective opposed to power, becomes "racket" or "area of hierarchical power") -- leading eventually to a glossary or encyclopaedia (Diderot was well aware of their importance and so are the Situationists).
  • 2. Open dialogue, the language of dialectic; conversation, and all forms of non-spectacular discussion
  • 3. What Jakob Boehme called "sensual speech" (sensualische Sprache) "because it is a clear mirror of the senses". And the author of the Way to God elaborates: "in sensual speech all spirits converse directly, and have no need of any language, because theirs is the language of nature." if you remember what I have called the recreation of nature, the language Boehme talks about clearly becomes the language of spontaneity, of "doind", of individual and collective poetry; language centred on realisation, leading lived experience out of the cave of history. This is also connected with what Paul Brousse and Ravachol understood by "propoganda of the deed"

There is a silent communication; it is well known to lovers. At this stage language seems to lose its importance as essential mediation, thought is no longer a distraction (in the sense of leading us away from ourselves), words and signs become a luxury, an exuberance. think of those bantering conversations with their baroque of cries and caresses which are so surprisingly ridiculous for those who do not share the lovers' intoxication.

The language of the whole man will be a whole language: perhaps the end of the old language of words. Inventing this language means reconstructing man right down to his unconscious. Totality is hacking its way through the fractured non-totality of thoughts, words and actions towards itself. We will have to speak until we can do without words.

Chapter 12 § 1

Humanity has never been short of justifications for giving up what is human. ln fact some people possess a veritable reflex of submission, an irrational terror of freedom; this masochism is everywhere visible in everyday life. With what agonizing facility we can give up a wish, a passion, stemming from the most essential part of ourselves. With what passivity, what inertia, we can accept living or acting for some thing--'thing' being the operative word, a word whose dead weight always seems to carry the day. lt is hard to be oneself, so we give up as quickly as possible, seizing whatever pretext offers itself: love of children, of reading, of artichokes, etc, etc. Such is the abstract generality of the ill that our desire for a cure tends to evaporate.

§ 2

The refusal of sacrifice is the refusal to be bartered. There is nothing in the world of things, exchangeable for money or not, which can be treated as equivalent to a human being. The individual is irreducible. He is subject to change but not to being exchanged.

Chapter 14 § 1

The organization of appearances is a system for protecting the facts. A racket. lt represents the facts in a mediated reality to prevent them emerging in unmediated form. Unitary power organized appearances as myth. Fragmentary power organizes appearances as spectacle. Challenged, the coherence of myth became the myth of coherence. Magnified by history, the incoherence of the spectacle turns into the spectacle of incoherence (eg, pop art, a contemporary form of consumable putrefaction, is also an expression of the contemporary putrefaction of consumption) (1). The poverty of 'the drama' as a literary genre goes hand in hand with the colonization of social space by theatrical attitudes. Enfeebled on the stage, theatre battens on to everyday life and attempts to dramatize everyday behaviour. Lived experience is poured into the moulds of roles. The job of perfecting roles has been turned over to experts.

The ideal world," says Nietzsche, "is a lie invented to deprive reality of its value, its meaning, its truth. Until now the ideal has been the curse of reality. This lie has so pervaded humanity that it has been perverted and has falsified itself even in its deepest instincts, even to the point where it bows down to values directly opposed to those which formerly ensured progress by ensuring the self-transformation of the present."

On the other hand the spectacle is fast approaching a saturation point, the point immediately prior to the eruption of everyday reality. For roles now operate on a level perilously close to their own negation: already the average failure is hard put to it to play his role properly, and some maladjusted people refuse their roles altogether. As it falls apart, the spectacular system starts scraping the barrel, drawing nourishment from the lowest social strata. It is forced, in fact, to eat its own shit. Thus tone-deaf singers, talent-free artists, reluctant laureates and pallid stars of all kinds emerge periodically to cross the firmament of the media, their rank in the hierarchy being determined by the regularity with which they achieve this feat.

Chapter 15 § 2

Which leaves the hopeless cases those who reject all roles and those who develop a theory and practice of this refusal. From such maladjustment to spectacular society a new poetry of real experience and a reinvention of life are bound to spring. The deflation of roles precipitates the decompression of spectacular time in favour of lived space-time. What is living intensely if not the mobilization and redirection of the current of time, so long arrested and lost in appearances? Are not the happiest moments of our lives glimpses of an expanded present that rejects Power's accelerated time which dribbles away year after year, for as long as it takes to grow old?

There is no such thing as mental illness. It is merely a convenient label for grouping and isolating cases where identification has not occurred properly. Those whom Power can neither govern nor kill, it taxes with madness.

§ 6

According to a Chinese philosopher, "Confluence tends towards the void. In total confluence presence stirs."

Beneath dissociation lies unity; beneath fatigue, concentrated energy; beneath the fragmentation of the self, radical subjectivity. In other words, the qualitative. ...When people are overtaken by joie de vivre they are lost to leadership and stage management of any kind. Only by starving the revolutionary masses of joy can one become their master: uncontained, collective pleasure can only go from victory to victory

Chapter 16 § 1

Stalin's show trials proved that it only takes a little patience and perseverance to get a man to accuse himself of every imaginable crime and appear in public begging to be executed. Now that we are aware of such techniques, and on our guard against them, how can we fail to see that the set of mechanisms controlling us uses the very same insidious persuasiveness though with more powerful means at its disposal, and with greater persistence when it lays down the law: "You are weak, you must grow old, you must die." Consciousness acquiesces, and the body follows suit. I am fond of a remark of Artaud's, though it must be set in a materialist light: "We do not die because we have to die: we die because one day, and not so long ago, our consciousness was forced to deem it necessary."

Whatever you possess possesses you in return. Everything that makes you into an owner adapts you to the order of things makes you old.

Chapter 17 § 1

As a palliative to the absence of real life we are offered death on an instalment plan. A world that condemns us to a bloodless death is naturally obliged to propagate the taste for blood. Where survival sickness reigns, the desire to live lays hold spontaneously of the weapons of death: senseless murder and sadism flourish. For passion destroyed is reborn in the passion for destruction.

No one has the right to ignore the fact that the sway of conditioning accustoms them to survive on one hundredth of their potential for life. So general is survival sickness that the slightest concentration of lived experience could not fail to unite the largest number of people in a common will to live. The negation of despair would of necessity become the construction of a new life. The rejection of economic logic (which only economizes on life) would of necessity entail the death of economics and carry us beyond the realm of survival.

Chapter 18 § 2

There is no mystery in the fact that a totalitarian regime is the price paid when the demand for total freedom is renounced once a handful of partial freedoms has been won. How could it be otherwise!

The revolution of daily life will be the work of those who, with varying degrees of facility, are able to recognize the seeds of total self-realization preserved, contradicted and dissimulated within ideologies of every kind and who cease consequently to be either mystified or mystifiers.

§ 5

The person who walks under a ladder to prove their freedom from superstition proves just the opposite

§ 6

Thus the explosion of myth frees an energy and creativity too long syphoned away from authentic experience into religious transcendence and abstraction. The interregnum between the collapse of classical philosophy and the erection of the Christian myth saw an unprecedented effervescence of thought and action. A thousand life-styles blossomed. Then came the dead hand of Rome, co-opting whatever it could not destroy utterly.

Chapter 19 § 1

The game we are about to play is the game of our creativity. Its rules are radically opposed to the rules and laws controlling our society. It is a game of loser wins: what you are is more important than what is said, what is lived is more important than what is represented on the level of appearances. This game must be played right through to its conclusion. To cede an inch in one's will to live without reserve is to surrender all along the line.

Chapter 20 § 1

Human beings are in a state of creativity twenty-four hours a day. Once revealed, the scheming use of freedom by the mechanisms of domination produces a backlash in the form of an idea of authentic freedom inseparably bound up with individual creativity. The passion to create which issues from the consciousness of constraint can no longer be pressed into the service of production, consumption or organization. (1). Spontaneity is the mode of existence of creativity; not an isolated state, but the unmediated experience of subjectivity.... Poetry is the organizer of creative spontaneity to the extent that it reinforces spontaneity's hold on reality. Poetry is an act which engenders new realities; it is the fulfilment of radical theory, the revolutionary act par excellence.

§ 3

Once the light of the qualitative is shed upon them, the most varied kinds of knowledge combine and form a magnetic bridge powerful enough to overthrow the weightiest traditions. The force of plain spontaneous creativity increases knowledge at an exponential rate.

§ 4

"What is poetry?", ask the aesthetes. And we may as well give them the obvious answer right away: poetry rarely involves poems these days. Most art works betray poetry. How could it be otherwise, when poetry and power are irreconcilable? At best, the artist's creativity is imprisoned, cloistered, within an unfinished oeuvre, awaiting the day when it will have the last word. Unfortunately, no matter how much importance the artist gives it, this last word, which is supposed to usher in perfect communication, will never be pronounced so long as the revolt of creativity has not realized art.

The African work of art -- poem, music, sculpture, or mask -- is not considered complete until it has become a form of speech, a word-in-action, a creative element which functions. Actually this is true for more than African art. There is no art in the world which does not seek to function; and to function -- even on the level of later co-optation -- consistently with the very same will which generated it, the will to live constantly in the euphoria of the moment of creation. Why is it that the work of the greatest artists never seems to have an end? The answer is that great art cries out in every possible way for realization, for the right to enter lived experience. The present decomposition of art is a bow perfectly readied for such an arrow.

Consumer society, as we well know, reduces art to a range of consumable products. The more vulgarized this reduction, the faster the rate of decomposition and the greater the chances for transcendence. That communication so urgently sought by the artist is cut off and prohibited even in the simplest relationships of everyday life. So true is this that the search for new forms of communication, far from being the preserve of painters and poets, is now part of a collective effort. In this way the old specialization of art has finally come to an end. There are no more artists because everyone is an artist. The work of art of the future will be the construction of a passionate life.

The object created is less important than the process which gives rise to it, the act of creating. What makes an artist is their state of creativity, not art galleries. Unfortunately, artists rarely recognize themselves as creators: most of the time they play to the gallery, exhibitionistically. A contemplative attitude before a work of art was the first stone thrown at the creator. They encouraged this attitude in the first place, but today it is their undoing: now it amounts to no more than a need to consume, an expression of the crassest economic imperatives. This is why there is no longer any such thing as a work of art in the classical sense of the word. Nor can there be such a thing. So much the better. Poetry is to be found everywhere: in the facts, in the events we bring about. The poetry of the facts, formerly always treated as marginal, now stands at the centre of everyone's concerns, at the centre of everyday life, a sphere which as a matter of fact it has never left.

Chapter 21 § 1

The master knows alienation by its positive pole, the slave by its negative pole; total mastery is equally refused both of them.

The superiority of the negative pole of alienation over the positive pole is that its integral revolt makes the project of absolute mastery the only solution. Slaves in struggle for the abolition of constraints reveal the moment through which history liquidates masters, and beyond history, there is the possibility of a new power over the things that they encounter, a power which no longer appropriates objects by appropriating people. But in the very course of a slowly elaborated history, it has been inevitable that the masters, instead of disappearing, have degenerated; there are no longer any masters, only slave-consumers of power, differing among themselves only in the degree and quantity of power consumed.

Chapter 22

Waiting for joyous tomorrows is what kills our joy today.

Whoever possesses the poetry of the present will experience the same adventure as the little Chinese boy who loved the Queen of the sea. He went to look for her at the bottom of the ocean. When he returned to the land he met an old man cutting roses who said to him: "My grandfather told me of a young boy who disappeared in the sea, and who had exactly the same name as you."

"Punctuality garners time" runs the esoteric tradition. Passed through the developing tray of history, the phrase of the Pistis Sophia - "One day of light is a million years in the world" ~ is exactly Lenin's remark that some revolutionary days are worth centuries.

It is always a matter of resolving the contradictions of the present, not stopping half way and getting 'distracted', but going straight for supersession. Collective work, the work of passion, the work of poetry and the work of the game (Eternity is the world of the game, said Boehme). However poor it may be, the present always contains true wealth, the wealth of possible creation.

Chapter 23 § 2

Each subjectivity is different from every other one, but all obey the same will to self-realisation. The problem is one of setting their variety in a common direction, of creating a united front of subjectivity. Any attempt to build a new life is subject to two conditions: first, that the realisation of each individual subjectivity will either take place in a collective form or it will not take place at all; and, secondly, that "To tell the truth, the only reason anyone fights is for what they love. Fighting for everyone else is only the consequence." (Saint-Just)

In the same way, all subjectivities are different from one another and yet all reveal a fundamental identity in their will to total self-realisation. Only because of this can one speak of a real "radical subjectivity".

Radical subjectivity is the common front of identity rediscovered. Those who cannot see themselves in other people are condemned fo ever to be strangers to themselvs. (alt-One's own quest searches for itself everywhere in others. "While I was on a mission in the state of Tchou", says Confucius, "I saw some piglets suckling their dead mother. After a short while they shuddered and went away. They had sensed that she could no longer see them and that she wasn't like them any more. What they loved in their mother wasn't her body, but whatever it was that made her body live." Likewise, what I am looking for in other people is the richest part of myself hidden within them. Can the reflex of identity spread naturally? One can only hope so. Certainly it's high time for it.)

And love is also an adventure; an attempt to break free of dishonesty. To approach someone in any spectacular, exhibitionistic way, is to condemn oneself to a reified relationship from the very first. The choice is between spectacular seduction - that of the playboy - and the seduction exercised by something that is qualitatively different - the person who is seductive because he isn't trying to seduce.

Love must be freed from its myths, from its images, from its spectacular categories; its authenticity must be strengthened and its spontaneity renewed. There is no other way of fighting its reification and its recuperation in the spectacle. Love can't stand either isolation or fragmentation; it is bound to overflow into the will to transform the whole of human activity, into the necessity of building a world where lovers feel themselves to be free everywhere.

The moment of love is the space-time of authentic lived experience, a present containing both the past and the future.

Freud defined the goal of Eros as unification or the search for union. But when he maintains that fear of being separated and expelled from the group comes from an underlying fear of castration, his proposition should be inverted. Fear of castration comes from the fear of being excluded, not the other way round. This anxiety becomes more marked as the isolation of individuals in an illusory community becomes more and more difficult to ignore.

§ 3

A society based on organised survival can only tolerate false, spectacular forms of play. But given the crisis of the spectacle, playfulness, distorted in every imaginable way, is being reborn everywhere. From now on it has all the features of social upheaval and, beyond its negativity, the foundations of a society of real participation can be detected. To play means to refuse leaders, self-sacrifice and roles, to embrace every form of self-realisation and to be utterly, painfully, honest with all one's friends.

The desire to play has returned to destroy the hierarchical society which banished it. At the same time it is setting up a new type of society, one based on real participation. It is impossible to foresee the details of such, a society - a society in which play is completely unrestricted - but one could expect to see the following characteristics:

  • rejection of all leaders and all hierarchies;
  • rejection of self-sacrifice;
  • rejection of roles;
  • freedom of genuine self-realisation;
  • transparent social relationships (alt-utter honesty)

Play comes to an end as soon as an authority crystallises, becomes absolute (alt-institutionalised) and assumes a magical aura.

The new innocence means the destruction of an order of things which has never done more than impede the art of living.

Chapter 25 § 1

Thus people cannot hope to control the laws governing their general history if they do not at the same time master their own individual histories.