Revolution of Everyday Life

Raoul Vaneigem, Donald Nicholson-Smith

Description

Originally published just months before the May 1968 upheavals in France, Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life offered a lyrical and aphoristic critique of the “society of the spectacle” from the point of view of individual experience. Whereas Debord’s masterful analysis of the new historical conditions that triggered the uprisings of the 1960s armed the revolutionaries of the time with theory, Vaneigem’s book described their feelings of desperation directly, and armed them with “formulations capable of firing point-blank on our enemies.”

“I realise,” writes Vaneigem in his introduction, “that I have given subjective will an easy time in this book, but let no one reproach me for this without first considering the extent to which the objective conditions of the contemporary world advance the cause of subjectivity day after day.”

Vaneigem names and defines the alienating features of everyday life in consumer society: survival rather than life, the call to sacrifice, the cultivation of false needs, the dictatorship of the commodity, subjection to social roles, and above all the replacement of God by the Economy. And in the second part of his book, “Reversal of Perspective,” he explores the countervailing impulses that, in true dialectical fashion, persist within the deepest alienation: creativity, spontaneity, poetry, and the path from isolation to communication and participation.

For “To desire a different life is already that life in the making.” And “fulfillment is expressed in the singular but conjugated in the plural.”

The present English translation was first published by Rebel Press of London in 1983. This new edition of The Revolution of Everyday Life has been reviewed and corrected by the translator and contains a new preface addressed to English-language readers by Raoul Vaneigem. The book is the first of several translations of works by Raoul Vaneigem that PM Press plans to publish in uniform volumes. Vaneigem’s classic work is to be followed by The Knight, the Lady, the Devil, and Death (2003) and The Inhumanity of Religion (2000).

Sujets

• Late capitalism
• Situationist International
• Socialism
• Anarchism
• Slogans

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 05 octobre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781604867824
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Revolution of Everyday Life
Raoul Vaneigem
Originally published as Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations by Éditions Gallimard (Paris). Copyright © 1967 by Éditions Gallimard.
Author’s preface to the first French mass-market (Folio) edition copyright © 1992 by Éditions Gallimard.
An earlier version of this translation first published in 1983 by Rebel Press (London) and Left Bank Books (Seattle); second edition, 1994.
First PM Press edition, 2012.
All rights reserved
English translation copyright © 2012 by Donald Nicholson-Smith.
The publication of this work has been facilitated by financial support from the French Community of Belgium.
Cet ouvrage publié dans le cadre du programme d’aide à la publication bénéficie du soutien du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères et du Service Culturel de l’Ambassade de France représenté aux Etats-Unis. This work received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States through their publishing assistance program.
Published by:
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Cover illustration by Jean-Marie Pierret
Cover design by François Rabet
Interior design by briandesign
ISBN: 978–1–60486–678–0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2009912461
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the USA on recycled paper, by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.
www.thomsonshore.com
Contents
Translator’s Acknowledgements
Author’s Preface to the Present Edition
The Revolution of Everyday Life
Introduction
PART ONE Power’s Perspective
I The Insignificant Signified
The Impossibility of Participation: Power as Sum of Constraints
II Humiliation
III Isolation
IV Suffering
V The Decline of Work
VI Decompression and the Third Force
The Impossibility of Communication: Power as Universal Mediation
VII The Age of Happiness
VIII Exchange and Gift
IX Technology and Its Mediated Use
X The Reign of Quantity
XI Mediated Abstraction and Abstracted Mediation
The Impossibility of Fulfilment: Power as Sum of Seductions
XII Sacrifice
XIII Separation
XIV The Organization of Appearances
XV Roles
XVI The Fascination of Time
Survival and Its Pseudo-Negation
XVII Survival Sickness
XVIII Unbuttressed Refusal
PART TWO Reversal of Perspective
XIX Reversal of Perspective
XX Creativity, Spontaneity and Poetry
XXI Masters Without Slaves
XXII The Space-Time of Lived Experience and the Rectification of the Past
XXIII The Unitary Triad: Fulfilment, Communication, Participation
XXIV The Interworld and the New Innocence
XXV You Won’t Fuck with Us Much Longer!
POSTSCRIPT (1972) A Toast to Revolutionary Workers
APPENDIX 1 Author’s Preface to the First French Mass-Market Edition (1992)
APPENDIX 2 Concerning the Translation
INDEX
Translator’s Acknowledgements
Once again I am most grateful to Raoul Vaneigem for his unstinting help. My great thanks, too, to Jean-Marie Pierret and François Rabet for the cover art and cover design respectively, and to all at PM Press, especially for their patience. The eagle eyes of John McHale and Jim Brook must be credited for the elimination of many an error. I am indebted to T. J. Clark and Chris Winks for their encouragement. Mia Nadezhda Rublowska has contributed immeasurably to this new edition, and there is no way for me to thank her enough.
In memoriam Chris Gray (1942–2009), one of Raoul Vaneigem’s earliest translators (in the broadest sense of the word).
D. N.-S., June 2012
Author’s Preface to the Present Edition
Long known as the New World, the United States of America is now viewed by Europeans as a paradoxically archaic country. Its technological achievements would warrant only admiration were they not belied by a mental stagnation that allows the ‘icy waters of egotistical calculation’ to preside over an inhumanity cynically defended in the name of profit.
I am not speaking of the Americans themselves. It takes a repellent contempt and stupidity to place what are unique individuals under the abstract rubric of a national identity, no matter how prone those individuals may be to relinquishing their creative powers and embracing mass conformity. What I have in mind, rather, is the dismal succession of American administrations, all brought to power by plain old graft, which in their ever more risible arrogance care nothing for growing immiseration, know nothing of social solidarity, degrade the environment, destroy the earth for financial gain and, armed with an ignominiously clear conscience, promote a Calvinism that treats financial success as a divine dispensation.
Of course the Europeans, no less arrogant, have a grand old time pointing the finger at these would-be paragons of formal democracy who practise capital punishment, embrace the idiotic fad for creationism, tolerate a woefully inadequate social safety net that scorns workers’ rights and skimps on unemployment benefits and pensions, and cede immense power to the military and to barbarity in which last department they are indeed champions.
But so-called left-wing public opinion in France, as fond as it is of draping itself in the robes of the Revolution of 1789, even of the Paris Commune, and to citing those events as object lessons for others, has not only fallen over the years for every conceivable false vision of emancipation liberalism, socialism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Castroism but offers not the slightest objection to the reversal of progressive social gains: the slashing of social security and cultural budgets, the dismemberment of the health-care system, the reduction of education to a form of battery farming, and, in general, the growing impoverishment of existence source of the despair from which the managers of economic collapse wring their last profits.
Ever since consumerism spread patronage everywhere and harnessed the lies of ideology to the needs of merchandising, the free-for-all of market democracy has obliterated any consciousness of the need to fight exploitation.
The crimes committed in the name of the liberation of the proletariat have helped in no small measure to spread a spirit of apathy and fatalism highly conducive to that suicidal impulse which, with or without religious buttressing, works for a universal and apocalyptic death. The plunder of existential and terrestrial resources carried on with impunity by state and private mafias fuels a creeping dread, a state of funk that is absurd inasmuch as Europeans no longer need to fear tanks in the streets or brutal and systematic police intrusion. This internalized terror is, quite simply, a fear of living, of autonomy, of self-creation.
But no matter how exhausted the life forces grow, a moment always comes when consciousness rouses itself, reasserting its rights and retrieving its outgoing exuberance. I have always wagered on a reversal of perspective which, razing a past dominated by contempt for human beings, will usher in a new society founded on the creative capacities of individuals and on an irrepressible desire to revel in oneself and in the world.
We are in the midst of a civilizational shift, one that the Occupations Movement of May 1968 in France illuminated in that it strove to accelerate it, thus hastening the collapse of consumer society and the emergence of a society committed to life.
Just as the agrarian economy of the ancien régime was an atrophied formation fated, thanks to the Revolution of 1789, to be swept away by the surging free-market system, so the investment-driven and speculative capitalism whose crisis we are now witnessing is about to give way to a newly dynamic form driven by the production of ‘green’, nonpolluting kinds of energy, by an appeal to use-value, by organic farming, by a hurried makeover of the public sector and by a spurious ethical reform of trade.
We are confronted not by an economic crisis but by a crisis of the economy as such. Strife rages between two forces within the capitalist system, the one moribund, the other still young: on the one hand a system dating back thousands of years whose basis is the exploitation of nature and of human beings; on the other a rejigged version seeking to establish itself by investing in natural forces and making us pay very dear (once new means of production have been put in place) for things hitherto free: wind, sun, water, and the energy that resides in the plant world and in the earth itself.
The Traité de savoir-vivre made no prophecies. It merely pointed out what many people, blinded by the past, refused to see. It sought to show how the will to emancipation, reborn with each succeeding generation, might take advantage of the seismic convulsions which under the impact of consumerism were shaking a supposedly eternal authoritarian power to its very foundations. And it demonstrated the irreversibility of the break with patriarchal values with work, the exploitation of nature, exchange, predatory relationships, separation from the self, sacrifice, guilt, the renunciation of happiness, the fetishism of money and power, hierarchical authority, contempt for and fear of women, the corruption of childhood, intellectual pedigrees, military and police despotism, religion, ideology, and repression (and lethal ways of rel