rev of everyday life
re re re re read of revolution of everyday life (1963-5) by raoul vaniegem via 170 pg kindle version from anarchist library [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/raoul-vaneigem-the-revolution-of-everyday-life]
notes/quotes:
7
author’s preface
it owes this to its radical bias, to the preponderance in it of that ‘self’ which is in the world without being of the world, that ‘self’ whose emancipation is a sine qua non for anyone who has discovered that learning to live is not the same thing as learning to survive.
so too.. listening to live.. something else altogether.. ie: comes from what is already on each heart.. the dance
8
Violence has changed its meaning. Not that the rebel has grown weary of fighting exploitation, boredom, poverty and death: the rebel has simply resolved no longer to fight them with the weapons of exploitation, boredom, poverty and death. For the first victim of any such struggle is anyone who engages in it full of contempt for their own life. Suicidal behaviour is naturally an integral part of a system that battens on the dilapidation of human nature as of nature tout court.
still suicide ness as long as any us & them ness.. any re ness.. et al
The refusal of commodities implicit in the shattered plate-glass windows of 1968 marked such a clear and public breach in a millennia-old economic boundary-line drawn around individual destiny that archaic reflexes of fear and impotence immediately obscured the insurrectionary movement’s truly radical character. I say ‘ truly radical’ because here at long last was a chance to make the will to live that exists in each of us the basis for a society which for the first time in history would attain an authentic humanity..t
something we’ve still not yet tried/seen.. ie: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
huge.. now have means.. and we’re missing it.. for (blank)’s sake
9
There has never been a revolutionary movement not governed from start to finish by the expanding empire of the commodity.
yeah.. nothing legit rev/diff to date
Revolutions have never done anything but turn on themselves and negate themselves at the velocity of their own rotation..t capital as more precious than the individual to the individual as the most precious capital.
all same song ness to date
The Western model has made tabula rasa of the old forms of oppression and instated a democracy of the supermarket, a self-service autonomy, a hedonism whose pleasures must be paid for. Its racketeering has exploded all the great ideological balloons of earlier times, so laboriously inflated from generation to generation by the winds of the political seasons. A flea market of religion has been set up alongside the sleaze merchants and the shopping centres. The system has realised in the nick of time that a living human being is more of a paying proposition than a dead human being — or one riddled by pollutants. A fact proved, if proof were needed, by the rise of a vast market of the affections — an industry for extracting profits from the heart.
10
If there is one area where the achievement of consciousness comes into its own as a truly essential act, it is the realm of everyday life, where every passing instant reveals once again that the dice are loaded and that as per usual we are being taken for a ride.
because we haven’t yet gotten to the root of problem
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
how we gather in a space is huge.. need to try spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove to facil curiosity over decision making.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us..
ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)
the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
[‘in an undisturbed ecosystem ..the individual left to its own devices.. serves the whole’ –dana meadows]
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. the unconditional part of left-to-own-devices ness.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
The rejection of work, sacrifice, guilt, separation, exchange, survival, so easily co-optable by an intellectual discourse, drew nourishment on this occasion from a lucidity that went far beyond contestation (or perhaps rather stopped far short of it) by hewing to the quest for a honing of desire, by remaining beholden to the everyday childhood of a life locked in combat with everything that sought to exhaust and destroy it.
hari present in society law et al
11
A consciousness severed from the living forces is blind. *The dark glasses of the negative at first obscure the fact that what seems like progress is working against us..t The only consistency in the social analyses of our fashionable thinkers is the formidable tenacity with which they cling to their laughable claims. Revolution, self-management, workers’ councils — so many words held up to public opprobrium at the very moment when state power is put on the defensive by groups whose collective decision-making admits of no intrusion by political representatives, shuns all organisers or leaders and combats all hierarchy.
*cancerous distractions ness
I do not mean to downplay the shortcomings of a practice of this kind, which has for the most part been *confined to reactions of a defensive nature.
*any form of re ness as cancerous distraction
Everyday life itself is even more full of shortcomings — one has but to consider how little light is shed on it by those who wander about at the whim of its pleasures and pains.
in sea world.. imgagining wander/whim ness huge part of legit free ness
After all, the Judaeo-Christian era itself had to end before we found out that the grimy word concealed a reality long overlain by that mere survival to which all life had been reduced by the cycle of the commodity, which mankind produces and which reproduces mankind in its own image.
cannot emerge from the atmosphere of putrefaction and death which characterises the daily grind of desires forced to deny themselves.
maté trump law et al.. brown belonging law et al..
Something is taking place today which no imagination has ever dared speculate upon: the process of individual alchemy is *on the point of transmuting an inhuman history into nothing less than humanity’s self-realisation.
September 1991
*good way to describe sea world.. but already.. and since forever..
13
Introduction
The world must be remade; all the specialists in reconditioning will not be able to stop it..t Since I do not want to understand them, I prefer that they should not understand me.
part\ial ness is killing usfor (blank)’s sake.. need a means to get at root of problem
As for the others, I ask for their goodwill with a humility they will not fail to perceive. I should have liked a book like this to be accessible to those minds least addled by intellectual jargon; I hope I have not failed absolutely. *One day a few formulae will emerge from this chaos and fire point-blank on our enemies. Till then these sentences, read and re-read, will have to do their slow work. The path toward simplicity is the most complex of all, and here in particular it seemed best not to tear away from the commonplace the tangle of roots which enable us to transplant it into another region, where we can cultivate it to our own profit.
*oi.. all seems good.. til this sentence.. ooof.. if enemies.. then still
I have never pretended to reveal anything new or to launch novelties onto the culture market. A minute correction of the essential is more important than a hundred new accessories. All that is new is the direction of the current which carries commonplaces along.
The desire to live is a political decision. We do not want a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation is bought by accepting the risk of dying of boredom.
hari present in society law et al
The man of survival is also self-united man, the man of total refusal. Not a single instant goes by without each of us living contradictorily, and on every level of reality, the conflict between oppression and freedom, and without this conflict being strangely deformed, and grasped at the same time in two antagonistic perspectives: the perspective of power and the perspective of supersession. The two parts of this book, devoted to the analysis of these two perspectives, should thus be approached, not in succession, as their arrangement demands, but simultaneously, since the description of the negative founds the positive project and the positive project confirms negativity. The best arrangement of a book is none at all, so that the reader can discover his own.
Where the writing fails it reflects the failure of the reader as a reader, and even more as a man. If the element of boredom it cost me to write it comes through when you read it, this will only be one more argument demonstrating our failure to live. For the rest, the gravity of the times must excuse the gravity of my tone. Levity always falls short of the written words or overshoots them. The irony in this case will consist in never forgetting that.
This book is part of a current of agitation of which the world has not heard the last. It sets forth a simple contribution, among others, to the recreation of the international revolutionary movement. Its importance had better not escape anybody, for nobody, in time, will be able to escape its conclusions.
My subjectivity and the Creator : This is too much for one brain.
— Lautréamont
15
Part I. The Perspective of Power
16
Chapter 1. The Insignificant Signified
1
The history of our times calls to mind those Walt Disney characters who rush madly over the edge of a cliff without seeing it, so that the power of their imagination keeps them suspended in mid-air; but as soon as they look down and see where they are, they fall.
Contemporary thought, like Bosustov’s heroes, can no longer rest on its own delusions. What used to hold it up, today brings it down. It rushes full tilt in front of the reality that will crush it: the reality that is lived every day.
17
2
Docility no longer emanates from priestly magic, it results from a mass of minor hypnoses: news, culture, town-planning, publicity, mechanisms of conditioning and suggestion in the service of any order, established or to come. .
structural violence.. spiritual violence et ala
3
Everywhere the law is verified: “There is no weapon of your individual will which, once appropriated by others, does not turn against you.” If anyone says or writes that practical reason must henceforth be based upon the rights of the individual and the individual alone, he invalidates his own proposition if he doesn’t invite his audience to make this statement true for themselves. Such a proof can only be lived, grasped from the inside. That is why everything in the notes which follow should be tested and corrected by the immediate experience of everyone. Nothing is so valuable that it need not be started afresh, nothing is so rich that it need not be enriched constantly..t
bravery to change your mind.. itch-in-the-soul in perpetual beta.. iterating detox.. graeber unpredictability/surprise law.. fromm spontaneous law.. et al
art (by day/light) and sleep (by night/dark) as global re\set.. to fittingness (undisturbed ecosystem)
18
*What’s the use of exchanging one isolation, one monotony, one lie for another? When the illusion of real change has been exposed, a mere change of illusion becomes intolerable..t
*need a nother way.. a means to get at the root of problem
19
4
People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have corpses in their mouths.
20
Impossible Participation or Power As the Sum of Constraints
22
Chapter 2. Humiliation
The economy of everyday life is based on a continuous exchange of humiliations and aggressive attitudes. .. the more man is a social being the more he is an object
1
One day, when Rousseau was travelling through a crowded village, he was insulted ..couldn’t think of a word in reply and was forced to take to his heels amidst the jeers of the crowd. By the time .. thought of a thousand possible retorts, any one of which would have silenced the joker once and for all, he was at two hours distance from the village.
Aren’t most of the trivial incidents of everyday life like this ridiculous adventure? but in an attenuated and diluted form, reduced to the duration of a step, a glance, a thought, experienced as a muffled impact, a fleeting discomfort barely registered by consciousness and leaving in the mind only the dull irritation at a loss to discover its own origin? The endless minuet of humiliation and its response gives human relationships an obscene hobbling rhythm.
All we can do is to enclose ourselves in embarrassing parentheses; ..
From the point of view of constraint, everyday life is governed by an economic system in which the production and consumption of insults tends to balance out. . Everywhere it’s hats off to family, marriage, sacrifice, work, inauthenticity, while simplified and rationalized homeostatic mechanisms reduce human relationships to ‘fair’ exchanges of deference and humiliation. And soon, in the ideal democracy of the cyberneticians, everyone will earn without apparent effort a share of unworthiness which he will have the leisure to distribute according to the finest rules of justice.
23
let ten men meet who are resolved on the lightning of violence rather than the long agony of survival; from this moment, despair ends and tactics begin. Despair is the infantile disorder of the revolutionaries of everyday life.
hari present in society law et al
24
I still feel today my adolescent admiration for outlaws, not because of an obsolete romanticism but because they expose the alibis by which social power avoids being put right on the spot. *Hierarchical social organization is like a gigantic racket whose secret, precisely exposed by anarchist terrorism, is to place itself out of reach of the violence it gives rise to, by consuming everybody’s energy in a multitude of irrelevant struggles..t (A ‘humanized’ power cannot allow itself recourse to the old methods of war and genocide.) The witnesses for the prosecution can hardly be suspected of anarchist tendencies. The biologist Hans Selye states that “as specific causes of disease (microbes, undernourishment) disappear, a growing proportion of people die of what are called stress diseases, or diseases of degeneration caused by stress, that is, by the wear and tear resulting from conflicts, shocks, nervous tension, irritations, debilitating rhythms…”
*cancerous distractions ness
2
The handshake ties and unties the knot of encounters. A gesture at once curious and trivial which the French quite accurately say is exchanged: isn’t it in fact the most simplified form of the social contract? What guarantees are they trying to seal, these hands clasped to the right, to the left, everywhere, with a liberality that seems to make up for a total lack of conviction? That agreement reigns, that social harmony exists, that life in society is perfect? But what still worries us is this need to convince ourselves, to believe it by force of habit, to reaffirm it with the strength of our grip.
bauwens contracts law et al
Eyes know nothing of these pleasantries; they do not recognize exchange. When our eyes meet someone else’s they become uneasy, as if they could make out their own empty, soulless reflection in the other person’s pupils. Hardly have they met when they slip aside and try to dodge one another; their lines of flight cross in an invisible point, making an angle whose acuteness expresses the divergence, the deeply felt lack of harmony. ..But most of the time the eyes repudiate the superficial agreement sealed by the handshake.
25
*A whole ethic based on exchange value, the pleasures of business, the dignity of labour, restrained desires, survival, and on their opposites, pure value, the gratuitous, parasitism, instinctive brutality and death: this is the filthy tub that human faculties have been bubbling in for nearly two centuries. ..But what does a minor improvement like this represent in comparison with the whole immense conditioning machine ,each of whose cogs — town planning, publicity, ideology, culture — is capable of dozens of comparable improvements? Once again, knowledge of the conditions which are going to continue to be imposed on people if they don’t look out is less relevant than the sensation of living in such degradation now. ..Compared with my present imprisonment the future holds no interest for me.
*rather.. since forever..
* * *
The feeling of humiliation is nothing but the feeling of being an object.
need.. organism as fractal ness
What is the illusion which stops us seeing the disintegration of values, the ruin of the world, inauthenticity, non-totality?
that sea world ness is a given
Is it that I think that I am happy? Hardly! Such a belief doesn’t stand up to analysis any better than it withstands the blasts of anguish. On the contrary, it is a belief in the happiness of others, an inexhaustible source of envy and jealousy which gives us a vicarious feeling of existence. I envy, therefore I am. To define oneself by reference to others is to define oneself as other. And the other is always object. So that life is measured in degrees of humiliation, the more you ‘live’: the more you live the orderly life of things.
rather.. khan filling the gaps law et al
The gentleness of these methods of oppression throws a certain light on the perversion which prevents me from shouting out “The emperor has no clothes!” each time the sovereignty of my everyday life reveals its poverty.. they organize peaceful demonstrations at which their trade-union police force treats anyone who questions their orders as an agent provocateur. The new policemen are ready to take over. The social psychologists will govern without truncheons: no more tough cops, only con cops. Oppressive violence is about to be transformed into a host of reasonably distributed pin-pricks. The same people who denounce police violence from the heights of their lofty ideals are urging us on toward a state based on polite violence.
26
Humanism merely upholsters the machine of Kafka’s “Penal Colony”. Less grinding and shouting! Blood upsets you? Never mind: men will be bloodless. The promised land of survival will be the realm of peaceful death, and it is this peaceful death that the humanists are fighting for. No more Guernicas, no more Auschwitzes, no more Hiroshimas, no more Setifs. Hooray! But what about the impossibility of living, what about this stifling mediocrity and this absence of passion? What about the jealous fury in which the rankling of never being ourselves drives us to imagine that other people are happy? What about this feeling of never really being inside your own skin? let nobody say these are minor details or secondary points. There are no negligible irritations; gangrene can start in the slightest graze.
3
I shall not renounce my share of violence.
cast first stone ness
27
Human relationships can hardly be discussed in terms of more or less tolerable conditions, more or less admissible indignities. Qualification is irrelevant. Do insults like ‘wog’ or ‘nigger’ hurt more than a word of command? When he is summoned, told off, or ordered around by a policeman, a boss, an authority, who doesn’t feel deep down, in moments of lucidity, that he is a darkie and a gook?
Before he tried to get himself made President of Martinique, Aimé Césaire made a famous remark: “The bourgeoisie has found itself unable to solve the major problems which its own existence has produced: the colonial problem and the problem of the proletariat.” He forgot to add: “For they are one and the same problem, a problem which anyone who separates them will fail to understand.”
root of problem ness
4
The respect due to the king’s person cannot in itself be criticized. It is odious only because it is based on the right to humiliate by subordination. Contempt rotted the thrones of kings. But what about the citizen’s sovereignty: the rights multiplied by bourgeois vanity and jealousy, sovereignty distributed like a dividend to each individual? What about the divine right of kings democratically shared out?
Today, France contains twenty-four million mini-kings, of which the greatest — the bosses — are great only in their ridiculousness. The sense of respect has become degraded to the point where humiliation is all that it demands. Democratized into public functions and roles, the monarchic principle floats with its belly up, like a dead fish: only its most repulsive aspect is visible. Its will to be absolutely and unreservedly superior has disappeared. Instead of basing our lives on our sovereignty, we try to base our sovereignty on other people’s lives. The manners of slaves.
28
Chapter 3. Isolation
1
It was *as if they were in a cage whose door was wide open without their being able to escape. Nothing outside the cage had any importance, because nothing else existed any more. .. For inside this cage, in which they had been born and in which they would die, the only tolerable framework of experience was the Real, which was simply an irresistible instinct to act so that things should have importance. Only if things had some importance could one breathe, and suffer. .The door remained open and the cage became more and more painful in its Reality which was so important for countless reasons and in countless ways.
*hari rat park law et al
We have never emerged from the times of the slavers.
On the public transport which throws them against one another with statistical indifference, people wear an untenable expression of disillusion, pride and contempt, like the natural effect of death on a toothless mouth. The atmosphere of false communication makes everyone the policeman of his own encounters. The instincts of flight and aggression trail the knights of wage-labour, who must now rely on subways and suburban trains for their pitiful wanderings.
We have nothing in common except the illusion of being together. Certainly the seeds of an authentic collective life are lying dormant within the illusion itself — there is no illusion without a real basis — but real community remains to be created. The power of the lie sometimes manages to erase the bitter reality of isolation from men’s minds. In a crowded street we can occasionally forget that suffering and separation are still present. And, since it is only the lie’s power which makes us forget, suffering and separation are reinforced; but in the end the lie itself comes to grief through relying on this support. For a moment comes when no illusion can measure up to our distress.
29
The compromises I have made with stupidity under the pressure of circumstances rush to meet me, swimming towards me in hallucinating waves of faceless heads. Edvard Munch’s famous painting, The Cry, evokes for me something I feel ten times a day. A man carried along by a crowd, which only he can see, suddenly screams out in an attempt to break the spell, to call himself back to himself, to get back inside his own skin. The tacit acknowledgments, fixed smiles, lifeless words
Everywhere neon signs are flashing out the dictum of Plotinus: All beings are together though each remains separate. But we only need to hold out our hands and touch one another, to raise our eyes and meet one another, and everything comes into focus, as if by magic.
In a gloomy bar where everyone is bored to death, a drunken young man breaks his glass, then picks up a bottle and smashes it against the wall. Nobody gets excited; the disappointed young man lets himself be thrown out. Yet everyone there could have done exactly the same thing. He alone made the thought concrete, crossing the first radioactive belt of isolation: interior isolation, the introverted separation between self and outside world. Nobody responded to a sign which he thought was explicit. He remained alone like the hooligan who burns down a church or kills a policeman, *at one with himself but condemned to exile as long as other people remain exiled from their own existence.
*this is the none of us are free ness.. the warning ness ness
30
What drives us to despair is not the immensity of our own unsatisfied desires, but the moment when our newborn passion discovers its own emptiness.
2
The no-man’s-land of impersonal relationships stretches between the blissful acceptance of false collectivities and the total rejection of society. It is the morality of shopkeepers: “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”, “You mustn’t let people get too familiar”: politeness, the art (for art’s sake) of non-communication.
politeness, the art (for art’s sake) of non-communication..t
yeah that.. evans polite\ness law et al
Let’s face it: human relationships being what social hierarchy has made them, impersonality is the least tiring form of contempt. It allows us to pass without useless friction through the mill of daily contacts.
31
..where one mode of survival is exchanged for another.
From the depths of their prisons, those who have been convicted of ‘mental illness’ add the screams of their strangled revolt to the sum of negativity.
32
Chapter 4. Suffering
37
Chapter 5. The Decline and Fall of Work
In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create..t
Every call for productivity in the conditions chosen by capitalist and Soviet economy is a call to slavery..t
gare enslavement law.. norton productivity law.. et al
38
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.
40
Chapter 6. Decompression and the Third Force
? would copy descriptions of each here.. but don’t get descriptions either
41
Heinrich Heine writes:
Lächelnd scheidet der Tyran
Denn er weiss, nach seinem Tode
Wechselt Willkür nur die Hände
Und die Knechtschaft hat kein Ende.The tyrant dies smiling; for he knows that after his death tyranny will merely change hands, and slavery will never end..
always, since forever, perpetuating same songAs 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.
42
Never, and for good reason, has an absolute confrontation been carried through. So far the last fight has only had false starts. Everything must be resumed from scratch. History’s only justification is to help us do it.
ie: a nother way.. something we haven’t yet tried/seen
43
Therefore, the movement of decompression appears to have the function of shackling man’s most irreducible desire, the desire to be completely himself.
Thus, the salvation of the soul is nothing but the will to live, incorporated through myth, mediated, emptied of its real content.
* * *
Individualism, alcoholism, collectivism, activism… the variety of ideologies shows that there are a hundred ways of being on the side of power...Soon we shall find that an energy is locked up in everyday life which can move mountains and abolish distances..t
what the world needs most: the energy of 8b alive people
44-45
Impossible Communication or Power As Universal Mediation
In the realm of Power, mediation is the false necessity wherein people learn to lose themselves rationally. Mediation’s power to alienate is now being reinforced, and also brought into question, by the dictatorship of consumption (seven), by the predominance of exchange over gift (eight), by cybernetisation (nine), and by the reign of the quantitative (ten).
46
Chapter 7. The Age of Happiness
And happy, happy humanity so soon to receive the parcels which were redirected to them at such great cost by the rebels of the nineteenth century. ..The millions of human beings who were shot, tortured, jailed, starved, treated like animals and made the objects of a conspiracy of ridicule can sleep in peace in their communal graves, for at least the struggle in which they died has enabled their descendants, isolated in their air-conditioned rooms, to believe on the strength of their daily dose of television that they are happy and free. .t
61 ness et al.. jeremy scahill – dirty wars et al
47
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.
48
The aristocratic life with its wealth of passions and adventures suffered the fate of a palace partitioned off into furnished rooms, gloomy bedsitters whose drabness is made even more unbearable by the sign outside which proclaims, like a challenge hurled at the Universe, that this is the age of freedom and well-being..t
51
Chapter 8. Exchange and Gift
52
No liberation is possible this side of economics; in the world defined by economics there is only a hypothetical economics of survival..t
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
need oikos (the economy our souls crave).. ‘i should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.’ – gaston bachelard, the poetics of space
More: *organization itself is the first coherent technique of struggle against nature. Social organization — hierarchical, since it is based on private appropriation — gradually destroys the magical bond between man and nature, but it preserves the magic for its own use: it creates between itself and mankind a **mythical unity modelled on the original participation in the mystery of nature. Framed by the ‘natural’ relations of prehistoric man, social organization slowly dissolves this frame that ***defines and imprisons it
*aziz let go law ness
**aka: sea world ness
***structural violence .. as in any form of m\a\p
53
The hierarchical principle is the magic spell that has blocked the path of men in their historical struggles for freedom. From now on, no revolution will be worthy of the name if it does not involve, at the very least, the radical elimination of all hierarchy..t
aka: any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
Sacrifice is the archaic form of exchange. It is a magical exchange, unquantified, irrational. it dominated human relationships, including commercial relationships, until merchant capitalism and its money-the-measure-of-all-things had carved out such a large area in the world of slaves, serfs and burghers that the economy could appear as a particular zone, a domain separated from life. When money appears, the element of exchange in the feudal gift begins to win out. The sacrifice-gift, the potlatch — that exchange-game of loser-takes-all in which the size of the sacrifice determines the prestige of the giver — could hardly find a place in a rationalized exchange economy. Forced out of the sectors dominated by economic imperatives, it finds itself reincarnated in values such as hospitality, friendship and love: refuges doomed to disappear as the dictatorship of quantified exchange (market value) colonises everyday life and turns it into a market.
marsh exchange law.. graeber exchange law.. graeber violence/quantification law.. 10-day-care-center\ness.. et al
54
Merchant and industrial capitalism accelerated the quantification of exchange. The feudal gift was rationalized according to the rigorous model of commerce. The game of exchange became a matter of calculation.
or has it always been.. tit for tat ness et al
And so sacrifice came to be quantified, rationalized, measured out and quoted on the stock exchange. But what is left of the magic of sacrifice in a world of market values?
Rigorously quantified, first by money and then by what you might call ‘sociometric units of power’, exchange pollutes all our relationships, all our feelings, all our thoughts. Where exchange is dominant, only things are left: a world of thing-men plugged into the organization charts of the computer freaks: the world of reification. But on the other hand it also gives us the chance radically to restructure our styles of life and thought. A rock bottom from which everything can start again.
The feudal mind seemed to conceive the gift as a sort of haughty refusal to exchange, a will to deny interchangeability. This refusal went with their contempt for money and common measurement. Of course, sacrifice excludes pure giving; but there was often so much room for play, humanity and gratuitous gestures that inhumanity, religion and seriousness could pass for accessories to such preoccupations as war, love, friendship, or hospitality.
constant hospitality law let al
Prefabricated needs are confronted with the unitary need for a new style of life. *Art, the economics of experience, has been absorbed by the market. Desires and dreams work for Madison Avenue now. Everyday life has crumbled into a series of moments as interchangeable as the gadgets which occupy them: mixers, stereograms, contraceptives, euphorimeters, sleeping pills.
*another art world ness
need: legit (being human) art (by day/light) and sleep (by night/dark) as global re\set.. to fittingness (undisturbed ecosystem)
56
Chapter 9. Technology and Its Mediated Use
Organisation thus stands revealed as nothing but the pure organisation of authority (1). Alienated mediations make man weaker as they become indispensible. A social mask disguises people and things. In the present stage of privative appropriation, this mask transforms its wearers into dead things, commodities. Nature no longer exists.
57
Similarly in the realm of consumption: it’s not the goods that are inherently alienating, but the conditioning that leads their buyers to choose them and the ideology in which they are wrapped.
hari rat park law et al
60
Chapter 10. Down Quantity Street
Economic imperatives seek to impose on the whole of human activity the standardised measuring system of the market. .A linear, measured time and a linear, measured life are the definitions of survival, or living on: a succession of inter-changeable instants. These lines are part of the confused geometry of power..t
1
The system of commercial exchange has come to govern all of man’s everyday relations with himself and with his fellow men. Every aspect of public and private life is dominated by the quantitative.
literacy and numeracy both elements of colonialism/control/enclosure.. we need to calculate differently and stop measuring things
The calculation of a man’s capacity to produce or to make others produce, to consume or to make others consume, concretises to a T that expression so dear to our philosophers: the measure of man. .t .. How could even spontaneous laughter last in a space-time that is measured and measurable, let alone real joy? At best the dull contentment of the man-who’s-got-his-money’s-worth, and who exists by that standard. Only objects can be measured, which is why exchange always reifies..t
we need organism as fractal.. so that we org around legit needs
marsh exchange law.. graeber exchange law.. et al
61
.. a man whose desire is not so much to change life as to seek refuge in the greatest attractions it has to offer..t
whales speaking whalespeak ness
hari present in society law.. hari rat park law
In fact, ideology draws its essence from quantity: it is simply an idea reproduced again and again in time (Pavlovian conditioning) and in space (where the consumers take over). Ideology, information and culture tend more and more to lose their content and become pure quantity. The less importance a piece of news has, the more it is repeated, and the more it distracts people from their real problems.
feedback loop is broken .. need to try iterating detox
63
Time is composed of a succession of points, each taken independently of the others like an absolute, but an absolute that is endlessly repeated and rehashed..t Down quantity street, everything’s always just the same. And these absolutized fragments are all quite interchangeable.
Individual survival-lines cross, collide and intersect. Each one assigns limits to the freedom of others; projects cancel one another out in the name of their autonomy. This is the basis of the geometry of fragmentary power..t
whac-a-mole-ing ness of sea world
We think we are living in the world, when in fact we are being positioned in a perspective. .. Power is the greatest town-planner. It parcels out loys of public and private survival, buys up vacant lots at cut price, and only permits construction that complies with its regulations. Its own plans involve the compulsory acquisition of everybody..t
64
Chapter 11. Mediated Abstraction and Abstract Mediation
1
..most of the time I live out of step with what I am, marking time with dead time.
wilde not-us law et al
In the same way, the stupid distinction between cause and effect has been able to govern societies in which human behaviour and phenomenae in general were analysed in terms of cause and effect. … The abstract and alienating mediation which estranges me from myself is terrifyingly concrete.
huge.. but even moreso that we think we have to analyze it al
65
Grace, a piece of God transplanted into man, outlived its Donor. Secularized, abandoning theology for metaphysics, it *remained buried in the individual’s flesh like a pace-maker, an internalised mode of government. ..Oppression reigns because men are divided, not only among themselves, but also inside themselves. What separates them from themselves and weakens them is laos the false bond that unites them with power, reinforcing this power and making them choose it as their protector, as their father.
*need means to listen to what is already on each heart
Power is the sum of alienated and alienating mediations. Science (scientia theologiae ancilla) converted the divine fraud into operational information, organised abstraction, returning to the etymology of the word: ab-trahere, to draw out of.
The energy which the individual expends in order to realise himself and extend into the world according to his desires and dreams, is suddenly braked, held up, shunted onto other tracks, recuperated. What would normally be the phase of fulfilment is forced out of the living world and kicked upstairs into the transcendental.
But the mechanism of abstraction is never completely loyal to the principle of authority. However reduced man may be by his stolen mediation, he can still enter the labyrinth of power with Theseus’ weapons of aggression and determination. if he finally loses his way, it is because he has already lost his Ariadne, snapped the sweet thread that links him with life: the desire to be himself. For it is only in an unbroken relationship between theory and lived praxis that there can be any hope of an end to all dualities, the end of the power of man over man, and the beginning of the era of totality..t
need means for global detox leap.. otherwise just more whac-a-mole-ing ness
Human energy does not let itself be led away into the inhuman without a fight. The field of battle is always in the immediate extension of lived experience, in spontaneous action. Not that I am opposing abstract mediation in the name of some sort of wild, ‘instinctive’ spontaneity; that would merely be to reproduce on a higher level the idiotic choice between pure speculation and mindless activism, the disjunction between theory and practice. I am saying that tactical adequacy involves launching the attack at the very spot where the highwaymen of experience lay their ambush, *the spot where the attempt to act is transformed and perverted, at the precise moment when spontaneous action is sucked up by misinterpretation and misunderstanding..t At this point there is a momentary crystallization of consciousness which illumines both the demands of the will-to-live and the fate that social organisation has in store for them; living experience and its recuperation by the machinery of authoritarianism. The point where resistance begins is the look-out post of subjectivity. For identical reasons, my knowledge of the world has no value except when I act to transform it
*the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness.. ie: a sabbatical ish transition
66
By force-feeding survival until it is satiated, consumer society awakens a new appetite for life. Wherever survival and work are both guaranteed, the old safeguards become obstacles. Not only does the struggle to survive prevent us from really living; once it becomes a struggle without real goals it begins to threaten survival itself: what was ridiculous becomes precarious. Survival has grown so fat that if it doesn’t shed its skin it will choke us all in it and die..t
67
We continue to believe that it is feeling, purposes or ideas that govern our behaviour, considering Form to be at most a harmless ornamental addition.. But the fact of the matter is this: a human being does not externalise himself in an immediate manner, according to his nature, but always through a definite Form; and this Form; and this Form, this way of being, this way of speaking and reacting, does not issue solely from himself but is imposed on him from outside.
aka: supposed to’s of school/work.. the way of sea world
68
Ideology is the falsehood of language and radical theory its truth. The conflict between them, which is the conflict between man and the inhumanity which he secretes, underlies the transformation of the world into human realities as much as its transmutation into metaphysical realities. Everything that men do and undo passes through the mediation of language. Semantics is one of the principal battlefields in the struggle between the will to live and the spirit of submission..t
The fight is unfair..t Words serve power better than they do men;..t they serve it more faithfully than most men do.., and more scrupulously than the other mediations (space, time, technology…) Hypostatised transcendence always depends on language and is developed in a system of signs and symbols, such as words, dance, ritual, music, sculpture and building. When a half-completed action, suddenly obstructed, tries to continue in a form which it hopes will eventually allow it to finish and realise itself — like a generator transforming mechanical energy into electrical energy which will be reconverted into mechanical energy by a motor miles away — at this moment language swoops down on living experience, ties it hand and foot, robs it of its substance, abstracts it. it always has categories ready to condemn to incomprehensibility and nonsense anything which they can’t contain, or summon into existence-for-power that which slumbers in nothingness because it has no place as yet in the system of Order..t The repetition of familiar signs is the basis of ideology.
language as control/enclosure et al
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Let nobody underestimate power’s skill in stuffing its slaves with words to the point of making them the slaves of its words..t
gibran talking law.. gibran words law.. rumi words law.. willard talking law.. lanier beyond words law.. et al
What weapons do we have to secure our freedom? We can mention three:
rather 2 – missing pieces
- 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).
need means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around legit needs.. via idiosyncratic jargon rather than glossary ness.. each person their own glossary et al
- Open dialogue, the language of dialectic; conversation, and all forms of non-spectacular discussion
- 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. but it was also direct communication that Léhautier referred to when the judge asked him what anarchists he knew in Paris: :Anarchists don’t need to know one another to think the same thing.” In radical groups which are able to reach the highest level of theoretical and practical coherence, words will sometimes acquire this privelege of playing and making love: erotic communication.
rumi words law.. lanier beyond words law.. et al
70
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.
rumi words law.. lanier beyond words law.. et al
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance (letting go of words et al).. the unconditional part of left-to-own-devices ness.. (to own language.. aka: idiosyncratic jargon).. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
72-73
Impossible Realisation or Power As the Sum of Seductions
74
Chapter 12. Sacrifice
76
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..t 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,..t 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.
And yet, the reflex of freedom also knows how to exploit a pretext. Thus a strike for higher wages or a rowdy demonstration can awaken the carnival spirit. As I write thousands of workers around the world are downing tools or picking up guns, ostensibly in obedience to directives or principles, but actually, at the profoundest level, in response to their passionate desire to change their lives. The real demand of all insurrectionary movements is the transformation of the world and the reinvention of life. This is not a demand formulated by theorists: rather, it is the basis of poetic creation. Revolution is made everyday despite, and in opposition to, the specialists of revolution. This revolution is nameless, like everything springing from lived experience. Its explosive coherence is being forged constantly in the everyday clandestinity of acts and dreams.
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No other problem is as important to me as a difficulty I encounter throughout the long daylight hours: how can I invent a passion, fulfill a wish or construct a dream in the daytime in the way my mind does spontaneously as I sleep? What haunts me are my unfinished actions, not the future of the human race or the state of the world in the year 2000. I could not care less about hypothetical possibilities, and the meandering abstractions of the futurologists leave me cold. If I write, it is not, as they say, “for others.” I have no wish to exorcise other people’s ghosts. I string words together as a way of getting out of the well of isolation, because I need others to pull me out. I write out of impatience, and with impatience. I want to live without dead time. What other people say interests me only in as much as it concerns me directly. They must use me to save themselves just as I use them to save myself. We have a common project. But it is out of the question that the project of the whole man should entail a reduction in individuality. There are no degrees in castration. The apolitical violence of the young, and its contempt for the interchangeable goods displayed in the supermarkets of culture, art and ideology, are a concrete confirmation of the fact that the individual’s self-realization depends on the application of the principle of “every man for himself,” though this has to be understood in collective terms — and above all in radical terms.
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 exchange..t Now, the most superficial examination of movements for social reform shows that they have never demanded anything more than a cleaning-up of exchange and sacrifice, making it a point of honor to humanize inhumanity and make it attractive. And every time slaves try to make their slavery more bearable they are striking a blow for their masters.
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The artist relinquishes the lived intensity of the creative moment in exchange for the durability of what he creates, so that his name may live on in the funereal glory of the museum. And his desire to produce a durable work is the very thing that prevents him from living imperishable instants of real life..t
another art world ness
79
The artist in every human being can never be brought out by regression to artistic forms defined by the spirit of sacrifice. We have to go back to square one.
need global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake
80
Future and past are docile pawns of history which merely cover up the sacrifice of the present. I want to exchange nothing — not for a thing, not for the past* not for the future. I want to live intensely, for myself grasping every pleasure firm in the knowledge that what is radically good for me will be good for everyone. And above all I would promote this one watchword: “Act as though there were no tomorrow.”
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Chapter 13. Separation
Wherever separation is not totally eliminated it is reinforced..t
thurman interconnectedness law.. no us & them ness.. has to be all for the dance to dance
82
And the end of separation means the end of the bourgeoisie and of all hierarchical power..t This is why no ruling class or caste can effect the transformation of feudal unity into real unity, into true social participation.
83
Boss and worker are separated not by any qualitative distinction of birth but merely by quantitative distinctions of money and power..t Indeed, what makes capitalist exploitation so repulsive is the fact that it occurs between ‘equals’. All the same, the bourgeoisie’s work of destruction — though quite unintentional-ly, of course — reveals the justification for even revolution. When peoples stop being fooled they stop doing what they are told..t
84
Thus in addition to the great collective onanisms — ideologies, illusions of social unity, herd mentalities, opiums of the people — we are offered a whole range of marginal solutions lying in the no-man’s-land between the permissible and the forbidden: individualized ideology, obsession, monomania, unique (and hence alienating) passions, drugs and other highs (alcohol, the cult of speed and rapid change, of rarefied sensations, etc). Now all these pursuits allow us to lose ourselves completely while preserving the impression of self-realization, but the corrosiveness of such activities stems above all from their partial quality.
need a nother way.. sans part\ial ness.. for (blank)’s sake
aka: detox leap
Unitary palliatives thus entail two risks for Power. ln the first place they fail to satisfy, and in the second they tend to foster the will to build a real social unity. ..
The complete unchaining of pleasure is the surest way to the revolution of everyday life, to the construction of the whole man.
rather.. unchaining (listening to – quiet enough to hear/see) itch-in-the-soul
85
Chapter 14. The Organization of Appearances
Common sense is the lie put into lay terms..t
aka: whalespeak
86
Revolution was the bourgeoisie’s finest invention..It is easy to see why bourgeois thought, strung up as it is on a rope of radicalism of its own manufacture, clings with the energy of desperation to every reformist solution, to anything that can prolong its life,..t even though its own weight must inevitably drag it down to its doom
87
With the advent of drama human society replaces the gods on the stage..So widespread is the confusion between play-acting and life that it does not even occur to us to wonder why it exists. Yet what is ‘natural’ about the fact that I stop being myself a hundred times a day and slip into the skin of people whose concerns and importance I have really not the slightest desire to know about?..t Not that I might not choose to be an actor on occasion — to play a role for diversion or pleasure. But this is not the type of role-playing I have in mind. The actor supposed to play a condemned man in a realist play is at perfect liberty to remain himself: herein lies, in fact, the paradox of fine acting. But this freedom that he enjoys is contingent upon the fact that this “condemned man” is in no danger of feeling a real hangman’s noose about his neck. The roles we play in everyday life, on the other hand, soak into the individual, preventing him from being what he really is and what he really wants to be..t They are nuclei of alienation embedded in the flesh of direct experience. The function of such stereotypes is to dictate to each person on an individual, even ‘intimate’, level the same things which ideology imposes collectively.
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It also means that from one point of view — from the point of view of government — progress in human knowledge improves the mechanisms of alienation: the more man views himself through the eyes of officialdom, the greater his alienation..t Science provides a rationale for the police. It teaches how much people can be tortured without dying, and above all to what degree a person may be turned into a héautontimorouménos a dutiful self-torturer. It teaches how to become a thing while still retaining a human appearance — and this in the name of a certain appearance of humanity.
huge.. intellectness as cancerous distraction et al
His most personal tics and idiosyncrasies become the means by which Power integrates him into its schemata. The poverty of everyday life reaches it nadir by being choreographed in this way. Just as the passivity of the consumer is an active passivity, so the passivity of the spectator lies in his ability to assimilate roles and play them according to official norms. The repetition of images and stereotypes offers a set of models from which everyone is supposed to choose a role. The spectacle is a museum of images, a showroom of stick figures.
Stereotypes are debased forms of the old ethical categories: knight, saint, sinner, hero, traitor, vassal, plain man, etc. The images which drew their effectiveness within the mythic system of appearances from their qualitative force work in the context of spectacular appearances solely by virtue of the frequency of their reproduction as factors of conditioning: slogans, photos, stars, catchwords, etc.
Real events come to us as one-dimensional scripts. We get their form, never their substance. And even their form is more or less clear according to how often it is repeated and according to its position in the structure of appearances. For as an organised system appearances are a vast filing cabinet in which events are broken up, isolated from one another, labelled and arbitrarily classified: Crimes of Passion, Political Affairs, Business Section, From the Police Blotter, Eating Out, etc, etc. An old lady is killed by a kid on the Boulevard St Germain. What are we told by the press? We are given a pre-established scenario designed to arouse pity, indignation, disgust, whatever. The event is broken down into abstract components which are really just cliches: youth, delinquency, crime in the streets, law and order, etc. Image, photo, style — all are fabricated and co-ordinated according to the permutations dispensed by an automatic vending machine of readymade explanations and predetermined emotions.
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Chapter 15. Roles
The stereotype is the model of the role; the role is a model form of behaviour. The repetition of an attitude creates a role; the repetition of a role creates a stereotype. The stereotype is an objective form into which people are integrated by means of the role. Skill in playing and handling roles determines rank in the spectacular hierarchy. ..Access to the role occurs by means of identification. The need to identify is more important to Power’s stability than the models identified with. Identification is a pathological state, but only accidental identifications are officially classed as “mental illness.” Roles are the bloodsuckers of the will to live (3). They express lived experience, yet at the same time they reify it. They also offer consolation for this impoverishment of life by supplying a surrogate, neurotic gratification. We have to break free of roles by restoring them to the realm of play (4). A role successfully adopted ensures promotion in the spectacular hierarchy, the rise from a given rank to a higher one. This is the process of initiation, as manifested notably in the cult of names and the use of photography. . The proliferation of unreal changes creates the preconditions for a sole and real change, a truly radical change. The weight of inauthenticity finally provokes a violent and quasi-biological reaction from the will to live (6).
?
..there is no such thing as power that does not embody a degree of submission. This is why some agree so readily to be governed. Wherever it is exercised, on every rung of the ladder, power is partial, not absolute. It is thus ubiquitous, but ever open to challenge.
The role is a consumption of power. It locates one in the representational hierarchy, and hence in the spectacle: at the top, at the bottom, in the middle but never outside the hierarchy, whether this side of it or beyond it. The role is thus the means of access to the mechanism of culture: a form of initiation. It is also the medium of exchange of individual sacrifice, and in this sense performs a compensatory function. And lastly, as a residue of separation, it strives to construct a behavioural unity; in this aspect it depends on identification.
91
Thus the satisfaction derived from a well-played role is in direct proportion to his distance from himself, to his self-negation and self-sacrifice.
so not legit satisfaction.. not graeber stop at enough law satisfaction
92
Everyone seeks spontaneously to extend such brief moments of real life; everyone wants basically to make something whole out of their everyday life. But conditioning succeeds in making most of us pursue these moments in exactly the wrong way by way of the inhuman with the result that we lose what we most want at the very moment we attain it.
93
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. .True madness is a function not of isolation but of identification.
crazywise (doc) ness et al.. myth of normal
94
If identification were maximized through increased isolation, the ultimate falseness of the distinction between mental and social alienation would soon become clear.
.. true pleasure, joie de vivre and orgastic potency shatter body armour and roles. If individuals could stop seeing the world through the eyes of the powers-that-be, and look at it from their own point of view, they would have no trouble discerning which actions are really liberating, which moments are lightning flashes in the dark night of roles. Real experience can illuminate roles can x-ray them, so to speak in such a way as to retrieve the energy invested in them, to extricate the truth from the lies. This task is at once individual and collective. Though all roles alienate equally, some are more vulnerable than others. It is easier to escape the role of a libertine than the role of a cop, executive or rabbi. A fact to which everyone should give a little thought..t
graeber rethink law.. sinclair perpetuation law.. et al
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4 Compensation
The ultimate reason why people come to value roles more highly than their own lives is that their lives are priceless. What this means, in its ambiguity, is that life cannot be priced, cannot be marketed; and also that such riches can only be described according to the spectacle’s categories as intolerable poverty. In the eyes of consumer society poverty is whatever cannot be brought down to terms of consumption. From the spectacular point of view the reduction of man to consumer is an enrichment: the more things he has, the more roles he plays, the more he is. So it is decreed by the organization of appearances. But, from the point of view of lived reality, all power so attained is paid for by the sacrifice of true self-realization. What is gained on the level of appearances is lost on the level of being and becoming.
Thus lived experience always furnishes the raw material of the social contract, the coin in which the entry fee is paid. Life is sacrificed, and the loss compensated by means of accomplished prestidigitation in the realm of appearances. The more daily life is thus impoverished, the greater the attraction of inauthenticity, and vice versa. Dislodged from its essential place by the bombardment of prohibitions, limitations and lies, lived reality comes to seem so trivial that appearances become the centre of our attention, until roles completely obscure the importance of our own lives. In an order of things, compensation is the only thing that gives a person any weight. The role compensates for a lack: ultimately, for the lack of life; more immediately, for the lack of another role. ..at best it is an ineffective plug for the gaping wound left by the vampirization of the self and of real life. The role is at once a threat and a protective shield. Its threatening aspect is only felt subjectively, however, and does not exist officially. Officially, the only danger lies in the loss or devaluation of the role: in loss of honour, loss of dignity, or (happy phrase!) loss of face. *This ambiguity accounts to my mind for people’s addiction to roles. It explains why roles stick to our skin, why we give up our lives for them. They impoverish real experience but they also protect this experience from becoming conscious of its impoverishment..t Indeed, so brutal a revelation would probably be too much for an isolated individual to take. Thus roles partake of organized isolation, of separation, of false union, while compensation is the depressant that ensures the realization of all the potentialities of inauthenticity, that gets us high on identification.
*marsh label law et al.. and the need for our only label to be daily itch-in-the-soul
Survival and its protective illusions form an inseparable whole. The end of survival naturally entails the disappearance of roles (although there are some dead people whose names are linked to stereotypes). Survival without roles is to be officially dead. Just as we are condemned to survival, so we are condemned to “keep up appearances” in the realm of inauthenticity. Armouring inhibits freedom of gesture but also deadens blows. Beneath this carapace we are completely vulnerable. But at least we can still play “let’s pretend” we still have a chance to play roles off against one another.
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I work, I consume, I know how to be polite, how to avoid aggravation, how to keep a low profile. All the same, this world of pretence has to be destroyed, which is why it is a shrewd course to let roles play each other off. Seeming to have no responsibility is the best way of behaving responsibly toward oneself. ..My only responsibility is to be absolutely honest with those who are on my side, those who are true partisans of authentic life.
responsibility ness et al
The more detached one is from a role, the easier it becomes to turn it against the enemy. The more effectively one avoids the weight of things, the easier it is to achieve lightness of movement. Comrades care little for forms. They argue openly, confident in the knowledge that they cannot inflict wounds on each other. Where communication is genuinely sought, misunderstandings are no crime..t
paul know\love law et al
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I possess badges of power, therefore I am. In order to be someone the individual must pay things their due. He must keep his roles in order, polish them up, enter into them repeatedly, and initiate himself little by little until he qualifies for promotion in the spectacle. The conveyor belts called schools, the advertising industry, the conditioning mechanisms inseparable from any Order — all conspire to lead the child, the adolescent and the adult as painlessly as possible into the big family of consumers..t
socrates supposed to law et al
There are different stages of initiation. Recognized social groups do not all enjoy the same measure of power, nor is that measure equally distributed within each group. It is a long way, in hierarchical terms, from the boss to his workers, from the star to his fans, or from the politician to his supporters. Some groups have a much more rigid structure than others. *But all are founded on the illusion of participation shared by every group member whatever his rank. This illusion is fostered through meetings, insignia, the distribution of minor ‘responsibilities’, etc. ..t
*huge.. seat at the table ness et al
98
The widespread use of name and photograph, as in what are laughingly referred to as ‘identification’ papers, is rather obviously tied up with the police function in modern societies. But the connection is not merely with the vulgar police work of search, surveillance, harassment, torture and murder incorporated. It also involves much more occult methods of maintaining law and order. The frequency with which an individual’s name or image passes through the visual and oral channels of communication is an index of that individual’s rank and category.
identity ness killing us .. cancerous distraction.. spiritual violence.. structural violence.. et al
99
Such is the superb dialectic of the change in perspective: since the powers-that-be forbid me to bear a name which is as it was for the feudal lord a true emanation of my strength, I refuse to be called by any name, and suddenly beneath the nameless I discover the wealth of real life, inexpressible poetry, the antechamber of transcendence. I enter the nameless forest where Lewis Carroll’s gnat explains to Alice: “If the governess wanted to call you for your lessons, she would call out ‘Come here — ’, and there she would have to leave off, because there wouldn’t be any name for her to call, and of course you wouldn’t have to go, you know.” The blissful forest of radical subjectivity.
marsh label law et al
100
As a class rent by contradictions, the bourgeoisie founds its domination on the transformation of the world, yet refuses to transform itself. It is thus a movement wishing to avoid movement. In unitary societies the image of immutability embraced movement; in fragmentary societies change seeks to reproduce immutability: “Wars (or the poor, or slaves) will always be with us.” Thus the bourgeoisie in power can tolerates change only if it is empty, abstract, cut off from the whole: partial change, changes of parts..t Now although the habit of change is intrinsically subversive, it is also the main prerequisite to the functioning of consumer society. People have to change cars, fashions, ideas, etc., all the time. For if they did not, a more radical change would occur which would put an end to a form of authority that is already reduced to putting itself up for sale as parcels of power: it has to be consumed at all costs, and one of the costs is that everyone is consumed along with it. Sad to say, this headlong rush towards death, this desperate and would-be endless race deprives us of any real future: ahead lies the past, hastily disguised and projected forward in time. **For decades now the selfsame ‘novelties’ have been turning up in the marketplace of fad and fancy, with the barest attempt to conceal their decrepitude. ..***The proliferation of trivial changes titillates the desire for real change but never satisfies it. Power accelerates changes in illusions, thereby hastening the eruption of reality, of radical change..t
*part\ial ness et al.. and warning ness et al
**yeah but since forever.. same song
***huge.. why we need to leap.. to global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake
Most of us are well acquainted with the malaise that accompanies any attempt to join a group and make contact with others. This feeling amounts to stage fright, the fear of not playing one’s part properly. Only with the crumbling of officially controllable attitudes and poses will the true source of this anxiety become clear to us. For *it arises not from our clumsiness in handling roles but from the loss of self in the spectacle, in the order of things. In his book Medecine et homme total, Soli‚ has this to say about the frightening spread of neurotic disorders: **“There is no such thing as disease per se, no such thing, even, as a sick person per se: all there is is authentic or inauthentic being-in-the-world.”..t The reconversion of the energy robbed by appearances into the will to live authentically is a function of the dialectic of appearances itself. The refusal of inauthenticity triggers a near-biological defensive reaction which because of its violence has a very good chance of destroying those who have been orchestrating the spectacle of alienation all this time. This fact should give pause to all who pride themselves on being idols, artists, sociologists, thinkers and specialists of every kind of mise en scene. Explosions of popular anger are never accidental.
*huge huge huge huge huge huge huge
**yeah that.. huge.. myth of normal.. and need to org around legit needs
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Chapter 16. The Fascination of Time
time ness
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*Plants transplanted to an unfavourable soil die. Animals adapt to their environment. Human beings transform theirs. Thus death is not the same thing for plants, animals and humans. In favourable soil, the plant lives like an animal: it can adapt. Where man fails to change his surroundings, he too is in the situation of an animal. **Adaptation is the law of the animal world.
*?
**rather.. is a cancerous distraction.. we need to listen deeper to itch-in-the-soul for the dance to dance.. rather than conditions we are in.. hari rat park law et al
A struggle against death exists, of course, but it takes place within the limits set by the adaptation syndrome: *death is part of the cure for death. ..**Partial cures are preferred because they leave the overall social pathology untouched. t***But what will happen when the proliferation of such partial cures ends up spreading the malaise of inauthenticity to every corner of daily life? And when the essential role of exorcism and bewitchment in the maintenance of a sick society ****becomes plain for all to see?
*?
**part\ial ness as cancerous distraction
***it already has.. since forever
****not sure it ever will.. hope not.. because seeing it is a cancerous distraction.. there’s a nother way to just .. carry on
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This link between age and the starting-post of measurable time is not the only thing which betrays age’s kinship with power. *I am convinced that people’s measured age is nothing but a role..t It involves a speeding up of lived time in the mode of non-life on the plane, **therefore, of appearances, and in accordance with the dictates of adaptation. To acquire power is to acquire ‘age’. In earlier times only the ‘aged’ or ‘elders’, those old either in nobility or in experience, exercised power. Today even the young enjoy the dubious privilege of age. In fact consumer society, which invented the teenager as a new class of consumer, fosters premature senility: to consume is to be consumed by inauthenticity, nurturing appearance to the advantage of the spectacle and to the detriment of real life. The consumer is killed by the things he becomes attached to, because these things (commodities, roles) are dead..t
*yeah.. you\th ness et al.. marsh label law.. et al
**maté trump law et al
The harder you run after time, the faster time goes: this is the law of consumption. Try to stop it, and it will wear you out and age you all the more easily.
We were born never to grow old, never to die. All we can hope for, however, is an awareness of having come too soon. And a healthy contempt for the future can at least ensure us a rich portion of life.
?
106-7
Survival and False Opposition to It
Survival is life reduced to economic imperatives.
every thing is
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Chapter 17. Survival Sickness
109
For to place an ideology of change in the service of what does not change creates a paradox which nothing henceforward can either conceal from consciousness or justify to consciousness. Thus in our universe of expanding technology and comfort we see people turning in upon themselves, shrivelling up, living trivial lives and dying for details. It is a nightmare where we are promised absolute freedom but granted a miserable square inch of individual autonomy — a square inch, moreover, that is strictly policed by our neighbours. A space-time of pettiness and mean thoughts..t
hari present in society law.. hari rat park law
110
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.
nah.. re ness perpetuates the death of us.. cancerous distraction
111
Chapter 18. Spurious Opposition
113
Almost every revolutionary movement embodies the desire for complete change, yet up to now almost every revolutionary movement has succeeded only in changing some detail.. t
i would say all .. to date
none yet tried/seen the unconditional part of left to own devices ness (root of problem)
..issue-politics, partial refusal and piecemeal demands are the very thing that blocks transcendence. The worst inhumanity is never anything but a wish for emancipation that has settled for compromise and fossilized beneath the strata of successive sacrifices. Liberalism, socialism and Bolshevism have each built new prisons under the sign of liberty. ..In this way once-radical impulses are doubly betrayed, twice renounced: first they are ossified, then dug up and used as a carrot..t have to show – no traces (police force et al
part\ial ness ie: any form of re ness.. as cancerous distractions
116
For when it comes to the qualitative sphere, to concede a fraction is to give up everything..t
none of us are free ness
Where is the radical core, the qualitative dimension?..t
ie: root of problem .. maté basic needs.. org around legit needs
119
Nothing was true anymore, and everything had become possible. .t
this is not ridiculous ness.. malatesta impossibility law.. things supposedly impossible.. et al
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How long must we bear the hegemony of these communist bureaucrats, fascist brutes, opinion makers, pockmarked politicians, sub-Joycean writers, neo-Dadaist thinkers all preaching the fragmentary, all working assiduously for the Big Sleep and justifying themselves in the name of one Order or another: the family, morality, culture, the flag, the space race, margarine, etc
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Part II. The Reversal of Perspective
125
Chapter 19. The Reversal of Perspective
126
To reverse perspective is to stop seeing with the eyes of the community, ideology. family or other people. It is to grasp oneself firmly, to choose oneself as starting point and centre. .. My creativity, however poor it may be, is a more certain guide than all the knowledge I have been forced to acquire.
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… 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.
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Chapter 20. Creativity, Spontaneity, and Poetry
The qualitative exists wherever creative spontaneity manifests itself. It entails the direct communication of the essential. It is poetry’s chance. A crystallization of possibilities, a multiplier of knowledge and practical potential, and the proper modis operandi of intelligence.
In this fractured world, whose common denominator throughout history has been hierarchical social power, only one freedom has ever been tolerated: the freedom to change the numerator, the freedom to prefer one master to another..t
.. what people do officially is nothing compared with what they do in secret. People usually associate creativity with works of art, but what are works of art alongside the creative energy displayed by everyone a thousand times a day: seething unsatisfied desires, daydreams in search of a foothold in reality, feelings at once confused and luminously clear, ideas and gestures presaging nameless upheavals.
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For me spontaneity is immediate experience, consciousness of a lived immediacy threatened on all sides yet not yet alienated, not yet relegated to inauthenticity. The centre of lived experience is that place where everyone comes closest to themself. Within this unique space-time we have the clear conviction that reality exempts us from necessity. Consciousness of necessity is always what alienates us..Consciousness of the present harmonizes with lived experience in a sort of extemporization. The pleasure this brings us — impoverished by its isolation, yet potentially rich because it reaches out towards an identical pleasure in other people — bears a striking resemblance to the enjoyment of jazz.
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Kierkegaard described this state of affairs as follows: “It is true that I have a lifebelt, but I cannot see the pole which is supposed to pull me out of the water. This is a ghastly way to experience things”. The pole is there, of course, and no doubt everyone could grab onto it, though many would be so slow about it that they would die of anxiety before realizing its existence. But exist it does, and its name is radical subjectivity: the consciousness that all people have the same will to authentic self-realization, and that their subjectivity is strengthened by the perception of this subjective will in others. This way of getting out of oneself and radiating out, not so much towards others as towards that part of oneself that is to be found in others, is what gives creative spontaneity the strategic importance of a launching pad.
*begs/needs the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
Similarly, a gesture, an attitude, perhaps merely a word, may suffice to show that poetry’s chance is at hand, that the total construction of everyday life, a global reversal of perspective — in short, the revolution — are immanent possibilities. The qualitative encapsulates and crystallizes these possibilities; it is a direct communication of the essential.
And she was right, for the curse of technological civilization, of quantified exchange and scientific knowledge, is that they have created no means of freeing people’s spontaneous creativity directly;..t indeed, they do not even allow people to understand the world in any unmediated fashion.
*there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. the unconditional part of left-to-own-devices ness.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
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“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 matte 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.
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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..t
art (by day/light) and sleep (by night/dark) as global re\set.. to fittingness (undisturbed ecosystem)
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Chapter 21. Masters Without Slaves
138
The refusal to be a slave is really what changes the world.
any form of re ness perpetuates same song.. not change.. not diff..
So what is the goal of history? History is made “under certain conditions” (Marx) by slaves against slavery. Thus it can only pursue one aim: the destruction of masters.
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The hierarchical system, man’s power over man, ..just saddles one with the need to adapt to the environment and conform to the state of things..t
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
Every single individual must root out the slightest inclination for prestige and the most trivial hierarchical pretensions, and raise against these roles a calm impetus towards authentic life..t
need means to listen to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday
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We must discover new frontiers. If the bounds of social alienation still imprison us, at least they no longer deceive us. For centuries men have remained before a wormeaten door, piercing little pin-holes in it with growing ease. *One kick is now enough to knock it down, and that’s when everything begins. The proletariat’s problem is no longer to seize power, but to put a definite end to it. On the other side of the hierarchical world, the possibilities come to meet us. **The primacy of life over survival will be the historical movement which will unmake history..t We have yet to invent worthwhile adversaries. It is up to us to find them, and to join them through the looking-glass of childhood.
**The primacy of life over survival will be the historical movement which will unmake history..t
*to (virus) leap et al
**need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit (life over survival) needs
life over survival ness
It’s the dawn of another human organisation, a society where individual creativity gives its energy free reign, to shape the world according to each individual’s dreams harmonised by all..t
again.. imagine if we listen to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & use that data to connect us (tech as it could be..
Utopia? Get stuffed! How condescension drivels! Who doesn’t behave as if this world wasn’t the dearest thing he owned? Sure, there are many who’ve let go, and now fall as despairingly as once they held on. Everyone wants his subjectivity to win out: we must therefore base the unity of men upon this common desire. No-one can strengthen his subjectivity without others helping him, without the aid of a group which has itself developed a subjective centre, a faithful reflection of the subjectivity of its members..t
getting to the root of problem that we all crave.. the thing we haven’t yet tried: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
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Chapter 22. The Space-Time of Lived Experience and the Rectification of the Past
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If he doesn’t watch out, survival sickness soon turns a young man into a haggard old Faust, burdened with regrets, passing through the youth he longs for without realizing it. The ‘teenager’ bears the first wrinkles of the consumer.
need tech as detox/nonjudgmental expo labeling so we can org around legit needs
Little separates him from the sixty-year-old; consuming faster and faster, he wins precocious old age to the rhythm of his compromises with inauthenticity. If he doesn’t take hold of himself quickly, the past will close up behind him; he won’t be able to return to what he’s done, not even to remake it. So much separates him from the children he played with only yesterday. He has become part of the market’s triviality, willing to exchange the poetry, freedom and subjective wealth of childhood for representation in the society of the spectacle..t Yet nonetheless, if he seized hold of himself and awoke from the nightmare, what an enemy would . You will see him fight for the confront the forces of order’ rights of his childhood with the most fearsome weapons devised by senile technocracy. We know what prodigious feats distinguished the young Simbas of the Lumumbaist revolution, in spite of their derisory equipment; so **how much more can we expect from a generation that’s equally pissed off but much more effectively armed, and at large in a theatre of operations that covers every aspect of daily life?
*maté trump law et al
**ie: imagine if we.. a sabbatical ish transition
Every aspect of daily life is lived to Some extent in embryonic form during childhood. The rich hoard of events lived in a few days or a few hours prevents time passing. Two months holiday is an eternity. Two months for an old man is just a few minutes. The child’s days escape adult time; their time is swollen by subjectivity, passion, dreams haunted by reality. Outside, the educators look on, waiting, watch in hand, till the child joins and fits the cycle of the hours. It’s they who have time. At first, the child feels strongly the imposition of adult time as a foreign intrusion; he ends up succumbing, and agrees to grow old..t Not knowing conditioning’s subtle ways, he allows himself to be snared, like a young animal. When finally he possesses the weapons of criticism and wants to aim them at time, the years have carried him far from the target. In his heart his childhood lies an open wound.
maté not yet scrambled law et al
So here we are all haunted by childhood, and meanwhile social organisation is scientifically destroying it. Psycho-, sociologists are on the look-out, and already the market researchers are exclaiming: “Just look at all those sweet little dollars.” (Quoted by Vance Packard.) A new decimal system..t
Children are playing in the street. Suddenly one of them leaves the group and comes up to me, bringing the most beautiful dreams I can remember. He shows me — for my ignorance on this point was the sole reason for my fall — what destroys the concept of age: the possibility of living many events; not just seeing them pass by, but of living them and recreating them endlessly. And now at this point where everything slips away from me and everything becomes clear to me, how could a kind of wild untamed instinct for totality not surge up in me from under so many false desires, my childishness turned dangerous through the lessons of history and class struggles? There cannot be a new proletariat unless it possesses in its purest form the realisation of childhood in an adult world.
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..so here we are in the age of watchmakers. The economic imperative has converted man into a living chronometer, distinguishing feature on his wrist. This is the time of work, progress and output, production, consumption and programming; it’s time for the spectacle, for a kiss, or a photo, time for anything (time is money). The time-commodity. Survival time..t
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From the viewpoint of power, there are no lived moments (lived experience has no name), only instants succeeding one another and all equal in the line of the past. A whole system of conditioning broadcasts this attitude, hidden persuasion introjects it. And here’s the result. Just where is this present that people go on about? In what forgotten corner of everyday life does it skulk?
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Through power’s telescope, the future is just the past rehashed. A dollop of known inauthenticity is pushed forward by so-called hopeful imagination into the time it is already filling up with utter vacuity. One’s only memories are of roles once played, and one’s only future an eternal remake. According to power, men’s memory should only operate within its time-scale, as a constant reminder of its presence. A nihil novi sub sole, popularly expressed as “someone must always be in charge”..t
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The sole reason for an historical ideology is to prevent men making history themselves. How better to distract men away from their present than by attracting them to where time flows away? This is the historian’s role. He organises the past, by breaking it up according to the official line of time, then classifies events according to ad hoc categories. These easy-to-use classifications place the event in quarantine. Unshakable parentheses isolate and contain it, stop it coming to life, being reborn and breaking out again in the streets of our daily 1ife. The event is frozen..t One is forbidden to rejoin it, remake it, perfect it, lead it on towards its supersession. It is just there, for all eternity suspended for the appreciation of aesthetes. Slightly alter its signification, and, hey presto! it can be transposed straight into the future, which is just the historians repeating themselves..t
Encouraged to identify himself with some other time and some other person, today’s individual has managed to have his present stolen from him under the illusion of gaining a historical perspective. In a spectacular space-time (“You are entering history, comrades.”) he loses the taste of authentic life..t Yet, those who refuse the heroism of historical action are warped by the complementary mystification that the psychological sector bestows on them. These two categories rub shoulders, and fuse in the extreme poverty of recuperation. You choose: either history or a nice quiet life..t
crazywise (doc) et al
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However time-honoured, facts never have the last word. A radical change in the present is enough to make them topple off their pedestals and fall at our feet.
Only the present can be total. A point of incredible density. We must learn to slow down time and live the permanent passion of immediate experience.
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In the space of creation, time dilates. In inauthenticity, it speeds up.
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Chapter 23. The Unitary Triad: Self-Rrealisation, Communication and Participation
The repressive unity of power is threefold: coercion, seduction and mediation..*Creativity, love and play stand in the same relation to true life as the need to eat and the need to find shelter stand in relation to survival (1). **Attempts to realise oneself can only be based on creativity (2). ***Attempts to communicate can only be based on love (4). ****Attempts to participate can only be based on play (6). Separated from one another these three projects merely strengthen the repressive unity of power. Radical subjectivity is the presence — which can be seen in almost everyone — of the same desire to create a truly passionate life (3). The erotic is the spontaneous coherence fusing attempts to enrich lived experience (5).
*i would say rather.. authenticity and attachment – maté basic needs.. which will take care of those 3.. but those three won’t necessarily take care of a&a
**i don’t think so.. more on listening to what is on your heart.. et al..
***yeah.. like paul know\love law et al.. and shaw communication law
****to me.. this idea is caught up in a lot of whalespeak.. i don’ think legit free people would ‘attempt to participate’.. they would just play
If human history was neither reduced to, nor dissociated from, the history of human survival, the dialectic of this threefold project (in conjunction with the dialectic of the productive forces) would prove sufficient explanation for most things men have done to themselves and to one another. Every riot, every revolution, reveals a passionate quest for exuberant life, for total honesty between people, for a collective form of transformation of the world. Today, one can see, throughout the whole of history, three fundamental passions related to life in the same way that the need to eat and find shelter are related to survival. The desire to create, the desire to love and the desire to play interact with the need to eat and find shelter, just as the will to live never ceases to play havoc with the necessity of surviving. Obviously, the importance of the part played by each element changes from one time to another, but today their whole importance lies in the extent to which they can be unified.
Today, with the Welfare State, the question of survival has become only a part of the whole problem of life. As we hope to have shown. Life-economy has gradually absorbed survival-economy, and in this context the dissociation of the three projects, and of the passions underlying them, appears more and more clearly as a consequence of a fundamentally erroneous distinction between life and survival. However, since the whole of existence is torn between two perspectives — that of separation, of power; and that of revolution, of unity — and is therefore essentially ambiguous, I am forced to discuss each project at once separately and together.
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Assurance of security leaves unused a large supply of energy formerly expended in the struggle for survival.
In these conditions, the struggle for enough to eat, for comfort, for stable employment and for security are, on the social front, so many aggressive raids which slowly but surely are becoming rearguard actions, despite their very real importance. The struggle for survival took up and still takes up an amount of energy and creativity which revolutionary society will inherit like a pack of ravening wolves. .. No longer recuperated by artistic and cultural consumption — by the ideological spectacle — creativity will turn spontaneously against the very safeguards of survival itself.
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Rebels have only their survival to lose. And there are only two ways in which they can lose it: either by living or by dying. And since survival is no more than dying very slowly, there is a temptation containing a very great deal of genuine feeling, to speed the whole thing up and to die a damn sight faster. To ‘live’ negatively the negation of survival. Or, on the other hand, to try to survive as an anti-survivor, focusing all one’s energy on breaking through to real life. To make survival no more than the basis of a systematic quest for happiness.
Self-realisation is impossible in this world. Half demented rebellion remains, for all its ferocity, a prisoner of the authoritarian dilemma: survival or death. This half-rebellion, this savage creativity so easily broken in by the order of things, is the will to power.
this are our options in sea world.. and why we need hari rat park law et al
The hero, the ruler, the superstar, the millionaire, the expert… How many times have they sold out all they held most dear? How many sacrifices have they made to force a few people, or a few million people, people they quite rightly regard as complete idiots, to have their photograph on the wall, to have their name remembered, to be stared at in the street?
maté trump law et al
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The manager, the leader, the tough guy, the mobster know little joy. Ability to endure is their main qualification.
People rely on Causes because they haven’t been able to make their own life a Cause sufficient unto itself. Through the Cause and the sacrifice it entails they stagger along, backwards, trying to find their own will to live.
I also have teenage gangs in mind. The very childishness of their will to power has often kept their will to live almost uncontaminated. Obviously the delinquent is threatened with recuperation. Firstly, as a consumer, because he wants things he cannot afford to buy; then, as he gets older, as a producer. But, within the gang, playing remains of such great importance that truly revolutionary consciousness can never be far away. If the violence inherent in teenage gangs stopped squandering itself in exhibitionistic and generally half-baked brawls and rave-ups and only saw how much real poetry was to be found in a riot, then their gameplaying, as it became increasingly riotous, would almost certainly set off a chain reaction: a qualitative flash. Almost everyone is fed up with their life. Almost everyone is sick of being pushed around. Almost everyone is sick of the lies they come out with all day long. All that is needed is a spark — plus tactics. Should delinquents arrive at revolutionary consciousness simply through understanding what they already are, and by wanting to be more so, then it’s quite possible that they could prove the key-factor in a general social retake on reality. This could be vitally important. Actually, all that’s really necessary is the federation of their gangs.
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*So far the heart of life has been sought anywhere but in the heart of man. Creativity has always been pushed to one side. It has been suburban; and, in fact, urbanism reflects very accurately the misadventures of the axis around which life has been organised for thousands of years.
*huge.. exactly.. nothing to date gets to root of problem.. to itch-in-the-soul.. to what’s already on each heart.. to the unconditional part of left to own devices ness..
One can only rediscover other people by consciously rediscovering oneself. For as long as individual creativity is not at the centre of social life, man’s only freedom will be freedom to destroy and be destroyed. If you do other people’s thinking for them, they will do your thinking for you. And *he who thinks for you judges you, he reduces you to his own norm and, whatever his intentions may be, he will end by making you stupid — for stupidity doesn’t come from a lack of intelligence, as stupid people imagine it does, it comes from renouncing, from abandoning one’s own true self. So if anyone asks you what you are doing, asks you to explain yourself, treat him as a judge — that is to say, as an enemy.
*why we need tech w/o judgment for global detox leap
Nothing is more difficult, or more painful, to approach than the question of one’s own self-regeneration. In the heart of each human being there is a hidden room, a camera obscura, to which only the mind and dreams can find the door. A magic circle in which the world and the self are reconciled where every childish wish comes true. The passions flower there, brilliant, poisonous blossoms clinging to and thriving on air, thin air.
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The real importance of subjectivity can easily be measured by the general embarassment with which it is approached. Everyone wants to pass it off as their mind ‘wandering’, as ‘introversion’, as ‘being stoned’. Everyone censors their own daydreams. But isn’t it the phantoms and visions of the mind that have dealt the most deadly blows at morality, authority, language and our collective hypnotic sleep? Isn’t a fertile imagination the source of all creativity, the alembic distilling the quick of life: the bridgehead driven into the old world and across which the coming invasions will pour?
Anyone who can be open-minded about their interior life will begin to see a different world outside themselves values change, things lose their glamour and become plain instruments.
Daydreaming could become the most powerful dynamo in the world. Modern technological expertise, just as it makes everything considered ‘Utopian’ in the past a purely practical undertaking today, also does away with the purely fairytale nature of dreams. All my wishes can come true from the moment that modern technology is put to their service.
ie: tech as it could be
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A bridge between imagination and reality must be built. Only a truly radical perspective can give everyone the right to make anything out of anything. A radical perspective grasps men by their roots and the roots of men lie in their subjectivity — this unique zone they possess in common.
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Love offers the model of perfect communication: the orgasm, the total fusion of two separate beings. It is a glimpse of a transformed universe. Its intensity, its here-and-now-ness, its physical exaltation, its emotional fluidity, its grateful acceptance of the value of change — everything indicates that love will prove the key factor in recreating the world.. lovers want to be at home everywhere.
Love has been able to stay free more successfully than the other passions. Creativity and play have always ‘been granted’ an official representation, a spectacular acknowledgment which did its best to cut them off at their source. Love has always been clandestine — “being alone together”. It turned out to be protected by the bourgeois concept of private life; banished from the day, reserved for work and for consumption, and driven into the darkest corners of the night; lit by the moon. Thus it partly escaped the major mopping-up of daily activities.
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Although love is always born of subjectivity — a girl is beautiful because I love her — my desire cannot stop itself objectifying what it wants. Desire always makes an object of the loved person.
Socially, this playing with one’s own attitudes could be expressed by changing partners at the same time as one is attached more or less permanently to a ‘pivotal’ partner. All these meetings would be the communication of a single purpose experienced in common. I have always wanted to be able to say: “I know you don’t love me because you only love yourself. I am just the same. So love me.”
Love can only be based on radical subjectivity. The time is up for all self-sacrificial forms of love. To love only oneself through other people, to be loved by others through the love they owe themselves. This is what the passion of love teaches; these are the only conditions of authentic communication.
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Love must be freed from its myths, from its images, from its spectacular categories; its authenticity must be strengthened and its spontaneity renewed.
the unconditional ness of legit love .. et al.. pearson unconditional law.. et al
brown belonging law et al
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Economic necessity and play don’t mix. Financial transactions are deadly serious: you don’t fool around with money. *The elements of play contained within feudal economy were gradually squeezed out by the rationality of money exchanges. Playing with exchange means to barter products without worrying too much about strictly standardised equivalents.
*’playing’ with exchange is still exchange.. marsh exchange law et al.. so still cancerous distraction.. and so.. not legit/free play
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Every game has two preconditions: the rules of playing and playing with the rules. Watch children at play. They know the rules of the game, they can remember them perfectly well but they never stop breaking them, they never stop dreaming up new ways of breaking them. But for them, cheating doesn’t have the same connotations as it does for adults. Cheating is part of the game, they play at cheating, accomplices even in their arguments. What they are really doing is spurring themselves on to create new games. And sometimes they are successful: a new game is found and unfolds. They revitalise their playfulness without interrupting its flow.
*Only play can deconsecrate, open up the possibilities of total freedom
*rather.. only legit/free play.. the paragraph before is still whalespeak.. oi.. not legit play
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In a group revolving around play, manual and domestic chores could be allotted as penalties, as the price one pays for losing a point in a game
huge red flag the what he’s describing is not legit/free play.. oi
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The Struggle for purely economic emancipation has made survival possible for everyone by making anything beyond survival impossible.
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Chapter 24. The Interworld and the New Innocence
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*The revolution of everyday life will blot out ideas of justice, punishment and torture, which are notions dependent on exchange and fragmentation. We don’t want to be judges, but, by destroying slavery, masters without slaves recovering a new innocence and gracefulness in living. **We have to destroy the enemy, not judge him.
*why we need nonjudgmental expo labeling et al
**if ‘enemy’ ness.. already judging
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Chapter 25. You’re F-ing Around with Us? — Not for Long!
No maximum program, no minimum program, and no transitional programme — instead a complete strategy based on the essential characteristics of the system we want destroyed.
oi.. only will perpetuate same song
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The long revolution is creating small federated microsocieties, true guerilla cells practising and fighting for this self-management. Effective radicality authorises all variations and guarantees every freedom. That’s why the Situationists don’t confront the world with: “Here’s your ideal organisation, on your knees!” They simply show by fighting for themselves and with the clearest awareness of this fight, why people really fight each other and why they must acquire an awareness of the battle.
again.. oi.. only will perpetuate same song.. any form of re ness et al.. any form of us & them ness et al
(1963–1965)
Raoul Vaneigem
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A Toast to Revolutionary Workers
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be you. 
