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The Revolution of Everyday Life
One of the most important exponents of Situationist ideas presents an impassioned critique of modern capitalism in this cornerstone of modern radical thought. Published in early 1968, it both kindled and colored the May 1968 upheavals in France, which captured the attention of the world. Naming and defining the alienating features of everyday life in consumer society: survival rather than living in full, the call to sacrifice, the cultivation of false needs, the dictatorship of the commodity, subjection to social roles, and the replacement of God by the economy, the book argues that the countervailing impulses that exist within deep alienation - creativity, spontaneity, poetry present an authentic alternative to nilhilistic consumerism. This carefully edited new translation marks the first North American publication of this important work and includes a new preface by the author.
279 pages, Paperback
First published December 8, 1967
About the author
Raoul Vaneigem
105 books145 followersRaoul Vaneigem (born 1934) is a Belgian writer and philosopher. He was born in Lessines (Hainaut, Belgium). After studying romance philology at the Free University of Brussels (now split into the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel) from 1952 to 1956, he participated in the Situationist International from 1961 to 1970. He currently resides in Belgium and is the father of four children.
Vaneigem and Guy Debord were the two principal theoreticians of the Situationist movement. Although Debord was the more disciplined thinker, Vaneigem's slogans frequently made it onto the walls of Paris during the May 1968 uprisings. His most famous book, and the one that contains the famous slogans, is The Revolution of Everyday Life (in French the title was more elaborate: Traité du savoir-vivre à l'usage des jeunes générations).
After leaving the Situationist movement Vaneigem wrote a series of polemical books defending the idea of a free and self-regulating social order. He frequently made use of pseudonyms, including "Julienne de Cherisy," "Robert Desessarts," "Jules-François Dupuis," "Tristan Hannaniel," "Anne de Launay," "Ratgeb," and "Michel Thorgal." Recently he has been an advocate of a new type of strike, in which service and transportation workers provide services for free and refuse to collect payment or fares.
From www.nothingness.org: "Along with Guy Debord, the voice of Raoul Vaneigem was one of the strongest of the Situationists. Counterpoised to Debord's political and polemic style, Vaneigem offered a more poetic and spirited prose. The Revolution of Everyday Life (Traité de savoir-vivre à l'usage des jeunes générations), published in the same year as The Society of the Spectacle, helped broaden and balance the presentation of the SI's theories and practices. One of the longest SI members, and frequent editor of the journal Internationale Situationniste, Vaneigem finally left the SI in November of 1970, citing their failures as well as his own in his letter of resignation. Soon after, Debord issued a typically scathing response denouncing both Vaneigem and his critique of the Situationist International."
Further biographical information can be found at www.nothingness.org and www.notbored.org.
Vaneigem and Guy Debord were the two principal theoreticians of the Situationist movement. Although Debord was the more disciplined thinker, Vaneigem's slogans frequently made it onto the walls of Paris during the May 1968 uprisings. His most famous book, and the one that contains the famous slogans, is The Revolution of Everyday Life (in French the title was more elaborate: Traité du savoir-vivre à l'usage des jeunes générations).
After leaving the Situationist movement Vaneigem wrote a series of polemical books defending the idea of a free and self-regulating social order. He frequently made use of pseudonyms, including "Julienne de Cherisy," "Robert Desessarts," "Jules-François Dupuis," "Tristan Hannaniel," "Anne de Launay," "Ratgeb," and "Michel Thorgal." Recently he has been an advocate of a new type of strike, in which service and transportation workers provide services for free and refuse to collect payment or fares.
From www.nothingness.org: "Along with Guy Debord, the voice of Raoul Vaneigem was one of the strongest of the Situationists. Counterpoised to Debord's political and polemic style, Vaneigem offered a more poetic and spirited prose. The Revolution of Everyday Life (Traité de savoir-vivre à l'usage des jeunes générations), published in the same year as The Society of the Spectacle, helped broaden and balance the presentation of the SI's theories and practices. One of the longest SI members, and frequent editor of the journal Internationale Situationniste, Vaneigem finally left the SI in November of 1970, citing their failures as well as his own in his letter of resignation. Soon after, Debord issued a typically scathing response denouncing both Vaneigem and his critique of the Situationist International."
Further biographical information can be found at www.nothingness.org and www.notbored.org.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 105 reviews
May 14, 2009
Raoul Vaneigem I have never ever been able to pronounce that name and I have never ever come across anyone else who’d read it. Including all my erstwhile Anarcho buddies from back in the 80’s.
Luckily for me I worked near Housman’s bookshop in Kings Cross for a few years this opened my eyes to a whole world of stuff including this book.
I read this book in 1983 in my teenage years and yes I can say it changed my life. I use to read it on the commuter train to and from work. The irony of reading such a book while surrounded by grey suited automatons wasn’t lost on me.
The complex text structure was almost impenetrable, but the same idea’s flowed round a few times in each chapter so I was able to build a view of what was being said. The texts richness shone through once you’d go use to the style and I was not able to put the book down.
It taught me to distrust my fellow revolutionaries who had fixed, dogmatic ideas and it helped me to try to influence our group of anarchists to be more creative than just drawing big A’s.
What I found amazing was how situationism produced the most impenetrable of texts but the most creative of slogans.
“All power to the imagination”
“We don’t just want a piece of cake we want the whole wheat field”
My local favourites were;
“I thought M25 was a vitamin until it went through my back garden”
“Poll Tax is Titanic”
I am now older and my beliefs have been tempered with age, no longer do I feel so black and white about everything. But I do still recognise how creativity is re-recuperated by the spectacle. How bosses are as much slaves to the system as the cleaners. How the dullness of work grinds you daily into a stupor and how radicalism is re-packaged, recuperated and sold back to us as a “lifestyle choice”.
The solution? Make your own head space, your own creativity, recognise the spectacle in all its forms and peoples greyness. Play!
Luckily for me I worked near Housman’s bookshop in Kings Cross for a few years this opened my eyes to a whole world of stuff including this book.
I read this book in 1983 in my teenage years and yes I can say it changed my life. I use to read it on the commuter train to and from work. The irony of reading such a book while surrounded by grey suited automatons wasn’t lost on me.
The complex text structure was almost impenetrable, but the same idea’s flowed round a few times in each chapter so I was able to build a view of what was being said. The texts richness shone through once you’d go use to the style and I was not able to put the book down.
It taught me to distrust my fellow revolutionaries who had fixed, dogmatic ideas and it helped me to try to influence our group of anarchists to be more creative than just drawing big A’s.
What I found amazing was how situationism produced the most impenetrable of texts but the most creative of slogans.
“All power to the imagination”
“We don’t just want a piece of cake we want the whole wheat field”
My local favourites were;
“I thought M25 was a vitamin until it went through my back garden”
“Poll Tax is Titanic”
I am now older and my beliefs have been tempered with age, no longer do I feel so black and white about everything. But I do still recognise how creativity is re-recuperated by the spectacle. How bosses are as much slaves to the system as the cleaners. How the dullness of work grinds you daily into a stupor and how radicalism is re-packaged, recuperated and sold back to us as a “lifestyle choice”.
The solution? Make your own head space, your own creativity, recognise the spectacle in all its forms and peoples greyness. Play!
January 9, 2009
Compared to The Society of the Spectacle, Revolution of Everyday Life is far more accessible, being less a theoretical critique of late capitalism and more a manifesto for revolution. That being said, Vaneigem's style, particularly in translation, is an acquired taste. If you happened to be steeped in the writing of left/radical French philosophers, sociologists, or critical theorists, then this is a "must read." Clearly tapping into the spleen & ennui of the existential mood of the late 60s, Vaneigem turns the source of existentialism away from some nebulous metaphysical source and redirects our attention to the real causes: the dehumanizing power of authoritarian bureaucracy and modern means of production.
May 14, 2020
"Τα πάντα, αλλά όχι η επιβίωση!" αποφαινόταν ανερυθρίαστα ο Ρ. Βανεγκέμ, εκείνες τις ημέρες σχόλης που κάποιοι νέοι (ψυχή τε και σώματι) αναζητούσαν την πλαζ κάτω από τα λιθόστρωτα. Και οι ευχές τους πραγματοποιήθηκαν, εν πολλοίς, και αυτή ήταν η τιμωρία τους, διότι όπως με πόνο ψυχής προειδοποιούσε ο Δάσκαλος Τσέχωφ: "Θα τη βρεις τελικά την αλήθεια και αυτή θα σε συντρίψει".
Δεν υπάρχει τίποτα πιο τραυματικό για την ύπαρξη από το να ανακαλύψει πως τα όνειρα και οι προσδοκίες έγιναν πράξη αργοπορημένα και στρεβλά, καθώς τελικά η ζωή έχει τον δικό της σαρκαστικό τρόπο να περιπαίζει τις ελπίδες των ανθρώπων, παρατηρώντας τες αδιάφορα να αναγεννώνται από τις στάχτες τους προτού επιστρέψουν ξανά εκεί, μαζί με εκείνους που τις έθρεψαν. Μέχρι την επόμενη φορά…
Δεν υπάρχει τίποτα πιο τραυματικό για την ύπαρξη από το να ανακαλύψει πως τα όνειρα και οι προσδοκίες έγιναν πράξη αργοπορημένα και στρεβλά, καθώς τελικά η ζωή έχει τον δικό της σαρκαστικό τρόπο να περιπαίζει τις ελπίδες των ανθρώπων, παρατηρώντας τες αδιάφορα να αναγεννώνται από τις στάχτες τους προτού επιστρέψουν ξανά εκεί, μαζί με εκείνους που τις έθρεψαν. Μέχρι την επόμενη φορά…
January 7, 2019
Anyone who talks about revolution and class struggle without referencing everyday life-without grasping what is subversive about love and positive in the refusal of constraint-has a corpse in their mouth.
To set the tone, I spent an entire semester studying Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord at length when I attended university years ago. That was my first introduction to the Situationists and the concept of the spectacle (in short, life has been degraded into a representation of life, not the actual lived experience..."All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.") I used to talk about the spectacle to people at parties, some who remember me walking up to them and suddenly asking, “Hey, did you know that society is a spectacle?”
Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life took my very breath away. The poetic, and radical speech used throughout the book moved me to really look at my reality and the possibilities of what I could do with my life in a very different light. It has left an enormous impression on me and I feel like things do need to change regarding the culture of excessive consumption and the constraints it has placed on us as human beings. I love the concept that we have the radical potential to be liberated through the energy of the creativity of the people.
I often read books and grasp relatable content from them, so, this is my view of Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life. I could interpret some things incorrectly but honestly, if radical theory grasps people at the very root, that is exactly how I processed these words. Written in 1967, this book remains relevant today.
Vaneigem stipulates that we, as a society, have achieved the status of guaranteed material security in all or most, First World, industrialized countries. Society now holds a large supply of energy which was formally expended on the struggle for survival. This energy is now harnessed by Power (hierarchy, exchange, consumption) which would otherwise, be available for the free development of individual life.
Vaneigem writes about the ‘impoverishment of existence’. As consumption, production and profits increase, the use-value of life steadily decreases. Human beings are encouraged to focus on the quantitative instead of the qualitative.
We live in a dictatorship of consumption and I feel that its grip has only become stronger. The continuous consumption of goods is now a new form of slavery for man. The consumer can never attain satisfaction-it is essential that commodities are manufactured with defects, so they need continual replacement. We are encouraged to focus on the perpetual replacement of commodities and assets in the name of technology, novelty and affluence, otherwise, if we didn't focus on changing the make of our car or our dining room set, a more radical change could occur.
Authentic life has been replaced with things and because things must be consumed, we cannot be attached or connected to them and thus, we remain devoid of true self fulfilment. Just as our existence has been permeated with lifeless objects, people have also been reduced to things while also being spoon-fed pre-fabricated desires and dreams on “..the conveyor belt called schools, the advertisement industry, the conditioning mechanisms essential to any Order- all conspire to lead the child, the adolescent, and the adult as painlessly as possible into the great family of consumers.” We give our children ‘gadgets’ (or in contemporary terms, ‘devices’-smartphones, tablets, iphones) that reward them for passivity, and so, the initiation begins earlier.
People learn to play their role in the spectacle and embody stereotypes or otherwise, they find their rank low in the hierarchy. We cannot be our true selves when we perform ‘roles’. Vaneigem argues, the more we see ourselves through official eyes, the greater our alienation. We inhabit the same space and form communities, yet with merely an illusion of being together. Veneigem makes it clear that Power and hierarchy have only blocked humanity’s path to emancipation. I feel that Vaneigem is correct in warning there is a real danger that a consumerist avalanche will sweep us all into oblivion and we will have lost all that we have materially gained if we do not harness the power and truth of creativity and subjectivity. The more oppression is justified in terms of freedom to consume, the more the malaise of the people and the thirst of freedom grows. This is where the revolution of everyday life will blossom.
Vaneigem believes that the creative spark is the spark of life with the ability to move mountains. “In creativity, everyone possesses the ultimate weapon.” Everyone who lives is an artist in Vaneigem’s eyes, and creativity is revolutionary; to live in the continual euphoria of the moment of creation....to feel self-fulfilled from that creation.
The revolution of everyday life is largely based on the theory of subjectivity: the idea that we all have the same will to self-fulfilment, although our individual desires may be different. Subjectivity is strengthened by perceiving the subjectivity of others; ‘the harmonizing of individual wills’ so to speak. This is where pleasure, which has been hidden away from public view and tucked away behind closed bedroom doors may flourish freely. Genuine revolution is when people take to making love in offices and other places where we are forced to produce and profit.
Vaneigem stresses in his book, that the victory of a system of human relationships is founded on three inseparable principles: participation, communication and fulfilment. These three principles are connected to three essential passions needed for a harmonized social organization: creation (self fulfilment), love (communication) and play (participation).
“The project of self-fulfilment is born of passion to create, at the moment when subjectivity wells up and aspires to reign universally. The project of communication is born of the passion of love, when individuals discover that the desire for amorous conquest in themselves is identical to others. The project of participation is born of passion for play when the group fosters the self-fulfilment of each individual. The isolation of the three passions perverts them...The will to self-fulfilment is transformed into the will to power: In thrall to status and role playing, it presides over a world of constraint and illusion. The will to communication turns into objective mendacity: founded now on relationships between objects, it provides the semiologist with the signs which it is their job to disguise as human. The will to participation serves to organize the loneliness of everyone in the crowd, setting up the tyrany of illusory community.”
Vaneigem generally concludes that we must move towards a new social organization where all the energy of individual creativity will have free rein so our world can be shaped by the dreams of each, as harmonized by all. He indicates that everyone wants their subjectivity to triumph, so human connection and unity should be built on this very concept, otherwise, we risk the chance of undermining all of the material progress we have made.
I feel there are waves made in culture which touch on some concepts Vaneigem raises in his book. They can be viewed as reactions to our world of mass consumption, illusion and constraint.
The minimalist culture or lifestyle is an example. It’s a lifestyle where one does not give into stereotypical consumerist behavior, for example, people donate unwanted clothes, and live in a decluttered, basic spaces. I have a friend who I believe self-identifies as ‘minimalist’ and she is very interested in gardening and saving money; decluttering and focusing on what’s important. This is definitely a reaction to the dictatorship of consumption. The constant need to change things so other change remains unfounded.
There is an acceleration in the rate that technological products, such as, different versions of cellphones are featured and therefore bought and sold each year. Our reliance on our smartphones have contributed to the degradation of everyday life. We no longer seem to use spontaneous thought or creativity. We check Google first.
Lastly, a contemporary symptom of the impoverishment of existence as it relates to consumption that I see, is the prescription pill epidemic. Scientists are learning now to manufacture stronger, and cheaper, deadlier drugs that could send a human being into acute psychosis, for example...because the profit margins are higher. Thus, contributing to the whirlpool of suffering experienced by those forgotten on the margins of society...
Creation can lead to a feeling of self fulfilment and achievement which are liberating emotions. I certainly feel fulfilled after I have accomplished something. I draw sketches, I write passages or I learn dances to delight my senses and explore my creative spark within my life.
To set the tone, I spent an entire semester studying Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord at length when I attended university years ago. That was my first introduction to the Situationists and the concept of the spectacle (in short, life has been degraded into a representation of life, not the actual lived experience..."All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.") I used to talk about the spectacle to people at parties, some who remember me walking up to them and suddenly asking, “Hey, did you know that society is a spectacle?”
Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life took my very breath away. The poetic, and radical speech used throughout the book moved me to really look at my reality and the possibilities of what I could do with my life in a very different light. It has left an enormous impression on me and I feel like things do need to change regarding the culture of excessive consumption and the constraints it has placed on us as human beings. I love the concept that we have the radical potential to be liberated through the energy of the creativity of the people.
I often read books and grasp relatable content from them, so, this is my view of Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life. I could interpret some things incorrectly but honestly, if radical theory grasps people at the very root, that is exactly how I processed these words. Written in 1967, this book remains relevant today.
Vaneigem stipulates that we, as a society, have achieved the status of guaranteed material security in all or most, First World, industrialized countries. Society now holds a large supply of energy which was formally expended on the struggle for survival. This energy is now harnessed by Power (hierarchy, exchange, consumption) which would otherwise, be available for the free development of individual life.
Vaneigem writes about the ‘impoverishment of existence’. As consumption, production and profits increase, the use-value of life steadily decreases. Human beings are encouraged to focus on the quantitative instead of the qualitative.
We live in a dictatorship of consumption and I feel that its grip has only become stronger. The continuous consumption of goods is now a new form of slavery for man. The consumer can never attain satisfaction-it is essential that commodities are manufactured with defects, so they need continual replacement. We are encouraged to focus on the perpetual replacement of commodities and assets in the name of technology, novelty and affluence, otherwise, if we didn't focus on changing the make of our car or our dining room set, a more radical change could occur.
Authentic life has been replaced with things and because things must be consumed, we cannot be attached or connected to them and thus, we remain devoid of true self fulfilment. Just as our existence has been permeated with lifeless objects, people have also been reduced to things while also being spoon-fed pre-fabricated desires and dreams on “..the conveyor belt called schools, the advertisement industry, the conditioning mechanisms essential to any Order- all conspire to lead the child, the adolescent, and the adult as painlessly as possible into the great family of consumers.” We give our children ‘gadgets’ (or in contemporary terms, ‘devices’-smartphones, tablets, iphones) that reward them for passivity, and so, the initiation begins earlier.
People learn to play their role in the spectacle and embody stereotypes or otherwise, they find their rank low in the hierarchy. We cannot be our true selves when we perform ‘roles’. Vaneigem argues, the more we see ourselves through official eyes, the greater our alienation. We inhabit the same space and form communities, yet with merely an illusion of being together. Veneigem makes it clear that Power and hierarchy have only blocked humanity’s path to emancipation. I feel that Vaneigem is correct in warning there is a real danger that a consumerist avalanche will sweep us all into oblivion and we will have lost all that we have materially gained if we do not harness the power and truth of creativity and subjectivity. The more oppression is justified in terms of freedom to consume, the more the malaise of the people and the thirst of freedom grows. This is where the revolution of everyday life will blossom.
Vaneigem believes that the creative spark is the spark of life with the ability to move mountains. “In creativity, everyone possesses the ultimate weapon.” Everyone who lives is an artist in Vaneigem’s eyes, and creativity is revolutionary; to live in the continual euphoria of the moment of creation....to feel self-fulfilled from that creation.
The revolution of everyday life is largely based on the theory of subjectivity: the idea that we all have the same will to self-fulfilment, although our individual desires may be different. Subjectivity is strengthened by perceiving the subjectivity of others; ‘the harmonizing of individual wills’ so to speak. This is where pleasure, which has been hidden away from public view and tucked away behind closed bedroom doors may flourish freely. Genuine revolution is when people take to making love in offices and other places where we are forced to produce and profit.
Vaneigem stresses in his book, that the victory of a system of human relationships is founded on three inseparable principles: participation, communication and fulfilment. These three principles are connected to three essential passions needed for a harmonized social organization: creation (self fulfilment), love (communication) and play (participation).
“The project of self-fulfilment is born of passion to create, at the moment when subjectivity wells up and aspires to reign universally. The project of communication is born of the passion of love, when individuals discover that the desire for amorous conquest in themselves is identical to others. The project of participation is born of passion for play when the group fosters the self-fulfilment of each individual. The isolation of the three passions perverts them...The will to self-fulfilment is transformed into the will to power: In thrall to status and role playing, it presides over a world of constraint and illusion. The will to communication turns into objective mendacity: founded now on relationships between objects, it provides the semiologist with the signs which it is their job to disguise as human. The will to participation serves to organize the loneliness of everyone in the crowd, setting up the tyrany of illusory community.”
Vaneigem generally concludes that we must move towards a new social organization where all the energy of individual creativity will have free rein so our world can be shaped by the dreams of each, as harmonized by all. He indicates that everyone wants their subjectivity to triumph, so human connection and unity should be built on this very concept, otherwise, we risk the chance of undermining all of the material progress we have made.
I feel there are waves made in culture which touch on some concepts Vaneigem raises in his book. They can be viewed as reactions to our world of mass consumption, illusion and constraint.
The minimalist culture or lifestyle is an example. It’s a lifestyle where one does not give into stereotypical consumerist behavior, for example, people donate unwanted clothes, and live in a decluttered, basic spaces. I have a friend who I believe self-identifies as ‘minimalist’ and she is very interested in gardening and saving money; decluttering and focusing on what’s important. This is definitely a reaction to the dictatorship of consumption. The constant need to change things so other change remains unfounded.
There is an acceleration in the rate that technological products, such as, different versions of cellphones are featured and therefore bought and sold each year. Our reliance on our smartphones have contributed to the degradation of everyday life. We no longer seem to use spontaneous thought or creativity. We check Google first.
Lastly, a contemporary symptom of the impoverishment of existence as it relates to consumption that I see, is the prescription pill epidemic. Scientists are learning now to manufacture stronger, and cheaper, deadlier drugs that could send a human being into acute psychosis, for example...because the profit margins are higher. Thus, contributing to the whirlpool of suffering experienced by those forgotten on the margins of society...
Creation can lead to a feeling of self fulfilment and achievement which are liberating emotions. I certainly feel fulfilled after I have accomplished something. I draw sketches, I write passages or I learn dances to delight my senses and explore my creative spark within my life.
November 3, 2015
Superbly intelligent and superb. Makes you feel superb. Makes you want to become more superb. Kills boredom forever. Exposes just about everything as a sham. Nihilism at its most hilarious. Not actually nihilistic at all. Religious. Powerful. Power-mad, in a mad-good way. Mad. Bad. Good.
July 19, 2023
Whether everything in the work is agreed upon or not is not the beauty of this book. The dialectic is played with constantly here to stimulate our active processors. Any who complain that you need to engage with this work are simply admiring their passivity. Indeed it is hard to read. But after re-reading it, it is fantastic. Learning actually works when you engage with the text…
This book is geared towards the underworked proletariat, the unemployed, the privileged and the artisans, of which the author claims to have been the core of past revolutions. The idea here is that the spectacle’s strategy is that of distracting these groups of potential revolutionaries, by giving them more free time and consumable images, rather them keep them overworked and focussed on survival. The fact that our free time has diminished spectacularly since then must be taken into account before jumping on this bandwagon.
However the author was right that the spectacle was taking over our consumption patterns. He also suggests that this spectacle can only be temporary, and it will inevitably lead to violent revolution. And indeed the decade or so following the publication of theses ideas (along with Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle) it may have seemed prophetic. (I think it was Vaneigem that said that radical works are necessarily pre (or post) revolution). But the spectacle still dominates us 44 years later…especially since the advent of neoliberalism starting in 1980.
In this book, many classic antagonisms of modern life are played with and inverted. Sometimes the author brilliantly succeeds, less often he misses out.
Some possible issues:
The individual vs. the collective.
A false dichotomy that the author points out. Although at times it seems he glorifies the individual, what he is really doing is making sure we don’t sacrifice our subjective creativity for the collective, something he sees many a failed revolution as having done.
The rational and objective vs. feeling:
another false dichotomy that he works through… he even equates the rational and objective to technocracy… he later contradicts this.
He exposes the dichotomy between feeling and rationality as a lie. We must be rational AND passionate.
Evolution of ideas in the text is rampant, another example: he starts out by glorifying sexual libertinism and Wilhem Reich’s ‘orgastic impotency’ but he then critiques Reich and sexuality and concludes that the problem of tensions and liquidation don’t just exist on the level of sexuality, while still acknowledging the importance of sexuality.
He also progresses from a critique of Organization in general … to one of hierarchical organization.
What appears at first to be a glorification of childhood becomes: The weapons of criticism (individual organization) + childlike vigour= a revolutionary life.
Still another: First we must hate things? All things? Comes across a bit primitivistic, but then he says that we need to use things to free us.
His everday life solutions are simple, yet not at all simplistic:
Open dialogue, sensual speech, poetry, dialectic.
Active nihilism + transcendence = real wealth = consciousness of decomposition + historical consciousness.
He turns traditional ideas of nihilism on their head completely...and suggests that nihilists will be the greatest friends of the revolutionaries.
Conclusions he might have missed:
A false dichotomy between reform and revolution? To concede a fraction is to give up everything…a bit ridiculous.
Every type of specialization is totalitarian?
This book is specialized…
What happens if capitalism can absorb creative energy for its own purposes(he suggests it no longer could, so far he has been quite wrong)?
Game-playing could flourish as never before in history (and it has… in the negative sense (video games)). Capitalism is using diversion negatively to divert us. We aren’t using diversion positively, (at least not yet).
According to Vaneigem, the only way the inevitable revolution will be stopped:
‘If ever social organization extends its control to our ideal world within ourselves, its domination will no longer be exercised over anything but robots or corpses’. That makes me seriously wonder why 44 years later why we haven't been anywhere near revolution...has the spectacle somehow managed to control our ideal worlds? ...It makes me wonder if indeed propaganda has entered our dreams...and if we really are just robots and corpses....terrifying.
But the fact that this book still inspires indicates at least a few of us have some capacity at revolt, and I can see how he hits a chord on innumerable ideas. Amongst other things it made me wonder if the obsession that modern-day spectacle consumers have on zombies, vampires, apocalypses may just finally symbolize the decomposition of the spectacle…or is just the spectacle of decomposition?
A work of genius that makes us engage. It doesn’t even matter that it is flawed, it is that good.
This book is geared towards the underworked proletariat, the unemployed, the privileged and the artisans, of which the author claims to have been the core of past revolutions. The idea here is that the spectacle’s strategy is that of distracting these groups of potential revolutionaries, by giving them more free time and consumable images, rather them keep them overworked and focussed on survival. The fact that our free time has diminished spectacularly since then must be taken into account before jumping on this bandwagon.
However the author was right that the spectacle was taking over our consumption patterns. He also suggests that this spectacle can only be temporary, and it will inevitably lead to violent revolution. And indeed the decade or so following the publication of theses ideas (along with Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle) it may have seemed prophetic. (I think it was Vaneigem that said that radical works are necessarily pre (or post) revolution). But the spectacle still dominates us 44 years later…especially since the advent of neoliberalism starting in 1980.
In this book, many classic antagonisms of modern life are played with and inverted. Sometimes the author brilliantly succeeds, less often he misses out.
Some possible issues:
The individual vs. the collective.
A false dichotomy that the author points out. Although at times it seems he glorifies the individual, what he is really doing is making sure we don’t sacrifice our subjective creativity for the collective, something he sees many a failed revolution as having done.
The rational and objective vs. feeling:
another false dichotomy that he works through… he even equates the rational and objective to technocracy… he later contradicts this.
He exposes the dichotomy between feeling and rationality as a lie. We must be rational AND passionate.
Evolution of ideas in the text is rampant, another example: he starts out by glorifying sexual libertinism and Wilhem Reich’s ‘orgastic impotency’ but he then critiques Reich and sexuality and concludes that the problem of tensions and liquidation don’t just exist on the level of sexuality, while still acknowledging the importance of sexuality.
He also progresses from a critique of Organization in general … to one of hierarchical organization.
What appears at first to be a glorification of childhood becomes: The weapons of criticism (individual organization) + childlike vigour= a revolutionary life.
Still another: First we must hate things? All things? Comes across a bit primitivistic, but then he says that we need to use things to free us.
His everday life solutions are simple, yet not at all simplistic:
Open dialogue, sensual speech, poetry, dialectic.
Active nihilism + transcendence = real wealth = consciousness of decomposition + historical consciousness.
He turns traditional ideas of nihilism on their head completely...and suggests that nihilists will be the greatest friends of the revolutionaries.
Conclusions he might have missed:
A false dichotomy between reform and revolution? To concede a fraction is to give up everything…a bit ridiculous.
Every type of specialization is totalitarian?
This book is specialized…
What happens if capitalism can absorb creative energy for its own purposes(he suggests it no longer could, so far he has been quite wrong)?
Game-playing could flourish as never before in history (and it has… in the negative sense (video games)). Capitalism is using diversion negatively to divert us. We aren’t using diversion positively, (at least not yet).
According to Vaneigem, the only way the inevitable revolution will be stopped:
‘If ever social organization extends its control to our ideal world within ourselves, its domination will no longer be exercised over anything but robots or corpses’. That makes me seriously wonder why 44 years later why we haven't been anywhere near revolution...has the spectacle somehow managed to control our ideal worlds? ...It makes me wonder if indeed propaganda has entered our dreams...and if we really are just robots and corpses....terrifying.
But the fact that this book still inspires indicates at least a few of us have some capacity at revolt, and I can see how he hits a chord on innumerable ideas. Amongst other things it made me wonder if the obsession that modern-day spectacle consumers have on zombies, vampires, apocalypses may just finally symbolize the decomposition of the spectacle…or is just the spectacle of decomposition?
A work of genius that makes us engage. It doesn’t even matter that it is flawed, it is that good.
April 11, 2013
I have had this on my to-read list for years. This is the first Situationist text that I have read and its influence is obvious, while reading it I recognized a lot that I had seen before in other cultural artefacts that came after it, from punk bands as Crass with which I sort of grew up to anarchist and political zines I've read over the years. As with everything, it’s good to finally read the original. It is also good read one of the main ’68 texts yourself rather than just the usual historically appropriated accounts of what it was all about. With the events May ’68 in your mind, it’s crazy to see to what extent writers like Vaneigem sort of expected something along those lines to happen. But it is also shocking to see to what extent we have actually regressed in achieving the radical changes Vaneigem envisioned.
The foundation of Vaneigem’s theory was to me surprisingly orthodox Marxist. Most of his account of history is basically the same as the one you can find in the communist manifesto. The bourgeoisie superseded the feudal system, which enabled capitalism and the creation of the proletariat. But the dominance of the bourgeoisie is only a transitional phase in the development of humanity, as the very same capitalism that they created allowed for the progress in productive forces and technology which will allow the proletariat to take over and finally actualize the egalitarian visions. The main thing that Vaneigem and the Situationists add is that it is not just about material conditions, which in the rich industrialized countries took the proletariat beyond the struggle of survival, it is the poverty of everyday life. The poverty of choice offered by our shallow consumer society, the lack of imagination, the alienation, and that all the liberal freedoms offered are a sham. “Anyone who talks about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life – without grasping what is subversive about love and positive in the refusal of constraints – has a corpse in his mouth”. According to Vaneigem, we’re past the struggle of survival, as in many parts of the world we have achieved a decent enough standard of material well-being. We've got our fridges and televisions. Now we want to live, not just survive. He loathes the work-ethic that was (and to a smaller extent still is) a big part of the Left, in for example the right-to-work campaigns and simplistic narrowing of class struggle to wage-bargaining. He reminds that the Latin word for labour means suffering. "Today the love of a job well done and belief in the rewards of hard work signal nothing so much as spineless and stupid submission”.
It is easy to see the appeal of all this, it´s not material poverty that pisses off young radicals in the ‘rich West’, it is this poverty of everyday life that makes us want to throw bricks at the cops. Vaneigem wants to give free reign to subjectivity, to our individual desires to live intensely. The theory he sets out is logical and coherent, but to me ultimately unsatisfying. You can write of the ‘rich West’ all you like, and we’re still free from the risk of starvation, but what’s left of the fat Keynesian-Fordist welfare state? This radical critique written in the heydays of welfare state capitalism made me angry. Angry at the so-called ‘social-democrats’ that have been destroying the welfare state, our social security, social housing, labour rights, healthcare-system and public services, by completely giving into neoliberal reforms. But also angry at Vaneigem, that constantly belittles all the achievements of that welfare state that was once ours, and which was achieved by socialist parties, through trade-union organizing, and militant leftists of all these ‘-isms’ that he loathes (Socialism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, Maoism etc). I wish we still had expanding welfare state with its annual wage increases that he bemoans. I am not saying that we should go back to the welfare state of the past and leave it at that, far from it, I completely support Vaneigem’s analysis of the poverty of everyday life, but I think that the revolution required to overthrow it is much more probable with the leftist militantism of the 60s and 70s that he despises still around.
What it basically comes down to is that I detest the puritanism of it all. This puritanism is present in Vaneigem´s writing and also in many other anarchist writings. He is against all kinds of hierarchy, against all kinds of reform and against any kind of sacrifice, as your actions should always come from your own true inner self (what is this true inner self anyway and how can we know?*), never from an “ideology” or leader. Never cooperate with more ‘reformist’ organizations. No mass organizations. Only self-managed communities and small radical cells. “I have already said that the confused conflict between so-called progressives and reactionaries comes down to the issue whether people should be broken by the carrot or the stick”. No nuance seems to be possible for Vaneigem, all reform is reactionary. “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.” Alright, it’s fine if you want to have fun in your actions towards social change and revolution, but don’t fucking belittle all those other people that work fucking hard for social change in different ways, because you’re whole theory is only rationalizing your own selfish ego by pretending everything will change because you and some others are “intensely following their inner desires”. If you don’t want work hard improving the political consciousness of the ‘masses’, then don’t, but fuck off belittling those who do. I mean, get real, politics is dirty. If you’re truly serious about achieving social change** then prepare to get your hands dirty and know that some foul Machiavellian shit needs to be pulled off by someone somewhere sooner or later.
The problem is that Vaneigem lacks a theory for social change. Vaneigem explicitly does not want to write a “what is to be done” step-guide towards revolution ala Lenin, but the question of how you want to achieve the social change towards a radically different system remains. Without it, what remains is merely an intellectual legitimation for petty violence, vandalism and shoplifting. There are never enough of those of course, but still. The system is not scared of you living out your “true inner desires”. Vaneigem’s idea is that everyone’s harmonized individual perspectives will successfully construct a new coherent and collective world. But how do you get there? Vaneigem expected that people were fed up and would soon collectively live out their subjectivity, but this simply never really ended up happening, perhaps except for a month in ´68. In the last chapters Vaneigem becomes a bit clearer on what the revolutionary approach ought to be. “Each phase of the revolutionary process is a faithful reflection of the ultimate goal.” Prefigurative politics it is I suppose.
I hoped that the part on culture, the spectacle, and how capitalism and the commodity form corrupts culture and leisure time would inspire me, but after reading the brilliant Culture Industry essays last year this part wasn’t much more than an Adorno-for-5-year-olds. I was quite curious about the part on sexuality, but the whole Wilhelm Reich fetish is weird to me and seems and typical 60s. Then there’s Vaneigem loathing the moralism of many leftist side-issue struggles and he beats up the anti-racist and anti-antisemetic hobbyhorses of the Left (“we’re all just niggers to the rulers of this land” to quote Crass) which is entertaining, but I am not sure whether I agree.
There were some parts that I really liked though. It is filled with a vast array of highly quotable sentences. Besides, I found the conceptualizations of roles, specialists, stereotypes and power actually rather insightful. On the masochistic nature of humans in their everyday life for instance:
“Consider a thirty-five-year-old man. Each morning he starts his car, drives to the office, pushes papers, has lunch in town, plays poker, pushes more papers, leaves work, has a couple of drinks, goes home, greets his wife, kisses his children, eats a steak in front of the TV, goes to bed, makes love and falls asleep. Who reduces a man’s life to this pathetic sequence of clichés? A journalist? A cop? A market researcher? A populist author? Not at all. He does it himself, breaking his day down into a series of poses chosen more or less unconsciously from the range of prevalent stereotypes.”
[..]
“The satisfaction of a well-played role is fuelled by his eagerness to remain at a distance from himself, to deny and sacrifice himself”
“We live our roles better than our own lives”
And on power:
“Slaves are not willing slaves for long if they are not compensated for their submission with a shred of authority”
“There is no Power without submission”
“Power is partial, not absolute”.
His concept of Power is vague and abstract, but you do get a sense of what he means. I like the insight that those that climb the ladder, the specialists, subject themselves to Power the most. The specialists are the masters-as-slaves. The more they climb the hierarchy, the more Power, but also the more restricted on what they can do with this Power. I do sort of agree here, changing the system from within by climbing the system's hierarchy most of the time does not work at all. Vaneigem expected the proletariat to collectively rise and live out their subjectivity. To let us all become masters-without-slaves. Sadly, WE’RE STILL WAITING. Anyway. Let’s end this critique with the spectacle of some more brilliant Vaneigem quotes.
“The millions of humans being shot, imprisoned, tortured, starved, brutalized and systematically humiliated must surely be at peace, in their cemeteries and mass graves, to know how history has made sure that the struggle in which they died has enabled their descendants, isolated in their air-conditioned apartments, to learn from their daily dose of TV how to repeat that they are happy and free”
“To consume is to be consumed by inauthenticity, nurturing appearances to the benefit of the spectacle and the detriment of real life”
“Whatever you possess possesses you in return. Everything that makes you into an owner adapts you to the order of things”
“the feeling of humiliation is simply the feeling of being an object”
“the abstract, alienating mediation that estranges me from myself is terribly concrete”
* Vaneigem is also not going to convince me that he wrote all these books and read even more out of a "pure inner desire to live intensely") I mean, everyone seeks to rationalize their own behaviour, but nobody truly knows why we do what we do. I just do not believe in some sort of repressed pure inner desire that exists somewhere in all of us.
** It's kind of typical of this day and age that I say social change rather than revolution. The word revolution simply isn't part of me and many other's vocabulary as it seems too far away.
The foundation of Vaneigem’s theory was to me surprisingly orthodox Marxist. Most of his account of history is basically the same as the one you can find in the communist manifesto. The bourgeoisie superseded the feudal system, which enabled capitalism and the creation of the proletariat. But the dominance of the bourgeoisie is only a transitional phase in the development of humanity, as the very same capitalism that they created allowed for the progress in productive forces and technology which will allow the proletariat to take over and finally actualize the egalitarian visions. The main thing that Vaneigem and the Situationists add is that it is not just about material conditions, which in the rich industrialized countries took the proletariat beyond the struggle of survival, it is the poverty of everyday life. The poverty of choice offered by our shallow consumer society, the lack of imagination, the alienation, and that all the liberal freedoms offered are a sham. “Anyone who talks about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life – without grasping what is subversive about love and positive in the refusal of constraints – has a corpse in his mouth”. According to Vaneigem, we’re past the struggle of survival, as in many parts of the world we have achieved a decent enough standard of material well-being. We've got our fridges and televisions. Now we want to live, not just survive. He loathes the work-ethic that was (and to a smaller extent still is) a big part of the Left, in for example the right-to-work campaigns and simplistic narrowing of class struggle to wage-bargaining. He reminds that the Latin word for labour means suffering. "Today the love of a job well done and belief in the rewards of hard work signal nothing so much as spineless and stupid submission”.
It is easy to see the appeal of all this, it´s not material poverty that pisses off young radicals in the ‘rich West’, it is this poverty of everyday life that makes us want to throw bricks at the cops. Vaneigem wants to give free reign to subjectivity, to our individual desires to live intensely. The theory he sets out is logical and coherent, but to me ultimately unsatisfying. You can write of the ‘rich West’ all you like, and we’re still free from the risk of starvation, but what’s left of the fat Keynesian-Fordist welfare state? This radical critique written in the heydays of welfare state capitalism made me angry. Angry at the so-called ‘social-democrats’ that have been destroying the welfare state, our social security, social housing, labour rights, healthcare-system and public services, by completely giving into neoliberal reforms. But also angry at Vaneigem, that constantly belittles all the achievements of that welfare state that was once ours, and which was achieved by socialist parties, through trade-union organizing, and militant leftists of all these ‘-isms’ that he loathes (Socialism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, Maoism etc). I wish we still had expanding welfare state with its annual wage increases that he bemoans. I am not saying that we should go back to the welfare state of the past and leave it at that, far from it, I completely support Vaneigem’s analysis of the poverty of everyday life, but I think that the revolution required to overthrow it is much more probable with the leftist militantism of the 60s and 70s that he despises still around.
What it basically comes down to is that I detest the puritanism of it all. This puritanism is present in Vaneigem´s writing and also in many other anarchist writings. He is against all kinds of hierarchy, against all kinds of reform and against any kind of sacrifice, as your actions should always come from your own true inner self (what is this true inner self anyway and how can we know?*), never from an “ideology” or leader. Never cooperate with more ‘reformist’ organizations. No mass organizations. Only self-managed communities and small radical cells. “I have already said that the confused conflict between so-called progressives and reactionaries comes down to the issue whether people should be broken by the carrot or the stick”. No nuance seems to be possible for Vaneigem, all reform is reactionary. “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.” Alright, it’s fine if you want to have fun in your actions towards social change and revolution, but don’t fucking belittle all those other people that work fucking hard for social change in different ways, because you’re whole theory is only rationalizing your own selfish ego by pretending everything will change because you and some others are “intensely following their inner desires”. If you don’t want work hard improving the political consciousness of the ‘masses’, then don’t, but fuck off belittling those who do. I mean, get real, politics is dirty. If you’re truly serious about achieving social change** then prepare to get your hands dirty and know that some foul Machiavellian shit needs to be pulled off by someone somewhere sooner or later.
The problem is that Vaneigem lacks a theory for social change. Vaneigem explicitly does not want to write a “what is to be done” step-guide towards revolution ala Lenin, but the question of how you want to achieve the social change towards a radically different system remains. Without it, what remains is merely an intellectual legitimation for petty violence, vandalism and shoplifting. There are never enough of those of course, but still. The system is not scared of you living out your “true inner desires”. Vaneigem’s idea is that everyone’s harmonized individual perspectives will successfully construct a new coherent and collective world. But how do you get there? Vaneigem expected that people were fed up and would soon collectively live out their subjectivity, but this simply never really ended up happening, perhaps except for a month in ´68. In the last chapters Vaneigem becomes a bit clearer on what the revolutionary approach ought to be. “Each phase of the revolutionary process is a faithful reflection of the ultimate goal.” Prefigurative politics it is I suppose.
I hoped that the part on culture, the spectacle, and how capitalism and the commodity form corrupts culture and leisure time would inspire me, but after reading the brilliant Culture Industry essays last year this part wasn’t much more than an Adorno-for-5-year-olds. I was quite curious about the part on sexuality, but the whole Wilhelm Reich fetish is weird to me and seems and typical 60s. Then there’s Vaneigem loathing the moralism of many leftist side-issue struggles and he beats up the anti-racist and anti-antisemetic hobbyhorses of the Left (“we’re all just niggers to the rulers of this land” to quote Crass) which is entertaining, but I am not sure whether I agree.
There were some parts that I really liked though. It is filled with a vast array of highly quotable sentences. Besides, I found the conceptualizations of roles, specialists, stereotypes and power actually rather insightful. On the masochistic nature of humans in their everyday life for instance:
“Consider a thirty-five-year-old man. Each morning he starts his car, drives to the office, pushes papers, has lunch in town, plays poker, pushes more papers, leaves work, has a couple of drinks, goes home, greets his wife, kisses his children, eats a steak in front of the TV, goes to bed, makes love and falls asleep. Who reduces a man’s life to this pathetic sequence of clichés? A journalist? A cop? A market researcher? A populist author? Not at all. He does it himself, breaking his day down into a series of poses chosen more or less unconsciously from the range of prevalent stereotypes.”
[..]
“The satisfaction of a well-played role is fuelled by his eagerness to remain at a distance from himself, to deny and sacrifice himself”
“We live our roles better than our own lives”
And on power:
“Slaves are not willing slaves for long if they are not compensated for their submission with a shred of authority”
“There is no Power without submission”
“Power is partial, not absolute”.
His concept of Power is vague and abstract, but you do get a sense of what he means. I like the insight that those that climb the ladder, the specialists, subject themselves to Power the most. The specialists are the masters-as-slaves. The more they climb the hierarchy, the more Power, but also the more restricted on what they can do with this Power. I do sort of agree here, changing the system from within by climbing the system's hierarchy most of the time does not work at all. Vaneigem expected the proletariat to collectively rise and live out their subjectivity. To let us all become masters-without-slaves. Sadly, WE’RE STILL WAITING. Anyway. Let’s end this critique with the spectacle of some more brilliant Vaneigem quotes.
“The millions of humans being shot, imprisoned, tortured, starved, brutalized and systematically humiliated must surely be at peace, in their cemeteries and mass graves, to know how history has made sure that the struggle in which they died has enabled their descendants, isolated in their air-conditioned apartments, to learn from their daily dose of TV how to repeat that they are happy and free”
“To consume is to be consumed by inauthenticity, nurturing appearances to the benefit of the spectacle and the detriment of real life”
“Whatever you possess possesses you in return. Everything that makes you into an owner adapts you to the order of things”
“the feeling of humiliation is simply the feeling of being an object”
“the abstract, alienating mediation that estranges me from myself is terribly concrete”
* Vaneigem is also not going to convince me that he wrote all these books and read even more out of a "pure inner desire to live intensely") I mean, everyone seeks to rationalize their own behaviour, but nobody truly knows why we do what we do. I just do not believe in some sort of repressed pure inner desire that exists somewhere in all of us.
** It's kind of typical of this day and age that I say social change rather than revolution. The word revolution simply isn't part of me and many other's vocabulary as it seems too far away.
July 4, 2007
Undecipherable situationist bullshit
January 24, 2008
Originally read this serialized in the pages of the mag "Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed."
One of the most important works I've ever read.
It changed my life for ever.
While I can't point to concrete particulars, everything was different afterwards.
This is the definitive document, along with Debord's "Society of the Spectacle", of everything wrong with modern life.
One of the most important works I've ever read.
It changed my life for ever.
While I can't point to concrete particulars, everything was different afterwards.
This is the definitive document, along with Debord's "Society of the Spectacle", of everything wrong with modern life.
January 15, 2012
I just re-read this (1/12) and still find it extremely relevant to understanding the malaise that seems to permeate my generation... and an outline of the means to free ourselves from it. Dense and wholesome, highly recommended.
October 22, 2022
The Society of the Spectacle again, only this time twice as long and seemingly written by John Cleese as head of the People's Front of Judea.
January 20, 2018
The Revolution of Everyday Life represents one of the fundamental works of the political wing of the Situationist International It represents the somewhat flipside to Guy Debord's ''Society of the Spectacle'' that has a more Marxist focus and retains some of his polemical style. Vaneigem leans more to the anarchist approach (a form of individualist anarchism, albeit in my interpretation different from Stirnerist radical individualism) utilizing a poetic, lyrical style in his political commentary. Despite or because of this his writing is very thick and sometimes impenetrable, though understanding his style and approach become more possible as the book goes on.
Vaneigem bring to the fore the issues of capitalism and consumerist society in the ways that they affect the the everyday life of individuals, the consequences of the tyranny of commodity and the affects of the spectacle.
Some of the concepts that stand out in his exploration are: the commodification of human relations to the point that everything becomes an exchange(instead of a gift) and how this becomes synonymous with the process of humiliation of individuals., the feeling of being an object.
The Illusion of togetherness created by an atomized and massified society, creation of ''neutral relations'' (i.e small talk) that lack passion or freedom of expression and lack of community, the suffering of others as a marker of our own happiness by virtue of being observers to others suffering. Equality, fraternity and liberty seen via consumption, the object, the thing as dispenser of small doses of Power (ideology). The primacy of life as survival (and the survival sickness that comes with it in the form of mental distress) instead of a life lived in it's totality, in it's fullness, life for the sake of life. The rule of linear/quantitative, measured expressions of instead of cyclical and qualitative. Spontaneous, creative moments anchored in the act of playing ''poetry in action''as the essence of creating authentic moments that free us from the grip of the spectacle. Sacrifice as a form of masochistic exchange. The acceleration of a straight linear time, a change in our perception of the passing of time due to the constraints of commodity culture and capitalism, segmentation of time into bits, each assigned a specialized space and function. Finally, the role of radical subjectivism, to see one another through our own common desires,our common humanity, to see myself and my being as center but applying this to all others around you ''to love oneself through other people'';''finding the riches part of yourself hidden in others''.
Vaneigem maintains a strong libertarian socialist tone, delivering harsh critiques of the dogmatic pit that the Left had fallen into, with parallel criticism of both bolshevism and liberalism/capitalism as well as the collective tyranny that many socialist states had fallen under, emphasizing radical subjectivity achieved collectively as an alternative.
The book challenges us to consider that ''if people can be made into dogs, bricks or Green Berets, who is to say that they cannot be made into human beings?''
Vaneigem bring to the fore the issues of capitalism and consumerist society in the ways that they affect the the everyday life of individuals, the consequences of the tyranny of commodity and the affects of the spectacle.
Some of the concepts that stand out in his exploration are: the commodification of human relations to the point that everything becomes an exchange(instead of a gift) and how this becomes synonymous with the process of humiliation of individuals., the feeling of being an object.
The Illusion of togetherness created by an atomized and massified society, creation of ''neutral relations'' (i.e small talk) that lack passion or freedom of expression and lack of community, the suffering of others as a marker of our own happiness by virtue of being observers to others suffering. Equality, fraternity and liberty seen via consumption, the object, the thing as dispenser of small doses of Power (ideology). The primacy of life as survival (and the survival sickness that comes with it in the form of mental distress) instead of a life lived in it's totality, in it's fullness, life for the sake of life. The rule of linear/quantitative, measured expressions of instead of cyclical and qualitative. Spontaneous, creative moments anchored in the act of playing ''poetry in action''as the essence of creating authentic moments that free us from the grip of the spectacle. Sacrifice as a form of masochistic exchange. The acceleration of a straight linear time, a change in our perception of the passing of time due to the constraints of commodity culture and capitalism, segmentation of time into bits, each assigned a specialized space and function. Finally, the role of radical subjectivism, to see one another through our own common desires,our common humanity, to see myself and my being as center but applying this to all others around you ''to love oneself through other people'';''finding the riches part of yourself hidden in others''.
Vaneigem maintains a strong libertarian socialist tone, delivering harsh critiques of the dogmatic pit that the Left had fallen into, with parallel criticism of both bolshevism and liberalism/capitalism as well as the collective tyranny that many socialist states had fallen under, emphasizing radical subjectivity achieved collectively as an alternative.
The book challenges us to consider that ''if people can be made into dogs, bricks or Green Berets, who is to say that they cannot be made into human beings?''
November 17, 2022
Pretty good, I finished it a few days ago and appreciate the conceptualisation of a truly total process of revolution in ALL aspects of life and the idea of self-realisation and personal fulfillment as only totally possible through the destruction of capital, but thought many of the concepts around "power" and "authority" were quite abstractionist and in some cases felt totally accusatory and baseless.
September 15, 2017
Re-read, 09/2017: Every sentiment I expressed in my first review of this book is still absolutely true.
many people will tell you that "the society of the spectacle" is the be all and end all of situationist literature, but vaneigem's novel is more readable, more easily understood, and much more inspiring and thought provoking. highly recommended.
many people will tell you that "the society of the spectacle" is the be all and end all of situationist literature, but vaneigem's novel is more readable, more easily understood, and much more inspiring and thought provoking. highly recommended.
August 31, 2012
Vaneigem writes like a poet ; a very angry, and insightful poet. Covers the same ground as "Society of the Spectacle" but much more easier (and fun) to read. This book will get you thinking, and may even turn you dangerously radical.
February 15, 2008
"down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom."
November 27, 2014
Muy recomendable. Reseña completa:
http://www.libros-prohibidos.com/raou...
http://www.libros-prohibidos.com/raou...
August 19, 2013
I have had this on my to-read list for years. This is the first Situationist text that I have read and its influence is obvious, while reading it I recognized a lot that I had seen before in other cultural artefacts that came after it, from punk bands as Crass with which I sort of grew up to anarchist and political zines I’ve read over the years. As with everything, it’s good to finally read the original. It is also good read one of the main ’68 texts yourself rather than just the usual historically appropriated accounts of what it was all about. With the events May ’68 in your mind, it’s crazy to see to what extent writers like Vaneigem sort of expected something along those lines to happen. But it is also shocking to see to what extent we have actually regressed in achieving the radical changes Vaneigem envisioned.
The foundation of Vaneigem’s theory was to me surprisingly orthodox Marxist. Most of his account of history is basically the same as the one you can find in the communist manifesto. The bourgeoisie superseded the feudal system, which enabled capitalism and the creation of the proletariat. But the dominance of the bourgeoisie is only a transitional phase in the development of humanity, as the very same capitalism that they created allowed for the progress in productive forces and technology which will allow the proletariat to take over and finally actualize the egalitarian visions. The main thing that Vaneigem and the Situationists add is that it is not just about material conditions, which in the rich industrialized countries took the proletariat beyond the struggle of survival, it is the poverty of everyday life. The poverty of choice offered by our shallow consumer society, the lack of imagination, the alienation, and that all the liberal freedoms offered are a sham. “Anyone who talks about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life – without grasping what is subversive about love and positive in the refusal of constraints – has a corpse in his mouth”. According to Vaneigem, we’re past the struggle of survival, as in many parts of the world we have achieved a decent enough standard of material well-being. We’ve got our fridges and televisions. Now we want to live, not just survive. He loathes the work-ethic that was (and to a smaller extent still is) a big part of the Left, in for example the right-to-work campaigns and simplistic narrowing of class struggle to wage-bargaining. He reminds that the Latin word for labour means suffering. “Today the love of a job well done and belief in the rewards of hard work signal nothing so much as spineless and stupid submission”.
It is easy to see the appeal of all this, it´s not material poverty that pisses off young radicals in the ‘rich West’, it is this poverty of everyday life that makes us want to throw bricks at the cops. Vaneigem wants to give free reign to subjectivity, to our individual desires to live intensely. The theory he sets out is logical and coherent, but to me ultimately unsatisfying. You can write of the ‘rich West’ all you like, and we’re still free from the risk of starvation, but what’s left of the fat Keynesian-Fordist welfare state? This radical critique written in the heydays of welfare state capitalism made me angry. Angry at the so-called ‘social-democrats’ that have been destroying the welfare state, our social security, social housing, labour rights, healthcare-system and public services, by completely giving into neoliberal reforms. But also angry at Vaneigem, that constantly belittles all the achievements of that welfare state that was once ours, and which was achieved by socialist parties, through trade-union organizing, and militant leftists of all these ‘-isms’ that he loathes (Socialism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, Maoism etc). I wish we still had expanding welfare state with its annual wage increases that he bemoans. I am not saying that we should go back to the welfare state of the past and leave it at that, far from it, I completely support Vaneigem’s analysis of the poverty of everyday life, but I think that the revolution required to overthrow it is much more probable with the leftist militantism of the 60s and 70s that he despises still around.
What it basically comes down to is that I detest the puritanism of it all. This puritanism is present in Vaneigem´s writing and also in many other anarchist writings. He is against all kinds of hierarchy, against all kinds of reform and against any kind of sacrifice, as your actions should always come from your own true inner self (what is this true inner self anyway and how can we know?*), never from an “ideology” or leader. Never cooperate with more ‘reformist’ organizations. No mass organizations. Only self-managed communities and small radical cells. “I have already said that the confused conflict between so-called progressives and reactionaries comes down to the issue whether people should be broken by the carrot or the stick”. No nuance seems to be possible for Vaneigem, all reform is reactionary. “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.” Alright, it’s fine if you want to have fun in your actions towards social change and revolution, but don’t fucking belittle all those other people that work fucking hard for social change in different ways, because you’re whole theory is only rationalizing your own selfish ego by pretending everything will change because you and some others are “intensely following their inner desires”. If you don’t want work hard improving the political consciousness of the ‘masses’, then don’t, but fuck off belittling those who do. I mean, get real, politics is dirty. If you’re truly serious about achieving social change** then prepare to get your hands dirty and know that some foul Machiavellian shit needs to be pulled off by someone somewhere sooner or later.
The problem is that Vaneigem lacks a theory for social change. Vaneigem explicitly does not want to write a “what is to be done” step-guide towards revolution ala Lenin, but the question of how you want to achieve the social change towards a radically different system remains. Without it, what remains is merely an intellectual legitimation for petty violence, vandalism and shoplifting. There are never enough of those of course, but still. The system is not scared of you living out your “true inner desires”. Vaneigem’s idea is that everyone’s harmonized individual perspectives will successfully construct a new coherent and collective world. But how do you get there? Vaneigem expected that people were fed up and would soon collectively live out their subjectivity, but this simply never really ended up happening, perhaps except for a month in ´68. In the last chapters Vaneigem becomes a bit clearer on what the revolutionary approach ought to be. “Each phase of the revolutionary process is a faithful reflection of the ultimate goal.” Prefigurative politics it is I suppose.
I hoped that the part on culture, the spectacle, and how capitalism and the commodity form corrupts culture and leisure time would inspire me, but after reading the brilliant Culture Industry essays last year this part wasn’t much more than an Adorno-for-5-year-olds. I was quite curious about the part on sexuality, but the whole Wilhelm Reich fetish is weird to me and seems and typical 60s. Then there’s Vaneigem loathing the moralism of many leftist side-issue struggles and he beats up the anti-racist and anti-antisemetic hobbyhorses of the Left (“we’re all just niggers to the rulers of this land” to quote Crass) which is entertaining, but I am not sure whether I agree.
There were some parts that I really liked though. It is filled with a vast array of highly quotable sentences. Besides, I found the conceptualizations of roles, specialists, stereotypes and power actually rather insightful. On the masochistic nature of humans in their everyday life for instance:
“Consider a thirty-five-year-old man. Each morning he starts his car, drives to the office, pushes papers, has lunch in town, plays poker, pushes more papers, leaves work, has a couple of drinks, goes home, greets his wife, kisses his children, eats a steak in front of the TV, goes to bed, makes love and falls asleep. Who reduces a man’s life to this pathetic sequence of clichés? A journalist? A cop? A market researcher? A populist author? Not at all. He does it himself, breaking his day down into a series of poses chosen more or less unconsciously from the range of prevalent stereotypes.”
[..]
“The satisfaction of a well-played role is fuelled by his eagerness to remain at a distance from himself, to deny and sacrifice himself”
“We live our roles better than our own lives”
And on power:
“Slaves are not willing slaves for long if they are not compensated for their submission with a shred of authority”
“There is no Power without submission”
“Power is partial, not absolute”.
His concept of Power is vague and abstract, but you do get a sense of what he means. I like the insight that those that climb the ladder, the specialists, subject themselves to Power the most. The specialists are the masters-as-slaves. The more they climb the hierarchy, the more Power, but also the more restricted on what they can do with this Power. I do sort of agree here, changing the system from within by climbing the system’s hierarchy most of the time does not work at all. Vaneigem expected the proletariat to collectively rise and live out their subjectivity. To let us all become masters-without-slaves. Sadly, WE’RE STILL WAITING. Anyway. Let’s end this critique with the spectacle of some more brilliant Vaneigem quotes.
“The millions of humans being shot, imprisoned, tortured, starved, brutalized and systematically humiliated must surely be at peace, in their cemeteries and mass graves, to know how history has made sure that the struggle in which they died has enabled their descendants, isolated in their air-conditioned apartments, to learn from their daily dose of TV how to repeat that they are happy and free”
“To consume is to be consumed by inauthenticity, nurturing appearances to the benefit of the spectacle and the detriment of real life”
“Whatever you possess possesses you in return. Everything that makes you into an owner adapts you to the order of things”
“the feeling of humiliation is simply the feeling of being an object”
“the abstract, alienating mediation that estranges me from myself is terribly concrete”
* Vaneigem is also not going to convince me that he wrote all these books and read even more out of a “pure inner desire to live intensely”) I mean, everyone seeks to rationalize their own behaviour, but nobody truly knows why we do what we do. I just do not believe in some sort of repressed pure inner desire that exists somewhere in all of us.
** It’s kind of typical of this day and age that I say social change rather than revolution. The word revolution simply isn’t part of me and many other’s vocabulary as it seems too far away.
The foundation of Vaneigem’s theory was to me surprisingly orthodox Marxist. Most of his account of history is basically the same as the one you can find in the communist manifesto. The bourgeoisie superseded the feudal system, which enabled capitalism and the creation of the proletariat. But the dominance of the bourgeoisie is only a transitional phase in the development of humanity, as the very same capitalism that they created allowed for the progress in productive forces and technology which will allow the proletariat to take over and finally actualize the egalitarian visions. The main thing that Vaneigem and the Situationists add is that it is not just about material conditions, which in the rich industrialized countries took the proletariat beyond the struggle of survival, it is the poverty of everyday life. The poverty of choice offered by our shallow consumer society, the lack of imagination, the alienation, and that all the liberal freedoms offered are a sham. “Anyone who talks about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life – without grasping what is subversive about love and positive in the refusal of constraints – has a corpse in his mouth”. According to Vaneigem, we’re past the struggle of survival, as in many parts of the world we have achieved a decent enough standard of material well-being. We’ve got our fridges and televisions. Now we want to live, not just survive. He loathes the work-ethic that was (and to a smaller extent still is) a big part of the Left, in for example the right-to-work campaigns and simplistic narrowing of class struggle to wage-bargaining. He reminds that the Latin word for labour means suffering. “Today the love of a job well done and belief in the rewards of hard work signal nothing so much as spineless and stupid submission”.
It is easy to see the appeal of all this, it´s not material poverty that pisses off young radicals in the ‘rich West’, it is this poverty of everyday life that makes us want to throw bricks at the cops. Vaneigem wants to give free reign to subjectivity, to our individual desires to live intensely. The theory he sets out is logical and coherent, but to me ultimately unsatisfying. You can write of the ‘rich West’ all you like, and we’re still free from the risk of starvation, but what’s left of the fat Keynesian-Fordist welfare state? This radical critique written in the heydays of welfare state capitalism made me angry. Angry at the so-called ‘social-democrats’ that have been destroying the welfare state, our social security, social housing, labour rights, healthcare-system and public services, by completely giving into neoliberal reforms. But also angry at Vaneigem, that constantly belittles all the achievements of that welfare state that was once ours, and which was achieved by socialist parties, through trade-union organizing, and militant leftists of all these ‘-isms’ that he loathes (Socialism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, Maoism etc). I wish we still had expanding welfare state with its annual wage increases that he bemoans. I am not saying that we should go back to the welfare state of the past and leave it at that, far from it, I completely support Vaneigem’s analysis of the poverty of everyday life, but I think that the revolution required to overthrow it is much more probable with the leftist militantism of the 60s and 70s that he despises still around.
What it basically comes down to is that I detest the puritanism of it all. This puritanism is present in Vaneigem´s writing and also in many other anarchist writings. He is against all kinds of hierarchy, against all kinds of reform and against any kind of sacrifice, as your actions should always come from your own true inner self (what is this true inner self anyway and how can we know?*), never from an “ideology” or leader. Never cooperate with more ‘reformist’ organizations. No mass organizations. Only self-managed communities and small radical cells. “I have already said that the confused conflict between so-called progressives and reactionaries comes down to the issue whether people should be broken by the carrot or the stick”. No nuance seems to be possible for Vaneigem, all reform is reactionary. “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.” Alright, it’s fine if you want to have fun in your actions towards social change and revolution, but don’t fucking belittle all those other people that work fucking hard for social change in different ways, because you’re whole theory is only rationalizing your own selfish ego by pretending everything will change because you and some others are “intensely following their inner desires”. If you don’t want work hard improving the political consciousness of the ‘masses’, then don’t, but fuck off belittling those who do. I mean, get real, politics is dirty. If you’re truly serious about achieving social change** then prepare to get your hands dirty and know that some foul Machiavellian shit needs to be pulled off by someone somewhere sooner or later.
The problem is that Vaneigem lacks a theory for social change. Vaneigem explicitly does not want to write a “what is to be done” step-guide towards revolution ala Lenin, but the question of how you want to achieve the social change towards a radically different system remains. Without it, what remains is merely an intellectual legitimation for petty violence, vandalism and shoplifting. There are never enough of those of course, but still. The system is not scared of you living out your “true inner desires”. Vaneigem’s idea is that everyone’s harmonized individual perspectives will successfully construct a new coherent and collective world. But how do you get there? Vaneigem expected that people were fed up and would soon collectively live out their subjectivity, but this simply never really ended up happening, perhaps except for a month in ´68. In the last chapters Vaneigem becomes a bit clearer on what the revolutionary approach ought to be. “Each phase of the revolutionary process is a faithful reflection of the ultimate goal.” Prefigurative politics it is I suppose.
I hoped that the part on culture, the spectacle, and how capitalism and the commodity form corrupts culture and leisure time would inspire me, but after reading the brilliant Culture Industry essays last year this part wasn’t much more than an Adorno-for-5-year-olds. I was quite curious about the part on sexuality, but the whole Wilhelm Reich fetish is weird to me and seems and typical 60s. Then there’s Vaneigem loathing the moralism of many leftist side-issue struggles and he beats up the anti-racist and anti-antisemetic hobbyhorses of the Left (“we’re all just niggers to the rulers of this land” to quote Crass) which is entertaining, but I am not sure whether I agree.
There were some parts that I really liked though. It is filled with a vast array of highly quotable sentences. Besides, I found the conceptualizations of roles, specialists, stereotypes and power actually rather insightful. On the masochistic nature of humans in their everyday life for instance:
“Consider a thirty-five-year-old man. Each morning he starts his car, drives to the office, pushes papers, has lunch in town, plays poker, pushes more papers, leaves work, has a couple of drinks, goes home, greets his wife, kisses his children, eats a steak in front of the TV, goes to bed, makes love and falls asleep. Who reduces a man’s life to this pathetic sequence of clichés? A journalist? A cop? A market researcher? A populist author? Not at all. He does it himself, breaking his day down into a series of poses chosen more or less unconsciously from the range of prevalent stereotypes.”
[..]
“The satisfaction of a well-played role is fuelled by his eagerness to remain at a distance from himself, to deny and sacrifice himself”
“We live our roles better than our own lives”
And on power:
“Slaves are not willing slaves for long if they are not compensated for their submission with a shred of authority”
“There is no Power without submission”
“Power is partial, not absolute”.
His concept of Power is vague and abstract, but you do get a sense of what he means. I like the insight that those that climb the ladder, the specialists, subject themselves to Power the most. The specialists are the masters-as-slaves. The more they climb the hierarchy, the more Power, but also the more restricted on what they can do with this Power. I do sort of agree here, changing the system from within by climbing the system’s hierarchy most of the time does not work at all. Vaneigem expected the proletariat to collectively rise and live out their subjectivity. To let us all become masters-without-slaves. Sadly, WE’RE STILL WAITING. Anyway. Let’s end this critique with the spectacle of some more brilliant Vaneigem quotes.
“The millions of humans being shot, imprisoned, tortured, starved, brutalized and systematically humiliated must surely be at peace, in their cemeteries and mass graves, to know how history has made sure that the struggle in which they died has enabled their descendants, isolated in their air-conditioned apartments, to learn from their daily dose of TV how to repeat that they are happy and free”
“To consume is to be consumed by inauthenticity, nurturing appearances to the benefit of the spectacle and the detriment of real life”
“Whatever you possess possesses you in return. Everything that makes you into an owner adapts you to the order of things”
“the feeling of humiliation is simply the feeling of being an object”
“the abstract, alienating mediation that estranges me from myself is terribly concrete”
* Vaneigem is also not going to convince me that he wrote all these books and read even more out of a “pure inner desire to live intensely”) I mean, everyone seeks to rationalize their own behaviour, but nobody truly knows why we do what we do. I just do not believe in some sort of repressed pure inner desire that exists somewhere in all of us.
** It’s kind of typical of this day and age that I say social change rather than revolution. The word revolution simply isn’t part of me and many other’s vocabulary as it seems too far away.
June 26, 2018
I don't understand why this book has garnered so many great reviews. I really don't. Honestly, I think that because he is using a much larger vocabulary than you would find in the typical Anarchist (or Situationist if you must) tract, that he is actually saying something worth hearing. Most of the great ideas you can find here are drawn almost whole cloth from either Marx (history/Marxism) or from Lefebvre (Anarchism/Situationism). Take that away and all you have remaining is one or two quotables buried deep inside steaming piles of... bombastically rhetorical nonsense.
I am reading a translation and maybe it is better in the original French. Also, I was born a decade after the '68 that would have made this book relevant. I'll be generous and round this up to two for the sake of that historical context. Sad thing is, you read some of his more recent interviews and the guy is still spouting the same nonsense. Apparently, in the past 50 years, he hasn't changed, matured, or developed his ideas beyond the junk you will read here. Maybe he was relevant once... I doubt it, but certainly, he is no longer so. This book belongs in a museum, not on my bookshelf.
I am reading a translation and maybe it is better in the original French. Also, I was born a decade after the '68 that would have made this book relevant. I'll be generous and round this up to two for the sake of that historical context. Sad thing is, you read some of his more recent interviews and the guy is still spouting the same nonsense. Apparently, in the past 50 years, he hasn't changed, matured, or developed his ideas beyond the junk you will read here. Maybe he was relevant once... I doubt it, but certainly, he is no longer so. This book belongs in a museum, not on my bookshelf.
April 17, 2024
Incendiario
August 24, 2022
Yine çeviri dışında taktir edemediğim bir kitap; ikinci bir Amok kosucusu vakası.
Bütün olay, yoldayken okunacak bir kitap olmaması da olabilir. Kararsızım 😳
Bütün olay, yoldayken okunacak bir kitap olmaması da olabilir. Kararsızım 😳
May 20, 2018
Bardzo inspirująca książka. Warto w maju 2018 roku przypomnieć jakie były nastroje 50 lat temu w maju '68.
Całkowicie zgadzam się z autorem - powinniśmy dążyć do spełnienia naszych pragnień, nie żyć w "roli", porzucić wszelkie podziały, głośno wyśmiewać i buntować się przeciwko ludziom starego porządku, którzy z góry narzucają nam sposób życia. Jak u Prousta - skupić się na ulotnych chwilach, dostrzegać piękno teraźniejszości, a nie zatracać się w minionej przeszłości i przewidywać niepewną przyszłość. Krytykujmy konsumpcję i reklamę, nie dajmy sobie mydlić oczu obietnicami. Praktykujmy rewolucją życia codziennego.
Całkowicie zgadzam się z autorem - powinniśmy dążyć do spełnienia naszych pragnień, nie żyć w "roli", porzucić wszelkie podziały, głośno wyśmiewać i buntować się przeciwko ludziom starego porządku, którzy z góry narzucają nam sposób życia. Jak u Prousta - skupić się na ulotnych chwilach, dostrzegać piękno teraźniejszości, a nie zatracać się w minionej przeszłości i przewidywać niepewną przyszłość. Krytykujmy konsumpcję i reklamę, nie dajmy sobie mydlić oczu obietnicami. Praktykujmy rewolucją życia codziennego.
January 3, 2022
BY 2022, this book is now archaic. It's not worth your time and hassle to plow through the now-useless abstractions and rhetorical muck.
By the May 1968 Paris Commune, well-intentioned Marxists were attempting to internalize in their theories and praxis, the modern insights of McLuhan, Herb Schiller, radical sociologists, and cybernetics about how the impacts on individuals and social controls of technocracy require reconsiderations of radical approaches to revolution against all forms of hierarchical social order.
But Vaneigem's models are 60 years old! Imagine how useful the models of social critics in 1900 might have appeared to the radicals of the 1960s.
We now know Americans of the liberal 65% no longer possess even the personal concept that they should be involved in political organizing, of any significance, much less can develop and implement coherent emancipatory societal redesigning strategies together.
We have to trust each other, all of us have to live out of personal character, and we have to otherwise be living lives of solidarity on all levels of our lifestyles to accomplish that.
Solidarity has to be habitual ubiquitously.
And it's one thing for thousands of radicals to tear apart the oppressive hierarchical institutions of society together, and basically now an impossibility to think that we can have enough unity together of hundreds of millions of us to immediately then rig up a new libertarian social order as readily as if it was a circus tent.
Then imagine an egoist, a radical subjectivist, writing that the number one goal of all of us is to shape reality to our wills. In particular we are to come together using our own subjectivity to shape it around Vaneigem's rather solipsistic will, which is pure subjectivity.
He has no ecological or anthropological/developmental psychological models about why we don't do the things we should do.
We don't have brothers-in-arms anymore in the non-psychopath/dimwit/dupe dumbest 35% of Americans.
He has no idea about dopamine hits controlling people through voluntary compulsive relentless smart phone use instead of socialist ideals and rhetoric.
Americans aren't comrades with anybody. But back in Vaneigem's Paris in the mid-1960s he thought: "My friends and I are one, and we know it. Each of us is acting for each other by acting for himself."
The final sentence in the book says it all: "We have a world of pleasure to win, and nothing to lose but our boredom."
And there is: "The reconstruction of society will necessarily entail the simultaneous reconstruction of everyone's unconscious,"
I do love a few of his one-liners, though, like: "We need a manual of subversion – a 'Consumer's Guide to Not Consuming.'" (Earth First!)
This book is a waste of time unless you are a scholar of the historical Left. It took me 14 months to plod through to the end. PHEW!
Check out Marcuse instead: "Make Love Not War."
By the May 1968 Paris Commune, well-intentioned Marxists were attempting to internalize in their theories and praxis, the modern insights of McLuhan, Herb Schiller, radical sociologists, and cybernetics about how the impacts on individuals and social controls of technocracy require reconsiderations of radical approaches to revolution against all forms of hierarchical social order.
But Vaneigem's models are 60 years old! Imagine how useful the models of social critics in 1900 might have appeared to the radicals of the 1960s.
We now know Americans of the liberal 65% no longer possess even the personal concept that they should be involved in political organizing, of any significance, much less can develop and implement coherent emancipatory societal redesigning strategies together.
We have to trust each other, all of us have to live out of personal character, and we have to otherwise be living lives of solidarity on all levels of our lifestyles to accomplish that.
Solidarity has to be habitual ubiquitously.
And it's one thing for thousands of radicals to tear apart the oppressive hierarchical institutions of society together, and basically now an impossibility to think that we can have enough unity together of hundreds of millions of us to immediately then rig up a new libertarian social order as readily as if it was a circus tent.
Then imagine an egoist, a radical subjectivist, writing that the number one goal of all of us is to shape reality to our wills. In particular we are to come together using our own subjectivity to shape it around Vaneigem's rather solipsistic will, which is pure subjectivity.
He has no ecological or anthropological/developmental psychological models about why we don't do the things we should do.
We don't have brothers-in-arms anymore in the non-psychopath/dimwit/dupe dumbest 35% of Americans.
He has no idea about dopamine hits controlling people through voluntary compulsive relentless smart phone use instead of socialist ideals and rhetoric.
Americans aren't comrades with anybody. But back in Vaneigem's Paris in the mid-1960s he thought: "My friends and I are one, and we know it. Each of us is acting for each other by acting for himself."
The final sentence in the book says it all: "We have a world of pleasure to win, and nothing to lose but our boredom."
And there is: "The reconstruction of society will necessarily entail the simultaneous reconstruction of everyone's unconscious,"
I do love a few of his one-liners, though, like: "We need a manual of subversion – a 'Consumer's Guide to Not Consuming.'" (Earth First!)
This book is a waste of time unless you are a scholar of the historical Left. It took me 14 months to plod through to the end. PHEW!
Check out Marcuse instead: "Make Love Not War."
December 2, 2014
Rich, poetic, and full of quotable material. Sometimes it seems a little over the top on the "quotable material", though. I found it to be, on the most part, a beautiful and inspiring exploration of anarchist/situationist ideas. In particular, I thought he demonstrated the negative impacts of hierarchical power/slavery systems (capitalism, gov't, religion, etc) on the authenticity of the individual and thus, society very well. Sometimes, in many other works, these discussions lack the passion and humanity that I find to be most powerful. I wouldn't say his arguments were water-tight, but I would say that many of his arguments spoke truth to that part of me which knows and experiences without the ability to properly express in language. I practically devoured the first 80%. The last 20% really dragged for me.
September 28, 2015
When I originally read this work, over a decade ago, I was floored. It should be noted, however, that I read the work in translation (that was the copy ordered for a class). Rereading Vaneigem today, I must say I was somewhat bemused. While certain passages struck me with that same eureka moment, others seemed woefully naive and still many others were dense, opaque, alien to me. Have I somehow un-understood what came to me so clearly 10 years ago? Was it an excellent translation that made sense of what was originally intellectual thicket (something I have to do on a quasi-daily basis, FWIW)? Or perhaps have I grown, leaving parts of this work behind? At any rate, for the importance this book has had in my life, I can only give it five stars, even if there are large swathes in which today I "no longer hear the music", to paraphrase Pete Doherty.
March 29, 2013
Boredom is counter revolutionary!
It seems so long since the events of May 1968 that the Situationist movement may be almost forgotten. It was a moving experience to read this remarkable book and recognise the necessity of recovering our present from our erstwhile masters. Never before have these words made more sense; hopefully they will serve as a blueprint for the next generation of revolutionists just as they did for ours - and yet, perhaps in the true spirit of playfullness a better way can be found?
It seems so long since the events of May 1968 that the Situationist movement may be almost forgotten. It was a moving experience to read this remarkable book and recognise the necessity of recovering our present from our erstwhile masters. Never before have these words made more sense; hopefully they will serve as a blueprint for the next generation of revolutionists just as they did for ours - and yet, perhaps in the true spirit of playfullness a better way can be found?
March 9, 2016
I dont know what there is to say about this piece that hasn't been said by much better people than me....
All i can say is HIGHLY RECOMMEND. if you buy one book this year, let it be this one, i promise you will not be disappointed and if you're anything like me you will come back to it often.
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All i can say is HIGHLY RECOMMEND. if you buy one book this year, let it be this one, i promise you will not be disappointed and if you're anything like me you will come back to it often.
<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3
November 27, 2020
As a manifesto, it is really engaging. However, somehow the poetic writing style, at least for me, distracts the message it wants to convey. For a brilliant book like this, it could've been shorter. But anyway, I still thoroughly enjoy it. The last part of this book where Vaneigem touches relationship, sex and love is quite funny.
January 21, 2008
I've always thought of this as a type of psycho-subversive instruction booklet written in Debord's language. Sort of a self-help guide for anarchists in need of a quick nudge in the ribs.
If you want meat - go to Debord. But if you need some inspiration, this works.
If you want meat - go to Debord. But if you need some inspiration, this works.
May 2, 2016
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.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 105 reviews