Revolution Of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem

THE REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE

(Being a translation of

TRAITÉ DE SAVOIR-VIVRE À L'USAGE DES JEUNES GÉNÉRATIONS)

by Raoul Vaneigem



anti-copyright (free reproduction permitted on a non profit making basis)

DONE INTO ENGLISH BY
JOHN FULLERTON AND
PAUL SIEVEKING. 1972

(minor typological corrections and hypertext markup by kubhlai@proweb.co.uk
1998. Please report errors.)





DEDICATION

To Ella, Maldoror and those who helped this adventure upon its way. "I LIVE
ON THE EDGE OF THE UNIVERSE AND I DON"T NEED TO FEEL SECURE."





"Man walketh in a vain shew, he shews to be a man, and that's all."

We seem to live in the State of variety, wherein we are not truly living but
only in appearance: in Unity is our life: in one we are, from one divided,
we are no longer.

While we perambulate variety, we walk but as so many Ghosts or Shadows in
it, that it self being but the Umbrage of the Unity.

The world travels perpetually, and every one is swoln full big with
particularity of interest; thus travelling together in pain, and groaning
under enmity: labouring to bring forth some one thing, some another, and all
bring forth nothing but wind and confusion.

Consider, is there not in the best of you a body of death? Is not the root
of rebellion planted in your natures? Is there not also a time for this
wicked one to be revealed?

You little think, and less know, how soon the cup of fury may be put into
your hands: my self, with many others, have been made stark drunk with that
wine of wrath, the dregs whereof (for ought I know) may fall to your share
suddenly."

From: "Heights in Depths and Depths in Heights (or TRVTH no less secretly
than sweetly sparkling out its Glory from under a cloud of Obloquie)" by the
Ranter Jo. Salmon (1651).



Introduction

I have no intention of revealing what there is of my life in this book to
readers who are not prepared to relive it. I await the day when it will lose
and find itself in a general movement of ideas, just as I like to think that
the present conditions will be erased from the memories of men.

The world must be remade; all the specialists in reconditioning will not be
able to stop it. Since I do not want to understand them, I prefer that they
should not understand me.

As for the others, I ask for their goodwill with a humility they will not
fail to perceive. I should have liked a book like this to be accessible to
those minds least addled by intellectual jargon; I hope I have not failed
absolutely. One day a few formulae will emerge from this chaos and fire
point-blank on our enemies. Till then these sentences, read and re-read,
will have to do their slow work. The path toward simplicity is the most
complex of all, and here in particular it seemed best not to tear away from
the commonplace the tangle of roots which enable us to transplant it into
another region, where we can cultivate it to our own profit.

I have never pretended to reveal anything new or to launch novelties onto
the culture market. A minute correction of the essential is more important
than a hundred new accessories. All that is new is the direction of the
current which carries commonplaces along.

For as long as there have been men -- and men who read Lautréamont --
everything has been said and few people have gained anything from it.
Because our ideas are in themselves commonplace, they can only be of value
to people who are not.

The modern world must learn what it already knows, become what it already
is, by means of a great work of exorcism, by conscious practice. One can
escape from the commonplace only by manhandling it, mastering it, steeping
it in dreams, giving it over to the sovereign pleasure of subjectivity.
Above all I have emphasized subjective will, but nobody should criticize
this until they have examined the extent to which the objective conditions
of the contemporary world are furthering the cause of subjectivity day by
day. Everything starts from subjectivity, and nothing stops there. Today
less than ever.

From now on the struggle between subjectivity and what degrades it will
extend the scope of the old class struggle. It revitalizes it and makes it
more bitter. The desire to live is a political decision. We do not want a
world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation is bought by
accepting the risk of dying of boredom.

The man of survival is man ground up by the machinery of hierarchical power,
caught in a mass of interferences, a tangle of oppressive techniques whose
rationalization only awaits the patient programming of programmed minds.

The man of survival is also self-united man, the man of total refusal. Not a
single instant goes by without each of us living contradictorily, and on
every level of reality, the conflict between oppression and freedom, and
without this conflict being strangely deformed, and grasped at the same time
in two antagonistic perspectives: the perspective of power and the
perspective of supersession. The two parts of this book, devoted to the
analysis of these two perspectives, should thus be approached, not in
succession, as their arrangement demands, but simultaneously, since the
description of the negative founds the positive project and the positive
project confirms negativity. The best arrangement of a book is none at all,
so that the reader can discover his own.

Where the writing fails it reflects the failure of the reader as a reader,
and even more as a man. If the element of boredom it cost me to write it
comes through when you read it, this will only be one more argument
demonstrating our failure to live. For the rest, the gravity of the times
must excuse the gravity of my tone. Levity always falls short of the written
words or overshoots them. The irony in this case will consist in never
forgetting that.

This book is part of a current of agitation of which the world has not heard
the last. It sets forth a simple contribution, among others, to the
recreation of the international revolutionary movement. Its importance had
better not escape anybody, for nobody, in time, will be able to escape its
conclusions.



My subjectivity and the Creator : This is too much for one brain.
-- LAUTRÉAMONT





PART ONE

POWER'S PERSPECTIVE

I THE INSIGNIFICANT SIGNIFIED

Because of its increasing triviality, everyday life has gradually become our
central preoccupation (1). No illusion, sacred or deconsecrated (2),
collective or individual, can hide the poverty of our daily actions any
longer (3). The enrichment of life calls inexorably for the analysis of the
new forms taken by poverty, and the perfection of the old weapons of refusal
(4).



1

The history of our times calls to mind those Walt Disney characters who rush
madly over the edge of a cliff without seeing it, so that the power of their
imagination keeps them suspended in mid-air; but as soon as they look down
and see where they are, they fall.

Contemporary thought, like Bosustov's heroes, can no longer rest on its own
delusions. What used to hold it up, today brings it down. It rushes full
tilt in front of the reality that will crush it: the reality that is lived
every day.

*

Is this dawning lucidity essentially new? I don't think so. Everyday life
always produces the demand for a brighter light, if only because of the need
which everyone feels to walk in step with the march of history. But there
are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man's life than in all the
philosophies. Even a philosopher cannot ignore it, for all his
self-contempt; and he learns this self-contempt from his consolation,
philosophy. After somersaulting onto his own shoulders to shout his message
to the world from a greater height, the philosopher finishes by seeing the
world inside out; and everything in it goes askew, upside down, to persuade
him that he is standing upright. But he cannot escape his own delirium; and
refusing to admit it simply makes it more uncomfortable.

The moralists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ruled over a
stockroom of commonplaces, but took such pains to conceal this that they
built around it a veritable palace of stucco and speculation. A palace of
ideas shelters but imprisons lived experience. From its gates emerges a
sincere conviction suffused with the Sublime Tone and the fiction of the
'universal man', but it breathes with perpetual anguish. The analyst tries
to escape the gradual sclerosis of existence by reaching some essential
profundity; and the more he alienates himself by expressing himself
according to the dominant imagery of his time (the feudal image in which
God, monarchy and the world are indivisibly united), the more his lucidity
photographs the hidden face of life, the more it 'invents' the everyday.

Enlightenment philosophy accelerated the descent towards the concrete
insofar as the concrete was in some ways brought to power with the
revolutionary bourgeoisie. From the ruin of Heaven, man fell into the ruins
of his own world. What happened? Something like this: ten thousand people
are convinced that they have seen a fakir's rope rise into the air, while as
many cameras prove that it hasn't moved an inch. Scientific objectivity
exposes mystification. Very good, but what does it show us? A coiled rope,
of absolutely no interest. I have little to choose between the doubtful
pleasure of being mystified and the tedium of contemplating a reality which
does not concern me. A reality which I have no grasp on, isn't this the old
lie re-conditioned, the ultimate stage of mystification?

From now on the analysts are in the streets. Lucidity isn't their only
weapon. Their thought is no longer in danger of being imprisoned, either by
the false reality of gods, or by the false reality of technocrats!

2

Religious beliefs concealed man from himself; their Bastille walled him up
in a pyramidal world with God at the summit and the king just below. Alas,
on the fourteenth of July there wasn't enough freedom to be found among the
ruins of unitary power to prevent the ruins themselves from becoming another
prison. Behind the rent veil of superstition appeared, not naked truth, as
Meslier had dreamed, but the birdlime of ideologies. The prisoners of
fragmentary power have no refuge from tyranny but the shadow of freedom.

Today there is not an action or a thought that is not trapped in the net of
received ideas. The slow fall-out of particles of the exploded myth spreads
sacred dust everywhere, choking the spirit and the will to live. Constraints
have become less occult, more blatant; less powerful, more numerous.
Docility no longer emanates from priestly magic, it results from a mass of
minor hypnoses: news, culture, town-planning, publicity, mechanisms of
conditioning and suggestion in the service of any order, established or to
come. We are like Gulliver lying stranded on the Lilliputian shore with
every part of his body tied down; determined to free himself, he looks
keenly around him: the smallest detail of the landscape, the smallest
contour of the ground, the slightest movement, everything becomes a sign on
which his escape may depend. The most certain chances of liberation are born
in what is most familiar. Was it ever otherwise? Art, ethics, philosophy
bear witness: under the crust of words and concepts, the living reality of
non-adaptation to the world is always crouched, ready to spring. Since
neither gods nor words can mange to cover it up decently any longer, this
commonplace creature roams naked in railway stations and vacant lots; it
confronts you at each evasion of yourself, it touches your elbow, catches
your eye; and the dialogue begins. You must lose yourself with it or save it
with you.

3

Too many corpses strew the paths of individualism and collectivism. Under
two apparently contradictory rationalities has raged an identical
gangsterism, an identical oppression of the isolated man. The hand which
smothered Lautréamont returned to strangle Serge Yesenin; one died in the
lodging house of his landlord Jules-Françoise Dupuis, the other hung himself
in a nationalized hotel. Everywhere the law is verified: "There is no weapon
of your individual will which, once appropriated by others, does not turn
against you." If anyone says or writes that practical reason must henceforth
be based upon the rights of the individual and the individual alone, he
invalidates his own proposition if he doesn't invite his audience to make
this statement true for themselves. Such a proof can only be lived, grasped
from the inside. That is why everything in the notes which follow should be
tested and corrected by the immediate experience of everyone. Nothing is so
valuable that it need not be started afresh, nothing is so rich that it need
not be enriched constantly.

*

Just as we distinguish in private life between what a man thinks and says
about himself and what he really is and does, everyone has learned to
distinguish the rhetoric and the messianic pretensions of political parties
from their organization and real interests: what they think they are, from
what they are. A man's illusions about himself and others are not basically
different from the illusions which groups, classes, and parties have about
themselves. Indeed, they come from the same source: the dominant ideas,
which are the ideas of the dominant class, even if they take an antagonistic
form.

The world of isms, whether it envelops the whole of humanity or a single
person, is never anything but a world drained of reality, a terribly real
seduction by falsehood. The three crushing defeats suffered by the Commune,
the Spartakist movement and the Kronstadt sailors showed once and for all
what bloodbaths are the outcome of three ideologies of freedom: liberalism,
socialism, and Bolshevism. However, before this could be universally
understood and admitted, bastard or hybrid forms of these ideologies had to
vulgarize their initial atrocity with more telling proofs: concentration
camps, Lacoste's Algeria, Budapest. The great collective illusions, anaemic
after shedding the blood of so many men, have given way to the thousands of
pre-packed ideologies sold by consumer society like so many portable
brain-scrambling machines. Will it need as much blood again to show that a
hundred thousand pinpricks kill as surely as a couple of blows with a club?

*

What am I supposed to do in a group of militants who expect me to leave in
the cloakroom, I won't say a few ideas -- for my ideas would have led me to
join the group -- but the dreams and desires which never leave me, the wish
to live authentically and without restraint? What's the use of exchanging
one isolation, one monotony, one lie for another? When the illusion of real
change has been exposed, a mere change of illusion becomes intolerable. But
present conditions are precisely these: the economy cannot stop making us
consume more and more, and to consume without respite is to change illusions
at an accelerating pace which gradually dissolves the illusion of change. We
find ourselves alone, unchanged, frozen in the empty space behind the
waterfall of gadgets, family cars and paperbacks.

people without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached
to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys imagination. This
means that people are not really tired of comfort, culture and leisure but
of the use to which they are put, which is precisely what stops us enjoying
them.

The affluent society is a society of voyeurs. To each his own kaleidoscope:
a tiny movement of the fingers and the picture changes. You can't lose: two
fridges, a mini-car, TV, promotion, time to kill... then the monotony of the
images we consume gets the upper hand, reflecting the monotony of the action
which produces them, the slow rotation of the kaleidoscope between finger
and thumb. There was no mini-car, only an ideology almost unconnected with
the automobile machine. Flushed with Pimm's No.1, we savour a strange
cocktail of alcohol and class struggle. Nothing surprising any more, there's
the rub! The monotony of the ideological spectacle makes us aware of the
passivity of life: survival. Beyond the pre-fabricated scandals - Scandale
perfume, Profumo scandal - a real scandal appears, the scandal of actions
drained of their substance to the profit of an illusion which the failure of
its enchantment renders more odious every day. Actions weak and pale from
nourishing dazzling imaginary compensations, actions pauperized by enriching
lofty speculations into which they entered like menials through the
ignominious category of 'trivial' or 'commonplace', actions which today are
free but exhausted, ready to lose their way once more, or expire under the
weight of their own weakness. There they are, in every one of you, familiar,
sad, newly returned to the immediate, living reality which was their
birthplace. And here you are, bewildered and lost in a new prosaism, a
perspective in which near and far coincide.

4

The concept of class struggle constituted the first concrete, tactical
marshalling of the shocks and injuries which men live individually; it was
born in the whirlpool of suffering which the reduction of human relations to
mechanisms of exploitation created everywhere in industrial societies. It
issued from a will to transform the world and change life.

Such a weapon needed constant adjustment. yet we see the First International
turning its back on artists by making workers' demands the sole basis of a
project which Marx had shown to concern all those who sought, in the refusal
to be slaves, a full life and a total humanity. Lacenaire, Borel, Lassailly,
Buchner, Baudelaire, Hölderlin - wasn't this also misery and its radical
refusal? perhaps this mistake was excusable then: I neither know nor care.
What is certain is that it is sheer madness a century later, when the
economy of consumption is absorbing the economy of production, and the
exploitation of labour power is submerged by the exploitation of everyday
creativity. The same energy is torn from the worker in his hours of work and
in his hours of leisure to drive the turbines of power, which the custodians
of the old theory lubricate sanctimoniously with their purely formal
opposition.

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.





PARTICIPATION MADE IMPOSSIBLE:
POWER AS THE SUM OF CONSTRAINTS



The mechanisms of wear and tear and destruction: humiliation (II), isolation
(III), suffering (IV), work (V), decompression (VI)







II HUMILIATION



The economy of everyday life is based on a continuous exchange of
humiliations and aggressive attitudes. It conceals a technique of wear and
tear (usure), which is itself prey to the gift of destruction which it
invites contradictorily (1). Today, the more man is a social being the more
he is an object (2). Decolonisation has not yet begun (3). It will have to
give a new value to the old principle of sovereignty (4).

1

One day, when Rousseau was travelling through a crowded village, he was
insulted by a yokel whose spirit delighted the crowd. Rousseau, confused and
discountenanced, couldn't think of a word in reply and was forced to take to
his heels amidst the jeers of the crowd. By the time he had finally regained
his composure and thought of a thousand possible retorts, any one of which
would have silenced the joker once and for all, he was at two hours distance
from the village.

Aren't most of the trivial incidents of everyday life like this ridiculous
adventure? but in an attenuated and diluted form, reduced to the duration of
a step, a glance, a thought, experienced as a muffled impact, a fleeting
discomfort barely registered by consciousness and leaving in the mind only
the dull irritation at a loss to discover its own origin? The endless minuet
of humiliation and its response gives human relationships an obscene
hobbling rhythm. In the ebb and flow of the crowds sucked in and crushed
together by the coming and going of suburban trains, and coughed out into
streets, offices, factories, there is nothing but timid retreats, brutal
attacks, smirking faces and scratches delivered for no apparent reason.
Soured by unwanted encounters, wine turns to vinegar in the mouth. Innocent
and good-natured crowds? What a laugh! Look how they bristle up, threaten on
every side, clumsy and embarrassed in the enemy's territory, far, very far
from themselves. Lacking knives, they learn to use their elbows and their
eyes.

There is no intermission, no truce between attackers and attacked. A flux of
barely perceptible signs assails the walker, who is not alone. Remarks,
gestures, glances tangle and collide, miss their aim, ricochet like bullets
fired at random, which kill even more surely by the continuous nervous
tension they produce. All we can do is to enclose ourselves in embarrassing
parentheses; like these fingers (I am writing this on a cafe terrace) which
slide the tip across the table and the fingers of the waiter which pick it
up, while the faces of the two men involved, as if anxious to conceal the
infamy which they have consented to, assume an expression of utter
indifference.

From the point of view of constraint, everyday life is governed by an
economic system in which the production and consumption of insults tends to
balance out. The old dream of the theorists of perfect competition thus
finds its real perfection in the customs of a democracy given new life by
the lack of imagination of the left. Isn't it strange, at first sight, to
see the fury with which 'progressives' attack the ruined edifice of free
enterprise, as if the capitalists, its official demolition gang, had not
themselves already planned its nationalized reconstruction? but it is not so
strange, in fact: for the deliberate purpose of keeping all attention
fastened on critiques which have already been overtaken by events (after
all, anybody can see that capitalism is gradually finding its fulfillment in
a planned economy of which the Soviet model is nothing but a primitive form)
is to conceal the fact that the only reconstruction of human relationships
envisaged is one based upon precisely this economic model, which, because it
is obsolete, is available at a knock-down price. Who can fail to notice the
alarming persistence with which 'socialist' countries continue to organize
life along bourgeois lines? Everywhere it's hats off to family, marriage,
sacrifice, work, inauthenticity, while simplified and rationalized
homeostatic mechanisms reduce human relationships to 'fair' exchanges of
deference and humiliation. And soon, in the ideal democracy of the
cyberneticians, everyone will earn without apparent effort a share of
unworthiness which he will have the leisure to distribute according to the
finest rules of justice. Distributive justice will reach its apogee. Happy
the old men who live to see the day!

For me -- and for some others, I dare to think -- there can be no
equilibrium in malaise. Planning is only the antithesis of the free market.
Only exchange has been planned, and with it the mutual sacrifice which it
entails. But if the word 'innovation' is to keep its proper meaning, it must
mean superseding, not tarting up. In fact, a new reality can only be based
on the principle of the gift. Despite their mistakes and their poverty, I
see in the historical experiences of workers' councils (1917, 1921, 1934,
1956), and in the pathetic search for friendship and love, a single and
inspiring reason not to despair over present 'reality'. Everything conspires
to keep secret the positive character of such experiences; doubt is
cunningly maintained as to their real importance, even their existence. By a
strange oversight, no historian has ever taken the trouble to study how
people actually lived during the most extreme revolutionary moments. At such
times, the wish to make an end of free exchange in the market of human
behaviour shows itself spontaneously but in the form of negation. When
malaise is brought into question it shatters under the onslaught of a
greater and denser malaise.

In a negative sense, Ravachol's bombs or, closer to our own time, the epic
of Caraquemada dispel the confusion which reigns around the total rejection
-- manifested to a varying extent, but manifested everywhere -- of
relationships based on exchange and compromise. I have no doubt, since I
have experienced it so many times, that anyone who passes an hour in the
cage of constraining relationships feels a profound sympathy for
Pierre-François Lacenaire and his passion for crime. The point here is not
to make an apology for terrorism, but to recognize it as an action -- the
most pitiful action and at the same time the most noble -- which is capable
of disrupting and thus exposing the self-regulating mechanisms of the
hierarchical social community. Inscribed in the logic of an unlivable
society, murder thus conceived can only appear as the concave form of the
gift. it is that absence of an intensely desired presence that Mallarmé
described; the same Mallarmé who, at the trial of the Thirty, called the
anarchists 'angels of purity'.

My sympathy for the solitary killer ends where tactics begin; but perhaps
tactics need scouts driven by individual despair. However that may be, the
new revolutionary tactics -- which will be based indissolubly on the
historical tradition and on the practice, so widespread and so disregarded,
of individual realization -- will have no place for people who only want to
mimic the gestures of Ravachol or Bonnot. But on the other hand these
tactics will be condemned to theoretical hibernation if they cannot, by
other means, attract collectively the individuals whom isolation and hatred
for the collective lie have already won over to the rational decision to
kill or to kill themselves. No murderers -- and no humanists either! The
first accept death, the second impose it. let ten men meet who are resolved
on the lightning of violence rather than the long agony of survival; from
this moment, despair ends and tactics begin. Despair is the infantile
disorder of the revolutionaries of everyday life.

I still feel today my adolescent admiration for outlaws, not because of an
obsolete romanticism but because they expose the alibis by which social
power avoids being put right on the spot. Hierarchical social organization
is like a gigantic racket whose secret, precisely exposed by anarchist
terrorism, is to place itself out of reach of the violence it gives rise to,
by consuming everybody's energy in a multitude of irrelevant struggles. (A
'humanized' power cannot allow itself recourse to the old methods of war and
genocide.) The witnesses for the prosecution can hardly be suspected of
anarchist tendencies. The biologist Hans Selye states that "as specific
causes of disease (microbes, undernourishment) disappear, a growing
proportion of people die of what are called stress diseases, or diseases of
degeneration caused by stress, that is, by the wear and tear resulting from
conflicts, shocks, nervous tension, irritations, debilitating rhythms..."
From now on, no-one can escape the necessity of conducting his own
investigation into the racket which pursues him even into his thoughts,
hunts him down even in his dreams. The smallest details take on a major
importance. irritation, fatigue, rudeness, humiliation... cui bono? Who
profits by them? And who profits by the stereotyped answers that Big Brother
Common Sense distributes under the label of wisdom, like so many alibis?
Shall I be content with explanations that kill me when I have everything to
win in a game where all the cards are stacked against me?

2

The handshake ties and unties the knot of encounters. A gesture at once
curious and trivial which the French quite accurately say is exchanged:
isn't it in fact the most simplified form of the social contract? What
guarantees are they trying to seal, these hands clasped to the right, to the
left, everywhere, with a liberality that seems to make up for a total lack
of conviction? That agreement reigns, that social harmony exists, that life
in society is perfect? But what still worries us is this need to convince
ourselves, to believe it by force of habit, to reaffirm it with the strength
of our grip.

Eyes know nothing of these pleasantries; they do not recognize exchange.
When our eyes meet someone else's they become uneasy, as if they could make
out their own empty, soulless reflection in the other person's pupils.
Hardly have they met when they slip aside and try to dodge one another;
their lines of flight cross in an invisible point, making an angle whose
acuteness expresses the divergence, the deeply felt lack of harmony.
Sometimes unison is achieved and eyes connect; the beautiful parallel stare
of royal couples in Egyptian sculpture, the misty, melting gaze, brimming
with eroticism, of lovers: eyes which devour one another from afar. But most
of the time the eyes repudiate the superficial agreement sealed by the
handshake. Consider the popularity of the energetic reiteration of social
agreement (the phrase 'let's shake on it' indicates its commercial
overtones): isn't it a trick played on the senses, a way of dulling the
sensitivity of the eyes so that they don't revolt against the emptiness of
the spectacle? The good sense of consumer society has brought the old
expression 'see things my way' to its logical conclusion: whichever way you
look, you see nothing but things.

Become as senseless and easily handled as a brick!

That is what social organization is kindly inviting everyone to do. The
bourgeoisie has managed to share out irritations more fairly, allowing a
greater number of people to suffer them according to rational norms
(economic, social, political, legal necessities...) The splinters of
constraint produced in this way have in turn fragmented the cunning and the
energy devoted collectively to evading or smashing them. The revolutionaries
of 1793 were great because they dared to usurp the unitary hold of God over
the government of men; the proletarian revolutionaries drew from what they
were defending a greatness that they could never have seized from the
bourgeois enemy -- their strength derived from themselves alone.

A whole ethic based on exchange value, the pleasures of business, the
dignity of labour, restrained desires, survival, and on their opposites,
pure value, the gratuitous, parasitism, instinctive brutality and death:
this is the filthy tub that human faculties have been bubbling in for nearly
two centuries. From these ingredients -- refined a little of course -- the
cyberneticians are dreaming of cooking up the man of the future. Are we
quite sure that we haven't yet arrived at the security of perfectly adapted
beings, moving about as uncertainly and unconsciously as insects? For some
time now there have been experiments with subliminal advertising: the
insertion into films of single frames lasting 1/24 of a second, which are
seen by the eye but not registered by consciousness. The first slogans give
more than a glimpse of what is to come: 'Don't drive too fast' and 'Go to
church'. But what does a minor improvement like this represent in comparison
with the whole immense conditioning machine ,each of whose cogs -- town
planning, publicity, ideology, culture -- is capable of dozens of comparable
improvements? Once again, knowledge of the conditions which are going to
continue to be imposed on people if they don't look out is less relevant
than the sensation of living in such degradation now. Zamiatin's We.
Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's 1984 and Touraine's Cinquieme Coup de
Trompette push back into the future a shudder of horror which one look at
the present would produce; and it is the present that develops consciousness
and the will to refuse. Compared with my present imprisonment the future
holds no interest for me.

*

The feeling of humiliation is nothing but the feeling of being an object.
Once it has been understood as such, it becomes the basis for a combative
lucidity for which the critique of the organization of life cannot be
separated from the immediate inception of the project of living differently.
Construction can begin only on the foundation of individual despair and its
supersession; the efforts made to disguise this despair and pass it off
under another wrapper are enough to prove it.

What is the illusion which stops us seeing the disintegration of values, the
ruin of the world, inauthenticity, non-totality?

Is it that I think that I am happy? Hardly! Such a belief doesn't stand up
to analysis any better than it withstands the blasts of anguish. On the
contrary, it is a belief in the happiness of others, an inexhaustible source
of envy and jealousy which gives us a vicarious feeling of existence. I
envy, therefore I am. To define oneself by reference to others is to define
oneself as other. And the other is always object. So that life is measured
in degrees of humiliation, the more you 'live': the more you live the
orderly life of things. Here is the cunning of reification, by which it
passes undetected, like arsenic in the jam.

The gentleness of these methods of oppression throws a certain light on the
perversion which prevents me from shouting out "The emperor has no clothes!"
each time the sovereignty of my everyday life reveals its poverty. Obviously
police brutality is still going strong, to say the least. Everywhere it
raises its head the kindly souls of the left quite rightly condemn it. But
what do they do about it? Do they urge people to arm themselves? Do they
call for legitimate reprisals? Do they encourage pig-hunts like the one
which decorated the trees of Budapest with the finest fruits of the AVO? No:
they organize peaceful demonstrations at which their trade-union police
force treats anyone who questions their orders as an agent provocateur. The
new policemen are ready to take over. The social psychologists will govern
without truncheons: no more tough cops, only con cops. Oppressive violence
is about to be transformed into a host of reasonably distributed pin-pricks.
The same people who denounce police violence from the heights of their lofty
ideals are urging us on toward a state based on polite violence. Humanism
merely upholsters the machine of Kafka's "Penal Colony". Less grinding and
shouting! Blood upsets you? Never mind: men will be bloodless. The promised
land of survival will be the realm of peaceful death, and it is this
peaceful death that the humanists are fighting for. No more Guernicas, no
more Auschwitzes, no more Hiroshimas, no more Setifs. Hooray! But what about
the impossibility of living, what about this stifling mediocrity and this
absence of passion? What about the jealous fury in which the rankling of
never being ourselves drives us to imagine that other people are happy? What
about this feeling of never really being inside your own skin? let nobody
say these are minor details or secondary points. There are no negligible
irritations; gangrene can start in the slightest graze. The crises that
shake the world are not fundamentally different from the conflicts in which
my actions and thoughts confront the hostile forces that entangle and
deflect them. (How could it be otherwise when history, in the last analysis,
is only important to me in so far as it affects my own life?) Sooner or
later the continual division and re-division of aggravations will split the
atom of unlivable reality and liberate a nuclear energy which nobody
suspected behind so much passivity and gloomy resignation. That which
produces the common good is always terrible.

3

From 1945 to 1960, colonialism was a fairy godmother to the left. With a new
enemy on the scale of Fascism, the left never had to define itself
positively, starting from itself (there was nothing there); it was ale to
affirm itself by negating something else. In this way it was able to accept
itself as a thing, part of an order of things in which things are everything
and nothing.

Nobody dared to announce the end of colonialism for fear that it would
spring up all over the place like a jack-in-the-box whose lid doesn't shut
properly. In fact, from the moment when the collapse of colonial power
revealed the colonialism inherent in all power over men, the problems of
race and colour became about as important as crossword puzzles. What effect
did the clowns of the left have as they trotted about on their
anti-racialist and anti-anti-semitic hobbyhorses? In the last analysis, that
of smothering the cries of tormented Jews and negroes which were uttered by
all those who were not Jews or negroes, starting with the Jews and negroes
themselves. Of course, I would not dream of questioning the spirit of
generosity which has inspired recent anti-racialism. But I lose interest in
the past as soon as I can no longer affect it. I am speaking here and now,
and nobody can persuade me, in the name of Alabama or South Africa and their
spectacular exploitation, to forget that the epicentres of such problems
lies in me and in each being who is humiliated and scorned by every aspect
of our own society.

I shall not renounce my share of violence.

Human relationships can hardly be discussed in terms of more or less
tolerable conditions, more or less admissible indignities. Qualification is
irrelevant. Do insults like 'wog' or 'nigger' hurt more than a word of
command? When he is summoned, told off, or ordered around by a policeman, a
boss, an authority, who doesn't feel deep down, in moments of lucidity, that
he is a darkie and a gook?

The old colonials provided us with a perfect identi-kit portrait of power
when they predicted the descent into bestiality and wretchedness of those
who found their presence undesirable. Law and order come first, says the
guard to the prisoner. Yesterday's anti-colonialists are trying to humanize
the generalized colonialism of power. They become it's watchdogs in the
cleverest way: by barking at all the after-effects of past inhumanity.

Before he tried to get himself made President of Martinique, Aimé Césaire
made a famous remark: "The bourgeoisie has found itself unable to solve the
major problems which its own existence has produced: the colonial problem
and the problem of the proletariat." He forgot to add: "For they are one and
the same problem, a problem which anyone who separates them will fail to
understand."

4

I read in Gouy's Histoire de France: "The slightest insult to the King meant
immediate death". In the American Constitution: "The people are sovereign".
In Pouget's Père Peinard: "Kings get fat off their sovereignty, while we are
starving on ours". Courbon's Secret du Peuple tells me: "The people today
means the mass of men to whom all respect is denied". Here we have, in a few
lines, the misadventures of the principle of sovereignty.

Kings designated as 'subjects' the objects of their arbitrary will. No doubt
this was an attempt to wrap the radical inhumanity of its domination in a
humanity of idyllic bonds. The respect due to the king's person cannot in
itself be criticized. It is odious only because it is based on the right to
humiliate by subordination. Contempt rotted the thrones of kings. But what
about the citizen's sovereignty: the rights multiplied by bourgeois vanity
and jealousy, sovereignty distributed like a dividend to each individual?
What about the divine right of kings democratically shared out?

Today, France contains twenty-four million mini-kings, of which the greatest
-- the bosses -- are great only in their ridiculousness. The sense of
respect has become degraded to the point where humiliation is all that it
demands. Democratized into public functions and roles, the monarchic
principle floats with its belly up, like a dead fish: only its most
repulsive aspect is visible. Its will to be absolutely and unreservedly
superior has disappeared. Instead of basing our lives on our sovereignty, we
try to base our sovereignty on other people's lives. The manners of slaves.







III ISOLATION

Para no sentirme solo
por los siglos de los siglos

All we have in common is the illusion of being together. And beyond the
illusion of permitted anodynes there is only the collective desire to
destroy isolation (1). -- Impersonal relationships are the no-man's land of
isolation. By producing isolation, contemporary social organization signs
its own death-sentence (2).



1

It was as if they were in a cage whose door was wide open without their
being able to escape. Nothing outside the cage had any importance, because
nothing else existed any more. They stayed in the cage, estranged from
everything except the cage, without even a flicker of desire for anything
outside the bars. it would have been abnormal -- impossible in fact -- to
escape into something which had neither reality nor importance. Absolutely
impossible. For inside this cage, in which they had been born and in which
they would die, the only tolerable framework of experience was the Real,
which was simply an irresistible instinct to act so that things should have
importance. Only if things had some importance could one breathe, and
suffer. it seemed that there was an understanding between them and the
silent dead that it should be so, for the habit of acting so that things had
some importance had become a human instinct, and one which was apparently
eternal. Life was the important thing, and the Real was part of the instinct
which gave life a little meaning. The instinct didn't try to imagine what
might lie beyond the Real, because there was nothing beyond it. Nothing
important. The door remained open and the cage became more and more painful
in its Reality which was so important for countless reasons and in countless
ways.

We have never emerged from the times of the slavers.

On the public transport which throws them against one another with
statistical indifference, people wear an untenable expression of
disillusion, pride and contempt, like the natural effect of death on a
toothless mouth. The atmosphere of false communication makes everyone the
policeman of his own encounters. The instincts of flight and aggression
trail the knights of wage-labour, who must now rely on subways and suburban
trains for their pitiful wanderings. If men were transformed into scorpions
who sting themselves and one another, isn't it really because nothing has
happened, and human beings with empty eyes and flabby brains have
'mysteriously' become mere shadows of men, ghosts of men, and in some ways
are no longer men except in name?

We have nothing in common except the illusion of being together. Certainly
the seeds of an authentic collective life are lying dormant within the
illusion itself -- there is no illusion without a real basis -- but real
community remains to be created. The power of the lie sometimes manages to
erase the bitter reality of isolation from men's minds. In a crowded street
we can occasionally forget that suffering and separation are still present.
And, since it is only the lie's power which makes us forget, suffering and
separation are reinforced; but in the end the lie itself comes to grief
through relying on this support. For a moment comes when no illusion can
measure up to our distress.

Malaise invades me as the crows around me grows. The compromises I have made
with stupidity under the pressure of circumstances rush to meet me, swimming
towards me in hallucinating waves of faceless heads. Edvard Munch's famous
painting, The Cry, evokes for me something I feel ten times a day. A man
carried along by a crowd, which only he can see, suddenly screams out in an
attempt to break the spell, to call himself back to himself, to get back
inside his own skin. The tacit acknowledgments, fixed smiles, lifeless
words, listlessness and humiliation sprinkled in his path suddenly surge
into him, driving him out of his desires and his dreams and exploding the
illusion of 'being together'. People touch without meeting; isolation
accumulates but is never realized; emptiness overcomes us as the density of
the crowd grows. The crowd drags me out of myself and installs thousands of
little sacrifices in my empty presence.

Everywhere neon signs are flashing out the dictum of Plotinus: All beings
are together though each remains separate. But we only need to hold out our
hands and touch one another, to raise our eyes and meet one another, and
everything comes into focus, as if by magic.

Like crowds, drugs, and love, alcohol can befuddle the most lucid mind.
Alcohol turns the concrete wall of isolation into a paper screen which the
actors can tear according to their fancy, for it arranges everything on the
stage of an intimate theatre. A generous illusion, and thus still more
deadly.

In a gloomy bar where everyone is bored to death, a drunken young man breaks
his glass, then picks up a bottle and smashes it against the wall. Nobody
gets excited; the disappointed young man lets himself be thrown out. Yet
everyone there could have done exactly the same thing. He alone made the
thought concrete, crossing the first radioactive belt of isolation: interior
isolation, the introverted separation between self and outside world. Nobody
responded to a sign which he thought was explicit. He remained alone like
the hooligan who burns down a church or kills a policeman, at one with
himself but condemned to exile as long as other people remain exiled from
their own existence. He has not escaped from the magnetic field of
isolation; he is suspended in a zone of zero gravity. All the same, the
indifference which greets him allows him to hear the sound of his own cry;
even if this revelation tortures him, he knows that he will have to start
again in another register, more loudly; with more coherence.

People will be together only in a common wretchedness as long as each
isolated being refuses to understand that a gesture of liberation, however
weak and clumsy it may be, always bears an authentic communication, an
adequate personal message. The repression which strikes down the libertarian
rebel falls on everyone: everyone's blood flows with the blood of a murdered
Durruti. Whenever freedom retreats one inch, there is a hundred-fold
increase in the weight of the order of things. Excluded from authentic
participation, men's actions stray into the fragile illusion of being
together, or else into its opposite, the abrupt and total rejection of
society. They swing from one to the other like a pendulum turning the hands
on the clock-face of death.

*

Love in its turn swells the illusion of unity. Most of the time it gets
fucked up and miscarries. Its songs are crippled by fear of always returning
to the same single note: whether there are two of us, or even ten, we will
finish up alone as before. What drives us to despair is not the immensity of
our own unsatisfied desires, but the moment when our newborn passion
discovers its own emptiness. The insatiable desire to fall in love with so
many pretty girls is born in anguish and the fear of loving: we are so
afraid of never escaping from meetings with objects. The dawn when lovers
leave each other's arms is the same dawn that breaks on the execution of
revolutionaries without a revolution. Isolation a deux cannot confront the
effect of general isolation. Pleasure is broken off prematurely and lovers
find themselves naked in the world, their actions suddenly ridiculous and
pointless. No love is possible in an unhappy world.

The boat of love breaks up in the current of everyday life.

Are you ready to smash the reefs of the old world before they wreck your
desires? Lovers should love their pleasure with more consequence and more
poetry. A story tells how Price Shekour captured a town and offered it to
his favourite for a smile. Some of us have fallen in love with the pleasure
of loving without reserve -- passionately enough to offer our love to the
magnificent bed of a revolution.

2

To adapt to the world is a game of heads-you-win, tails-I-lose in which one
decides a priori that the negative is positive and that the impossibility of
living is an essential precondition of life. Alienation never takes such
firm root as when it passes itself off as an inalienable good. Transformed
into positivity, the consciousness of isolation is none other than the
private consciousness, that scrap of individualism which people drag around
like their most sacred birthright, unprofitable but cherished. It is a sort
of pleasure-anxiety which prevents us both from settling down in the
community of illusion and from remaining trapped in the cellar of isolation.

The no-man's-land of impersonal relationships stretches between the blissful
acceptance of false collectivities and the total rejection of society. It is
the morality of shopkeepers: "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours", "You
mustn't let people get too familiar": politeness, the art (for art's sake)
of non-communication.

Let's face it: human relationships being what social hierarchy has made
them, impersonality is the least tiring form of contempt. It allows us to
pass without useless friction through the mill of daily contacts. it does
not prevent us dreaming of superior forms of civility, such as the courtesy
of Lacenaire, on the eve of his execution, urging a friend: "Above all,
please convey my gratitude to M.Scribe. Tell him that one day, suffering
from the pangs of hunger, I presented myself at his house in order to worm
some money out of him. He complied with my request with a touching
generosity; I am sure he will remember. tell him that he acted wisely, for I
had in my pocket, ready to hand, the means of depriving France of a
dramatist."

But the sterilized zone of impersonal relationships only offers a truce in
the endless battle against isolation, a brief transit which leads to
communication, or more frequently towards the illusion of community. I would
explain in this way my reluctance to stop a stranger to ask him the way or
to 'pass the time of day': to seek contact in this doubtful fashion. The
pleasantness of impersonal relationships is built on sand; and empty time
never did me any good.

Life is made impossible with such cynical thoroughness that the balanced
pleasure-anxiety of impersonal relationships, functions as a cog in the
general machine for destroying people. In the end it seems better to start
out right away with a radical and tactically worked-out refusal, rather than
to go around knocking politely on all the doors where one mode of survival
is exchanged for another.

"It would be a drag to die so young". wrote Jacques Vaché two years before
his suicide. if desperation at the prospect of surviving does not unite with
a new grasp of reality to transform the years to come, only two ways out are
left for the isolated man: the pisspot of parties and pataphysico-religious
sects, or immediate death with Umour. A sixteen-year-old murderer recently
explained: "I did it because I was bored." Anyone who has felt the drive to
self-destruction welling up inside him knows with what weary negligence he
might one day happen to kill the organizers of his boredom. One day. If he
was in the mood.

After all, if an individual refuses both to adapt to the violence of the
world, and to embrace the violence of the unadapted, what can he do? If he
doesn't raise his will to achieve unity with the world and with himself to
the level of coherent theory and practice, the vast silence of society's
open spaces will raise around him the palace of solipsist madness.

From the depths of their prisons, those who have been convicted of 'mental
illness' add the screams of their strangled revolt to the sum of negativity.
What a potential Fourier was cleverly destroyed in this patient described by
the psychiatrist Volnat: "He began to lose all capacity to distinguish
between himself and the external world. Everything that happened in the
world also happened in his body. He could not put a bottle between two
shelves in a cupboard, because the shelves might come together and break the
bottle. And that would hurt inside his head, as if his head were wedged
between the shelves. He could not shut a suitcase, because pressing the
things in the case would press inside his head. If he walked into the street
after closing all the doors and windows of his house, he felt uncomfortable,
because his brain was compressed by the air, and he had to go back home to
open a door or a window. 'For me to be at ease,' he said, 'I must have open
space. [...] I must have the freedom of my space. It's the battle with the
things all around me.'"

"Outside the consul paused, turning... No se puede vivir sin amar, were the
words on the house." (Lowry, Under the Volcano).







IV SUFFERING



Suffering caused by natural alienation has given way to suffering caused by
social alienation, while remedies have become justifications (1). Where
there is no justification, exorcism takes its place (2). But from now on no
subterfuge can hide the existence of an organization based on the
distribution of constraints (3). Consciousness reduced to the consciousness
of constraints is the antechamber of death. The despair of consciousness
makes the murderers of Order; the consciousness of despair makes the
murderers of Disorder (4).



The symphony of spoken and shouted words animates the scenery of the
streets. Over a rumbling basso continuo develop grave and cheerful themes,
hoarse and singsong voices, nostalgic fragments of sentences. There is a
sonorous architecture which overlays the outline of streets and buildings,
reinforcing or counteracting the attractive or repulsive tone of a district.
But from Notting Hill to Oxford Street the basic chord is the same
everywhere: it's sinister resonance has sunk so deeply into everyone's mind
that it no longer surprises them. "That's life", "These things are sent to
try us", "You have to take the rough with the smooth", "That's the way it
goes"... this lament whose weft unites the most diverse conversations has so
perverted our sensibility that it passes for the commonest of human
dispositions. Where it is not accepted, despair disappears from sight.
Nobody seems worried that joy has been absent from European music for nearly
two centuries; which says everything. Consume, consume: the ashes have
consumed the fire.

How have suffering and it's rites of exorcism usurped this importance?
Undoubtedly because of the struggle to survive imposed on the first men by a
hostile nature, full of cruel and mysterious forces. In the face of danger,
the weakness of men discovered in social agglomeration not only protection
but a way of co-operating with nature, making a truce with her and even
transforming her. In the struggle against natural alienation -- death,
sickness, suffering -- alienation became social. We escaped the rigours of
exposure, hunger and discomfort only to fall into the trap of slavery. We
were enslaved by gods, by men, by language. And such a slavery had its
positive side: there was a certain greatness of living in terror of a god
who also made you invincible. This mixture of human and inhuman would, it is
true, be a sufficient explanation of the ambiguity of suffering, its way of
appearing right through history at once as shameful sickness and salutary
evil -- as a good thing, after a fashion. But this would be to overlook the
ignoble slag of religion, above all Christian mythology, which devoted all
its genius to perfecting this morbid and depraved precept: protect yourself
against mutilation by mutilating yourself!

"Since Christ's coming, we are delivered not from the evil of suffering but
from the evil of suffering uselessly", writes the Jesuit father Charles. How
right he is: power's problem has always been, not to abolish itself, but to
give itself reasons so as not to oppress 'uselessly'. Christianity, that
unhealthy therapeutic, pulled off its masterstroke when it married man to
suffering, whether on the basis of divine grace or natural law. From prince
to manager, from priest to expert, from father confessor to social worker,
it is always the principle of useful suffering and willing sacrifice which
forms the most solid base for hierarchical power. Whatever reasons it
invokes -- a better world, the next world, building communism or fighting
communism -- suffering accepted is always Christian, always. Today the
clerical vermin have given way to the missionaries of a Christ dyed red.
Everywhere official pronouncements bear in their watermark the disgusting
image of the crucified man, everywhere comrades are urged to sport the
stupid halo of the militant martyr. And with their blood, the kitchen-hands
of the good Cause are mixing up the sausage-meat of the future: less
cannon-fodder, more doctrine-fodder!

*

To begin with, bourgeois ideology seemed determined to root out suffering
with as much persistence as it devoted to the pursuit of the religions that
it hated. Infatuated with progress, comfort, profit, well-being, it had
enough weapons -- if not real weapons, at least imaginary ones -- to
convince everyone of its will to put a scientific end to the evil of
suffering and the evil of faith. As we know, all it did was to invent new
anaesthetics and new superstitions.

Without God, suffering became 'natural', inherent in 'human nature'; it
would be overcome, but only after more suffering: the martyrs of science,
the victims of progress, the lost generations. But in this very movement the
idea of natural suffering betrayed its social root. When Human Nature was
removed, suffering became social, inherent in social existence. But of
course, revolutions demonstrated that the social evil of pain was not a
metaphysical principle: that a form of society could exist from which the
pain of living would be excluded. History shattered the social ontology of
suffering, but suffering, far from disappearing, found new reasons for
existence in the exigencies of History, which had suddenly become trapped,
in its turn, in a one-way street. China prepares children for the classless
society by teaching them love of their country, love of their family, and
love of work. Thus historical ontology picks up the remains of all the
metaphysical systems of the past: an sich, God, Nature, Man, Society. From
now on, men will have to make history by fighting History itself, because
History has become the last ontological earthwork of power, the last con by
which it hides, behind the promise of a long weekend, its will to endure
until Saturday which will never come. Beyond fetishised history, suffering
is revealed as stemming from hierarchical social organization. And when the
will to put an end to hierarchical power has sufficiently tickled the
consciousness of men, everyone will admit that freedom in arms and weight of
constraints have nothing metaphysical about them.

2

While it was placing happiness and freedom on the order of the day,
technological civilization was inventing the ideology of happiness and
freedom. Thus it condemned itself to creating no more than the freedom of
apathy, happiness in passivity. But at least this invention, perverted
though it was, had denied that suffering is inherent in the human condition,
that such an inhuman condition could last forever. That is why bourgeois
thought fails when it tries to provide consolation for suffering; none of
its justifications are as powerful as the hope which was born from its
initial bet on technology and well-being.

Desperate fraternity in sickness is the worst thing that can happen to
civilization. In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the
absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions,
stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day, until the exhaustion
of mind and body, until that death which is not the end of life but the
final saturation with absence; this is what lends a dangerous charm to
dreams of apocalypses, gigantic destructions, complete annihilations, cruel,
clean and total deaths. Auschwitz and Hiroshima are indeed the 'comfort of
nihilism'. Let impotence in the face of suffering become a collective
sentiment, and the demand for suffering and death can sweep a whole
community. Consciously or not, most people would rather die than live a
permanently unsatisfying life. Look at anti-bomb marchers: most of them were
nothing but penitents trying to exorcise their desire to disappear with all
the rest of humanity. They would deny it, of course, but their miserable
faces gave them away. The only real joy is revolutionary.

Perhaps it is in order to ensure that a universal desire to perish does not
take hold of men that a whole spectacle is organized around particular
suffer