The Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 4

Summary of Chapter 4: Suffering

V’s summary:

Suffering caused by natural alienation gave way to suffering caused by social alienation, while remedies became justifications (1). Where there was no justification, exorcism took place (2). But from now on no subterfuge can hide the existence of an organisation of suffering, stemming from a social organisation based on the distribution of constraints (3). Consciousness reduced to the consciousness of constraints is the ante­chamber of death. The despair of consciousness makes murderers for Order; the consciousness of despair makes murderers for Disorder (4). (44)

The chapter begins with a description of the “sonorous architecture” of the urban soundscape, “which overlays the outline of streets and buildings, reinforcing or counteracting the attractive or repulsive tone of a district” (44), a nice reminder of the intersection between situationalist urbanism, and rhythmanalysis. This quickly segues, however, into a chorus of voices, as The They or the generalized other, repeating slogans of resignation and powerlessness, which we absorb. The subject becomes the acceptance of suffering and its “rites of exorcism” which simply lead to more suffering, in an endless cycle.

V tells a little just-so-story about the original “natural alienation” of prehistoric humans facing a hostile environment; as indicated by his previous invocation of “non-adaptation” (meaning cultural adaptation), humans develop the social as a protection against natural alienation, but this results in alienation becoming social, social alienation. He jumps forward to religion, particularly Christianity, as a sort of [protection racket], seeking to rid us of our alienation by imposing alienation anew: “protect yourself against mutilation by mutilating yourself!” (45).

He ends this first section with a very dense paragraph, starting off with the liberal bourgeois ideology that replaces religion with its own metaphysics and illusions of “human nature,” treated in turn by social responses which lead to further alienation. Revolutions provide the example of a possible alternative social order “from which the pain of living would be excluded” (46), but the state socialist societies of the 20^th century just repeat the same old bullshit. Lower-case “history,” made by the people through struggle, must fight against official state “History.”

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 people’s consciousness, everyone will have to admit that armed freedom and the weight of constraints have nothing metaphysical about them.

“Technological civilization” celebrates “happiness and freedom” meaning also the ideology of happiness and freedom [which presumably means something like modern consumerism, and/or the need to all pretend like we are happy]. The promise of bourgeois thought, and of the bourgeois revolutions, have the benefit that they show that the suffering we have all been asked to accept as inevitable, is not actually inevitable. “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” (46-7).

People try to find ways to escape suffering, from self-flagellation to the media spectacle of other people’s sufferings, However, “The only real joy is revolutionary.” V ends this section discussing the joy of pain and grief as an outlet for all this pent-up suffering: “I sometimes feel such a diffuse suffering dispersed through me that I find relief in the chance misfortune that concretises and justifies it, offering it a legitimate outlet.” Mourning loss, crying, etc., all allow us to release our pent-up suffering for an acceptable pretext [but he seems to be leading to the same kind of argument he has made before, that this grief (like smashing bottles, murder, etc. in earlier chapters) betrays a pent-up revolutionary potential that stands in opposition to the drab living death of current society].

Suppose that a tyrant took pleasure in throwing prisoners, who had been flayed alive, in a small cell; suppose that to hear their screams and see them scramble each time they brushed against one another amused him no end, and caused him to meditate on human nature and the curious behaviour of human beings. Suppose that at the same time and in the same country there were philoso­phers and wise men who explained to the worlds of science and art that suffering had to do with the collective life of men, the inevitable presence of Others, society as such – wouldn't we be right to consider these men the tyrant's watchdogs? By proclaiming such theses, existentialism has exemplified not only the collusion of left intellectuals with power, but also the crude trick by which an inhuman social organisation attributes the responsibility for its cruelties to its victims themselves. (48)

Thus V castigates existentialism and other modern philosophies as just new versions of the same old fatalism that discourages resistance against injustice and oppression: “Witness Sartre’s hell-is-other-people, Freud’s death instinct, Mao’s historical necessity. After all, what distinguishes these doctrines from the stupid ‘it’s just human nature’?”

V admits the potential criticism that his writing on this risks “fostering a new fatalism;” “but I certainly intend in writing it that nobody should limit himself to reading it.”

V next attacks altruism in equally hostile terms, as the flipside of “hell-is-other people:”

What binds me to others must grow out of what binds me to the most exuberant and demanding part of my will to live – not the other way round. It is always myself that I am looking for in other people; my enrichment, my realisation. … The freedom of one will be the freedom of all. A community which is not built on individual demands and their dialectic can only reinforce the oppressive violence of power. (49)

“Altruism” reduces people to things, and the love of things; “solidarity” in turn is just the left equivalent, an appeal to a mystical and mystified “equality” that is set up against the individual as an other, rather than to real, liberatory equality:

For myself, I recognise no equality except that which my will to live according to my desires recognises in the will to live of others. Revolutionary equality will be indivisibly individual and collective.

Power tries to make you like itself, with its same castration and living death. “Suffering results from constraint. A portion of pure delight, no matter how tiny, will hold it at bay. To work for delight and authentic festivity is barely distinguishable from preparing for a general insurrection” (50-1).