Showing posts with label Situationalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Situationalism. Show all posts

Saturday, May 2, 2026

The Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 14


Summary of Chapter 14: The organisation of appearances


Vaneigem’s summary:

The organisation of appearances is a system for protecting the facts. A racket. It represents the facts in a mediated reality to prevent them emerging in unmediated form. Unitary power organised appearances as myth. Fragmentary power organises appearances as spectacle. Challenged, the coherence of myth became the myth of coherence. Magnified by history, the incoherence of the spectacle turns into the spectacle of incoherence (e.g., pop art, a contemporary form of consumable putrefaction, is also an expression of the contemporary putrefaction of consumption) (1). The poverty of ‘the drama’ as a literary genre goes hand in hand with the colonisation of social space by theatrical attitudes. Enfeebled on the stage, theatre battens on to everyday life and attempts to dramatise everyday behaviour. Lived experience is poured into the moulds of roles. The job of perfecting roles has been turned over to experts (2). (123)


He begins with a Nkee quote from Ecce Homo: the “ideal world is a lie invented to deprive reality of its value, its meaning, its truth...” V adds, “And it is true that man lies because in a world governed by lies he cannot do otherwise: he is falsehood himself, he is trapped in his own falsehood."

All the same, nobody lies groaning under the yoke of inauthenticity twenty-four hours a day. There are always a few radical thinkers in whom a truthful light shines briefly through the lie of words; and by the same token there are very few alienations which are not shattered every day for an instant, for an hour, for the space of a dream, by subjective refusal. Words are never completely in the thrall of Power, and no one is ever completely unaware of what is destroying him. When these moments of truth are extended they will turn out to have been the tip of the iceberg of subjectivity destined to sink the Titanic of the lie. (124)

The bourgeoisie killed God and myth, but the replacement they created, the lie of the ideal, is weak and unsustainable.

Revolution was the bourgeoisie’s finest invention. It is also the running noose which will help it take its leap into oblivion.

Fascism is in a way a consistent response to this hopeless predicament. It is like an aesthete dreaming of dragging the whole world down with him into the abyss, lucid as to the death of his class but a sophist when he announces the inevitability of universal annihilation. Today this mise en scẽne of death chosen and refused lies at the core of the spectacle of incoherence. 

There is, however, an important difference between myth and its fragmented, desanctified avatar, the spectacle, with respect to the way each resists the criticism of facts. The varying importance assumed in unitary systems by artisans, merchants and bankers explains the continual oscillation in these societies between the coherence of myth and the myth of coherence. With the triumph of the bourgeoisie something very different happens: by introducing history into the armoury of appearances, the bourgeois revolution historicises appearance and thus makes the progression from the incoherence of the spectacle to the spectacle of incoherence inevitable. (124-5)

Thus, in the old unitary society there was an oscillation between the “coherence of myth” and the “myth of coherence;” this is replaced in the society of the spectacle with a progression from the “incoherence of the spectacle” to the “spectacle of incoherence.” V explains the first:

In unitary societies, whenever the merchant class, with its disrespect for tradition, threatened to deconsecrate values, the coherence of myth would give way to the myth of coherence. What does this mean? What had formerly been taken for granted had suddenly to be vigorously reasserted. Loud professions of faith were heard where previously faith was so automatic as to need no stating, and respect for the great had to be preserved through recourse to the principle of absolute monarchy.

Under pressure from the bourgeoisie, this oscillation finally pulls the unitary order apart:

There comes a time when the myth of coherence is so undermined by the criticism of facts that it cannot mutate back into a coherent myth. Appearance, that mirror in which men hide their own choices from themselves, shatters into a thousand pieces and falls into the public realm of individual supply and demand. The demise of appearances means the end of hierarchical power, that façade ‘with nothing behind it’.

None of the fragmentary ideologies of the spectacular era can more than momentarily replace this lost hierarchy, so “Eventually the decomposition of the spectacle entails the resort to the spectacle of decomposition” (126).

V now makes a very interesting argument about drama and technology:

The development of the drama as a literary genre cannot but throw light on the question of the organisation of appearances. After all, a play is the simplest form of the organisation of appearances, and a prototype for all more sophisticated forms. As religious plays designed to reveal the mystery of transcendence to men, the earliest theatrical forms were indeed the organisation of appearances of their time. And the process of secularisation of the theatre supplied the models for later, spectacular stage management. Aside from the machinery of war, all machines of ancient times originated in the needs of the theatre. The crane, the pulley and other hydraulic devices started out as theatrical paraphernalia; it was only much later that they revolutionised production relations. It is a striking fact that no matter how far we go back in time the domination of the earth and of men seems to depend on techniques which serve the purposes not only of work but also of illusion.

[This connects with the concept of “wonder” in the work of Aristotle, and the inventions of Hero of Alexandria; how unlike Vaneigem to have not included religion with theater and war as origins of illusion, on account of Hero’s hydraulic temple doors... though arguably, this was also “drama.”]

The birth of tragedy was already a narrowing of the arena in which primitive men and gods had held their cosmic dialogue. It meant a distancing, a putting in parentheses, of magical participation. This was now organised in accordance with a refraction of the principles of initiation, and no longer involved the rites themselves. What emerged was a spectaculum, a thing seen, while the gradual relegation of the gods to the role of mere props presaged their eventual eviction from the social scene as a whole.

Tragedy in turn is superseded by drama, and by comedy. In drama, “human society replaced the gods on stage” (127).

The cliché which likens life to a drama seems to evoke a fact so obvious as to need no discussion. So widespread is the confusion between play-acting and life that it does not even occur to us to wonder why it exists. Yet what is 'natural' about the fact that I stop being myself a hundred times a day and slip into the skin of people whose concerns and importance I have really not the slightest desire to know about?

This is not quite the same as being an actor in a play, because that actor retains a self to return to at the end of the performance.

The roles we play in everyday life, on the other hand, soak into the individual, preventing him from being what he really is and what really wants to be. They are nuclei of alienation embedded in the flesh of direct experience. The function of such stereotypes is to dictate to each person on an individual – even an ‘intimate’ – level the same things which ideology imposes collectively.

V talks about the increased personalization of the lies/spectacle (his example is television but obviously social media is an even better illustration). These do not work through the dissemination of ideas, but rather of gestures, portrayed on the screen and imitated by viewers.

What we have here is a school of gesture, a lesson in dramatic art in which a particular facial expression or motion of the hand supplies thousands of viewers with a supposedly adequate way of expressing particular feelings, wishes, and so on. Thus the still rudimentary technology of the image teaches the individual to model his existential attitudes on the complete portraits of him assembled by the psychosociologists. His most personal tics and idiosyncrasies become the means by which Power integrates him into its schemata. The poverty of everyday life reaches it nadir by being choreographed in this way. Just as the passivity of the consumer is an active passivity, so the passivity of the spectator lies in his ability to assimilate roles and play them according to official norms. (128)

Individuals acting out roles, personalities, mannerisms, etc. which they have consumed through media are thus being “choreographed” by the Spectacle.

We thus see the return of the original conception of theatre, of general participation in the mystery of divinity. But, thanks to technology, this now occurs on a higher level, and by the same token embodies possibilities of transcendence unavailable in ancient times.

As we have seen, the technical reproduction of magical relationships such as religious faith or identification resulted eventually in the dissolution of magic. Coupled with the demise of the great ideologies, this development precipitated the chaos of stereotypes and roles. Hence the new demands placed upon the spectacle. (129)

News stories are just assembled cliches, divided up into stereotypical categories (“Crimes of Passion, Political Affairs, Business Section, From the Police Blotter, Eating Out, etc., etc.”). There is the constant, meaningless juxtaposition of news items (cf. Latour): “The husband who kills his wife’s lover competes for attention with the Pope on his deathbed, and Mick Jagger’s underpants are on a par with Mao’s cap. It’s all one, everything is equivalent to everything else, in the perpetual spectacle of incoherence.” “The spectacle has to be everywhere, so it becomes diluted and self-contradictory.”

The spectacle’s degeneration is in the nature of things, and the dead weight which enforces passivity is bound to lighten. Roles are eroded by the resistance put up by lived experience, and spontaneity will eventually lance the abscess of inauthenticity and pseudo-activity. (130)






Wednesday, March 18, 2026

Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 13



Summary of Chapter 13: Separation

Vaneigem’s summary:

Privative appropriation, the basis of social organisation, keeps individuals separated from themselves and from others. Artificial unitary paradises seek to conceal this separation by co-opting more or less successfully people’s prematurely shattered dreams of unity. To no avail. People may be forced to swing back and forth across the narrow gap between the pleasure of creating and the pleasure of destroying, but this very oscillation suffices to bring Power to its knees. (117)

Like the related primitive accumulation in classical Marxism, privative appropriation plays a foundational role in creating the social order of “separation,” whereby resources are appropriated away from the [commons] into the private hands of individuals, castes, classes, which at the same time atomizes and alienates individuals away from the sense of social unity which, as the Situationalists consistently argue, we all truly long for. Separation, to be maintained, thus has to be dissimulated, and the rebellion against it in search of unity needs to be coöpted and diverted into maintaining separation.

“What is God? The guarantor and quintessence of the myth used to justify the domination of man by man.” V follows this with a dense theory of how the tripartite nature of the Christian god corresponds to soul, spirit, and body, leading into a master/servant dialectic.

God is a harmony of lies, an ideal form uniting the slave’s voluntary sacrifice (Christ), the consenting sacrifice of the master (the Father; the slave as the master’s son), and the indissoluble link between them (the Holy Ghost). The same model underlies the ideal picture of man as a divine, whole and mythic creature: a body subordinated to a guiding spirit working for the greater glory of the soul— the soul being the all-embracing synthesis. (119)

“We thus have a type of relationship in which two terms take their meaning from an absolute principle, from an obscure and inaccessible norm of unchallengeable transcendence (God, blood, holiness, grace, etc).” However, in today’s world ruled by the bourgeoisie, this has been reduced to “a vague nostalgia for warmth of the unitary myth and a set of cold and flavourless abstractions: body and spirit, being and consciousness, individual and society, private and public, general and particular, etc, etc.”

The old aristocratic orders were “unitary regimes” which supplanted the natural human wish for unity with myths and abstractions; this has become fragmented under the bourgeoisie (as they overthrew the old myths and abstractions but replaced them with inferior ones), which only makes the drive for unity more urgently felt.

By laying bare the economic and social foundations of separation, the bourgeoisie supplied the arms which will serve to end separation once and for all. And the end of separation means the end of the bourgeoisie and of all hierarchical power. … This mission can only be accomplished by the new proletariat, which must forcibly wrest the third force (spontaneous creation, poetry) from the gods, and keep it alive in the everyday life of all.

V traces the history of dualism in science, theology, and philosophy as part of the bourgeois overthrow of the previous unitary order and the emergence of capitalism, which is a dualist order, lacking a transcendent third (and thus more bare-faced and unstable).

The spirit of feudal lordship had found an adequate justification in a certain transcendence. But a capitalist God is an absurdity. Whereas lordship called for a trinitarian system, capitalist exploitation is dualistic. Moreover, it cannot be dissociated from the material nature of economic relationships. (120)

The mystical authority of the feudal lord was very different from that instituted by the bourgeoisie. For the lord did not simply change his role and become a factory boss: once the mysterious superiority of blood and lineage is abolished, nothing is left but a mechanics of exploitation and a race for profit which have no justification but themselves. Boss and worker are separated not by any qualitative distinction of birth but merely by quantitative distinctions of money and power. Indeed, what makes capitalist exploitation so repulsive is the fact that it occurs between ‘equals.’ All the same, the bourgeoisie’s work of destruction—though quite unintentionally, of course—reveals the justification for every revolution. (120-1)

Commodification adds individual fantasies to the collective ones, but these are unsatisfying, and thus lead to a stronger desire for real unity:

Thus in addition to the great collective onanisms—ideologies, illusions of social unity, herd mentalities, opiums of the people—we are offered a whole range of marginal solutions lying in the no-man’s—land between the permissible and the forbidden: individualised ideology, obsession, monomania, unique (and hence alienating) passions, drugs and other highs (alcohol, the cult of speed and rapid change, of rarefied sensations, etc). All these pursuits allow us to lose ourselves completely while preserving the impression of self-realisation, but the corrosiveness of such activities stems above all from their partial quality. The passion for play is no longer alienating if the person who gives himself up to it seeks play in the whole of life—in love, in thought, in the construction of situations. In the same way, the wish to kill is no longer megalomania if it is combined with revolutionary consciousness. (121)

The urge to destroy the current order may be expressed negatively, leading only to self-destruction, or, “should a revolutionary consciousness prevail,” with positive liberation.

The complete unchaining of pleasure is the surest way to the revolution of everyday life, to the construction of the whole man. (122)





Thursday, February 19, 2026

Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 12



Summary of Chapter 12: Sacrifice

This chapter begins a new section, titled “The impossibility of realisation: power as sum of seductions,” which V summarizes:

Where constraint breaks people, and mediation makes fools of them, the seduction of power is what makes them love their oppression. Because of it people give up their real riches: for a cause that mutilates them {twelve}; for an imaginary unity that fragments them {thirteen}; for an appearance that reifies them {fourteen}; for roles that wrest them from authentic life (fifteen}; for a time whose passage defines and confines them {sixteen}. (105)

This chapter will thus be on “the cause that mutilates.” V’s summary (107):

There is such a thing as a reformism of sacrifice that is really a sacrifice to reformism. Humanistic self-mortification and fascistic self-destruction both leave us nothing – not even the option of death. All causes are equally inhuman. But the will to live raises its voice against this epidemic of masochism wherever there is the slightest pretext for revolt; for what appear to be merely partial demands actually conceal the process whereby a revolution is being prepared: the nameless revolution, the revolution of everyday life (1). The refusal of sacrifice is the refusal to be bartered: human beings are not exchangeable. Henceforward the appeal to voluntary self -sacrifice is going to have to rely on three strategies only: the appeal to art, the appeal to human feelings and the appeal to the present (2).

“Where people are not broken – and broken in – by force and fraud, they are seduced.” The seduction of the current consumerist world (and its parallel in the State-socialist world, at the time V was writing), is familiar from earlier chapters. The way that myth and sacrifice operate in the current bourgeois world is a sort of debasement of their aristocratic predecessors (cf. Chapter 8).

the master-slave dialectic implies that the mythic sacrifice of the master embodies within itself the real sacrifice of the slave: the master makes a spiritual sacrifice of his real power to the general interest, while the slave makes a material sacrifice of his real life to a power which he shares in appearance only.

The decline and fall of sacrifice parallels the decline and fall of myth. Bourgeois thought exposes the materiality of myth, deconsecrating and fragmenting it. It does not abolish it, however, because if it did the bourgeoisie would cease to exploit – and hence to exist. The fragmentary spectacle is simply one phase in the decomposition of myth, a process today being accelerated by the dictates of consumption. Similarly, the old sacrifice-gift ordained by cosmic forces has shrivelled into a sacrifice-exchange minutely metered in terms of social security and social-democratic justice. (108)

Throughout this book V has been discussing “privative appropriation” (l’appropriation privative), and only now has it occured to me to wonder how this relates to the more common phrase “primitive accumulation.” V defines privative appropriation elsewhere (Vaneigem 2009) as “the seizing of control by a class, group, caste or individual of a general power over socioeconomic survival whose form remains complex — from ownership of land, territory, factories or capital, all the way to the ‘pure’ exercise of power over people (hierarchy).”

He mocks the pro-Soviet, statist left as also demanding “sacrifice.” Fanatics across the political spectrum sacrifice themselves to a Cause, which is really an aesthetics of death.

For aesthetics is carnival paralysed, as cut off from life as a Jibaro head, the carnival of death. The aesthetic element, the element of pose, corresponds to the element of death secreted by everyday life. (109)

The moment revolution calls for self-sacrifice it ceases to exist. The individual cannot give himself up for a revolution, only for a fetish. (110)

Ideology is the rebel's tombstone, its purpose being to prevent his coming back to life.

And yet, the reflex of freedom also knows how to exploit a pretext. Thus a strike for higher wages or a rowdy demonstration can awaken the carnival spirit. (111)

Thus for V, any of these specific causes or goals is a “thing,” a limitation to which individuals are called to sacrifice themselves; the real aim of revolution in his eyes is this reawakening of the “carnival spirit.”

The real demand of all insurrectionary movements is the transformation of the world and the reinvention of life. This is not a demand formulated by theorists: rather, it is the basis of poetic creation. Revolution is made everyday despite, and in opposition to, the specialists of revolution.

The ‘road to socialism’ consists in this: as people become more and more tightly shackled by the sordid relations of reification, the tendency of the humanitarians to mutilate people in an egalitarian fashion grows ever more insistent. And with the deepening crisis of the virtues of self-abnegation and of devotion generating a tendency towards radical refusal, the sociologists, those watchdogs of modern society, have been called in to peddle a subtler form of sacrifice: art. (112)

He traces how art changed from ancient, to bourgeois times, and its role in recuperating struggle into the service of the status quo.

The function of the spectacle in ideology, art and culture is to turn the wolves of spontaneity into the sheepdogs of knowledge and beauty. Literary anthologies are replete with insurrectionary writings, the museums with calls to arms. But history does such a good job of pickling them in perpetuity that we can neither see nor hear them. (113)

New art movements are subject to planned obsolescence, such that the “dictatorship of consumption ensures that every aesthetic collapses before it can produce any masterpieces.” V is critical of attempts to resist this manufacturing a new aesthetic out of everyday life via “Sociodramas and happenings which supposedly provoke spontaneous participation on the part of the spectators,” as these do not truly challenge the spectacle. He considers the potentials, and failures, of surrealism, but notes that the “present state of affairs tends to favour situationist agitation” (115).

Wherever the will to live fails to spring spontaneously from individual poetry, there falls the shadow of the crucified Toad of Nazareth. The artist in every human being can never be brought out by regression to artistic forms defined by the spirit of sacrifice. We have to go back to square one. (115)

The fact is that there will never be any friendship, or love, or hospitality, or solidarity, so long as self-abnegation exists. The call for self-denial always amounts to an attempt to make inhumanity attractive.

We never really give ourselves over completely to what we are doing, except perhaps in orgasm. Our present is grounded in what we are going to do later and in what we have just done, with the result that it always bears the stamp of unpleasure. In collective as well as in individual history, the cult of the past and the cult of the future are equally reactionary. Everything which has to be built has to be built in the present. (116)

I want to live intensely, for myself, grasping every pleasure firm in the knowledge that what is radically good for me will be good for everyone. And above all I would promote this one watchword: ‘Act as though there were no tomorrow.’



Vaneigem, Raoul (2009 [1963]) “Basic Banalities.” The Anarchist Library. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/raoul-vaneigem-basic-banalities





Wednesday, January 7, 2026

The Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 11

 


Summary of Chapter 11: Mediated Abstraction, Abstracted Mediation

ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ ㅤ

Vaneigem’s summary:

Reality is today imprisoned within metaphysics in the same way as it was once imprisoned within theology. The way of seeing which Power imposes ‘abstracts’ mediations from their original function, which is to extend the demands that arise in lived experience into the real world. But mediation never completely loses contact with experience: it resists the magnetic pull of authority. The point where resistance begins is the look-out post of subjectivity. Until now, metaphysicians have only organised the world in various ways; our problem is to change it, by opposing them (1). The regime of guaranteed survival is slowly undermining the belief that Power is necessary (2). This leads to a growing rejection of the forms which govern us, a rejection of their ordering principle (3). Radical theory, which is the only guarantee of the coherence of such a rejection, penetrates the masses because it extends their spontaneous creativity. ‘Revolutionary’ ideology is theory co-opted by the authorities. Words exist at the frontier between the will to live and its repression; the way they are employed determines their meaning; history controls the ways in which they are employed. The historical crisis of language indicates the possibility of transcending it towards the poetry of action, towards the great game with signs (4).

The first section begins with some trying to find yourself stuff, which you can’t, because of alienation and “non-totality.”

… the world, in certain periods, takes on the very forms of the dominant metaphysic. No matter how demented it may seem to us to believe in God and the Devil, this phantom pair become a living reality from the moment that a society considers them sufficiently present to inspire the text of its laws. In the same way, the stupid distinction between cause and effect has been able to govern societies in which human behaviour and phenomena in general were analysed in such terms. Even now nobody should underestimate the power of the misbegotten dichotomy between thought and action, theory and practice, real and imaginary . . . these ideas are forces of organisation. The world of falsehood is a real world; people are killing one another there, and we had best not forget it. (95)

[V’s “dominant metaphysic” seems to be about binary oppositions everyone takes for granted in a given “period.” The action/theory opposition brings Simondon to mind?]

In the modern world, “grace” remains like a "pacemaker" (granted by government rather than God) in the modern secularized subject?

Oppression reigns because men are divided, not only among themselves but also inside themselves. What separates them from themselves and weakens them is also the false bond that unites them with Power, reinforcing this Power and making them choose it as their protector, as their father.

The most interesting aspect of this chapter is its discussion of the connection between mediations [e.g., technology, language, representation] and “Power” [hierarchical authority]:

As soon as mediation escapes my control, every step I take drags me towards something foreign and inhuman. Engels painstakingly showed that a stone, a fragment of nature alien to man, became human as soon as it became an extension of the hand by serving as a tool (and the stone in its turn humanised the hand of the hominid). But once it is appropriated by a master, an employer, a ministry of planning, a management, the tool’s meaning is changed: it deflects the action of its user towards other purposes. And what is true for tools is true for all mediations. (96) 

For the Situationalists, as for Marx and Engels, such mediation plays an essential role in the development of a human subject through interaction with their environment, in which they shape and learn about the world around them, and achieve self-consciousness. However, according to V, “Power” appropriates this mediation, inserting itself into the relation of subject-mediator-environment, thus stealing power from the individual subject, and diverting the outcome for its own ends. As “the magnetism of the governing principle always draws to itself the largest possible number of mediations,” this intervenes more and more assiduously, even cancerously, in all forms of art, work, and language.

Just as God was the supreme dispenser of grace, the magnetism of the governing principle always draws to itself the largest possible number of mediations. Power is the sum of alienated and alienating mediations.

V opposes alienating abstraction with spontaneity, but not simplistically, this is what he means by the “look-out post of subjectivity.”

Section 2 reinvokes the slave mentality, alienation in “a world of non-totality.”

In mankind’s struggle for survival, hierarchical social organisation was undeniably a decisive step forward. At one point in history the cohesion of a collectivity around its leader gave it the best, perhaps the only chance of self-preservation. (97)

This took different forms under feudalism and under the bourgeoisie.

If the bourgeoisie prefers man to God, it is because only man produces and consumes, supplies and demands. The divine universe, which is pre-economic, incurs their disapproval just as much as the post-economic world of the whole man. (98)

“By force-feeding survival to satiation point, consumer society awakens a new appetite for life.” This is an argument V has made before; he here adds that “Power no longer protects the people; it protects itself against the people.” [This seems a bit to beg the question as to whether it didn’t always do that? But the point he is trying to make is that people (in the wealthier nations, in the relatively wealthy time in which he is writing) are no longer terrified of starvation, etc. and so come to question the value of “Power” (aka hierarchy) which had previously seemed like a necessary aspect of social organization [V seems to be conceding that point simply to give the history a dialectic form]].

The third section celebrates "spontaneous poetry" as a practice of freedom:

Every time the total and immediate consummation of an action is deferred, Power is confirmed in its function of grand mediator. Sponta­neous poetry, on the other hand, is the anti-mediation par excellence.

“Power” (aka centralized power, domination/hierarchy) plays a role a bit like Althusser’s state Subject, inserted into or entangled into mediation (art, technology, “the Spectacle,” etc. as the relation of subjects with their environments). In the comfortable modern consumerist (and state socialist) world, “Ideological hypnosis is replacing the bayonet” (99). “But the more mediations are alienated, the more the thirst for the immediate rages, the more the savage poetry of revolutions tramples down frontiers.”

In its final phase, authority will culminate in the union of abstract and concrete. Power is already making the concrete abstract, even if it still occasionally resorts to the electric chair. The very face of the world, as illuminated by Power, is about to be organised according to a metaphysic of reality …

This ends with a lengthy quote on Form from the novel Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz.

In section 4, radical theory (aka critique) is opposed by ideology, and revolutions and revolutionary movements have failed or been coopted by those who turn theory into ideology, such as the Leninists who “explained” revolution with bullets to the sailors of Kronstadt, and to the Makhnovists (100).

Whenever the powers-that-be get their hands on theory, it turns into ideology: an ad hominem argument against man himself. Radical theory comes out of the individual, out of being as subject: it penetrates the masses through what is most creative in each person, through subjectivity, through the desire for realisation. Ideological conditioning is quite the opposite: the technical management of the inhuman, of the weight of things. It turns men into objects which have no meaning apart from the Order in which they have their place. It assembles them in order to isolate them, makes the crowd into a multiplicity of solitudes.

    Ideology is the falsehood of language, radical theory the truth of language. (101)

The fight is unfair. Words serve Power better than they do men; they serve it more faithfully than most men do, and more scrupulously than the other mediations (space, time, technology ...). For all transcendence depends on language and is developed through a system of signs and symbols (words, dance, ritual, music, sculpture, building ...).

Language, as the servant of “Power,” abstracts, and forces complex living experience into reductive categories, in order to reproduce the familiar signs (or Forms, in the earlier Gombrowicz quote). “The repetition of familiar signs is the basis of ideology.” [A more nuanced version of this argument would be D&G on the refrain.]

Yet lived experience keeps generating the radical gesture of spontaneity and poetry:

Even when it is co-opted and turned against its original purpose, poetry always gets what it wants in the end. The ‘Proletarians of all lands, unite’ which produced the Stalinist State will one day realise the classless society. No poetic sign is ever completely turned by ideology. (102)

Poetry is opposed by anti-poetry [about as apt a description of generative “AI” as any]:

The language that neglects radical actions, creative actions, human actions par excellence, from their realisation, becomes anti-poetry. It defines the linguistics of power: its science of information. This information is the model of false communication, the communication of the inauthentic, non-living. There is a principle that I find holds good: as soon as language no longer obeys the desire for realisation, it falsifies communication; it no longer communicates anything except that false promise of truth which is called a lie. But this lie is the truth of what destroys me, infects me with its virus of submission.

“Each word, idea , or symbol is a double agent” serving either the centralization of Power, or the liberatory “will to live.”

In a general way, the fight for language is the fight for the freedom to love, for the reversal of perspective. The battle is between metaphysical facts and the reality of facts: I mean between facts conceived statically as part of a system of interpretation of the world and facts understood in their development by the praxis which transforms them.

Power cannot be overthrown like a government. The united front against authority covers the whole spectrum of everyday life and enlists the vast majority of people. (102-3)

Three weapons in the service of freedom:

1) Poeticization. “‘Information’ should be corrected in the direction of poetry” (103), aka the poeticization or repoeticization of language, “leading eventually to a glossary or encyclopaedia” (which presumably translates the words used by Power into opposing or subversive meanings?)

2) Dialogue. “Open dialogue, the language of the dialectic; conversation, and forms of non-spectacular discussion.”

3) Sensual speech. “Sensual speech” is a concept from the mystic Jakob Boehme, which V states is a form of “propaganda by the deed.”

V discusses direct communication without words, as between lovers, and celebrates [Edward] Lear and [Lewis] Carroll, and Dada, as resistance in the realm of language.

By exposing falsified communication Dada began to transcend language in the direction of poetry. Today, the language of myth and the language of spectacle are giving way to the reality which underlies them: the language of deeds. This language contains in itself the critique of all modes of expression and is thus a continuous self-criticism. (104)

V ends with a dream of a post-revolutionary, seemingly post-linguistic? society, which makes Fourier seem boringly practical, though the final “do” is a double-entendre: to “speak” here means to speak within the ideological system of Forms and familiar signs, while to “do” is what we can do with language outside of this, when theory and practice have been reunited in totality:]

The language of the whole man will be a whole language: perhaps the end of the old language of words. Inventing this language means reconstructing man right down to his unconscious. Totality is hacking its way through the fractured non-totality of thoughts, words and actions towards itself. But we shall have to speak until we can do without words.


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Tuesday, November 11, 2025

The Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 10



Summary of Chapter 10: Down Quantity Street

Insert the words dill pickle into every sentence of every summary.

V’s Summary:

Economic imperatives seek to impose the standardised measuring system of the market on the whole of human activity. Very large quantities take the place of the qualitative, but even quantity is rationed and economised. Myth is based on quality, ideology on quantity. Ideological saturation is an atomisation into small contradictory quantities which can no more avoid destroying one another than they can avoid being smashed by the qualitative negativity of popu1ar refusal (1). The quantitative and the linear are indissociable. A linear, measured time and a linear, measured life are the co-ordinates of survival: a succession of interchangeable instants. These lines are part of the confused geometry of Power (2). (88)

Everything is being subsumed under quantifying logic. V discusses figures such as Don Juan and the idler, as half-ass forms of resistance – this is the attraction of large quantity: feasting, overconsumption, as the only available stand-in for quality in this system. My first thought on reading this was that he could have done a lot more with this insight a la consumption in general, as a drive to overconsume, accumulate pointlessly, in a sort of derailed potlatch. Cf. a recent BBC story about Elon Musk forcing Tesla investors to give him some ridiculous sum of additional money; the reporters openly wondered, does he really think he needs more money? And in general the pointless, psychotic quest for accumulation of wealth over all over ends, which characterizes Silicon Valley culture and poisons all it produces.

However, Vaneigem’s next point shows why he didn’t go down this path; his argument is that “even quantity is rationed” (89): the bourgeoisie have refused the Gift (and so also Potlatch, Bataille’s general economy, etc.). That belonged to the old order of Myth; this has been replaced by the order of Ideology corresponding to capitalism and the modern State. Modern politics has moved from the Big Lie of the Nazis to countless lies, which overwhelm (e.g., the countless, confusing diversity of products for purchase) yet the system sows the seeds of its own destruction by producing trauma and inhibition in consumers”

Boredom breeds the irresistible rejection of uniformity, a refusal that can break out at any moment. Stockholm, Amsterdam and Watts (for a start) have shown that the tiniest of pretexts can fire the oil spread on troubled waters. Think of the vast quantity of lies that can be wiped out by one act of revolutionary poetry! From Villa to Lumumba, from Stockholm to Watts, qualitative agitation, the agitation that radicalises the masses because it springs from the radicalism of the masses, is redefining the frontiers of submission and degradation. (91)

The bourgeois world-order destroyed the old pyramidal hierarchy of the “unitary regimes” of the past, claiming to free the individual. But

The dismantling of the pyramid, far from destroying the inhuman cement, only pulverises it. We see tiny individual beings becoming absolute: little ‘citizens’ released by social atomisation. The inflated imagination of egocentricity creates a universe on the model of one point, a point just the same as thousands of other points, grains of sand, all free, equal and fraternal, scurrying here and there like so many ants when their nest is broken open.

The old order was unified around the omnipresence/omniscience of God; V expresses doubts whether “cybernetians” could replace him.

Quantification implies linearity. The qualitative is plurivalent, the quantitative univocal. Life quantified becomes a measured route march towards death. The radiant ascent of the soul towards heaven is replaced by inane speculations about the future. Moments of time no longer radiate, as they did in the cyclical time of earlier societies; time is a thread stretching from birth to death, from memories of the past to expectations of the future, on which an eternity of survival strings out a row of instants and hybrid presents nibbled away by what is past and what is yet to come. The feeling of living in symbiosis with cosmic forces – the sense of the simultaneous – revealed joys to our forefathers which our passing presence in the world is hard put to it to provide. What remains of such a joy? Only vertigo, giddy transience, the effort of keeping up with the times. You must move with the times – the motto of those who make a profit if you do. (92)

Not to beat a dead horse, but that last line sums up the AI hype pumped out manically by an industry desperate to achieve profitability at any (social) cost (exhibit A, investor Marc Andreesen attacking the Pope’s fairly tepid calls for “morality” in AI, because any and all slowdowns in investment must be resisted).

V does not seek a restoration of the old cyclical time, centered on the “divine animal,” but a corrected version, centered on “man.” [though how is “man” not every bit as much a wheel in the head, as V is at pains to demonstrate that the “individual” is, in the current order?] In any event, “Man is not now the centre of time, he is merely a point in it.” The reduction of everything to points in an endless and pointless sequence has hollowed out all meaning and made life into a superficial acting out of roles, actions, stereotypes. Once again, as V repeatedly stresses, the exhaustion and disaffection created by this system, and even our hapless attempts to create meaning within it, are the key to its eventual overturning:

What do I want? Not a succession of moments, but one huge instant. A totality that is lived, and without the experience of ‘time passing.’ The feeling of ‘time passing’ is simply the feeling of growing old. And yet, since one must survive in order to live, virtual moments, possibilities, are necessarily rooted in that time. When we try to federate moments, to bring out the pleasure in them, to release their promise of life, we are already learning how to construct ‘situations’. (93)



Tuesday, September 9, 2025

The Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 9


Summary of Chapter 9: Technology and its mediated use

Vaneigem’s summary:

Contrary to the interest of those who control its use, technology tends to demystify the world. The democratic reign of consumption deprives commodities of any magical value. At the same time, organisation – the technology of new technologies – deprives modern productive forces of their subversive and seductive qualities. Such organisation is simply the organisation of authority (1). Alienated mediations weaken men by making themselves indispensable. A social mask conceals people and things, transforming them, in the present stage of privative appropriation, into dead things - into commodities. Nature is no more. The rediscovery of nature will be its reinvention as a worthy adversary by building new social relationships. The shell of the old hierarchical society will be burst open from within by the cancerous expansion of its technical apparatus (2). (83)

The same bankruptcy is evident in non-industrial civilisations, where people are still dying of starvation, and in automated civilisations, where people are already dying of boredom. Every paradise is artificial. The life of a Trobriand islander, rich in spite of ritual and taboo, is at the mercy of a smallpox epidemic; the life of an ordinary Swede, poor in spite of his comforts, is at the mercy of suicide and survival sickness.

“Belief in the magical power of technology goes hand in hand with its opposite, the tendency to deconsecration.” Machines are both perfectly intelligible, and miraculous.

this ambiguity is useful to the masters: old con about happy tomorrows and the green grass over the hill operates at various levels to justify the rational exploitation of people today. (84)

[Interestingly enough, both this phenomenon and its opposite are at play in the current AI hype. As Bender and Hanna (2025) point out, the “doomer” scenario also helps, by making AI seem more capable and important than it is.]

In his typically dense and wide-ranging manner, V runs through desanctification, liberalism, and fascism, all in one paragraph (with a nod to Ubu thrown in). The basic argument is that commodity culture has created the conditions for its own destruction, through general dissatisfaction and disenchantment.

Today the promises of the old society of production are raining down on our heads in an avalanche of consumer goods that nobody is likely to call manna from heaven. You can hardly believe in the magical power of gadgets in the same way as people used to believe in productive forces. There is a certain hagiographical literature on the steam hammer. One cannot imagine much on the electric toothbrush.

He takes aim at the “cyberneticists” and their dream of a general science of organization transforming society; read today, it is easy to substitute the fantasies of Silicon Valley technocrats:

The first landing on Mars will pass unnoticed at Disneyland.

He contrasts the fantasies of the cyberneticists with the utopianism of Fourier, and foretells the failure of the former:

By laying the basis for a perfect power structure, the cyberneticians will only stimulate the perfection of its refusal. Their programming of new techniques will be shattered by the same techniques turned to its own use by another kind of organisation. A revolutionary organisation. (85)

V’s summation of the dual alienations of production and consumption in the modern world contrasts and resonates with Simondon’s conclusion (covered recently):

It has been known for ages that the master uses the slave as a means to appropriate the objective world, that the tool only alienates the worker as long as it belongs to a master. Similarly in the realm of consumption: it is not the goods that are inherently alienating, but the conditioning that leads their buyers to choose them and the ideology in which they are wrapped. The tool in production and the conditioning of choice in consumption are the mainstays of the fraud: they are the mediations which move man the producer and man the consumer to the illusion of action in a real passivity and transform him into an essentially dependent being.

Again paralleling Simondon, he goes into the whole “technology-as-humanity’s-confrontation’with-nature” theme, and how this becomes superficial in a world in which everything is fake, including “nature.”

What we have to do now is to create a new nature that will be a worthwhile adversary: that is, to resocialise it by liberating the technical apparatus from the sphere of alienation, by snatching it from the hands of rulers and specialists. Only at the end of a process of social disalienation will nature become a worthwhile opponent, in a society in which man’s creativity will not come up against man himself as the first obstacle to its expansion. (87)

Technocratic organization aims at a mastery it cannot achieve, and in its failure, will create the space for a revolutionary transformation of society.

But total power does not exist, only totalitarian powers. And cyberneticians make such pitiful priests that their baptism of organisation will be laughed off the stage. (86)

Technological organisation cannot be destroyed from without. Its collapse will result from internal decay. Far from being punished for its Promethean aspirations, it is dying because it never escaped from the dialectic of master and slave. Even if the cybernauts did come to power they would have a hard time staying there. (87)

Let us so hope!



Bender, Emily M.; and Hanna, Alex (2025) The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want. Harper-Collins, New York.





Sunday, July 6, 2025

The Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 8




Summary of Chapter 8: Exchange and Gift


V’s summary:

Both the nobility and the proletariat conceive human relationships on the model of giving, but the proletarian way of giving transcends the feudal gift. The bourgeoisie, the class of exchange, is the lever which enables the feudal project to be overthrown and transcended in the long revolution (1). History is the continuous transformation of natural alienation into social alienation, and also, paradoxically, the continuous strengthening of a movement of opposition which will overcome all alienation. The historical struggle against natural alienation transforms natural alienation into social alienation, but the movement of historical disalienation eventually attacks social alienation itself and reveals that it is based on magic. This magic has to do with privative appropriation. It is expressed through sacrifice. Sacrifice is the archaic form of exchange. The extreme quantification of exchange reduces man to an object. From this rock bottom a new type of human relationship, involving neither exchange nor sacrifice, can be born (2). (75)

Vaneigem begins with the recurrent theme, of the present social order as an interregnum between two revolutions, a “no-man’s land” in history waiting for its culmination and transcendence:

The bourgeoisie administers a precarious and none-too-glorious interregnum between the sacred hierarchy of feudalism and the anarchic order of future classless societies. The bourgeois no-man’s-land of exchange is the uninhabitable region separating the old, unhealthy pleasure of giving oneself, in which the aristocrats indulged, from the pleasure of giving through self-love, which the new generations of proletarians are little by little beginning to discover.

This is also true where (at V’s time of writing) the “shadow of the bourgeoisie continues to rule under the red flag” (76). The bourgeoisie does of course play an important, though temporary, role in this history:

to give the devil his due, it is through the historical presence and mediation of the bourgeoisie that such a future becomes accessible to the proletariat. Is it not thanks to the technical progress and the productive forces developed by capitalism that the proletariat is in a position to realise, through the scientifically worked-out project of a new society, its egalitarian visions, its dreams of omnipotence and its desire to live without dead time?

Social organisation – hierarchical since it is based on privative appropriation – gradually destroys the magical bond between man and nature, but it preserves the magic for its own use; it creates between itself and mankind a mythical unity modelled on the original participation in the mystery of nature. (77)

From this point of view history is just the transformation of natural alienation into social alienation: a process of disalienation transformed into a process of social alienation, a movement of liberation producing new chains. Eventually, though, the will for human liberation will launch a direct attack on the whole collection of paralysing mechanisms, that is, on the social organisation based on privative appropriation. This is the movement of disalienation which will at once undo history and realise it in new modes of life.

The bourgeoisie’s accession to power signals man’s victory over natural forces. But as soon as this happens, hierarchical social organisation, born out of the struggle against hunger, sickness and material distress, loses its justification, and is obliged to take full responsibility for the malaise of industrial civilisations.

The hierarchical principle is the magic spell that has blocked the path of man in his historical struggles for freedom. From now on, no revolution will be worthy of the name if it does not involve, at the very least, the radical elimination of all hierarchy. (78)

The old feudal elites justified their rule in terms of myth and sacrifice, though this in reality meant “mythical power for those who sacrifice themselves in reality, real power for those who sacrifice themselves in myth.” (79)

The sacrifice-gift, the potlatch – the game of exchange or loser-take-all, in which the size of the sacrifice determined the prestige of the giver – obviously had no place in a rationalised trading economy. Forced out of the sectors dominated by economic imperatives, it re-emerged in values such as hospitality, friendship and love: refuges doomed to disappear as the dictatorship of quantified exchange (market value) colonised everyday life and turned this too into a market.

Strictly quantified, first by money and then by what might be called ‘sociometric units of power’, exchange pollutes all our relationships, feelings and thoughts. Where exchange dominates, only things are left, a world plugged into the organisation charts of cybernetic power: the world of reification. Yet this world is also, paradoxically, the jumping-off point for a total reconstruction of life and thought. A rock bottom on which we can really start to build. (80)

V posits also a final stage, or possibly an alternate non-revolutionary future, of “cybernetic democracy:”

The sacrifice of the masters is followed by the last stage in the history of sacrifice: the sacrifice of specialists. In order to consume, the specialist makes others consume according to a cybernetic programme whose hyper-rationality of exchange is destined to abolish sacrifice – and man along with it. The day pure exchange comes to regulate the modes of existence of the robot citizens of the cybernetic democracy, sacrifice will cease to exist. Objects need no justification to make them obedient. Sacrifice is no more part of the programme of machines than it is of a quite opposite project, the project of the whole human being. (81)

The order of exchange will fall apart, and be replaced by that of the pure gift:

We must rediscover the pleasure of giving: giving because you have so much. What beautiful potlatches the affluent society will see – whether it likes it or no – when the exuberance of the younger generation discovers the pure gift. The growing passion for stealing books, clothes, food, weapons or jewellery simply for the pleasure of giving them away, offers a glimpse of what the will to live has in store for consumer society.

We will have to renew our acquaintance with feudal imperfection, not in order to perfect it, but in order to transcend it. We will have to rediscover the harmony of unitary society while freeing it from the phantom of divinity and from hierarchy sanctified. The new innocence is not so far removed from the ordeals and judgements of God: the inequality of blood is closer to the equality of free individuals, irreducible to one another, than bourgeois equality. The cramped style of the nobility was only a crude sketch of the grand style which will be invented by masters without slaves. Yet it was a style of life nonetheless – a world away from the wretched forms of mere survival which ravage the individual’s existence in our time. (81-2)



 

Wednesday, May 28, 2025

The Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 7


 

Summary of Chapter 7: The Age of Happiness

Chapter 7 begins a new subsection of part 1, titled, “The impossibility of Communication: Power as Universal Mediation,” under which heading V states:

In the realm of Power, mediation is the false necessity wherein people learn to lose themselves rationally. Mediation’s power to alienate is now being reinforced, and also brought into question, by the dictatorship of consumption (seven), by the predominance of exchange over gift (eight), by cybernetisation (nine), and by the reign of the quantitative (ten). (65)

This chapter, then, will be about the “dictatorship of consumption. Vaneigem’s summary:

The contemporary welfare state belatedly provides the guarantees of survival which were demanded by the disinherited members of the production-based society of former days (1). Affluent survival entails the pauper­isation of life (2). Purchasing power is a licence to purchase power, to become an object in the order of things. The tendency is for both oppressor and oppressed to fall, albeit at different speeds, under one and the same dictatorship: the dictatorship of consumer goods (3). (65)

V begins the chapter with condemnations of both the welfare state and consumerism, noting with great sarcasm the obfuscation of the working class, who can now be imagined to be “rich” because they have various objects, and how consumption is meant to stand in for or replace the goals of revolution. Nevertheless, the younger generation are not taken in, and V celebrates various examples of uprising/insurrection.

The dictatorship of consumer goods has finally destroyed the barriers of blood, lineage and race; this would be good cause for celebration were it not that consumption, with its logic of things, forbids all qualitative differences and recognises only differences of quantity between values and between people. (69)

Vaneigem notes that consumer goods are losing their use value, with their value for consumption being all that matters. Noting Stalin’s revealing phrase that humans are “the most precious kind of capital,” V asserts that even this is no longer true: humans are only good for moving consumption along, gaining our entire identity from what we buy. “Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume: the hellish cycle is complete” (70). V observes with some irony that

a historical period based on such an anti-human truth can only be a period of transition, an intermediate stage between the life that was lived, if obscurely, by the feudal masters and the life that will be constructed rationally and passionately by masters without slaves. Only thirty years are left if we want to end the transitional period of slaves without masters before it has lasted two centuries. (70-1)

The great Bourgeois revolutions of the west have turned out to be no better than counter-revolutions, producing a society, not of “masters without slaves,” but of “slaves without masters.” At the same time, as the Stalin quote revealed, state “socialism” is also not truly revolutionary, but just another variation on the capitalist/consumerist order. [and has not China since demonstrated this even more clearly?]

The old proletarian sold his labour power in order to subsist; what little leisure time he had was passed pleasantly enough in conversation, arguments, drinking, making love, wandering, celebrating and rioting. The new proletarian sells his labour power in order to consume. When he’s not flogging himself to death to get promoted in the labour hierarchy, he’s being persuaded to buy himself objects to distinguish himself in the social hierarchy. The ideology of consumption becomes the consumption of ideology.... On the one hand, homo consumator buys a bottle of whiskey and gets as a free gift the lie that accompanies it. On the other hand, communist man buys ideology and gets a bottle of vodka for free. Paradoxically, Soviet and capitalist regimes are taking a common path, the first thanks to an economy of production, the second thanks to an economy of consumption. (72-3)

In the Soviet Union, the “surplus value of power” is the support of the bureaucrat. “He earns it not on the basis of money-capital, but on the basis of a primitive accumulation of confidence-capital obtained through the docile absorption of ideological matter.” (73)

In capitalist countries, the material profit reaped by the employer from both production and consumption remains distinct from the ideological profit which the employer is not alone in deriving from the organisation of consumption. This is all that prevents us from reducing the difference between a manager and worker to the difference between a new Rolls Royce every year and a VW lovingly maintained for five.

But State planning reduces everyone to no more than agents for consumption. Although many of V’s Cold War observations can sound a bit dated, the following presciently evokes the fantasies of some current Silicon Valley technocrats:

The culmination of the process would be a cybernetic society composed of specialists ranked hierarchically according to their aptitude for consuming, and making others consume, the doses of power necessary for the functioning of a gigantic social computer of which they themselves would be at once program and print-out. (73-4)

He ends by expressing hope that the disaffected proletarian youth of the first world, and the peasantry of the third world, will have none of this, and will join forces in revolt, putting an end to the bourgeois half-revolution:

The revolt against the welfare state will set the minimum demands for world revolution. You can choose to forget this, but you forget it at your peril. As Saint-Just said, those who make a revolution by halves are only digging their own graves. (74)



 

Sunday, February 16, 2025

The Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 6



Summary of Chapter 6: Decompression and the third force

V’s summary:

Up till now, tyranny has merely changed hands. In their common respect for rulers, antagonistic powers have always fostered the seeds of their future coexistence. (When the leader of the game takes the power of a Leader, the revolution dies with the revolutionaries.) Unresolved antagonisms fester, hiding real contradictions. Decompression is the permanent control of both antagonists by the ruling class. The third force radicalises contradictions, and leads to their transcendence, in the name of individual freedom and against all forms of constraint. Power has no option but to smash or incorporate the third force without admitting its existence. (57)

V begins with a parable of people living in a windowless tower, with the poor responsible for providing light with oil lamps. A revolutionary movement calls for the socialization of light, and radicals call even for the demolition of the tower; a stray bullet cracks the walls, letting natural light pour in. Windows are constructed and the radicals who had advocated the destruction of the building quietly eliminated; however, dissatisfaction soon reappears, as people are now unhappy about living in a “greenhouse.”

V charges that “The consciousness ofour time oscillates between that of the walled-up man and that of the prisoner” (58). A man enclosed in darkness sees his condition clearly and is filled with desperate rage, battering his head against the walls to break them down by any means; a prisoner in a cell, on the other hand, is passive because of the barred window or door which keeps alive the hope of escape or reprieve. “The man who is walled up alive has nothing to lose; the prisoner still has hope. Hope is the leash of submission” (58).

Thus, power has learned how to keep hope alive among the downtrodden and exploited, in order to render them passive, or rather, in order to be able to channel their resistance into controllable forms. In particular, V is referring to the cold war opposition of Capitalist and Communist states, each standing as an alternative to the exploited subjects of the other, while at the same time both retain their faithfulness to the principle of hierarchy:

The hierarchical principle remains common to the fanatics of both sides: opposite the capitalism of Lloyd George and Krupp appears the anti-capitalism of Lenin and Trotsky. From the mirrors of the masters of the present, the masters of the future are already smiling back. (58-9)

The Russian Revolution, for example, had started as a real, anarchist, uprising and organization from below, but had been betrayed and coöpted by the Bolsheviks:

As soon as the leader of the game turns into a Leader, the principle of hierarchy is saved, and the Revolution sits down to preside over the execution of the revolutionaries. We must never forget that the revolution­ary project belongs to the masses alone; leaders help it - Leaders betray it. To begin with, the real struggle takes place between the leader of the game and the Leader. (59)\

While the cold war powers go through the motions of opposition as part of the global spectacle, the people of the modern nation-states are kept entertained and confused by a multitude of momentary mini-conflicts, propagated in the media:

There is no one who is not accosted at every moment of the day by posters, news flashes, stereotypes, and summoned to take sides over each of the prefabricated trifles that conscientiously stop up all the sources of everyday creativity. In the hands of Power, that glacial fetish, such particles of antagonism form a magnetic ring whose function it is to make everybody lose their bearings, to abstract individuals from themselves and scramble all lines of force. (61)

[And how better to describe the workings of social media today, than as the algorithmically moderated flow of “particles of antagonism?”]

“Decompression is simply the control of antagonisms by Power” (61). Decompression, like the window in the jail cell, allows the pressure of despair and rage to relax into a controllable energy, which can be fed back into maintaining the spectacular oppositions which stand in for the possibility of real revolution. He cites old arcane church disputes as an example: a stark choice of god vs the devil would have overthrown the church; instead smaller, more arcane conflicts are promulgated, that don’t threaten the overall structure.

“In all conflicts between opposing sides an irrepressible upsurge of indi­vidual desire takes place and often reaches a threatening intensity.” (62) This is the third force, a true opposition to the spectacle and the workings of power, which can only have reality outside of the controlled binary of decompression.

From the individual's point of view the third force is what the force of decompression is from the point of view of Power. A spontaneous feature of every struggle, it radicalises insurrections, denounces false problems, threatens Power in its very struc­ture.

Individualism, alcoholism, collectivism, activism ... the variety of ideologies shows that there are a hundred ways of being on the side of Power. There is only one way to be radical. The wall that must be knocked down is immense, but it has been cracked so many times that soon a single cry will be enough to bring it crashing to the ground. Let the formidable reality of the third force emerge at last from the mists of history, with all the individual passions that have fuelled the insurrections of the past! Soon we shall find that an energy is locked up in everyday life which can move mountains and abolish distances. (62)

The long revolution is this history of seemingly failed insurrections, revolutionary communes, momentary resistances, etc., which have each left cracks in the wall; each revolutionary individual or generation adds their own impetus to it, playing their part in “the great gamble whose stake is freedom” (63).