The Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 1

Summary of Chapter 1: The Insignificant Signified.

The title is a play on semiotic terminology. Vaneigem provides his own brief summary of each chapter, and here is this one's:

Because of its increasing triviality, daily 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).

Similarly (not surprisingly) to the premise of the Society of the Spectacle, the opening falls into the Death-of-God, disenchantment-of-the-world tradition. V writes that we are like cartoon characters who have rushed off a cliff and have yet to notice. “Lucidity” is an awareness that the spectacle/etc. is not satisfying, that there is something wrong; that we are off the cliff and falling. [The potential felicitous connection with “lucid dreaming” does not appear to be invoked.] “Everyday life” appears as both an illusion and an unnoticed or underappreciated source of potential understanding or inspiration: “There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man’s life than in all the philosophies” (21). Philosophers see everything upside down (a very Marxian reversal-style criticism, favored also by Debord).

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. (22)

The Enlightenment accelerated the “descent towards the concrete.” [It would be great if this was a continuation of the falling metaphor; that does not seem to be the case.] Science exposes the fallacy of mysticism, pops its bubble:

I have little inclination 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 of, isn't this the old lie reconditioned, the highest stage of mystification?

This is to be asked to choose between “the false reality of gods or ... the false reality of technocrats.” [i.e., the technocrats support their order by exposing the previous order of mysticism, but they simply ask us to have faith in a new order [which furthermore is beyond our senses, dependent on technology to grasp?]]

Docility is no longer ensured by means of priestly magic, it results from a mass of minor hypnoses: news, culture, city planning, advertising, mecha­nisms of conditioning and suggestion ready to serve any order, established or to come. (23)

There is a reference to the “living reality of non-adaptation to the world:” [with an almost hauntological language of a double or shadow?]:

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 manage to cover it up decently any longer, this commonplace creature roams naked in railway stations and vacant lots; it confronts you at each self-evasion, it grasps your shoulder, catches your eye, and the dialogue begins. Win or lose, it goes with you.

“Non-adaptation” seems to be used usually (e.g. by Leroi-Gourhan, Steven Jay Gould) as a synonym for cultural adaptation, or reliance on technology. V might mean that, or (more interestingly) he might mean a sense of discomfort, of inability to adapt or conform to the mediated world of the spectacle. [It is probably the former, given how often V will speak of "adaptation" throughout the rest of the text.]

Individualism and collectivism are “two apparently contrary rationalities" which "cloak an identical gangsterism, an identical oppression of the isolated man.” -Isms are falsehoods:

The three crushing defeats suffered by the Com­mune, the Spartakist movement and Kronstadt-the-Red showed once and for all what bloodbaths are the outcome of three ideologies of freedom: liberalism, socialism and Bolshevism. (24)

The great collective illusions, anaemic from shedding the blood of so many, have since 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 blood­shed to show that a hundred pinpricks kill as surely as a couple of blows with a club?

Modern consumerism is less bloody than the great ideologies of the past, but it is also weaker, less enthralling, more dependent on constant change and novelty, and this means its illusion grows threadbare:

... to consume without respite is to change illusions at an accelerating pace which gradually dissolves the spaces behind the waterfall of gadgets, family cars and paperback books.

... 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. (25)

The affluent society is a society of voyeurs.

[In his many references to the technologically-enabled illusions of modern consumerism, it is easy to find imagery applicable to smartphones, e.g.,:]

To each his own kaleidoscope: a tiny movement of the fingers and the picture changes.

But the kaleidoscope of consumerism is just a new kind of monotony:

The monotony of the ideological spectacle makes us aware of the passivity of life, of survival.

Class struggle grew as a response to this, a refusal; contra mainstream Marxism, V argues that not just workers should be considered as revolutionary, but also artists; he lists various romantic poets and asks, “wasn't this also poverty and its radical refusal?” it was a mistake for revolutionary Marxism to “turn its back on artists,” especially now:

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, and it drives the turbines of power which the custodians of the old theory lubricate sanctimoniously with their purely formal opposition. (26)

The importance of the revolutionary potential of art and poetry, etc., have to do with the importance of the everyday as a potential subversive realm:

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 a corpse in their mouth.

The Revolution of Everyday Life, Prefaces and Introduction

Raoul Vaneigem, (1967[2001]) The Revolution of Everyday Life. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Rebel Press, London

[I first read portions of this excerpted in AJODA, then took out a library copy in 1989. I read the line "we have nothing in common except the illusion of being together" to my roommate Ducky Heins (RIP), and he laughed and called it "pseudo-intellectual." That is a bit unfair, however.]

Translator's Preface

Nicholson-Smith thanks earlier translators he has relied upon, and notes that the title is not the best, “I would have preferred The Rudiments of Savoir-Vivre: A Guide for Young Persons Recently Established in the World, or more simply The Facts of Life for Younger Readers” (5). Nevertheless he sticks with the old name under which the work has become familiar in English. He embarks on a defense of his relation to the SI, since he was expelled in 1967, though he feels this “parting of the ways” was mutual. 

 

French preface from 1991/2:

In the 1990s preface, Vaneigem gives his take on the failure of 69:

In the end the economy picks up whatever it has put in at the outset, plus appreciation. This is the whole meaning  of the notion of ‘recuperation.’ Revolutions have never done anything but turn on themselves at the velocity of their own rotation. The revolution of 1968 was no exception to this rule. The commodity system, finding generalized consumption more profitable than production, itself speeds up the shift from authoritarianism to the seductions of the market, from saving to spending, from puritanism to hedonism, from an exploitation that sterilises the earth and mankind to a lucrative reconstruction of the environment, from capital as more precious than the individual to the individual as the most precious capital. (10)

“Even the critique of the spectacle has now been travestied as ‘critical’ spectacle.” Nevertheless he insists that the 1968 revolution, unlike all previous, more violent revolutions, did not fail because it did not ever really end; the system responded with “the official world’s recognition of pleasure – so long, of course, as the pleasure in question was a profitable one, tagged with an exchange value and wrested from the gratuitousness of real life to serve a new commodity order” (12). Besides pushing capitalist recuperation into a new, presumably less stable position, the 1968 revolution also gave birth to a new, anti-hierarchical form of mass movement, which poses new problem for authority/power: “a coming together of individuals in no way reducible to a crowd manipulable at will” (13).

He describes his work and writings as “the persistent attempt to create myself and reconstruct society at the same time” (13). He notes with optimism the conditions for revolution in the 1990s: the falling rate of profit continues, the various dissatisfactions of the present day.

Something is taking place today which no imagination has ever dared speculate upon: the process of individual alchemy is on the point of transmuting an inhuman history into nothing less than humanity’s self-realisation. (14)

Introduction

The introduction sets up a list of related binaries, listed here with the preferred term first:

• subjectivity, objectivity
• living, survival
• positive, negative
• transcendence, power
• freedom, oppression

Vaneigem claims “a humility that should not be hard to see” and notes various limitations in his work, and his attempt to intervene with it in this world (17). Perhaps this book can contribute to the ideas in it becoming someday better and more clearly formulated, and thus more effective. His point is not about creating novelty, but since everything has already been said, he means to put this to use, to “escape the commonplace by manipulating it, controlling it, thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our subjectivity.”

He notes that while his argument is largely subjectivist, it will have impact beyond this: “Everything starts from subjectivity, but nothing stays there” (18).

The struggle between subjectivity and everything that corrupts it is about to widen the terrain of the old class struggles. It will revitalise it and make it more bitter. The desire to live is a political decision. Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?

He seems to see the modern subject of his day reduced to a “man of survival,” “ground up in the machinery of hierarchical power....” However, this subject of survival is also one of self-unity, of “absolute refusal;” there is a constantly-experienced contradiction, for this modern subject, of oppression and freedom, as the capitalist system attempts to deliver on promises it simply cannot fulfill. The rest of the book will have two parts, “Power’s Perspective,” and “Reversal of Perspective,” but this order is purely for convenience; V wants the reader to see them as synchronic, and wishes that “a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.”

This work is part of a subversive current of which the last has not yet been heard. It constitutes one contribution among others to the reconstruc­tion of the international revolutionary movement. Its significance should escape no one; in any case, as time will show, no one is going to escape its implications.