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 That belonged to the old order of Myth; this has been replaced by the order of Ideology corresponding to capitalism and the modern State.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)

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)