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Title: Basic Banalities Author: Raoul Vaneigem Date: 1963 Language: en Topics: alienation, introductory, situationist Source: Retrieved on May 14, 2009 from http://library.nothingness.org/articles/all/all/display/10 Notes: Published in Internationale Situationniste #8, 1963
Bureaucratic capitalism has found its legitimation in Marx. I am not
referring here to orthodox Marxism’s dubious merit of having reinforced
the neocapitalist structures whose present reorganization is an implicit
homage to Soviet totalitarianism; I am emphasizing the extent to which
Marx’s most profound analyses of alienation have been vulgarized in the
most commonplace facts, which, stripped of their magical veil and
materialized in each gesture, have become the sole substance, day after
day, of the lives of an increasing number of people. In a word,
bureaucratic capitalism contains the palpable reality of alienation; it
has brought it home to everybody far more successfully than Marx could
ever have hoped to do, it has banalized it as the diminishing of
material poverty has been accompanied by a spreading mediocrity of
existence. As poverty has been reduced in terms of mere material
survival, it has become more profound in terms of our way of life — this
is at least one widespread feeling that exonerates Marx from all the
interpretations a degenerate Bolshevism has derived from him. The
“theory” of peaceful coexistence has accelerated such an awareness and
revealed, to those who were still confused, that exploiters can get
along quite well with each other despite their spectacular divergences.
“Any act,” writes Mircea Eliade, “can become a religious act. Human
existence is realized simultaneously on two parallel planes, that of
temporality, becoming, illusion, and that of eternity, substance,
reality.” In the nineteenth century the brutal divorce of these two
planes demonstrated that power would have done better to have maintained
reality in a mist of divine transcendence. But we must give reformism
credit for succeeding where Bonaparte had failed, in dissolving becoming
in eternity and reality in illusion; this union may not be as solid as
the sacraments of religious marriage, but it is lasting, which is the
most the managers of coexistence and social peace can ask of it. This is
also what leads us to define ourselves — in the illusory but inescapable
perspective of duration — as the end of abstract temporality, as the end
of the reified time of our acts; to define ourselves — does it have to
be spelled out? — at the positive pole of alienation as the end of
social alienation, as the end of humanity’s term of social alienation.
The socialization of primitive human groups reveals a will to struggle
more effectively against the mysterious and terrifying forces of nature.
But struggling in the natural environment, at once with it and against
it, submitting to its most inhuman laws in order to wrest from it an
increased chance of survival — doing this could only engender a more
evolved form of aggressive defense, a more complex and less primitive
attitude, manifesting on a higher level the contradictions that the
uncontrolled and yet influenceable forces of nature never ceased to
impose. In becoming socialized, the struggle against the blind
domination of nature triumphed inasmuch as it gradually assimilated
primitive, natural alienation, but in another form. Alienation became
social in the fight against natural alienation. Is it by chance that a
technological civilization has developed to such a point that social
alienation has been revealed by its conflict with the last areas of
natural resistance that technological power hadn’t managed (and for good
reasons) to subjugate? Today the technocrats propose to put an end to
primitive alienation: with a stirring humanitarianism they exhort us to
perfect the technical means that “in themselves” would enable us to
conquer death, suffering, discomfort and boredom. But to get rid of
death would be less of a miracle than to get rid of suicide and the
desire to die. There are ways of abolishing the death penalty than can
make one miss it. Until now the specific use of technology — or more
generally the socioeconomic context in which human activity is confined
— while quantitatively reducing the number of occasions of pain and
death, has allowed death itself to eat like a cancer into the heart of
each person’s life.
The prehistoric food-gathering age was succeeded by the hunting age
during which clans formed and strove to increase their chances of
survival. Hunting grounds and reserves were staked out from which
outsiders were absolutely excluded since the welfare of the whole clan
depended on its maintaining its territory. As a result, the freedom
gained by settling down more comfortably in the natural environment, and
by more effective protection against its rigors, engendered its own
negation outside the boundaries laid down by the clan and forced the
group to moderate its customary rules in organizing its relations with
excluded and threatening groups. From the moment it appeared, socially
constituted economic survival implied the existence of boundaries,
restrictions, conflicting rights. It should never be forgotten that
until now both history and our own nature have developed in accordance
with the movement of privative appropriation: 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). Beyond the struggle against
regimes whose vision of paradise is a cybernetic welfare state lies the
necessity of a still vaster struggle against a fundamental and initially
natural state of things, in the development of which capitalism plays
only an incidental, transitory role; a state of things which will only
disappear when the last traces of hierarchical power disappear — along
with the “swine of humanity;’ of course.
To be an owner is to arrogate a good from whose enjoyment one excludes
other people — while at the same time recognizing everyone’s abstract
right to possession. By excluding people from the real right of
ownership, the owner extends his dominion over those he has excluded
(absolutely over nonowners, relatively over other owners), without whom
he is nothing. The nonowners have no choice in the matter. The owner
appropriates and alienates them as producers of his own power, while the
necessity of ensuring their own physical existence forces them in spite
of themselves to collaborate in producing their own exclusion and to
survive without ever being able to live. Excluded, they participate in
possession through the mediation of the owner, a mystical participation
characterizing from the outset all the clan and social relationships
that gradually replaced the principle of obligatory cohesion in which
each member was an integral part of the group (“organic
interdependence”). Their guarantee of survival depends on their activity
within the framework of privative appropriation. They reinforce a right
to property from which they are excluded. Due to this ambiguity each of
them sees himself as participating in ownership, as a living fragment of
the right to possess, and this belief in turn reinforces his condition
as excluded and possessed. (Extreme cases of this alienation: the
faithful slave, the cop, the bodyguard, the centurion — creatures who,
through a sort of union with their own death, confer on death a power
equal to the forces of life and identify in a destructive energy the
negative and positive poles of alienation, the absolutely submissive
slave and the absolute master.) It is of vital importance to the
exploiter that this appearance is maintained and made more
sophisticated; not because he is especially machiavellian, but simply
because he wants to stay alive. The organization of appearance is bound
to the survival of his privileges and to the physical survival of the
nonowner, who can thus remain alive while being exploited and excluded
from being a person. Privative appropriation and domination are thus
originally imposed and felt as a positive right, but in the form of a
negative universality. Valid for everyone, justified in everyone’s eyes
by divine or natural law, the right of privative appropriation is
objectified in a general illusion, in a universal transcendence, in an
essential law under which everyone individually manages to tolerate the
more or less narrow limits assigned to his right to live and to the
conditions of life in general.
In this social context the function of alienation must be understood as
a condition of survival. The labor of the nonowners is subject to the
same contradictions as the right of privative appropriation. It
transforms them into possessed beings, into producers of their own
expropriation and exclusion, but it represents the only chance of
survival for slaves, for serfs, for workers — so much so that the
activity that allows their existence to continue by emptying it of all
content ends up, through a natural and sinister reversal of perspective,
by taking on a positive sense. Not only has value been attributed to
work (in its form of sacrifice in the ancien régime, in its brutalizing
aspects in bourgeois ideology and in the so-called People’s
Democracies), but very early on to work for a master, to alienate
oneself willingly, became the honorable and scarcely questioned price of
survival. The satisfaction of basic needs remains the best safeguard of
alienation; it is best dissimulated by being justified on the grounds of
undeniable necessities. Alienation multiplies needs because it can
satisfy none of them; nowadays lack of satisfaction is measured in the
number of cars, refrigerators, Tvs: the alienating objects have lost the
ruse and mystery of transcendence, they are there in their concrete
poverty. To be rich today is to possess the greatest number of poor
objects.
Up to now surviving has prevented us from living. This is why much is to
be expected of the increasingly evident impossibility of survival, an
impossibility which will become all the more evident as the glut of
conveniences and elements of survival reduces life to a single choice:
suicide or revolution.
The sacred presides even over the struggle against alienation. As soon
as the relations of exploitation and the violence that underlies them
are no longer concealed by the mystical veil, there is a breakthrough, a
moment of clarity, the struggle against alienation is suddenly revealed
as a ruthless hand-to-hand fight with naked power, power exposed in its
brute force and its weakness, a vulnerable giant whose slightest wound
confers on the attacker the infamous notoriety of an Erostratus. Since
power survives, the event remains ambiguous. Praxis of destruction,
sublime moment when the complexity of the world becomes tangible,
transparent, within everyone’s grasp; inexpiable revolts — those of the
slaves, the Jacques, the iconoclasts, the Enrage’s,.the Communards,
Kronstadt, the Asturias, and — promises of things to come — the
hooligans of Stockholm and the wildcat strikes... only the destruction
of all hierarchical power will allow us to forget these. We aim to make
sure it does.
The deterioration of mythical structures and their slowness in
regenerating themselves, which make possible the awakening of
consciousness and the critical penetration of insurrection, are also
responsible for the fact that once the “excesses” of revolution are
past, the struggle against alienation is grasped on a theoretical plane,
subjected to an “analysis” that is a carryover from the demystification
preparatory to revolt. It is at this point that the truest and most
authentic aspects of a revolt are reexamined and repudiated by the “we
didn’t really mean to do that” of the theoreticians charged with
explaining the meaning of an insurrection to those who made it — to
those who aim to demystify by acts, not just by words.
All acts contesting power call for analysis and tactical development.
Much can be expected of:
consumer abundance (see the development of the workers’ struggles
presently beginning in England, and the attitudes of rebellious youth in
all the modern countries);
are consigning their past and present theorists to the museums (see the
role of the intelligentsia in the Eastern bloc);
alive by the colonial cops and mercenaries, the last, over-zealous
militants of a transcendence against which they are the best possible
vaccination;
forestalling remote-controlled revolts, “crystal nights” and sheepish
resistance.
Privative appropriation is bound to the dialectic of particular and
general. In the mystical realm where the contradictions of the slave and
feudal systems are resolved, the nonowner, excluded as a particular
individual from the right of possession, strives to ensure his survival
through his labor: the more he identifies with the interests of the
master, the more successful he is. He knows the other nonowners only
through their common plight: the compulsory surrender of their labor
power (Christianity recommended voluntary surrender: once the slave
“willingly” offered his labor power, he ceased to be a slave), the
search for the optimum conditions of survival, and mystical
identification. Struggle, though born of a universal will to survive,
takes place on the level of appearance where it brings into play
identification with the desires of the master and thus introduces a
certain individual rivalry that reflects the rivalry between the
masters. Competition develops on this plane as long as the relations of
exploitation remain dissimulated behind a mystical opacity and as long
as the conditions producing this opacity continue to exist; as long as
the degree of slavery determines the slave’s consciousness of the degree
of lived reality. (We are still at the stage of calling “objective
consciousness” what is in reality the consciousness of being an object.)
The owner, for his part, depends on the general acknowledgment of a
right from which he alone is not excluded, but which is seen on the
plane of appearance as a right accessible to each of the excluded taken
individually. His privileged position depends on such a belief, and this
belief is also the basis for the strength that is essential if he is to
hold his own among the other owners; it is his strength. If, in his
turn, he seems to renounce exclusive appropriation of everything and
everybody, if he poses less as a master than as a servant of public good
and defender of collective security, then his power is crowned with
glory and to his other privileges he adds that of denying, on the level
of appearance (which is the only level of reference in unilateral
communication), the very notion of personal appropriation; he denies
that anyone has this right, he repudiates the other owners. In the
feudal perspective the owner is not integrated into appearance in the
same way as the nonowners, slaves, soldiers, functionaries, servants of
all kinds. The lives of the latter are so squalid that the majority can
live only as a caricature of the Master (the feudal lord, the prince,
the major-domo, the taskmaster, the high priest, God, Satan ...). But
the master himself is also forced to play one of these caricatural
roles. He can do so without much effort since his pretension to total
life is already so caricatural, isolated as he is among those who can
only survive. He is already one of our own kind (with the added grandeur
of a past epoch, which adds an exquisite savor to his sadness); he, like
each of us, was anxiously seeking the adventure where he could find
himself on the road to his total perdition. Could the master, at the
very moment he alienates the others, see that he reduces them to
dispossessed and excluded beings, and thus realize that he is only an
exploiter, a purely negative being? Such an awareness is unlikely and
would be dangerous. By extending his dominion over the greatest possible
number of subjects, isn’t he enabling them to survive, giving them their
only chance of salvation? (“Whatever would happen to the workers if the
capitalists weren’t kind enough to employ them?” the high-minded souls
of the nineteenth century liked to ask.) In fact, the owner officially
excludes himself from all claim to privative appropriation. To the
sacrifice of the non- owner, who through his labor exchanges his real
life for an apparent one (thus avoiding immediate death by allowing the
master to determine his variety of living death), the owner replies by
appearing to sacrifice his nature as owner and exploiter; he excludes
himself mythically, he puts himself at the service of everyone and of
myth (at the service of God and his people, for example). With an
additional gesture with an act whose gratuitousness bathes him in an
otherworldly radiance, he gives renunciation its pure form of mythical
reality renouncing common life, he is the poor man amidst illusory
wealth, he who sacrifices himself for everyone while all the other
people only sacrifice themselves for their own sake, for the sake of
their survival. He turns his predicament into prestige. The more
powerful he is the greater his sacrifice. He becomes the living
reference point of the whole illusory life, the highest attainable point
in the scale of mythical values. “Voluntarily” withdrawn from common
mortals, he is drawn toward the world of the gods, and his more or less
established participation in divinity, on the level of appearance (the
only generally acknowledged frame of reference), consecrates his rank in
the hierarchy of the other owners. In the organization of transcendence
the feudal lord — and, through osmosis, the owners of some power or
production materials, in varying degrees — is led to play the principal
role the role that he really does play in the economic organization of
the’ group’s survival. As a result, the existence of the group is bound
on every level to the existence of the owners as such, to those who,
owning everything because they own everybody, also force everyone to
renounce their lives on the pretext of the owners’ unique absolute and
divine renunciation. (From the god Prometheus punished by the gods to
the god Christ punished by men, the sacrifice of the Owner becomes
vulgarized, it loses its sacred aura, is humanized.) Myth thus unites
owner and nonowner, it envelops them in a common form in which the
necessity of survival, whether merely physical or as a privileged being
forces them to live on the level of appearance and of the inversion of’
real life, the inversion of the life of everyday praxis. We are still
there waiting to live a life less than or beyond a mystique against
which our every gesture protests while submitting to it.
Myth, the unitary absolute in which the contradictions of the world find
an illusory resolution, the harmonious and constantly harmonized vision
that reflects and reinforces order — this is the sphere of the sacred,
the extrahuman zone where an abundance of revelations are manifested but
where the revelation of the process of privative appropriation is
carefully suppressed. Nietzsche saw this when he wrote “All becoming is
a criminal revolt from eternal being and its price is death.” When the
bourgeoisie claimed to replace the pure Being of feudalism with
Becoming, all it really did was to desacralize Being and resacralize
Becoming to its own profit; it elevated its own Becoming to the status
of Being, no longer that of absolute ownership but rather that of
relative appropriation: a petty democratic and mechanical Becoming, with
its notions of progress, merit and causal succession. The owner’s life
hides him from himself; bound to myth by a life and death pact, he
cannot see himself in the positive and exclusive enjoyment of any good
except through the lived experience of his own exclusion. (And isn’t it
through this mythical exclusion that the non- owners will come to grasp
the reality of their own exclusion?) He bears the responsibility for a
group, he takes on the burden of a god. Submitting himself to its
benediction and its retribution, he swathes himself in austerity and
wastes away. Model of gods and heroes, the master, the owner, is the
true reality of Prometheus, of Christ, of all those whose spectacular
sacrifice has made it possible for “the vast majority of people” to
continue to sacrifice themselves to the extreme minority, to the
masters. (Analysis of the owner’s sacrifice should be worked out more
subtly: isn’t the case of Christ really the sacrifice of the owner’s
son? If the owner can never sacrifice himself except on the level of
appearance, then Christ stands for the real immolation of the owner’s
son when circumstances leave no other alternative. As a son he is only
an owner at a very early stage of development, an embryo, little more
than a dream of future ownership. In this mythic dimension belongs
Barrès’s well-known remark in 1914 when war had arrived and made his
dreams come true at last: “Our youth, as is proper, has gone to shed
torrents of our blood.”) This rather distasteful little game, before it
became transformed into a symbolic rite, knew a heroic period when kings
and tribal chiefs were ritually put to death according to their “will.”
Historians assure us that these august martyrs were soon replaced by
prisoners, slaves or criminals. They may not get hurt any more, but
they’ve kept the halo.
The concept of a common fate is based on the sacrifice of the owner and
the nonowner. Put another way, the notion of a human condition is based
on an ideal and tormented image whose function is to resolve the
irresolvable opposition between the mythical sacrifice of the minority
and the really sacrificed life of everyone else. The function of myth is
to unify and eternalize, in a succession of static moments, the
dialectic of “will-to-live” and its opposite. This universally dominant
factitious unity attains its most tangible and concrete representation
in communication, particularly in language. Ambiguity is most manifest
at this level, it leads to an absence of real communication, it puts the
analyst at the mercy of ridiculous phantoms, at the mercy of words —
eternal and changing instants — whose content varies according to who
pronounces them, as does the notion of sacrifice. When language is put
to the test, it can no longer dissimulate the misrepresentation and thus
it provokes the crisis of participation. In the language of an era one
can follow the traces of total revolution, unfulfilled but always
imminent. They are the exalting and terrifying signs of the upheavals
they foreshadow, but who takes them seriously? The discredit striking
language is as deeply rooted and instinctive as the suspicion with which
myths are viewed by people who at the same time remain firmly attached
to them. How can key words be defined by other words? How can phrases be
used to point out the signs that refute the phraseological organization
of appearance? The best texts still await their justification. When a
poem by Mallarmé becomes the sole explanation for an act of revolt, then
poetry and revolution will have overcome their ambiguity. To await and
prepare for this moment is to manipulate information not as the last
shock wave whose significance escapes everyone, but as the first
repercussion of an act still to come.
Born of man’s will to survive the uncontrollable forces of nature, myth
is a public welfare policy that has outlived its necessity. It has
consolidated its tyrannical force by reducing life to the sole dimension
of survival, by negating it as movement and totality.
When contested, myth homogenizes the diverse attacks on it; sooner or
later it engulfs and assimilates them. Nothing can withstand it, no
image or concept that attempts to destroy the dominant spiritual
structures. It reigns over the expression of facts and lived experience,
on which it imposes its own interpretive structure (dramatization).
Private consciousness is the consciousness of lived experience that
finds its expression on the level of organized appearance.
Myth is sustained by rewarded sacrifice. Since every individual life is
based on its own renunciation, lived experience must be defined as
sacrifice and recompense. As a reward for his asceticism, the initiate
(the promoted worker, the specialist, the manager — new martyrs
canonized democratically) is granted a niche in the organization of
appearance; he is made to feel at home in alienation. But collective
shelters disappeared with unitary societies, all that’s left is their
later concrete embodiments for the benefit of the public: temples,
churches, palaces... memories of a universal protection. Shelters are
private nowadays, and even if their protection is far from certain there
can be no mistaking their price.
“Private” life is defined primarily in a formal context. It is, to be
sure, born out of the social relations created by privative
appropriation, but its essential form is determined by the expression of
those relations. Universal, incontestable but constantly contested, this
form makes appropriation a right belonging to everyone and from which
everyone is excluded, a right one can obtain only by renouncing it. As
long as it fails to break free of the context imprisoning it (a break
that is called revolution), the most authentic experience can be
grasped, expressed and communicated only by way of an inversion through
which its fundamental contradiction is dissimulated. In other words, if
a pos itive project fails to sustain a praxis of radically overthrowing
the conditions of life — which are nothing other than the conditions of
privative appropriation — it does not have the slightest chance of
escaping being taken over by the negativity that reigns over the
expression of social relationships: it is recuperated like the image in
a mirror, in inverse perspective. In the totalizing perspective in which
it conditions the whole of everyone’s life, and in which its real and
its mythic power can no longer be distinguished (both being both real
and mythical), the process of privative appropriation has made it
impossible to express life any way except negatively. Life in its
entirety is suspended in a negativity that corrodes it and formally
defines it. To talk of life today is like talking of rope in the house
of a hanged man. Since the key of will-to-live has been lost we have
been wandering in the corridors of an endless mausoleum. The dialogue of
chance and the throw of the dice no longer suffices to justify our
lassitude; those who still accept living in well-furnished weariness
picture themselves as leading an indolent existence while failing to
notice in each of their daily gestures a living denial of their despair,
a denial that should rather make them despair only of the poverty of
their imagination. Forgetting life, one can identify with a range of
images, from the brutish conqueror and brutish slave at one pole to the
saint and the pure hero at the other. The air in this shithouse has been
unbreathable for a long time. The world and man as representation stink
like carrion and there’s no longer any god around to turn the charnel
houses into beds of lilies. After all the ages men have died while
accepting without notable change the explanations of gods, of nature and
of biological laws, it wouldn’t seem unreasonable to ask if we don’t die
because so much death enters — and for very specific reasons — into
every moment of our lives.
Privative appropriation can be defined notably as the appropriation of
things by means of the appropriation of people. It is the spring and the
troubled water where all reflections mingle and blur. Its field of
action and influence, spanning the whole of history, seems to have been
characterized until now by a fundamental double behavioral
determination: an ontology based on sacrifice and negation of self (its
subjective and objective aspects respectively) and a fundamental
duality, a division between particular and general, individual and
collective, private and public, theoretical and practical, spiritual and
material, intellectual and manual, etc. The contradiction between
universal appropriation and universal expropriation implies that the
master has been seen for what he is and isolated. This mythical image of
terror, want and renunciation presents itself to slaves, to servants, to
all those who can’t stand living as they do; it is the illusory
reflection of their participation in property, a natural illusion since
they really do participate in it through the daily sacrifice of their
energy (what the ancients called pain or torture and we call labor or
work) since they themselves produce this property in a way that excludes
them. The master can only cling to the notion of work-as-sacrifice, like
Christ to his cross and his nails; it is up to him to authenticate
sacrifice, to apparently renounce his right to exclusive enjoyment and
to cease to expropriate with purely human violence (that is, violence
without mediation). The sublimity of the gesture obscures the initial
violence, the nobility of the sacrifice absolves the commando, the
brutality of the conqueror is bathed in the light of a transcendence
whose reign is internalized, the gods are the intransigent guardians of
rights, the irascible shepherds of a peaceful and law-abiding flock of
“Being and Wanting-To-Be Owner.” The gamble on transcendence and the
sacrifice it implies are the masters’ greatest conquest, their most
accomplished submission to the necessity of conquest. Anyone who
intrigues for power while refusing the purification of renunciation (the
brigand or the tyrant) will sooner or later be tracked down and killed
like a mad dog, or worse: as someone who only pursues his own ends and
whose blunt conception of “work” lacks any tact toward others’ feelings:
Troppmann, Landru, Petiot, murdering people without justifying it in the
name of defending the Free World, the Christian West, the State or Human
Dignity, were doomed to eventual defeat. By refusing to play the rules
of the game, pirates, gangsters and outlaws disturb those with good
consciences (whose consciences are a reflection of myth), but the
masters, by killing the encroacher or enrolling him as a cop,
reestablish the omnipotence of “eternal truth”: those who don’t sell
themselves lose their right to survive and those who do sell themselves
lose their right to live. The sacrifice of the master is the matrix of
humanism, which is what makes humanism — and let this be understood once
and for all the miserable negation of everything human. Humanism is the
master taken seriously at his own game, acclaimed by those who see in
his apparent sacrifice — that caricatural reflection of their real
sacrifice — a reason to hope for salvation. Justice, dignity, nobility,
freedom... these words that yap and howl, are they anything other than
household pets whose masters have calmly awaited their homecoming since
the time when heroic lackeys won the right to walk them on the streets?
To use them is to forget that they are the ballast that enables power to
rise out of reach. And if we imagine a regime deciding that the mythical
sacrifice of the masters should not be promoted in such universal forms,
and setting about tracking down these word-concepts and wiping them out,
we could well expect the Left to be incapable of combating it with
anything more than a plaintive battle of words whose every phrase,
invoking the “sacrifice” of a previous master, calls for an equally
mythical sacrifice of a new one (a leftist master, a power mowing down
workers in the name of the proletariat). Bound to the notion of
sacrifice, humanism is born of the common fear of masters and slaves: it
is nothing but the solidarity of a shit-scared humanity. But those who
reject all hierarchical power can use any word as a weapon to punctuate
their action. Lautréamont and the illegalist anarchists were already
aware of this; so were the dadaists.
The appropriator thus becomes an owner from the moment he puts the
ownership of people and things in the hands of God or of some universal
transcendence whose omnipotence is reflected back on him as a grace
sanctifying his slightest gesture; to oppose an owner thus consecrated
is to oppose God, nature, the fatherland, the people. In short, to
exclude oneself from the physical and spiritual world. “We must neither
govern nor be governed,” writes Marcel Havrenne so neatly. For those who
add an appropriate violence to his humor, there is no longer any
salvation or damnation, no place in the universal order, neither with
Satan, the great recuperator of the faithful, nor in any form of myth
since they are the living proof of the uselessness of all that. They
were born for a life yet to be invented; insofar as they lived, it was
on this hope that they finally came to grief.
Two corollaries of singularization in transcendence:
automatically justifies the being of the master and the hierarchical
power wherein the master is reflected in degraded, more or less faithful
images.
practice and theory, is superimposed the distinction between
work-as-real-sacrifice and the organization of work in the form of
apparent sacrifice.
It would be tempting to explain fascism — among other reasons for it —
as an act of faith, the auto-da-fé of a bourgeoisie haunted by the
murder of God and the destruction of the great sacred spectacle,
dedicating itself to the devil, to an inverted mysticism, a black
mysticism with its rituals and its holocausts. Mysticism and high
finance.
It should not be forgotten that hierarchical power is inconceivable
without transcendence, without ideologies, without myths.
Demystification itself can always be turned into a myth: it suffices to
“omit,” most philosophically, demystification by acts. Any
demystification so neutralized, with the sting taken out of it, becomes
painless, euthanasic, in a word, humanitarian. Except that the movement
of demystification will ultimately demystify the demystifiers.
RAOUL VANEIGEM
What will become of the totality inherent in unitary society when it
comes up against the bourgeois demolition of that society?
worker alienated in consumption?
organization of appearance will finally bring us to a happy ending?
IF YOU DON’T ALREADY KNOW, FIND OUT IN PART TWO!
The vast majority of people have always devoted all their energy to
SURVIVAL, thereby denying themselves any chance to LIVE. They continue
to do so today as the WELFARE STATE imposes the elements of this
survival in the form of technological conveniences (appliances,
preserved food, prefabricated cities, Mozart for the masses).
The organization controlling the material equipment of our everyday life
is such that what in itself would enable us to construct it richly
plunges us instead into a poverty of abundance, making alienation all
the more intolerable as each convenience promises liberation and turns
out to be only one more burden. We are condemned to slavery to the means
of liberation.
To be understood, this problem must be seen in the clear light of
hierarchical power. But perhaps it isn’t enough to say that hierarchical
power has preserved humanity for thousands of years like alcohol
preserves a fetus — by arresting either growth or decay. It should also
be specified that hierarchical power represents the highest stage of
privative appropriation, and historically is its alpha and omega.
Privative appropriation itself can be defined as appropriation of things
by means of appropriation of people, the struggle against natural
alienation engendering social alienation.
Privative appropriation entails an ORGANIZATION OF APPEARANCE by which
its radical contradictions can be dissimulated: the servants must see
themselves as degraded reflections of the master, thus reinforcing,
through the looking glass of an illusory freedom, everything that
reinforces their submission and passivity; while the master must
identify himself with the mythical and perfect servant of a god or of a
transcendence which is nothing other than the sacred and abstract
representation of the TOTALITY of people and things over which he wields
power-a power all the more real and less contested as he is universally
credited with the virtue of his renunciation. The mythical sacrifice of
the director corresponds to the real sacrifice of the executant; each
negates himself in the other, the strange becomes familiar and the
familiar strange, each fulfills himself by being the inversion of the
other. From this common alienation a harmony is born, a negative harmony
whose fundamental unity lies in the notion of sacrifice. This objective
(and perverted) harmony is sustained by myth-this term being used to
designate the organization of appearance in unitary societies, that is,
in societies where slave, tribal or feudal power is officially
consecrated by a divine authority and where the sacred allows power to
seize the totality.
The harmony originally based on the “GIFT of oneself” contains a form of
relationship that was to develop, become autonomous and destroy it. This
relationship is based on partial EXCHANGE (commodity, money, product,
labor power ... ), the exchange of a part of oneself, which underlies
the bourgeois notion of freedom. It arises as commerce and technology
become preponderant within agrarian-type economies.
When the bourgeoisie seized power the unity of power was destroyed.
Sacred privative appropriation became secularized in capitalist
mechanisms. Freed from the grip of power, the totality once again became
concrete and immediate. The era of fragmentation has been nothing but a
succession of attempts to recapture an inaccessible unity, to
reconstitute some ersatz sacred behind which to shelter power. A
revolutionary moment is when “everything reality presents” finds its
immediate REPRESENTATION. All the rest of the time hierarchical power,
increasingly deprived of its magical and mystical regalia, strives to
make everyone forget that the totality (which has never been anything
other than reality!) is exposing its imposture.
By directly attacking the mythical organization of appearance, the
bourgeois revolutions, in spite of themselves, attacked the weak point
not only of unitary power but of any hierarchical power whatsoever. Does
this unavoidable mistake explain the guilt complex that is one of the
dominant traits of bourgeois mentality? In any case, the mistake was
undoubtedly inevitable.
It was a mistake because once the cloud of lies dissimulating privative
appropriation was pierced, myth was shattered, leaving a vacuum that
could be filled only by a delirious freedom and a splendid poetry.
Orgiastic poetry, to be sure, has not yet destroyed power. Its failure
is easily explained and its ambiguous signs reveal the blows struck at
the same time as they heal the wounds. And yet — let us leave the
historians and aesthetes to their collections — one has only to pick at
the scab of memory and the cries, words and gestures of the past make
the whole body of power bleed again. The whole organization of the
survival of memories will not prevent them from dissolving into oblivion
as they come to life; just as our survival will dissolve in the
construction of our everyday life.
And it was an inevitable process: as Marx showed, the appearance of
exchange-value and its symbolic representation by money opened a
profound latent crisis in the heart of the unitary world. The commodity
introduced into human relationships a universality (a 1000- franc note
represents anything I can obtain for that sum) and an egalitarianism
(equal things are exchanged). This “egalitarian universality” partially
escapes both the exploiter and the exploited, but they recognize each
other through it. They find themselves face to face confronting each
other no longer within the mystery of divine birth’ and ancestry, as was
the case with the nobility, but within an intelligible transcendence,
the Logos, a body of laws that can be understood by everyone, even if
such understanding remains cloaked in mystery.
A mystery with its initiates: first of all priests struggling to
maintain the Logos in the limbo of divine mysticism, but soon yielding
to philosophers and then to technicians both their positions and the
dignity of their sacred mission. From Plato’s Republic to the Cybernetic
State.
Thus, under the pressure of exchange-value and technology (generally
available mediation), myth was gradually secularized. Two facts should
be noted, however:
within it and against it. Upon magical and analogical structures of
behavior are superimposed rational and logical ones which negate the
former while preserving them (mathematics, poetics, economics,
aesthetics, psychology, etc.).
becomes more autonomous, it tends to break away from the sacred and
become fragmented. In this way it presents a double danger for unitary
power. We have already seen that the sacred expresses power’s seizure of
the totality, and that anyone wanting to accede to the totality must do
so through the mediation of power: the interdict against mystics,
alchemists and gnostics is sufficient proof of this. This also explains
why present-day power “protects” specialists (though without completely
trusting them): it vaguely senses that they are the missionaries of a
resacralized Logos. There are historical signs that testify to the
attempts made within mystical unitary power to found a rival power
asserting its unity in the name of the Logos — Christian syncretism
(which makes God psychologically explainable), the Renaissance, the
Reformation and the Enlightenment.
The masters who strove to maintain the unity of the Logos were well
aware that only unity can stabilize power. Examined more closely, their
efforts can be seen not to have been as vain as the fragmentation of the
Logos in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would seem to prove. In
the general movement of atomization the Logos has been broken down into
specialized techniques (physics, biology, sociology, papyrology, etc.),
but at the same time the need to reestablish the totality has become
more imperative. It should not be forgotten that all it would take would
be an all-powerful technocratic power in order for there to be a
totalitarian domination of the totality, for the Logos to succeed myth
as the seizure of the totality by a future unitary (cybernetic) power.
In such an event the vision of the Encyclopédistes (strictly
rationalized progress stretching indefinitely into the future) would
have known only a two-century postponement before being realized. This
is the direction in which the Stalino-cyberneticians are preparing the
future. In this perspective, peaceful coexistence should be seen as a
preliminary step toward a totalitarian unity. It is time everyone
realized that they are already resisting it.
We know the battlefield. The problem now is to prepare for battle before
the pataphysician, armed with his totality without technique, and the
cybernetician, armed with his technique without totality, consummate
their political coitus.
From the standpoint of hierarchical power, myth could be desacralized
only if the Logos, or at least its desacralizing elements, were
resacralized. To attack the sacred was at the same time supposed to
liberate the totality and thus destroy power (we’ve heard that one
before!). But the power of the bourgeoisie — fragmented, impoverished,
constantly contested-maintains a relative stability by relying on this
ambiguity: Technology, which objectively desacralizes, subjectively
appears as an instrument of liberation. Not a real liberation, which
could be attained only by desacralization — that is, by the end of the
spectacle — but a caricature, an imitation, an induced hallucination.
What the unitary vision of the world transferred into the beyond (above)
fragmentary power pro-jects (’throws forward’) into a state of future
well-being, of brighter tomorrows proclaimed from atop the dunghill of
today-tomorrows that are nothing more than the present multiplied by the
number of gadgets to be produced. From the slogan “Live in God” we have
gone on to the humanistic motto “Survive until you are old,”
euphemistically expressed as: “Stay young at heart and you’ll live a
long time.”
Once desacralized and fragmented, myth loses its grandeur and its
spirituality. It becomes an impoverished form, retaining its former
characteristics but revealing them in a concrete, harsh, tangible
fashion. God doesn’t run the show anymore, and until the day the Logos
takes over with its arms of technology and science, the phantoms of
alienation will continue to materialize and sow disorder everywhere.
Watch for them: they are the first symptoms of a future order. We must
start to play right now if the future is not to become impossible (the
hypothesis of humanity destroying itself-and with it obviously the whole
experiment of constructing everyday life). The vital objectives of a
struggle for the construction of everyday life are the sensitive key
points of all hierarchical power. To build one is to destroy the other.
Caught in the vortex of desacralization and resacralization, we stand
essentially for the negation of the following elements the organization
of appearance as a spectacle in which everyone denies himself, the
separation on which private life is based, since it is there that the
objective separation between owners and dispossessed is lived and
reflected on every level and sacrifice These three elements are
obviously interdependent, just as are their opposites: participation,
communication, realization. The same applies to their context
nontotality (a bankrupt world, a controlled totality) and totality.
The human relationships that were formerly dissolved in divine
transcendence (the totality crowned by the sacred) settled out and
solidified as soon as the sacred stopped acting as a catalyst. Their
materiality was revealed and, as the capricious laws of the economy
succeed those of Providence, the power of men began to appear behind the
power of gods. Today a multitude of roles corresponds to the mythical
role everyone once played under the divine spotlight. Though their masks
are now human faces, these roles still require both actors and extras to
deny their real lives in accordance with the dialectic of real and
mythical sacrifice. The spectacle is nothing but desacralized and
fragmented myth. It forms the armor of a power (which could also be
called essential mediation) that becomes vulnerable to every blow once
it no longer succeeds in dissimulating (in the cacophony where all cries
drown out each other and form an overall harmony) its nature as
privative appropriation, and the greater or lesser dose of misery it
allots to everyone.
Roles have become impoverished within the context of a fragmentary power
eaten away by desacralization, just as the spectacle represents an
impoverishment in comparison with myth. They betray its mechanisms and
artifices so clumsily that power, to defend itself against popular
denunciation of the spectacle, has no other alternative than to itself
take the initiative in this denunciation by even more clumsily changing
actors or ministers, or by organizing pogroms of supposed or
prefabricated scapegoat agents (agents of Moscow, Wall Street, the
Judeocracy or the Two Hundred Families). Which also means that the whole
cast has been forced to become hams, that style has been replaced by
manner.
Myth, as an immobile totality, encompassed all movement (consider
pilgrimage, for example, as fulfillment and adventure within
immobility). On the one hand, the spectacle can seize the totality only
by reducing it to a fragment and to a series of fragments
(psychological, sociological, biological, philological and mythological
world-views), while on the other hand, it is situated at the point where
the movement of desacralization converges with the efforts at
resacralization. Thus it can succeed in imposing immobility only within
the real movement, the movement that changes it despite its resistance.
In the era of fragmentation the organization of appearance makes
movement a linear succession of immobile instants (this notch-to-notch
progression is perfectly exemplified by Stalinist “Dialectical
Materialism”). Under what we have called “the colonization of everyday
life,” the only possible changes are changes of fragmentary roles. In
terms of more or less inflexible conventions, one is successively
citizen, head of family, sexual partner, politician, specialist,
professional, producer, consumer. Yet what boss doesn’t himself feel
bossed? The proverb applies to everyone: You sometimes get a fuck, but
you always get fucked!
The era of fragmentation has at least eliminated all doubt on one point:
everyday life is the battlefield where the war between power and the
totality takes place, with power using all its strength to control the
totality.
What do we demand in backing the power of everyday life against
hierarchical power? We demand everything. We are taking our stand in the
generalized conflict stretching from domestic squabbles to revolutionary
war, and we have gambled on the will to live. This means that we must
survive as antisurvivors. Fundamentally we are concerned only with the
moments when life breaks through the glaciation of survival (whether
these moments are unconscious or theorized, historical-like
revolution-or personal). But we must recognize that we are also
prevented from freely following the course of such moments (except for
the moment of revolution itself) not only by the general repression
exerted by power, but also by the exigencies of our own struggle, our
own tactics, etc. It is also important to find the means of compensating
for this additional “margin of error” by widening the scope of these
moments and demonstrating their qualitative significance. What prevents
what we say on the construction of everyday life from being recuperated
by the cultural establishment (Arguments, academic thinkers with paid
vacations) is the fact that all situationist ideas are nothing other
than faithful developments of acts attempted constantly by thousands of
people to try and prevent another day from being no more than
twenty-four hours of wasted time. Are we an avant-garde? If so, to be
avant-garde means to move in step with reality.
It’s not the monopoly of intelligence that we hold, but that of its use.
Our position is strategic, we are at the heart of every conflict. The
qualitative is our striking force. People who half understand this
journal ask us for an explanatory monograph thanks to which they will be
able to convince themselves that they are intelligent and cultured —
that is to say, idiots. Someone who gets exasperated and chucks it in
the gutter is making a more meaningful gesture. Sooner or later it will
have to be understood that the words and phrases we use are still
lagging behind reality. The distortion and clumsiness in the way we
express ourselves (which a man of taste called, not inaccurately, “a
rather irritating kind of hermetic terrorism”) comes from our central
position, our position on the ill-defined and shifting frontier where
language captured by power (conditioning) and free language (poetry)
fight out their infinitely complex war. To those who follow behind us we
prefer those who reject us impatiently because our language is not yet
authentic poetry-the free construction of everyday life.
Everything related to thought is related to the spectacle. Almost
everyone lives in a state of terror at the possibility that they might
awake to themselves, and their fear is deliberately fostered by power.
Conditioning, the special poetry of power, has extended its dominion so
far (all material equipment belongs to it: press, television,
stereotypes, magic, tradition, economy, technology — what we call
captured language) that it has almost succeeded in dissolving what Marx
called the undominated sector, replacing it with another dominated one
(see below our composite portrait of “the survivor”). But lived
experience cannot so easily be educed to a succession of empty
configurations Resistance to the external organization of life to the
organization of life as survival contains more poetry than any volume of
verse or prose and the poet in the literary sense of the word is one who
has at least understood or felt this But such poetry is in a most
dangerous situation Certainly poetry in the situationist sense of the
word is irreducible and cannot be recuperated by power (as soon as an
act is recuperated it becomes a stereotype, conditioning, language of
power). But it is encircled by power. Power encircles the irreducible
and holds it by isolating it; yet such isolation is impracticable. The
two pincers are, first, the threat of disintegration (insanity, illness,
destitution, suicide), and second, remote-controlled therapeutics. The
first grants death, the second grants no more than survival (empty
communication, the company of family or friendship, psychoanalysis in
the service of alienation, medical care, ergotherapy). Sooner or later
the SI must define itself as a therapy: we are ready to defend the
poetry made by all against the false poetry rigged up by power
(conditioning). Doctors and psychoanalysts better get it straight too,
or they may one day, along with architects and other apostles of
survival, have to take the consequences for what they have done.
All unresolved, unsuperseded antagonisms weaken. Such antagonisms can
evolve only by remaining imprisoned in previous unsuperseded forms
(anticultural art in the cultural spectacle, for example). Any radical
opposition that fails or is partially successful (which amounts to the
same thing) gradually degenerates into reformist opposition. Fragmentary
oppositions are like the teeth on cogwheels, they mesh with each other
and make the machine go round, the machine of the spectacle, the machine
of power.
Myth maintained all antagonisms within the archetype of Manicheanism.
But what can function as an archetype in a fragmented society? In fact,
the memory of previous antagonisms, presented in their obviously
devalued and unaggressive form, appears today as the last attempt to
bring some coherence into the organization of appearance, so great is
the extent to which the spectacle has become a spectacle of confusion
and equivalences. We are ready to wipe out all trace of these memories
by harnessing all the energy contained in previous antagonisms for a
radical struggle soon to come. All the springs blocked by power will one
day burst through to form a torrent that will change the face of the
world.
In a caricature of antagonisms, power urges everyone to be for or
against Brigitte Bardot, the nouveau roman, the 4-horse Citroën,
spaghetti, mescal, miniskirts, the UN, the classics, nationalization,
thermonuclear war and hitchhiking. Everyone is asked their opinion about
every detail in order to prevent them from having one about the
totality. However clumsy this maneuver may be, it might have worked if
the salesmen in charge of peddling it from door to door were not
themselves waking up to their own alienation. To the passivity imposed
on the dispossessed masses is added the growing passivity of the
directors and actors subjected to the abstract laws of the market and
the spectacle and exercising less and less real power over the world.
Already signs of revolt are appearing among the actors — stars who try
to escape publicity or rulers who criticize their own power; Brigitte
Bardot or Fidel Castro. The tools of power are wearing out; their desire
for their own freedom should be taken into account.
At the very moment when slave revolt threatened to overthrow the
structure of power and to reveal the relationship between transcendence
and the mechanism of privative appropriation, Christianity appeared with
its grandiose reformism, whose central democratic demand was for the
slaves to accede not to the reality of a human life — which would have
been impossible without denouncing the exclusionary aspect of privative
appropriation-but rather to the unreality of an existence whose source
of happiness is mythical (the imitation of Christ as the price of the
hereafter). What has changed? Anticipation of the hereafter has become
anticipation of a brighter tomorrow; the sacrifice of real, immediate
life is the price paid for the illusory freedom of an apparent life. The
spectacle is the sphere where forced labor is transformed into voluntary
sacrifice. Nothing is more suspect than the formula “To each according
to his work” in a world where work is the blackmail of survival; to say
nothing of the formula “To each according to his needs” in a world where
needs are determined by power Any construction that attempts to define
itself autonomously and thus partially, and does not take into account
that it is in fact defined by the negativity in which everything is
suspended enters into the reformist project. It is trying to build on
quicksand’ as though it were rock. Contempt and misunderstanding of the
context fixed by hierarchical power can only end up reinforcing that
context. On the other hand, the spontaneous acts we can see everywhere
forming against power and its spectacle must be warned of all the
obstacles in their path and must find a tactic taking into account the
strength of the enemy and its means of recuperation. This tactic, which
we are going to popularize, is detournement.
Sacrifice must be rewarded. In exchange for their real sacrifice the
workers receive the instruments of their liberation (comforts gadgets)
but this liberation is purely fictitious since power controls the ways
in’ which all the material equipment can be used; since power uses to
its own ends both the instruments and those who use them. The Christian
and bourgeois revolutions democratized mythical sacrifice, the
“sacrifice of the master.” Today there are countless initiates who
receive crumbs of power for putting to public service the totality of
their partial knowledge. They are no longer called “initiates” and not
yet “priests of the Logos”; they are simply known as specialists.
On the level of the spectacle their power is undeniable: the contestant
on “Double Your Money” and the postal clerk running on all day about all
the mechanical details of his car both identify with the specialist, and
we know how production managers use such identification to bring
unskilled workers to heel. Essentially the true mission of the
technocrats would be to unify the Logos; if only — because of one of the
contradictions of fragmentary power — they weren’t so absurdly
compartmentalized and isolated. Each one is alienated in being out of
phase with the others; he knows the whole of one fragment and knows no
realization. What real control can the atomic technician the strategist
or the political specialist exercise over a nuclear weapon? What
ultimate control can power hope to impose on all the gestures developing
against it? The stage is so crowded that only chaos reigns as master.
“Order reigns and doesn’t govern” (IS #6).
To the extent that the specialist takes part in the development of the
instruments that condition and transform the world, he is preparing the
way for the revolt of the privileged. Until now such revolt has been
called fascism. It is essentially an operatic revolt — didn’t Nietzsche
see Wagner as a precursor?-in which actors who have been pushed aside
for a long time and see themselves as less and less free suddenly demand
to play the leading roles. Clinically speaking, fascism is the hysteria
of the spectacular world pushed to the point of paroxysm. In this
paroxysm the spectacle momentarily ensures its unity while at the same
time revealing its radical inhumanity. Through fascism and Stalinism,
which constitute its romantic crises, the spectacle reveals its true
nature: it is a disease.
We are poisoned by the spectacle. All the elements necessary for a
detoxification (that is, for the construction of our everyday lives) are
in the hands of specialists. We are thus highly interested in all these
specialists, but in different ways. Some are hopeless cases: we are not,
for example, going to try and show the specialists of power, the rulers,
the extent of their delirium. On the other hand, we are ready to take
into account the bitterness of specialists imprisoned in roles that are
constricted, absurd or ignominious. We must confess, however, that our
indulgence has its limits. If’ in spite of all our efforts, they persist
in putting their guilty conscience and their bitterness in the service
of power by fabricating the conditioning that colonizes their own
everyday lives; if they prefer an illusory representation in the
hierarchy to true realization; if they persist in ostentatiously
brandishing their specializations (their painting, their novels, their
equations, their sociometry, their psychoanalysis, their ballistics);
finally, if, knowing perfectly well-and soon ignorance of this fact will
be no excuse — that only power and the SI hold the key to using their
specialization, they nevertheless still choose to serve power because
power, battening on their inertia, has chosen them to serve it, then
fuck them! No one could be more generous. They should understand all
this and above all the fact that henceforth the revolt of nonruling
actors is linked to the revolt against the spectacle (see below the
thesis on the SI and power).
The generalized anathematization of the lumpenproletariat stems from the
use to which it was put by the bourgeoisie, which it served both as a
regulating mechanism for power and as a source of recruits for the more
dubious forces of order: cops, informers, hired thugs, artists...
Nevertheless, the lumpenproletariat embodies a remarkably radical
implicit critique of the society of work. Its open contempt for both
lackeys and bosses contains a good critique of work as alienation, a
critique that has not been taken into consideration until now because
the lumpenproletariat was the sector of ambiguities, but also because
during the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth the
struggle against natural alienation and the production of well-being
still appeared as valid justifications for work.
Once it became known that the abundance of consumer goods was nothing
but the flip side of alienation in production, the lumpenproletariat
acquired a new dimension: it liberated a contempt for organized work
which, in the age of the Welfare State, is gradually taking on the
proportions of a demand that only the rulers still refuse to
acknowledge. In spite of the constant attempts of power to recuperate
it, every experiment carried out on everyday life, that is, every
attempt to construct it (an illegal activity since the destruction of
feudal power where it was limited and restricted to a minority), is
concretized today’ through the critique of alienating work and the
refusal to submit to forced labor. So much so that the new proletariat
tends to define itself negatively as a “Front Against Forced Labor”
bringing together all those who resist recuperation by power. This
defines our field of action; it is here that we are gambling on the ruse
of history against the ruse of power; it is here that we back the worker
(whether steelworker or artist) who — consciously or not-rejects
organized work and life, against the worker who — consciously or not —
accepts working at the dictates of power. In this perspective, it is not
unreasonable to foresee a transitional period during which automation
and the will of the new proletariat leave work solely to specialists,
reducing managers and bureaucrats to the rank of temporary slaves. In a
generalized automation the “workers,” instead of supervising machines,
could devote their attention to watching over the cybernetic
specialists, whose sole task would be to increase a production which,
through a reversal of perspective, will have ceased to be the priority
sector, in order to serve the priority of life over survival.
Unitary power strove to dissolve individual existence in a collective
consciousness so that each social unit subjectively defined itself as a
particle with a clearly determined weight suspended as though in oil.
Everyone had to feel overwhelmed by the omnipresent evidence that
everything was merely raw material in the hands of God, who used it for
his own purposes, which were naturally beyond individual human
comprehension. All phenomena were seen as emanations of a supreme will;
any abnormal divergence signified some hidden meaning (any perturbation
was merely an ascending or descending path toward harmony: the Four
Reigns, the Wheel of Fortune, trials sent by the gods). One can speak of
a collective consciousness in the sense that it was simultaneously for
each individual and for everyone: consciousness of myth and
consciousness of particular-existence-within-myth. The power of the
illusion was such that authentically lived life drew its meaning from
what was not authentically lived; from this stems that priestly
condemnation of life, the reduction of life to pure contingency, to
sordid materiality, to vain appearance and to the lowest state of a
transcendence that became increasingly degraded as it escaped mythical
organization.
God was the guarantor of space and time, whose coordinates defined
unitary society. He was the common reference point for all men; space
and time came together in him just as in him all beings becam’e one with
their destiny. In the era of fragmentation, man is torn between a time
and a space that no transcendence can unify through the mediation of any
centralized power. We are living in a space and time that are out of
joint, deprived of any reference point or coordinate, as though we were
never going to be able to come into contact with ourselves, although
everything invites us to.
There is a place where you create yourself and a time in which you play
yourself. The space of everyday life, that of one’s true realization, is
encircled by every form of conditioning. The narrow space of our true
realization defines us, yet we define ourselves in the time of the
spectacle. Or put another way: our consciousness is no longer
consciousness of myth and of particular-being-in-myth, but rather
consciousness of the spectacle and of particular-role-in-the-spectacle.
(I pointed out above the relationship between all ontology and unitary
power; it should be recalled here that the crisis of ontology appears
with the movement toward fragmentation.) Or to put it still another way:
in the space-time relation in which everyone and everything is situated,
time has become the imaginary (the field of identifications); space
defines us, although we define ourselves in the imaginary and although
the imaginary defines us qua subjectivities.
Our freedom is that of an abstract temporality in which we are named in
the language of power (these names are the roles assigned to us), with a
choice left to us to find officially recognized synonyms for ourselves.
In contrast, the space of our authentic realization (the space of our
everyday life) is under the dominion of silence. There is no name to
name the space of lived experience except in poetry, in language
liberating itself from the domination of power.
By desacralizing and fragmenting myth, the bourgeoisie was led to demand
first of all independence of consciousness (demands for freedom of
thought, freedom of the press, freedom of research, rejection of dogma).
Consciousness thus ceased being more or less consciousness-
reflecting-myth. It became consciousness of successive roles played
within the spectacle. What the bourgeoisie demanded above all was the
freedom of actors and extras in a spectacle no longer organized by God,
his cops and his priests, but by natural and economic laws, “capricious
and inexorable laws” defended by a new team of cops and specialists.
God has been torn off like a useless bandage and the wound has stayed
raw. The bandage may have prevented the wound from healing, but it
justified suffering, it gave it a meaning well worth a few shots of
morphine. Now suffering has no justification whatsoever and morphine is
far from cheap. Separation has become concrete. Anyone at all can put
their finger on it, and the only answer cybernetic society has to offer
us is to become spectators of the gangrene and decay, spectators of
survival.
The drama of consciousness to which Hegel referred is actually the
consciousness of drama. Romanticism resounds like the cry of the soul
torn from the body, a suffering all the more acute as each of us finds
himself alone in facing the fall of the sacred totality and of all the
Houses of Usher.
The totality is objective reality, in the movement of which subjectivity
can participate only in the form of realization. Anything separate from
the realization of everyday life rejoins the spectacle where survival is
frozen (hibernation) and served out in slices. There can be no authentic
realization except in objective reality, in the totality. All the rest
is caricature. The objective realization that functions in the mechanism
of the spectacle is nothing but the success of power-manipulated objects
(the “objective realization in subjectivity” of famous artists stars
celebrities of Who’s Who). On the level of the organization of
appearance, every success — and every failure — is inflated until it
becomes a stereotype, and is broadcast as though it were the only
possible success or failure. So far power has been the only judge,
though its judgment has been subjected to various pressures. Its
criteria are the only valid ones for those who accept the spectacle and
are satisfied to play a role in it. But there are no more artists on
that stage, there are only extras.
The space-time of private life was harmonized in the space-time of myth.
Fourier’s harmony responds to this perverted harmony. As soon as myth no
longer encompasses the individual and the partial in a totality
dominated by the sacred, each fragment sets itself up as a totality. The
fragment set up as a totality is, in fact, the totalitarian. In the
dissociated space-time that constitutes private life, time — made
absolute in the form of abstract freedom, the freedom of the spectacle —
consolidates by its very dissociation the spatial absolute of private
life its isolation and constriction. The mechanism of the alienating
spec-’ tacle wields such force that private life reaches the point of
being defined as that which is deprived of spectacle; the fact that one
escapes roles and spectacular categories is experienced as an additional
privation, as a malaise which power uses as a pretext to reduce everyday
life to insignificant gestures (sitting down, washing, opening a door).
The spectacle that imposes its norms on lived experience itself arises
out of lived experience. The time of the spectacle, lived in the form of
successive roles, makes the space of authentic experience the area of
objective impotence, while at the same time the objective impotence that
stems from the conditioning of privative appropriation makes the
spectacle the ultimate of potential freedom.
Elements born of lived experience are acknowledged only on the level of
the spectacle, where they are expressed in the form of stereotypes,
although such expression is constantly contested and refuted in and by
lived experience. The composite portrait of the survivors — whom
Nietzsche referred to as the “little people” or the “last men” — can be
conceived only in terms of the following dialectic of possibilityl
impossibility:
reinforces impossibility on the level of authentic experience;
appropriation) determines the field of abstract possibilities.Survival
is two-dimensional. Against such a reduction, what forces can bring out
what constitutes the daily problem of all human beings: the dialectic of
survival and life? Either the specific forces the SI has counted on will
make possible the supersession of these contraries, reuniting space and
time in the construction of everyday life; or life and survival will
become locked in an antagonism growing weaker and weaker until the point
of ultimate confusion and ultimate poverty is reached.
Lived reality is spectacularly fragmented and labeled in biological,
sociological or other categories which, while being related to the
communicable, never communicate anything but facts emptied of their
authentically lived content. It is in this sense that hierarchical
power, imprisoning everyone in the objective mechanism of privative
appropriation (admission/exclusion, see section #3), is also a
dictatorship over subjectivity. It is as a dictator over subjectivity
that it strives, with limited chances of success, to force each
individual subjectivity to become objectivized, that is, to become an
object it can manipulate. This extremely interesting dialectic should be
analyzed in greater detail (objective realization in subjectivity — the
realization of power — and objective realization in objectivity — which
enters into the praxis of constructing everyday life and destroying
power).
Facts are deprived of content in the name of the communicable, in the
name of an abstract universality, in the name of a perverted harmony in
which everyone realizes himself in an inverted perspective. In this
context the SI is in the line of contestation that runs through Sade,
Fourier, Lewis Carroll, Lautréamont, surrealism, lettrism-at least in
its least known currents, which were the most extreme.
Within a fragment set up as a totality, each further fragment is itself
totalitarian. Sensitivity, desire, will, intelligence, good taste, the
subconscious and all the categories of the ego were treated as absolutes
by individualism. Today sociology is enriching the categories of
psychology, but the introduction of variety into the roles merely
accentuates the monotony of the identification reflex. The freedom of
the “survivor” will be to assume the abstract constituent to which he
has “chosen” to reduce himself. Once any real realization has been put
out of the picture, all that remains is a psychosociological dramaturgy
in which interiority functions as a safety-valve, as an overflow to
drain off the effects one has worn for the daily exhibition. Survival
becomes the ultimate stage of life organized as the mechanical
reproduction of memory.
Until now the approach to the totality has been falsified. Power has
parasitically interposed itself as an indispensable mediation between
man and nature. But the relation between man and nature is based only on
praxis. It is praxis which constantly breaks through the coherent veneer
of lies that myth and its substitutes try to maintain. It is praxis,
even alienated praxis, which maintains contact with the totality. By
revealing its own fragmentary character, praxis at the same time reveals
the real totality (reality): it is the totality being realized by way of
its opposite, the fragment.
In the perspective of praxis, every fragment is totality. In the
perspective of power, which alienates praxis, every fragment is
totalitarian. This should be enough to wreck the attempts cybernetic
power will make to envelop praxis in a mystique, although the
seriousness of these attempts should not be underestimated.
All praxis enters into our project; it enters with its share of
alienation, with the impurities of power: but we are capable of
filtering them out. We will elucidate the force and purity of acts of
refusal as well as the manipulative maneuvers of power, not in a
Manichean perspective, but as a means of developing, through our own
strategy, this combat in which everywhere, at every moment, the
adversaries are seeking one another but only clashing accidentally, lost
in irremediable darkness and uncertainty.
Everyday life has always been drained to the advantage of apparent life,
but appearance, in its mythical cohesion, was powerful enough to repress
any mention of everyday life. The poverty and emptiness of the
spectacle, revealed by all the varieties of capitalism and all the
varieties of bourgeoisie, has revealed both the existence of everyday
life (a shelter life, but a shelter for what and from what?) and the
poverty of everyday life. As reification and bureaucratization grow
stronger, the debility of the spectacle and of everyday life is the only
thing that remains clear. The confiict between the human and the inhuman
has also been transferred to the plane of appearance. As soon as Marxism
became an ideology, Marx’s struggle against ideology in the name of the
richness of life was transformed into an ideological anti-ideology, an
antispectacle spectacle (just as in avant-garde culture the
antispectacular spectacle is restricted to actors alone, antiartistic
art being created and understood only by artists, so the relationship
between this ideological anti-ideology and the function of the
professional revolutionary in Leninism should be examined). Thus
Manicheanism has found itself momentarily revived. Why did St. Augustine
attack the Manicheans so relentlessly? It was because he recognized the
danger of a myth offering only one solution, the victory of good over
evil; he saw that this impossibility threatened to provoke the collapse
of all mythical structures and bring into the open the contradiction
between mythical and authentic life. Christianity offered the third way,
the way of sacred confusion. What Christianity accomplished through the
force of myth is accomplished today through the force of things. There
can no longer be any antagonism between Soviet workers and capitalist
workers or between the bomb of the Stalinist bureaucrats and the bomb of
the non-Stalinist bureaucrats; there is no longer anything but unity in
the chaos of reified beings.
Who is responsible? Who should be shot? We are dominated by a system, by
an abstract form. Degrees of humanity and inhumanity are measured by
purely quantitative variations of passivity. The quality is the same
everywhere: we are all proletarianized or well on the way to becoming
so. What are the traditional “revolutionaries” doing? They are
eliminating certain distinctions, making sure that no proletarians are
any more proletarian than all the others. But what party is working for
the end of the proletariat?
The perspective of survival has become intolerable. What is weighing us
down is the weight of things in a vacuum. That’s what reification is:
everyone and everything falling at an equal speed, everyone and
everything stigmatized with their equal value. The reign of equal values
has realized the Christian project, but it has realized it outside
Christianity (as Pascal had supposed) and, above all, it has realized it
over God’s dead body, contrary to Pascal’s expectations.
The spectacle and everyday life coexist in the reign of equal values.
People and things are interchangeable. The world of reification is a
world without a center, like the new prefabricated cities that are its
decor. The present fades away before the promise of an eternal future
that is nothing but a mechanical extension of the past. Time itself is
deprived of a center. In this concentration-camp world, victims and
torturers wear the same mask and only the torture is real. No new
ideology can soothe the pain, neither the ideology of the totality
(Logos) nor that of nihilism — which will be the two crutches of the
cybernetic society. The tortures condemn all hierarchical power, however
organized or dissimulated it may be. The antagonism the SI is going to
revive is the oldest of all, it is radical antagonism and that is why it
is taking up again and assimilating all that has been left by the
insurrectionary movements and great individuals in the course of
history.
So many other banalities could be taken up and reversed. The best things
never come to an end. Before rereading the above — which even the most
mediocre intelligence will be able to understand by the third attempt —
the reader would be well-advised to concentrate carefully on the
following text, for these notes, as fragmentary as the preceding ones,
must be discussed in detail and implemented. It concerns a central
question: the SI and revolutionary power.
Being aware of the crises of both mass parties and “elites,” the SI must
embody the supersession of both the Bolshevik Central Committee
(supersession of the mass party) and of the Nietzschean project
(supersession of the intelligentsia).
upsurge, it has automatically undermined the power of the revolution.
The Bolshevik C.C. defined itself simultaneously as concentration and as
representation. Concentration of a power antagonistic to bourgeois power
and representation of the will of the masses. This duality led it
rapidly to become no more than an empty power, a power of empty
representation, and consequently to rejoin, in a common form
(bureaucracy), a bourgeois power that was being forced (in response to
the very existence of the Bolshevik power) to follow a similar
evolution. The conditions for a concentrated power and mass
representation exist potentially in the SI when it states that it holds
the qualitative and that its ideas are in everyone’s mind. Nevertheless
we refuse both concentrated power and the right of representation,
conscious that we are now taking the only public attitude (for we cannot
avoid being known to some extent in a spectacular manner) enabling those
who find that they share our theoretical and practical positions to
accede to revolutionary power: power without mediation, power entailing
the direct action of everyone. Our guiding image could be the Durruti
Column, moving from town to village, liquidating the bourgeois elements
and leaving the workers to see to their own self-organization.
never offers anything but passive cathartic identification to those
whose every gesture gropingly expresses real contestation. The
radicalism — not of theory, obviously, but of gesture — that could be
glimpsed in the “Declaration of the 121,” however, suggests some
different possibilities. We are capable of precipitating this crisis,
but we can do so only by entering the intelligentsia as a power against
the intelligentsia. This phase — which must precede and be contained
within the phase described in point a) — will put us in the perspective
of the Nietzschean project. We will form a small, almost alchemical,
experimental group within which the realization of the total man can be
started. Nietzsche could conceive of such an undertaking only within the
framework of the hierarchical principle. It is, in fact, within such a
framework that we find ourselves. It is therefore of the utmost
importance that we present ourselves without the slightest ambiguity (on
the level of the group, the purification of the nucleus and the
elimination of residues now seems to be completed). We accept the
hierarchical framework in which we are placed only while impatiently
working to abolish our domination over those whom we cannot avoid
dominating on the basis of our criteria for mutual recognition.
more or less hidden center. We will establish nonmaterialized networks
(direct relationships, episodic ones, contacts without ties, development
of embryonic relations based on sympathy and understanding, in the
manner of the red agitators before the arrival of the revolutionary
armies). We will claim radical gestures (actions, writings, political
attitudes, works) as our own by analyzing them, and we will consider
that our own acts and analyses are supported by the majority of people.
Just as God constituted the reference point of past unitary society, we
are preparing to create the central reference point for a unitary
society now possible. But this point cannot be fixed. As opposed to the
ever-renewed confusion that cybernetic power draws from the past of
inhumanity, it stands for the game that everyone will play, “the moving
order of the future.”