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Title: The Totality For Kids
Author: Raoul Vaneigem
Date: 1963
Language: en
Topics: situationist international, situationist, dialectics
Source: Introduction from *Beneath the Paving Stones: Situationists and the Beach, May 1968* with the main text taken from Bureau of Public Secrets. Retrieved on 2020-05-21 from http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/7.basic1.htm]
Notes: Originally published as “Basic Banalities.” “Banalités de base” Part 1 originally appeared in *Internationale Situationniste* #7 (Paris, April 1962). And part two in *Internationale Situationniste* #8 (Paris, January 1963). This translation by Ken Knabb is from the *Situationist International Anthology* (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006). No copyright.

Raoul Vaneigem

The Totality For Kids

Introduction

Almost everyone has always been excluded from life and forced to devote

the whole of their energy to survival. Today, the welfare state imposes

the elements of this survival in the form of technological comforts

(cars, frozen foods, Welwyn Garden City, Shakespeare televised for the

masses).

Moreover, the organisation controlling the material equipment of our

everyday lives is such that what in itself would enable us to construct

them richly, plunges us instead into a luxury of impoverishment, making

alienation even more intolerable as each element of comfort appears to

be a liberation and turns out to be a servitude. We are condemned to the

slavery of working for freedom.

To be understood, this problem must be seen in the light of hierarchical

power. Perhaps it isn’t enough to say that hierarchical power has

preserved humanity for thousands of years as alcohol preserves a foetus,

by arresting either growth or decay. It should also be made dear that

hierarchical power represents the most highly evolved form of private

appropriation, and historically is its alpha and omega. Private

appropriation itself can be defined as appropriation of things by means

of appropriation of people, the struggle against natural alienation

engendering social alienation.

Private appropriation entails an organisation of appearances by which

its radical contradictions can be dissimulated. The executives must see

themselves as degraded reflections of the master, thus strengthening,

through the looking-glass of an illusory liberty, all that produces

their submission and their passivity. The master must be identified with

the mythical and perfect servant of a god or a transcendence, whose

substance is no more than a sacred and abstract representation of the

totality of people and things over which the master exercises a power

which can only become even stronger as everyone accepts the purity of

his renunciation. To the real sacrifice of the worker corresponds the

mythical sacrifice of the organiser, each negates himself in the other,

the strange becomes familiar and the familiar strange, each is realised

in an inverted perspective. From this common alienation a harmony is

born, a negative harmony whose fundamental unity lies in the notion o f

sacrifice. This objective (and perverted) harmony is sustained by myth;

this term having been used to characterise the organisation of

appearances in unitary societies, that is to say, in societies where

power over s laves, over a tribe, or over serfs is officially

consecrated by divine authority where the sacred allows power to seize

the totality.

The harmony based initially on the ‘gift of oneself’ contains a

relationship which was to develop, become autonomous, and destroy it.

This relationship is based on partial exchange (commodity, money,

product, labour force ) the exchange of a part of oneself on which the

bourgeois conception of liberty is based. it arises as commerce and

technology become preponderant within agrarian-type economies.

When the bourgeoisie seized power they destroyed its unity. Sacred

private appropriation became liacised in capitalistic mechanisms. The

totality was freed from its seizure by power and became concrete and

immediate once more. The era of fragmentation has been a succession of

attempts to recapture an inaccessible unity, to shelter power behind a

substitute for the sacred.

A revolutionary movement is when ‘all that reality presents’ finds its

immediate representation. For the rest of the time hierarchical power.

always more distant from its magical and mystical regalia, endeavours to

make everyone forget that the totality (no more than reality!) exposes

its imposture.

1

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 stressing the extent to which

crude versions of Marx’s most profound analyses of alienation have

become generally recognized in the most commonplace realities —

realities which, stripped of their magical veil and materialized in each

gesture, have become the sole substance of the daily lives of an

increasing number of people. In a word, bureaucratic capitalism contains

the tangible 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 reduction of material poverty has been accompanied

by a spreading mediocrity of existence. As poverty has been reduced in

terms of 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 made of him. The

“theory” of peaceful coexistence has accelerated this awareness and

revealed, to those who were still confused, that exploiters can get

along quite well with each other despite their spectacular divergences.

2

“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[1] 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 lasts,

which is all that 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.

3

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. The struggle against

natural alienation gave rise to social alienation. Is it by chance that

a technological civilization has developed to such a point that this

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 eliminate death

would be less of a miracle than to eliminate suicide and the desire to

die. There are ways of abolishing the death penalty than can make one

miss it. Up till now the particular uses that have been made of

technology — or more generally the socio-economic context in which human

activity is confined — while quantitatively reducing the number of

occasions of pain and death, have allowed death itself to eat like a

cancer into the heart of each person’s life.

4

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 preserves were staked out from which

outsiders were absolutely excluded — the welfare of the whole clan

depended on it. As a result, the freedom gained by settling down more

safely and comfortably within the natural environment engendered its own

negation outside the boundaries laid down by the clan and forced the

group to modify its customary rules in organizing its relations with

excluded and threatening groups. From the moment it appeared, socially

engendered 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 development of private appropriation: the seizing of control by

a class, group, caste or individual of a general power over a

socio-economic survival whose form remains complex, ranging from

ownership of land, territory, factories or capital 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 that will only

disappear with the disappearance of the last traces of hierarchical

power — along with the “swine of humanity,” of course.

5

To be an owner is to claim a good one prevents others from using — while

at the same time acknowledging everyone’s abstract, potential right to

ownership. By excluding people from a 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 despite themselves to

collaborate in producing their own exclusion and to survive without ever

being able to live. Excluded, they participate in ownership 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 private

appropriation; they reinforce a property right 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 their 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 appearances depends on the survival of the owner and his

privileges, which in turn depend on the physical survival of the

nonowner, who can thus remain alive while being exploited and excluded

from being a real person. Private 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 private 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.

6

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 private 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

appearance. Not only has value been attributed to work (as a form of

self-sacrifice during the old regime, and in its most mentally degrading

forms 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 quantity of poor objects.

Up till now surviving has prevented us from living. This is why much is

to be expected of the increasingly obvious impossibility of survival, an

impossibility that will become all the more obvious as the glut of

conveniences and elements of survival reduces life to a single choice:

suicide or revolution.

7

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.[2]

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 Enragés, the

Fédérés,[3] 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 intend to

make sure that 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:

• the new proletariat, which is discovering its destitution amid

consumer abundance (see the development of the workers’ struggles

presently beginning in England, and the attitudes of rebellious youth in

all the modern countries);

• countries that have had enough of their partial, sham revolutions and

are consigning their past and present theorists to the museums (see the

role of the intelligentsia in the Eastern bloc);

• the Third World, whose mistrust of technological myths has been kept

alive by the colonial cops and mercenaries, the last, over-zealous

militants of a transcendence against which they are the best possible

vaccination;

• the force of the SI (“our ideas are in everyone’s mind”), capable of

forestalling remote-controlled revolts, “crystal nights”[4] and sheepish

resistance.

8

Private appropriation is linked 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 ownership, 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 joint 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 appearances 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 exploitive

relations remain dissimulated behind a mystical veil and as long as the

conditions producing this veil persist; or to put it another way, 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 appearances 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 he seems to renounce exclusive appropriation of everything

and everybody, if he poses less as a master than as a servant of the

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 appearances (which is the only level of reference in the

world of one-way communication), the very notion of personal

appropriation. Denying that anyone has this right, he repudiates the

other owners. In the feudal perspective the owner is not integrated into

appearances in the same way as the nonowners, slaves, soldiers,

functionaries and 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 a poignant 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 has

reduced 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? (“What would become of 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 private

appropriation. To the sacrifice of the nonowner, 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 the 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 recognized participation in

divinity, on the level of appearances (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 association with him the other owners of power or means of

production, 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, 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, becomes humanized.) Myth thus unites owner and

nonowner, enveloping them in a common form in which the necessity of

survival, whether mere physical survival or survival as a privileged

being, forces them to live on the level of appearances 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.

9

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 the reigning order — is the sphere

of the sacred, the extrahuman zone where an abundance of revelations are

manifested but where the revelation of the process of private

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 nonowners 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 examined more

carefully: 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

appearances, 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 an early stage of development, an embryo, little more than a

dream of future ownership. In this mythic dimension belongs Maurice

Barrès’s famous 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. The penalty was delegated, but the

rulers kept the halo.

10

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 purpose is to try 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 a lack 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 appearances? 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 that 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.

11

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 of 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

appearances.

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

appearances; 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 use of the general public: temples,

churches, palaces ... memorials of a universal protection. Shelters are

private nowadays, and even if their protection is far from certain there

can be no mistaking their price.

12

“Private” life is defined primarily in a formal context. It is, to be

sure, engendered by the social relations created by private

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 positive project fails to sustain a praxis of radically overthrowing

the conditions of life — which are nothing other than the conditions of

private 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 coopted like an inverted

mirror image. 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 powers being both real and mythical),

the process of private appropriation has made it impossible to express

life any way except negatively. Life in its entirety is immersed 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[5] 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.

13

Private 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, destitution 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 short-tempered shepherds of a

peaceful, law-abiding flock of owners and owner wannabes. 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 disdain for “work” lacks any tact

toward others’ feelings: serial killers like Troppmann, Landru, Petiot

were doomed to defeat because they murdered people without justifying it

in the name of defending the Free World, the Christian West, the State

or Human Dignity. 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 the

“eternal truth”: namely, that 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 essence 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 but household pets who have

continued to reliably return home to their masters 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 regime mowing down workers

in the name of the proletariat). Bound to the notion of sacrifice,

humanism is born of the mutual 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 whole 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 coopter 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:

• If ontology implies transcendence, it is clear that any ontology

automatically justifies the being of the master and the hierarchical

power wherein the master is reflected in degraded, more or less faithful

images.

• Over the distinction between manual and intellectual work, between

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.

14

By directly attacking the mythical organization of appearances, the

bourgeois revolutions unintentionally 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 covering private

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 bill

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 (what we might

call “mediation at your fingertips”), myth was gradually secularized.

Two facts should be noted, however:

• As the Logos frees itself from mystical unity, it affirms itself both

within and against that unity. Rational and logical structures of

behavior are superimposed on the old magical and analogical ones,

simultaneously negating and preserving them (mathematics, poetics,

economics, aesthetics, psychology, etc.).

• Each time the Logos, the “organization of intelligible appearances,”

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 repression of 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. Various historical movements represent attempts

within mystical unitary power to found a rival unitary power based on

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 myth’s domination of the

totality to be succeeded by the Logos’s 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

context, peaceful coexistence should be seen as a preliminary step

toward a totalitarian unity. It is time everyone realized that they are

already resisting it.

15

We know the battlefield. The problem now is to prepare for battle before

the pataphysician,[6] 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. Attacking 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 the

following 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 worldview previously transferred into

the beyond (above), fragmentary power pro-jects (literally, “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 those phantoms: they are the first signs of a future order. We

must start to play right now if we want to avoid a future condemned to

mere survival, or even a future in which survival itself will 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

key, sensitive points of all hierarchical power. To build one is to

destroy the other. Caught in the vortex of desacralization and

resacralization, we aim above all to abolish (1) the organization of

appearances as a spectacle in which everyone denies himself; (2) 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 (3) sacrifice. These three elements are

obviously interdependent, just as are their opposites: participation,

communication, and realization.[7] The same applies to their respective

contexts: nontotality (a bankrupt world, a controlled totality) and

totality.

16

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. As Providence was replaced by the capricious

laws of the economy, 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 secularized 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 disguising (in the cacophonous harmony where

all cries drown each other out) its nature as private 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 initiate

such denunciation itself by even more clumsily replacing actors or

ministers, or by organizing pogroms of prefabricated scapegoats (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 mannerisms.

Myth, as a motionless totality, encompassed all movement (pilgrimage can

be considered as an example of adventure and fulfillment within

immobility). On the one hand, the spectacle can seize the totality only

by reducing it to a fragment or a series of fragments (psychological,

sociological, biological, philological and mythological worldviews); on

the other, it is situated at the point where the process 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 appearances makes movement a linear

succession of motionless 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, parent, sexual

partner, politician, specialist, professional, producer, consumer. Yet

what boss doesn’t himself feel bossed? The proverb applies to everyone:

You may 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 having to use 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 a

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

those moments are unconscious or theorized, historical (e.g. revolution)

or personal. But we must also recognize that we are prevented from

freely following the course of such moments (except during the moment of

revolution itself) not only by the general repression exerted by power,

but also by the requirements of our own struggle and tactics. We have to

find ways of compensating for this “margin of error” by broadening the

scope of these moments and demonstrating their qualitative significance.

What prevents what we say about the construction of everyday life from

being coopted by the cultural and subcultural establishment (Arguments,

academic thinkers with paid vacations) is the fact that all situationist

ideas are faithful extensions of acts attempted constantly by thousands

of people to try and prevent a day from being nothing but twenty-four

hours of wasted time. Are we an avant-garde? If so, to be avant-garde

means to move in step with reality.

17

We don’t claim to have a monopoly on intelligence, but only on its use.

Our position is strategic, we are at the heart of every conflict. The

qualitative is our striking force.[8] 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 — not yet 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

awaken to themselves, and this 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 reduced to a succession of empty roles.

Resistance to the external organization of life, i.e. 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 sensed this fact. But such poetry is

in a most dangerous situation. Certainly poetry in the situationist

sense of the word is irreducible and cannot be coopted by power (as soon

as an act is coopted it becomes a stereotype, something conditioned by

the language of power). But it is encircled by power. Power contains the

irreducible by isolating it. But such isolation cannot last; something

has to give. 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 a lifeless

survival (empty communication, “togetherness” of family or friends,

psychoanalysis in the service of alienation, medical care, ergotherapy).

Sooner or later the SI must define itself as therapeutic: we are ready

to defend the poetry made by all against the false poetry contrived by

power (conditioning). Doctors and psychoanalysts better get it straight

too, or they, along with architects and other apostles of survival, may

one day have to take the consequences for what they have done.

18

All unresolved, unsuperseded antagonisms weaken. Such antagonisms can

evolve only by remaining imprisoned in previous, unsuperseded forms

(anticultural art within the cultural spectacle, for example). Any

radical opposition that fails or that 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? The

memory of previous antagonisms, presented in obviously devalued and

unaggressive forms, appears today as the latest attempt to bring some

coherence into the organization of appearances, 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 those 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, Italian

cuisine, 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 forming 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.

Signs of revolt are already appearing among the actors — stars trying to

escape publicity, rulers criticizing their own power (Brigitte Bardot,

Fidel Castro). The tools of power are wearing out; their desire for

their own freedom is a factor that should be taken into account.

19

At the moment when slave revolts threatened to overthrow the power

structure and reveal the relationship between transcendence and the

mechanism of private 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 private

appropriation — but rather to the unreality of an existence whose source

of happiness is mythical (imitation of Christ as the price of the

hereafter). What has changed since then? 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 “To each according to his needs” in a world

where needs are determined by power. Any constructive project that tries

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, becomes reformist. It is trying to build on quicksand as

though it were a cement foundation. Ignoring or misunderstanding the

context set by hierarchical power can only end up reinforcing that

context. The spontaneous acts we 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 cooption. This tactic, which we are going to popularize, is

détournement.

20

Sacrifice must be rewarded. In exchange for their real sacrifice the

workers receive the instruments of their liberation (comforts, gadgets),

but this liberation remains purely fictitious since power controls the

ways in which the material equipment can be used. 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 chattering all day about all

the mechanical features of his car both identify with the specialist,

and we know how production managers use such identification to bring

unskilled workers to heel. The true mission of the technocrats would be

to unify the Logos — if only (due to one of the contradictions of

fragmentary power) they themselves weren’t so absurdly compartmentalized

and isolated. Each specialist is alienated by being out of phase with

the others; each knows everything about one fragment and no one grasps

the totality. 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 with actors that chaos is

the only master of the show. “Order reigns and doesn’t govern”

(Internationale Situationniste #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 long been pushed

aside and see themselves becoming less and less free suddenly insist on

playing the leading roles. Clinically speaking, fascism is the hysteria

of the spectacular world pushed to the point of climax. In this climax

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 our own 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 fulfillment; 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! There’s a limit to our generosity. They should

understand all this, and especially the fact that the revolt of

nonruling actors is henceforth linked to the revolt against the

spectacle (see below the thesis on the SI and power).

21

The general disparagement of the lumpenproletariat stemmed 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, not only

because the lumpenproletariat was an ambiguous sector, but also because

during the nineteenth and early twentieth century 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

took on a new dimension: it expressed 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 coopt it,

every experiment carried out on everyday life, that is, every attempt to

construct it (an activity that has been illegal since the destruction of

feudal power, where it was limited and reserved for the ruling

minority), is concretized today in the critique of alienating work and

the refusal to submit to forced labor. So much so that the new

proletariat can be negatively defined as a “Front Against Forced Labor”

bringing together all those who resist cooption by power. This is our

field of action, the arena where we are gambling on the ruse of history

against the ruse of power, backing 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. With the extension of

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 that, through a reversal of

perspective, will have ceased to be the priority sector, so as to serve

the priority of life over survival.

22

Unitary power strove to dissolve individual existence in a collective

consciousness in such a way 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 mere raw material in the hands of God, who

used it for his own purposes, which were naturally beyond individual

human comprehension. All phenomena were emanations of a supreme will;

any seemingly unexplainable perturbation was presumed to be a means

toward some larger, hidden harmony (the Four Kingdoms [of the Tarot],

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. This is the reason for the 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 mankind;

space and time came together in him just as in him all beings became 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-time that is 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, of our 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. To put it another way: our consciousness is no longer

consciousness of myth and of particular-being-within-myth, but rather

consciousness of the spectacle and of

particular-role-within-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 yet 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 being the roles assigned to us), our

only margin of choice being limited to finding officially accepted

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.

23

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.

24

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 — a hibernation

in which survival is frozen and served out in slices. There can be no

authentic realization except in objective reality, in the totality.

Anything else is a farce. The objective realization that functions

within the mechanism of the spectacle is nothing but the success of

power-manipulated objects (the “objective realization in subjectivity”

of famous artists, stars, personalities of Who’s Who). On the level of

the organization of appearances, every success — and even 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.

25

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, its constriction. The mechanism of the alienating

spectacle wields such force that private life reaches the point of being

defined as that which is deprived of spectacles: the fact that someone

escapes roles and spectacular categories is felt as an additional

deprivation, a distressful feeling which power uses as a pretext to

reduce everyday life to insignificant gestures (sitting down, washing,

opening a door).

26

The spectacle that imposes its norms on lived experience itself arises

out of lived experience. Spectacular time, lived in the form of

successive roles, makes the space of authentic experience the area of

objective powerlessness, while at the same time the objective

powerlessness that stems from the conditioning of private 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 — those whom

Nietzsche referred to as the “small ones” or the “last men” — can be

conceived only in terms of the following dialectic of

possibility/impossibility:

• Possibility on the level of the spectacle (variety of abstract roles)

reinforces impossibility on the level of authentic experience.

• Impossibility (that is, limits imposed on real experience by private

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.

27

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 private

appropriation (admission/exclusion, see section #3), is also a

dictatorship over subjectivity. It is as a dictator over subjectivity

that it strives, with limited success, to force each individual

subjectivity to become objectified, 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 and 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. Individualism treated sensitivity, desire, will,

intelligence, good taste, the subconscious and all the categories of the

ego as absolutes. 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 fulfillment has been put

out of the picture, all that remains is a psycho-sociological dramaturgy

in which interiority functions as a safety valve 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.

28

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 replacements 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 that

cybernetic power will make to envelop praxis in a mystique, although the

seriousness of these attempts should not be underestimated.

All forms of praxis enter our project. They enter with their share of

alienation, with the impurities of power; but we are capable of

filtering them. 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 to come to grips with one another but only

clashing accidentally, lost in irremediable darkness and uncertainty.

29

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 conflict between the human and the inhuman

has been transferred to the plane of appearances. 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.) Manicheanism

has thus 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 the impossibility of such a solution threatened to provoke the

collapse of all mythical structures and bring into the open the

contradiction between mythical and authentic life. Christianity offered

a 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

struggling to eliminate certain distinctions, making sure that no

proletarians are any more proletarian than all the others. But what

party is calling 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 an equal value. The reign of equal values

has realized the Christian project, but it has realized it outside

Christianity (as Pascal surmised) and more importantly, 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.

30

So many other banalities could be examined and reversed. The best things

never come to an end. Before rereading this text (which even the most

mediocre intelligence will be able to understand by the third attempt)

the reader would be well advised to pay particular attention to the

following points — points as fragmentary as the preceding ones, but

which must be discussed in detail and implemented. They concern 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).

• Every time a power has presented itself as directing a revolutionary

upsurge, it has automatically undermined the power of the revolution.

The Bolshevik Central Committee 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 merge into a

common form (bureaucracy) with a bourgeois power that was being

pressured (by the Bolshevik threat) into following a similar evolution.

The conditions for a concentrated power and mass representation exist

potentially in the SI when it notes that it possesses 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.[9]

• The intelligentsia is power’s hall of mirrors. Opposing power, it

never offers anything but passive cathartic identification to those

whose every gesture gropingly expresses real opposition. The radicalism

— not of theory, obviously, but of gesture — that could be glimpsed in

the “Declaration of the 121,”[10] 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 paragraph (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 (at

the group level, 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.

• Tactically our communication should be a diffusion emanating from a

more or less hidden center. We will establish nonmaterialized networks

(direct relationships, episodic ones, contacts without ties, development

of embryonic relations based on affinity and understanding, in the

manner of red agitators before the arrival of 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 new unitary

society now possible. But this point cannot be fixed. As opposed to the

ever-renewed confusion that cybernetic power draws from the inhuman

past, it stands for the game that everyone will play, “the moving order

of the future.”

[1] The French word pouvoir can mean power in general, but it can also

refer to the ruling powers, the ruling classes, the ruling system, or

the particular regime in power.

[2] Erostratus burned down a famous Greek temple in 356 BC so that his

name would be remembered for all time.

[3] Jacques: French peasants who revolted in the Jacquerie of 1358; by

extension, a jacquerie is any particularly violent peasant rebellion.

Enragés: extreme radical current during the French Revolution

(1793–1794). Fédérés: insurgents of the Paris Commune (1871),

particularly those massacred during its last stand.

[4] The “Crystal Night” was a Nazi-orchestrated “popular” reaction

against Jews in Germany in 1938, so called because of the enormous

number of store windows broken.

[5] Reference to Mallarmé’s poem “A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish

Chance.” Vaneigem’s meaning here is somewhat obscure (as is the poem),

but he seems to be referring to the inadequacy of an indifferent

alternation between arbitrary decisions and leaving things purely to

chance. “Stéphane Mallarmé, in the great poem that expresses and sums up

the idea he pursued throughout his life, declares: A Throw of the Dice

Will Never Abolish Chance. By the game of dice he symbolized pure

thought, which is in essence Number. What he meant by chance is

everything that escapes conscious thought and that arises out of its

very lapses. He somberly proclaimed the failure of the human spirit, its

inability to succeed in mastering itself” (André Rolland de Renéville,

Expérience Poétique).

[6] pataphysician: reference to “pataphysics,” the absurdist-nihilist

philosophy of Alfred Jarry.

[7] Many of the themes in “Basic Banalities” were later developed more

clearly and fully in Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967).

Chapter 23 of that book deals with the “unitary triad”: participation,

communication and realization, while Part I deals with their contraries:

spectacle, separation, sacrifice, etc.

[8] striking force: play on de Gaulle’s contention that France needed to

develop a strong military striking force.

[9] Durruti Column: anarchist militia unit led by Buenaventura Durruti

during the Spanish civil war.

[10] Declaration of the 121: a “Declaration on the Right to Resist the

Algerian War” signed by 121 French artists and intellectuals (September

1960). The French government responded with arrests and firings, and

even prohibited news media from mentioning the name of any signer —

which only resulted in more people signing. The “Declaration” polarized

the intellectual community and contributed toward arousing French public

opinion (the first demonstration against the war came a month later).

Michèle Bernstein and Guy Debord were among the signers. See

Internationale Situationniste #5, pp. 5–7, 12.