Revolution Of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem

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                       THE REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE

                          (Being a translation of

          TRAITÉ DE SAVOIR-VIVRE À L'USAGE DES JEUNES GÉNÉRATIONS)

                              by Raoul Vaneigem

  anti-copyright (free reproduction permitted on a non profit making basis)

                            DONE INTO ENGLISH BY

                             JOHN FULLERTON AND

                            PAUL SIEVEKING. 1972

 (minor typological corrections and hypertext markup by kubhlai@proweb.co.uk

                        1998. Please report errors.)

DEDICATION

To Ella, Maldoror and those who helped this adventure upon its way. "I LIVE

ON THE EDGE OF THE UNIVERSE AND I DON"T NEED TO FEEL SECURE."

     "Man walketh in a vain shew, he shews to be a man, and that's all."

We seem to live in the State of variety, wherein we are not truly living but

 only in appearance: in Unity is our life: in one we are, from one divided,

                              we are no longer.

  While we perambulate variety, we walk but as so many Ghosts or Shadows in

            it, that it self being but the Umbrage of the Unity.

     The world travels perpetually, and every one is swoln full big with

  particularity of interest; thus travelling together in pain, and groaning

under enmity: labouring to bring forth some one thing, some another, and all

                 bring forth nothing but wind and confusion.

 Consider, is there not in the best of you a body of death? Is not the root

   of rebellion planted in your natures? Is there not also a time for this

                         wicked one to be revealed?

  You little think, and less know, how soon the cup of fury may be put into

 your hands: my self, with many others, have been made stark drunk with that

 wine of wrath, the dregs whereof (for ought I know) may fall to your share

                                 suddenly."

From: "Heights in Depths and Depths in Heights (or TRVTH no less secretly

than sweetly sparkling out its Glory from under a cloud of Obloquie)" by the

Ranter Jo. Salmon (1651).

Introduction

I have no intention of revealing what there is of my life in this book to

readers who are not prepared to relive it. I await the day when it will lose

and find itself in a general movement of ideas, just as I like to think that

the present conditions will be erased from the memories of men.

The world must be remade; all the specialists in reconditioning will not be

able to stop it. Since I do not want to understand them, I prefer that they

should not understand me.

As for the others, I ask for their goodwill with a humility they will not

fail to perceive. I should have liked a book like this to be accessible to

those minds least addled by intellectual jargon; I hope I have not failed

absolutely. One day a few formulae will emerge from this chaos and fire

point-blank on our enemies. Till then these sentences, read and re-read,

will have to do their slow work. The path toward simplicity is the most

complex of all, and here in particular it seemed best not to tear away from

the commonplace the tangle of roots which enable us to transplant it into

another region, where we can cultivate it to our own profit.

I have never pretended to reveal anything new or to launch novelties onto

the culture market. A minute correction of the essential is more important

than a hundred new accessories. All that is new is the direction of the

current which carries commonplaces along.

For as long as there have been men -- and men who read Lautréamont --

everything has been said and few people have gained anything from it.

Because our ideas are in themselves commonplace, they can only be of value

to people who are not.

The modern world must learn what it already knows, become what it already

is, by means of a great work of exorcism, by conscious practice. One can

escape from the commonplace only by manhandling it, mastering it, steeping

it in dreams, giving it over to the sovereign pleasure of subjectivity.

Above all I have emphasized subjective will, but nobody should criticize

this until they have examined the extent to which the objective conditions

of the contemporary world are furthering the cause of subjectivity day by

day. Everything starts from subjectivity, and nothing stops there. Today

less than ever.

From now on the struggle between subjectivity and what degrades it will

extend the scope of the old class struggle. It revitalizes it and makes it

more bitter. The desire to live is a political decision. We do not want a

world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation is bought by

accepting the risk of dying of boredom.

The man of survival is man ground up by the machinery of hierarchical power,

caught in a mass of interferences, a tangle of oppressive techniques whose

rationalization only awaits the patient programming of programmed minds.

The man of survival is also self-united man, the man of total refusal. Not a

single instant goes by without each of us living contradictorily, and on

every level of reality, the conflict between oppression and freedom, and

without this conflict being strangely deformed, and grasped at the same time

in two antagonistic perspectives: the perspective of power and the

perspective of supersession. The two parts of this book, devoted to the

analysis of these two perspectives, should thus be approached, not in

succession, as their arrangement demands, but simultaneously, since the

description of the negative founds the positive project and the positive

project confirms negativity. The best arrangement of a book is none at all,

so that the reader can discover his own.

Where the writing fails it reflects the failure of the reader as a reader,

and even more as a man. If the element of boredom it cost me to write it

comes through when you read it, this will only be one more argument

demonstrating our failure to live. For the rest, the gravity of the times

must excuse the gravity of my tone. Levity always falls short of the written

words or overshoots them. The irony in this case will consist in never

forgetting that.

This book is part of a current of agitation of which the world has not heard

     the last. It sets forth a simple contribution, among others, to the

 recreation of the international revolutionary movement. Its importance had

 better not escape anybody, for nobody, in time, will be able to escape its

                                conclusions.

      My subjectivity and the Creator : This is too much for one brain.

                               -- LAUTRÉAMONT

                                  PART ONE

                             POWER'S PERSPECTIVE

I THE INSIGNIFICANT SIGNIFIED

Because of its increasing triviality, everyday life has gradually become our

central preoccupation (1). No illusion, sacred or deconsecrated (2),

collective or individual, can hide the poverty of our daily actions any

longer (3). The enrichment of life calls inexorably for the analysis of the

new forms taken by poverty, and the perfection of the old weapons of refusal

(4).

The history of our times calls to mind those Walt Disney characters who rush

madly over the edge of a cliff without seeing it, so that the power of their

imagination keeps them suspended in mid-air; but as soon as they look down

and see where they are, they fall.

Contemporary thought, like Bosustov's heroes, can no longer rest on its own

delusions. What used to hold it up, today brings it down. It rushes full

tilt in front of the reality that will crush it: the reality that is lived

every day.

Is this dawning lucidity essentially new? I don't think so. Everyday life

always produces the demand for a brighter light, if only because of the need

which everyone feels to walk in step with the march of history. But there

are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man's life than in all the

philosophies. Even a philosopher cannot ignore it, for all his

self-contempt; and he learns this self-contempt from his consolation,

philosophy. After somersaulting onto his own shoulders to shout his message

to the world from a greater height, the philosopher finishes by seeing the

world inside out; and everything in it goes askew, upside down, to persuade

him that he is standing upright. But he cannot escape his own delirium; and

refusing to admit it simply makes it more uncomfortable.

The moralists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ruled over a

stockroom of commonplaces, but took such pains to conceal this that they

built around it a veritable palace of stucco and speculation. A palace of

ideas shelters but imprisons lived experience. From its gates emerges a

sincere conviction suffused with the Sublime Tone and the fiction of the

'universal man', but it breathes with perpetual anguish. The analyst tries

to escape the gradual sclerosis of existence by reaching some essential

profundity; and the more he alienates himself by expressing himself

according to the dominant imagery of his time (the feudal image in which

God, monarchy and the world are indivisibly united), the more his lucidity

photographs the hidden face of life, the more it 'invents' the everyday.

Enlightenment philosophy accelerated the descent towards the concrete

insofar as the concrete was in some ways brought to power with the

revolutionary bourgeoisie. From the ruin of Heaven, man fell into the ruins

of his own world. What happened? Something like this: ten thousand people

are convinced that they have seen a fakir's rope rise into the air, while as

many cameras prove that it hasn't moved an inch. Scientific objectivity

exposes mystification. Very good, but what does it show us? A coiled rope,

of absolutely no interest. I have little to choose between the doubtful

pleasure of being mystified and the tedium of contemplating a reality which

does not concern me. A reality which I have no grasp on, isn't this the old

lie re-conditioned, the ultimate stage of mystification?

From now on the analysts are in the streets. Lucidity isn't their only

weapon. Their thought is no longer in danger of being imprisoned, either by

the false reality of gods, or by the false reality of technocrats!

Religious beliefs concealed man from himself; their Bastille walled him up

in a pyramidal world with God at the summit and the king just below. Alas,

on the fourteenth of July there wasn't enough freedom to be found among the

ruins of unitary power to prevent the ruins themselves from becoming another

prison. Behind the rent veil of superstition appeared, not naked truth, as

Meslier had dreamed, but the birdlime of ideologies. The prisoners of

fragmentary power have no refuge from tyranny but the shadow of freedom.

Today there is not an action or a thought that is not trapped in the net of

received ideas. The slow fall-out of particles of the exploded myth spreads

sacred dust everywhere, choking the spirit and the will to live. Constraints

have become less occult, more blatant; less powerful, more numerous.

Docility no longer emanates from priestly magic, it results from a mass of

minor hypnoses: news, culture, town-planning, publicity, mechanisms of

conditioning and suggestion in the service of any order, established or to

come. We are like Gulliver lying stranded on the Lilliputian shore with

every part of his body tied down; determined to free himself, he looks

keenly around him: the smallest detail of the landscape, the smallest

contour of the ground, the slightest movement, everything becomes a sign on

which his escape may depend. The most certain chances of liberation are born

in what is most familiar. Was it ever otherwise? Art, ethics, philosophy

bear witness: under the crust of words and concepts, the living reality of

non-adaptation to the world is always crouched, ready to spring. Since

neither gods nor words can mange to cover it up decently any longer, this

commonplace creature roams naked in railway stations and vacant lots; it

confronts you at each evasion of yourself, it touches your elbow, catches

your eye; and the dialogue begins. You must lose yourself with it or save it

with you.

Too many corpses strew the paths of individualism and collectivism. Under

two apparently contradictory rationalities has raged an identical

gangsterism, an identical oppression of the isolated man. The hand which

smothered Lautréamont returned to strangle Serge Yesenin; one died in the

lodging house of his landlord Jules-Françoise Dupuis, the other hung himself

in a nationalized hotel. Everywhere the law is verified: "There is no weapon

of your individual will which, once appropriated by others, does not turn

against you." If anyone says or writes that practical reason must henceforth

be based upon the rights of the individual and the individual alone, he

invalidates his own proposition if he doesn't invite his audience to make

this statement true for themselves. Such a proof can only be lived, grasped

from the inside. That is why everything in the notes which follow should be

tested and corrected by the immediate experience of everyone. Nothing is so

valuable that it need not be started afresh, nothing is so rich that it need

not be enriched constantly.

Just as we distinguish in private life between what a man thinks and says

about himself and what he really is and does, everyone has learned to

distinguish the rhetoric and the messianic pretensions of political parties

from their organization and real interests: what they think they are, from

what they are. A man's illusions about himself and others are not basically

different from the illusions which groups, classes, and parties have about

themselves. Indeed, they come from the same source: the dominant ideas,

which are the ideas of the dominant class, even if they take an antagonistic

form.

The world of isms, whether it envelops the whole of humanity or a single

person, is never anything but a world drained of reality, a terribly real

seduction by falsehood. The three crushing defeats suffered by the Commune,

the Spartakist movement and the Kronstadt sailors showed once and for all

what bloodbaths are the outcome of three ideologies of freedom: liberalism,

socialism, and Bolshevism. However, before this could be universally

understood and admitted, bastard or hybrid forms of these ideologies had to

vulgarize their initial atrocity with more telling proofs: concentration

camps, Lacoste's Algeria, Budapest. The great collective illusions, anaemic

after shedding the blood of so many men, have given way to the thousands of

pre-packed ideologies sold by consumer society like so many portable

brain-scrambling machines. Will it need as much blood again to show that a

hundred thousand pinpricks kill as surely as a couple of blows with a club?

What am I supposed to do in a group of militants who expect me to leave in

the cloakroom, I won't say a few ideas -- for my ideas would have led me to

join the group -- but the dreams and desires which never leave me, the wish

to live authentically and without restraint? What's the use of exchanging

one isolation, one monotony, one lie for another? When the illusion of real

change has been exposed, a mere change of illusion becomes intolerable. But

present conditions are precisely these: the economy cannot stop making us

consume more and more, and to consume without respite is to change illusions

at an accelerating pace which gradually dissolves the illusion of change. We

find ourselves alone, unchanged, frozen in the empty space behind the

waterfall of gadgets, family cars and paperbacks.

people without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached

to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys imagination. This

means that people are not really tired of comfort, culture and leisure but

of the use to which they are put, which is precisely what stops us enjoying

them.

The affluent society is a society of voyeurs. To each his own kaleidoscope:

a tiny movement of the fingers and the picture changes. You can't lose: two

fridges, a mini-car, TV, promotion, time to kill... then the monotony of the

images we consume gets the upper hand, reflecting the monotony of the action

which produces them, the slow rotation of the kaleidoscope between finger

and thumb. There was no mini-car, only an ideology almost unconnected with

the automobile machine. Flushed with Pimm's No.1, we savour a strange

cocktail of alcohol and class struggle. Nothing surprising any more, there's

the rub! The monotony of the ideological spectacle makes us aware of the

passivity of life: survival. Beyond the pre-fabricated scandals - Scandale

perfume, Profumo scandal - a real scandal appears, the scandal of actions

drained of their substance to the profit of an illusion which the failure of

its enchantment renders more odious every day. Actions weak and pale from

nourishing dazzling imaginary compensations, actions pauperized by enriching

lofty speculations into which they entered like menials through the

ignominious category of 'trivial' or 'commonplace', actions which today are

free but exhausted, ready to lose their way once more, or expire under the

weight of their own weakness. There they are, in every one of you, familiar,

sad, newly returned to the immediate, living reality which was their

birthplace. And here you are, bewildered and lost in a new prosaism, a

perspective in which near and far coincide.

The concept of class struggle constituted the first concrete, tactical

marshalling of the shocks and injuries which men live individually; it was

born in the whirlpool of suffering which the reduction of human relations to

mechanisms of exploitation created everywhere in industrial societies. It

issued from a will to transform the world and change life.

Such a weapon needed constant adjustment. yet we see the First International

turning its back on artists by making workers' demands the sole basis of a

project which Marx had shown to concern all those who sought, in the refusal

to be slaves, a full life and a total humanity. Lacenaire, Borel, Lassailly,

Buchner, Baudelaire, Hölderlin - wasn't this also misery and its radical

refusal? perhaps this mistake was excusable then: I neither know nor care.

What is certain is that it is sheer madness a century later, when the

economy of consumption is absorbing the economy of production, and the

exploitation of labour power is submerged by the exploitation of everyday

creativity. The same energy is torn from the worker in his hours of work and

in his hours of leisure to drive the turbines of power, which the custodians

of the old theory lubricate sanctimoniously with their purely formal

opposition.

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring

explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about

love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have

corpses in their mouths.

PARTICIPATION MADE IMPOSSIBLE:

POWER AS THE SUM OF CONSTRAINTS

The mechanisms of wear and tear and destruction: humiliation (II), isolation

(III), suffering (IV), work (V), decompression (VI)

II HUMILIATION

The economy of everyday life is based on a continuous exchange of

humiliations and aggressive attitudes. It conceals a technique of wear and

tear (usure), which is itself prey to the gift of destruction which it

invites contradictorily (1). Today, the more man is a social being the more

he is an object (2). Decolonisation has not yet begun (3). It will have to

give a new value to the old principle of sovereignty (4).

One day, when Rousseau was travelling through a crowded village, he was

insulted by a yokel whose spirit delighted the crowd. Rousseau, confused and

discountenanced, couldn't think of a word in reply and was forced to take to

his heels amidst the jeers of the crowd. By the time he had finally regained

his composure and thought of a thousand possible retorts, any one of which

would have silenced the joker once and for all, he was at two hours distance

from the village.

Aren't most of the trivial incidents of everyday life like this ridiculous

adventure? but in an attenuated and diluted form, reduced to the duration of

a step, a glance, a thought, experienced as a muffled impact, a fleeting

discomfort barely registered by consciousness and leaving in the mind only

the dull irritation at a loss to discover its own origin? The endless minuet

of humiliation and its response gives human relationships an obscene

hobbling rhythm. In the ebb and flow of the crowds sucked in and crushed

together by the coming and going of suburban trains, and coughed out into

streets, offices, factories, there is nothing but timid retreats, brutal

attacks, smirking faces and scratches delivered for no apparent reason.

Soured by unwanted encounters, wine turns to vinegar in the mouth. Innocent

and good-natured crowds? What a laugh! Look how they bristle up, threaten on

every side, clumsy and embarrassed in the enemy's territory, far, very far

from themselves. Lacking knives, they learn to use their elbows and their

eyes.

There is no intermission, no truce between attackers and attacked. A flux of

barely perceptible signs assails the walker, who is not alone. Remarks,

gestures, glances tangle and collide, miss their aim, ricochet like bullets

fired at random, which kill even more surely by the continuous nervous

tension they produce. All we can do is to enclose ourselves in embarrassing

parentheses; like these fingers (I am writing this on a cafe terrace) which

slide the tip across the table and the fingers of the waiter which pick it

up, while the faces of the two men involved, as if anxious to conceal the

infamy which they have consented to, assume an expression of utter

indifference.

From the point of view of constraint, everyday life is governed by an

economic system in which the production and consumption of insults tends to

balance out. The old dream of the theorists of perfect competition thus

finds its real perfection in the customs of a democracy given new life by

the lack of imagination of the left. Isn't it strange, at first sight, to

see the fury with which 'progressives' attack the ruined edifice of free

enterprise, as if the capitalists, its official demolition gang, had not

themselves already planned its nationalized reconstruction? but it is not so

strange, in fact: for the deliberate purpose of keeping all attention

fastened on critiques which have already been overtaken by events (after

all, anybody can see that capitalism is gradually finding its fulfillment in

a planned economy of which the Soviet model is nothing but a primitive form)

is to conceal the fact that the only reconstruction of human relationships

envisaged is one based upon precisely this economic model, which, because it

is obsolete, is available at a knock-down price. Who can fail to notice the

alarming persistence with which 'socialist' countries continue to organize

life along bourgeois lines? Everywhere it's hats off to family, marriage,

sacrifice, work, inauthenticity, while simplified and rationalized

homeostatic mechanisms reduce human relationships to 'fair' exchanges of

deference and humiliation. And soon, in the ideal democracy of the

cyberneticians, everyone will earn without apparent effort a share of

unworthiness which he will have the leisure to distribute according to the

finest rules of justice. Distributive justice will reach its apogee. Happy

the old men who live to see the day!

For me -- and for some others, I dare to think -- there can be no

equilibrium in malaise. Planning is only the antithesis of the free market.

Only exchange has been planned, and with it the mutual sacrifice which it

entails. But if the word 'innovation' is to keep its proper meaning, it must

mean superseding, not tarting up. In fact, a new reality can only be based

on the principle of the gift. Despite their mistakes and their poverty, I

see in the historical experiences of workers' councils (1917, 1921, 1934,

1956), and in the pathetic search for friendship and love, a single and

inspiring reason not to despair over present 'reality'. Everything conspires

to keep secret the positive character of such experiences; doubt is

cunningly maintained as to their real importance, even their existence. By a

strange oversight, no historian has ever taken the trouble to study how

people actually lived during the most extreme revolutionary moments. At such

times, the wish to make an end of free exchange in the market of human

behaviour shows itself spontaneously but in the form of negation. When

malaise is brought into question it shatters under the onslaught of a

greater and denser malaise.

In a negative sense, Ravachol's bombs or, closer to our own time, the epic

of Caraquemada dispel the confusion which reigns around the total rejection

-- manifested to a varying extent, but manifested everywhere -- of

relationships based on exchange and compromise. I have no doubt, since I

have experienced it so many times, that anyone who passes an hour in the

cage of constraining relationships feels a profound sympathy for

Pierre-François Lacenaire and his passion for crime. The point here is not

to make an apology for terrorism, but to recognize it as an action -- the

most pitiful action and at the same time the most noble -- which is capable

of disrupting and thus exposing the self-regulating mechanisms of the

hierarchical social community. Inscribed in the logic of an unlivable

society, murder thus conceived can only appear as the concave form of the

gift. it is that absence of an intensely desired presence that Mallarmé

described; the same Mallarmé who, at the trial of the Thirty, called the

anarchists 'angels of purity'.

My sympathy for the solitary killer ends where tactics begin; but perhaps

tactics need scouts driven by individual despair. However that may be, the

new revolutionary tactics -- which will be based indissolubly on the

historical tradition and on the practice, so widespread and so disregarded,

of individual realization -- will have no place for people who only want to

mimic the gestures of Ravachol or Bonnot. But on the other hand these

tactics will be condemned to theoretical hibernation if they cannot, by

other means, attract collectively the individuals whom isolation and hatred

for the collective lie have already won over to the rational decision to

kill or to kill themselves. No murderers -- and no humanists either! The

first accept death, the second impose it. let ten men meet who are resolved

on the lightning of violence rather than the long agony of survival; from

this moment, despair ends and tactics begin. Despair is the infantile

disorder of the revolutionaries of everyday life.

I still feel today my adolescent admiration for outlaws, not because of an

obsolete romanticism but because they expose the alibis by which social

power avoids being put right on the spot. Hierarchical social organization

is like a gigantic racket whose secret, precisely exposed by anarchist

terrorism, is to place itself out of reach of the violence it gives rise to,

by consuming everybody's energy in a multitude of irrelevant struggles. (A

'humanized' power cannot allow itself recourse to the old methods of war and

genocide.) The witnesses for the prosecution can hardly be suspected of

anarchist tendencies. The biologist Hans Selye states that "as specific

causes of disease (microbes, undernourishment) disappear, a growing

proportion of people die of what are called stress diseases, or diseases of

degeneration caused by stress, that is, by the wear and tear resulting from

conflicts, shocks, nervous tension, irritations, debilitating rhythms..."

From now on, no-one can escape the necessity of conducting his own

investigation into the racket which pursues him even into his thoughts,

hunts him down even in his dreams. The smallest details take on a major

importance. irritation, fatigue, rudeness, humiliation... cui bono? Who

profits by them? And who profits by the stereotyped answers that Big Brother

Common Sense distributes under the label of wisdom, like so many alibis?

Shall I be content with explanations that kill me when I have everything to

win in a game where all the cards are stacked against me?

The handshake ties and unties the knot of encounters. A gesture at once

curious and trivial which the French quite accurately say is exchanged:

isn't it in fact the most simplified form of the social contract? What

guarantees are they trying to seal, these hands clasped to the right, to the

left, everywhere, with a liberality that seems to make up for a total lack

of conviction? That agreement reigns, that social harmony exists, that life

in society is perfect? But what still worries us is this need to convince

ourselves, to believe it by force of habit, to reaffirm it with the strength

of our grip.

Eyes know nothing of these pleasantries; they do not recognize exchange.

When our eyes meet someone else's they become uneasy, as if they could make

out their own empty, soulless reflection in the other person's pupils.

Hardly have they met when they slip aside and try to dodge one another;

their lines of flight cross in an invisible point, making an angle whose

acuteness expresses the divergence, the deeply felt lack of harmony.

Sometimes unison is achieved and eyes connect; the beautiful parallel stare

of royal couples in Egyptian sculpture, the misty, melting gaze, brimming

with eroticism, of lovers: eyes which devour one another from afar. But most

of the time the eyes repudiate the superficial agreement sealed by the

handshake. Consider the popularity of the energetic reiteration of social

agreement (the phrase 'let's shake on it' indicates its commercial

overtones): isn't it a trick played on the senses, a way of dulling the

sensitivity of the eyes so that they don't revolt against the emptiness of

the spectacle? The good sense of consumer society has brought the old

expression 'see things my way' to its logical conclusion: whichever way you

look, you see nothing but things.

Become as senseless and easily handled as a brick!

That is what social organization is kindly inviting everyone to do. The

bourgeoisie has managed to share out irritations more fairly, allowing a

greater number of people to suffer them according to rational norms

(economic, social, political, legal necessities...) The splinters of

constraint produced in this way have in turn fragmented the cunning and the

energy devoted collectively to evading or smashing them. The revolutionaries

of 1793 were great because they dared to usurp the unitary hold of God over

the government of men; the proletarian revolutionaries drew from what they

were defending a greatness that they could never have seized from the

bourgeois enemy -- their strength derived from themselves alone.

A whole ethic based on exchange value, the pleasures of business, the

dignity of labour, restrained desires, survival, and on their opposites,

pure value, the gratuitous, parasitism, instinctive brutality and death:

this is the filthy tub that human faculties have been bubbling in for nearly

two centuries. From these ingredients -- refined a little of course -- the

cyberneticians are dreaming of cooking up the man of the future. Are we

quite sure that we haven't yet arrived at the security of perfectly adapted

beings, moving about as uncertainly and unconsciously as insects? For some

time now there have been experiments with subliminal advertising: the

insertion into films of single frames lasting 1/24 of a second, which are

seen by the eye but not registered by consciousness. The first slogans give

more than a glimpse of what is to come: 'Don't drive too fast' and 'Go to

church'. But what does a minor improvement like this represent in comparison

with the whole immense conditioning machine ,each of whose cogs -- town

planning, publicity, ideology, culture -- is capable of dozens of comparable

improvements? Once again, knowledge of the conditions which are going to

continue to be imposed on people if they don't look out is less relevant

than the sensation of living in such degradation now. Zamiatin's We.

Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's 1984 and Touraine's Cinquieme Coup de

Trompette push back into the future a shudder of horror which one look at

the present would produce; and it is the present that develops consciousness

and the will to refuse. Compared with my present imprisonment the future

holds no interest for me.

The feeling of humiliation is nothing but the feeling of being an object.

Once it has been understood as such, it becomes the basis for a combative

lucidity for which the critique of the organization of life cannot be

separated from the immediate inception of the project of living differently.

Construction can begin only on the foundation of individual despair and its

supersession; the efforts made to disguise this despair and pass it off

under another wrapper are enough to prove it.

What is the illusion which stops us seeing the disintegration of values, the

ruin of the world, inauthenticity, non-totality?

Is it that I think that I am happy? Hardly! Such a belief doesn't stand up

to analysis any better than it withstands the blasts of anguish. On the

contrary, it is a belief in the happiness of others, an inexhaustible source

of envy and jealousy which gives us a vicarious feeling of existence. I

envy, therefore I am. To define oneself by reference to others is to define

oneself as other. And the other is always object. So that life is measured

in degrees of humiliation, the more you 'live': the more you live the

orderly life of things. Here is the cunning of reification, by which it

passes undetected, like arsenic in the jam.

The gentleness of these methods of oppression throws a certain light on the

perversion which prevents me from shouting out "The emperor has no clothes!"

each time the sovereignty of my everyday life reveals its poverty. Obviously

police brutality is still going strong, to say the least. Everywhere it

raises its head the kindly souls of the left quite rightly condemn it. But

what do they do about it? Do they urge people to arm themselves? Do they

call for legitimate reprisals? Do they encourage pig-hunts like the one

which decorated the trees of Budapest with the finest fruits of the AVO? No:

they organize peaceful demonstrations at which their trade-union police

force treats anyone who questions their orders as an agent provocateur. The

new policemen are ready to take over. The social psychologists will govern

without truncheons: no more tough cops, only con cops. Oppressive violence

is about to be transformed into a host of reasonably distributed pin-pricks.

The same people who denounce police violence from the heights of their lofty

ideals are urging us on toward a state based on polite violence. Humanism

merely upholsters the machine of Kafka's "Penal Colony". Less grinding and

shouting! Blood upsets you? Never mind: men will be bloodless. The promised

land of survival will be the realm of peaceful death, and it is this

peaceful death that the humanists are fighting for. No more Guernicas, no

more Auschwitzes, no more Hiroshimas, no more Setifs. Hooray! But what about

the impossibility of living, what about this stifling mediocrity and this

absence of passion? What about the jealous fury in which the rankling of

never being ourselves drives us to imagine that other people are happy? What

about this feeling of never really being inside your own skin? let nobody

say these are minor details or secondary points. There are no negligible

irritations; gangrene can start in the slightest graze. The crises that

shake the world are not fundamentally different from the conflicts in which

my actions and thoughts confront the hostile forces that entangle and

deflect them. (How could it be otherwise when history, in the last analysis,

is only important to me in so far as it affects my own life?) Sooner or

later the continual division and re-division of aggravations will split the

atom of unlivable reality and liberate a nuclear energy which nobody

suspected behind so much passivity and gloomy resignation. That which

produces the common good is always terrible.

From 1945 to 1960, colonialism was a fairy godmother to the left. With a new

enemy on the scale of Fascism, the left never had to define itself

positively, starting from itself (there was nothing there); it was ale to

affirm itself by negating something else. In this way it was able to accept

itself as a thing, part of an order of things in which things are everything

and nothing.

Nobody dared to announce the end of colonialism for fear that it would

spring up all over the place like a jack-in-the-box whose lid doesn't shut

properly. In fact, from the moment when the collapse of colonial power

revealed the colonialism inherent in all power over men, the problems of

race and colour became about as important as crossword puzzles. What effect

did the clowns of the left have as they trotted about on their

anti-racialist and anti-anti-semitic hobbyhorses? In the last analysis, that

of smothering the cries of tormented Jews and negroes which were uttered by

all those who were not Jews or negroes, starting with the Jews and negroes

themselves. Of course, I would not dream of questioning the spirit of

generosity which has inspired recent anti-racialism. But I lose interest in

the past as soon as I can no longer affect it. I am speaking here and now,

and nobody can persuade me, in the name of Alabama or South Africa and their

spectacular exploitation, to forget that the epicentres of such problems

lies in me and in each being who is humiliated and scorned by every aspect

of our own society.

I shall not renounce my share of violence.

Human relationships can hardly be discussed in terms of more or less

tolerable conditions, more or less admissible indignities. Qualification is

irrelevant. Do insults like 'wog' or 'nigger' hurt more than a word of

command? When he is summoned, told off, or ordered around by a policeman, a

boss, an authority, who doesn't feel deep down, in moments of lucidity, that

he is a darkie and a gook?

The old colonials provided us with a perfect identi-kit portrait of power

when they predicted the descent into bestiality and wretchedness of those

who found their presence undesirable. Law and order come first, says the

guard to the prisoner. Yesterday's anti-colonialists are trying to humanize

the generalized colonialism of power. They become it's watchdogs in the

cleverest way: by barking at all the after-effects of past inhumanity.

Before he tried to get himself made President of Martinique, Aimé Césaire

made a famous remark: "The bourgeoisie has found itself unable to solve the

major problems which its own existence has produced: the colonial problem

and the problem of the proletariat." He forgot to add: "For they are one and

the same problem, a problem which anyone who separates them will fail to

understand."

I read in Gouy's Histoire de France: "The slightest insult to the King meant

immediate death". In the American Constitution: "The people are sovereign".

In Pouget's Père Peinard: "Kings get fat off their sovereignty, while we are

starving on ours". Courbon's Secret du Peuple tells me: "The people today

means the mass of men to whom all respect is denied". Here we have, in a few

lines, the misadventures of the principle of sovereignty.

Kings designated as 'subjects' the objects of their arbitrary will. No doubt

this was an attempt to wrap the radical inhumanity of its domination in a

humanity of idyllic bonds. The respect due to the king's person cannot in

itself be criticized. It is odious only because it is based on the right to

humiliate by subordination. Contempt rotted the thrones of kings. But what

about the citizen's sovereignty: the rights multiplied by bourgeois vanity

and jealousy, sovereignty distributed like a dividend to each individual?

What about the divine right of kings democratically shared out?

Today, France contains twenty-four million mini-kings, of which the greatest

-- the bosses -- are great only in their ridiculousness. The sense of

respect has become degraded to the point where humiliation is all that it

demands. Democratized into public functions and roles, the monarchic

principle floats with its belly up, like a dead fish: only its most

repulsive aspect is visible. Its will to be absolutely and unreservedly

superior has disappeared. Instead of basing our lives on our sovereignty, we

try to base our sovereignty on other people's lives. The manners of slaves.

III ISOLATION

                            Para no sentirme solo

                        por los siglos de los siglos

All we have in common is the illusion of being together. And beyond the

illusion of permitted anodynes there is only the collective desire to

destroy isolation (1). -- Impersonal relationships are the no-man's land of

isolation. By producing isolation, contemporary social organization signs

its own death-sentence (2).

It was as if they were in a cage whose door was wide open without their

being able to escape. Nothing outside the cage had any importance, because

nothing else existed any more. They stayed in the cage, estranged from

everything except the cage, without even a flicker of desire for anything

outside the bars. it would have been abnormal -- impossible in fact -- to

escape into something which had neither reality nor importance. Absolutely

impossible. For inside this cage, in which they had been born and in which

they would die, the only tolerable framework of experience was the Real,

which was simply an irresistible instinct to act so that things should have

importance. Only if things had some importance could one breathe, and

suffer. it seemed that there was an understanding between them and the

silent dead that it should be so, for the habit of acting so that things had

some importance had become a human instinct, and one which was apparently

eternal. Life was the important thing, and the Real was part of the instinct

which gave life a little meaning. The instinct didn't try to imagine what

might lie beyond the Real, because there was nothing beyond it. Nothing

important. The door remained open and the cage became more and more painful

in its Reality which was so important for countless reasons and in countless

ways.

We have never emerged from the times of the slavers.

On the public transport which throws them against one another with

statistical indifference, people wear an untenable expression of

disillusion, pride and contempt, like the natural effect of death on a

toothless mouth. The atmosphere of false communication makes everyone the

policeman of his own encounters. The instincts of flight and aggression

trail the knights of wage-labour, who must now rely on subways and suburban

trains for their pitiful wanderings. If men were transformed into scorpions

who sting themselves and one another, isn't it really because nothing has

happened, and human beings with empty eyes and flabby brains have

'mysteriously' become mere shadows of men, ghosts of men, and in some ways

are no longer men except in name?

We have nothing in common except the illusion of being together. Certainly

the seeds of an authentic collective life are lying dormant within the

illusion itself -- there is no illusion without a real basis -- but real

community remains to be created. The power of the lie sometimes manages to

erase the bitter reality of isolation from men's minds. In a crowded street

we can occasionally forget that suffering and separation are still present.

And, since it is only the lie's power which makes us forget, suffering and

separation are reinforced; but in the end the lie itself comes to grief

through relying on this support. For a moment comes when no illusion can

measure up to our distress.

Malaise invades me as the crows around me grows. The compromises I have made

with stupidity under the pressure of circumstances rush to meet me, swimming

towards me in hallucinating waves of faceless heads. Edvard Munch's famous

painting, The Cry, evokes for me something I feel ten times a day. A man

carried along by a crowd, which only he can see, suddenly screams out in an

attempt to break the spell, to call himself back to himself, to get back

inside his own skin. The tacit acknowledgments, fixed smiles, lifeless

words, listlessness and humiliation sprinkled in his path suddenly surge

into him, driving him out of his desires and his dreams and exploding the

illusion of 'being together'. People touch without meeting; isolation

accumulates but is never realized; emptiness overcomes us as the density of

the crowd grows. The crowd drags me out of myself and installs thousands of

little sacrifices in my empty presence.

Everywhere neon signs are flashing out the dictum of Plotinus: All beings

are together though each remains separate. But we only need to hold out our

hands and touch one another, to raise our eyes and meet one another, and

everything comes into focus, as if by magic.

Like crowds, drugs, and love, alcohol can befuddle the most lucid mind.

Alcohol turns the concrete wall of isolation into a paper screen which the

actors can tear according to their fancy, for it arranges everything on the

stage of an intimate theatre. A generous illusion, and thus still more

deadly.

In a gloomy bar where everyone is bored to death, a drunken young man breaks

his glass, then picks up a bottle and smashes it against the wall. Nobody

gets excited; the disappointed young man lets himself be thrown out. Yet

everyone there could have done exactly the same thing. He alone made the

thought concrete, crossing the first radioactive belt of isolation: interior

isolation, the introverted separation between self and outside world. Nobody

responded to a sign which he thought was explicit. He remained alone like

the hooligan who burns down a church or kills a policeman, at one with

himself but condemned to exile as long as other people remain exiled from

their own existence. He has not escaped from the magnetic field of

isolation; he is suspended in a zone of zero gravity. All the same, the

indifference which greets him allows him to hear the sound of his own cry;

even if this revelation tortures him, he knows that he will have to start

again in another register, more loudly; with more coherence.

People will be together only in a common wretchedness as long as each

isolated being refuses to understand that a gesture of liberation, however

weak and clumsy it may be, always bears an authentic communication, an

adequate personal message. The repression which strikes down the libertarian

rebel falls on everyone: everyone's blood flows with the blood of a murdered

Durruti. Whenever freedom retreats one inch, there is a hundred-fold

increase in the weight of the order of things. Excluded from authentic

participation, men's actions stray into the fragile illusion of being

together, or else into its opposite, the abrupt and total rejection of

society. They swing from one to the other like a pendulum turning the hands

on the clock-face of death.

Love in its turn swells the illusion of unity. Most of the time it gets

fucked up and miscarries. Its songs are crippled by fear of always returning

to the same single note: whether there are two of us, or even ten, we will

finish up alone as before. What drives us to despair is not the immensity of

our own unsatisfied desires, but the moment when our newborn passion

discovers its own emptiness. The insatiable desire to fall in love with so

many pretty girls is born in anguish and the fear of loving: we are so

afraid of never escaping from meetings with objects. The dawn when lovers

leave each other's arms is the same dawn that breaks on the execution of

revolutionaries without a revolution. Isolation a deux cannot confront the

effect of general isolation. Pleasure is broken off prematurely and lovers

find themselves naked in the world, their actions suddenly ridiculous and

pointless. No love is possible in an unhappy world.

The boat of love breaks up in the current of everyday life.

Are you ready to smash the reefs of the old world before they wreck your

desires? Lovers should love their pleasure with more consequence and more

poetry. A story tells how Price Shekour captured a town and offered it to

his favourite for a smile. Some of us have fallen in love with the pleasure

of loving without reserve -- passionately enough to offer our love to the

magnificent bed of a revolution.

To adapt to the world is a game of heads-you-win, tails-I-lose in which one

decides a priori that the negative is positive and that the impossibility of

living is an essential precondition of life. Alienation never takes such

firm root as when it passes itself off as an inalienable good. Transformed

into positivity, the consciousness of isolation is none other than the

private consciousness, that scrap of individualism which people drag around

like their most sacred birthright, unprofitable but cherished. It is a sort

of pleasure-anxiety which prevents us both from settling down in the

community of illusion and from remaining trapped in the cellar of isolation.

The no-man's-land of impersonal relationships stretches between the blissful

acceptance of false collectivities and the total rejection of society. It is

the morality of shopkeepers: "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours", "You

mustn't let people get too familiar": politeness, the art (for art's sake)

of non-communication.

Let's face it: human relationships being what social hierarchy has made

them, impersonality is the least tiring form of contempt. It allows us to

pass without useless friction through the mill of daily contacts. it does

not prevent us dreaming of superior forms of civility, such as the courtesy

of Lacenaire, on the eve of his execution, urging a friend: "Above all,

please convey my gratitude to M.Scribe. Tell him that one day, suffering

from the pangs of hunger, I presented myself at his house in order to worm

some money out of him. He complied with my request with a touching

generosity; I am sure he will remember. tell him that he acted wisely, for I

had in my pocket, ready to hand, the means of depriving France of a

dramatist."

But the sterilized zone of impersonal relationships only offers a truce in

the endless battle against isolation, a brief transit which leads to

communication, or more frequently towards the illusion of community. I would

explain in this way my reluctance to stop a stranger to ask him the way or

to 'pass the time of day': to seek contact in this doubtful fashion. The

pleasantness of impersonal relationships is built on sand; and empty time

never did me any good.

Life is made impossible with such cynical thoroughness that the balanced

pleasure-anxiety of impersonal relationships, functions as a cog in the

general machine for destroying people. In the end it seems better to start

out right away with a radical and tactically worked-out refusal, rather than

to go around knocking politely on all the doors where one mode of survival

is exchanged for another.

"It would be a drag to die so young". wrote Jacques Vaché two years before

his suicide. if desperation at the prospect of surviving does not unite with

a new grasp of reality to transform the years to come, only two ways out are

left for the isolated man: the pisspot of parties and pataphysico-religious

sects, or immediate death with Umour. A sixteen-year-old murderer recently

explained: "I did it because I was bored." Anyone who has felt the drive to

self-destruction welling up inside him knows with what weary negligence he

might one day happen to kill the organizers of his boredom. One day. If he

was in the mood.

After all, if an individual refuses both to adapt to the violence of the

world, and to embrace the violence of the unadapted, what can he do? If he

doesn't raise his will to achieve unity with the world and with himself to

the level of coherent theory and practice, the vast silence of society's

open spaces will raise around him the palace of solipsist madness.

From the depths of their prisons, those who have been convicted of 'mental

illness' add the screams of their strangled revolt to the sum of negativity.

What a potential Fourier was cleverly destroyed in this patient described by

the psychiatrist Volnat: "He began to lose all capacity to distinguish

between himself and the external world. Everything that happened in the

world also happened in his body. He could not put a bottle between two

shelves in a cupboard, because the shelves might come together and break the

bottle. And that would hurt inside his head, as if his head were wedged

between the shelves. He could not shut a suitcase, because pressing the

things in the case would press inside his head. If he walked into the street

after closing all the doors and windows of his house, he felt uncomfortable,

because his brain was compressed by the air, and he had to go back home to

open a door or a window. 'For me to be at ease,' he said, 'I must have open

space. [...] I must have the freedom of my space. It's the battle with the

things all around me.'"

"Outside the consul paused, turning... No se puede vivir sin amar, were the

words on the house." (Lowry, Under the Volcano).

IV SUFFERING

Suffering caused by natural alienation has given way to suffering caused by

social alienation, while remedies have become justifications (1). Where

there is no justification, exorcism takes its place (2). But from now on no

subterfuge can hide the existence of an organization based on the

distribution of constraints (3). Consciousness reduced to the consciousness

of constraints is the antechamber of death. The despair of consciousness

makes the murderers of Order; the consciousness of despair makes the

murderers of Disorder (4).

The symphony of spoken and shouted words animates the scenery of the

streets. Over a rumbling basso continuo develop grave and cheerful themes,

hoarse and singsong voices, nostalgic fragments of sentences. There is a

sonorous architecture which overlays the outline of streets and buildings,

reinforcing or counteracting the attractive or repulsive tone of a district.

But from Notting Hill to Oxford Street the basic chord is the same

everywhere: it's sinister resonance has sunk so deeply into everyone's mind

that it no longer surprises them. "That's life", "These things are sent to

try us", "You have to take the rough with the smooth", "That's the way it

goes"... this lament whose weft unites the most diverse conversations has so

perverted our sensibility that it passes for the commonest of human

dispositions. Where it is not accepted, despair disappears from sight.

Nobody seems worried that joy has been absent from European music for nearly

two centuries; which says everything. Consume, consume: the ashes have

consumed the fire.

How have suffering and it's rites of exorcism usurped this importance?

Undoubtedly because of the struggle to survive imposed on the first men by a

hostile nature, full of cruel and mysterious forces. In the face of danger,

the weakness of men discovered in social agglomeration not only protection

but a way of co-operating with nature, making a truce with her and even

transforming her. In the struggle against natural alienation -- death,

sickness, suffering -- alienation became social. We escaped the rigours of

exposure, hunger and discomfort only to fall into the trap of slavery. We

were enslaved by gods, by men, by language. And such a slavery had its

positive side: there was a certain greatness of living in terror of a god

who also made you invincible. This mixture of human and inhuman would, it is

true, be a sufficient explanation of the ambiguity of suffering, its way of

appearing right through history at once as shameful sickness and salutary

evil -- as a good thing, after a fashion. But this would be to overlook the

ignoble slag of religion, above all Christian mythology, which devoted all

its genius to perfecting this morbid and depraved precept: protect yourself

against mutilation by mutilating yourself!

"Since Christ's coming, we are delivered not from the evil of suffering but

from the evil of suffering uselessly", writes the Jesuit father Charles. How

right he is: power's problem has always been, not to abolish itself, but to

give itself reasons so as not to oppress 'uselessly'. Christianity, that

unhealthy therapeutic, pulled off its masterstroke when it married man to

suffering, whether on the basis of divine grace or natural law. From prince

to manager, from priest to expert, from father confessor to social worker,

it is always the principle of useful suffering and willing sacrifice which

forms the most solid base for hierarchical power. Whatever reasons it

invokes -- a better world, the next world, building communism or fighting

communism -- suffering accepted is always Christian, always. Today the

clerical vermin have given way to the missionaries of a Christ dyed red.

Everywhere official pronouncements bear in their watermark the disgusting

image of the crucified man, everywhere comrades are urged to sport the

stupid halo of the militant martyr. And with their blood, the kitchen-hands

of the good Cause are mixing up the sausage-meat of the future: less

cannon-fodder, more doctrine-fodder!

To begin with, bourgeois ideology seemed determined to root out suffering

with as much persistence as it devoted to the pursuit of the religions that

it hated. Infatuated with progress, comfort, profit, well-being, it had

enough weapons -- if not real weapons, at least imaginary ones -- to

convince everyone of its will to put a scientific end to the evil of

suffering and the evil of faith. As we know, all it did was to invent new

anaesthetics and new superstitions.

Without God, suffering became 'natural', inherent in 'human nature'; it

would be overcome, but only after more suffering: the martyrs of science,

the victims of progress, the lost generations. But in this very movement the

idea of natural suffering betrayed its social root. When Human Nature was

removed, suffering became social, inherent in social existence. But of

course, revolutions demonstrated that the social evil of pain was not a

metaphysical principle: that a form of society could exist from which the

pain of living would be excluded. History shattered the social ontology of

suffering, but suffering, far from disappearing, found new reasons for

existence in the exigencies of History, which had suddenly become trapped,

in its turn, in a one-way street. China prepares children for the classless

society by teaching them love of their country, love of their family, and

love of work. Thus historical ontology picks up the remains of all the

metaphysical systems of the past: an sich, God, Nature, Man, Society. From

now on, men will have to make history by fighting History itself, because

History has become the last ontological earthwork of power, the last con by

which it hides, behind the promise of a long weekend, its will to endure

until Saturday which will never come. Beyond fetishised history, suffering

is revealed as stemming from hierarchical social organization. And when the

will to put an end to hierarchical power has sufficiently tickled the

consciousness of men, everyone will admit that freedom in arms and weight of

constraints have nothing metaphysical about them.

While it was placing happiness and freedom on the order of the day,

technological civilization was inventing the ideology of happiness and

freedom. Thus it condemned itself to creating no more than the freedom of

apathy, happiness in passivity. But at least this invention, perverted

though it was, had denied that suffering is inherent in the human condition,

that such an inhuman condition could last forever. That is why bourgeois

thought fails when it tries to provide consolation for suffering; none of

its justifications are as powerful as the hope which was born from its

initial bet on technology and well-being.

Desperate fraternity in sickness is the worst thing that can happen to

civilization. In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the

absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions,

stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day, until the exhaustion

of mind and body, until that death which is not the end of life but the

final saturation with absence; this is what lends a dangerous charm to

dreams of apocalypses, gigantic destructions, complete annihilations, cruel,

clean and total deaths. Auschwitz and Hiroshima are indeed the 'comfort of

nihilism'. Let impotence in the face of suffering become a collective

sentiment, and the demand for suffering and death can sweep a whole

community. Consciously or not, most people would rather die than live a

permanently unsatisfying life. Look at anti-bomb marchers: most of them were

nothing but penitents trying to exorcise their desire to disappear with all

the rest of humanity. They would deny it, of course, but their miserable

faces gave them away. The only real joy is revolutionary.

Perhaps it is in order to ensure that a universal desire to perish does not

take hold of men that a whole spectacle is organized around particular

sufferings. A sort of nationalized philanthropy impels man to find

consolation for his own infirmities in the spectacle of other people's.

Consider disaster photographs, stories of cuckolded singers, the ridiculous

dramas of the gutter press; hospitals, asylums, and prisons: real museums of

suffering for the use of those whose fear of entering them makes them happy

to be outside. I sometimes feel such a diffuse suffering dispersed through

me that I find relief in the chance misfortune that concretizes and

justifies it, offers it a legitimate outlet. Nothing will dissuade me of

this: the sadness I feel after a separation, a failure, a bereavement

doesn't reach me from outside like an arrow but wells up from inside me like

a spring freed by a landslide. There are wounds which allow the spirit to

utter a long-stifled cry. Despair never lets go its prey; it is only the

prey which isolates despair in the end of a love or the death of a child,

where there is only its shadow. Mourning is a pretext, a convenient way of

spitting out nothingness in small drops. The tears, the cries and howls of

childhood remain imprisoned in the hearts of men. For ever? In you also the

emptiness is growing.

Another word about the alibis of power. Suppose that a tyrant took pleasure

in throwing prisoners who had been flayed alive into a small cell; suppose

that to hear their screams and see them scramble each time they brushed

against one another amused him a lot, at the same time causing him to

meditate on human nature and the curious behaviour of men. Suppose that at

the same time and in the same country there were philosophers and wise men

who explained to the worlds of science and art that suffering had to do with

the collective life of men, the inevitable presence of Others, society as

such -- wouldn't we be right to consider these men the tyrant's watchdogs?

By proclaiming such theses as these, a certain existentialist conception has

demonstrated not only the collusion of left intellectuals with power, but

also the crude trick by which an inhuman social organization attributes the

responsibility for its cruelties to its victims themselves. A nineteenth

century critic remarked: "Throughout contemporary literature we find the

tendency to regard individual suffering as a social evil and to make the

organization of society responsible for the misery and degradation of its

members. This is a profoundly new idea: suffering is no longer treated as a

matter of fatality." Certain thinkers steeped in fatalism have not been

troubled overmuch by such novelties: consider Sartre's hell-is-other-people,

Freud's death instinct, Mao's historical necessity. After all, what

distinguishes these doctrines from the stupid "it's just human nature"?

Hierarchical social organization is like a system of hoppers lined with

sharp blades. While it flays us alive power cleverly persuades us that we

are flaying each other. It is true that to limit myself to writing this is

to risk fostering a new fatalism; but I certainly intend in writing it that

nobody should limit himself to reading it.

Altruism is the other side of the coin of 'hell-is-other-people'; only this

time mystification appears under a positive sign. Let's put an end to this

old soldier crap once and for all! For others to interest me I must first

find in myself the energy for such an interest. What binds me to others must

grow out of what binds me to the most exuberant and demanding part of my

will to live; not the other way round. It is always myself that I am looking

for in other people; my enrichment, my realization. let everyone understand

this and 'each for himself' taken to its ultimate conclusion will be

transformed into 'all for each'. The freedom of one will be the freedom of

all. A community which is not built on the demands of individuals and their

dialectic can only reinforce the oppressive violence of power. The Other in

whom I do not find myself is nothing but a thing, and altruism leads me to

the love of things, to the love of my isolation.

Seen from the viewpoint of altruism, or of solidarity, that altruism of the

left, the sentiment of equality is standing on its head. What is it but the

common anguish of associates who are lonely together, humiliated, fucked up,

beaten, deprived, contented together, the anguish of unattached particles,

hoping to be joined together, not in reality, but in a mystical union, any

union, that of the Nation or that of the Labour Movement, it doesn't matter

which so long as it makes you feel like those drunken evenings when we're

all pals together? Equality in the great family of man reeks of the incense

of religious mystification. You need a blocked-up nose to miss the stink.

For myself, I recognize no equality except that which my will to live

according to my desires recognizes in the will to live of others.

Revolutionary equality will be indivisibly individual and collective.

The perspective of power has only one horizon: death. And life goes to this

well of despair so often that in the end it falls in and drowns. Wherever

the fresh water of life stagnates, the features of the drowned man reflect

the faces of the living: the positive, looked at closely, turns out to be

negative, the young are already old and everything we are building is

already a ruin. In the realm of despair, lucidity blinds just as much as

falsehood. We die of not knowing, struck from behind. In addition, the

knowledge of the death that awaits us only increases the torture and brings

on the agony. The disease of attrition that checks, shackles, forbids our

actions, eats us away more surely than a cancer, but nothing spreads the

disease like the acute consciousness of this attrition. I remain convinced

that nothing could save a man who was continually asked: have you noticed

the hand that, with all die respect, is killing you? To evaluate the effect

of each tiny persecution, to estimate neurologically the weight of each

constraint, would be enough to flood the strongest individual with a single

feeling, the feeling of total and terrible powerlessness. The maggots of

constraint are spawned in the very depths of the mind; nothing human can

resist them.

Sometimes I feel as if power is making me like itself: a great energy on the

point of collapsing, a rage powerless to break out, a desire for wholeness

suddenly petrified. An impotent order survives only by ensuring the

impotence of its slaves: Franco and Batista demonstrated this fact with brio

when they castrated captured revolutionaries. The regimes jokingly known as

'democratic' merely humanize castration. At first sight, to bring an old age

prematurely seems less feudal than the use of the knife and ligature. But

only at first sight: for as soon as a lucid mind has understood that

impotence now strikes through the mind itself, we might as well pack up and

go home.

There is a kind of understanding which is allowed by power because it serves

its purposes. To borrow one's lucidity from the light of power is to

illuminate the darkness of despair, to feed truth on lies. Thus the

aesthetic stage is defined: either death against power, or death in power:

Arthur Cravan and Jacques Vaché on one side, the S.S, the mercenary and the

hired killer on the other. For them death is a logical and natural end, the

final confirmation of a permanent state of affairs, the last dot of a

lifeline on which, in the end, nothing was written. Everyone who does not

resist the almost universal attraction of power meets the same fate: the

stupid and confused always, very often the intelligent too. The same rift is

to be found in Drieu and Jacques Rigaux, but they came down on different

sides: the impotence of the first was moulded in submission and servility,

the revolt of the second smashed itself prematurely against the impossible.

The despair of consciousness makes the murderers of Order, the consciousness

of despair makes the murderers of Disorder. The fall back into conformity of

the so-called anarchists of the right is caused by the same gravitational

pull as the fall of damned archangels into the iron jaws of suffering. The

rattles of counter-revolution echo through the vaults of despair.

Suffering is the pain of constraints. An atom of pure delight, no matter how

small, will hold it at bay. To work on the side of delight and authentic

festivity can hardly be distinguished from preparing for a general

insurrection.

In our times, people are invited to take part in a gigantic hunt with myths

and received ideas as quarry, but for safety's sake they are sent without

weapons, or, worse, with paper weapons of pure speculation, into the swamp

of constraints where they finally stick. Perhaps we will get our first taste

of delight by pushing the ideologists of demystification in front of us, so

that we can see how they make out, and either take advantage of their

exploits or advance over their bodies.

As Rosanov says, men are crushed under the wardrobe. Without lifting up the

wardrobe it is impossible to deliver whole peoples from their endless and

unbearable suffering. It is terrible that even one man should be crushed

under such a weight: to want to breathe, and not to be able to. The wardrobe

rests on everybody, and everyone gets his inalienable share of suffering.

And everybody tries to lift up the wardrobe, but not with the same

conviction, not with the same energy. A curious groaning civilization.

Thinkers ask themselves: "What? Men under the wardrobe? However did they get

there?" All the same, they got there. And if someone comes along and proves

in the name of objectivity that the burden can never be removed, each of his

words adds to the weight of the wardrobe, that object which he means to

describe with the universality of his 'objective consciousness'. And the

whole Christian spirit is there, fondling suffering like a good dog and

handing out photographs of crushed but smiling men. "The rationality of the

wardrobe is always the best", proclaim the thousands of books published

every day to be stacked in the wardrobe. And all the while everyone wants to

breathe and no-one can breathe, and many say "We will breathe later", and

most do not die, because they are already dead.

It is now or never.

V THE DECLINE AND FALL OF WORK

The duty to produce alienates the passion for creation. Productive labour is

part and parcel of the technology of law and order. The working day grows

shorter as the empire of conditioning extends.

In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity

of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create. What spark of

humanity, of a possible creativity, can remain alive in a being dragged out

of sleep at six every morning, jolted about in suburban trains, deafened by

the racket of machinery, bleached and steamed by meaningless sounds and

gestures, spun dry by statistical controls, and tossed out at the end of the

day into the entrance halls of railway stations, those cathedrals of

departure for the hell of weekdays and the nugatory paradise of weekends,

where the crowd communes in weariness and boredom? From adolescence to

retirement each 24-hour cycle repeats the same shattering bombardment, like

bullets hitting a window: mechanical repetition, time-which-is-money,

submission to bosses, boredom, exhaustion. From the butchering of youth's

energy to the gaping wound of old age, life cracks in every direction under

the blows of forced labour. Never before has a civilization reached such a

degree of contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in

mortification, felt such a rage to live. The same people who are murdered

slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing,

drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and

inventing a new poetry. Already the front against forced labour is being

formed; its gestures of refusal are moulding the consciousness of the

future. Every call for productivity in the conditions chosen by capitalist

and Soviet economy is a call to slavery.

The necessity of production is so easily proved that any hack philosopher of

industrialism can fill ten books with it. Unfortunately for these

neo-economist thinkers, these proofs belong to the nineteenth century, a

time when the misery of the working classes made the right to work the

counterpart of the right to be a slave, claimed at the dawn of time by

prisoners about to be massacred. Above all it was a question of surviving,

of not disappearing physically. The imperatives of production are the

imperatives of survival; from now on, people want to live, not just to

survive.

The tripalium is an instrument of torture. Labour means 'suffering'. We are

unwise to forget the origin of the words 'travail' and 'labour'. At least

the nobility never forgot their own dignity and the indignity which marked

their bondsmen. The aristocratic contempt for work reflected the master's

contempt for the dominated classes; work was the expiation to which they

were condemned to all eternity by the divine decree which had willed them,

for impenetrable reasons, to be inferior. Work took its place among the

sanctions of Providence as the punishment for poverty, and because it was

the means to a future salvation such a punishment could take on the

attributes of pleasure. Basically, work was less important than submission.

The bourgeoisie does not dominate, it exploits. It does not need to be

master, it prefers to use. Why has nobody seen that the principle of

productivity simply replaced the principle of feudal authority? Why has

nobody wanted to understand?

Is it because work ameliorates the human condition and saves the poor, at

least in illusion, from eternal damnation? Undoubtedly, but today it seems

that the carrot of happier tomorrows has smoothly replaced the carrot of

salvation in the next world. In both cases the present is always under the

heel of oppression.

Is it because it transforms nature? Yes, but what can I do with a nature

ordered in terms of profit and loss, in a world where the inflation of

techniques conceals the deflation of the use-value of life? Besides, just as

the sexual act is not intended to procreate, but makes children by accident,

organized labour transforms the surface of continents as a by-product, not a

purpose. Work to transform the world? Tell me another. The world is being

transformed in the direction prescribed by the existence of forced labour;

which is why it is being transformed so badly.

Perhaps man realizes himself in his forced labour? In the nineteenth century

the concept of work retained a vestige of the notion of creativity. Zola

describes a nailsmiths' contest in which the workers competed in the

perfection of their tiny masterpiece. Love of the trade and the vitality of

an already smothered creativity incontestably helped man to bear ten or

fifteen hours which nobody could have stood if some kind of pleasure had not

slipped into it. The survival of the craft conception allowed each worker to

contrive a precarious comfort in the hell of the factory. But Taylorism

dealt the death-blow to a mentality which had been carefully fostered by

archaic capitalism. It is useless to expect even a caricature of creativity

from the conveyor-belt. Nowadays ambition and the love of the job well done

are the indelible mark of defeat and the most mindless submission. Which is

why, wherever submission is demanded, the old ideological fart wends its

way, from the Arbeit Macht Frei of the concentration camps to the homilies

of Henry Ford and Mao Tse-tung.

So what is the function of forced labour? The myth of power exercised

jointly by the master and God drew its coercive force from the unity of the

feudal system. Destroying the unitary myth, the power of the bourgeoisie

inaugurated, under the flag of crisis, the reign of ideologies, which can

never attain, separately or together, a fraction of the efficacy of myth.

The dictatorship of productive work stepped into the breech. It's mission is

physically to weaken the majority of men, collectively to castrate and

stupefy them in order to make them receptive to the least pregnant, least

virile, most senile ideologies in the entire history of falsehood.

Most of the proletariat at the beginning of the nineteenth century had been

physically enervated, systematically broken by the torture of the workshop.

Revolts came from artisans, from privileged or unemployed groups, not from

workers shattered by fifteen hours of labour. Isn't it disturbing that the

reduction of working time came just when the spectacular ideological

miscellany produced by consumer society was beginning effectively to replace

the feudal myths destroyed by the young bourgeoisie? (People really have

worked for a refrigerator, a car, a television set. Many still do, 'invited'

as they are to consume the passivity and empty time that the 'necessity' of

production 'offers' them.)

Statistics published in 1938 indicated that the use of the most modern

technology then available would reduce necessary working time to three hours

a day. Not only are we a long way off with our seven hours, but after

wearing out generations of workers by promising them the happiness which is

sold today on the installment plan, the bourgeoisie (and its Soviet

equivalent) pursue man's destruction outside the workshop. Tomorrow they

will deck out their five hours of necessary wear and tear with a time of

'creativity' which will grow just as fast as they can fill it with the

impossibility of creating anything (the famous 'leisure explosion').

It has been quite correctly written: "China faces gigantic economic

problems; for her, productivity is a matter of life and death." Nobody would

dream of denying it. What seems important to me is not the economic

imperatives, but the manner of responding to them. The Red Army in 1917 was

a new kind of organization. The Red Army in 1960 is an army such as is found

in capitalist countries. Circumstances have shown that its effectiveness has

been far below the potential of a revolutionary militia. In the same way,

the planned Chinese economy, by refusing to allow federated groups to

organize their work autonomously, condemns itself to become another example

of the perfected form of capitalism called socialism. Has anyone bothered to

study the modes of work of primitive peoples, the importance of play and

creativity, the incredible yield obtained by methods which the application

of modern technology would make a hundred times more efficient? Obviously

not. Every appeal for productivity comes from above. But only creativity is

spontaneously rich. It is not from 'productivity' that a full life is to be

expected, it is not 'productivity' that will produce an enthusiastic

collective response to economic needs. But what can we say when we know how

the cult of work is honoured from Cuba to China, and how well the virtuous

pages of Guizot would sound in a May Day speech?

To the extent that automation and cybernetics foreshadow the massive

replacement of workers by mechanical slaves, forced labour is revealed as

belonging purely to the barbaric practices needed to maintain order. Thus

power manufactures the dose of fatigue necessary for the passive

assimilation of its televised diktats. What carrot is worth working for,

after this? The game is up; there is nothing to lose anymore, not even an

illusion. The organization of work and the organization of leisure are the

blades of the castrating shears whose job is to improve the race of fawning

dogs. One day, will we see strikers, demanding automation and a ten-hour

week, choosing, instead of picketing, to make love in the factories, the

offices and the culture centres? Only the planners, the managers, the union

bosses and the sociologists would be surprised and worried. Not without

reason; after all, their skin is at stake.

VI DECOMPRESSION AND THE THIRD FORCE

Until now, tyranny has merely changed hands. In their common respect for

rulers, antagonistic powers have always fostered the seeds of their future

coexistence. (When the leader of the game takes the power of a Leader, the

revolution dies with the revolutionaries.) Unresolved antagonisms fester,

hiding real contradictions. Decompression is the permanent control of both

antagonists by the ruling class. The third force radicalizes contradictions

and leads to their supersession, in the name of individual freedom and

against all forms of constraint. Power has no option but to smash or

incorporate the third force without admitting its existence.

To sum up. Millions of men lived in a huge building with no doors or

windows. The feeble light of countless oil lamps competed with the

unchanging darkness. As had been the custom since remotest antiquity, the

upkeep of the lamps was the duty of the poor, so that the flow of oil

followed the alternation of revolt and pacification. One day a general

insurrection broke out, the most violent that this people had ever known.

Its leaders demanded a fair allotment of the costs of lighting; a large

number of revolutionaries said that what they considered a public utility

should be free; a few extremists went so far as to clamour for the

destruction of the building, which they claimed was unhealthy, even unfit

for human habitation. As usual, the more reasonable combatants found

themselves helpless before the violence of the conflict. During a

particularly lively clash with the forces of order, a stray bullet pierced

the outer wall, leaving a crack through which daylight streamed in. After a

moment of stupor, this flood of light was greeted with cries of victory. The

solution had been found: all they had to do was to make some more holes. The

lamps were thrown away or put in museums, and power fell to the window

makers. The partisans of radical destruction were forgotten, and even their

discreet liquidation, it seems, went almost unnoticed. (Everyone was arguing

about the number and position of the windows.) Then, a century or two later,

their names were remembered, when the people, that eternal malcontent, had

grown accustomed to plate-glass windows, and took to asking extravagant

questions. To drag out our days in a greenhouse, is that living?" they

asked.

The consciousness of our time oscillates between that of the walled-up man

and that of the prisoner. For the individual, the oscillation takes the

place of freedom; like a condemned man, he paces up and down between the

blank wall of his cell and the barred window that represents the possibility

of escape. If somebody knocks a hole in the cellar of isolation, hope

filters in with the light. The good behaviour of the prisoner depends on the

hope of escape which prisons foster. On the other hand, when he is trapped

by a wall with no windows, a man can only feel the desperate rage to knock

it down or break his head against it, which can only be seen as unfortunate

from the point of view of efficient social organization (even if the suicide

doesn't have the happy idea of going to his death in the style of an

oriental price, immolating all his slaves: judges, bishops, generals,

policemen, psychiatrists, philosophers, managers, specialists, planners...)

The man who is walled up alive has nothing to lose; the prisoner still has

hope. Hope is the leash of submission. When power's boiler is in danger of

exploding, it uses its safety-valve to lower the pressure. It seems to

change; in fact it only adapts itself and resolves its difficulties.

There is no authority which does not see, rising against it, an authority

which is similar but which passes for its opposite. But nothing is more

dangerous for the principle of hierarchical government than the merciless

confrontation of two powers driven by a rage for total annihilation. In such

a conflict, the tidal wave of fanaticism carries away the most stable

values; no-mans-land eats up the whole map, establishing everywhere the

inter-regnum of nothing is true. everything is permitted". History, however,

offers not one example of a titanic conflict which has not opportunely

defused and turned into a comic-opera battle. What is the source of this

decompression? The agreement on matters of principle which is implicitly

reached by the warring powers.

The hierarchical principle remains common to the fanatics of both sides:

opposite the capitalism of Lloyd George and Krupp appears the anticapitalism

of Lenin and Trotsky. From the mirrors of the masters of the present the

masters of the future are already smiling back. Heinrich Heine writes:

                         LSchelnd scheidet der Tyran

                       Denn er weiss, nach seinem Tode

                       Wechselt Willkür nur die HSnde

                    Und die Knechtschaft hat kein Ende.

The tyrant dies smiling; for he knows that after his death tyranny will

merely change hands, and slavery will never end. Bosses differ according to

their modes of domination, but they are still bosses, owners of a power

exercised as a private right. (Lenin's greatness has to do with his romantic

refusal to assume the position of absolute master implied by his

ultra-hierarchical organization of the Bolshevik party; and it is to this

greatness also that the workers' movement is indebted for Kronstadt,

Budapest and batiuchka Stalin.)

From this moment, the point of contact between the two powers becomes the

point of decompression. To identify the enemy with Evil and crown one's own

side with the halo of Good has the strategic advantage of ensuring unity of

action by canalising the energy of the combatants. But this manoeuvre

demands the annihilation of the enemy. Moderates hesitate before such a

prospect; for the radical destruction of the enemy would include the

destruction of what their own side has in common with the enemy. The logic

of Bolshevism demanded the heads of the leaders of social-democracy; the

latter hastily sold out, and they did so precisely because they were

leaders. The logic of anarchism demanded the liquidation of Bolshevik power;

the latter rapidly crushed them, and did so inasmuch as it was hierarchical

power. The same predictable sequence of betrayals threw Durrutti's

anarchists before the united guns of republicans, socialists and Stalinists.

As soon as the leader of the game turns into a Leader. the principle of

hierarchy is saved, and the Revolution sits down to preside over the

execution of the revolutionaries. We must never forget that the

revolutionary project belongs to the masses alone; leaders help it, Leaders

betray it. To begin with, the real struggle takes place between the leader

of the game and the Leader.

The professional revolutionary measures the state of his forces in

quantitative terms, just as any soldier judges an officer's rank by the

number of men under his command. The leaders of so-called insurrectionary

parties dismiss the qualitative in favour of a quantitative expertise. had

the 'reds' been blessed with half a million more men with modern weapons,

the Spanish revolution would still have been lost. It died under the heels

of the people's commissars. The speeches of La Pasionaria already sounded

like funeral orations; pathetic whining drowned the language of deeds, the

spirit of the collectives of Aragon -- the spirit of a radical minority

resolved to sever with a single stroke all the heads of the hydra, not just

its fascist head.

Never, and for good reason, has an absolute confrontation been carried

through. So far the last fight has only had false starts. Everything must be

resumed from scratch. History's only justification is to help us do it.

Under the process of decompression, antagonists who seemed irreconcilable at

first sight grow old together, become frozen in purely formal opposition,

lose their substance, neutralize and moulder into each other. Who would

recognize the Bolshevik with his knife between his teeth in the Gagarinism

of doting Moscow? Today, by the grace of the Ïcumenical miracle, the slogan

Workers of the World, unite" celebrates the union of the world's bosses. A

touching scene. The common element in the antagonism, the seed of power,

which a radical struggle would have rooted out, has grown up to reconcile

the estranged brothers.

Is it as simple as this? Of course not; the farce would lose its

entertainment value. On the international stage, those two old hams,

capitalism and anticapitalism, carry on their lovers' banter. How the

spectators tremble when they begin to quarrel, how they stamp with glee when

peace blesses the loving couple! Is interest flagging? A brick is added to

the Berlin wall; the bloodthirsty Mao gnashes his paper teeth, while in the

background a choir of little Chinese nitwits sings paeons to fatherland,

family and work. Patched up like this, the old melodrama is ready to hit the

road. The ideological spectacle keeps up with the times by bringing out

harmless plastic antagonisms; are you for or against Brigitte Bardot, the

Beatles, mini-cars, hippies, nationalization, spaghetti, old people, the

TUC, mini-skirts, pop art, thermonuclear war, hitch-hiking? There is no one

who is not accosted at every moment of the day by posters, news flashes,

stereotypes, summoned to take sides over each of the prefabricated trifles

that conscientiously stop up all the sources of everyday creativity. In the

hands of power these particles of antagonism are moulded into a magnetic

ring whose function is to make everybody lose their bearings, to pull

everyone out of himself and to scramble lines of force.

Decompression is simply the control of antagonisms by power. The opposition

of two terms is given its real meaning by the introduction of a third. As

long as there are only two equal and opposite polarities, they neutralize

each other, since each is defined by the other; as it is impossible to

choose between them, we are led into the domain of tolerance and relativity

which is so dear to the bourgeoisie. One can well understand the importance

for the apostolic hierarchy of the dispute between Manicheism and

Trinitarianism! In a merciless confrontation between God and Satan, what

would have been left of ecclesiastical authority? Nothing, as the

millenarian crises demonstrated. That is why the secular arm carried out its

holy offices, and the pyres crackled for the mystics of God or the devil,

those overbold theologians who questioned the principle of Three in One. The

temporal masters of Christianity were resolved that only they should be

entitled to treat of the difference between the master of Good and the

master of Evil. They were the great intermediaries through which the choice

of one side or the other had to pass; they controlled the paths to salvation

and damnation, and this control was more important to them than salvation

and damnation themselves. On earth they proclaimed themselves judges without

appeal, since they had also decided to be the judged in an afterlife whose

laws they had invented.

The Christian myth defused the bitter Manichean conflict by offering to the

believer the possibility of individual salvation; this was the breach opened

up by the Poor Bugger of Nazareth. Thus man escaped the rigours of a

confrontation which necessarily led to the destruction of values, to

nihilism. But the same stroke denied him the opportunity to reconquer

himself by means of a general upheaval, the chance of taking his place in

the universe by chasing out the gods and their slavemasters. Therefore, the

movement of decompression appears to have the function of shackling man's

most irreducible desire, the desire to be completely himself.

In all conflicts between opposing sides, an irrepressible upsurge of

individual desires takes place and often reaches a threatening intensity. To

this extent we are justified in talking of a third force. From the

individual's point of view, the third force is what the force of

decompression is from the point of view of power. The small chance of every

struggle, it radicalizes insurrections, denounces false problems, threatens

power in its very structure. It is what Brecht was referring to in one of

his Keuner stories: When a proletarian was brought to court and asked if he

wished to take the oath in the ecclesiastical or the lay form, he replied

'I'm out of work.'" The third force does not hope for the withering away of

constraints, but aims to supersede them. Prematurely crushed or

incorporated, it becomes by inversion a force of decompression. Thus, the

salvation of the soul is nothing but the will to live, incorporated through

myth, mediated, emptied of its real content. On the other hand, their

peremptory demand for a full life explains the hatred incurred by certain

gnostic sects or by the Brethren of the Free Spirit. During the decline of

Christianity, the struggle between Pascal and the Jesuits spotlighted the

opposition between the reformist doctrine of individual salvation and

compromise with heaven and the project of realizing God by the nihilist

destruction of the world. And, once it had got rid of the dead wood of

theology, the third force survived to inspire Babeuf's struggle against the

million doré, the Marxist project of the complete man, the dreams of

Fourier, the explosion of the Commune, and the violence of the anarchists.

Individualism, alcoholism, collectivism, activism... the variety of

ideologies shows that there are a hundred ways of being on the side of

power. There is only one way to be radical. The wall that must be knocked

down is immense, but it has been cracked so many times that soon a single

cry will be enough to bring it crashing to the ground. Let the formidable

reality of the third force emerge at last from the mists of history, with

all the individual passions that have fuelled the insurrections of the past!

Soon we shall find that an energy is locked up in everyday life which can

move mountains and abolish distances. The long revolution is preparing to

write works in the ink of action whose unknown or nameless authors will

flock to join Sade, Fourier, Babeuf, Marx, Lacenaire, Stirner, Lautréamont,

Léhautier, Vaillant, Henry, Villa, Zapata, Makhno, the Communards, the

insurrectionaries of Hamburg, Kiel, Kronstadt, Asturias -- all those who

have not yet played their last card in a game which we have only just

joined: the great gamble whose stake is freedom.

COMMUNICATION MADE IMPOSSIBLE:

POWER AS UNIVERSAL MEDIATION

In the order of power, mediation consists of false needs in which the

illusion of legal reform appears as the sole general will arising from

mediations. These false needs have grown to a greater and greater extent,

but are today threatened by the dictatorship of the consumable (VII), the

primacy of exchange over gift (VIII), the cybernetic techniques (IX) and the

reign of quantity (X).

VII THE AGE OF HAPPINESS

The contemporary welfare state belatedly provides the guarantees of survival

which were demanded by the disinherited members of the production society of

former days (1). Richness of survival entails the pauperisation of life (2).

Purchasing power is licence to purchase power, to become an object in the

order of things. The tendency is for both oppressor and oppressed to fall,

albeit at different speeds, under one and the same dictatorship: the

dictatorship of consumer goods (3).

The face of happiness vanished from art and literature as it began to be

reproduced along endless walls and hoardings, offering to each particular

passerby the universal image in which he is invited to recognize himself.

Three cheers for Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham: happiness is not a myth! The

more we produce, the better we shall live," writes the humanist Fourastié,

and another genius, general Eisenhower, takes up the refrain: to save the

economy, we must buy, buy anything." Production and consumption are the dugs

of modern society. Thus suckled, humanity grows in strength and beauty:

rising standards of living, all mod. cons, a choice of entertainments,

culture for all, the comfort of your dreams. On the horizon of the

Khrushchev report, the rosy dawn of Communism is breaking at last, a new era

heralded by two revolutionary decrees: the abolition of taxes and free

transport for all. Yes, the golden age is in sight; or rather within

spitting distance.

In this upheaval one thing has disappeared: the proletariat. Where on earth

can it be? Spirited away? Gone underground? Or has it been put in a museum?

Sociologi disputant. We hear from some quarters that in the advanced

industrial countries the proletariat no longer exists, what with all these

stereograms, TV sets, slumberland mattresses, mini-cars, tower blocks and

bingo halls. Others denounce this as a sleight of hand and indignantly point

out a few remaining workers whose low wages and wretched conditions do

undeniably evoke the 19th century. Backward sectors", comes the retort, in

the process of reabsorption". Can you deny that the direction of economic

development is towards Sweden, Czechoslovakia, the welfare state, and not

towards India?

The black curtain rises: the hunt is on for the starving, for the last of

the proletarians. The prize goes to the one who sells him his car and his

mixer, his bar and his home library; the one who teaches him to see himself

in the leering hero of an advertisement that reassures him: You smile when

you smoke Cadets."

And happy, happy humanity so soon to receive the parcels which were

redirected to them at such great cost by the rebels of the nineteenth

century. The insurgents of Lyon and Fourmies have certainly proved luckier

dead than alive. The millions of human beings who were shot, tortured,

jailed, starved, treated like animals and made the objects of a conspiracy

of ridicule can sleep in peace in their communal graves, for at least the

struggle in which they died has enabled their descendants, isolated in their

air-conditioned rooms, to believe on the strength of their daily dose of

television that they are happy and free. The Communards went down, fighting

to the last, so that you too could own a Philips hi-fi stereo system. A fine

future, and one to realize all the dreams of the past, there is no doubt

about it.

Only the present is left out of the reckoning. Ungrateful and uncouth, the

younger generation doesn't want to know about this glorious past which is

offered as a free gift to every consumer of Trotskyist-reformist ideology.

They claim that to make demands means to make demands for the here and now.

They recall that the meaning of past struggles is rooted in the present of

the men who fought them, and that despite different historical conditions

they themselves are living in the same present. In short, one might say that

radical revolutionary currents are inspired by one unchanging project: the

project of being a whole man, a will to live totally which Marx was the

first to provide with scientific tactics. But these are pernicious theories

which the holy churches of Christ and Stalin never miss a chance to condemn.

More money, more fridges, more holy sacraments and more GNP, that's what is

needed to satisfy our revolutionary appetites.

Are we condemned to the state of well-being? peace-loving citizens will

inevitably deplore the forms taken by the opposition to a programme which

everybody agrees with, from Khrushchev to Schweitzer, from the Pope to Fidel

Castro, from Aragon to the late Mr.Kennedy.

In December 1956, a thousand young people ran wild in the streets of

Stockholm, setting fire to cars, smashing neon signs, tearing down hoardings

and looting department stores. At Merlebach, during a strike called to force

the mine-owners to bring up the bodies of seven miners killed by a cave-in,

the workers set about the cars parked at the pit head. In January 1961,

strikers in Liege burned down the Guillemins station and destroyed the

offices of the newspaper La Meuse. Seaside resorts in England and Belgium

were devastated by the combined efforts of hundreds of mods and rockers in

March 1964. In Amsterdam (1966) the workers held the streets for several

days. Not a month goes by without a wildcat strike which pits the workers

against both employers and union bosses. Welfare State? The people of Watts

have given their answer.

A Ford worker summed up his difference of opinion with the B.F.Skinners,

Doxiadis', Lord Robenses, Norbert Weiners and other watchdogs of the future

in the following terms: Since 1936 I have been fighting for higher wages. My

father before me fought for higher wages. I've got a TV, a fridge and a

Cortina. If you ask me it's been a dog's life from start to finish."

In action, as in words, the new poetry just doesn't get on with the Welfare

State.

In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy:

equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, and freedom through

consumption. The dictatorship of consumer goods has finally destroyed the

barriers of blood, lineage and race; this would be good cause for

celebration were it not that consumption, by its logic of things, forbids

all qualitative difference and recognizes only differences of quantity

between values and between men. The distance has not changed between those

who possess a lot and those who possess a small but ever-increasing amount;

but the intermediate stages have multiplied, and have, so to speak, brought

the two extremes, rulers and ruled, closer to the same centre of mediocrity.

To be rich nowadays merely means to possess a large number of poor objects.

Consumer goods are tending to lose all use-value. Their nature is to be

consumable at all costs. (Recall the recent vogue of the nothing-box in the

USA: an object which cannot be used for anything at all.) And as General

Eisenhower so candidly explained, the present economic system can only be

rescued by turning man into a consumer, by identifying him with the largest

possible number of consumable values, which is to say, non-values, or empty,

fictitious, abstract values. After being the most precious kind of capital",

in Stalin's happy phrase, man must now become the most valued of consumer

goods. The stereotyped images of the star, the poor man, the communist, the

murderer-for-love, the law-abiding-citizen, the rebel, the bourgeois, will

replace man, putting in his place a system of multicopy categories arranged

according to the irrefutable logic of robotisation. Already the idea of

'teenager' tends to define the buyer in conformity with the product he buys,

to reduce his variety to a varied but limited range of objects in the shops,

(Records, guitars, Levis...). You are no longer as old as you feel or as old

as you look, but as old as what you buy. The time of production-society

where 'time is money' will give way to the Time of consumption, measured in

terms of products bought, worn out and thrown away: a Time of premature old

age, which is the eternal youth of trees and stones.

The truth of the concept of immiseration has been demonstrated today not, as

Marx expected, in the field of goods necessary for survival, since these,

far from becoming scarce, have become more and more abundant; but rather in

relation to survival itself, which is always the enemy of real life.

Affluence had seemed to promise to all men the Dolce Vita previously lived

by the feudal aristocracy. But in the event affluence and its comforts are

only the children of capitalist productivity, children doomed to age

prematurely as soon as the marketing system has transformed them into mere

objects of passive consumption. Work to survive, survive by consuming,

survive to consume, the hellish cycle is complete. In the realm of

economism, survival is both necessary and sufficient. This is the

fundamental truth of bourgeois society. But it is also true that a

historical period based on such an antihuman truth can only be a period of

transition, an intermediate stage between the unenlightened life that was

lived by the feudal masters and the life that will be constructed rationally

and passionately by the masters without slaves. Only thirty years are left

if we want to end the transitional period of slaves without masters before

it has lasted two centuries.

With regard to everyday life, the bourgeois revolution looks more like a

counter-revolution. The market in human values has rarely known such a

collapse. The aristocratic life with its wealth of passions and adventures

suffered the fate of a palace partitioned off into furnished rooms, gloomy

bedsitters whose drabness is made even more unbearable by the sign outside

which proclaims, like a challenge hurled at the Universe, that this is the

age of freedom and well-being. From now on hatred gives way to contempt,

love to cohabitation, the ridiculous to the stupid, passion to

sentimentality, desire to envy, reason to calculation, the taste for life to

the fear of death. The utterly contemptible morality of profit came to

replace the utterly detestable morality of honour; the mysterious and

perfectly ridiculous power of birth and blood gave way to the perfectly

ubuesque power of money. The children of August 4th 1789 took bankers'

orders and sales charts as their coats of arms; mystery was now enshrined in

their ledgers.

Wherein lies the mystery of money? Clearly in that it represents a sum of

beings and things that can be appropriated. The nobleman's coat of arms

expresses God's choice and the real power exercised by his elect; money is

only a sign of what might be acquired, it is a draft on power, a possible

choice.

The feudal God, who appeared to be the basis of the social order, was really

only its magnificent crowning excuse. Money, that odourless god of the

bourgeois, is also a mediation; a social contract. It is a god swayed not by

prayers or by promises but by science and specialist know-how. Its mystery

no longer lies in a dark and impenetrable totality but in the sum of an

infinite number of partial certainties; no longer in the quality of lordship

but in the number of marketable people and things (for example, what a

hundred thousand pounds puts within the reach of its possessor).

In the economy of free-trade capitalism, dominated by imperatives of

production, wealth alone confers power and honour. Master of the means of

production and of labour power, it controls the development of productive

forces and consumer goods and thus its owners have the pick of the myriad

fruits of an infinite progress. However, as this capitalism transforms

itself into its contrary, state-planned economy, the prestige of the

capitalist playing the market with his millions fades away and with it the

caricature of the pot-bellied, cigar-puffing merchant of human flesh. Today

we have managers, who derive their power from their talent for organization;

and already computers are doing them out of a job. Managers, of course, do

get their monthly paychecks but do they do anything worthwhile with them?

Can they enjoy making their salary signify the wealth of possible choices

before them: building a Xanadou, keeping a harem, cultivating

flower-children? When all possibilities of consumption are already

organized, how can wealth preserve its representable value? Under the

dictatorship of consumer goods, money melts away like a snowball in hell.

Its significance passes to objects with more representational value, more

tangible objects better adapted to the spectacle of the welfare state.

Consumer goods are already encroaching on the power of money, because

wrapped in ideology, they are the true signs of power. Before long its only

remaining justification will be the quantity of objects and useless gadgets

it enables one to acquire and throw away at an ever-accelerating pace; only

the quantity and the pace matter, because mass-distribution automatically

wipes out quality and rarity-appeal. From now on the ability to consume,

faster and faster, great quantities of cars, alcohol, houses, TV-sets and

girlfriends will show how far you've got up the hierarchical ladder. From

the superiority of blood to the power of money, from the superiority of

money to the power of the gadget, the nec plus ultra of Christian/socialist

civilization: a civilization of prosaism and vulgar detail. A nice nest for

Nietzsche's little men".

Purchasing power is a license to purchase power. The old proletariat sold

its labour power in order to subsist; what little leisure time it had was

passed pleasantly enough in conversations, arguments, drinking, making love,

wandering, celebrating and rioting. The new proletarian sells his labour

power in order to consume. When he's not flogging himself to death to get

promoted in the labour hierarchy, he's being persuaded to buy himself

objects to distinguish himself in the social hierarchy. The ideology of

consumption becomes the consumption of ideology. The cultural détente

between east and west is not accidental! On the one hand, homo consomator

buys a bottle of whisky and gets as a free gift the lie that accompanies it.

On the other, Communist man buys ideology and gets as a free gift a bottle

of vodka. Paradoxically, Soviet and capitalist regimes are taking a common

path, the first thanks to their economy of production, the second thanks to

their economy of consumption.

In the USSR, the surplus labour of the workers does not, strictly speaking,

directly enrich their comrade the director of the enterprise. it simply

strengthens his power as an organizer and a bureaucrat. His surplus-value is

a surplus-value of power. (But this new-style surplus-value is nevertheless

subject to the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Marx's laws of

economic life are confirmed today in the economy of life.) He earns it, not

on the basis of money-capital, but on the basis of a primitive accumulation

of confidence-capital gained by his docile absorption of ideological matter.

The car and the dacha which are thrown in to reward his services to the

Socialist Fatherland, to Output and the Cause, foretell a form of social

organization in which money will indeed have disappeared, giving way to

honorific distinctions of rank, a mandarinate of the biceps and of

specialized thought. (Remember the special treatment given to Stakhanovites,

to 'heroes of space' and scrapers of catgut and canvas.)

In capitalist countries, the material profit gained by the employer from

both production and consumption is still distinct from the ideological

profit which the employer is no longer alone in deriving from the

organization of consumption. This is all that prevents us from reducing the

difference between manager and worker to the difference between a new Jaguar

every year and a mini lovingly maintained for five. But we must recognize

that the tendency is towards planning, and planning tends to quantify social

differences in terms of the ability to consume and to make others consume.

With the differences growing in number and shrinking in significance, the

real differences between rich and poor is diminishing, and mankind is

levelled into mere variations on poverty. The culmination of the process

would be a cybernetic society composed of specialists ranked hierarchically

according to their aptitude for consuming and making others consume the

doses of power necessary for the functioning of a gigantic social computer

of which they themselves would be simultaneously the programme and the

printout. A society of exploited exploiters where some slaves are more equal

than others.

There remains the third world. There remain the old forms of oppression.

That the serfs of the latifundia should be the contemporaries of the new

proletariat seems to me a perfect formula for the explosive mixture from

which the total revolution will be born. Who would dare to suppose that the

South American Indians will be satisfied with land reform and lay down their

arms when the best-paid workers in Europe are demanding a radical change in

their way of life? From now on, the revolt against the State of Well-Being

sets the minimum demands for world revolution. You can choose to forget

this, but you forget it at your peril... as Saint-Just said, those who make

a revolution by halves do nothing but dig their own graves.

VIII EXCHANGE AND GIFT

The nobility and the proletariat conceive human relationships on the model

of giving, but the proletarian way of giving supersedes the feudal gift. The

bourgeoisie, the class of exchange, is the lever which enables the feudal

project to be overthrown and superseded in the long revolution (1). History

is the continuous transformation of natural alienation into social

alienation, and the continuous strengthening of a contradictory movement of

opposition which will overcome all alienation and end history. The

historical struggle against natural alienation transforms natural alienation

into social alienation, but the movement of historical disalienation

eventually attacks social alienation itself and reveals that it is based on

magic. This magic has to do with privative appropriation. It is expressed

through sacrifice. Sacrifice is the archaic form of exchange. The extreme

quantification of exchange reduces man to an object. From this rock bottom a

new type of human relationship, involving neither exchange nor sacrifice,

can be born (2).

The bourgeoisie administers a precarious and none-too-glorious interregnum

between the sacred hierarchy of feudalism and the anarchic order of future

classless societies. The bourgeois no-man's-land of exchange is the

uninhabitable region separating the old, unhealthy pleasure of giving

oneself, in which the aristocrats indulged, and the pleasure of giving

through love of oneself, which the new generations of proletarians are

little by little beginning to discover.

'Fair exchange' is the favourite absurdity of capitalism and its essentially

similar competitors. The USSR 'offers' its hospitals and technicians, just

as the USA 'offers' its investments and good offices, and supermarkets

'offer' 'free gifts'.

But the fact is that the meaning of giving has been rooted out from our

minds, feelings and actions. Remember Breton and his friends offering roses

to the pretty girls on the Boulevard Poissoniere, and immediately arousing

the suspicion and hostility of the public.

The infection of human relations by exchange and bargaining is plainly

linked to the existence of the bourgeoisie. The fact that exchange persists

in a part of the world where it is claimed that there is a classless society

suggests that the shadow of the bourgeoisie continues to rule under the red

flag. Especially as the pleasure of giving, which appears in all industrial

societies, defines very clearly the frontier between the world of

calculation and the world of exuberance, of festivity. This style of giving

has nothing to do with the prestige-gift practiced by the nobility,

hopelessly imprisoned by the notion of sacrifice. The proletariat really

does carry the project of human fullness, the project of total life: a

project in which the aristocracy had failed, albeit failed magnificently.

But let's give the devil his due: it is through the historical presence and

mediation of the bourgeoisie that such a future becomes accessible to the

proletariat. Is it not thanks to the technical progress and the productive

forces developed by capitalism that the proletariat is in a position to

realize, through the scientifically elaborated project of a new society, the

egalitarian visions, the dreams of omnipotence and the desire to live

without dead time? Today everything confirms the mission, or rather the

historical opportunity of the proletariat: the destruction and supersession

of feudalism. And it will do it by trampling underfoot the bourgeoisie,

which is doomed to represent merely a transitional period in the development

of man, albeit a transitional period without which the superseding of the

feudal project would have been inconceivable: an essential stage, then,

which created the lever without which unitary power would never have been

overthrown, and above all could never have been transformed and corrected

according to the project of the whole man. The invention of God shows that

unitary power was already a world for the whole man, but for a whole man

standing on his head. All that was required was to turn it right side up.

No liberation is possible this side of economics; in the world defined by

economics there is only a hypothetical economics of survival. With these two

truths the bourgeoisie is spurring mankind on towards the supersession of

economics, towards a point beyond history. So the bourgeoisie is doing an

even greater service than that of putting technology at the service of

poetry. Its greatest day will be the day it disappears.

Exchange is linked to the survival of primitive hordes in the same way as

privative appropriation; both together constitute the fundamental axiom on

which the history of mankind has been built up to the present day.

When the first men found that it gave them more security in the face of a

hostile nature, the formation of hunting territories laid the foundations of

a social organization which has imprisoned us ever since. (Cf.Raoul and

Laura Makarius: Totem et exagomie.) Primitive man's unity with nature is

essentially magical. Man only really separates himself from nature by

transforming it through technology, and as he transforms it he disenchants

it. But the use of technology is determined by social organization. The

birth of society coincides with the invention of the tool. More:

organization itself is the first coherent technique of struggle against

nature. Social organization -- hierarchical, since it is based on private

appropriation -- gradually destroys the magical bond between man and nature,

but it preserves the magic for its own use: it creates between itself and

mankind a mythical unity modelled on the original participation in the

mystery of nature. Framed by the 'natural' relations of prehistoric man,

social organization slowly dissolves this frame that defines and imprisons

it. From this point of view, history is just the transformation of natural

alienation into social alienation: a process of disalienation becomes a

process of social alienation, a movement of liberation only produces new

chains; until the will for human liberation launches a direct attack upon

the whole collection of paralyzing mechanisms, that is on the social

organization based on privative appropriation. This is the movement of

disalienation which will undo history and realize it in new modes of life.

Effectively, the bourgeoisie's accession to power represents man's victory

over natural forces. But as soon as this happens, hierarchical social

organization, which was born out of the struggle against hunger, sickness,

discomfort... loses its justification, and can no longer escape taking full

responsibility for the malaise of industrial civilizations. Today men no

longer blame their sufferings on the hostility of nature, but on the tyranny

of a perfectly inadequate and perfectly anachronistic form of society. When

it destroyed the magical power of the feudal lords, the bourgeoisie

pronounced the death sentence on the magic of hierarchical power itself. The

proletariat will carry out this sentence. What the bourgeoisie began by

historical processes will now be finished off in opposition to its own

narrow conception of history. But it will still be a historical struggle, a

class struggle which will realize history.

The hierarchical principle is the magic spell that has blocked the path of

men in their historical struggles for freedom. From now on, no revolution

will be worthy of the name if it does not involve, at the very least, the

radical elimination of all hierarchy.

As soon as the members of a horde mark out a hunting territory and claim

private ownership of it, they find themselves confronted by a hostility

which is no longer the hostility of wild animals, weather, inhospitable

regions, or sickness, but that of human groups who are excluded from the

hunting-grounds. Man's genius found a way out of the animal dilemma: destroy

the rival group or be destroyed by it. This way was through treaties,

contracts and exchanges, which are the basis of primitive communities.

Between the period of nomadic food-gathering hordes and that of agricultural

societies, the survival of clans required a triple exchange: exchange of

women, exchange of food and exchange of blood. Magical thinking provides

this operation with a supreme controller, a master of exchanges, a power

beyond and above the contracting parties. The birth of the gods coincides

with the twin birth of sacred myth and hierarchical power.

Of course this exchange is never of equal benefit to both clans. The problem

is always to ensure the neutrality of the excluded clan without actually

letting it into the hunting territory. And agricultural societies refined

these tactics. The excluded class, who were tenants before they became

slaves, enter the landowning group not as landowners, but as their degraded

reflection (the famous myth of the Fall), the mediation between the land and

its masters. Why do they submit? Because of the coherent hold over them

exercised by the myth -- although it's not the deliberate intention of the

masters (that would be to credit them with a rationality which was still

foreign to them). This myth conceals the cunning of exchange, the imbalance

in the sacrifice which each side agrees to make. The excluded class really

sacrifice an important part of their life to the landowner: they accept his

authority and work for him. The master mythically sacrifices his authority

and his power as landowner to the dominated class: he is ready to pay for

the safety of his people. God is the underwriter of the transaction and the

defender of the myth. He punishes those who break the contract, while those

who keep it he rewards with power: mythical power for those who sacrifice

themselves in reality, real power for those who sacrifice themselves in

myth. History and mythology show that the master could go as far as to

sacrifice his life to the mythical principle. The fact that he payed the

price of the alienation which he imposed on others reinforced the master's

divine character. But it seems that a make-believe execution, or one in

which he was replaced by a deputy, soon released the master from such a hard

bargain. When the Christian God delegated his son to the world, he gave

generations of bosses a perfect model by which to authenticate their own

sacrifice.

Sacrifice is the archaic form of exchange. It is a magical exchange,

unquantified, irrational. it dominated human relationships, including

commercial relationships, until merchant capitalism and its

money-the-measure-of-all-things had carved out such a large area in the

world of slaves, serfs and burghers that the economy could appear as a

particular zone, a domain separated from life. When money appears, the

element of exchange in the feudal gift begins to win out. The

sacrifice-gift, the potlatch -- that exchange-game of loser-takes-all in

which the size of the sacrifice determines the prestige of the giver --

could hardly find a place in a rationalized exchange economy. Forced out of

the sectors dominated by economic imperatives, it finds itself reincarnated

in values such as hospitality, friendship and love: refuges doomed to

disappear as the dictatorship of quantified exchange (market value)

colonises everyday life and turns it into a market.

Merchant and industrial capitalism accelerated the quantification of

exchange. The feudal gift was rationalized according to the rigorous model

of commerce. The game of exchange became a matter of calculation. The

playful Roman promise to sacrifice a cock to the gods in exchange for a

peaceful voyage remained outside the grasp of commercial measurement because

of the disparity of the things that were exchanged. And we can well imagine

that the age in which a man like Fourquet could ruin himself in order to

shine more brightly in the eyes of his contemporaries produced a poetry

which has disappeared from our times, which take as their model of a human

relationship the exchange of 35p for an 8oz. steak.

And so sacrifice came to be quantified, rationalized, measured out and

quoted on the stock exchange. But what is left of the magic of sacrifice in

a world of market values? And what is left of the magic of power, the sacred

terror that impels the model employee to tip his hat respectfully to the

boss? In a society where the quantity of gadgets and ideologies produced

represents the quantity of power consumed, exercised and used up, magical

relationships evaporate, leaving hierarchical power exposed to the full

blast of opposition. When the last bastion falls, it will be either the end

of a world or the end of the world. It's up to us to knock it down before it

falls down by itself and drags us all with it.

Rigorously quantified, first by money and then by what you might call

'sociometric units of power', exchange pollutes all our relationships, all

our feelings, all our thoughts. Where exchange is dominant, only things are

left: a world of thing-men plugged into the organization charts of the

computer freaks: the world of reification. But on the other hand it also

gives us the chance radically to restructure our styles of life and thought.

A rock bottom from which everything can start again.

The feudal mind seemed to conceive the gift as a sort of haughty refusal to

exchange, a will to deny interchangeability. This refusal went with their

contempt for money and common measurement. Of course, sacrifice excludes

pure giving; but there was often so much room for play, humanity and

gratuitous gestures that inhumanity, religion and seriousness could pass for

accessories to such preoccupations as war, love, friendship, or hospitality.

By giving themselves, the nobility united their power with the totality of

cosmic forces and claimed control over the totality which myth had made

sacred. The bourgeoisie exchanged being for having and lost the mythical

unity of being and the world: the totality fell into fragments.

Semi-rational exchange in production implicitly makes a creativity that is

reduced to labour-power equal in value to its hourly wage. Semi-rational

exchange in consumption implicitly makes consumer-experience (life reduced

to the activity of consumption) equal in value to an amount of power which

indicates the consumer's position in the hierarchical organization chart.

The sacrifice of the master is followed by the last stage of sacrifice, the

sacrifice of the specialist.

In order to consume, the specialist makes others consume according to a

cybernetic programme whose hyperrationality of exchange will abolish

sacrifice... and man. If pure exchange ever comes to regulate the modes of

existence of the robot-citizens of the cybernetic democracy, sacrifice will

cease to exist. Objects need no justification to make them obedient.

Sacrifice forms no part of the programme of machines, or of the antagonistic

project, the project of the whole man.

The crumbling away of human values under the influence of exchange

mechanisms leads to the crumbling of exchange itself. The insufficiency of

the feudal gift means that new human relationships must be built on the

principle of pure giving. We must rediscover the pleasure of giving: giving

because you have so much. What beautiful and priceless potlatches the

affluent society will see -- whether it likes it or not! -- when the

exuberance of the younger generation discovers the pure gift. The growing

passion for stealing books, clothes, food, weapons or jewelry simply for the

pleasure of giving them away gives us a glimpse of what the will to live has

in store for consumer society.

Prefabricated needs are confronted with the unitary need for a new style of

life. Art, the economics of experience, has been absorbed by the market.

Desires and dreams work for Madison Avenue now. Everyday life has crumbled

into a series of moments as interchangeable as the gadgets which occupy

them: mixers, stereograms, contraceptives, euphorimeters, sleeping pills.

Everywhere equal particles vibrate in the uniform light of power. Equality,

justice. Exchange of nothings, restrictions and prohibitions. Nothing

moving, only dead time passing.

We will have to renew our acquaintance with the feudal imperfection, not in

order to make it perfect but in order to supersede it. We will have to

rediscover the harmony of unitary society and liberate it from the divine

phantom and the sacred hierarchy. The new innocence is not so far removed

from the ordeals and judgments of God: the inequality of blood is closer to

the equality of free individuals, irreducible to one another, than bourgeois

equality is. The cramped style of the nobility is only a crude sketch of the

grand style which will be invented by masters without slaves. But what a

world is trapped between this style of life and the mere way of living on,

surviving, which ravages so many existences in our time!

IX TECHNOLOGY AND ITS MEDIATED USE

Contrary to the interests of those who control its use, technology tends to

disenchant the world. Mass consumption society strips gadgets of any magical

value. Similarly, organisation (a technique for handling new techniques)

robs new productive forces of their subversive appeal and their power of

disruption. Organisation thus stands revealed as nothing but the pure

organisation of authority (1). Alienated mediations make man weaker as they

become indispensible. A social mask disguises people and things. In the

present stage of privative appropriation, this mask transforms its wearers

into dead things, commodities. Nature no longer exists. To rediscover nature

means to reinvent it as a worthwhile adversary by constructing new social

relationships. With the expansion of material equipment, the old

hierarchical society is bursting at the seams (2)

The same bankruptcy is evident in non-industrial civilisations, where people

are still dying of starvation, and automated civilisations, where people are

already dying od boredom. Every paradise is artificial. The life of a

Trobriand islander, rich in spite of ritual and taboo, is at the mercy of a

smallpox epidemic; the life of an ordinary Swede, poor in spite of his

comforts, is at the mercy of suicide and survival sickness.

Rousseauism and pastoral idylls accompany the first throbbings of the

industrial machine. The ideology of progress, as one finds it in Condorcet

or Adam Smith, emerged from the old myth of the Four Ages. With the age of

iron leading into the golden age, it seemed 'natural' that progress should

fulfil itself as a return: a return to the state of innocence before the

Fall.

The belief in the magical power of technology goes hand in hand with its

opposite, the movement of disenchantment. The machine is the model of the

intelligible. There is no mystery, nothing obscure in its drive-belts, cogs

and gears; it can all be explained perfectly. But the machine is also the

miracle that is to transport man into the realms of happiness and freedom.

Besides, this ambiguity is useful to its masters: the old con about happy

tomorrows and the green grass over the hill operates at various levels to

justify the rational exploitation of men today. Thus it is not the logic of

disenchantment that shakes people's faith in progress so much as the inhuman

use of technical potential, the way that its mystical justification begins

to grate. While the labouring classes and the underdeveloped peoples still

offered the spectacle of their slowly decreasing material poverty, the

enthusiasm for progress still drew ample nourishment from the troughs of

liberal ideology and its extension, socialism. But, a century after the

spontaneous demystification of the Lyons workers, when they smashed the

looms, a general crisis broke out, springing this time from the crisis of

big industry: Fascist regression, sickly dreams of a return to artisanry and

corporatism, the Ubuesque master-race of blond beasts.

Today, the promises of the old society of production are raining down on our

heads in an avalanche of consumer goods that nobody would venture to call

mana from heaven. You can hardly believe in the magical power of gadgets in

the same way as people used to believe in productive forces. There is a

certain hagiographical literature on the steam hammer. One cannot imagine

much on the electric toothbrush. The mass production of instruments of

comfort -- all equally revolutionary according to the publicity handouts --

has given the most unsophisticated of men the right to express an opinion on

the marvels of technological innovation in a tone as familiar as the hand he

sticks up the barmaid's skirt. The first landing on Mars will pass unnoticed

on Blackpool beach.

Admittedly, the yoke and harness, the steam engine, electricity and the rise

of nuclear energy all disturbed and altered the infrastructure of society

(though this was almost accidental). But today it would be foolish to expect

new productive forces to upset modes of production. The blossoming of

technology has seen the birth of a super-technology of synthesis which could

prove as important as the social community, that first of all technical

syntheses, founded at the dawn of time. Perhaps more important still; for if

cybernetics was taken from its masters, it might be able to free human

groups from labour and from social alienation. This was precisely the

project of Charles Fourier in an age when utopia was still possible.

But between Fourier and the cyberneticians who control the operational

organisation of technology lies the distance between freedom and slavery. Of

course, the cybernetic project claims that it is already sufficiently

developed to be able to solve all the problems raised by the appearance of a

new technique. But don't you believe it

1: The permanent development of productive forces, the exploding mass

production of consumer goods, promise nothing. Musical air-conditioners and

solar-ovens stand unheralded and unsung. We see a weariness coming, and one

that is already so obviously present that sooner or later it's bound to

develop into a critique of organisation itself

2: For all its flexibility, the cybernetic synthesis will never be able to

conceal the fact that it is only the superseding synthesis of the different

forms of government that have ruled over men, and their final stage. How

could it hope to disguise the inherent alienation that no power has ever

managed to shield from the weapons of criticism and the criticism of

weapons?

By laying down the basis for a perfect power structure, the cyberneticians

will only stimulate the perfection of refusal. Their programming of new

techniques will be shattered by the same techniques turned to its own use by

another kind of organisation. A revolutionary organisation

Technocratic organisation raises technical mediation to its highest point of

coherence. It has been known for ages that the master uses the slave as a

means to appropriate the objective world, that the tool only alienates the

worker as long as it belongs to a master. Similarly in the realm of

consumption: it's not the goods that are inherently alienating, but the

conditioning that leads their buyers to choose them and the ideology in

which they are wrapped. The tool in production and the conditioning of

choice in consumption are the mainstays of the fraud: they are the

mediations which move man the producer and man the consumer to the illusion

of action in a real passivity and transform him into an essentially

dependent thing. The stolen mediations separate the individual from himself,

his desires, his dreams, and his will to live; and so people come to believe

in th myth that you can't do without them, or the power that governs them.

Where power fails to paralyse with constraints, it paralyses by suggestion:

by forcing everyone to use crutches of which it is the sole supplier. Power

as the sum of alienating mediations is only waiting for the holy water of

cybernetics to baptise it into the state of Totality. But total power does

not exist, only totalitarian powers. And the baptism of cybernetics has

already been cancelled owing to lack of interest.

Because the objective world (or nature, if you prefer) has been grasped by

means of alienated mediations (tools, thoughts, false needs), it ends up

surrounded by a sort of screen: so that, paradoxically, the more man

transforms himself and the world, the more it becomes alien to him. The veil

of social relations envelops the natural world totally. What we call

'natural' today is about as natural as Nature Girl lipstick. The instruments

of praxis do not belong to the agents of praxis, the workers: and it is

obviously because of this that the opaque zone that separates man from

himself and from nature has become a part of man and a part of nature. Our

task is not to rediscover nature but to make a new one, to reconstruct it.

The search for the real nature, for a natural life that has nothing to do

with the lie of social ideology, is one of the most touching naïvetés of a

good part of the revolutionary proletariat, not to mention the anarchists

and such notable figures as the young Wilhelm Reich.

In the realm of the exploitation of man by man, the real transformation of

nature only takes place through the real transformation of the social fraud.

At no point in their struggle have man and nature ever been really face to

face. They have been kept apart by what mediates this struggle: hierarchical

social power and its organisation of appearance. To transform nature was to

socialise it, but they certainly made a mess of the job. There is no nature

other than social nature, since history has never known a society without

power.

Is an earthquake a natural phenomenon? It affects men, but it affects them

only as alienated social beings. What is an earthquake-in-itself? Suppose

that at this moment there was an earthquake disaster on Alpha Centauri. Who

would it bother apart from the old farts in the universities and other

centres of pure thought?

And death: death also strikes men socially. In the first place, because the

energy and resources poured down the drain of militarism and wasted in the

anarchy of capitalism and bureaucracy could make a vital contribution to the

scientific struggle against death. But above all because it is in the vast

laboratory of society (and under the benevolent eye of science) that the

foul brew of culture in which the germs of death are spawned is kept on the

boil; (stress, nervous tension, conditioning, pollution, latrogenic

disease...) Only animals are still allowed to die a natural death... some of

them.

Could it be that, after disengaging themselves from the animal world by

means of their history, men might come to envy the animal's contact with

nature? This is, I think, the childish meaning which should be seen in the

search for the 'natural'. But if we could enrich it and set it off in the

right direction such a desire would mean that we had superseded 30,000 years

of history.

Wgat we have to do now is to create a new nature that will be a worthwhile

adversary: that is, to resocialise it by liberating the technical apparatus

from the sphere of alienation, by snatching it from the hands of rulers and

specialists. Only at the end of a process of social disalienation will

nature become a worthwhile opponent: in a society in which man's creativity

will not come up against man himself as the first obstacle to its expansion

Technological organisation can't be destroyed from the outside. It's

collapse is the result of internal decay. Far from being punished for its

Promethean aspirations, it is dying because it never escaped from the

dialectic of master and slave. Even if the cybernauts did come to power

they'd have a hard time staying there. The very best they can offer has

already been turned down in these words from a black worker to a white boss

(Presence Africaine, 1956): "When we first saw your trucks and planes we

thought that you were gods. Then, after a few years we learned how to drive

your trucks, as we shall soon learn how to fly your planes, and we

understood that what interested you most was manufacturing trucks and planes

and making money. For our part, what we are interested in is using them.

Now, you are just our metal-workers."

X DOWN QUANTITY STREET

Economic imperatives seek to impose on the whole of human activity the

standardised measuring system of the market. Very large quantities take the

place of the qualitative, but even quantity is rationed and economised. Myth

is based on quality, ideology on quantity. Ideological saturation is an

atomisation into small contradictory quantities which can no more avoid

destroying one another than they can avoid being smashed by the qualitative

negativity of popular refusal (1). The quantitative and the linear are

indissociable. A linear, measured time and a linear, measured life are the

definitions of survival, or living on: a succession of inter-changeable

instants. These lines are part of the confused geometry of power (2)

The system of commercial exchange has come to govern all of man's everyday

relations with himself and with his fellow men. Every aspect of public and

private life is dominated by the quantitative.

The merchant in The Exception and the Rule confesses: "I don't know what a

man is. Only that every man has his price." To the extent that individuals

accept power and enable it to exist, power in turn judges them by its own

yard-stick: it reduces and standardises them. What is the individual to an

authoritarian system? A point duly located in its perspective. A point that

it recognises, certainly, but recognises only in terms of the number that

define its position in a system of co-ordinates.

The calculation of a man's capacity to produce or to make others produce, to

consume or to make others consume, concretises to a T that expression so

dear to our philosophers: the measure of man. Even the simple pleasures of a

ride in the country are generally measured up in terms of miles on the

clock, speeds reached and petrol consumption. With the rate at which

economic 'imperatives' are buying up feelings, desires and needs and

falsifying them, man will soon be left with nothing but the memory of having

once been alive. Living in the past: the memory of days gone by will be our

consolation for living on. How could even spontaneous laughter last in a

space-time that is measured and measurable, let alone real joy? At best the

dull contentment of the man-who's-got-his-money's-worth, and who exists by

that standard. Only objects can be measured, which is why exchange always

reifies

Any excitement that could still be found in the pursuit of pleasure is fast

disintegrating into a panting succession of mechanical gestures, and one

hopes in vain that their rhythm will speed up enought to reach even the

semblance of orgasm. The quantitative Eros of speed, novelty,

love-against-the-clock is disfiguring the real face of pleasure everywhere.

The qualitative is slowly taking on the aspect of a quantitative infinity,

an endless series whose momentary end is always the negation of pleasure,

Don Juan's basic "can't get no satisfaction". If only contemporary society

would encourage such dissatisfaction, and allow total licence to the

delirious and devastating attractions of an insatiable appetite! Who would

deny that there is a certain charm in the life of an idler, a trifle blasé

perhaps, but enjoying at his leisure everything that can make passivity

sweet: a seraglio of pretty girls, witty and sophisticated friends, subtle

drugs, seven-course Chinese meals, heady liqueurs and sultry perfumes: a man

whose desire is not so much to change life as to seek refuge in the greatest

attractions it has to offer. A libertine in the grand style.

Let's talk sense, though. Nowadays that kind of choice just doesn't exist,

for in both Western and Eastern societies even quantity is rationed. A

tycoon with only on emonth left to livewould still refuse to blow his entire

fortune on one huge orgy... the morality of exchange and profit doesn't let

go that easily. Thrift, the capitalist economics of family life.

Yet what a windfall for mystification, to have the qualitative imprisoned in

the skin of the quantitative! I mean that a world in which all things seem

possible can still harbour the illusion of being a world of many dimensions.

But to let exchange be subsumed by the gift, to let all kinds of adventures

blossom between heaven and earth (from Gilles de Rais to Dante...) this was

precisely what the bourgeoisie couldn't do, this was the door that it had

closed on itself in the name of industry and commerce! All it had left was a

vast nostalgia. Poor and precious catalyst -- at once all and nothing --

thanks to which a society without class and without authoritarian power will

come to realise all the dreams of its aristocratic childhood.

In the act of faith, the unitary societies of tribal and feudal times

possessed a qualitative element of myth and mystification which was of major

importance. The bourgeoisie, once it had shattered the unity of power and

God, found itself clutching fragments and crumbs of power, crumbs which it

tried to clothe with a unitary spirit. But it didn't work. Without unity

there can be no qualitative! Democracy triumphs along with social

atomisation. Democracy is the limited power of the greatest number, and the

power of the greatest limited number. The great ideologies very soon abandon

faith for numbers. Nowadays 'La Patrie' is no more than a few thousand war

veterans. And what Marx and Engels used to call 'our party' is today a few

million voters and a couple of thousand bill-stickers: a mass party.

In fact, ideology draws its essence from quantity: it is simply an idea

reproduced again and again in time (Pavlovian conditioning) and in space

(where the consumers take over). Ideology, information and culture tend more

and more to lose their content and become pure quantity. The less importance

a piece of news has, the more it is repeated, and the more it distracts

people from their real problems. Goebbels said that the bigger the lie, the

more easily it is swallowed. But ideology takes us away from the Big Lie by

constantly bidding against itself. One after another it lays before us a

hundred paperbacks, a hundred washing powders, a hundred political ideas,

and with equal conviction proves that each of them is incontestably superior

to any of the others. Even in ideology quantity is being destroyed by

quantity itself: conflicting conditionings end by cancelling each other out.

Is this the way to rediscover the power of the qualitative ,a power that can

move mountains?

Quite the contrary. Contradictory conditioning is more likely to end in

trauma, inhibition and a radical refusal to be brainwashed any more.

Admittedly ideology still has one trick up its sleeve -- that of posing

false questions, raising false dilemmas and leaving the conditioned

individual, poor bugger, with the worry of sorting out which is the truer of

two lies. But such pointless diversions carry little weight compared with

the survival sickness to which consumer society exposes its members.

Boredom breeds the irresistible rejection of uniformity, a refusal that can

break out at any moment. Stockholm, Amsterdam and Watts (for a start) have

shown that the tiniest of pretexts can fire the oil spread on troubled

waters. Think of the vast quantity of lies that can be wiped out by one act

of revolutionary poetry! From Villa to Lumumba, from Stockholm to Watts,

qualitative agitation, the agitation that radicalises the masses because it

springs from the radicalism of the masses, is redefining the frontiers of

submission and degradation

In unitary regimes the sacred was the cement which held together the social

pyramid in which each particular being from the highest lord to the lowest

serf had his place according to the will of Providence, the order of the

world and the king's pleasure. The cohesion of the structure soon

disappeared, dissolved by the corrosive criticism of the young bourgeoisie;

but, as we know, the shadow of the divine hierarchy remains. The dismantling

of the pyramid, far from destroying the inhuman cement, only pulverises it.

We see little particular beings becoming absolute: little 'citizens'

released by social atomisation. The inflated imagination of egocentricity

creates a universe on the model of one point, a point just the same as

thousands of other points, grains of sand, all free, equal and fraternal,

scurrying here and there like so many ants when their nest is broken open.

All the lines have gone haywire since God disappeared, depriving them of

their point of convergence; they weave and collide in apparent disorder. But

make no mistake, despite the anarchy of competition and the isolation of

individualism, class and caste interests are beginning to tie up,

structuring a geometry, and impatient to reconquer its coherence.

Now, the coherence of unitary power, although it's based on the divine

principle, is a palpable coherence, which each individual lives in and

knows. But paradoxically the material principle of fragmentary power can

only furnish an abstract coherence. How could the organisation of economic

survival hope to substitute itself smoothly for this immanent, this

omnipresent God who is called on to witness the most trivial gestures, like

cutting bread and sneezing...? The omnipotence of the feudal mode of

domination was quite relative anyway, but let us suppose that with the aid

of cyberneticians it could be equalled by a secularised government of men.

Even so, how could anyone replace the mythic and poetic ethos surrounding

the life of communities thast are socially cohesive, an ethos that provides

them with some kind of third dimension? The bourgeoisie is well and truly

caught in the trap of its own half-revolution

Quantification implies linearity. the qualitative is plurivalent, the

quantitative univocal. Life quantified becomes a measured route-march

towards death. The radiant ascent of the soul towards heaven is replaced by

inane speculations about the future. Moments of time no longer radiate, as

they did in the cyclical time of earlier societies; time is a thread

stretching from birth to death, from memories of the past to expectations of

the future, on which an eternity of survival strings out a row of instants

and hybrid presents nibbled away by what is past an what is yet to come.

The feeling of living in symbiosis with cosmic forces -- the sense of the

simultaneous -- revealed to our forefathers joy which our passing presence

in the world is hard put to provide. What remains of such a joy? Only

vertigo, giddy transcience, the effort of keeping up with the times. You

must move with the times -- the motto of those who make a profit out of it.

Not that we should lament the passing of the old days of cyclical time, the

time of mystical effusion. Rather correct it: centre it in man, and not in

the divine animal. Man is not the centre of present time, he is merely a

point in it. Time is composed of a succession of points, each taken

independently of the others like an absolute, but an absolute that is

endlessly repeated and rehashed. Because they are located on the same line,

all actions and all moments assume equal importance. The definition of

prosaism. Down quantity street, everything's always just the same. And these

absolutized fragments are all quite interchangeable. Divided from one

another -- and thus separated from man himself -- the moments of survival

follow one another and resemble one another just like the specialised

attitudes that correspond to them: roles. Making love or riding a motorbike,

it's all the same. Each moment has its stereotype, and the fragments of time

carry off the fragments of men into a past that can never be changed.

What's the use of threading pearls to make a garland of memories? If only

the weight of the pearls would snap the thread! But no: moment by moment,

time bores on; everything is lost, nothing created...

What do I want? Not a succession of moments, but one huge instant. A

totality that is lived and without the experience of 'time passing'. The

feeling of 'time passing' is simply the feeling of growing old. And yet,

since one must first of all survive in order to live, virtual moments,

possibilities, are necessarily rooted in that time. To federate moments, to

bring out the pleasure in them, to release their promise of life is already

to be learning how to construct a 'situation'

Individual survival-lines cross, collide and intersect. Each one assigns

limits to the freedom of others; projects cancel one another out in the name

of their autonomy. This is the basis of the geometry of fragmentary power.

We think we are living in the world, when in fact we are being positioned in

a perspective. No longer the simultaneous perspective of primitive painters,

but the perspective of the Renaissance rationalists. It is hardly possible

for looks, thoughts and gestures to escape the attraction of the distant

vanishing-point which orders and deforms them; situates them in its

spectacle. Power is the greatest town-planner. It parcels out loys of public

and private survival, buys up vacant lots at cut price, and only permits

construction that complies with its regulations. Its own plans involve the

compulsory acquisition of everybody. It builds with a heaviness which is the

envy of the real town-builders that copy its style, translating the old

mumbo-jumbo of the sacred hierarchy into stockbroker-belts, white collar

apartments and workers flats. (Like, for example, in Croydon)

The reconstruction of life, the rebuilding of the world: one and the same

desire.

XI MEDIATED ABSTRACTION AND ABSTRACT MEDIATION

Today, reality is imprisoned in metaphysics in the same way as it was once

imprisoned in theology. The way of seeing which power imposes, 'abstracts'

mediations from their original function, which is to extend into the real

world the demands which arise in lived experience; it resists the magnetic

pull of authority. The point where resistance begins is the look-out post of

subjectivity. Until now, metaphysicians have only organised the world in

various ways; the point is to change it, by opposing them (1). The regime of

guaranteed survival is slowly undermining the belief that power is necessary

(2). This leads to a growing rejection of the forms which govern us, a

rejection of their (coercive) ordering principle. (3) Radical theory, which

is the only guarantee of the coherence of such a rejection, penetrates the

masses because it extends their spontaneous creativity. "Revolutionary"

ideology is theory which has been recuperated by the authorities. Words

exist as the frontier between the will to live and its repression; the way

they are employed determines their meaning; history controls the way in

which they are employed. The historical crisis of language indicates the

possibility of superseding it towards the poetry of action, towards the

great game with signs (4)

What is this detour in which I get lost when I try to find myself? What is

this screen that separates me from myself under the pretence of protecting

me? And how can I ever find myself again in this crumbling fragmentation of

which I am composed? I move forward with a terrible doubt of ever getting to

grips with myself. It is as though my path is already marked out in front of

me, my thoughts and feelings following the contours of a mental landscape

which they imagine they are creating, but which in fact is moulding them. An

absurd force -- all the more absurd for being part of the rationality of the

world, and seeming incontestable -- keeps me jumping in an effort to reach a

solid ground which my feet have never left. And by this useless leap towards

myself I succeed only in losing my grip on the present; most of the time I

live out of step with what I am, marking time with dead time.

I think that people are surprisingly insensitive to the way in which the

world, in certain periods, takes on the forms of the dominant metaphysic. No

matter how daft it may seem to us to believe in God and the Devil, this

phantom pair become a living reality the moment that a collectivity

considers them sufficiently present to inspire the text of their laws. In

the same way, the stupid distinction between cause and effect has been able

to govern societies in which human behaviour and phenomenae in general were

analysed in terms of cause and effect. And in our own time, nobody should

underestimate the power of the misbegotten dichotomy between thought and

action, theory and practice, real and imaginary... these ideas are forces of

organisation. The world of falsehood is a real world, people are killing one

another there, and we'd better not forget it. While we spiel and spout

ironically about the decay of philosophy, contemporary philosophers watch

with knowing smiles from behind the mediocrity of their thought; they know

that come what may the world is still a philosophical construction, a huge

ideological foozle. We survive in a metaphysical landscape. The abstract and

alienating mediation which estranges me from myself is terrifyingly

concrete.

Grace, a piece of God transplanted into man, outlived its Donor.

Secularized, abandoning theology for metaphysics, it remained buried in the

individual's flesh like a pace-maker, an internalised mode of government.

When Freudian imagery hangs the monster Superego over the doorway of the

ego, its fault is not so much facile oversimplification as refusal to search

further for the social origin of constraints. (Reich understood this well.)

Oppression reigns because men are divided, not only among themselves, but

also inside themselves. What separates them from themselves and weakens them

is laos the false bond that unites them with power, reinforcing this power

and making them choose it as their protector, as their father.

"Mediation", says Hegel, "is self-identity in movement." But what moves can

lose itself. And when he adds "it is the moment of dying and becoming", the

same words differ radically in meaning according to the perspective in which

they are placed: that of totalitarian power or that of the total man.

As soon as mediation escapes my control, every step I take drags me towards

something foreign and inhuman. Engels painstakingly showed that a stone, a

fragment of nature alien to man, became human as soon as it became an

extension of the hand by serving as a tool (and the stone in its turn

humanised the hand of the hominid). But once it is appropriated by a master,

an employer, a ministry of planning, a management, the tool's meaning is

changed: it deflects the action of its user towards other purposes. And what

is true of tools is true for all mediations.

Just as God was the supreme arbiter of grace, the magnetism of the governing

principle always draws to itself the largest possible number of mediations.

Power is the sum of alienated and alienating mediations. Science (scientia

theologiae ancilla) converted the divine fraud into operational information,

organised abstraction, returning to the etymology of the word: ab-trahere,

to draw out of.

The energy which the individual expends in order to realise himself and

extend into the world according to his desires and dreams, is suddenly

braked, held up, shunted onto other tracks, recuperated. What would normally

be the phase of fulfilment is forced out of the living world and kicked

upstairs into the transcendental.

But the mechanism of abstraction is never completely loyal to the principle

of authority. However reduced man may be by his stolen mediation, he can

still enter the labyrinth of power with Theseus' weapons of aggression and

determination. if he finally loses his way, it is because he has already

lost his Ariadne, snapped the sweet thread that links him with life: the

desire to be himself. For it is only in an unbroken relationship between

theory and lived praxis that there can be any hope of an end to all

dualities, the end of the power of man over man, and the beginning of the

era of totality.

Human energy does not let itself be led away into the inhuman without a

fight. The field of battle is always in the immediate extension of lived

experience, in spontaneous action. Not that I am opposing abstract mediation

in the name of some sort of wild, 'instinctive' spontaneity; that would

merely be to reproduce on a higher level the idiotic choice between pure

speculation and mindless activism, the disjunction between theory and

practice. I am saying that tactical adequacy involves launching the attack

at the very spot where the highwaymen of experience lay their ambush, the

spot where the attempt to act is transformed and perverted, at the precise

moment when spontaneous action is sucked up by misinterpretation and

misunderstanding. At this point there is a momentary crystallization of

consciousness which illumines both the demands of the will-to-live and the

fate that social organisation has in store for them; living experience and

its recuperation by the machinery of authoritarianism. The point where

resistance begins is the look-out post of subjectivity. For identical

reasons, my knowledge of the world has no value except when I act to

transform it

The mediation of power works a permanent blackmail on the immediate. of

course, the idea that an act can't be carried through in the totality of its

implications faithfully reflects the reality of a bankrupt world, a world of

non-totality; but at the same time it reinforces the metaphysical character

of events, which is their official falsification. Common sense is a

compendium of slanders like "We'll always need bosses", "Without authority

mankind would sink into barbarism and chaos" and so on. Custom has mutilated

man so thoroughly that when he mutilates himself he thinks he is following a

law of nature. And perhaps he is chained so firmly to the pillory of

submission through suppressing the memory of what he has lost. Anyway, it

benefits the slave mentality to associate power with the only possible form

of life, survival. And it fits well with the master's purposes to encourage

such an idea.

In mankind's struggle for survival, hierarchical social organisation was

undeniably a decisive step forward. At one point in history, the cohesion of

a collectivity around its leader gave it the best, perhaps the only chance

of self-preservation. But the survival was guaranteed at the price of a new

alienation: the safeguard was a prison, preserving life but preventing

growth. Feudal regimes reveal the contradiction bluntly: serfs, half men and

half beasts, existed side-by-side with a small priveleged sector, some of

whom strained after individual access to the exuberance and energy of

unrestrained living.

The feudal idea cared little about survival as such: famines, plagues and

massacres swept millions of beings from that best of all possible worlds

without unduly disturbing the generations of literati and subtle hedonists.

The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, finds in survival the raw material of

its economic interests. The need to eat and subsist materially is bound to

be good for trade. Indeed it is not excessive to see in the primacy of the

economy, that dogma of bourgeois thought, the very source of its celebrated

humanism. If the bourgeoisie prefers man to God, it is because only man

produces and consumes, supplies and demands. The divine universe, which is

pre-economic, incurs their disapproval almost as much as the post-economic

world of the total man.

By force-feeding survival until it is satiated, consumer society awakens a

new appetite for life. Wherever survival and work are both guaranteed, the

old safeguards become obstacles. Not only does the struggle to survive

prevent us from really living; once it becomes a struggle without real goals

it begins to threaten survival itself: what was ridiculous becomes

precarious. Survival has grown so fat that if it doesn't shed its skin it

will choke us all in it and die.

The protection provided by masters has lost its justification since the

mechanical solicitude of gadgets theoretically ended the necessity for

slaves. From now on, the ultima ratio of the rulers is the deliberately

maintained terror of a thermonuclear apocalypse. Peaceful coexistence

guarantees their existence. Power no longer protects the people; it protects

itself against the people. Today, this inhumanity spontaneously created by

men has become simply the inhuman prohibition of all creation

Every time the total and immediate completion of an action is deferred,

power is confirmed in its function of grand mediator. Spontaneous poetry, on

the other hand, is anti-mediation par excellence.

One could say schematically that bourgeois/Soviet fragmentary power, which

may be characterized as the sum of constraints, is being absorbed gradually

into a form of organisation based more on alienating mediations. Ideological

enchantment replaces the bayonet. This perfected mode of government

inevitably brings to mind the prophets of cybernetics. Following the prudent

directives of the technocratic specialised left, the electronic Argus is

planning to eliminate the middlemen (spiritual leaders, putschist generals,

Franco-Stalinists and other sons of Ubu) and wire up its Absolute State of

well-being. But the more mediations are alienated, the more the thirst for

the immediate rages and the savage poetry of revolutions tramples down

frontiers.

In its final phase, authority will culminate in the union of abstract and

concrete. Power already abstracts, and the electric chair is still neing

used. The face of the world, lit up by power, is organised according to a

metaphysic of reality: and it's a sight for sore eyes to see the faithful

philosophers showing off their new uniforms: technocrat, sociologist,

specialist...

The pure form which is haunting society is recognisable as the death of men.

It is the neurosis which preceds necrosis, survival sickness spreading

slowly as living experience is replaced by images, forms, objects, as

alienated mediation transmutes experience into a thing; madreporises it.

It's a man or a tree or a stone... as Lautréamont prophesied.

Gombrowicz at least gives due respect to Form, power's old go-between, now

promoted to the place of honour among pimps of State:

"You have never really been able to recognize or explain the importance of

Form in your life. Even in psychology you have been unable to accord to Form

its rightful place. We continue to believe that it is feeling, purposes or

ideas that govern our behaviour, considering Form to be at most a harmless

ornamental addition. When the widow weeps tenderly beside her husband's

coffin, we think that she is crying because she feels her loss so keenly.

When some engineer, doctor or lawyer murders his wife, his children or a

friend, we suppose that he was driven to the deed by violent or bloodthirsty

impulses. When some politician expresses himself vacuously, deceitfully or

shabbily in a public speech, we say that he is stupid because he expresses

himself stupidly. But the fact of the matter is this: a human being does not

externalise himself in an immediate manner, according to his nature, but

always through a definite Form; and this Form; and this Form, this way of

being, this way of speaking and reacting, does not issue solely from himself

but is imposed on him from outside.

"And so the same man can appear sometimes wise, sometimes stupid,

blood-thirsty or angelic, according to the Form which affects him and

according to the pressure of conditioning... When will you consciously

oppose the Forms? When will you stop identifying with what defines you?"

In this Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Marx writes:

Theory becomes a material force once it has got hold of the masses. Theory

is capable of getting hold of men once it demonstrates its truth with regard

to man, once it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp something at its

roots. But for man the root is man himself

In short, radical theory gets hold of the masses because it comes from them

in the first place. It is the repository of spontaneous creativity, and its

job is to ensure the striking power of this creativity. It is revolutionary

technique at the service of poetry. Any analysis of revolutions past or

present that does not involve a determination to resume the struggle more

coherently and more effectively plays fatally into the hands of the enemy:

it is incorporated into the dominant culture. The only time to talk about

revolutionary moments is when you are ready to live them at short notice. A

simple touchstone for testing the mettle of the clanking thinkers-errant of

the planet's left.

Those who are able to end a revolution are always the most eager to explain

it to those who have made it. The arguments they use to explain it are as

good as their arguments for ending it, one can say that much. When theory

escapes from the makers of a revolution it turns against them. It no longer

gets hold of them, it dominates and conditions them. The theory developed by

the strength of the armed people now develops the strength of those who

disarm the people. leninism explains revolutions too -- it certainly taught

Makhno's partisans and the Kronstadt sailors a thing or two. An ideology.

Whenever the powers-that-be get their hands on theory, it turns into

ideology: an argument ad hominem against man in general. Radical theory

comes out of the individual, being-as-subject: it penetrates the masses

through what is most creative in each person, through subjectivity and the

desire for realisation. Ideological conditioning is quite the opposite: the

technical management of the inhuman, the weight of things. It turns men into

objects which have no meaning apart from the Order in which they have their

place. It assembles them in order to isolate them, making the crowd into a

multiplicity of solitudes.

Ideology is the falsehood of language and radical theory its truth. The

conflict between them, which is the conflict between man and the inhumanity

which he secretes, underlies the transformation of the world into human

realities as much as its transmutation into metaphysical realities.

Everything that men do and undo passes through the mediation of language.

Semantics is one of the principal battlefields in the struggle between the

will to live and the spirit of submission

The fight is unfair. Words serve power better than they do men; they serve

it more faithfully than most men do, and more scrupulously than the other

mediations (space, time, technology...) Hypostatised transcendence always

depends on language and is developed in a system of signs and symbols, such

as words, dance, ritual, music, sculpture and building. When a

half-completed action, suddenly obstructed, tries to continue in a form

which it hopes will eventually allow it to finish and realise itself -- like

a generator transforming mechanical energy into electrical energy which will

be reconverted into mechanical energy by a motor miles away -- at this

moment language swoops down on living experience, ties it hand and foot,

robs it of its substance, abstracts it. it always has categories ready to

condemn to incomprehensibility and nonsense anything which they can't

contain, or summon into existence-for-power that which slumbers in

nothingness because it has no place as yet in the system of Order. The

repetition of familiar signs is the basis of ideology.

And yet men still try to use words and signs to perfect their interrupted

gestures. This is why a poetic language exists: a language of lived

experience which, for me, merges with radical theory, the theory which

penetrates the masses and becomes a material force. Even when it is

recuperated and turned against its original purpose, poetry always gets what

it wants in the end. The "Proletarians of all lands, unite" which produced

the Stalinist State will one day realise the classless society. No poetic

sign is ever completely tamed by ideology.

The language that diverts radical actions, creative actions, human actions

par excellence, from their realisation, becomes anti-poetry. it defines the

linguistics of power: its science of information. This information is the

model of false communication, the communication of the inauthentic, the

non-living. There is a principle that I find holds good: as soon as a

language no longer obeys the desire for realisation, it falsifies

communication; it no longer communicates anything except that false promise

of truth which is called a lie. But this lie is the truth of what destroys

me, infects me with its virus of submission. Signs are thus the vanishing

points from which diverge the antagonistic perspectives which make up the

world and divide it between them: the perspective of power and the

perspective of the will to live. Each word, idea or symbol is a double

agent. Some, like the word 'fatherland' or the policeman's uniform, usually

work for authority; but make no mistake, when ideologies clash or begin to

wear out the most mercenary sign can become a good anarchist (I am thinking

of the splendid title that Bellegarigue chose for his paper: L'Anarchie,

Journal de l'Ordre).

Dominant semiological systems -- which are those of the dominant castes --

have only mercenary signs, and, as Humpty-Dumpty says, the king pays double

time to words he uses a lot. But deep down inside, every mercenary has

dreams of killing the king. If we are condemned to a diet of lies we must

learn to spike them with a drop of the acid truth. This is the way the

agitator works: he charges his words and signs so powerfully with living

reality that all the others are pulled out of place. He diverts them.

In a general way, the fight for language is the fight for the freedom to

live, for the reversal of perspective. The battle is between metaphysical

facts and the reality of facts: I mean between facts conceived statistically

as part of a system of interpretation of the world and facts understood in

their development by the praxis which transforms them.

Power can't be overthrown like a government. The united front against

authority covers the whole extent of everyday life and engages the vast

majority of men. To know how to live is to know how to fight against

renunciation without ever giving an inch. Let nobody underestimate power's

skill in stuffing its slaves with words to the point of making them the

slaves of its words.

What weapons do we have to secure our freedom? We can mention three:

1. Information should be corrected in the direction of poetry, news

deciphered, official terms translated (so that "society", in the perspective

opposed to power, becomes "racket" or "area of hierarchical power") --

leading eventually to a glossary or encyclopaedia (Diderot was well aware of

their importance and so are the Situationists).

2. Open dialogue, the language of dialectic; conversation, and all forms of

non-spectacular discussion

3. What Jakob Boehme called "sensual speech" (sensualische Sprache) "because

it is a clear mirror of the senses". And the author of the Way to God

elaborates: "in sensual speech all spirits converse directly, and have no

need of any language, because theirs is the language of nature." if you

remember what I have called the recreation of nature, the language Boehme

talks about clearly becomes the language of spontaneity, of "doind", of

individual and collective poetry; language centred on realisation, leading

lived experience out of the cave of history. This is also connected with

what Paul Brousse and Ravachol understood by "propoganda of the deed"

There is a silent communication; it is well known to lovers. At this stage

language seems to lose its importance as essential mediation, thought is no

longer a distraction (in the sense of leading us away from ourselves), words

and signs become a luxury, an exuberance. think of those bantering

conversations with their baroque of cries and caresses which are so

surprisingly ridiculous for those who do not share the lovers' intoxication.

but it was also direct communication that Léhautier referred to when the

judge asked him what anarchists he knew in Paris: :Anarchists don't need to

know one another to think the same thing." In radical groups which are able

to reach the highest level of theoretical and practical coherence, words

will sometimes acquire this privelege of playing and making love: erotic

communication.

An aside: history has often been accused of happening back-to-front; the

question of language becoming superfluous and turning into language-game is

another example. A baroque current runs through the history of thought,

making fun of words and signs with the subversive intention of disturbing

the semiological order and Order in general. But the series of attempts on

the life of language by the rabble of tumbloing nonsense-rhymers whose prize

fools were Lear and Carroll finds its true expression in the Dada explosion.

In 1916, the desire to have it out with signs, thoughts and words

corresponded for the first time to a real crisis of communication. The

liquidation of language that had so often been undertaken speculatively had

a chance to find its historical realisation at last.

In an epoch which still had all its transcendental faith inlanguage, and in

God, the master of all transcendence, doubts about signs could only lead to

terrorist activity. When the crisis of human relationships shattered the

unitary web of mythical communication, the attack on language took on a

revolutionary air. So much so that it is tempting to say, as Hegel might

have, that the decomposition of language chose Dada as the medium through

which to reveal itself to the minds of men. Under the unitary regime the

same desire to play with signs had been betrayed by history and found no

response. By exposing falsified communication Dada began to supersede

language in the direction of poetry. Today the language of myth and the

language of spectacle are giving way to the reality which underlies them:

the language of deeds. This language contains in itself the critique of all

modes of expression and is thus a continuous auto-critique. Poor little

sub-dadaists! Because they haven't understood that Dada necessarily implies

this supersession, they continue to mumble that we talk like deaf men. Which

is one way to be a fat maggot in the spectacle of cultural decomposition

The language of the whole man will be a whole language: perhaps the end of

the old language of words. Inventing this language means reconstructing man

right down to his unconscious. Totality is hacking its way through the

fractured non-totality of thoughts, words and actions towards itself. We

will have to speak until we can do without words.

 Chapters 12 to 18 are from the translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Left

   Bank Books/Rebel Press, 1983. No copyright claims will be made against

publishers of nonprofit editions. [Published in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire

     Armed, #34. Additional edits and translations by a.h.s. boy, 1994]

             ---------------------------------------------------

                                 Chapter 12

        The impossibility of realization: Power as sum of seductions

   Where constraint breaks people, and mediation makes fools of them, the

 seduction of power is what makes them love their oppression. Because of it

    people give up their real riches: (a) for a cause that mutilates them

  [chapter twelve], (b) for an imaginary unity that fragments them [chapter

 thirteen], (c) for an appearance that reifies them [chapter fourteen], (d)

 for roles that wrest them from authentic life [chapter fifteen], (e) for a

       time whose passage defines and confines them [chapter sixteen].

                                  SACRIFICE

There is such a thing as a reformism of sacrifice that is really a sacrifice

to reformism. Humanistic self-mortification and fascistic self-destruction

both leave us nothing--not even the option of death. All causes are equally

inhuman. But the will to live raises its voice against this epidemic of

masochism, wherever there is the slightest pretext for revolt; for what

appear to be merely partial demands actually conceal the process whereby a

revolution is being prepared: the nameless revolution, the revolution of

everyday life (1). The refusal of sacrifice is the refusal to be bartered:

human beings are not exchangeable. Henceforward the appeal to voluntary

self-sacrifice is going to have to rely on three strategies only: on art, on

"great human values," and on the present (2).

Where people are not broken--and broken in--by force and fraud, they are

seduced. What are Power's methods of seduction? Internalized constraints

which ensure a good conscience based on a lie: the masochism of the honnête

homme. Thus Power castrates but calls castration self-denial; it offers a

choice of servitudes but calls this choice liberty. The feeling of having

done one's duty is Power's reward for self-immolation with honor.

As I showed in "Banalités de base" (Internationale Situationiste, issues

7-8; English version: "The Totality for Kids"), the master-slave dialectic

implies that the mythic sacrifice of the master embodies within itself the

real sacrifice of the slave: the master makes a spiritual sacrifice of his

real power to the general interest, while the slave makes a material

sacrifice of his real life to a power which he shares in appearance only.

The framework of generalized appearances or, if you will, the essential lie

required for the development of privative appropriation (i.e., the

appropriation of things by means of the appropriation of beings) is an

intrinsic aspect of the dialectic of sacrifice, and the root of the infamous

separation that this involves. The mistake of the philosophers was that they

built an ontology and the notion of an unchanging human nature on the basis

of a mere social accident, a purely contingent necessity. History has been

seeking to eliminate privative appropriation ever since the conditions which

called for it ceased to exist. But the metaphysical maintenance of the

philosophers' error continues to work to the advantage of the masters, of

the 'eternal' ruling minority.

                                    * * *

The decline and fall of sacrifice parallels the decline and fall of myth.

Bourgeois thought exposes the materiality of myth, deconsecrating and

fragmenting it. lt does not abolish it, however, because if it did the

bourgeoisie would cease to exploit--and hence to exist. The fragmentary

spectacle is simply one phase in the decomposition of myth, a process today

being accelerated by the dictates of consumption. Similarly, the old

sacrifice-gift ordained by cosmic forces has shrivelled into a

sacrifice-exchange minutely metered in terms of social security and

social-democratic justice. And sacrifice attracts fewer and fewer devotees,

just as fewer and fewer people are seduced by the miserable show put on by

ideologies. The fact is that today's tiny masturbations are a feeble

replacement indeed for the orgastic heights offered by eternal salvation.

Hoping for promotion is a far cry from hoping--albeit insanely--for life

everlasting. Our only gods are heroes of the fatherland, heroes of the shop

floor, heroes of the frigidaire, heroes of fragmented thought...How are the

mighty fallen!

Nevertheless. The knowledge that an ill's end is in sight is cold comfort

when you still have to suffer it in the immediate. And the praises of

sacrifice are still sung on every side. The air is filled with the

sermonizing of red priests and ecumenical bureaucrats. Vodka mixed with holy

water. Instead of a knife between our teeth we have the drool of Jesus

Christ on our lips. Sacrifice yourselves joyfully, brothers and sisters! For

the Cause, for the Established Order, for the Party, for Unity, for Meat and

Potatoes!

The old socialists used to like saying, "They say we are dying for our

country, but really we are dying for Capital." Nowadays their bureaucratic

heirs are berated in similar terms: "You think you're fighting for the

proletariat, but really you die for your leaders." "We are not building for

the future; men and steel are the same thing in the eyes of the

five-year-plan." And yet, what do young leftist radicals do after stating

these obvious truths? They enter the service of a Cause--the 'best' of all

Causes. The time they have for creative activity they squander handing out

leaflets, putting up posters, demonstrating or heckling local politicians.

They become militants, fetishizing action because others are doing their

thinking for them. Sacrifice seems to have an endless series of tricks up

its sleeve.

The best cause is one in which the individual can lose himself body and

soul. The principle of death is simply the denial of the principle of the

will to live. One or other of these principles must win out, however. There

is no middle ground, no possibility of compromise between them on the level

of consciousness. And you have to fight for one or for the other. Fanatics

of established orders--Chouans, Nazis, Carlists--display their unequivocal

choice of the party of death with absolute consistency. The fascist slogan

Viva la Muerte! must at least be given credit for pulling no punches. By

contrast, our reformists of death in small doses and socialists of ennui

cannot even claim the dubious honor of having an aesthetic of total

destruction. All they can do is mitigate the passion for life, stunting it

to the point where it turns against itself and changes into a passion for

destruction and self-destruction. They oppose concentration camps, but only

in the name of moderation--in the name of moderate power and moderate death.

Great despisers of life that they are, the partisans of absolute

self-sacrifice to State, Cause or Fuhrer do have one thing in common with

those whose passion for life challenges the ethos and techniques of

renunciation. Though antagonistic, their respective perceptions of revelry

are equally sharp. Life being so Dionysian in its essence, it is as though

the partisans of death, their lives twisted by their monstrous asceticism,

manage to distill all the joy that has been lost to them into the precise

moment of their death. Spartan legions, mercenaries, fanatics, suicide

squads--all experience an instant of bliss as they die.

But this is a fuîte macabre, frozen, aestheticized, caught for eternity in a

camera flash. The paratroopers that Bigeard speaks of leave this world

through the portal of aesthetics: they are petrified figures,

madrepores--conscious, perhaps, of their ultimate hysteria. For aesthetics

is carnival paralyzed, as cut off from life as a Jibaro head, the carnival

of death. The aesthetic element, the element of pose, corresponds to the

element of death secreted by everyday life. Every apocalypse is beautiful,

but this beauty is a dead one. Remember the song of the Swiss Guard that C?

taught us to love.

The end of the Commune was no apocalypse. The difference between the Nazis

dreaming of bringing the world down with them and the Communards setting

Paris on fire is the difference between total death brutally affirmed and

total life brutally denied. The Nazis merely operated the mechanism of

logical annihilation already designed by humanists preaching submission and

abnegation. The Communards knew that a life constructed with passion cannot

be taken away; that there is more pleasure in destroying such a life than in

seeing it mutilated; and that it is better to go up in flames with a glad

heart than to give an inch, when giving an inch is the same as giving up all

along the line. "Better die on our feet than live on our knees!" Despite its

repulsive source--the lips of the Stalinist Ibarruri--it seems to me that

this cry eloquently expresses the legitimacy of a particular form of

suicide, a good way of taking leave. And what was valid for the Communards

holds good for individuals today.

Let us have no more suicides from weariness, which come like a final

sacrifice crowning all those that have gone before. Better one last laugh, à

la Cravan, or one last song, à la Ravachol.

                                    * * *

The moment revolution calls for self-sacrifice it ceases to exist. The

individual cannot give himself up for a revolution, only for a fetish.

Revolutionary moments are carnivals in which the individual life celebrates

its unification with a regenerated society. The call for sacrifice in such a

context is a funeral knell. Jules Vallée fell short of his own train of

thought when he wrote: "If the submissive do not outlive the rebellious, one

might as well rebel in the name of an idea." For a militant can only be a

revolutionary in spite of the ideas which he agrees to serve. The real

Vallée, the Communard Vallée, is first the child, then the student, making

up in one long Sunday for all the endless weeks that have gone before.

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

back to life.

When the rebel begins to believe that he is fighting for a higher good, the

authoritarian principle gets a fillip. Humanity has never been short of

justifications for giving up what is human. ln fact some people possess a

veritable reflex of submission, an irrational terror of freedom; this

masochism is everywhere visible in everyday life. With what agonizing

facility we can give up a wish, a passion, stemming from the most essential

part of ourselves. With what passivity, what inertia, we can accept living

or acting for some thing--'thing' being the operative word, a word whose

dead weight always seems to carry the day. lt is hard to be oneself, so we

give up as quickly as possible, seizing whatever pretext offers itself: love

of children, of reading, of artichokes, etc, etc. Such is the abstract

generality of the ill that our desire for a cure tends to evaporate.

And yet, the reflex of freedom also knows how to exploit a pretext. Thus a

strike for higher wages or a rowdy demonstration can awaken the carnival

spirit. As I write thousands of workers around the world are downing tools

or picking up guns, ostensibly in obedience to directives or principles, but

actually, at the profoundest level, in response to their passionate desire

to change their lives. The real demand of all insurrectionary movements is

the transformation of the world and the reinvention of life. This is not a

demand formulated by theorists: rather, it is the basis of poetic creation.

Revolution is made everyday despite, and in opposition to, the specialists

of revolution. This revolution is nameless, like everything springing from

lived experience. Its explosive coherence is being forged constantly in the

everyday clandestinity of acts and dreams.

No other problem is as important to me as a difficulty I encounter

throughout the long daylight hours: how can I invent a passion, fulfill a

wish or construct a dream in the daytime in the way my mind does

spontaneously as I sleep? What haunts me are my unfinished actions, not the

future of the human race or the state of the world in the year 2000. I could

not care less about hypothetical possibilities, and the meandering

abstractions of the futurologists leave me cold. If I write, it is not, as

they say, "for others." I have no wish to exorcise other people's ghosts. I

string words together as a way of getting out of the well of isolation,

because I need others to pull me out. I write out of impatience, and with

impatience. I want to live without dead time. What other people say

interests me only in as much as it concerns me directly. They must use me to

save themselves just as I use them to save myself. We have a common project.

But it is out of the question that the project of the whole man should

entail a reduction in individuality. There are no degrees in castration. The

apolitical violence of the young, and its contempt for the interchangeable

goods displayed in the supermarkets of culture, art and ideology, are a

concrete confirmation of the fact that the individual's self-realization

depends on the application of the principle of "every man for himself,"

though this has to be understood in collective terms--and above all in

radical terms.

At that stage in a piece of writing where people used to look for

explanations, I would like them from now on to find a settling of scores.

The refusal of sacrifice is the refusal to be bartered. There is nothing in

the world of things, exchangeable for money or not, which can be treated as

equivalent to a human being. The individual is irreducible. He is subject to

change but not to exchange. Now, the most superficial examination of

movements for social reform shows that they have never demanded anything

more than a cleaning-up of exchange and sacrifice, making it a point of

honor to humanize inhumanity and make it attractive. And every time slaves

try to make their slavery more bearable they are striking a blow for their

masters.

The "road to socialism" consists in this: as people become more and more

tightly shackled by the sordid relations of reification, the tendency of the

humanitarians to mutilate people in an egalitarian fashion grows ever more

insistent. And with the deepening crisis of the virtues of self-abnegation

and of devotion generating a tendency towards radical refusal, the

sociologists, those watchdogs of modern society, have been called in to

peddle a subtler form of sacrifice: art.

                                    * * *

The great religions succeeded in turning people's wretched earthly existence

into a time of voluptuous expectation: at the end of this valley of tears

lay life eternal in God. According to the bourgeois conception, art is

better equipped than God to bestow eternal glory on people. The

art-in-life-and-in-God of unitary social systems (Egyptian statuary, African

art, etc.) gave way to an art which complemented life and sought to make up

for the absence of God (fourth-century Greece, Horace, Ronsard, Malherbe,

the Romantics, etc.). The builders of cathedrals cared as little for

posterity as did de Sade. Their salvation was guaranteed by God, as de

Sade's was guaranteed by himself: neither sought a place in the museum of

history. They worked for a supreme state of being, not for the temporal

survival of their work or for the admiration of centuries to come.

History is the earthly paradise of the bourgeois idea of transcendence. This

realm is accessible not through commodities but through apparent gratuity:

through the sacrifice called for by the work of art, through activity

seemingly undetermined by the immediate need to increase capital. The

philanthropist does good works; the patriot produces heroism; the soldier

fashions victory; the poet or scholar creates works of literary or

scientific value, and so on. But there is an ambiguity in the very idea of

"making a work of art," for it embraces both the lived experience of the

artist and the sacrifice of this experience to the abstraction of a creative

substance, i.e., to the aesthetic form. The artist relinquishes the lived

intensity of the creative moment in exchange for the durability of what he

creates, so that his name may live on in the funereal glory of the museum.

And his desire to produce a durable work is the very thing that prevents him

from living imperishable instants of real life.

Actually, if we except academicism, artists never succumb completely to

aesthetic assimilation. Though he may abdicate his immediate experience for

the sake of appearances, any artist--and anyone who tries to live is an

artist--must also follow his desire to increase his share of dreams in the

objective world of others. ln this sense he entrusts the thing he creates

with the mission of completing his personal self-realization within the

collectivity. And in this sense creativity is revolutionary in its essence.

The spectacle, in ideology, art and culture, turns the wolves of spontaneity

into the sheepdogs of knowledge and beauty. Literary anthologies are replete

with insurrectionary writings, the museums with calls to arms. But history

does such a good job of pickling them in perpetuity that we can neither see

nor hear them. ln this area, however, consumer society performs a salutary

task of dissolution. For today art can only construct plastic cathedrals.

The dictatorship of consumption ensures that every aesthetic collapses

before it can produce any masterpieces. Premature burial is an axiom of

consumerism, imperfection a precondition of planned obsolescence.

Sensational aesthetic departures occur only because someone briefly finds a

way to outdo the spectacle of artistic decomposition in its own terms. And

any such originality soon turns up mass-marketed in every five-and-dime.

Bernard Buffet, pop art, Andy Warhol, rock music--where are you now? To talk

of a modern work of art enduring is sillier than talking of the eternal

values of Standard Oil.

As for the progressive sociologists, once they had finished shaking their

heads sadly over the discovery that the value of the art object had become

nothing but its market price, and that the artists were working according to

the norms of profitability, they decided that we should return to the source

of art, to everyday life--not in order to change it, of course, for such is

not their function, but rather to make it the raw material for a new

aesthetic which would defy packaging techniques and so remain independent of

buying and selling. As though there were no such thing as consuming on the

spot! The result? Sociodramas and happenings which supposedly provoke

spontaneous participation on the part of the spectators. The only thing the

spectators participate in, though, is an aesthetic of nothingness. The only

thing that can be expressed in the mode of the spectacle is the emptiness of

everyday life. And indeed, what better commodity than an aesthetic of

emptiness? The accelerating decomposition of values has itself become the

only available form of entertainment. The trick is that the spectators of

the cultural and ideological vacuum are here enlisted as its organizers. The

spectacle's inanity is made up for by forcing its spectators --passive

agents par excellence--to participate in it. The ultimate logic of the

happening and its derivatives is to supply the society of masterless slaves,

which the cyberneticians have planned for us, with the spectatorless

spectacle it will require. For artists in the strict sense of the word, the

road to complete assimilation is well posted: they have merely to follow the

progressive sociologists and their ilk into the super-corporation of

specialists. They may rest assured that Power will reward them well for

applying their talents to the job of dressing up the old conditioning to

passivity in bright new colors.

From the perspective of Power, everyday life is a latticework of

renunciations and mediocrity. A true void. An aesthetic of daily life would

make us all into artists responsible for organizing this nothingness. The

final ploy of official art will be the attempt to lend therapeutic features

to what Freud, in a dubious simplification, referred to as the death

instinct--i.e., rapturous submission to authority.

Wherever the will to live fails to spring spontaneously from individual

poetry, there falls the shadow of the crucified Toad of Nazareth. The artist

in every human being can never be brought out by regression to artistic

forms defined by the spirit of sacrifice. We have to go back to square one.

                                    * * *

The surrealists--or some of them at any rate--understood that the only valid

transcendence of art lay in direct experience, in works that no ideology

could assimilate into its internally consistent lie. They came to grief, of

course, precisely because of their complaisant attitude towards the cultural

spectacle. Admittedly, the current process of decomposition of thought and

art has made the danger of aesthetic assimilation much less than it was in

the thirties. The present state of affairs tends to favor situationist

agitation.

Much mournful wailing has gone on--since surrealism's demise, in fact--over

the disappearance of idyllic relationships such as friendship, love and

hospitality. But make no mistake: all this nostalgia for the more human

virtues of the past answers to one thing and one thing only, namely, the

impending need to revive the idea of sacrifice, which has been coming under

too heavy fire. The fact is that there will never be any friendship, or

love, or hospitality, or solidarity, so long as self-abnegation exists. The

call for self-denial always amounts to an attempt to make inhumanity

attractive. Here is an anecdote of Brecht's that makes the point perfectly.

To illustrate the proper way of doing a service for friends, and to

entertain his listeners, Herr K tells a story. Three young people once came

to an old Arab and said: "Our father is dead. He left us seventeen camels,

but he laid down in his will that the eldest son should have a half, the

second son a third, and the youngest a ninth part of his possessions. Try as

we will, we cannot agree on how to divide up the camels. So we'd like to

leave it up to you to decide." The old man thought it over before replying:

"l see that you need another camel before you can share them out properly.

Take mine. lt's the only one I have but it's at your disposal. Take it,

divide the beasts up, and bring me back whatever you have left over." The

young men thanked him for his friendly offer, took his camel and divided up

the eighteen animals as follows: the eldest took a half, which was nine

camels, the second son took a third, which was six, and the youngest took

his ninth, which was two. To everyone's surprise there was still one camel

remaining, and this they promptly returned with renewed thanks to their old

friend. According to Herr K, this was the perfect example of the correct way

to do a friend a service because nobody had to make a sacrifice. Here is a

model which should be made axiomatic and strictly applied to all of everyday

life.

lt is not a question of opting for the art of sacrifice as opposed to the

sacrifice of art, but rather of putting an end to sacrifice as art. The

triumph of an authentic savoir-vivre and of the construction of

authentically lived situations exists everywhere as a potentiality, but

everywhere these tendencies are distorted by the falsification of what is

human.

                                    * * *

                                 Chapter 13

                                 SEPARATION

Privative appropriation, the basis of social organization, keeps individuals

separated from themselves and from others. Artificial unitary paradises seek

   to conceal this separation by assimilating, more or less successfully,

 people's prematurely shattered dreams of unity. To no avail. People may be

forced to swing back and forth across the narrow gap between the pleasure of

 creating and the pleasure of destroying, but this very oscillation suffices

                        to bring Power to its knees.

People live separated from one another, separated from what they are in

others, and separated from themselves. The history of humanity is the

history of one basic separation which precipitates and determines all the

others: the social distinction between masters and slaves. By means of

history men try to find one another and attain unity. The class struggle is

but one stage, though a decisive one, in the struggle for the whole man.

Just as the ruling class has every reason in the world to deny the existence

of the class struggle, so the history of separation is necessarily

indistinguishable from the history of the dissimulation of separation. This

mystification results less from a deliberate intent than from a long drawn

out and confused battle in which the desire for unity has generally ended up

being transformed into its opposite. Wherever separation is not totally

eliminated it is reinforced. When the bourgeoisie came to power, fresh light

was shed on the factors which divide men in this most essential way, for

bourgeois revolution laid bare the social and material character of

separation.

                                    * * *

What is God? The guarantor and quintessence of the myth used to justify the

domination of man by man. This repellent invention has no other raison

d'être. As myth decomposes and passes into the stage of the spectacle, the

Grand External Object, as Lautréamont called him, is shattered by the forces

of social atomization and degenerates into a remedy for intimate use only--a

sort of salve for social diseases.

At the high point of the crisis brought on by the end of classical

philosophy and of the ancient world, Christianity's genius lay in the fact

that it subordinated the recasting of a mythic system to one fundamental

principle: the doctrine of the Trinity. What does this dogma of the Three in

One, which caused so much ink and blood to flow, really mean?

Man belongs to God in his soul, to the temporal authority in his body, and

to himself in his spirit. His salvation depends on his soul, his liberty on

his spirit, his earthly existence on his body. The soul envelops the body

and the spirit, and without the soul these are as nothing. If we look more

closely at this schema, we find an analogy for the union of master and slave

under the principle of man envisaged as a divine creature. The slave is the

body, the labor power appropriated by the lord; the master is his spirit

which governs the body and invests it with a small part of its higher

essence. The slave sacrifices himself in body to the power of the master,

while the master sacrifices himself in spirit to the community of his slaves

(e.g., the king 'serving' his people, de Gaulle 'serving' France, the Pope

washing the feet of the poor). The slave abdicates his earthly life in

exchange for the feeling of being free, that is, for the spirit of the

master come down into him. Consciousness mystified is mythic consciousness.

The master makes a notional gift of his master's power to all those whom he

governs. By drenching the alienation of bodies in the subtler alienation of

the spirit, he economizes on the amount of violence needed to maintain

slavery. The slave identifies in spirit, or at least he may, with the master

to whom he gives up his life force. But whom can the master identify with!

Not with his slaves qua possessions, qua bodies, certainly: rather, with his

slaves qua emanation of the spirit of mastery itself, of the master supreme.

Since the individual master must sacrifice himself on the spiritual plane,

he has to find someone or something within the coherent mythic system to

make this sacrifice to: this need is met by a notion of mastery-in-itself of

which he partakes and to which he submits. The historically contingent class

of masters had thus to create a God to bow down to spiritually and with whom

to identify. God validated both the master's mythic sacrifice to the public

good and the slave's real sacrifice to the master's private and privative

power. God is the principle of all submission, the night which makes all

crimes lawful. The only illegal crime is the refusal to accept a master. God

is a harmony of lies, an ideal form uniting the slave's voluntary sacrifice

(Christ), the consenting sacrifice of the master (the Father; the slave as

the master's son), and the indissoluble link between them (the Holy Ghost).

The same model underlies the ideal picture of man as a divine, whole and

mythic creature: a body subordinated to a guiding spirit working for the

greater glory of the soul--the soul being the all embracing synthesis.

We thus have a type of relationship in which two terms take their meaning

from an absolute principle, from an obscure and inaccessible norm of

unchallengeable transcendence (God, blood, holiness, grace, etc.).

Innumerable dualities of this type were kept bubbling for century after

century like a good stew on the fire of mythic unity. Then the bourgeoisie

took the pot off the fire and was left with nothing but a vague nostalgia

for the warmth of the unitary myth and a set of cold and flavorless

abstractions: body and spirit, being and consciousness, individual and

society, private and public, general and particular, etc., etc. Ironically,

though moved by class interests, the bourgeoisie destroyed the unitary myth

and its tripartite structure to its own detriment. The wish for unity, so

effectively fobbed off by the mythic thinking of unitary regimes, did not

disappear along with those regimes: on the contrary, the wish became all the

more urgent as the material nature of separation became clearer and clearer

to people's consciousness. By laying bare the economic and social

foundations of separation, the bourgeoisie supplied the arms which will

serve to end separation once and for all. And the end of separation means

the end of the bourgeoisie and of all hierarchical power. This is why no

ruling class or caste can effect the transformation of feudal unity into

real unity, into true social participation. This mission can only be

accomplished by the new proletariat, which must forcibly wrest the third

force (spontaneous creation, poetry) from the gods, and keep it alive in the

everyday life of all. The transient period of fragmentary power will then be

seen in its true light as a mere moment of insomnia, as the vanishing point

prerequisite to the reversal of perspective, as the step back preparatory to

the leap of transcendence.

                                    * * *

History testifies to the struggle waged against the unitary principle and to

the ways in which a dualistic reality began to emerge. The challenge was

voiced to begin with in a theological language, the official language of

myth. Later the idiom became that of ideology, the idiom of the spectacle.

In their preoccupations, the Manichaeans, the Cathari, the Hussites, the

Calvinists, etc, have much in common with such figures as Jean de Meung, La

Boème or Vanino Vanini. We find Descartes desperately locating the soul, for

want of any better place, in the pineal gland. The Cartesian God is a

funambulist balancing for some perfectly unaccountable reason atop a

perfectly intelligible world. Pascal's, by contrast, hides himself from

view, so depriving man and the world of a justification without which they

are left in meaningless confrontation, each being the only criterion for

judging the other: how can something be measured against nothing?

By the close of the eighteenth century the fabric was rending in all

directions as the process of decomposition began to speed up. This was the

beginning of the era of "little men" in competition. Fragments of human

beings claimed the status of absolutes: matter, mind, consciousness, action,

universal, particular-- what God could put this Humpty Dumpty together

again?

The spirit of feudal lordship had found an adequate justification in a

certain transcendence. But a capitalist God is an absurdity. Whereas

lordship called for a trinitarian system, capitalist exploitation is

dualistic. Moreover, it cannot be dissociated from the material nature of

economic relationships. The economic realm is no mystery: the nearest things

to miracles here are the element of chance in the functioning of the market

and the perfect programming of computerized planning. Calvin's rational God

is much less attractive than the loans with interest that Calvinism

authorizes so readily. As for the God of the Anabaptists of Munster and of

the revolutionary peasant of 1525, he is a primitive expression of the

irrepressible thrust of the masses towards a society of whole men.

The mystical authority of the feudal lord was very different from that

instituted by the bourgeoisie. For the lord did not simply change his role

and become a factory boss: once the mysterious superiority of blood and

lineage is abolished, nothing is left but a mechanics of exploitation and a

race for profit which have no justification but themselves. Boss and worker

are separated not by any qualitative distinction of birth but merely by

quantitative distinctions of money and power. Indeed, what makes capitalist

exploitation so repulsive is the fact that it occurs between 'equals'. All

the same, the bourgeoisie's work of destruction--though quite

unintentional-ly, of course--reveals the justification for even revolution.

When peoples stop being fooled they stop doing what they are told.

                                    * * *

Fragmentary power carries fragmentation to the point where the human beings

over which it holds sway themselves become contradictory. At the same time

the unitary lie breaks down. The death of God democratizes the consciousness

of separation. What was the "Romantic agony" if not a response to the pain

of this split? Today we see it in every aspect of life: in love, in the

human gaze, in nature, in our dreams, in reality. Hegel spoke of the tragedy

of consciousness; he would have been nearer the mark had he spoken of a

consciousness of tragedy. We find such a consciousness in revolutionary form

in Marx. A far more comforting picture, from the viewpoint of Power, is

offered by Peter Schlemiel setting off in search of his own shadow so as to

forget that he is really a shadow in search of a body. The bourgeoisie's

invention of artificial unitary paradises is a self-defensive reflex which

is more or less successful in retrieving the old enchantment and reviving

prematurely shattered dreams of unity.

Thus in addition to the great collective onanisms--ideologies, illusions of

social unity, herd mentalities, opiums of the people--we are offered a whole

range of marginal solutions lying in the no-man's-land between the

permissible and the forbidden: individualized ideology, obsession,

monomania, unique (and hence alienating) passions, drugs and other highs

(alcohol, the cult of speed and rapid change, of rarefied sensations, etc).

Now all these pursuits allow us to lose ourselves completely while

preserving the impression of self-realization, but the corrosiveness of such

activities stems above all from their partial quality. The passion for play

is no longer alienating wherever the person who gives himself up to it seeks

play in the whole of life--in love, in thought, in the construction of

situations. ln the same way the wish to kill is no longer megalomania if it

is combined with revolutionary consciousness.

Unitary palliatives thus entail two risks for Power. ln the first place they

fail to satisfy, and in the second they tend to foster the will to build a

real social unity. Mystical elevation led only to God; by contrast,

horizontal historical progression towards a dubious spectacular unity is

infinitely finite. It creates an unlimited appetite for the absolute, yet

its quantitative nature is limiting by definition. Its mad rush, therefore,

must sooner or later debouch into the qualitative, whether in a negative way

or-- should a revolutionary consciousness prevail--through the

transformation of negativity into positivity. The negative road does not

lead to self-realization: it precipitates us into a willful

self-destruction. Madness deliberately sought, the voluptuousness of crime

and cruelty, the convulsive lightning of perversity--these are the enticing

paths open to such unrepentant self-annihilation. To take them is merely to

respond with unusual enthusiasm to the gravitational pull of Power's own

tendency to dismember and destroy. But if it is to last, Power has to

shackle its destructiveness: the good general oppresses his men, he does not

execute them. On the other hand, it remains to be seen whether nothingness

can be successfully doled out drop by drop. The limited pleasures derived

from self-destruction could end up bringing down the power which sets such

limits to pleasure. We only have to look at Stockholm or Watts to see that

negative pleasure is forever on the point of tipping over into total

pleasure--a little shove, and negative violence releases its positivity. I

believe that all pleasure embodies the search for total, unitary

satisfaction, in every sphere--a fact which I doubt Huysmans had the humor

to see when he solemnly described a man with an erection as 'insurgent'.

The complete unchaining of pleasure is the surest way to the revolution of

everyday life, to the construction of the whole man.

                                 Chapter 14

                       THE ORGANIZATION OF APPEARANCES

   The organization of appearances is a system for protecting the facts. A

    racket. lt represents the facts in a mediated reality to prevent them

  emerging in unmediated form. Unitary power organized appearances as myth.

    Fragmentary power organizes appearances as spectacle. Challenged, the

  coherence of myth became the myth of coherence. Magnified by history, the

  incoherence of the spectacle turns into the spectacle of incoherence (eg,

     pop art, a contemporary form of consumable putrefaction, is also an

expression of the contemporary putrefaction of consumption) (1). The poverty

 of 'the drama' as a literary genre goes hand in hand with the colonization

  of social space by theatrical attitudes. Enfeebled on the stage, theatre

  battens on to everyday life and attempts to dramatize everyday behaviour.

 Lived experience is poured into the moulds of roles. The job of perfecting

                 roles has been turned over to experts (2).

The ideal world," says Nietzsche, "is a lie invented to deprive reality of

its value, its meaning, its truth. Until now the ideal has been the curse of

reality. This lie has so pervaded humanity that it has been perverted and

has falsified itself even in its deepest instincts, even to the point where

it bows down to values directly opposed to those which formerly ensured

progress by ensuring the self-transformation of the present." The lie of the

ideal is of course merely the truth of the masters. When theft needs legal

justification, when authority raises the banner of the general interest

while pursuing private ends with impunity, is it any wonder that the lie

fascinates the minds of men, twisting them to fit its laws until their

contortions come to resemble 'natural' human postures? And it is true that

man lies because in a world governed by lies he cannot do otherwise: he is

falsehood himself, he is trapped in his own falsehood. Common sense never

underwrites anything except the decree promulgated in the name of everyone

against the truth. Common sense is the lie put into lay terms.

All the same, nobody lies groaning under the yoke of inauthenticity

twenty-four hours a day. There are always a few radical thinkers in whom a

truthful light shines briefly through the lie of words; and by the same

token there are very few alienations which are not shattered every day for

an instant, for an hour, for the space of a dream, by subjective refusal.

Words are never completely in the thrall of Power, and no one is ever

completely unaware of what is destroying him. When these moments of truth

are extended they will turn out to have been the tip of the iceberg of

subjectivity destined to sink the Titanic of the lie.

                                    * * *

After shattering myth, the tide of materialism has washed its fragments out

to sea. Once the motor force of this tide, the bourgeoisie will end up as so

much foam drifting out along with all the flotsam. When he describes the

mechanism whereby the king's hired assassin returns in due time to carry out

his orders upon the one who gave them, Shakespeare seems to offer us a

curiously prophetic account of the fate reserved for the class that killed

God. Once the assassins of the established order lose their faith in the

myth, or, in other words, in the God who legalizes their crimes, the

machinery of death is turned against its devisers. Revolution was the

bourgeoisie's finest invention. It is also the running noose which will help

it take its leap into oblivion. It is easy to see why bourgeois thought,

strung up as it is on a rope of radicalism of its own manufacture, clings

with the energy of desperation to every reformist solution, to anything that

can prolong its life, even though its own weight must inevitably drag it

down to its doom. Fascism is in a way a consistent response to this hopeless

predicament. It is like an aesthete dreaming of dragging the whole world

down with him into the abyss, lucid as to the death of his class but a

sophist when he announces the inevitability of universal annihilation. Today

this mise en sc? of death chosen and refused lies at the core of the

spectacle of incoherence.

The organization of appearances aspires to the immobility of the shadow of a

bird in flight. But this aspiration amounts to no more than a vain hope,

bound up with the ruling class's efforts to solidify its power, of escaping

from the course of history. There is, however, an important difference

between myth and its fragmented, desanctified avatar, the spectacle, with

respect to the way each resists the criticism of facts. The varying

importance assumed in unitary systems by artisans, merchants and bankers

explains the continual oscillation in these societies between the coherence

of myth and the myth of coherence. With the triumph of the bourgeoisie

something very different happens: by introducing history into the armoury of

appearances, the bourgeois revolution historicizes appearance and thus makes

the progression from the incoherence of the spectacle to the spectacle of

incoherence inevitable.

In unitary societies, whenever the merchant class, with its disrespect for

tradition, threatened to deconsecrate values, the coherence of myth would

give way to the myth of coherence. What does this mean? What had formerly

been taken for granted had suddenly to be vigorously reasserted. Loud

professions of faith were heard where previously faith was so automatic as

to need no stating, and respect for the great had to be preserved through

recourse to the principle of absolute monarchy. I hope closer study will be

given to these paradoxical interregnums of myth during which we see the

bourgeoisie trying to sanctify its rise by means of a new religion and by

self-ennoblement, while the nobility engages in the corollary but very

different activity of gambling on an impossible transcendence. (The Fronde

springs to mind--but so do the Heraclitean dialectic and Gilles de Rais.)

The aristocracy had the elegance to turn its last words into a witticism;

the bourgeoisie's disappearance from the scene will have but the gravity of

bourgeois thought. As for the forces of revolutionary transcendence, they

surely have more to win from lighthearted death than from the dead weight of

survival.

There comes a time when the myth of coherence is so undermined by the

criticism of facts that it cannot mutate back into a coherent myth.

Appearance, that mirror in which men hide their own choices from themselves,

shatters into a thousand pieces and falls into the public realm of

individual supply and demand. The demise of appearances means the end of

hierarchical power, that facade "with nothing behind it." The trend is

clear, and leaves no room for doubt as to this final outcome. The Great

Revolution was scarcely over before God's motley successors turned up at

bargain prices as 'unclaimed' items on a pawnbroker's shelves. First came

the Supreme Being and the Bonapartist concordat, and then, hard on their

heels, nationalism, individualism, socialism, national socialism, and all

the other neo-isms--not to mention the individualized dregs of every

imaginable hand-me-down weltanschauung and the thousands of portable

ideologies offered as free gifts every time someone buys a TV, an item of

culture or a box of detergent. Eventually the decomposition of the spectacle

entails the resort to the spectacle of decomposition. It is in the logic of

things that the last actor should film his own death. As it happens, the

logic of things is the logic of what can be consumed, and sold as it is

consumed. Pataphysics, sub-Dada, and the mise en scène of impoverished

everyday life line the road that leads us with many a twist and turn to the

last graveyards.

The development of the drama as a literary genre cannot but throw light on

the question of the organization of appearances. After all, a play is the

simplest form of the organization of appearances, and a prototype for all

more sophisticated forms. As religious plays designed to reveal the mystery

of transcendence to men, the earliest theatrical forms were indeed the

organization of appearances of their time. And the process of secularization

of the theatre supplied the models for later, spectacular stage management.

Aside from the machinery of war, all machines of ancient times originated in

the needs of the theatre. The crane, the pulley and other hydraulic devices

started out as theatrical paraphernalia; it was only much later that they

revolutionized production relations. It is a striking fact that no matter

how far we go back in time the domination of the earth and of men seems to

depend on techniques which serve the purposes not only of work but also of

illusion.

The birth of tragedy was already a narrowing of the arena in which primitive

men and gods had held their cosmic dialogue. It meant a distancing, a

putting in parentheses, of magical participation. This was now organized in

accordance with a refraction of the principles of initiation, and no longer

involved the rites themselves. What emerged was a spectaculum, a thing seen,

while the gradual relegation of the gods to the role of mere props presaged

their eventual eviction from the social scene as a whole. Once mythic

relationships have been dissolved by secularizing tendencies, tragedy is

superseded by drama. Comedy is a good indicator of this transition: with all

the vigour of a completely new force, its corrosive humour devastates

tragedy in its dotage. Molière's Don Juan and the parody of Handel in John

Gay's Beggar's Opera bear sufficiently eloquent testimony on this score.

With the advent of drama human society replaces the gods on the stage. Now,

although it is true that nineteenth-century theatre was merely one form of

entertainment among others, we must not let this obscure the much more

important fact that during this period theatre left the theatre, so to

speak, and colonized the entire social arena. The cliché which likens life

to a drama seems to evoke a fact so obvious as to need no discussion. So

widespread is the confusion between play-acting and life that it does not

even occur to us to wonder why it exists. Yet what is 'natural' about the

fact that I stop being myself a hundred times a day and slip into the skin

of people whose concerns and importance I have really not the slightest

desire to know about? Not that I might not choose to be an actor on

occasion--to play a role for diversion or pleasure. But this is not the type

of role-playing I have in mind. The actor supposed to play a condemned man

in a realist play is at perfect liberty to remain himself: herein lies, in

fact, the paradox of fine acting. But this freedom that he enjoys is

contingent upon the fact that this "condemned man" is in no danger of

feeling a real hangman's noose about his neck. The roles we play in everyday

life, on the other hand, soak into the individual, preventing him from being

what he really is and what he really wants to be. They are nuclei of

alienation embedded in the flesh of direct experience. The function of such

stereotypes is to dictate to each person on an individual, even 'intimate',

level the same things which ideology imposes collectively.

                                    * * *

                                 Chapter 15

 Stereotypes are the dominant images of a period, the images of the dominant

spectacle. The stereotype is the model of the role; the role is a model form

 of behaviour. The repetition of an attitude creates a role; the repetition

  of a role creates a stereotype. The stereotype is an objective form into

   which people are integrated by means of the role. Skill in playing and

      handling roles determines rank in the spectacular hierarchy. The

 degeneration of the spectacle brings about the proliferation of stereotypes

 and roles, which by the same token become risible, and converge dangerously

  upon their negation, i.e., spontaneous actions (1,2). Access to the role

occurs by means of identification. The need to identify is more important to

   Power's stability than the models identified with. Identification is a

   pathological state, but only accidental identifications are officially

  classed as ``mental illness.'' Roles are the bloodsuckers of the will to

live (3). They express lived experience, yet at the same time they reify it.

 They also offer consolation for this impoverishment of life by supplying a

    surrogate, neurotic gratification. We have to break free of roles by

restoring them to the realm of play (4). A role successfully adopted ensures

   promotion in the spectacular hierarchy, the rise from a given rank to a

 higher one. This is the process of initiation, as manifested notably in the

  cult of names and the use of photography. Specialists are those initiates

 who supervise initiation. The always partial expertise of specialists is a

 component part of the systematic strategy of Power, Power which destroys us

   even as it destroys itself (5). The degeneration of the spectacle makes

   roles interchangeable. The proliferation of unreal changes creates the

preconditions for a sole and real change, a truly radical change. The weight

 of inauthenticity finally provokes a violent and quasi-biological reaction

                         from the will to live (6).

Our efforts, our boredom, our defeats, the absurdity of our actions all stem

most of the time from the imperious necessity in our present situation of

playing hybrid parts, parts which appear to answer our desires, but which

are really antagonistic to them. ``We would live,'' says Pascal, ``according

to the ideas of others; we would live an imaginary life, and to this end we

cultivate appearances. Yet in striving to beautify and preserve this

imaginary being we neglect everything authentic.'' This was an original

thought in the seventeenth century; at a time when the system of appearances

was still hale, its coming crisis was apprehended only in the inhibitive

flashes of the most lucid. Today, amidst the decomposition of all values,

Pascal's observation states only what is obvious to everyone. By what magic

do we attribute the liveliness of human passions to lifeless forms? Why do

we succumb to the seduction of borrowed attitudes? What are roles?

Is what drives people to seek power the very weakness to which Power reduces

them? The tyrant is irked by the duties the subjection of his people imposes

on him. The price he pays for the divine consecration of his authority over

men is perpetual mythic sacrifice, a permanent humility before God. The

moment he quits God's service, he no longer `serves' his people and his

people are immediately released from their obligation to serve him. What vox

populi, vox dei really means is: ``What God wants, the people want.'' Slaves

are not willing slaves for long if they are not compensated for their

submission by a shred of power: all subjection entails the right to a

measure of power, and there is no such thing as power that does not embody a

degree of submission. This is why some agree so readily to be governed.

Wherever it is exercised, on every rung of the ladder, power is partial, not

absolute. It is thus ubiquitous, but ever open to challenge.

The role is a consumption of power. It locates one in the representational

hierarchy, and hence in the spectacle: at the top, at the bottom, in the

middle but never outside the hierarchy, whether this side of it or beyond

it. The role is thus the means of access to the mechanism of culture: a form

of initiation. It is also the medium of exchange of individual sacrifice,

and in this sense performs a compensatory function. And lastly, as a residue

of separation, it strives to construct a behavioural unity; in this aspect

it depends on identification.

In a restrictive sense, the expression ``to play a role in society'' clearly

implies that roles are a distinction reserved for a chosen few. Roman

slaves, medieval serfs, agricultural day-labourers, proletarians brutalized

by a thirteen-hour day -the likes of these do not have roles, or they have

such rudimentary ones that `refined' people consider them more animals than

men. There is, after all, such a thing as poverty founded on exclusion from

the poverty of the spectacle. By the nineteenth century, however, the

distinction between good worker and bad worker had begun to gain ground as a

popular notion, just as that between master and slave had been vulgarized,

along with Christ, under the earlier, mythic system. It is true that the

spread of this new idea was achieved with less effort, and that it never

acquired the importance of the master-slave idea (although it was

significant enough for Marx to deem it worthy of his derision). So, just

like mythic sacrifice, roles have been democratized. Inauthenticity is a

right of man; such, in a word, is the triumph of socialism. Take a

thirty-five-year-old man. Each morning he takes his car, drives to the

office, pushes papers, has lunch in town, plays pool, pushes more papers,

leaves work, has a couple of drinks, goes home, greets his wife, kisses his

children, eats his steak in front of the TV, goes to bed, makes love, and

falls asleep. Who reduces a man's life to this pathetic sequence of clichés?

A journalist? A cop? A market researcher? A socialist-realist author? Not at

all. He does it himself, breaking his day down into a series of poses chosen

more or less unconsciously from the range of dominant stereotypes. Taken

over body and consciousness by the blandishments of a succession of images,

he rejects authentic satisfaction and espouses a passionless asceticism: his

pleasures are so mitigated, yet so demonstrative, that they can only be a

facade. The assumption of one role after another, provided he mimics

stereotypes successfully, is titillating to him. Thus the satisfaction

derived from a well-played role is in direct proportion to his distance from

himself, to his self-negation and self-sacrifice.

What power masochism has! Just as others were Count of Sandomir, Palatine of

Smirnoff, Margrave of Thorn, Duke of Courlande, so he invests his poses as

driver, employee, superior, subordinate, colleague, customer, seducer,

friend, philatelist, husband, paterfamilias, viewer, citizen with a quite

personal majesty. And yet such a man cannot be entirely reduced to the

idiotic machine, the lethargic puppet, that all this implies. For brief

moments his daily life must generate an energy which, if only it were not

rechannelled, dispersed and squandered in roles, would suffice to overthrow

the world of survival. Who can gauge the striking-power of an impassioned

daydream, of pleasure taken in love, of a nascent desire, of a rush of

sympathy? Everyone seeks spontaneously to extend such brief moments of real

life; everyone wants basically to make something whole out of their everyday

life. But conditioning succeeds in making most of us pursue these moments in

exactly the wrong way by way of the inhuman with the result that we lose

what we most want at the very moment we attain it.

                                   * * *

Stereotypes have a life and death of their own. Thus an image whose

magnetism makes it a model for thousands of individual roles will eventually

crumble and disappear in accordance with the laws of consumption, the laws

of constant novelty and universal obsolescence. So how does spectacular

society find new stereotypes? It finds them thanks to that injection of real

creativity which prevents some roles from conforming to ageing stereotypes

(rather as language gets a new lease on life through the assimilation of

popular forms). Thanks, in other words, to that element of play which

transforms roles.

To the extent that it conforms to a stereotype, a role tends to congeal, to

take on the static nature of its model. Such a role has neither present, nor

past, nor future, because its time resembles exposure time, and is, so to

speak, a pause in time: time compressed into the dissociated space-time

which is that of Power. (Here again we see the truth of the argument that

Power's strength lies in its facility in enforcing both actual separation

and false union.) The timeless moment of the role may be compared to the

cinematic image, or rather to one of its elements, to one frame, to one

image in the series of images of minimally varying predetermined attitudes

whose reproduction constitutes a shot. In the case of roles reproduction is

ensured by the rhythms of the advertising media, whose power of

dissemination is the precondition for a role's achievement of the status of

a stereotype (Monroe, Sagan, Dean). No matter how much or how little

limelight a given role attains in the public eye, however, its prime

function is always that of social adaptation, of integrating people into the

well policed universe of things. Which is why there are hidden cameras

always ready to catapult the most pedestrian of lives into the spotlight of

instant fame. Bleeding hearts fill columns, and superfluous body hair

becomes an affair of Beauty. When the spectacle battening on to everyday

life takes a pair of unhappy lovers and mass-markets them as Tristan and

Isolde, sells a tattered derelict as a piece of nostalgia, or makes a

drudging housewife into a good fairy of the kitchen, it is already way ahead

of anything modern art can dream up. It was inevitable, perhaps, that people

would end up modelling themselves on collages of smiling spouses, crippled

children and do-it-yourself geniuses. At any rate we have reached that point

and such ploys always pay off. On the other hand the spectacle is fast

approaching a saturation point, the point immediately prior to the eruption

of everyday reality. For roles now operate on a level perilously close to

their own negation: already the average failure is hard put to it to play

his role properly, and some maladjusted people refuse their roles

altogether. As it falls apart, the spectacular system starts scraping the

barrel, drawing nourishment from the lowest social strata. It is forced, in

fact, to eat its own shit. Thus tone-deaf singers, talent-free artists,

reluctant laureates and pallid stars of all kinds emerge periodically to

cross the firmament of the media, their rank in the hierarchy being

determined by the regularity with which they achieve this feat.

Which leaves the hopeless cases those who reject all roles and those who

develop a theory and practice of this refusal. From such maladjustment to

spectacular society a new poetry of real experience and a reinvention of

life are bound to spring. The deflation of roles precipitates the

decompression of spectacular time in favour of lived space-time. What is

living intensely if not the mobilization and redirection of the current of

time, so long arrested and lost in appearances? Are not the happiest moments

of our lives glimpses of an expanded present that rejects Power's

accelerated time which dribbles away year after year, for as long as it

takes to grow old?

Identification. The principle of Szondi's test is well known. The patient is

asked to choose, from forty-eight photographs of people in various types of

paroxystic crisis, those which evoke sympathy in him and those which evoke

aversion. The subject invariably prefers those faces expressing instinctual

feelings which he accepts in himself, and rejects those expressing ones

which he represses. The results enable the psychiatrist to draw up an

instinctual profile of his patient which helps him decide whether to

discharge him or send him to the air-conditioned crematorium known as a

mental hospital.

Consider now the needs of consumer society, a society in which man's essence

is to consume to consume Coca-Cola, literature, ideas, emotions,

architecture, TV, power, etc. Consumer goods, ideologies, stereotypes all

play the part of photos in a gigantic version of Szondi's test in which each

of us is supposed to take part, not merely by making a choice, but by a

commitment, by practical activity. This society's need to market objects,

ideas and model forms of behaviour calls for a decoding centre where an

instinctual profile of the consumer can be constructed to help in product

design and improvement, and in the creation of new needs liable to increase

consumption. Market research, motivation techniques, opinion polls,

sociological surveys and structuralism may all be considered a part of this

project, no matter how anarchic and feeble their contributions may be as

yet. The cyberneticians can certainly supply the missing co-ordination and

rationalization if they are given the chance.

At first glance the main thing would seem to be the choice of the

``consumable image.'' The housewife-who-uses-Fairy-Snow is different and the

difference is measured in profits from the housewife-who-uses-Tide. The

Labour voter differs from the Conservative voter, and the Communist from the

Christian, in much the same way. But such differences are increasingly hard

to discern. The spectacle of incoherence ends up putting a value on the

vanishing point of values. Eventually, identification with anything at all,

like the need to consume anything at all, becomes more important than brand

loyalty to a particular type of car, idol, or politician. The essential

thing, after all, is to alienate people from their desires and pen them in

the spectacle, in the occupied zone. It matters little whether people are

good or bad, honest or criminal, left-wing or right-wing: the form is

irrelevant, just so long as they lose themselves in it. Let those who cannot

identify with Khrushchev identify with Yevtushenko; this should cover

everyone but hooligans and we can deal with them. And indeed it is the third

force alone that has nothing to identify with no enemy, no

pseudo-revolutionary leader. The third force is the force of identity that

identity in which everyone recognizes and discovers himself. There, at

least, no one makes decisions for me, or in my name; there my freedom is the

freedom of all.

                                   * * *

There is no such thing as mental illness. It is merely a convenient label

for grouping and isolating cases where identification has not occurred

properly. Those whom Power can neither govern nor kill, it taxes with

madness. The category includes extremists and megalomaniacs of the role, as

well as those who deride roles or refuse them. It is only the isolation of

such individuals which condemns them, however. Let a General identify with

France, with the support of millions of voters, and an opposition

immediately springs up which seriously seeks to rival him in his lunacy.

Horbiger's attempt to invent a Nazi physics met with a similar kind of

success. General Walker was taken seriously when he drew a distinction

between superior, white, divine and capitalist man on the one hand, and

black, demoniacal, communist man on the other. Franco would meditate

devoutly and beg God for guidance in oppressing Spain. Everywhere in the

world are leaders whose cold frenzy lends substance to the thesis that man

is a machine for ruling. True madness is a function not of isolation but of

identification.

The role is the self-caricature which we carry about with us everywhere, and

which brings us everywhere face to face with an absence. An absence, though,

which is structured, dressed up, prettified. The roles of paranoiac,

schizophrenic or psychopath do not carry the seal of social usefulness; in

other words, they are not distributed under the label of power, as are the

roles of cop, boss, or military officer. But they do have a utility in

specified places in asylums and prisons. Such places are museums of a sort,

serving the double purpose, from Power's point of view, of confining

dangerous rivals while at the same time supplying the spectacle with needed

negative stereotypes. For bad examples and their exemplary punishment add

spice to the spectacle and protect it. If identification were maximized

through increased isolation, the ultimate falseness of the distinction

between mental and social alienation would soon become clear.

At the opposite extreme from absolute identification is a particular way of

putting a distance between the role and one's self, a way of establishing a

zone of free play. This zone is a breeding place of attitudes disruptive of

the spectacular order. Nobody is ever completely swallowed up by a role.

Even turned on its head, the will to live retains a potential for violence

always capable of carrying the individual away from the path laid down for

him. One fine morning, the faithful lackey, who has hitherto identified

completely with his master, leaps on his oppressor and slits his throat. For

he has reached that point where his right to bite like a dog has finally

aroused his desire to strike back like a human being. Diderot has described

this moment well in Rameau's Nephew and the case of the Papin sisters