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

illustrates it even better. The fact is that identification, like all

manifestations of inhumanity, has its roots in the human. Inauthentic life

feeds on authentically felt desires. And identification through roles is

doubly successful in this respect. In the first place it co-opts the

pleasure to be derived from metamorphoses, from putting on masks and going

about in different disguises. Secondly, it appropriates mankind's ancient

love of mazes, the love of getting lost solely in order to find one's way

again: the pleasure of the derive. In this way roles also lay under

contribution the reflex of identity, the desire to find the richest and

truest part of ourselves in other people. The game ceases to involve play:

it petrifies because the players can no longer make up the rules. The quest

for identity degenerates into identification.

Let us reverse the perspective for a moment. A psychiatrist tells us that

``Recognition by society leads the individual to expend his sexual drives on

cultural goals, and this is the best way for him to defend himself against

these drives.'' Read: the aim of roles is to absorb vital energies, to

reduce erotic energy by ensuring it permanent sublimation. The less erotic

reality there is, the more the sexualized forms appearing in the spectacle.

Roles Reich would say `armouring' guarantee orgastic impotence. Conversely,

true pleasure, joie de vivre and orgastic potency shatter body armour and

roles. If individuals could stop seeing the world through the eyes of the

powers-that-be, and look at it from their own point of view, they would have

no trouble discerning which actions are really liberating, which moments are

lightning flashes in the dark night of roles. Real experience can illuminate

roles can x-ray them, so to speak in such a way as to retrieve the energy

invested in them, to extricate the truth from the lies. This task is at once

individual and collective. Though all roles alienate equally, some are more

vulnerable than others. It is easier to escape the role of a libertine than

the role of a cop, executive or rabbi. A fact to which everyone should give

a little thought.

Compensation. The ultimate reason why people come to value roles more highly

than their own lives is that their lives are priceless. What this means, in

its ambiguity, is that life cannot be priced, cannot be marketed; and also

that such riches can only be described according to the spectacle's

categories as intolerable poverty. In the eyes of consumer society poverty

is whatever cannot be brought down to terms of consumption. From the

spectacular point of view the reduction of man to consumer is an enrichment:

the more things he has, the more roles he plays, the more he is. So it is

decreed by the organization of appearances. But, from the point of view of

lived reality, all power so attained is paid for by the sacrifice of true

self-realization. What is gained on the level of appearances is lost on the

level of being and becoming.

Thus lived experience always furnishes the raw material of the social

contract, the coin in which the entry fee is paid. Life is sacrificed, and

the loss compensated by means of accomplished prestidigitation in the realm

of appearances. The more daily life is thus impoverished, the greater the

attraction of inauthenticity, and vice versa. Dislodged from its essential

place by the bombardment of prohibitions, limitations and lies, lived

reality comes to seem so trivial that appearances become the centre of our

attention, until roles completely obscure the importance of our own lives.

In an order of things, compensation is the only thing that gives a person

any weight. The role compensates for a lack: ultimately, for the lack of

life; more immediately, for the lack of another role. A worker conceals his

prostration beneath the role of foreman, and the poverty of this role itself

beneath the incomparably superior image of a late-model car. But every role

is paid for by self-injury (overwork, the renunciation of `luxuries',

survival, etc.). At best it is an ineffective plug for the gaping wound left

by the vampirization of the self and of real life. The role is at once a

threat and a protective shield. Its threatening aspect is only felt

subjectively, however, and does not exist officially. Officially, the only

danger lies in the loss or devaluation of the role: in loss of honour, loss

of dignity, or (happy phrase!) loss of face. This ambiguity accounts to my

mind for people's addiction to roles. It explains why roles stick to our

skin, why we give up our lives for them. They impoverish real experience but

they also protect this experience from becoming conscious of its

impoverishment. Indeed, so brutal a revelation would probably be too much

for an isolated individual to take. Thus roles partake of organized

isolation, of separation, of false union, while compensation is the

depressant that ensures the realization of all the potentialities of

inauthenticity, that gets us high on identification.

Survival and its protective illusions form an inseparable whole. The end of

survival naturally entails the disappearance of roles (although there are

some dead people whose names are linked to stereotypes). Survival without

roles is to be officially dead. Just as we are condemned to survival, so we

are condemned to ``keep up appearances'' in the realm of inauthenticity.

Armouring inhibits freedom of gesture but also deadens blows. Beneath this

carapace we are completely vulnerable. But at least we can still play

``let's pretend'' we still have a chance to play roles off against one

another.

Rosanov's approach is not a bad one: ``Externally, I decline. Subjectively,

I am quite indeclinable. I don't agree. I'm a kind of adverb.'' In the end,

of course, the world must be modelled on subjectivity: then I will `agree'

with myself in order to `agree' with others. But, right now, to throw out

all roles like a bag of old clothes would amount to denying the fact of

separation and plunging into mysticism or solipsism. I am in enemy

territory, and the enemy is within me. I don't want him to kill me, and the

armour of roles gives me a measure of protection. I work, I consume, I know

how to be polite, how to avoid aggravation, how to keep a low profile. All

the same, this world of pretence has to be destroyed, which is why it is a

shrewd course to let roles play each other off. Seeming to have no

responsibility is the best way of behaving responsibly toward oneself. All

jobs are dirty so do them dirtily! All roles are lies, but leave them alone

and they'll give each other the lie! I love the arrogance of Jacques Vache

when he writes: ``I wander from ruins to village with my monocle of Crystal

and a disturbing theory of painting. I have been in turn a lionized author,

a celebrated pornographic draftsman and a scandalous cubist painter. Now I

am going to stay at home and let others explain and debate my personality in

the light of the above mentioned indications.'' My only responsibility is to

be absolutely honest with those who are on my side, those who are true

partisans of authentic life.

The more detached one is from a role, the easier it becomes to turn it

against the enemy. The more effectively one avoids the weight of things, the

easier it is to achieve lightness of movement. Comrades care little for

forms. They argue openly, confident in the knowledge that they cannot

inflict wounds on each other. Where communication is genuinely sought,

misunderstandings are no crime. But if you accost me armed to the teeth,

understanding agreement only in terms of a victory for you, then you will

get nothing out of me but an evasive pose, and a formal silence intended to

indicate that the discussion is closed. For interchange on the basis of

contending roles is useless a priori. Only the enemy wants to fight on the

terrain of roles, according to the rules of the spectacle. It is hard enough

keeping one's phantoms at arm's length: who needs `friendships' which put us

back on the same footing? Would that biting and barking could wake people up

to the dog's life roles force them to live wake them up to the importance of

their selves!

Fortunately, the spectacle of incoherence is obliged to introduce an element

of play into roles. Its levelling of all ethical distinctions makes it

impossible to take seriously. The playful approach to roles leaves them

floating in the sea of its indifference. This accounts for the rather

unhappy efforts of our reorganizers of appearances to increase the playful

element (TV game shows, etc.), to press flippancy into the service of

consumption. The disintegration of appearances tends to foster distancing

from roles. Some roles, being dubious or ambiguous, embody their own

self-criticism. The spectacle is destined eventually for reconversion into a

collective game. Daily life, seizing whatever means it has to hand, will

establish the preconditions for this game's never-ending expansion.

Initiation. As it seeks to safeguard the poverty of survival by loudly

protesting against it, the compensatory tendency bestows upon each

individual a certain number of formal possibilities of participating in the

spectacle a sort of permit for the scenic representation of one or more

slices of (private or public) life. Just as God used to bestow grace on all

men, leaving each free to choose salvation or damnation, so modern social

organization accords everyone the right to be a success or a failure in the

social world. But whereas God appropriated human subjectivity in one fell

swoop, the bourgeoisie commandeers it by means of a series of partial

alienations. In one sense, therefore, there is progress here: subjectivity,

which was nothing, becomes something; it attains its own truth, its mystery,

its passions, its rationality, its rights. But this official recognition is

bought at the price of its subdivision into components which are graded and

pigeonholed according to Power's norms. Subjectivity attains objective form

as stereotypes, by means of identification. In the process it has to be

broken up into would-be-absolute fragments and pathetically reduced (witness

the Romantics' grotesque treatment of the self, and the antidote for it,

humour).

I possess badges of power, therefore I am. In order to be someone the

individual must pay things their due. He must keep his roles in order,

polish them up, enter into them repeatedly, and initiate himself little by

little until he qualifies for promotion in the spectacle. The conveyor belts

called schools, the advertising industry, the conditioning mechanisms

inseparable from any Order -all conspire to lead the child, the adolescent

and the adult as painlessly as possible into the big family of consumers.

There are different stages of initiation. Recognized social groups do not

all enjoy the same measure of power, nor is that measure equally distributed

within each group. It is a long way, in hierarchical terms, from the boss to

his workers, from the star to his fans, or from the politician to his

supporters. Some groups have a much more rigid structure than others. But

all are founded on the illusion of participation shared by every group

member whatever his rank. This illusion is fostered through meetings,

insignia, the distribution of minor `responsibilities', etc. The spurious

solidarities maintained by such expedients are often friable. This boyscout

mentality is frighteningly pervasive, and it throws up its own stereotypes,

its own martyrs, heroes, models, geniuses, thinkers, good niggers, great

successes e.g., Tania, Cienfuegos, Brando, Dylan, Sartre, a national darts

champion, Lin Piao. (The reader is asked to assign each to the appropriate

category....)

Can the collectivization of roles successfully replace the quondam power of

the old ideologies? It has to be remembered that Power stands or falls with

the organization of appearances. The fission of myth into particles of

ideology has produced roles as fallout. The poverty of power now has no

means of self-concealment aside from its lie-in-pieces. The prestige of a

film star, a head of a family, or a chief executive is not worth a wet fart.

Nothing can escape the effects of this nihilistic process of decomposition

except its transcendence. Even a technocratic victory preventing this

transcendence can only amount to the condemnation of people to meaningless

activity, to rites of initiation leading nowhere, to unrewarded sacrifice,

to enrollment without roles, t o specialization.

The specialist is, indeed, an adumbration of just such a chimerical being,

cog, mechanical thing, housed in the rationality of a perfect social order

of zombies. He turns up everywhere among politicians, among hijackers.

Specialization is in a sense the science of roles, the science of endowing

appearances with the éclat formerly bestowed by nobility, wit, extravagance

or wealth. The specialist does more than this, however, for he enrolls

himself in order to enroll others. He is the vital link between the

techniques of production and consumption and the technique of spectacular

representation. Yet he is, so to speak, an isolated link a monad. Knowing

everything about a small area, he enlists others to produce and consume

within the confines of this area so that he himself may receive a

surplus-value of power and increase the significance of his own hierarchical

image. He knows, if need be, how to give up a multitude of roles for one

only, how to concentrate his power instead of spreading it around, how to

make his life unilinear. When he does this he becomes a manager. His

misfortune is that the sphere within which he exercises power is always too

restricted, too partial. He is like the gastro-enterologist who cures a

stomach but poisons the rest of the body in the process. Naturally, the

importance of the group which he holds in thrall can allow him the illusion

of power, but the anarchy is such, the clash of contradictory competing

interests so violent, that he must eventually realize how powerless he

really is. Just as heads of state with the power to unleash thermonuclear

war contrive to paralyze each other, so specialists, by working at

cross-purposes, construct and (in the last analysis) operate a gigantic

machine Power, social organization which dominates them all and oppresses

them in varying degrees according to their importance as cogs. They

construct and operate this machine blindly, because it is simply the

aggregate of their crossed purposes. We may expect, therefore, that in the

case of most specialists the sudden consciousness of such a disastrous

passivity, a passivity in which they have invested so much effort, will

eventually fling them all the more energetically in the direction of an

authentic will to live. It is also predictable that others among them, those

who have been longer or more intensely exposed to the radiation of

authoritarian passivity, will follow the example of the officer in Kafka's

Penal Colony and perish along with the machine, tormented to the end by its

last spasms. Every day the crossed purposes of the powerful make and unmake

the tottering majesty of Power. We have seen with what results. Let us now

try to imagine the glacial nightmare into which we would be plunged were the

cyberneticians able so to co-ordinate their efforts as to achieve a rational

organization of society, eliminating or at any rate reducing the effects of

crossed purposes. They would have no rivals for the Nobel Prize, save

perhaps the proponents of thermonuclear suicide.

                                   * * *

The widespread use of name and photograph, as in what are laughingly

referred to as `identification' papers, is rather obviously tied up with the

police function in modern societies. But the connection is not merely with

the vulgar police work of search, surveillance, harassment, torture and

murder incorporated. It also involves much more occult methods of

maintaining law and order. The frequency with which an individual's name or

image passes through the visual and oral channels of communication is an

index of that individual's rank and category. It goes without saying that

the name most often uttered in a neighbourhood, town, country, or in the

world has a powerful fascination. Charted statistically for any given time

and place, this information would supply a perfect relief map of Power.

Historically, however, the degeneration of roles goes hand in hand with the

increasing meaninglessness of names. The aristocrat's name crystallizes the

mystery of birth and title. In consumer society the spectacular exposure of

the name of a Bernard Buffet serves to transform a very ordinary talent into

a famous painter. The manipulation of names fabricates leaders in the same

way as it sells shampoo. But this also means that a famous name is no longer

the attribute of the one who bears it. The name `Buffet' does not designate

anything except a thing and a pig in a poke. It is a fragment of power.

I laugh when I hear the humanists whining about the reduction of people to

ciphers. What makes them think the destruction of men complete with

tricked-up names is any less inhuman than their destruction as a set of

numbers? I have already said that the obscure antagonism between the

would-be progressives and the reactionaries boils down to this: should

people be smashed by punishments or by rewards? As for the reward of

celebrity, thanks for nothing!

In any case, it is things that have names nowadays, not people. To reverse

the perspective, however, it makes me happy to think that what I am cannot

be reduced to a name. My pleasure is nameless: those all too rare moments

when I act for myself afford no handhold for external manipulation of

whatever kind. It is only when I accede to the dispossession of my self that

I risk petrification amidst the names of the things which oppress me. This

is the context in which to grasp the full meaning of Albert Libertad's

burning of his identification papers. Such an act echoed much later by the

black workers of Johannesburg is more than a rejection of police control: it

is a way of giving up one name so as to have the pick of a thousand. Such is

the superb dialectic of the change in perspective: since the powers-that-be

forbid me to bear a name which is as it was for the feudal lord a true

emanation of my strength, I refuse to be called by any name, and suddenly

beneath the nameless I discover the wealth of real life, inexpressible

poetry, the antechamber of transcendence. I enter the nameless forest where

Lewis Carroll's gnat explains to Alice: ``If the governess wanted to call

you for your lessons, she would call out `Come here -', and there she would

have to leave off, because there wouldn't be any name for her to call, and

of course you wouldn't have to go, you know.'' The blissful forest of

radical subjectivity.

Giorgio de Chirico, to my mind, also has an admirably lucid knowledge of the

way to Alice's forest. What holds for names holds too for the representation

of the face. The photograph is the expression par excellence of the role, of

the pose. It imprisons the soul and offers it up for inspection this is why

a photograph is always sad. We examine it as we examine an object. And, true

enough, to identify oneself with a range of facial expressions, no matter

how broad a range, is a form of self-objectification. The God of the mystics

at least had the good sense to avoid this trap. But let us get back to

Chirico a near contemporary of Libertad's. (Power, if only it were human,

would be proud of the number of potential encounters it has successfully

prevented.) The blank faces of Chirico's figures are the perfect indictment

of inhumanity. His deserted squares and petrified backgrounds display man

dehumanized by the things he has made things which, frozen in an urban space

crystallizing the oppressive power of ideologies, rob him of his substance

and suck his blood. (I forget who speaks somewhere of vampiric landscapes;

Breton, perhaps.) More than this, the absence of facial features seems to

conjure up new faces, to materialize a presence capable of investing the

very stones with humanity. For me this ghostly presence is that of

collective creation: because they have no one's face, Chirico's figures

evoke everyone.

In striking contrast to the fundamental tendency of modern sculpture, which

goes to great lengths to express its own nothingness and concocts a

semiology on the basis of its nullity, Chirico gives us paintings in which

this absence is evoked solely as a means of intimating what lies beyond it

namely, the poetry of reality and the realization of art, of philosophy, of

man. As the sign of a reified world, the blank space is incorporated into

the canvas at the crucial spot; the implication is that the countenance is

no longer part of the representational universe, but is about to become part

of everyday praxis.

One of these days the incomparable wealth of the decade between 1910 and

1920 will be clearly seen. The genius of these years, however primitive and

intuitive, lay in the fact that for the first time an attempt was made to

bridge the gulf between art and life. I think we may safely say that, the

surrealist adventure aside, nothing was achieved in the period between the

demise of this vanguard of transcendence and the inception of the

situationist project. The disillusionment of the older generation which has

been marking time for the last forty years, as much in the realm of art as

in that of social revolution, merely reinforces this view. Dada, Malevich's

white square, Ulysses, Chirico's canvasses -all impregnated the absence of

man reduced to the state of a thing with the presence of the whole man. And

today the whole man is simply the project which the majority of men harbour

under the sign of a forbidden creativity.

In the unitary world, under the serene gaze of the gods, adventure and

pilgrimage were paradigms of change in an unchanging universe. Inasmuch as

this world was given for all time there was really nothing to be discovered,

but revelation awaited the pilgrim, knight or wanderer at the crossroads.

Actually revelation lay within each individual: the seeker would travel the

world seeking it in himself, seeking it in far lands, until suddenly it

would surge forth, a magical spring released by the purity of a gesture at

the same place where the ill-favoured seeker would have found nothing. The

spring and the castle dominate the creative imagination of the Middle Ages.

The symbolic theme here is plain: beneath movement lies immutability, and

beneath immutability, movement.

Wherein lies the greatness of Heliogabalus, Tamerlane, Gilles de Rais,

Tristan, Perceval? In the fact that, once vanquished, they withdraw into a

living God; they identify with the demiurge, abandoning their unsatisfied

humanity in order to reign and die under the mask of divine awe. This death

of men, which is the God of the immutable, lets life bloom under the shadow

of its scythe. Our dead God weighs more heavily than the living God of old;

for the bourgeoisie has not completely disposed of God, it has only

contrived to air-condition his corpse. (The Romantic attitude was a reaction

to the odour of that corpse's putrefaction, a disgusted wrinkling of the

nostrils at the conditions imposed by survival.)

As a class rent by contradictions, the bourgeoisie founds its domination on

the transformation of the world, yet refuses to transform itself. It is thus

a movement wishing to avoid movement. In unitary societies the image of

immutability embraced movement; in fragmentary societies change seeks to

reproduce immutability: ``Wars (or the poor, or slaves) will always be with

us.'' Thus the bourgeoisie in power can tolerates change only if it is

empty, abstract, cut off from the whole: partial change, changes of parts.

Now although the habit of change is intrinsically subversive, it is also the

main prerequisite to the functioning of consumer society. People have to

change cars, fashions, ideas, etc., all the time. For if they did not, a

more radical change would occur which would put an end to a form of

authority that is already reduced to putting itself up for sale as parcels

of power: it has to be consumed at all costs, and one of the costs is that

everyone is consumed along with it. Sad to say, this headlong rush towards

death, this desperate and would-be endless race deprives us of any real

future: ahead lies the past, hastily disguised and projected forward in

time. For decades now the selfsame `novelties' have been turning up in the

marketplace of fad and fancy, with the barest attempt to conceal their

decrepitude. The same is true in the supermarket of the role. The system is

confronted by the problem of how to supply a variety of roles wide enough to

compensate for the loss of the qualitative force of the role as it existed

in the prebourgeois era. This is a hopeless task for two reasons. In the

first place, the quantitative character of roles is a limitation by

definition, and inevitably engenders the demand for a conversion into

quality. Secondly, the lie of renewal cannot be sustained within the poverty

of the spectacle. The constant need for fresh roles forces a resort to

remakes, to transparent mummery. The proliferation of trivial changes

titillates the desire for real change but never satisfies it. Power

accelerates changes in illusions, thereby hastening the eruption of reality,

of radical change.

It is not just that the increasing number of roles tends to make them

indistinguishable, it also triturates them and makes them ludicrous. The

quantification of subjectivity has created spectacular categories for the

most prosaic acts and the most ordinary attributes: a certain smile, a chest

measurement, a hairstyle. Great roles are few and far between; walk-ons are

a dime a dozen. Even the Ubus the Stalins, Hitlers or Mussolinis have but

the palest of successors. Most of us are well acquainted with the malaise

that accompanies any attempt to join a group and make contact with others.

This feeling amounts to stage fright, the fear of not playing one's part

properly. Only with the crumbling of officially controllable attitudes and

poses will the true source of this anxiety become clear to us. For it arises

not from our clumsiness in handling roles but from the loss of self in the

spectacle, in the order of things. In his book Medecine et homme total,

Soli‚ has this to say about the frightening spread of neurotic disorders:

``There is no such thing as disease per se, no such thing, even, as a sick

person per se: all there is is authentic or inauthentic

being-in-the-world.'' The reconversion of the energy robbed by appearances

into the will to live authentically is a function of the dialectic of

appearances itself. The refusal of inauthenticity triggers a near-biological

defensive reaction which because of its violence has a very good chance of

destroying those who have been orchestrating the spectacle of alienation all

this time. This fact should give pause to all who pride themselves on being

idols, artists, sociologists, thinkers and specialists of every kind of mise

en scene. Explosions of popular anger are never accidental.

                                   * * *

According to a Chinese philosopher, ``Confluence tends towards the void. In

total confluence presence stirs.'' Alienation extends to all human

activities and dissociates them in the extreme. But by the same token it

loses its own coherence and becomes everywhere more vulnerable. In the

disintegration of the spectacle we see what Marx called ``the new life which

becomes self-aware, destroys what is already destroyed, and rejects what is

already rejected.'' Beneath dissociation lies unity; beneath fatigue,

concentrated energy; beneath the fragmentation of the self, radical

subjectivity. In other words, the qualitative. But there is more to wanting

to remake the world than wanting to make love to your lover.

With the weakening of the factors responsible for the etiolation of everyday

life, the forces of life tend to get the upper hand over the power of roles.

This is the beginning of the reversal of perspective. Modern revolutionary

theory should concentrate its efforts on this area so as to open the breach

that leads to transcendence. As the period of calculation and suspicion

ushered in by capitalism and Stalinism draws to a close, it is challenged

from within by the initial phase, based on clandestine tactics, of the era

of play.

The degenerate state of the spectacle, individual experience, collective

acts of refusal these supply the context for development of practical

tactics for dealing with roles. Collectively it is quite possible to abolish

roles. The spontaneous creativity and festive atmosphere given free rein in

revolutionize moments afford ample evidence of this. When people are

overtaken by joie de vivre they are lost to leadership and stage management

of any kind. Only by starving the revolutionary masses of joy can one become

their master: uncontained, collective pleasure can only go from victory to

victory. Meanwhile it is already possible for a group dedicated to

theoretical and practical actions, like the situationists, to infiltrate the

political and cultural spectacle as a subversive force. Individually and

thus in a strictly temporary way we must learn how to sustain roles without

strengthening them to the point where they are detrimental to us. How to use

them as a protective shield while at the same time protecting ourselves

against them. How to retrieve the energy they absorb and actualize the

illusory power they dispense. How to play the game of a Jacques Vache.

If your role imposes a role on others, assume this power which is not you,

then set this phantom loose. Nobody wins in struggles for prestige, so don't

bother with them. Down with pointless quarrels, vain discussions, forums,

debates and Weeks for Marxist Thought! When the time comes to strike for

your real liberation, strike to kill. Words cannot kill. Do people want to

discuss things with you? Do they admire you? Spit in their faces. Do they

make fun of you? Help them recognize themselves in their mockery. Roles are

inherently ridiculous. Do you see nothing but roles around you? Treat them

to your nonchalance, to your dispassionate wit. Play cat and mouse with

them, and there is a good chance that one or two people about you will wake

up to themselves and discover the prerequisites for real communication.

Remember: all roles alienate equally, but some are less despicable than

others. The range of stereotyped behaviour includes forms which barely

conceal lived experience and its alienated demands. To my mind, temporary

alliances are permissible with certain revolutionary images, to the extent

that a glimmer of radicalism shines through the ideological screen which

they presuppose. A case in point is the cult of Lumumba among young

Congolese revolutionaries. In any case, it is impossible to go wrong so long

as we never forget that the only proper treatment for ourselves and for

others is to make ever more radical demands.

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                 Chapter 16

People are bewitched into believing that time slips away, and this belief is

 the basis of time actually slipping away. Time is the work of attrition of

 that adaptation to which people must resign themselves so long as they fail

 to change the world. Age is a role, an acceleration of `lived' time on the

               plane of appearances, an attachment to things.

The growth of civilization's discontents is now forcing every branch of

therapeutics towards a new demonology. Just as, formerly, invocation,

sorcery, possession, exorcism, black sabbaths, metamorphoses, talismans and

all the rest were bound up with the suspect capacity for healing and

hurting, so today (and more effectively) the apparatus for offering

consolation to the oppressed medicine, ideology, compensatory roles,

consumer gadgetry, movements for social change serves the oppressor and the

oppressor alone. The order of things is sick: this is what our leaders would

conceal at all costs. In a fine passage of The Function of the Orgasm,

Wilhelm Reich relates how after long months of psychoanalytic treatment he

managed to cure a young Viennese working woman. She was suffering from

depression brought on by the conditions of her life and work. When she was

recovered Reich sent her back home. A fortnight later she killed herself.

Reich's intransigent honesty condemned him, as everyone knows, to exclusion

from the psychoanalytic establishment, to isolation, delusion and death in

prison: the duplicity of our neodemonologists cannot be exposed with

impunity.

Those who organize the world organize both suffering and the anaesthetics

for dealing with it; this much is common knowledge. Most people live like

sleepwalkers, torn between the gratification of neurosis and the traumatic

prospect of a return to real life. Things are now reaching the point,

however, where the maintenance of survival calls for so many analgesics that

the organism approaches saturation point. But the magical analogy is more

apt here than the medical: practitioners of magic fully expect a backlash

effect in such circumstances, and we should expect the same. It is because

of the imminence of this upheaval that I compare the present conditioning of

human beings to a massive bewitchment.

Bewitching of this kind presupposes a spatial network which links up the

most distant objects sympathetically, according to specific laws: formal

analogy, organic coexistence, functional symmetry, symbolic affiliation,

etc. Such correspondences are established through the infinitely frequent

association of given forms of behaviour with appropriate signals. In other

words, through a generalized system of conditioning. The present vogue for

loudly condemning the role of conditioning, propaganda, advertising and the

mass media in modern society may be assumed to be a form of partial exorcism

designed to reinforce a vaster and more essential mystification by

distracting attention from it. Outrage at the gutter press goes hand in hand

with subservience to the more elegant lies of posh journalism. Media,

language, time these are the giant claws with which Power manipulates

humanity and moulds it brutally to its own perspective. These claws are not

very adept, admittedly, but their effectiveness is enormously increased by

the fact that people are not aware that they can resist them, and often do

not even know the extent to which they are already spontaneously doing so.

Stalin's show trials proved that it only takes a little patience and

perseverance to get a man to accuse himself of every imaginable crime and

appear in public begging to be executed. Now that we are aware of such

techniques, and on our guard against them, how can we fail to see that the

set of mechanisms controlling us uses the very same insidious persuasiveness

though with more powerful means at its disposal, and with greater

persistence when it lays down the law: ``You are weak, you must grow old,

you must die.'' Consciousness acquiesces, and the body follows suit. I am

fond of a remark of Artaud's, though it must be set in a materialist light:

``We do not die because we have to die: we die because one day, and not so

long ago, our consciousness was forced to deem it necessary.''

Plants transplanted to an unfavourable soil die. Animals adapt to their

environment. Human beings transform theirs. Thus death is not the same thing

for plants, animals and humans. In favourable soil, the plant lives like an

animal: it can adapt. Where man fails to change his surroundings, he too is

in the situation of an animal. Adaptation is the law of the animal world.

According to Hans Selye, the theoretician of `stress', the general syndrome

of adaptation has three phases: the alarm reaction, the phase of resistance

and the phase of exhaustion. In terms of real life he is still at the level

of animal adaptation: spontaneous reactions in childhood, consolidation in

maturity, exhaustion in old age. And today, the harder people try to find

salvation in appearances, the more vigorously is it borne in upon them by

the ephemeral and inconsistent nature of the spectacle that they live like

dogs and die like bundles of hay. The day cannot be far off when men will

have to face the fact that the social organization they have constructed to

change the world according to their wishes no longer serves this purpose.

For all this organization amounts to is a system of prohibitions preventing

the creation of a higher form of organization and the use therein of the

techniques of liberation and individual self-realization which have evolved

throughout the history of privative appropriation, of exploitation of man by

man, of hierarchical authority.

We live in a closed, suffocating system. Whatever we gain in one sphere we

lose in another. Death, for instance, though quantitatively defeated by

modern medicine, has re-emerged qualitatively on the plane of survival.

Adaptation has been democratized, made easier for everyone, at the price of

abandoning the essential project, which is the adaptation of the world to

human needs.

A struggle against death exists, of course, but it takes place within the

limits set by the adaptation syndrome: death is part of the cure for death.

Significantly, therapeutic efforts concentrate mainly on the exhaustion

phase, as though the main aim were to extend the stage of resistance as far

as possible into old age. Thus the big guns are brought out only once the

body is old and weak, because, as Reich understood well, any all-out attack

on the attrition wreaked by the demands of adaptation would inevitably mean

a direct onslaught on social organization i.e., on that which stands opposed

to any transcendence of the principle of adaptation. Partial cures are

preferred because they leave the overall social pathology untouched. But

what will happen when the proliferation of such partial cures ends up

spreading the malaise of inauthenticity to every corner of daily life? And

when the essential role of exorcism and bewitchment in the maintenance of a

sick society becomes plain for all to see?

                                   * * *

The question ``How old are you?'' inevitably contains a reference to power.

Dates themselves serve to pigeonhole and circumscribe us. Is not the passage

of time always measured by reference to the establishment of some authority

or other in terms of the years accumulated since the installation of a god,

messiah, leader or conquering city? To the aristocratic mind, moreover, such

accumulated time was a measure of authority: the prepotency of the lord was

increased both by his own age and by the antiquity of his lineage. At his

death the noble bequeathed a vitality to his heirs which drew vigour from

the past. By contrast, the bourgeoisie has no past; or at any rate it

recognizes none inasmuch as its fragmented power no longer depends on any

hereditary principle. The bourgeoisie is thus reduced to aping the nobility:

identification with forebears is sought in nostalgic fashion via the photos

in the family album; identification with cyclical time, with the time of the

eternal return, is feebly emulated by blind identification with a staccato

succession of short spans of linear time.

This link between age and the starting-post of measurable time is not the

only thing which betrays age's kinship with power. I am convinced that

people's measured age is nothing but a role. It involves a speeding up of

lived time in the mode of non-life on the plane, therefore, of appearances,

and in accordance with the dictates of adaptation. To acquire power is to

acquire `age'. In earlier times only the `aged' or `elders', those old

either in nobility or in experience, exercised power. Today even the young

enjoy the dubious privilege of age. In fact consumer society, which invented

the teenager as a new class of consumer, fosters premature senility: to

consume is to be consumed by inauthenticity, nurturing appearance to the

advantage of the spectacle and to the detriment of real life. The consumer

is killed by the things he becomes attached to, because these things

(commodities, roles) are dead.

Whatever you possess possesses you in return. Everything that makes you into

an owner adapts you to the order of things makes you old.

Time-which-slips-away is what fills the void created by the absence of the

self. The harder you run after time, the faster time goes: this is the law

of consumption. Try to stop it, and it will wear you out and age you all the

more easily. Time has to be caught on the wing, in the present but the

present has yet to be constructed.

We were born never to grow old, never to die. All we can hope for, however,

is an awareness of having come too soon. And a healthy contempt for the

future can at least ensure us a rich portion of life.

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

                    Survival and false opposition to it

  Survival is life reduced to economic imperatives. In the present period,

  therefore, survival is life reduced to what can be consumed (seventeen).

    Reality is giving answers to the problem of transcendence before our

  so-called revolutionaries have even thought of formulating this problem.

   Whatever is not transcended rots, and whatever is rotten cries out for

 transcendence. Spurious opposition, being unaware of both these tendencies,

  speeds up the process of decomposition while becoming an integral part of

 it: it thus makes the task of transcendence easier but only in the sense in

  which we sometimes say of a murdered man that he made his murderer's task

 easier. Survival is non-transcendence become unlivable. The mere rejection

 of survival dooms us to impotence. We have to retrieve the core of radical

 demands which has repeatedly been renounced by movements which started out

                        as revolutionary (eighteen).

                                 Chapter 17

                              SURVIVAL SICKNESS

 Capitalism has demystified survival. It has made the poverty of daily life

  intolerable in view of the increasing wealth of technical possibilities.

 Survival has become an economizing on life. The civilization of collective

 survival increases the dead time in individual lives to the point where the

  death forces are liable to carry the day over collective survival itself.

 The only hope is that the passion for destruction may be reconverted into a

                             passion for life.

       Up until now people have merely complied with a system of world

    transformation. Today the task is to make the system comply with the

                        transformation of the world.

The organization of human societies has changed the world, and the world in

changing has brought upheaval to the organization of human societies. But if

hierarchical organization seizes control of nature, while itself undergoing

transformation in the court of this struggle, the portion of liberty and

creativity falling to the lot of the individual is drained away by the

requirements of adaptation to social norms of various kinds. This is true,

at any rate, so long as no generalized revolutionary moment occurs.

The time belonging to the individual in history is for the most part dead

time. Only a rather recent awakening of consciousness has made this fact

intolerable to us. For with its revolution the bourgeoisie does two things.

On the one hand, it proves that people can accelerate world transformation,

and that they can improve their individual lives (where improvement is

understood in terms of accession to the ruling class, to riches, to

capitalist success). But at the same time the bourgeois order nullifies the

individual's freedom by interference; it increases the dead time in daily

life (imposing the need to produce, consume, calculate); and it capitulates

before the haphazard laws of the market, before the inevitable cyclical

crises with their burden of wars and misery, and before the limitations

invented by ``common sense'' (``You can't change human nature,'' ``The poor

will always be with us'', etc.). The politics of the bourgeoisie, as of the

bourgeoisie's socialist heirs, is the politics of a driver pumping the brake

while the accelerator is jammed fast to the floor: the more the speed

increases, the more frenetic, perilous and useless become the attempts to

slow down. The helter-skelter pace of consumption is set at once by the rate

of the disintegration of Power and by the imminence of the construction of a

new order, a new dimension, a parallel universe born of the collapse of the

Old World.

The changeover from the aristocratic system of adaptation to the

``democratic'' one brutally widened the gap between the passivity of

individual submission and the social dynamism that transforms nature the gap

between people's powerlessness and the power of new techniques. The

contemplative attitude was perfectly suited to the feudal system, to a

virtually motionless world underpinned by eternal gods. But the spirit of

submission was hardly compatible with the dynamic vision of merchants,

manufacturers, bankers and discoverers of riches -the vision of those

acquainted not with the revelation of the immutable, but rather with the

shifting economic world, the insatiable hunger for profit and the necessity

of constant innovation. Yet wherever the bourgeoisie's action results in the

popularization and valorization of the sense of transience, the sense of

hope, the bourgeoisie qua power seeks to imprison people within this

transitoriness. To replace the old theology of stasis the bourgeoisie sets

up a metaphysics of motion. Although both these ideological systems hinder

the movement of reality, the earlier one does so more successfully and more

harmoniously than the second: the aristocratic scheme is more consistent,

more unified. For to place an ideology of change in the service of what does

not change creates a paradox which nothing henceforward can either conceal

from consciousness or justify to consciousness. Thus in our universe of

expanding technology and comfort we see people turning in upon themselves,

shrivelling up, living trivial lives and dying for details. It is a

nightmare where we are promised absolute freedom but granted a miserable

square inch of individual autonomy -a square inch, moreover, that is

strictly policed by our neighbours. A space-time of pettiness and mean

thoughts.

Before the bourgeois revolution, the possibility of death in a living God

lent everyday life an illusory dimension which aspired to the fullness of a

multifaceted reality. You might say that humanity has never come closer to

self-realization while yet confined to the realm of the inauthentic. But

what is one to say of a life lived out in the shadow of a God that is dead:

the decomposing God of fragmented power? The bourgeoisie has dispensed with

a God by economizing on people's lives. It has also made the economic sphere

into a sacred imperative and life into an economic system. This is the model

that our future programmers are preparing to rationalize, to submit to

proper planning -in a word, to ``humanize.'' And, never fear, they will be

no less irresponsible than the corpse of God.

Kierkegaard describes survival sickness well: ``Let others bemoan the

maliciousness of their age. What irks me is its pettiness, for ours is an

age without passion...My life comes out all one colour." Survival is life

reduced to bare essentials, to life's abstract form, to the minimum of

activity required to ensure people's participation in production and

consumption. The entitlement of a Roman slave was rest and sustenance. As

beneficiaries of the Rights of Man we receive the wherewithal to nourish and

cultivate ourselves, enough consciousness to play a role, enough initiative

to acquire power and enough passivity to flaunt Power's insignia. Our

freedom is the freedom to adapt after the fashion of higher animals.

Survival is life in slow motion. How much energy it takes to remain on the

level of appearances! The media gives wide currency to a whole personal

hygiene of survival: avoid strong emotions, watch your blood pressure, eat

less, drink in moderation only, survive in good health so that you can

continue playing your role. ``Overwork: the executive's disease,'' said a

recent headline in Le Monde. We must be economical with survival for it

wears us down; we have to live it as little as possible for it belongs to

death. In former times one died a live death, one quickened by the presence

of God. Today our respect for life prohibits us from touching it, reviving

it or snapping it out of its lethargy. We die of inertia, whenever the

charge of death that we carry with us reaches saturation point.

Unfortunately there is no branch of science that can measure the intensity

of the deadly radiation that kills our daily actions. In the end, by dint of

identifying ourselves with what we are not, of switching from one role to

another, from one authority to another, and from one age to another, how can

we avoid becoming ourselves part of that never-ending state of transition

which is the process of decomposition?

The presence within life itself of a mysterious yet tangible death so misled

Freud that he postulated an ontological curse in the shape of a ``death

instinct.'' This mistake of Freud's, which Reich had already pointed out,

has now been clarified by the phenomenon of consumption. The three aspects

of the death instinct -Nirvana, the repetition compulsion and masochism

-have turned out to be simply three styles of domination: constraint

passively accepted, seduction through conformity to custom, and mediation

perceived as an ineluctable law.

As we know, the consumption of goods -which comes down always, in the

present state of things, to the consumption of power -carries within itself

the seeds of its own destruction and the conditions of its own

transcendence. The consumer cannot and must not ever attain satisfaction:

the logic of the consumable object demands the creation of fresh needs, yet

the accumulation of such false needs exacerbates the malaise of people

confined with increasing difficulty solely to the status of consumers.

Furthermore, the wealth of consumer goods impoverishes authentic life. It

does so in two ways. First, it replaces authentic life with things.

Secondly, it makes it impossible, with the best will in the world, to become

attached to these things, precisely because they have to be consumed, i.e.,

destroyed. Whence an absence of life which is ever more frustrating, a

self-devouring dissatisfaction. This need to live is ambivalent: it

constitutes one of those points where perspective is reversed.

In the consumer's manipulated view of things -the view of conditioning -the

lack of life appears as insufficient consumption of power and insufficient

self-consumption in the service of power. As a palliative to the absence of

real life we are offered death on an instalment plan. A world that condemns

us to a bloodless death is naturally obliged to propagate the taste for

blood. Where survival sickness reigns, the desire to live lays hold

spontaneously of the weapons of death: senseless murder and sadism flourish.

For passion destroyed is reborn in the passion for destruction. If these

conditions persist, no one will survive the era of survival. Already the

despair is so great that many people would go along with the Antonin Artaud

who said: "l bear the stigma of an insistent death that strips real death of

all terror for me."

The individual of survival is inhabited by pleasure-anxiety, by

unfulfillment: a mutilated person. Where is one to find oneself in the

endless self-loss into which everything draws one? They are wanderers in a

labyrinth with no centre, a maze full of mazes. Theirs is a world of

equivalents. Should one kill oneself? Killing oneself, though, implies some

sense of resistance: one must possess a value that one can destroy. Where

there is nothing, the destructive actions themselves crumble to nothing. You

cannot hurl a void into a void. ``If only a rock would fall and kill me,''

wrote Kierkegaard, ``at least that would be an expedient.'' I doubt if there

is anyone today who has not been touched by the horror of a thought such as

that. Inertia is the surest killer, t he inertia of people who settle for

senility at eighteen, plunging eight hours a day into degrading work and

feeding on ideologies. Beneath the miserable tinsel of the spectacle there

are only gaunt figures yearning for, yet dreading, Kierkegaard's

``expedient,'' so that they might never again have to desire what they dread

and dread what they desire.

At the same time the passion for life emerges as a biological need, the

reverse side of the passion for destroying and letting oneself be destroyed.

``So long as we have not managed to abolish any of the causes of human

despair we have no right to try and abolish the means whereby people attempt

to get rid of despair.'' The fact is that people possess both the means to

eliminate the causes of despair and the power to mobilize these means in

order to rid themselves of it. No one has the right to ignore the fact that

the sway of conditioning accustoms them to survive on one hundredth of their

potential for life. So general is survival sickness that the slightest

concentration of lived experience could not fail to unite the largest number

of people in a common will to live. The negation of despair would of

necessity become the construction of a new life. The rejection of economic

logic (which only economizes on life) would of necessity entail the death of

economics and carry us beyond the realm of survival.

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                 Chapter 18

          Spurious Opposition Survival and false opposition to it

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Survival is life reduced to economic imperatives. In the present period,

  therefore, survival is life reduced to what can be consumed (seventeen).

    Reality is giving answers to the problem of transcendence before our

  so-called revolutionaries have even thought of formulating this problem.

   Whatever is not transcended rots, and whatever is rotten cries out for

 transcendence. Spurious opposition, being unaware of both these tendencies,

  speeds up the process of decomposition while becoming an integral part of

 it: it thus makes the task of transcendence easier but only in the sense in

  which we sometimes say of a murdered man that he made his murderer's task

 easier. Survival is non-transcendence become unlivable. The mere rejection

 of survival dooms us to impotence. We have to retrieve the core of radical

 demands which has repeatedly been renounced by movements which started out

 as revolutionary (eighteen). There comes a moment of transcendence that is

     historically defined by the strength and weakness of Power; by the

fragmentation of the individual to the point where he or she is a mere monad

  of subjectivity; and by the intimacy between everyday life and that which

   destroys it. This transcendence will be general, undivided and built by

 subjectivity (1). Once they abandon their initial extremism, revolutionary

elements become irremediably reformist. The well-nigh general abandonment of

    the revolutionary spirit in our time is a soil in which reformisms of

  survival thrive. Any modern revolutionary organization must identify the

seeds of transcendence in the great movements of the past. In particular, it

    must rediscover and carry through the project of individual freedom,

  perverted by liberalism; the project of collective freedom, perverted by

socialism; the project of the recapture of nature, perverted by fascism; and

 the project of the whole person, perverted by Marxist ideologies. This last

    project, though expressed in the theological terms of the time, also

informed the great medieval heresies and their anticlerical rage, the recent

   exhumation of which is so apt in our own century with its new clergy of

  ``experts'' (2). People of ressentiment are the perfect survivors people

 bereft of the consciousness of possible transcendence, people of the age of

 decomposition (3). By becoming aware of spectacular decomposition, a person

  of ressentiment becomes a nihilist. Active nihilism is prerevolutionary.

     There is no consciousness of transcendence without consciousness of

 decomposition. Juvenile delinquents are the legitimate heirs of Dada (4).

1.

The question of transcendence. Refusal is multiform; transcendence is one.

Faced by modern discontent and incited by it to bear witness, human history

is quite simply the history of a radical refusal which invariably carries

transcendence within itself, which invariably tends towards self-negation.

Although only one or two aspects of this refusal are ever seen at a time,

this can never successfully conceal the basic identity of dictatorship by

God, monarch, chief, class or organization. What idiocy it is to evoke an

ontology of revolt. By transforming natural alienation into social

alienation, the movement of history teaches us freedom in servitude: it

teaches us both revolt and submission. Revolt has less need of

metaphysicians than metaphysicians have of revolt. Hierarchical power, which

has been with us for millennia, furnishes a perfectly adequate explanation

for the permanence of rebellion, as it does of the repression that smashes

rebellion.

The overthrow of feudalism and the creation of masters without slaves are

one and the same project. The memory of the partial failure of this project

in the French Revolution has continued to render it more familiar and more

attractive, even as later revolutions, each in their own way abortive (the

Paris Commune, the Bolshevik Revolution), have at once clarified the

project's contours and deferred its enactment.

All philosophies of history without exception collude with this failure,

which is why consciousness of history cannot be divorced from consciousness

of the necessity of transcendence.

How is it that the moment of transcendence is increasingly easy to discern

on the social horizon? The question of transcendence is a tactical question.

Broadly, we may outline it as follows:

1 a) Anything that does not kill power reinforces it, but anything which

power does not itself kill weakens power.

b) The more the requirements of consumption come to supersede the

requirements of production, the more government by constraint gives way to

government by seduction.

c) With the democratic extension of the right to consume comes a

corresponding extension to the largest group of people of the right to

exercise authority (in varying degrees, of course).

d) As soon as people fall under the spell of Authority they are weakened and

their capacity for refusal withers. Power is thus reinforced, it is true,

yet it is also reduced to the level of the consumable and is indeed

consumed, dissipated and, of necessity, becomes vulnerable.

The point of transcendence is one moment in this dialectic of strength and

weakness. While it is undoubtedly the task of radical criticism to identify

this moment and to work tactically to precipitate it, we must not forget

that it is the facts all around us that call such radical criticism forth.

Transcendence sits astride a contradiction that haunts the modern world,

permeating the daily news and leaving its stamp on most of our behaviour.

This is the contradiction between impotent refusal i.e., reformism and wild

refusal, or nihilism (two types of which, the active and the passive, are to

be distinguished).

2) The diffusion of hierarchical power may broaden that power's realm but it

also tarnishes its glamour. Fewer people live on the fringes of society as

bums and parasites, yet at the same time fewer people actually respect an

employer, a monarch, a leader or a role; although more people survive within

the social organization, many more of the people within it hold it in

contempt. Everyone finds themself at the center of the struggle in their

daily life. This has two consequences:

a) In the first place, the individual is not only the victim of social

atomization, he or she is also the victim of fragmented power. Now that

subjectivity has emerged onto the historical stage, only to come immediately

under attack, it has become the most crucial revolutionary demand.

Henceforward the construction of a harmonious collectivity will require a

revolutionary theory founded not on communitarianism but rather upon

subjectivity a theory founded, in other words, on individual cases, on the

lived experience of individuals.

b) Secondly, the extreme fragmentariness of resistance and refusal turns,

ironically, into its opposite, for it recreates the preconditions for a

global refusal. The new revolutionary collective will come into being

through a chain reaction leaping from one subjectivity to the next. The

construction of a community of people who are whole individuals will

inaugurate the reversal of perspective without which no transcendence is

possible.

3) A final point is that the idea of a reversal of perspective is invading

popular consciousness. For everyone is too close for comfort to that which

negates them. This proximity to death makes the life forces rebel. Just as

the allure of faraway places fades when one gets closer, so perspective

vanishes as the eye gets too near. By locking people up in its decor of

things, and by its clumsy attempt to insinuate itself into people

themselves, all Power manages to do is to spread the discontent and

disaffection. Vision and thought get muddled, values blur, forms become

vague, and anamorphic distortions trouble us rather as though we were

looking at a painting with our nose pressed hard against the canvas.

Incidentally, the change in pictorial perspective (Uccello, Kandinsky)

coincided with a change of perspective at the level of social life. The

rhythm of consumption thrusts the mind into that interregnum where far and

near are indistinguishable. The facts themselves will soon come to the aid

of the mass of humanity in their struggle to enter at long last that state

of freedom aspired to though they lacked the means of attaining it by those

Swabian heretics of 1270 mentioned by Norman Cohn in his Pursuit of the

Millennium, who ``said that they had mounted up above God and, reaching the

very pinnacle of Divinity, abandoned God. Often the adept would affirm that

he or she had no longer `any need of God.'''

2.

The renunciation of poverty and the poverty of renunciation. Almost every

revolutionary movement embodies the desire for complete change, yet up to

now almost every revolutionary movement has succeeded only in changing some

detail. As soon as the people in arms renounces its own will and starts

kow-towing to the will of its counsellors it loses control of its freedom

and confers the ambiguous title of revolutionary leader upon its

oppressors-to-be. This is the ``cunning'', so to speak, of fragmentary

power: it gives rise to fragmentary revolutions, revolutions dissociated

from any reversal of perspective, cut off from the totality, paradoxically

detached from the proletariat which makes them. There is no mystery in the

fact that a totalitarian regime is the price paid when the demand for total

freedom is renounced once a handful of partial freedoms has been won. How

could it be otherwise! People talk in this connection of a fatality, a

curse: the revolution devouring its children, and so on. As though Makhno's

defeat, the crushing of Kronstadt revolt, or Durruti's assassination were

not already writ large in the structure of the original Bolshevik cells,

perhaps even in Marx's authoritarian positions in the First International.

``Historical necessity'' and ``reasons of state'' are simply the necessity

and the reasons of leaders who have to legitimate their renunciation of the

revolutionary project, their renunciation of extremism.

Renunciation equals non-transcendence. And issue-politics, partial refusal

and piecemeal demands are the very thing that blocks transcendence. The

worst inhumanity is never anything but a wish for emancipation that has

settled for compromise and fossilized beneath the strata of successive

sacrifices. Liberalism, socialism and Bolshevism have each built new prisons

under the sign of liberty. The left fights for an increase in comfort within

alienation, skillfully furthering this impoverished aim by evoking the

barricades, the red flag and the finest revolutionary moments of the past.

In this way once-radical impulses are doubly betrayed, twice renounced:

first they are ossified, then dug up and used as a carrot. ``Revolution'' is

doing pretty well everywhere: worker-priests, priest-junkies, communist

generals, red potentates, trade unionists on the board of directors....

Radical chic harmonizes perfectly with a society that can sell Watney's Red

Barrel beer under the slogan ``The Red Revolution is Coming.'' Not that all

this is without risk for the system. The endless caricaturing of the most

deeply felt revolutionary desires can produce a backlash in the shape of a

resurgence of such feelings, purified in reaction to their universal

prostitution. There is no such thing as lost allusions.

The new wave of insurrection tends to rally young people who have remained

outside specialized politics, whether right or left, or who have passed

briefly through these spheres because of excusable errors of judgement, or

ignorance. All currents merge in the tide race of nihilism. The only

important thing is what lies beyond this confusion. The revolution of daily

life will be the work of those who, with varying degrees of facility, are

able to recognize the seeds of total self-realization preserved,

contradicted and dissimulated within ideologies of every kind and who cease

consequently to be either mystified or mystifiers.

***

If a spirit of revolt once existed within Christianity, I defy anybody who

still calls himself a Christian to understand that spirit. Such people have

neither the right nor the capacity to inherit the heretical tradition. Today

heresy is an impossibility. The theological language used to express the

impulses of so many fine revolts was the mark of a particular period; it was

the only language then available, and nothing more than that. Translation is

now necessary not that it presents any difficulties. Setting aside the

period in which I live, and the objective assistance it gives me, how can I

hope to improve in the twentieth century on what the Brethren of the Free

Spirit said in the thirteenth: ``A man may be so much one with God that

whatever he does he cannot sin. I am part of the freedom of Nature and I

satisfy all my natural desires. The free man is perfectly right to do

whatever gives him pleasure. Better that the whole world be destroyed and

perish utterly than that a free man should abstain from a single act to

which his nature moves him.'' One cannot but admire Johann Hartmann's ``The

truly free man is lord and master of all creatures. All things belong to

him, and he is entitled to make use of whichever pleases him. If someone

tries to stop him doing so, the free man has the right to kill him and take

his possessions.'' The same goes for John of Brunn, who justifies his

practice of fraud, plunder and armed robbery by announcing that ``All things

created by God are common property. Whatever the eye sees and covets, let

the hand grasp it.'' Or again, consider the Pifles d'Arnold and their

conviction that they were so pure that they were incapable of sinning no

matter what they did (1157). Such jewels of the Christian spirit always

sparkled a little too brightly for the bleary eyes of the Christians. The

great heretical tradition may still be discerned dimly perhaps, but with its

dignity still intact in the acts of a Pauwels leaving a bomb in the church

of La Madeleine (March 15, 1894), or of the young Robert Burger slitting a

priest's throat (August 11, 1963). The last and the last possible instances

of priests retrieving something genuine from a real attachment to the

revolutionary origins of Christianity are furnished in my opinion by Meslier

and Jacques Roux fomenting jacquerie and riot. Not that we can expect this

to be understood by the sectarians of today's ecumenizing forces. These

emanate from Moscow as readily as from Rome, and their evangelists are

cybernetician scum as often as creatures of Opus Dei. Such being the new

clergy, the way to transcend heresy should not be hard to divine.

***

No one is about to deny liberalism full credit for having spread the thirst

for freedom to every corner of the world. Freedom of the press, freedom of

thought, freedom of creation if all their ``freedoms'' have no other merit,

at least they stand as a monument to liberalism's falseness. The most

eloquent of epitaphs, in fact: after all, it is no mean feat to imprison

liberty in the name of liberty. In the liberal system, the freedom of

individuals is destroyed by mutual interference: one person's liberty begins

where the other's ends. Those who reject this basic principle are destroyed

by the sword; those who accept it are destroyed by justice. Nobody gets

their hands dirty: a button is pressed, and the guillotine of the police and

state intervention falls. A very fortunate business, to be sure. The State

is the bad conscience of the liberal, the instrument of a necessary

repression for which deep in their heart they deny responsibility. As for

day-to-day business, it is left to the freedom of the capitalists to keep

the freedom of the worker within proper bounds. Here, however, the

upstanding socialist comes on the scene to denounce this hypocrisy.

What is socialism? It is a way of getting liberalism out of its

contradiction, i.e., the fact that it simultaneously safeguards and destroys

individual freedom. Socialism proposes (and there could be no more worthy

goal) to prevent individuals from negating each other through interference.

The solution it actually produces, however, is very different. For it ends

up eliminating interferences without liberating the individual; what is much

worse, it melds the individual will into a collective mediocrity.

Admittedly, only the economic sphere is affected by the institution of

socialism, and opportunism i.e., liberalism in the sphere of daily life is

scarcely incompatible with bureaucratic planning of all activities from

above, with manoeuvering for promotion, with power struggles between

leaders, etc. Thus socialism, by abolishing economic competition and free

enterprise, puts an end to interference on one level, but it retains the

race for the consumption of power as the only authorized form of freedom.

The partisans of self-limiting freedom are split into two camps, therefore:

those who are for liberalism in production and those who are for liberalism

in consumption. And a fat lot of difference there is between them!

The contradiction in socialism between radicalism and its renunciation is

well exemplified by two statements recorded in the minutes of the debates of

the First International. In 1867 we find Chémalé reminding his listeners

that ``The product must be exchanged for another product of equal value;

anything less amounts to trickery, to fraud, to robbery.'' According to

Chémalé, therefore, the problem is how to rationalize exchange, how to make

it fair. The task of socialism, on this view, is to correct capitalism, to

give it a human face, to plan it, and to empty it of its substance (profit).

And who profits from the end of capitalism? This we have found out since

1867. But there was already another view of socialism, coexistent with this

one, and we find it expressed by Varlin, Communard-to-be, at the Geneva

Congress of this same International Association of Workingmen in 1866: ``So

long as anything stands in the way of the employment of oneself freedom will

not exist.'' There is thus a freedom locked up in socialism, but nothing

could be more foolhardy than to try and release this freedom today without

declaring total war on socialism itself.

Is there any need to expatiate on the abandonment of the Marxist project by

every variety of present-day Marxism? The Soviet Union, China, Cuba: what is

there here of the construction of the whole man? The material poverty which

fed the revolutionary desire for transcendence and radical change has been

attenuated, but a new poverty has emerged, a poverty born of renunciation

and compromise. The renunciation of poverty has led only to the poverty of

renunciation. Was it not the feeling that he had allowed his initial project

to be fragmented and effected in piecemeal fashion that occasioned Marx's

disgusted remark, ``l am not a Marxist''? Even the obscenity of fascism

springs from a will to live but a will to live denied, turned against itself

like an ingrowing toenail. A will to live become a will to power, a will to

power become a will to passive obedience, a will to passive obedience become

a death wish. For when it comes to the qualitative sphere, to concede a

fraction is to give up everything.

By all means, let us destroy fascism, but let the same destructive flame

consume all ideologies, and all their lackeys to boot.

***

Through force of circumstance, poetic energy is everywhere renounced or

allowed to go to seed. Isolated people abandon their individual will, their

subjectivity, in an attempt to break out. Their reward is the illusion of

community and an intenser affection for death. Renunciation is the first

step towards a man's co-optation by the mechanisms of Power.

There is no such thing as a technique or thought which does not arise in the

first instance from a will to live; in the official world, however, there is

no such thing as a technique or thought which does not lead us towards

death. The faces of past renunciations are the data of a history still

largely unknown to us. The study of these traces helps in itself to forge

the arms of total transcendence. Where is the radical core, the qualitative

dimension? This question has the power to shatter habits of mind and habits

of life; and it has a part to play in the strategy of transcendence, in the

building of new networks of radical resistance. It may be applied to

philosophy, where ontology bears witness to the renunciation of

being-as-becoming. It may be applied to psychoanalysis, a technique of

liberation which confines itself for the most part to ``liberating'' us from

the need to attack social organization. It may be applied to all the dreams

and desires stolen, violated and twisted beyond recognition by conditioning.

To the basically radical nature of our spontaneous acts, so often denied by

our stated view of ourselves and of the world. To the playful impulse, whose

present imprisonment in the categories of permitted games from roulette to

war, by way of lynching parties leaves no place for the authentic game of

playing with each moment of daily life. And to love, so inseparable from

revolution, and so largely cut off, as things stand, from the pleasure of

giving.

Remove the qualitative and all that remains is despair. Despair comes in

every variety available to a system designed for killing human beings, the

system of hierarchical power: reformism, fascism, philistine politicism,

mediocracy, activism and passivity, boyscoutism and ideological

masturbation. A friend of Joyce's recalls: ``l don't remember Joyce ever

saying a word during all those years about Poincaré, Roosevelt, de Valera,

Stalin; never so much as a mention of Geneva or Locarno, Abyssinia, Spain,

China, Japan, the Prince affair, Violette Nozière....'' What, indeed, could

he have added to Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake? Once the Capital of individual

creativity had been written, it only remained for the Leopold Blooms of the

world to unite, to throw off their miserable survival and to actualize the

richness and diversity of their ``interior monologues'' in the lived reality

of their existence. Joyce was never a comrade-in-arms to Durruti; he fought

shoulder to shoulder with neither the Asturians nor the Viennese workers.

But he had the decency to pass no comment on news items, to the anonymity of

which he abandoned Ulysses that ``monument of culture,'' as one critic put

it while at the same time abandoning himself, Joyce, the man of total

subjectivity. To the spinelessness of the man of letters, Ulysses is

witness. As to the spinelessness of renunciation, its witness is invariably

the ``forgotten'' radical moment.

Thus revolutions and counterrevolutions follow hard upon one another's

heels, sometimes within a twenty-four hour period in the space, even, of the

least eventful of days. But consciousness of the radical act and of its

renunciation becomes more widespread and more discriminating all the time.

Inevitably. For today survival is non-transcendence become unliveable.

3.

The individual of ressentiment. The more power is dispensed in consumer size

packs, the more circumscribed becomes the sphere of survival, until we enter

that reptilian world in which pleasure, the effort of liberation and agony

all find expression in a single shudder. Low thought and short sight have

long signalled the fact that the bourgeoisie belongs to a civilization of

troglodytes in the making, a civilization of survival perfectly epitomized

by the invention of the fallout shelter complete with all modern

conveniences. The greatness of the bourgeoisie is a borrowed cloak: unable

to build truly on the back of its defeated opponent, it donned feudal robes

only to find itself draped in a pale shadow of feudal virtue, of God, of

nature, etc. No sooner had it discovered its incapacity to control these

entities directly than it fell to internal squabbling over details,

involuntarily dealing itself blow after blow though never, it is true, a

mortal one.

The same Flaubert who flays the bourgeois with ridicule calls them to arms

to put down the Paris Commune....

The nobility turns the bourgeois into an aggressor: the proletariat puts it

on the defensive. What does the proletariat represent for the bourgeoisie?

Not a true adversary: at the most a guilty conscience that it desperately

tries to conceal. Withdrawn, seeking a position of minimum exposure to

attack, proclaiming that reform is the only legitimate form of change, the

bourgeoisie clothes its fragmented revolutions in a cloth of wary envy and

resentment.

I have already said that in my view no insurrection is ever fragmentary in

its initial impulses, that it only becomes so when the poetry of agitators

and ringleaders gives way to authoritarian leadership. The individual of

ressentiment is the official world's travesty of a revolutionary: an

individual bereft of awareness of the possibility of transcendence; a person

who cannot grasp the necessity for a reversal of perspective and who, gnawed

by envy, spite and despair, tries to use these feelings as weapons against a

world so well designed for his or her oppression. An isolated person. A

reformist pinioned between total refusal and absolute acceptance of Power.

They reject hierarchy out of umbrage at not having a place therein, and this

makes them, as rebels, ideal slaves to the designs of revolutionary

``leaders''. Power has no better buttress than thwarted ambition, which is

why it makes every effort to console losers in the rat race by flinging them

the privileged as a target for their rancour.

Short of a reversal in perspective, therefore, hatred of power is merely

another form of obeisance to Power's ascendancy. The person who walks under

a ladder to prove their freedom from superstition proves just the opposite.

Obsessive hatred and the insatiable thirst for positions of authority wear

down and impoverish people to the same degree though perhaps not in the same

way, for there is, after all, more humanity in fighting against Power than

in prostituting oneself to it. There is in fact a world of difference

between struggling to live and struggling not to die. Revolts within the

realm of survival are measured by the yardstick of death, which explains why

they always require self-abnegation on the part of their militants, and the

a priori renunciation of that will to live for which everyone is in reality

struggling.

The rebel with no other horizon than a wall of restraints either rams their

head against this wall or ends up defending it with dogged stupidity. No

matter whether one accepts or rejects Power, to see oneself in the light of

constraints is to see things from Power's point of view. Here we have

humanity at the vanishing point swarming with vermin, in Rosanov's words.

Hemmed in on all sides, they resist any kind of intrusion and mount a

jealous guard over themselves, never realizing that they have become

sterile, that they are keeping vigil over a graveyard. They have

internalized their own lack of existence. Worse, they borrow Power's

impotence in order to fight Power; such is the zeal with which they apply

the principle of fair play. Alongside such sacrifice, the price they pay for

purity for playing at being pure is small indeed. How the most compromised

people love to give themselves credit for integrity out of all proportion to

the odd minor points over which they have preserved any! They get on their

high horses because they refused a promotion in the army, gave out a few

leaflets at a factory gate or got hit on the head by a cop. And all their

bragging goes hand in hand with the most obtuse militantism in some

communist party or other.

Once in a while, too, an individual at the vanishing point takes it into

their head that they have a world to conquer, that they need more

Lebensraum, a vaster ruin in which to engulf themself. The rejection of

Power easily comes to embrace the rejection of those things which Power has

appropriated e.g., the rebel's own self. Defining oneself negatively by

reference to Power's constraints and lies can result in constraints and lies

entering the mind as an element of travestied revolt generally without so

much as a dash of irony to give a breath of air. No chain is harder to break

than the one which the individual attaches to themself when their

rebelliousness is lost to them in this way. When they place their freedom in

the service of unfreedom, the resulting increase in unfreedom's strength

enslaves them. Now, it may well be that nothing resembles unfreedom so much

as the effort to attain freedom, but unfreedom has this distinguishing mark:

once bought, it loses all its value. even though its price is every bit as

high as freedom's.

The wails close in and we can't breath. The more people struggle for breath,

the worse it gets. The ambiguity of the signs of life and freedom, which

oscillate between their positive and negative forms according to the

necessary conditions imposed by global oppression, tends to generalize a

confusion in which one hand is constantly undoing the work of the other.

Inability to apprehend oneself encourages people to apprehend others on the

basis of their negative representations, on the basis of their roles and

thus to treat them as objects. Old bachelors, bureaucrats all, in fact, who

thrive on survival have no affective knowledge of any other reason for

existing. Needless to say, Power's best hopes of co-optation lie precisely

in this shared malaise. And the greater the mental confusion, the greater

its chances.

Myopia and voyeurism are the twin prerequisites of humanity's adaptation to

the social mediocrity of the age. Look at the world through a keyhole! This

is what all the experts urge us to do, and what the individual of

ressentiment delights in doing. Unable to play a leading part, they rush to

get the best seat in the auditorium. They are desperately in need of minute

platitudes to chew on: all politicians are crooks, de Gaulle is a great man,

China is a workers' paradise, etc. They love to hate an individualized

oppressor, to love a flesh-and-blood Uncle Joe: systems are too complicated

for them. How easy it is to understand the success of such crass images as

the foul Jew, the shiftless native or the two hundred families! Give the

enemy a face and immediately the countenance of the masses apes another most

admirable face, the face of the Defender of the Fatherland, Ruler, Fuhrer.

The individual of ressentiment is a potential revolutionary, but the

development of this potentiality entails passing through a phase of larval

consciousness: to first become a nihilist. If they do not kill the

organizers of their ennui, or at least those people who appear as such in

the forefront of their vision (managers, experts, ideologues, etc.), then

they will end up killing in the name of an authority, in the name of some

reason of state, or in the name of ideological consumption. And if the state

of things does not eventually provoke a violent explosion, they will

continue to flounder in a sea of roles, locked in the tedious rigidity of

their spite, spreading their saw-toothed conformism everywhere and

applauding revolt and repression alike; for, in this eventuality, incurable

confusion is their only possible fate.

The nihilist. Rozanov's definition of nihilism is the best: ``The show is

over. The audience get up to leave their seats. Time to collect their coats

and go home. They turn round...No more coats and no more home.''

Nihilism is born of the collapse of myth. During those periods when the

contradiction between mythical explanation Heaven, Redemption, the Will of

Allah and everyday life becomes patent, all values are sucked into the

vortex and destroyed. Deprived of any justification, stripped of the

illusions that concealed it, the weakness of humanity emerges in all its

nakedness. On the other hand, once myth no longer justifies the ways of

Power to us, the real possibilities of social action and experiment appear.

Myth was not just a cloak for this weakness: it was also the cause of it.

Thus the explosion of myth frees an energy and creativity too long syphoned

away from authentic experience into religious transcendence and abstraction.

The interregnum between the collapse of classical philosophy and the

erection of the Christian myth saw an unprecedented effervescence of thought

and action. A thousand life-styles blossomed. Then came the dead hand of

Rome, co-opting whatever it could not destroy utterly. Later, in the

sixteenth century, the Christian myth itself disintegrated, and another

period of frenetic experimentation burst upon the world. Nothing was true

anymore, and everything had become possible. Gilles de Rais tortured a

thousand children to death, and the revolutionary peasants of 1535 set about

building heaven on earth. But this new period of dissolution differed in one

important respect from all previous ones, for after 1789 the reconstruction

of a new myth became an absolute impossibility.

Christianity neutered the explosive nihilism of certain gnostic sects, and

improvised a protective garment for itself from their remains. But the

establishment of the bourgeois world made any new displacement of nihilistic

energy on to the plane of myth impossible: the nihilism generated by the

bourgeois revolution was a concrete nihilism. The reality of exchange, as we

have seen, precludes all dissimulation. Until its abolition, the spectacle

can never be anything except the spectacle of nihilism. That vanity of the

world which the Pascal of the Pensées evoked, as he thought, to the greater

glory of God, turned out to be a product of historical reality and this in

the absence of God, himself a casualty of the explosion of myth. Nihilism

swept everything before it, God included.

For the last century and a half, the most lucid contributions to art and

life have been the fruit of free experiment in the field of abolished

values. De Sade's passionate rationalism, Kierkegaard's sarcasm, Nietszche's

vacillating irony, Maldoror's violence, Mallarmé's icy dispassion, Jarry's

Umour, Dada's negativism these are the forces which have reached out to

confront people with some of the dankness and acridity of decaying values.

And also, with the desire for a reversal of perspective, the need to

discover alternative forms of life the area which Melville called, ``that

wild whaling life where individual notabilities make up all totalities.''

Paradox:

a) The great propagators of nihilism lacked an essential weapon: the sense

of historic reality, the sense of the reality of decay, erosion,

fragmentation.

b) Those who have made history in the period of bourgeois decline have been

tragically lacking in any acute awareness of the immense dissolvent power of

history in this period. Marx failed to analyze Romanticism and the artistic

phenomenon in general. Lenin was wilfully blind to the importance of

everyday life and its degeneration, of the Futurists, of Mayakovsky, or of

the Dadaists.

Nihilism and historical consciousness have yet to join forces: Marx smashing

something better than the street lamps in Kentish Town; Mallarmé with fire

in his belly. The gap between these two forces is an open door to the hordes

of passive liquidators, nihilists of the official world doggedly destroying

the already dead values they pretend to believe in. How long must we bear

the hegemony of these communist bureaucrats, fascist brutes, opinion makers,

pockmarked politicians, sub-Joycean writers, neo-Dadaist thinkers all

preaching the fragmentary, all working assiduously for the Big Sleep and

justifying themselves in the name of one Order or another: the family,

morality, culture, the flag, the space race, margarine, etc. Perhaps

nihilism could not have attained the status of platitude if history had not

advanced so far. But advanced it has. Nihilism is a self-destruct mechanism:

today a flame, tomorrow ashes. The old values in ruins today feed the

intensive production of consumable and ``futurized'' values sold under the

old label of ``the modern''; but they also thrust us inevitably towards a

future yet to be constructed, towards the transcendence of nihilism. In the

consciousness of the new generation a slow reconciliation is occurring

between history's destructive and constructive tendencies. The alliance of

nihilism and transcendence means that transcendence will be total. Here lies

the only wealth to be found in the affluent society.

When the individual of ressentiment becomes aware of the dead loss which is

survival, they turn into a nihilist. They embrace the impossibility of

living so tightly that even survival becomes impossible. Once you are in

that void, everything breaks up. The horrors. Past and future explode; the

present is ground zero. And from ground zero there are only two ways out,

two kinds of nihilism: active and passive.

***

The passive nihilist compromises with his own lucidity about the collapse of

all values. They make one final nihilistic gesture: throw a dice to decide

their ``cause'', and become its devoted slave, for Art's sake, and for the

sake of a little bread.... Nothing is true, so a few gestures become hip.

Joe Soap intellectuals, pataphysicians, crypto-fascists, aesthetes of the

acte gratuit, mercenaries, Kim Philbys, pop-artists, psychedelic impresarios

bandwagon after bandwagon works out its own version of the credo quia

absurdum est: you don't believe in it, but you do it anyway; you get used to

it and you even get to like it in the end. Passive nihilism is an overture

to conformism.

After all, nihilism can never be more than a transition, a shifting,

ill-defined sphere, a period of wavering between two extremes, one leading

to submission and subservience, the other to permanent revolt. Between the

two poles stretches a no-man's-land, the wasteland of the suicide and the

solitary killer, of the criminal described so aptly by Bettina as the crime

of the State. Jack the Ripper is essentially inaccessible. The mechanisms of

hierarchical power cannot touch him; he cannot be touched by revolutionary

will. He gravitates round that zero-point beyond which destruction, instead

of reinforcing the destruction wrought by power, beats it at its own game,

excites it to such violence that the machine of the Penal Colony, stabbing

wildly, shatters into pieces and flies apart. Maldoror takes the

disintegration of contemporary social organization to its logical

conclusion: to the stage of its self-destruction. The individual's absolute

rejection of society as a response to society's absolute rejection of the

individual. Isn't this the still point of the reversal of perspective, the

exact point where movement, dialectics and time no longer exist? Noon and

eternity of the great refusal. Before it, the pogroms; beyond it, the new

innocence. The blood of Jews or the blood of cops.

***

The active nihilist does not simply watch things fall apart. He criticizes

the causes of disintegration by speeding up the process. Sabotage is a

natural response to the chaos ruling the world. Active nihilism is

pre-revolutionary; passive nihilism is counter revolutionary. And most

people waltz tragicomically between the two. Like the red soldier described

by some Soviet author Victor Chlovsky perhaps who never charged without

shouting, ``Long Live the Tsar!'' But circumstances inevitably end by

drawing a line, and people suddenly find themselves, once and for all, on

one side or the other of the barricades.

You learn to dance for yourself on the off-beat of the official world. And

you must follow your demands to their logical conclusion, not accept a

compromise at the first setback. Consumer society's frantic need to

manufacture new needs adroitly cashes in on the way-out, the bizarre and the

shocking. Black humour and real agony turn up on Madison Avenue. Flirtation

with non-conformism is an integral part of prevailing values. Awareness of

the decay of values has its role to play in sales strategy. More and more

pure rubbish is marketed. The figurine salt-shaker of Kennedy, complete with

``bullet-holes'' through which to pour salt, for sale in the supermarket,

should be enough to convince anybody, if there is anybody who still needs

convincing, how easily a joke which once would have delighted Ravachol or

Peter the Painter now merely helps to keep the market going.

Consciousness of decay reached its most explosive expression in Dada. Dada

really did contain the seeds by which nihilism could have been surpassed;

but it just left them to rot, along with all the rest. The whole ambiguity

of surrealism, on the other hand, lies in the fact that it was an accurate

critique made at the wrong moment. While its critique of the transcendence

aborted by Dada was perfectly justified, when it in its turn tried to

surpass Dada it did so without going back to Dada's initial nihilism,

without basing itself on Dada-anti-Dada, without seeing Dada historically.

History was the nightmare from which the surrealists never awoke: they were

defenseless before the Communist Party, they were out of their depth with

the Spanish Civil War. For all their yapping they slunk after the official

left like faithful dogs.

Certain features of Romanticism had already proved, without awakening the

slightest interest on the part of either Marx or Engels, that art the pulse

of culture and society is the first index of the decay and disintegration of

values. A century later, while Lenin thought that the whole issue was beside

the point, the Dadaist could see the artistic abscess as a symptom of a

cancer whose poison was spread throughout society. Unpleasant art only

reflects the repression of pleasure instituted by Power. It is this the

Dadaists of 1916 proved so cogently. To go beyond this analysis could mean

only one thing: to take up arms. The neo-Dadaist larvae pullulating in the

shitheap of present-day consumption have found more profitable employment.

The Dadaists, working to cure themselves and their civilization of their

discontents working, in the last analysis, more coherently than Freud

himself built the first laboratory for the revitalization of everyday life.

Their activity was far more radical than their theory. Grosz: ``The point

was to work completely in the dark. We didn't know where we were going.''

The Dada group was a funnel sucking in all the trivia and garbage cluttering

up the world. Reappearing at the other end, everything was transformed,

original, brand new. Though people and things stayed the same they took on

totally new meanings. The reversal of perspective was begun in the magic of

rediscovering lost experience. Subversion, the tactics of the reversal of

perspective, overthrew the rigid frame of the old world. This upheaval

showed exactly what is meant by ``poetry made by everyone'' a far cry indeed

from the literary mentality to which the surrealists eventually succumbed.

The initial weakness of Dada lay in its extraordinary humility. Think of

Tzara, who, it is said, used every morning to repeat Descartes' statement,

``l don't even want to know whether there were men before me.'' In this

Tzara, a buffoon taking himself as seriously as a pope, it is not hard to

recognize the same individual who would later spit on the memory of such men

as Ravachol, Bonnot and Makhno's peasant army by joining up with the

Stalinist herds.

If Dada broke up because transcendence was impossible, the blame still lies

on the Dadaists themselves for having failed to search the past for the real

occasions when such transcendence became a possibility: those moments when

the masses arise and take their destiny into their own hands.

***

The first compromise is always terrible in its effects. Dada's original

error tainted its heirs irrevocably: it infected surrealism throughout its

history, and finally turned malignant witness neo-Dadaism. Admittedly, the

surrealists looked to the past. But with what results? While they were right

in recognizing the subversive genius of a Sade, a Fourier or a Lautréamont,

all they could do then was to write so much and so well about them as to win

for their heroes the honour of a few timid footnotes in progressive school

textbooks. A literary celebrity much like the celebrity the Neo-Dadaists win

for their forebears in the present spectacle of decomposition.

The only modern phenomena comparable to Dada are the most savage outbreaks

of juvenile delinquency. The same contempt for art and bourgeois values. The

same refusal of ideology. The same will to live. The same ignorance of

history. The same barbaric revolt. The same lack of tactics.

The nihilist makes one mistake: they do not realize that other people are

also nihilists, and that the nihilism of other people is now an active

historical factor. They have no consciousness of the possibility of

transcendence. The fact is, however, that the present reign of survival, in

which all the talk about progress expresses nothing so much as the fear that

progress may be impossible, is the outcome of a series of past revolutionary

defeats. The history of survival is the historical movement which will

eventually turn these defeats into harbingers of victory.

Awareness of just how nightmarish life has become is on the point of fusing

with a rediscovery of the real revolutionary movement in the past. We must

reappropriate the most radical aspects of all past revolts and insurrections

at the point where they were prematurely arrested, and bring to this task

all the violence bottled up inside us. A chain explosion of subterranean

creativity cannot fail to overturn the world of hierarchical power. In the

last reckoning, the nihilists are our only allies. They cannot possibly go

on living as they are. Their lives are like an open wound. A revolutionary

perspective could put all the latent energy generated by years of repression

at the service of their will to live. Anyone who combines consciousness of

past renunciations with a historical consciousness of decomposition is ready

to take up arms in the cause of the transformation of daily life and of the

world. Nihilists, as de Sade would have said, one more effort if you want to

be revolutionaries!

[Chapter 19 is from the translation by.... ]

                             JOHN FULLERTON AND

                            PAUL SIEVEKING. 1972

           (minor typological corrections and hypertext markup by

             >kubhlai@proweb.co.uk< 1998. Please report errors.)

XIX THE REVERSAL OF PERSPECTIVE

The light of power is waning. The eyes of individual subjectivity cannot

adapt to mere holes in a mask, which are the eyes of those fog-bound in

shared illusion. The individual's point of view must prevail over false

collective participation. In total self-possession, reach society with the

tentacles of subjectivity and remake everything startingwith yourself. The

reversal of perspsctive is what is positive in negativity, the fruit which

will burst out of the old world's bud (1-2).

One day Monsieur Keuner was asked just what was meant by "reversal of

perspective"; and he told the following story. Two brothers deeply attached

to one another had a strange habit. They marked the nature of the day's

events with pebbles a white one for each happy moment and a black one for

each moment of misfortune or displeasure. But when, at the end of the day,

they compared the contents of the jars one found only white pebbles and the

other only black.

Fascinated by the persistence with which they lived the same experience

differently, they both agreed to ask the advice of an old man famed for his

wisdom. "You don't talk to one another enough" said the wise man, "Both of

you must give the reasons for your choice, and discover its causes". From

then on they did so, and soon discovered that while the first remained

faithful to his white pebbles and the second to his black ones, in neither

jar were there as many pebbles as before. Where there had been about thirty

there were hardly more than seven or eight. After a short while they went to

see the wise man again. Both looked extremely miserable. "Not so long ago,"

said one, "my jar was filled with pebbles the colour of the night. My

despair was unbroken; I continued to live, I admit, only through the force

of habit. Now I hardly ever collect more than eight pebbles, but what these

eight signs of misery represent has become so intolerable that I cannot go

on like this." And the other said: "Every day I piled up white pebbles..

Today there are only seven or eight, but these obsess me to the point that I

cannot recall these moments of happiness without immediately wanting to

relive them more intensely and, in a word, eternally. This desire torments

me". The wise man smiled as he listened to them. "Excellent. Things are

shaping up well. Keep at it. And one thing: whenever you can, ask yourselves

why the game with the jar and the pebbles arouses so much passion in you."

When the two brothers next saw the wise man it was to say "We asked

ourselves the question but we could not find the answer. So we asked the

whole village. You can see how much it has disturbed them. In the evening.

squatting in front of their houses, whole families discuss the black and

white pebbles. Only the elders and chieftains refuse to take part. They say

a pebble is a pebble, and all are of equal value." The old man didn't

conceal his pleasure. "Everything is developing as I foresaw. Don't worry.

Soon the question will no longer be asked: it has lost its importance, and

perhaps one day you will no longer believe you ever asked it." Shortly

afterwards the old man's predictions were confirmed in the following way: a

great joy overcame the members of the village; at the dawn of a troubled

night, the rays of the sun fell upon the heads of the elders and chieftains,

impaled upon the sharp-pointed stakes of the palisade.

The world has always had a geometry. The angle and perspective within which

men could see, speak to, and represent each other was at first decided

solely by the gods of the unitary epochs. Then men, the men of the

bourgeoisie, played a fast one on them: they placed them in perspective,

arraying them in an historical becoming in which they were born, developed

and killed off. History was the twilight of the gods.

Seen historically, God is confused with the dialectlc of his material

aspect, masters and slaves, the history of class struggle and hierarchical

social power. Thus in a sense the bourgeoisie began the reversal of

perspective, only immediately to limit it to appearance. God may be

abolished, but the pillars which held him up still rise towards the empty

sky. And, as if the explosion in the cathedral of sacred values spread in

very slow shock waves, the crumbling of mythic rubble is only complete today

in the disintegration of the spectacle, nearly two centuries after the

attack. The bourgeoisie is only a stage in the dynamiting of God who is now

about to disappear once and for all and with him all trace of his material

origin: man's domination of man.

Economic mechanisms, whose control and strength the bourgeoisie partially

possessed, revealed the materiality of power, releasing it from the divine

phantom. But at what price? God offered a sort of refuge in his vast

negation of the human in which the faithful paradoxically had licence to

affirm themselves against temporal authority by opposing the absolute power

of God to the 'usurped' power of priests and rulers, as the mystics so often

did. Today it is power which sidles up to men and solicits them to consume

it. It weighs more and more heavily, reducing the space of life to mere

survival, compressing time to the density of a "role". To use a facile

image, one could compare power to an angle. Acute at first, its summit lost

in the depths of the sky, then gradually growing wider as its summit sinks,

becomes visible and subsides to the point of becoming flat, extending its

sides in a straight line, which cannot be distinguished from a succession of

points, equivalent and without strength.

Beyond this line, which is that of nihilism, a new perspective opens, which

is neither the reflection of the previous one nor its involution. On the

contrary, it is a body of individual perspectives in harmony, never entering

into conflict, but constructing the world according to the principles of

coherence and collectivity. All these angles, all different, nevertheless

open in the same direction, individual will henceforward being

indistinguishable from collective will.

The function of conditioning is to place and displace everyone along the

length of the hierarchical ladder. The reversal of perspective entails a

sort of anti-conditioning, not conditioning of a new type, but playful

tactics: diversion.

The reversal of perspective replaces knowledge by praxis, hope by freedom

and mediation by the will of the here and now. It consecrates the triumph of

a body of human relationships founded on three inseparable poles:

participation, communication and realization.

To reverse perspective is to stop seeing with the eyes of the community,

ideology. family or other people. It is to grasp oneself firmly, to choose

oneself as starting point and centre. To base everything on subjectivity and

to follow one's subjective will to be everything. In the sights of my

insatiable desire to live, the whole of power is only one particular target

within a wider horizon. It's show of strength doesn't obstruct my vision,

but I locate it, estimate its dangers, and study its movement. My

creativity, however poor it may be, is a more certain guide than all the

knowledge I have been forced to acquire. In the night of power, its glow

holds the hostile forces at bay: cultural conditioning, every type of

specialisation and Weltanschauungen are inevitably totalitarian. Everyone

has the absolute weapon. However, it must be used with circumspection, like

certain charms. If one approaches it from the standpoint of lies and

oppression - back to front - then it is no more than bad clowning: an

artistic consecration. The acts which destroy power are the same as the acts

which construct free individual will but their range is different just as in

strategy preparation for defense is obviously different from preparation for

attack.

We haven't chosen the reversal of perspective through any kind of

voluntarism. It has chosen us. Caught as we are in the historical phase of

NOTHING, the next step can only be a change of EVERYTHING. Consciousness of

total revolution, of its necessity, is our final way of being historical,

our last chance, under certain conditions, of unmaking history. The game we

are about to play is the game of our creativity. Its rules are radically

opposed to the rules and laws controlling our society. It is a game of loser

wins: what you are is more important than what is said, what is lived is

more important than what is represented on the level of appearances. This

game must be played right through to its conclusion. To cede an inch in

one's will to live without reserve is to surrender all along the line. Those

who give up their violence and their radical demands are doomed. Murdered

truths become venomous, said Nietzsche. If we do not reverse perspective,

then the perspective of power will succeed in turning us against ourselves

once and for all. German Fascism was born in the blood of Spartacus. In each

daily renunciation, reaction is preparing nothing less than the death of

everyone.

  [Chapter 20 is from the translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Left Bank

Books/Rebel Press, 1983. No copyright claims will be made against publishers

                           of nonprofit editions.

                                 Chapter 20

                     Creativity, Spontaneity and Poetry

   Human beings are in a state of creativity twenty-four hours a day. Once

    revealed, the scheming use of freedom by the mechanisms of domination

 produces a backlash in the form of an idea of authentic freedom inseparably

bound up with individual creativity. The passion to create which issues from

the consciousness of constraint can no longer be pressed into the service of

  production, consumption or organization. (1). Spontaneity is the mode of

     existence of creativity; not an isolated state, but the unmediated

experience of subjectivity. Spontaneity concretizes the passion for creation

  and is the first moment of its practical realization: the precondition of

poetry, of the impulse to change the world in accordance with the demands of

     radical subjectivity. (2). The qualitative exists wherever creative

  spontaneity manifests itself. It entails the direct communication of the

   essential. It is poetry's chance. A crystallization of possibilities, a

    multiplier of knowledge and practical potential, and the proper modis

operandi of intelligence. Its criteria are sui generis. The qualitative leap

   precipitates a chain reaction which is to be seen in all revolutionary

  moments; such a reaction must be awoken by the scandal of free and total

   creativity. (3). Poetry is the organizer of creative spontaneity to the

  extent that it reinforces spontaneity's hold on reality. Poetry is an act

 which engenders new realities; it is the fulfilment of radical theory, the

                      revolutionary act par excellence.

In this fractured world, whose common denominator throughout history has

been hierarchical social power, only one freedom has ever been tolerated:

the freedom to change the numerator, the freedom to prefer one master to

another. Freedom of choice so understood has increasingly lost its

attraction -- especially since it became the official doctrine of the worst

totalitarianisms of the modern world, East and West. The generalization of

the refusal to make such a Hobson's choice -- to do no more than change

employers -- has in turn occasioned a restructuring of State power. All the

governments of the industrialized or semi-industrialized world now tend to

model themselves -- after a single prototype: the common aim is to

rationalize, to 'automate', the old forms of domination. And herein lies

freedom's first chance. The bourgeois democracies have clearly shown that

individual freedoms can be tolerated only insofar as they entrench upon and

destroy one another; now that this is clear, it has become impossible for

any government, no matter how sophisticated, to wave the muleta of freedom

without everyone discerning the sword concealed behind it. In fact the

constant evocation of freedom merely incites freedom to rediscover its roots

in individual creativity, to break out of its official definition as the

permitted the licit, the tolerable -- to shatter the benevolence of

despotism.

Freedom's second chance comes once it has retrieved its creative

authenticity, and is tied up with the very mechanisms of Power. It is

obvious that abstract systems of exploitation and domination are human

creations, brought into being and refined through the diversion or

co-optation of creativity. The only forms of creativity that authority can

deal with, or wished to deal with, are those which the spectacle can

recuperate. But what people do officially is nothing compared with what they

do in secret. People usually associate creativity with works of art, but

what are works of art alongside the creative energy displayed by everyone a

thousand times a day: seething unsatisfied desires, daydreams in search of a

foothold in reality, feelings at once confused and luminously clear, ideas

and gestures presaging nameless upheavals. All this energy, of course, is

relegated to anonymity and deprived of adequate means of expression,

imprisoned by survival and obliged to find outlets by sacrificing its

qualitative richness and conforming to the spectacle's categories. Think of

Cheval's palace, the Watts Towers, Fourier's inspired system, or the

pictorial universe of Douanier Rousseau. Even more to the point, consider

the incredible diversity of anyone's dreams -- landscapes the brilliance of

whose colors qualitatively surpass the finest canvases of a Van Gogh. Every

individual is constantly building an ideal world within themselves, even as

their external motions bend to the requirements of soulless routine.

Nobody, no matter how alienated, is without (or unaware of) an irreducible

core of creativity, a camera obscura safe from intrusion from lies and

constraints. If ever social organization extends its control to this

stronghold of humanity, its domination will no longer be exercised over

anything save robots, or corpses. And, in a sense, this is why consciousness

of creative energy increases, paradoxically enough, as a function of

consumer society's efforts to co-opt it.

Argus is blind to the danger right in front of him. Where quantity reigns,

quality has no legal existence; but this is the very thing that safeguards

and nourishes it. I have already mentioned the fact that the dissatisfaction

bred by the manic pursuit of quantity calls forth a radical desire for the

qualitative. The more oppression is justified in terms of the freedom to

consume, the more the malaise arising from this contradiction exacerbates

the thirst for total freedom. The crisis of production-based capitalism

pointed up the element of repressed creativity in the energy expended by the

worker, and Marx gave us the definitive expose of this alienation of

creativity through forced labor, through the exploitation of the producer.

Whatever the capitalist system and its avatars (their antagonisms

notwithstanding) lose on the production front they try to make up for in the

sphere of consumption. The idea is that, as they gradually free themselves

from the imperatives of production, people should be trapped by the newer

obligations of the consumer. By opening up the wasteland of 'leisure' to a

creativity liberated at long last thanks to reduced working hours, our

kindly apostles of humanism are really only raising an army suitable for

training on the parade ground of a consumption- based economy. Now that the

alienation of the consumer is being exposed by the dialectic internal to

consumption itself, what kind of prison can be devised for the highly

subversive forces of individual creativity? As I have already pointed out,

the rulers' last chance here is to turn us all into organizers of our own

passivity.

With touching candour, Dewitt Peters remarks that, "If paints, brushes and

canvas were handed out to everyone who wanted them, the results might be

quite interesting". It is true that if this policy were applied in a variety

of well-defined and well-policed spheres, such as the theatre, the plastic

arts, music, writing, etc., and in a general way to any such sphere

susceptible of total isolation from all the others, then the system might

have a hope of endowing people with the consciousness of the artist, ie.,

the consciousness of someone who makes a profession of displaying their

creativity in the museums and shopwindows of culture. The popularity of such

a culture would be a perfect index of Power's success. Fortunately the

chances of people being successfully 'culturized' in this way are now

slight. Do they really imagine that people can be persuaded to engage in

free experiment within bounds laid down by authoritarian decree? OR that

prisoners who have become aware of their creative capacity will be content

to decorate their cells with original graffiti? They are more likely to

apply their newfound penchant for experiment in other spheres: firearms,

desires, dreams, self- realization techniques. Especially since the crowd is

already full of agitators. No: the last possible way of coopting creativity,

which is the organization of artistic passivity, is happily doomed to

failure.

"What I am trying to reach", wrote Paul Klee, "is a far-off point, at the

sources of creation, where I suspect a single explanatory principle applies

for people, animals, plants, fire, water, air and all the forces that

surround us". As a matter of fact, this point is only far off in Power's

lying perspective: the source of all creation lies in individual creativity;

it is from this starting point that everything, being or thing, is ordered

in accordance with poetry's grand freedom. This is the take-off point of the

new perspective: that perspective for which everyone is struggling

willy-nilly with all their strength and at every moment of their existence.

"Subjectivity is the only truth" (Kierkegaard).

Power cannot enlist true creativity. In 1869 the Brussels police thought

they had found the famous gold of the International, about which the

capitalists were losing so much sleep. They seized a huge strongbox hidden

in some dark corner. When they opened it, however, they found only coal.

Little did the police know that the pure gold of the International would

always turn into coal if touched by enemy hands.

The laboratory of individual creativity transmutes the basest metals of

daily life into gold through a revolutionary alchemy. The prime objective is

to dissolve slave consciousness, consciousness of impotence, by releasing

creativity's magnetic power; impotence is magically dispelled as creative

energy surges forth, genius serene in its self-assurance. So sterile on the

plane of the race for prestige in the Spectacle, megalomania is an important

phase in the struggle of the self against the combined forces of

conditioning. The creative spark, which is the spark of true life, shines

all the more brightly in the night of nihilism which at present envelopes

us. As the project of a better organization of survival aborts, the sparks

will become more and more numerous and gradually coalesce into a single

light, the promise of a new organization based this time on the harmonizing

of individual wills. History is leading us to the crossroads where radical

subjectivity is destined to encounter the possibility of changing the world.

The crossroads of the reversal of perspective.

Spontaneity. Spontaneity is the true mode of being of individual creativity,

creativity's initial, immaculate form, unpolluted at the source and as yet

unthreatened by the mechanisms of co- optation. Whereas creativity in the

broad sense is the most equitably distributed thing imaginable, spontaneity

seems to be confined to a chosen few. Its possession is a privilege of those

whom long resistance to Power has endowed with a consciousness of their own

value as individuals. In revolutionary moments this means the majority; in

other periods, when the old mole works unseen, day by day, it is still more

people than one might think. For so long as the light of creativity

continues to shine spontaneity has a chance.

"The new artist protests", wrote Tzara in 1919. "He no longer paints: he

creates directly." The new artists of the future, constructors of situations

to be lived, will undoubtedly have immediacy as their most succinct - though

also their most radical - demand. I say 'succinct' because it is important

after all not to be confused by the connotations of the word 'spontaneity'.

Spontaneity can never spring from internalized restraints, even subconscious

ones, nor can it survive the effects of alienating abstraction and

spectacular co-optation: it is a conquest, not a given. The reconstruction

of the individual presupposes the reconstruction of the unconscious (cf the

construction of dreams).

What spontaneous creativity has lacked up to now is a clear consciousness of

its poetry. The commonsense view has always treated spontaneity as a primary

state, and initial stage in need of theoretical adaptation, of transposition

into formal terms. This view isolates spontaneity, treats it as a

thing-in-itself - and thus recognizes it only in the travestied forms which

it acquires within the spectacle (e.g. action painting). In point of fact,

spontaneous creativity carries the seeds of a self- sufficient development

within itself. It is possessed by its own poetry.

For me spontaneity is immediate experience, consciousness of a lived

immediacy threatened on all sides yet not yet alienated, not yet relegated

to inauthenticity. The centre of lived experience is that place where

everyone comes closest to themself. Within this unique space-time we have

the clear conviction that reality exempts us from necessity. Consciousness

of necessity is always what alienates us. We have been taught to apprehend

ourselves by default -- in absentia, so to speak. But it takes a single

moment of awareness of real life to eliminate all alibis, and consign the

absence of future to the same void as the absence of past. Consciousness of

the present harmonizes with lived experience in a sort of extemporization.

The pleasure this brings us -- impoverished by its isolation, yet

potentially rich because it reaches out towards an identical pleasure in

other people -- bears a striking resemblance to the enjoyment of jazz. At

its best, improvisation in everyday life has much in common with jazz as

evoked by Dauer: :The African conception of rhythm differs from the Western

in that it is perceived through bodily movement rather than aurally. The

technique consists essentially in the introduction of discontinuity into the

static balance imposed upon time by rhythm and metre. This discontinuity,

which results from the existence of ecstatic centres of gravity out of time

with the musical rhythm and metre proper, creates a constant tension between

the static beat and the ecstatic beat which is superimposed on it."

The instant of creative spontaneity is the minutest possible manifestation

of reversal of perspective. It is a unitary moment, i.e., one and many. The

eruption of lived pleasure is such that in losing myself I find myself;

forgetting that I exist, I realize myself. Consciousness of immediate

experience lies in this oscillation, in this improvisational jazz. By

contrast, thought directed toward lived experience with analytical intent is

bound to remain detached from that experience. This applies to all

reflection on everyday life, including, to be sure, the present one. To

combat this, all I can do is try to incorporate an element of constant

self-criticism, so as to make the work of co-optation a little harder than

usual. The traveller who is always thinking about the length of the road

before them tires more easily than his or her companion who lets their

imagination wander as they go along. Similarly, anxious attention paid to

lived experience can only impede it, abstract it, and make it into nothing

more than a series of memories-to-be.

If thought is really to find a basis in lived experience, it has to be free.

The way to achieve this is to think other in terms of the same. As you make

yourself, imagine another self who will make you one day in his or her turn.

Such is my conception of spontaneity: the highest possible

self-consciousness which is still inseparable from the self and from the

world.

All the same, the paths of spontaneity are hard to find. Industrial

civilization has let them become overgrown. And even when we find real life,

knowing the best way to grasp it is not easy. Individual experience is also

prey to insanity -- a foothold for madness. Kierkegaard described this state

of affairs as follows: "It is true that I have a lifebelt, but I cannot see

the pole which is supposed to pull me out of the water. This is a ghastly

way to experience things". The pole is there, of course, and no doubt

everyone could grab onto it, though many would be so slow about it that they

would die of anxiety before realizing its existence. But exist it does, and

its name is radical subjectivity: the consciousness that all people have the

same will to authentic self-realization, and that their subjectivity is

strengthened by the perception of this subjective will in others. This way

of getting out of oneself and radiating out, not so much towards others as

towards that part of oneself that is to be found in others, is what gives

creative spontaneity the strategic importance of a launching pad. The

concepts and abstractions which rule us have to be returned to their source,

to lived experience, not in order to validate them, but on the contrary to

correct them, to turn them on their heads, to restore them to that sphere

whence they derive and which they should never have left. This is a

necessary precondition of people's imminent realization that their

individual creativity is indistinguishable from universal creativity. The

sole authority is one's own lived experience; and this everyone must prove

to everyone else.

The qualitative. I have already said that creativity, though equally

distributed to all, only finds direct, spontaneous expression on specific

occasions. These occasions are pre- revolutionary moments, the source of the

poetry that changes life and transforms the world. They must surely be

placed under the sign of that modern equivalent of grace, the qualitative.

The presence of the divine abomination is revealed by a cloying spirituality

suddenly conferred upon all, from the rustic to the most refined: on a

cretin like Claudel as readily as on a St.John of the Cross. Similarly, a

gesture, an attitude, perhaps merely a word, may suffice to show that

poetry's chance is at hand, that the total construction of everyday life, a

global reversal of perspective -- in short, the revolution -- are immanent

possibilities. The qualitative encapsulates and crystallizes these

possibilities; it is a direct communication of the essential.

One day Kagame heard an old woman of Rwanda, who could neither read nor

write, complaining: "Really, these whites are incurably simple-minded. They

have no brains at all." "How can you be so stupid?" he answered her. "I

would like to see you invent so many unimaginably marvellous things as the

whites have done." With a condescending smile the old woman replied,

"Listen, my child. They may have learned a lot of things, but they have no

brains. They don't understand anything." And she was right, for the curse of

technological civilization, of quantified exchange and scientific knowledge,

is that they have created no means of freeing people's spontaneous

creativity directly; indeed, they do not even allow people to understand the

world in any unmediated fashion. The sentiments expressed by the Rwandan

woman -- whom the Belgian administrator doubtless looked upon, from the

heights of his superior intelligence, as a wild animal -- are also to be

found, though laden with guilt and thus tainted by crass stupidity, in the

old platitude: "I have studied a great deal and now know that I know

nothing". For it is false, in a sense, to say that study can teach us

nothing, so long as it does not abandon the point of view of the totality.

What this attitude refuses to see, or to learn, are the various stages of

the qualitative -- whatever, at whatever level, lends support to the

qualitative. Imagine a number of apartments located immediately above one

another, communicating directly by means of a central elevator and also

indirectly linked by an outside spiral staircase. People in the different

apartments have direct access to each other, whereas someone slowly climbing

the spiral stairs is cut off from them. The former have access to the

qualitative at all levels; the latter's knowledge is limited to one step at

a time, and so no dialogue is possible between the two. Thus the

revolutionary workers of 1848 were no doubt incapable of reading the

Communist Manifesto, yet they possessed within themselves the essential

lessons of Marx and Engels' text. In fact this is what made the Marxist

theory truly radical. The objective conditions of the worker, expressed by

the Manifesto on the level of theory, made it possible for the most

illiterate proletarian to understand Marx immediately when the moment came.

The cultivated person who uses their culture like a flame thrower is bound

to get on with the uncultivated person who experiences what the first person

puts in scholarly terms the lived reality of everyday life. The arms of

criticism do indeed have to join forces with criticism by force of arms.

Only the qualitative permits a higher stage to be reached in one bound. This

is the lesson that any endangered group must learn, the pedagogy of the

barricades. The graded world of hierarchical power, however, can only

envisage knowledge as being similarly graded: the people on the spiral

staircase, experts on the type and number of steps, meet, pass, bump into

one another and trade insults. What difference does it make? At the bottom

we have the autodidact gorged on platitudes, at the top the intellectual

collecting ideas like butterflies: mirror images of foolishness. The

opposition between Miguel de Unamuno and the repulsive Millan Stray, between

the paid thinker and their reviler, is an empty one: where the qualitative

is not in evidence, intelligence is a fool's cap and bells.

The alchemists called those elements needed for the Great Work the materia

prima. Paracelsus' description of this applies perfectly to the qualitative:

"It is obvious that the poor possess it in greater abundance than the rich.

People squander the good portion of it and keep only the bad. It is visible

and invisible, and children play with it in the street. But the ignorant

crush it underfoot everyday." The consciousness of this qualitative materia

prima may be expected to become more and more acute in most minds as the

bastions of specialized thought and gradated knowledge collapse. Those who

make a profession of creating, and those whose profession prevents them from

creating, both artists and workers, are being pushed into the same nihilism

by the process of proletarianization. This process, which is accompanied by

resistance to it, i.e., resistance to co-opted forms of creativity, occurs

amid such a plethora of cultural goods -- records, films, paperback books --

that once these commodities have been freed from the laws of consumption

they will pass immediately into the service of true creativity. The sabotage

of the mechanisms of economic and cultural consumption is epitomized by

young people who steal the books in which they expect to find confirmation

of their radicalism.

Once the light of the qualitative is shed upon them, the most varied kinds

of knowledge combine and form a magnetic bridge powerful enough to overthrow

the weightiest traditions. The force of plain spontaneous creativity

increases knowledge at an exponential rate. Using makeshift equipment and

negligible funds, a German engineer recently built an apparatus able to

replace the cyclotron. If individual creativity can achieve suck results

with such meagre stimulation, what marvels of energy must be expected from

the qualitative shock waves and chain reactions that will occur when the

spirit of freedom still alive in the individual re-emerges in collective

form to celebrate the great social fete, with its joyful breaking of all

taboos.

The job of a consistent revolutionary group, far from being the creation of

a new type of conditioning, is to establish protected areas where the

intensity of conditioning tends toward zero. Making each person aware of

their creative potential will be a hapless task unless recourse is had to

qualitative shock tactics. Which is why we expect nothing from the mass

parties and other groupings based on the principle of quantitative

recruitment. Something can be expected, on the other hand, from a micro-

society formed on the basis of the radical acts or thought of its members,

and maintained in a permanent state of practical readiness by means of

strict theoretical discrimination. Cells successfully established along such

lines would have every chance of wielding sufficient influence one day to

free the creativity of the majority of the people. The despair of the

anarchist terrorist must be changed into hope; those tactics, worthy of some

medieval warrior, must be changed into a modern strategy.

Poetry. What is poetry? It is the organization of creative spontaneity, the

exploitation of the qualitative in accordance with its internal laws of

coherence. Poetry is what the Greeks called poiein, 'making', but 'making'

restored to the purity of its moment of genesis -- seen, in other words,

from the point of view of the totality.

Poetry cannot exist in the absence of the qualitative. In this absence we

find the opposite of the qualitative: information, the transitional

programme, specialization, reformism -- the various guises of the

fragmentary. The presence of the qualitative does not of itself guarantee

poetry, however. A rich complex of signs and possibilities may get lost in

confusion, disintegrate from lack of coherence, or be destroyed by crossed

purposes. The criterion of effectiveness must remain supreme. Thus poetry is

also radical theory completely embodied in action; the mortar binding

tactics and revolutionary strategy; the high point of the great gamble on

everyday life.

What is poetry? In 1895, during an ill-advised and seemingly foredoomed

French railway worker's strike, one trade unionist stood up and mentioned

and ingenious and cheap way of advancing the strikers' cause: "It takes two

sous' worth of a certain substance used in the right way to immobilize a

locomotive". Thanks to this bit of quick thinking, the tables were turned on

the government and capitalists. Here it is clear that poetry is the act

which brings new realities into being, the act which reverses the

perspective. The materia prima is within everyone's reach. Poets are those

who know how to use it to best effect. Moreover, two sous' worth of some

chemical is nothing compared with the profusion of unrivalled energy

generated and made available by everyday life itself: the energy of the will

to live, of desire unleashed, of the passions of love, the power of fear and

anxiety, the hurricane of hatred and the wild impetus of the urge for

destruction. What poetic upheavals may confidently be expected to stem from

such universally experienced feelings as those associated with deaths, old

age, and sickness. The long revolution of everyday life, the only true

poetry-made-by-all, will take this still marginal consciousness as its point

of departure.

"What is poetry?", ask the aesthetes. And we may as well give them the

obvious answer right away: poetry rarely involves poems these days. Most art

works betray poetry. How could it be otherwise, when poetry and power are

irreconcilable? At best, the artist's creativity is imprisoned, cloistered,

within an unfinished oeuvre, awaiting the day when it will have the last

word. Unfortunately, no matte how much importance the artist gives it, this

last word, which is supposed to usher in perfect communication, will never

be pronounced so long as the revolt of creativity has not realized art.

The African work of art -- poem, music, sculpture, or mask -- is not

considered complete until it has become a form of speech, a word-in-action,

a creative element which functions. Actually this is true for more than

African art. There is no art in the world which does not seek to function;

and to function -- even on the level of later co-optation -- consistently

with the very same will which generated it, the will to live constantly in

the euphoria of the moment of creation. Why is it that the work of the

greatest artists never seems to have an end? The answer is that great art

cries out in every possible way for realization, for the right to enter

lived experience. The present decomposition of art is a bow perfectly

readied for such an arrow.

Nothing can save past culture from the cult of the past except those

pictures, writings, musical or lithic architectures, etc., whose qualitative

dimension gets through to us free of its form - - of all art forms. This

happens with Sade and Lautréamont, of course, but also with Villon,

Lucretius, Rabelais, Pascal, Fourier, Bosch, Danté, Bach, Swift,

Shakespeare, Uccello, etc. All are liable to shed their cultural chrysalis,

and emerge from the museums to which history has relegated them to become so

much dynamite for the bombs of the future realizers of art. Thus the value

of an old work of art should be assessed on the basis of the amount of

radical theory that can be drawn from it, on the basis of the nucleus of

creative spontaneity which the new creators will be able to release from it

for the purpose, and by means of an unprecedented kind of poetry.

Radical theory's forte is its ability to postpone an action begun by

creative spontaneity without mitigating it or redirecting its thrust.

Conversely, the artistic approach seeks in its finest moments to stamp the

world with the impress of a tentacular subjective activity constantly

seeking to create, and to create itself. Whereas radical theory sticks close

to poetic reality, to reality in process and to the world as it is being

changed, art takes an identical tack but at much greater risk of being lost

and corrupted. Only an art armed against itself, against its own weaker side

-- its most aesthetic side -- has any hope of evading co-optation.

Consumer society, as we well know, reduces art to a range of consumable

products. The more vulgarized this reduction, the faster the rate of

decomposition and the greater the chances for transcendence. That

communication so urgently sought by the artist is cut off and prohibited

even in the simplest relationships of everyday life. So true is this that

the search for new forms of communication, far from being the preserve of

painters and poets, is now part of a collective effort. In this way the old

specialization of art has finally come to an end. There are no more artists

because everyone is an artist. The work of art of the future will be the

construction of a passionate life.

The object created is less important than the process which gives rise to

it, the act of creating. What makes an artist is their state of creativity,

not art galleries. Unfortunately, artists rarely recognize themselves as

creators: most of the time they play to the gallery, exhibitionistically. A

contemplative attitude before a work of art was the first stone thrown at

the creator. They encouraged this attitude in the first place, but today it

is their undoing: now it amounts to no more than a need to consume, an

expression of the crassest economic imperatives. This is why there is no

longer any such thing as a work of art in the classical sense of the word.

Nor can there be such a thing. So much the better. Poetry is to be found

everywhere: in the facts, in the events we bring about. The poetry of the

facts, formerly always treated as marginal, now stands at the centre of

everyone's concerns, at the centre of everyday life, a sphere which as a

matter of fact it has never left.

True poetry cares nothing for poems. In his quest for the Book, Mallarmé

wanted nothing so much as to abolish the poem. What better way could there

be of abolishing the poem than realizing it? And indeed a few of Mallarmé's

contemporaries proved themselves rather brilliant exponents of just such a

'new poetry'. Did the author of Herodiade have an inking, perhaps, when he

described them as "angels of purity", that the anarchists with their bombs

offered the poet a key which, walled up in his words, he could never use?

Poetry is always somewhere. Its recent abandonment of the arts makes it

easier to see that it resides primarily in individual acts, in a lifestyle

and in the search for such a style. Everywhere repressed, this poetry

springs up everywhere. Brutally put down, it is reborn in violence. It plays

muse to rioters, informs revolt and animates all great revolutionary

carnivals for a while, until the bureaucrats consign it to the prison of

hagiography.

Lived poetry has effectively shown throughout history, even in partial

revolts, even in crime -- which Coeurderoy so aptly dubbed the "revolt of

one" -- that it is the protector par excellence of everything irreducible in

mankind, i.e., creative spontaneity. The will to unite the individual and

the social, not on the basis of an illusory community but on that of

subjectivity -- this is what makes the new poetry into a weapon which

everyone must learn to handle by themself. Poetic experience is henceforth

at a premium. The organization of spontaneity will be the work of

spontaneity itself.

[Chapters 21 to 25 and the appendices are from the translation by...]

                             JOHN FULLERTON AND

                            PAUL SIEVEKING. 1972

           (minor typological corrections and hypertext markup by

             >kubhlai@proweb.co.uk< 1998. Please report errors.)

XXI MASTERS WITHOUT SLAVES

Power is the social organisation which enables masters to maintain

conditions of slavery. God, State, Organisation: these three words reveal

well enough the amount of autonomy and historical determination there is in

power, three principles have successively held sway: the domination

principle (feudal power), the exploitation principle (bourgeois power) and

the organisation principle (cybernetic power) (2). Hierarchical social

organisation has perfected itself by desacralisation and mechanisation, but

its contradictions have increased. it has humanised itself to the extent

that it has emptied men of their human substance. it has gained in autonomy

at the expense of the masters; (the rulers are in control but it's the

strings that make them dance), today, those in power are perpetuating the

race of willing slaves, those whom Theognis said were born with bowed heads,

they have lost even the unhealthy pleasures of domination. Facing the

masters/slaves stand the men of refusal, the new proletariat, rich in

revolutionary traditions. From these the masters without slaves will emerge,

together with a superior type of society in which the lived project of

childhood and the historical project of the great aristocrats will be

realised (l) (3).

In the Theages Plato writes: "Each man would 1ike if posslble to be the

master of all men. Or, better still, God." A mediocre ambition in view of

the weakness of masters and gods. For if, in the last analysis, the

pettiness of slaves derives from the allegiance to their rulers, the

pettiness of rulers and of God Himself comes from deficiencies in the nature

of those ruled. The master knows alienation by its positive pole, the slave

by its negative pole; total mastery is equally refused both of them.

How does the feudal lord behave in this dialectic of master and slave? Slave

of God and master of men - and master of men because he is slave of God, as

the myth would have it - we see him condemned to blend within himself the

disgust and respectful interest that he has before God, for it is to God

that he owes his obedience, and it is from him that he derives his power

over men. In short, he reproduces between God and himself the type of

relationship that exists between nobles and king. What is a king? A chosen

one among the chosen, and one whose succession generally occurs as a game in

which equals compete. Feudal lords serve the king, but they serve him as his

equals in power, they submit themselves to God in the same way as rivals and

competitors.

One can understand why the masters of old were unsatisfied. Through God they

enter into the positive pole of alienation; through those they oppress, into

its negative pole. What desire could they have to be God, knowing the

boredom of positive alienation? And at the same time, how could they not

want to rid themselves of God, the tyrant over them? The "To be or not to

be" of great men has always been expressed by the question, insoluble in

their epoch, of how to deny God, and yet preserve Him, that is, to supersede

and realize Him.

History bears witness to two practical attempts at such a supersession: that

of the mystics and that of the great refusers. Meister Eckhart declared: "1

pray God to absolve me from God". Similarly, the Swabian heretics of 1270

said that they had raised themselves above God, and that, having attained

the highest degree of divine perfection, they had abandoned Him. On another

tack, the negative tack, certain strong personalities like Elogabalus,

Gilles de Rais and Erszebet Bathory, strove, as one can see, to attain a

total mastery over the world by the liquidation of intermediaries, those who

were alienating them positively, their slaves. They approached the total man

via a total inhumanity. "Against Nature". So the passion for an unbounded

rule and the absolute refusal of constraints form the same single route, an

ascending and descending road on which Caligula and Spartacus, Gilles de

Rais and Dosza Gyorgy stand side by side, together yet separate. However, it

is not enough to say that the integral revolt of slaves - I insist the

integral revolt, and not its deficient forms whether Christian, bourgeois or

socialist - unites with the extreme revolt of the masters of old. In fact,

the will to abolish slavery and all its sequels (the proletariat, servants,

submissive and passive men) offers a unique chance to the will to rule the

world with no other limit than a reinvented nature, and the resistance of

objects to their own transformation.

That chance is inscribed in the historical process. History exists because

the oppressed exist. The struggle against nature, and then against the

different social organisations of the struggle against nature, is always the

struggle for human emancipation, for the total man. The refusal to be a

slave is really what changes the world.

So what is the goal of history? History is made "under certain conditions"

(Marx) by slaves against slavery. Thus it can only pursue one aim: the

destruction of masters. For his part, the master never stops trying to

escape from history, to refuse it by massacring those who make it, and who

make it against him.

Some paradoxes:

1. The most human aspect of the masters of old resides in their claim to

absolute mastery. Such a project implies the absolute blockage of history,

and thus the extreme refusal of emancipation. That is to say, total

inhumanity.

2. The desire to escape from history makes you vulnerable. If you try to

flee you lose your cover, and are more easily attacked; a determined

immobility can no more resist waves of attack by lived reality than it can

the dialectic of productive forces. The masters are the sacrificial victims

of history; from the height of the pyramid of the present, contemplating

three thousand years of history, one can see them crushed by it, either in

terms of a definite plan, a strict programme, or a line of force which

allows one to conceive of a Sense of History (the end of the slave world,

the feudal world and the bourgeois world).

Because they try to escape it, the masters slot themselves tidily in the

drawers of history: they enter into linear temporal evolution in spite of

themselves. On the other hand, those who make history, the revolutionaries,

slaves drunk with total freedom, seem to act "sub specie aeternitatis",

under the sign of the intemporal, driven by an insatiable taste for an

intense life, pursuing their aim through various historical conditions.

Perhaps the philosophical notion of eternity is linked with historical

attempts at emancipation,.. perhaps this notion will one day be realised,

like philosophy, by those who carry within them total freedom and the end of

traditional history.

3. The superiority of the negative pole of alienation over the positive pole

is that its integral revolt makes the project of absolute mastery the only

solution. Slaves in struggle for the abolition of constraints reveal the

moment through which history liquidates masters, and beyond history, there

is the possibility of a new power over the things that they encounter, a

power which no longer appropriates objects by appropriating people. But in

the very course of a slowly elaborated history, it has been inevitable that

the masters, instead of disappearing, have degenerated; there are no longer

any masters, only slave-consumers of power, differing among themselves only

in the degree and quantity of power consumed.

The transformation of the world by the productive forces was bound slowly to

realise the material conditions of total emancipation, having first passed

through the stage of the bourgeoisie. Today, when automation and cybernetics

applied in a human way would permit the construction of the dream of masters

and slaves of all time, there only exists a socially shapeless magma which

blends in each individual paltry portions of master and slave. Yet it is

from this reign of equivalent values that then new masters, the masters

without slaves, will emerge.

I want in passing to hail de Sade. He is, as much by his privileged

appearance at a turning point in history as by his astounding lucidity, the

last of the great aristocrats in revolt. How do the masters of the Chateau

of Selling assure their absolute mastery? They massacre all their servants

and reach an eternity of delight by this gesture. This is the subject of 120

Days of Sodom.

Marquis and sans-culotte, D.A.F. de Sade unites the perfect hedonist logic

of the grand seigneur badman and the revolutionary desire to enjoy without

limitations a subjectivity which is at last freed from the hierarchical

framework. The desperate effort he makes to abolish both positive and

negative poles of alienation ranges him at once among the most important

theoreticians of the total man. Its high time that revolutionaries were

reading de Sade with the same care that they set about reading Marx. (Of

Marx, as we know, the revolutionary specialists know mostly what he wrote

under the pseudonym of Stalin, or at best of Lenin and Trotsky.) At any

rate, nobody who wants to change daily life radically will be able from now

on to ignore either the great refusers of power, or those masters of old who

came to feel cramped in the power that God granted them.

Bourgeois power fed on the crumbs of feudal power. It is crumbled feudal

power. Eaten away by revolutionary criticism, trodden underfoot and broken

up, (without this liquidation ever reaching its logical conclusion - the end

of hierarchical power), aristocratic authority survived the death of the

aristocracy in the form of parody, the pain-stricken grin. Awkward and stiff

in their fragmentary power, making their fragment a totality (and the

totalitarian is nothing else), the bourgeois rulers were condemned to see

their prestige fall apart at the seams, rotted by the decomposition of the

spectacle. As soon as myth and authority lost their credibility, the form of

government could only be either burlesque terror or democratic bullshit. O

look at Napoleon's pretty children! Louis Philippe, Napoleon III, Thiers,

Alphonse XIII, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin. Franco, Salazar, Nasser, Mao, de

Gaulle... ubiquitous Ubus in the four corners of the world spawning more and

more cretinous miscarriages. Yesterday they still brandished their twigs of

authority like Olympian thunderbolts; today the apes of power glean no more

from the social scene than a little dubious respect. Certainly, the

absurdity of a Franco is still lethal - no-one would dream of forgetting it

- but one should always remember that the stupidity of power will be a

deadlier killer than stupidity in power.

The spectacle is the brainscrambling machine of our penal colony, The

master-slaves of today are its faithful servants, the extras and

stage-managers. Who will want to judge them? They will plead not guilty and

in fact they aren't really guilty. They don't need cynicism so much as

spontaneous confessions, terror so much as acquiescent victims, or force so

much as herds of masochists. The alibi of the rulers lies in the cowardice

of the ruled. But now everyone is governed, manipulated as things by an

abstract power, by an organisation-in-itself whose laws are imposed on the

self-styled rulers. Things are not judged, they are just stopped from being

a nuisance.

In October 1963 Monsieur Fourastié reached the following conclusions on the

subject of the future leader: "The leader has lost his almost magical power;

he is and will be a man capable of provoking actions. Finally, a reign of

workgroups will develop to prepare decisions. The leader will be a committee

president, but one who knows how to sum up and make decisions." (My

italics). You can see the three historical phases characterising the

evolution of the master:

1. The principle of domination, linked with feudal society.

2. The principle of exploitation, linked with bourgeois society.

3. The principle of organisation, linked with cybernetic society.

In fact, the three elements are inseparable; one cannot dominate without

exploiting and organising at the same time; but their importance varies with

the epoch. As one passes from one stage to the next, the autonomy and the

role of the master wane and diminish. The humanity of the master tends

towards zero, while the inhumanity of disembodied power tends towards

infinity.

According to the principle of domination, the master refuses slaves an

existence which would limit his own. With the principle of exploitation, the

boss allows the workers an existence which fattens and develops his own. The

principle of organisation classifies individual existences like fractions,

according to their managerial or executive faculties. (A shop-steward would,

for example, be defined in terms of long calculations involving his

productivity, his representativeness, etc., as 56 per cent directing

function, 40 per cent executive function and 4 per cent ambiguity, as

Fourier would have said.)

Domination is a right, exploitation a contract, organisation an order of

things. The tyrant dominates according to his will to power, the capitalist

exploits according to the laws of profit, the organiser plans and is

planned. The first wants to be arbitrary, the second just, the third

rational and objective. The aristocrat's inhumanity is a humanity seeking

itself; the exploiter's inhumanity tries to disguise itself by seducing

humanity with technical progress, comfort and the struggle against hunger

and disease; the cybernetician's inhumanity is the inhumanity which accepts

itself. In this manner, the master's inhumanity has become less and less

human. A systematic extermination camp is far more horrifying than the

murderous fury of feudal barons throwing themselves into gratuitous war. And

what lyricism there still is even in the massacres of Auschwitz compared

with the icy hands of generalised conditioning which the cyberneticians'

technocratic organisation reach out towards the future society, that is so

close!

Make no mistake: it's not a matter of choosing between the "humanity" of a

lettre de cachet and the "humanity" of a brain-washing. That's the choice

between being hanged and being shot! I simply mean that the dubious

pleasures of dominating and crushing underfoot tend to disappear. Capitalism

formally introduced the need to exploit men without passionately enjoying

it. No sadism, no negative joy of inflicting pain, no human perversion, not

even the man "against nature". The reign of things is accomplished. In

renouncing the hedonist principle, the masters have renounced mastery. It is

the task of the masters without slaves to correct this self-denial.

What the society of production sowed is reaped today by the dictatorship of

the consumable. Its principle of organisation merely perfects the real

mastery of dead things over men. Whatever power remained to the owners of

the instruments of production disappeared when their machines escaped them

and passed under the control of the technicians who organise their use.

Meanwhile, the organisers themselves are gradually ingested by the charts

and programmes which they have so carefully worked out. The simple machine

wil1 be the leader's last justification, the last support for his last trace

of humanity. Cybernetic organisation of production and consumption must

necessarily control, plan and rationalise daily life.

These small-time masters are the specialists, masters/ slaves who pullulate

all over daily life. No one need worry, they don't stand a chance. Already

by 1867, at the Congress of Basel. Francau, a member of the First

International, was declaring: "We've been towed along by marquesses of

diplomas and princes of science for far too long. Let's look after our own

affairs and however inept we are we can't make more of a mess than what

they've done in our name." Ripe words of wisdom, whose meaning grows as

specialists proliferate and encrust individual life. Those who succumb to

the magnetic attraction exercised by the huge Kafkaesque cybernetic machine

are nicely divided from those who follow their own impulses and try to

escape from it. The latter are the trustees of everything human, since from

now on nobody can lay any clalm to it in the name of the masters of old.

There are only things falling at the same speed in a vacuum on the one hand,

and, on the other, the age-old project of slaves drunk with total freedom.

The master without slaves, or the aristocratic supersession of the

aristocracy. The master lost out in the same way as God. He topples like a

Golem the moment he stops loving mankind, and thus the moment he ceases to

enjoy indulging his pleasure of oppressing them. That's when he abandons

hedonism. There is little fun just moving things around, dealing with being

inert as bricks. With fine discernment. God seeks out living creatures with

smooth palpitating flesh whose souls shiver in terror and respect. To

confirm His own grandeur, He needs to feel the presence of His subjects,

fervent in prayer, competition, cunning, and even insult. The Catholic God

is quite good at lending out a little genuine freedom, in the manner of a

pawnbroker. Like a cat with a mouse, He lets men alone, until the Last

Judgment when He'll gobble them up. Then, towards the close of the Middle

Ages when the bourgeoisie enters on the scene, we see Him humanising

Himself; paradoxically, for He is becoming an object, just as each man is.

When He condemns men to predestination, Calvin's God loses the pleasure of

arbitrariness: He's no longer free to crush whom He will, nor when He will.

The God of commercial transactions, humourless, as cold and calculated as a

discount rate, is ashamed; He hides away. Deus absconditus. The dialogue is

broken. Pascal despairs. Descartes does not know what to do with a soul that

is suddenly unattached. Later - too late - Kierkegaard will attempt to

resuscitate the subjective God by resuscitating men's subjectivity. But

nothing can bring God back to life once He has become in men's minds "the

great external object"; He is definitely dead, turned to stone, like coral.

Moreover, mankind, caught in the rigor mortis of His last embrace (the

hierarchical form of power), seems doomed to reification, the death of

what's human. The perspective of power offers our gaze nothing but things,

fragments of the great divine rock. Isn't it according to this perspective

that sociology, psychology, economics, and the so-called "human" sciences -

so anxious to observe "objectively" - focus their microscopes?

What forces the master to abandon his hedonism? What prevents him reaching

total enjoyment if not his position as master, his prejudice for

hierarchical superiority? That renunciation grows greater as hierarchy

fragments, as masters multiply and shrink in status, as history democratises

power. The imperfect enjoyment of the masters has become the enjoyment of

imperfect masters. We have seen the bourgeois masters, Ubuesque plebians,

crown their beerhall revolt with the funeral festivity of Fascism. But there

will be no more festivities among the masters/slaves, among the last of

hierarchical man; only the sadness of things, a gloomy placidity, uneasy

role-playing, the awareness of "belng nothing".

What will become of these things that govern us? Must we destroy them? Given

an affirmative, those best prepared to liquidate the slaves-in-power are

those who've been struggling against slavery all along. Popular creativity,

which neither lords nor bosses have managed to break, will never kow-tow to

programmatic necessity and technocrats' plans. You might object that less

passion and enthusiasm are aroused by liquidating an abstract form and a

system than by executing detested masters; that's to see the problem in the

wrong light, the light of power. Unlike the bourgeoisie, the proletariat

does not define itself in terms of its class enemy; it brings the end of

class distinction and hierarchy. The role of the bourgeoisie was uniquely

negative. Saint-Just captures it superbly: "What constitutes a republic is

the total destruction of what opposes it."

If the bourgeoisie is content with forging weapons against feudalism and

therefore against itself, the proletariat, on the other hand, contains its

own possible supersession. It is poetry momentarily alienated by the ruling

class or technocratic organisation, but always on the point of bursting out.

As the sole trustee of the will to live since it has felt to the full how

intolerable is mere survival, the proletariat will break the wall of

constralnts by the breath of its pleasure and the spontaneous violence of

its creativity. It already possesses all the joy to be had and all the

laughter to offer. It draws its strength and passion from itself. What it is

preparing to build will in addition destroy all that opposes it just as a

new tape recording erases the previous one. The proletariat will abolish

itself at the same instant that it abolishes the power of things, with

luxuriance, a trace of nonchalance and the grace worn by the man who has

proved his superiority. The masters wlthout slaves will emerge from the new

proletariat; not the conditioned robots of humanism that the self-styled

'revolutionary' leftist onanists dream about. The insurrectional violence of

the masses is only one aspect of the proletariat's creativity, its

impatience to abolish itself, as strong as its desires to carry out the

sentence that survival pronounces upon itself.

I like to distinguish - a specious distinction - three predominant passions

in the destruction of the reified order. The passion for absolute power,

exercised over objects placed immediately at the service of men; without the

mediation of men themselves. It's therefore the destruction of those hooked

on the order of things, the slave-owners of fragmented power. "Because we

can no longer stand the sight of slaves, we suppress them." (Nietzsche)

The the passion to destroy constraints, to smash the chains. As De Sade

says: "Can lawful pleasure compare with the delights which combine far more

piquant attractions with the inestimable joy of breaking social constraints

and overthrowing all laws?"

The passion to straighten out a miserable past, to re-excite old

disappointed hopes as much in each individual life as in the history of

crushed revolutions. Just as once it was legitimate to punish Louis XVI for

the crimes of his predecessors, so today there's no lack of passionate

reasons, as it's impossible to take revenge on things, to wipe out the

memory of the executed Communards, the torture of the peasants of 1525, the

assassination of workers, revolutionaries hunted down and shot,

civilisations obliterated by colonialism, so much pain in free souls from

past misery that the present has never eradicated. The correction of history

has become passionate because it is possible: to swamp the blood of Babeuf,

Lacenaire, Ravachol and Bonnot in the blood of the hidden descendants of

those who, as slaves of an order founded on profit and economic mechanisms,

thought to put cruel checks on human emancipation.

The pleasure of overthrowing power, being master-without-slaves and righting

the past is what lies uppermost in the subjectivity of each of us. In the

revolutionary moment, every man is invited to make his own history himself.

Freedom of realization as a cause, while ceasing to be a cause, always

espouses subjectivity. Only such a perspective can loosen the riot of

intoxicating possibilities and the giddy feeling when every delight is

within the grasp of all.

Take care that the old order of things doesn't collapse on the heads of

those demolishing it. The avalanche of the consumable could drag us down in

the final fall if people don't take care to arrange collective shelters

against the conditioning of the spectacle and hierarchical organisation;

shelters from which further offensives will be launched. The microsocieties

that are now forming will realise the former masters' project as they free

it from its hierarchical mould. The supersession of the "grand seigneur bad

man" will apply to the letter that admirable principle of Keats: "Everything

that can be annihilated must be annihilated so that children may be saved

from slavery".

This supersession must operate simultaneously on three levels:

1. Supersession of patriarchal organisation.

2. Supersession of hierarchical power.

3. Supersession of the arbitrarily subjective, the authoritarian whim.

1. - Lineage contains the magic strength of the aristocracy, the energy

transmitted from generation to generation. By undermining feudal mastery,

the bourgeoisie was led against its will to undermine the family. And it

acts the same way towards the organisation of society... I've already said

that this very negativity surely represents its richest, most 'positive',

aspect. But what the bourgeoisie lacks is the possibility of supersession.

What would the supersession of an aristocratic type of family imply? We

would have to answer: the formation of coherent groups where individual

creativity is totally invested in collective creativity and strengthened by

it; where the immediacy of the lived present takes over the energy potential

which in feudal times derived from the past. The relative weakness of the

master paralysed by his own hierarchical system brings to mind the weakness

of the child brought up within the bourgeois family framework.

The child acquires a subjective experience of freedom unknown to any other

animal species. but he remains for all that subjectively dependent upon his

parents - he needs their care and their solicitude. What differentiates

child from animal is that the child possesses a feeling of the continuous

transformation of the world, or poetry, to an unlimited degree. At the same

time he is denied access to the techniques that adults use most of the time

against such poetry, for example against children by conditioning them. And

when children, in their maturity, finally acquire the techniques, they have

lost, under the weight of constraints, what made their childhood superior.

The universe of the masters of old falls under the same curse as the

universe of children: they have no access to the techniques of liberation.

Consequently they are condemned to dream of world transformation and live

according to the laws of adaptation to it. One was quite justified in

believing that hierarchical organisation was the best means of concentrating

social energy in a world where that energy didn't enjoy the valuable support

of machinery. But once the bourgeoisie develops highly effective techniques

for transforming the world, then hierarchical power becomes anachronistic,

and acts like a brake on the development of human power over the world. The

hierarchical system, man's power over man, prevents the recognition of

worthwhile adversaries, thwarting the real transformation of one's

surroundings. Instead, it just saddles one with the need to adapt to the

environment and conform to the state of things. That's why:

2. In order to smash the social screen that messes up our vision, we

postulate the categorical rejection of any hierarchy within the group. The

very notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat deserves attention. On

most occasions, the dictatorship of the proletariat turns into dictatorship

over the proletariat, and becomes institutionalized. Now, as Lenin wrote:

"The dictatorship of the proletariat is a relentless struggle, both bloody

and bloodless, violent and peaceful, military and economic, educational and

administrative, against the forces and tradition of the Old World." The

proletariat cannot set up a lasting domination, since it cannot exercise a

dictatorship that no-one wants. Conversely, the absolute need to smash the

enemy obliges it to concentrate in its hands a strongly coherent repressive

power. So it's a matter of passing through a dictatorship that itself

negates itself, as the party "whose victory must also be its defeat", the

proletariat itself. The proletariat, through its dictatorship, must

immediately make its own negation its first priority. It has no choice but

to liquidate, in a short space of time, bloodily or not as circumstances

permit, those who stand in the way of its project of total freedom and those

who oppose the ending of its existence as proletariat. It must utterly

destroy them as vermin. Every single individual must root out the slightest

inclination for prestige and the most trivial hierarchical pretensions, and

raise against these roles a calm impetus towards authentic life.

3. - The end of roles means the triumph of subjectivity. Once this

subjectivity is finally recognized and set at the centre of concern,

contradictorily it brings a new objectivity into being. A new world of

objects, or, if you prefer, a new nature, will create itself out of the

needs of individual subjectivity. Here too a relationship is established

between childhood's perspective and that of the feudal masters. In the one

as in the other, even though in a completely different manner, the

possibilities are masked by the screen of social alienation.

Who can have forgotten? Childhood solitudes would open on primaeval

vastness, and every stick was a magic wand. Then we had to adapt, become

social and sociable. The solitude was depopulated, the children chose

despite themselves to grow old, and the vastness closed up like a story

book. Nobody in this world completely escapes the sewers of puberty.

Childhood itself is slowly colonised by consumer society. Those under ten

join "teen-agers" in the great consumer family and grow older faster as

"junior consumers'. It's impossible at this point not to feel the similarity

between the historical dethronement of the masters of old and the growing

decadence of the kingdom of childhood. Never before has the corruption of

humanity reached such an intensity. Never before have we been so near and

yet so far from the total man.

The caprices of the masters of old, the lords, were insidiously inferior to

the whims of the child, for they demanded the repression of other men.

Whatever subjectivity there is in feudal arbitrariness - as I choose I shall

give you riches or death - is spoilt and fettered by the poverty of its

realisation. The master's subjectivity is only realised by denying the

subjectivity of others, and thus by loading itself with chains; it chains

itself by chaining others.

The child does not have this privilege of imperfection. In one fell swoop he

loses his right to pure subjectivity. He's taunted with childishness,

encouraged to behave like a grown-up. Any everyone grows up, suppressing his

childhood to the point where cretinism and death pangs convince him that

he's managing to live like an adult.

The child's game like that of the great noble, needs to be freed and given

the honour it is due. Today, the moment is historically favourable. It's a

matter of saving childhood and its sovereign subjectivity, childhood and the

laughter which is like the rippling of spontaneity, childhood and its way of

relying upon itself to light up the world, and the objects within it, in a

strangely familiar light - by realizing the project of the masters of old.

We have lost the beauty of things, their way of existing, by letting them

die at the hands of power and the gods. Surrealism's magnificent dream tried

in vain to bring them back to life and suffuse them with poetry. But the

power of imagination alone is not enough to shatter the framework in which

social alienation imprisons things, for it doesn't return them to the free

play of subjectivity. In the light of power, a stone, a tree, a concrete

mixer, or a cyclotron are dead objects, crosses planted on the will to see

them differently and change them. And yet, beyond what they have been made

to mean, I know I shall find their exhilaration again. I know what emotion a

machine can awaken when brought into the game, into fantasy and freedom. In

a world where everything is alive, including trees and rocks, nothing is

just passively contemplated. Everything speaks of joy. Subjectivity's

triumph gives everything life; and isn't the fact that dead things exercise

an intolerable domination over subjectivity really the best chance,

historically, of arriving at a superior way of life?

What does it take? The realisation in today's language - that is to say,

praxis - of what a heretic once declared to Ruysbroeck : "God can know,

wish, do nothing without me. With God I have created myself and I have

created all things, and it is my hand that supports heaven and earth and all

creatures. Without me nothing exists."

We must discover new frontiers. If the bounds of social alienation still

imprison us, at least they no longer deceive us. For centuries men have

remained before a wormeaten door, piercing little pin-holes in it with

growing ease. One kick is now enough to knock it down, and that's when

everything begins. The proletariat's problem is no longer to seize power,

but to put a definite end to it. On the other side of the hierarchical

world, the possibilities come to meet us. The primacy of life over survival

will be the historical movement which will unmake history. We have yet to

invent worthwhile adversaries. It is up to us to find them, and to join them

through the looking-glass of childhood.

Will we see men resume the cosmic communication that the first inhabitants

of the earth must have known, only this time on a higher level reaching way

above prehistory, and without the fearful trembling of early man defenceless

before its mystery? In short, will men impose a human meaning on the

universe which would most beneficially replace the divine meaning with which

it was invested at the dawn of time?

And this other infinite, man as he really is? Could he not one day govern

his body, this constant flow of nerves, his beautiful muscular system and

his wayfaring through dreams? Couldn't the exploits of individual will

finally freed by collective will get beyond the already sinister degree of

control that police conditioning can impose on the human being? We know how

to make a dog. a brick and a cop out of a man; do we know how to make a man?

We have never really believed our infallibility. We have left that claim -

out of pride perhaps - to unalterable forms and wrinkled old men: power,

God, the Pope, the boss, the others. And yet every time we refer to Society,

God, or All-powerful Justice, we're really talking about our own power, even

though, it's true, we are talking rather badly and indirectly. We are one

step above prehistory. It's the dawn of another human organisation, a

society where individual creativity gives its energy free reign, to shape

the world according to each individual's dreams harmonised by all.

Utopia? Get stuffed! How condescension drivels! Who doesn't behave as if

this world wasn't the dearest thing he owned? Sure, there are many who've

let go, and now fall as despairingly as once they held on. Everyone wants

his subjectivity to win out: we must therefore base the unity of men upon

this common desire. No-one can strengthen his subjectivity without others

helping him, without the aid of a group which has itself developed a

subjective centre, a faithful reflection of the subjectivity of its members.

The Situationist International is so far the only group to decide to defend

radical subjectivity.

XXII THE SPACE-TIME OF LIVED EXPERIENCE AND THE CORRECTION OF THE

PAST

The dialectic of decay and supersession is the dialectic of dissociated and

unitary space-time (l). The new proletariat carries within itself the

realisation of childhood, which is its space-time (2). The history of

separations is slowly resolved at the end of "historic" history (3).

Cyclical time and linear time. - Lived space-time is space-time in

transformation, and the role's space-time is that of adaptation. - The

function of the past and of its projection into the future is to outlaw the

present. Historical ideology is the screen that comes between the will to

individual self-realisation and the will to construct history; it prevents

them joining up and merging (4). The present is the space-time to be

constructed; it entails the correction of the past.

As specialists organise the survival of the species and leave learned

diagrams to programme history, the will to change life by changing the world

grows among people everywhere. So much so that every single individual is

confronted, like humanity as a whole, by universal despair beyond which lies

oblivion or supersession. This is the age when the entire evolution of

history and the particular history of the individual are tending to merge,

since they are heading towards a corn destiny. the condition of a thing and

its rejection. We could say that the history of the species and of myriad

individual lives are gathering together to die, or together start EVERYTHING

afresh. The past surges back on us with its germs of death and its seeds of

life. Our childhood is also at the meeting place, and threatened with Lot's

fate.

The danger overhanging childhood gives rise, I would like to believe, to the

outburst of revolt against the ghastly aging to which the forced consumption

of ideologies and gadgets condemns us. I want to emphasise the analogy

clearly revealed between dreams and desires, and the feudal will and the

subjective will of childhood. By realising childhood, won't we, adults of

the technological era, rich in what children lack and strong where the

greatest conquerors were weak, realise the project of the masters of old?

Can't we identify history and individual destiny more successfully than

Tamerlalne or Elogabalus dared Imagine in their wildest dreams?

The primacy of life over survival Is the historical movement which will

unmake history. Construct daily life and realise history. these two

watchwords are now one. In decay and supersession, the essential

contradiction of our era, the transition to a stage superior to prehistory

is prepared. What will constitute the joint construction of life and the new

society, in other words, the revolution of everyday life? Rooting out decay

by superseding it. All that Is not superseded rots, all that rots incites

supersession.

However far back into history, all attempts at supersession are part of the

poetry of the present reversal of perspective. They are with us now,

bursting the barriers of space and time and breaking them down. It's certain

that the end of separations begins by ending the separation between space

and time. What follows in the reconstitution of primordial unity must be

critical analyses of the space-time of children, of unitary societies and of

fragmentary societies as bearers of decay and the supersession now possible.

If he doesn't watch out, survival sickness soon turns a young man into a

haggard old Faust, burdened with regrets, passing through the youth he longs

for without realizing it. The 'teenager' bears the first wrinkles of the

consumer.

Little separates him from the sixty-year-old; consuming faster and faster,

he wins precocious old age to the rhythm of his compromises with

inauthenticity. If he doesn't take hold of himself quickly, the past will

close up behind him; he won't be able to return to what he's done, not even

to remake it. So much separates him from the children he played with only

yesterday. He has become part of the market's triviality, willing to

exchange the poetry, freedom and subjective wealth of childhood for

representation in the society of the spectacle. Yet nonetheless, if he

seized hold of himself and awoke from the nightmare, what an enemy would .

You will see him fight for the confront the forces of order' rights of his

childhood with the most fearsome weapons devised by senile technocracy. We

know what prodigious feats distinguished the young Simbas of the Lumumbaist

revolution, in spite of their derisory equipment; so how much more can we

expect from a generation that's equally pissed off but much more effectively

armed, and at large in a theatre of operations that covers every aspect of

daily life?

Every aspect of daily life is lived to Some extent in embryonic form during

childhood. The rich hoard of events lived in a few days or a few hours

prevents time passing. Two months holiday is an eternity. Two months for an

old man is just a few minutes. The child's days escape adult time; their

time is swollen by subjectivity, passion, dreams haunted by reality.

Outside, the educators look on, waiting, watch in hand, till the child joins

and fits the cycle of the hours. It's they who have time. At first, the

child feels strongly the imposition of adult time as a foreign intrusion; he

ends up succumbing, and agrees to grow old. Not knowing conditioning's

subtle ways, he allows himself to be snared, like a young animal. When

finally he possesses the weapons of criticism and wants to aim them at time,

the years have carried him far from the target. In his heart his childhood

lies an open wound.

So here we are all haunted by childhood, and meanwhile social organisation

is scientifically destroying it. Psycho-, sociologists are on the look-out,

and already the market researchers are exclaiming: "Just look at all those

sweet little dollars." (Quoted by Vance Packard.) A new decimal system.

Children are playing in the street. Suddenly one of them leaves the group

and comes up to me, bringing the most beautiful dreams I can remember. He

shows me - for my ignorance on this point was the sole reason for my fall -

what destroys the concept of age: the possibility of living many events; not

just seeing them pass by, but of living them and recreating them endlessly.

And now at this point where everything slips away from me and everything

becomes clear to me, how could a kind of wild untamed instinct for totality

not surge up in me from under so many false desires, my childishness turned

dangerous through the lessons of history and class struggles? There cannot

be a new proletariat unless it possesses in its purest form the realisation

of childhood in an adult world.

We are the discoverers of a world new and yet known, which lacks the unity

of space and time; a world still shot through with separations, still

fragmented. The semi-barbarity of our bodies, our needs and our spontaneity

(which is childhood enriched by awareness) opens to us secret passages that

centuries of aristocracy never discovered, and which the bourgeoisie never

even suspected. They allow us to penetrate the maze of uncompleted

civilisations and all the embryonic supersessions conceived by a hidden

history. Our rediscovered childhood desires rediscover the childhood of our

desires. And from the savage depths of the past, always so close and as yet

unfulfilled, emerges a new geography of the passions.

Mobile within immobility, the time of unitary societies is cyclical. People

and things follow their course, moving along a circumference whose centre is

God. This pivot-God, unchangeable although nowhere and everywhere, measures

the duration of an eternal power. He is His own standard, and the standard

of everything which, gravitating at an equal distance from Him, develops and

returns without ever really flowing away or even coming unwound. "The

thirteenth returns, and Is the first again."

The space of unitary societies is organised as a function of time. Both time

and space belong entirely to God. Space stretches from the centre to the

circumference, from heaven to earth, from the One to the multiple. At first

sight, time seems irrelevant, since it neither brings God closer nor pushes

Him further away. Space, on the other hand, is the path towards God: the

ascending path of spiritual elevation and hierarchical promotion. Time

really belongs to God alone, but the space granted men keeps a specifically

human and irreducible nature. In fact, man can climb or descend, rise in

society or fall, assure his salvation or. risk damnation. Space is the

presence of man, the sphere of his relative freedom, while time imprisons

him within its circumference. And what is the Last Judgement if not God

bringing time back to Himself, the centre sucking in the circumference and

gathering in its immaterial point the totality of the space imparted to His

creatures? The annihilation of human matter (its occupation of space), is

the project of the master who cannot totally possess his slave and therefore

cannot escape being partially possessed by him.

Duration keeps a tight hand on space; it drags us towards death, eating away

the space of our life. The distinction, however, doesn't appear so clearly

in the course of history. Feudal societies are societies of separation just

as much as bourgeois societies, since separation is caused by privative

appropriation; but feudal societies have the advantage over bourgeois

societies of an extraordinary strength of dissimulation.

The power of myth reunites separated elements making live unitarily though

under false pretences. But the world of coherent myth is a world where the

inauthentic is One, and accepted unanimously by a coherent community, be it

tribe, clan or kingdom. God is the image, the symbol of the supersession of

dissociated space and time, and everyone who "lives" in God takes part in

this supersession. The majority can only take part in a mediated way,

meaning that in the space of their daily lives, they, simple mortals, obey

God, priests and leaders, the organisers of duly hierarchised space. In

reward for submission, they are offered eternal duration, the promise of

duration without space, the assurance of a pure temporality in God.

Others reckon this exchange to be a lousy deal. They have dreamt of

attaining the eternal present which absolute mastery over the world confers.

One is constantly struck by the analogy between the synchronised space-time

of children and the will to unity of the great mystics. Thus Gregory of

Palamas (1341) can describe Illumination as a sort of immaterial

consciousness of unity: "The Light exists beyond space and time (...) He who

shares in divine energy becomes Light himself in a sense; he is united with

the Light and, with Light, he sees with perfect consciousness all that

remains hidden to those who have not received this grace." This confused

hope, which could only be Indistinct and even indescribable, was popularised

and made more specific by the transient bourgeois era. It concretised it by

killing off the aristocracy with its spirituality, and gave it a chance by

taking its own decomposition to its logical conclusion. The history of

separations is slowly resolved in the end of separations. The feudal unitary

illusion is gradually embodied in the libertarian unity of the life to be

constructed, which lies beyond materially guaranteed survival.

Einstein's speculations on space and time remind us how dead God is. When

myth could no longer contain the dissociation of space and time, the malaise

to which consciousness was then subject made Romanticism's heyday (viz. The

attraction of far-off lands, anguish at time's slipping away...)

How does the bourgeois mind conceive of time? No longer as God's time, but

rather as the time of power, fragmented power. Time in shreds has a common

measurement in the moment, which attempts to recall cyclical time. The

circumference no longer exists; instead we have a finite and infinite

straight line. In place of everyone's synchronous regulation according to

hours fixed by God, there are succeeding states in which everyone is chasing

after himself but never catching up, as if the curse of Becoming damned us

to getting only a glimpse of the back while the human face remains unknown

and inaccessible, forever turned towards the future. If there is no longer a

circular space under the all-seeing central eye of the Almighty, there is a

series of little points which appear autonomous but are in reality being

integrated in a ripple of succession along the line they trace as each one

joins on to the next.

Time flowed through the Mediaeval hourglass, but it was the same sand which

flowed back and forth from one globe to the other. On the circular

clock-face, time sheds its seeds and never returns. An irony of forms: the

new spirit took its form from a dead reality, while the bourgeoisie is

wearing the death of time, specifically the death of its time, in its

wrist-watches as in the cheap finery of its humanist woolgathering, both of

which appear cyclical.

But nothing's made of it, so here we are in the age of watchmakers. The

economic imperative has converted man into a living chronometer,

distinguishing feature on his wrist. This is the time of work, progress and

output, production, consumption and programming; it's time for the

spectacle, for a kiss, or a photo, time for anything (time is money). The

time-commodity. Survival time.

Space is a point on the line of time, in the machine transforming the future

into the past. Time controls lived space, but controls it externally, making

it pass through, in transit. But the space of individual life isn't pure

space, nor is the time it sweeps along pure temporality. This is worth

examining in greater depth.

Each point terminating the line of time is unique and particular, but as

soon as the next point is added it is drowned in the uniform line, swallowed

up by a past with other pasts in its stomach. It is impossible to

distinguish them. Thus each point adds to the line that makes it disappear.

Power ensures its duration on the model of destruction and replacement, but

at the same time those who are encouraged to consume power destroy and renew

it by enduring. If power destroys everything, it destroys itself; and if it

doesn't destroy anything, it is destroyed. Only between the two poles of

this contradiction is there duration, and the dictatorship of the consumable

brings them closer every day. And its duration is subordinated to the simple

duration of men, or, in other words, to the permanence of their survival.

This is why the problem of dissociated space-time is posed today in

revolutionary terms.

Lived space may well be a universe of dreams and desires and prodigious

creatlvlty, but in the order of duration it is only one point succeeding

another; it flows on a precise duration - towards its destruction. It

appears, grows and disappears in the anonymous line of the past where its

corpse offers food for historians and sudden jolts of memory.

The advantage of the lived point of space is that it partly escapes the

generalised system of conditioning; its disadvantag is that it is nothing in

itself. The space of daily life diverts a little time to its own ends, it

imprisons it and makes it its own. On the other hand, time that flows away

soaks into lived space and interiorises the sense of transitoriness, of

destructIon and death. Let me explain.

The punctual space of daily life steals a part of "exterior" time, thanks to

which it creates a restricted unitary space-time: it is the space-time of

moments, of creativity, pleasure and orgasm. The area of this alchemy is

minute, but its lived intensity is such that it exercises an unequaled

fascination on most people. In the eyes of power, which observe from

outside, the passionate moment is a quite insignificant point, an instant

drained from the future into the past. The line of objective time knows

nothing and wishes to know nothing of the present as immediate subjective

presence. And, in its turn, subjective life concentrated in the space of a

point - my joy, my pleasure, my daydreams - isn't interested in time that

flows away, in linear time, the time of things. On the contrary, it wants to

learn everything about its present - for, after all, it is only a present.

Thus, lived space extracts, from the time sweeping it away, a part with

which it creates its present, or rather attempts to for the present has

always to be constructed.

It is the unitary space-time of love and poetry, of pleasure and

communication... It is lived experience without dead time. On the other

hand, linear time, objective time, time that flows away, infuses in its turn

the space imparted to everyday life. It is introduced as negative time, as

dead time, a reflection of the time of destruction. It is the time of the

role, the time within life itself which encourages it to lose its character

and renounce authentically lived space, to hold back and prefer appearances

and the spectacular function. The space-time created by this hybrid marriage

is merely the space-time of survival.

What Is private life? It is, in any instant, on any point drawn towards its

destruction along the line of survival, the amalgam of a real space-time

(the moment) and a fake (the role). Obviously, the structure of private life

doesn't strictly conform to such a dichotomy. There is permanent

interaction. Thus the restrictions that beset lived experience on every

side, and compress it into far too small a space, incite it to change itself

into a role, to enter the time that flows away as a commodity, become purely

repetitious, and create, as accelerated time, the fictitious space of

appearances. While at the same time the malaise born of inauthenticity,

space falsely lived, sends one back to search for real time, subjectivity's

time, which is the present. So private life is dialectically a real lived

time + a fictitious spectacular time + a fictitious spectacular space + a

real lived space.

The more fictitious time compounds with the fictitious space it creates, the

further one is heading towards the state of being a thing and towards pure

exchange value. The more the space of authentic lived experience compounds

with really lived time, the stronger the mastery of man becomes.

Unitarily lived space-time is the guerilla's first base, the qualitative

spark in the night that's still concealing the revolution of daily life.

Thus, not only does objective time furiously try to destroy punctual space

by hurling it into the past, but moreover it gnaws away at it from inside by

introducing this accelerated rhythm which creates the substance of the role.

(The role's fictitious space in effect results from the rapid repetition of

an attitude, just as the repetition of a film image makes it seem to live.)

The role installs the time that flows away, aging and death within

subjective consciousness. This is the "rut into which consciousness has been

forced" which Antonin Artaud talks about. Dominated from outside by linear

time and from inside by the role's time, subjectivity has nothing else to do

than become a thing, a valuable commodity. What's more, the process speeds

up through history. In fact, the role is henceforward a consumption of time

in a society where the time of consumption is the only one acknowledged. And

once again the unity of oppression creates the unity of opposition. What is

death today? Absence of subjectivity and absence of the present.

The will to live always reacts unitarily. Most individuals really divert

time to the advantage of lived space. If their efforts to intensify lived

experience and increase the space-time of authenticity don't get lost in

confusion or break up in isolation, then perhaps objective time, the time of

death, can be smashed. Isn't the revolutionary moment an eternal youth?

The project of enriching the space-time of lived experience must analyse

what impoverishes it. Linear time only has a hold over men to the extent

that it forbids them to transform the world, and forces them to adapt to it.

Freely radiating creativity is power's public enemy number one.

And the strength of creativity lies in the unitary. How does power try to

break the unity of lived space-time? By transforming lived experience into a

commodity and throwing it on the market of the spectacle at the mercy of the

supply and demand of roles and stereotypes. I examined this in the section

devoted to the role (Chapter XV). Also, by recourse to a particular means of

identification: the joint attraction of the past and future, which

annihilates the present. And, finally, by trying to recuperate within an

Ideology of history the will to construct the unitary space-time of lived

experience (in other words, the will to create situations worth living). I

will examine these two last points further.

From the viewpoint of power, there are no lived moments (lived experience

has no name), only instants succeeding one another and all equal in the line

of the past. A whole system of conditioning broadcasts this attitude, hidden

persuasion introjects it. And here's the result. Just where is this present

that people go on about? In what forgotten corner of everyday life does it

skulk?

If we're not looking on, we're looking forward or looking back. The shade of

my next meeting joins up with the shade of my last one. Both haunt me. Every

passing second drags me from the moment that was to the moment that will be.

Every second spirits me away from myself; now never exists. A meaningless

commotion makes sure that everyone is "just passing through", or as we say

so prettily, "just passing the tlme", and even ensures that time passes into

man, through and through. When Schopenhauer writes: "Before Kant, we were in

time ; since Kant, time is in us", he well expresses how aging and

decrepitude permeate men's consciousness. But it never occurs to

Schopenhauer that man's being torn to pieces on the rack of time reduced to

the apparent difference between future and past is exactly what's pushing

him, as a philosopher, to build up his mystique of despair.

Imagine the despair and giddiness of someone torn between two instants which

he is pursuing in zigzags, never catching them up nor laying hold of

himself. Or the despair of passionate expectation: you are caught in the

spell of some past moment, love, for Instance, the woman you love is about

to appear, you're sure of it, you already feel her kisses... Passionate

expectation is no more than the shadow of the situation to be constructed.

But one must admit that most of the time the whirligig of memory and

anticipation gets in the way of expectation and the feeling of the present,

and instead starts up a mad run of dead and empty time.

Through power's telescope, the future is just the past rehashed. A dollop of

known inauthenticity is pushed forward by so-called hopeful imagination into

the time it is already filling up with utter vacuity. One's only memories

are of roles once played, and one's only future an eternal remake. According

to power, men's memory should only operate within its time-scale, as a

constant reminder of its presence. A nihil novi sub sole, popularly

expressed as "someone must always be in charge".

The future advertised as "other time" is a worthy response to the other

space where I'm supposed to let myself relax. Change time, change skin,

change the hour. change the role; only alienation doesn't change. Every time

that I is another, I 'm hovering somewhere between past and future. Roles

never have a present. How could one wish a role good morning? If I bungle my

present - here being always elsewhere - could I expect to find myself with a

pleasant past and future?

The crowning achievement of the identification with the past-future is

historical ideology, which causes individual and collective will to develop

on its head.

Time is one form of mental perception, clearly not one of man's inventions

but a dialectical relationship with outside reality; it is therefore a

tributary connection stemming from alienation and man's struggle against it.

Animals submit absolutely to adaptation and are unaware of time. Man rejects

adaptation and attempts to transform the world. Every time he slips up in

his desire to be demiurge, he suffers the agony of having to adapt, the

wrenching pain when he feels reduced to the animal's passivity. Awareness of

necessary adaptation is awareness of time slipping away, which is why time

is so intimately tied up with human suffering. The more his need to adapt to

circumstances overrides the desire and possibility of changing them, the

more awareness of time grabs him by the throat. What else is survival

sickness except the acute awareness of that other time and space slipping

away, the awareness of alienation? Rejecting the awareness of aging and the

objective conditions of aging awareness entails a much greater urgency on

the part of the will to remake history, with more consequence and according

to the wishes of everyone's subjectivity.

The sole reason for an historical ideology is to prevent men making history

themselves. How better to distract men away from their present than by

attracting them to where time flows away? This is the historian's role. He

organises the past, by breaking it up according to the official line of

time, then classifies events according to ad hoc categories. These

easy-to-use classifications place the event in quarantine. Unshakable

parentheses isolate and contain it, stop it coming to life, being reborn and

breaking out again in the streets of our daily 1ife. The event is frozen.

One is forbidden to rejoin it, remake it, perfect it, lead it on towards its

supersession. It is just there, for all eternity suspended for the

appreciation of aesthetes. Slightly alter its signification, and, hey

presto! it can be transposed straight into the future, which is just the

historians repeating themselves. The future they foretell is a collage of

their memories. Vulgarised by Stalinist thinkers, the famous concept of the

Sense of History has ended up leaving the future as drained of humanity as

the past.

Encouraged to identify himself with some other time and some other person,

today's individual has managed to have his present stolen from him under the

illusion of gaining a historical perspective. In a spectacular space-time

("You are entering history, comrades.") he loses the taste of authentic

life. Yet, those who refuse the heroism of historical action are warped by

the complementary mystification that the psychological sector bestows on

them. These two categories rub shoulders, and fuse in the extreme poverty of

recuperation. You choose: either history or a nice quiet life.

All roles are decaying, whether historical or not. The crisis of history and

the crisis of daily life coincide. The mixture will be explosive. From now

on we must divert history to subjective ends; and with everyone's help. Marx

really wished for nothing less.

For nearly a century, significant pictural movements have been playing about

- even joking - with space. Nothing could express so well the restless and

passionate search for a new space to inhabit as artistic creativity. And

humour is surely the best way to express the feeling that art could no

longer provide a valid solution. I'm thinking of the beginnings of

Impressionism, Pointillism, Fauvism, Cubism, the Dada collages, and the

first abstracts.

As art has decomposed, the number of people affected by the malaise which

was first of all felt by the artist has grown. Today, the desire to

construct an art of living has reached the level of a popular demand. The

researches of a whole artistic past, which really have been so carelessly

abandoned, must be incorporated in a passionately lived space-time.

What I'm thinking of here are memories of mortal wounds. If you're not busy

being born you're busy rotting. The past is now irretrievable, and the final

twist of irony is that those who discuss it as if it were definite fact are

actually grinding it away, falsifying and arranging it as fashion dictates.

It's very reminiscent of poor Wilson in Orwell's 1984 rewriting old official

news items which had been contradicted by a subsequent turn of events.

There's only one allowable way to forget, which is to wipe out the past by

realising it. Avert decomposition by supersession. However time-honoured,

facts never have the last word. A radical change in the present is enough to

make them topple off their pedestals and fall at our feet. I know no more

touching example of the correction of the past than the one given by Victor

Serge in Ville Conquise; and I've no need to know a better one.

At the end of a lecture on the Paris Commune, given during the height of the

Bolshevik revolution, a soldier at the back of the room lumbered up out of

his armchair. "You could easily hear his commanding rumble: 'Tell the story

of Dr Millière's execution.'

Standing up, a giant of a man, with his head bowed so that all you could see

of his face were his large hairy jowls, sullen mouth and buckled wrinkled

brows - he looked like one of those busts of Beethoven - he listened to the

story:

Dr Millière, in a dark blue overcoat and top hat, driven in the rain through

the Paris streets, - forced to kneel on the steps of the Panthéon, -

shouting 'Long live humanity!' - the words of the Versailles sentry leaning

on the railings a few yards away:

'We'll fuck you with your humanity!'

In the black night of the unlit street the peasant came up to the lecturer

(...) His taciturn manner was gone. He had a secret he wanted to share.

'I was also in Perm's government, last year when the Kulaks revolted (...)

On the way I'd read Arnould's pamphlet Les Morts de la Commune.. It's a fine

pamphlet. I was thinking about Millière. I've avenged him, citizen! It was

one of the best days of my life, and I haven't had many of them. Point for

point I've avenged him. Like that on the steps of the church, I shot the

biggest landowner in the district; I've forgotten his name and I couldn't

care less...'

After a short silence, he added - 'But it was me who shouted 'Long live

humanity!'"

Past revolts take on a new dimension in my present, that of an immanent

reality to be constructed immediately. The walks of the Luxembourg palace

and the square of the Tour Saint-jacques still echo the shots and the cries

of the suppressed Commune. But there will be more shots fired and more heaps

of corpses. One day the revolutionaries of all the ages will join together

with the revolutionaries of all countries to wash the wall of the Fédérés

with the blood of firing squads.

To construct the present is to correct the past, change the psycho-geography

of the landscape, free dreams and unsatisfied desires from their matrix, and

bring all the separate passions together in harmony. From the insurgents of

1525 to the Mulétist rebels, Spartacus to Pancho Villa, Lucretius to

Lautréamont, there's only the time of my will to live.

Hope for tomorrow overshadows our festivities. The future is worse than the

Ocean - it contains nothing. Blue-print, program, long-term view... count

your chickens before you've even seen eggs. But if you construct the present

well the future will be more than abundant.

Only the quick of the present, its multiplicity, interests me. Despite all

that might prevent me, I want to surround myself with today as with a great

light; and bring that other time and the space of other people to the

immediacy of everyday experience. I wish to embody Schwester Katrei's

formulation: "Everything that is in me is also outside me and everywhere,

around me; everything belongs to me, and everywhere I can see only what lies

within me." That's no more than subjectivity's rightful triumph, as far as

history allows it today; however firmly we go about tearing down the

bastilles of the future and however thorough our restructuring of the past,

if only we could live each second as if caught in the spell of eternal

recurrence, it would exactly and endlessly repeat itself.

Only the present can be total. A point of incredible density. We must learn

to slow down time and live the permanent passion of immediate experience. A

tennis champion tells the story how once during a very tense match a ball

was played that was very difficult to take. Suddenly, he saw it approach

slowed down, so slowly that he had time to judge the situation, make a

reasonable decision and return it with masterful brilliance. In the space of

creation, time dilates. In inauthenticity, it speeds up. Whoever possesses

the poetry of the present will experience the same adventure as the little

Chinese boy who loved the Queen of the sea. He went to look for her at the

bottom of the ocean. When he returned to the land he met an old man cutting

roses who said to him: "My grandfather told me of a young boy who

disappeared in the sea, and who had exactly the same name as you."

"Punctuality garners time" runs the esoteric tradition. Passed through the

developing tray of history, the phrase of the Pistis Sophia - "One day of

light is a million years in the world" ~ is exactly Lenin's remark that some

revolutionary days are worth centuries.

It is always a matter of resolving the contradictions of the present, not

stopping half way and getting 'distracted', but going straight for

supersession. Collective work, the work of passion, the work of poetry and

the work of the game (Eternity is the world of the game, said Boehme).

However poor it may be, the present always contains true wealth, the wealth

of possible creation. But now you know well enough - you live well enough -

all the things that tear out of my grasp this uninterrupted poem that is my

joy.

Yield to the vortex of dead time, to age and decay till body and mind are

empty? Rather disappear in defiance of duration. In his Précis de l'histoire

universelle which appeared in Paris in year VII of the Republic, citizen

Anquetil tells of a Persian prince who, wounded by the vanity of the world,

withdrew to a chateau with forty of the most beautiful and intelligent

courtisans of the kingdom. He died within a month, worn out by too much

pleasure. But what is death compared with this eternity? If I have to die,

at least let it be as I have loved.

XXIII THE UNITARY TRIAD: SELF-REALISATION, COMMUNICATION

AND PARTICIPATION

The repressive unity of power is threefold: coercion, seduction and

mediation. This is no more than the inversion and perversion of an equally

threefold unitary project. The new society, as it develops underground,

chaotically, is moving towards a total honesty - a transparency - between

individuals: an honesty promoting the participation of each individual in

the self-realisation of everyone else. Creativity, love and play stand in

the same relation to true life as the need to eat and the need to find

shelter stand in relation to survival (1). Attempts to realise oneself can

only be based on creativity (2). Attempts to communicate can only be based

on love (4). Attempts to participate can only be based on play (6).

Separated from one another these three projects merely strengthen the

repressive unity of power. Radical subjectivity is the presence - which can

be seen in almost everyone - of the same desire to create a truly passionate

life (3). The erotic is the spontaneous coherence fusing attempts to enrich

lived experience (5).

1. - The construction of everyday life fuses reason and passion. The plain

confusion to which life has always been subject comes from the mystification

covering up the utter triviality of merely continuing to exist. Will to live

entails practical organisation. Individual desire for a rich

multidimensional life cannot be totally divorced from a collective project.

The oppression exercised by human government is essentially threefold:

coercion, alienating mediation and magical seduction. The will to live also

draws its vitality and its coherence from the unity of a threefold project:

self-realisation, communication and participation.

If human history was neither reduced to, nor dissociated from, the history

of human survival, the dialectic of this threefold project (in conjunction

with the dialectic of the productive forces) would prove sufficient

explanation for most things men have done to themselves and to one another.

Every riot, every revolution, reveals a passionate quest for exuberant life,

for total honesty between people, for a collective form of transformation of

the world. Today, one can see, throughout the whole of history, three

fundamental passions related to life in the same way that the need to eat

and find shelter are related to survival. The desire to create, the desire

to love and the desire to play interact with the need to eat and find

shelter, just as the will to live never ceases to play havoc with the

necessity of surviving. Obviously, the importance of the part played by each

element changes from one time to another, but today their whole importance

lies in the extent to which they can be unified.

Today, with the Welfare State, the question of survival has become only a

part of the whole problem of life. As we hope to have shown. Life-economy

has gradually absorbed survival-economy, and in this context the

dissociation of the three projects, and of the passions underlying them,

appears more and more clearly as a consequence of a fundamentally erroneous

distinction between life and survival. However, since the whole of existence

is torn between two perspectives - that of separation, of power; and that of

revolution, of unity - and is therefore essentially ambiguous, I am forced

to discuss each project at once separately and together.

The project of self-realisation is born of the passion of creativity, in the

moment when subjectivity wells up and wants to reign universally. The

project of communication is born of the passion of love, whenever people

discover in one another the selfsame will to conquest. The project of

participation is born of the passion of playing, whenever group activity

facilitates the self-realisation of each individual.

Isolated, the three passions become perverted. Dissociated, the three

projects become falsified. The will to self-realisation is turned into the

will to power; sacrificed to status and role-playing, it reigns in a world

of restrictions and illusions. The will to communication becomes objective

dishonesty; based on relationships between objects, it provides the field of

operations for semiology, the science of fucked-up communications. The will

to participation organises the loneliness of everyone in the lonely crowd;

it creates the tyranny of the illusory community.

Isolated, each passion is integrated in a metaphysical vision which makes it

absolute and, as such, leaves it completely out of touch. Intellectuals can

be funny when they try: they pull the plug out and then announce that the

electricity doesn't work. Not in the least abashed they proceed to inform us

that we're really in the dark, and that's just all there is to it. Wherever

everything is separated from everything else, everything really is

impossible. Cartesian analysis can only produce the jerry-built. The armies

of Order can recruit only the crippled.

2. - The project of self-realisation

Assurance of security leaves unused a large supply of energy formerly

expended in the struggle for survival. The will to power tries to

recuperate, for the reinforcement of hierarchical slavery, this

free-floating energy which could be used for the blossoming of individual

life (l). Universal oppression forces almost everyone to withdraw

strategically towards what they feel to be their only uncontaminated

possession: their subjectivity. The revolution of everyday life must create

practical forms for the countless attacks on the outside world launched

daily by subjectivity (2).

The historic phase of privative appropriation stopped man being the demiurge

he was forced to create in an ideal form and thus to confirm his own real

failure. At heart everyone wants to be God. To date we have merely prevented

ourselves being so. I have shown how hierarchical social organisation builds

up the world by breaking men down; how the perfection of its structure and

machinery makes it function like a giant computer whose programmers are also

programmed; how, lastly, the cybernetic state is the coldest of all cold

monsters.

In these conditions, the struggle for enough to eat, for comfort, for stable

employment and for security are, on the social front, so many aggressive

raids which slowly but surely are becoming rearguard actions, despite their

very real importance. The struggle for survival took up and still takes up

an amount of energy and creativity which revolutionary society will inherit

like a pack of ravening wolves. Despite false conflicts and illusory

activities, a constantly stimulated creative energy is no longer being

absorbed fast enough by consumer society. What will happen to this vitality

suddenly at a loose end, to this surplus virility which neither coercion nor

lies can really continue to handle? No longer recuperated by artistic and

cultural consumption - by the ideological spectacle - creativity will turn

spontaneously against the very safeguards of survival itself.

Rebels have only their survival to lose. And there are only two ways in

which they can lose it: either by living or by dying. And since survival is

no more than dying very slowly, there is a temptation containing a very

great deal of genuine feeling, to speed the whole thing up and to die a damn

sight faster. To 'live' negatively the negation of survival. Or, on the

other hand, to try to survive as an anti-survivor, focusing all one's energy

on breaking through to real life. To make survival no more than the basis of

a systematic quest for happiness.

Self-realisation is impossible in this world. Half demented rebellion

remains, for all its ferocity, a prisoner of the authoritarian dilemma:

survival or death. This half-rebellion, this savage creativity so easily

broken in by the order of things, is the will to power.

The will to power is the project of self-realization falsified - divorced

from any attempt to communicate with, or to participate in, the life of

others. It is the passion of creating and of creating oneself caught in the

hierarchical system, condemned to turn the treadmill of repression and

appearances. Accepting being put down because you can put others down in

your turn. The hero is he who sacrifices himself to the power of his role

and his rifle. And when, finally, he's burnt out, he follows Voltaire's

advice and cultivates his garden. Meantime his mediocrity has become a model

for the common rule of mortals.

The hero, the ruler, the superstar, the millionaire, the expert... How many

times have they sold out all they held most dear? How many sacrifices have

they made to force a few people, or a few million people, people they quite

rightly regard as complete idiots, to have their photograph on the wall, to

have their name remembered, to be stared at in the street?

Yet, for all its bullshit, the will to power does contain traces of an

authentic will to live. Think of the virtú of the condottiere, of the Titans

of the Renaissance. But the condottiere are dead and buried. All that's left

is industrial magnates, gangsters and hired guns, dealers in art and

artillery. The adventurer and the explorer are comic-strip characters

(Tin-tin and Schweitzer). And it's with these people that Zarathustra dreamt

of peopling the heights of Sils-Maria; it's in these abortions he thought he

could see the lineaments of a future race. Nietzsche is, in fact, the last

master, crucified by his own illusions. His death was a replay, with more

brio, and in slightly better taste, of the black comedy of Golgotha. It

explains the disappearance of the feudal lords just as the death of Christ

explained the disappearance of God. Nietzsche may have had a refined

sensibility but the stench of Christianity didn't stop him breathing it in

by the lungful. And he pretends not to understand that Christianity, however

much contempt it may have poured on the will to power, is in fact its best

means of protection, its most faithful bodyguard, since it stands in the way

of the appearance of masters who no longer need slaves to be masters.

Nietzsche blessed a world in which the will to live is condemned never to be

more than the will to power. His last letters were signed 'Dionysus the

Crucified'. He too was looking for someone to assume responsibility for his

broken zest. You don't mess with the witch-doctor of Bethlehem.

Nazism is Nietzschean logic called to order by history. The question was:

what can become of those who wish to live like a lord in a society from

which all true rulers have disappeared? And the answer: a super-slave.

Nietzsche's concept of the superman, however threadbare it may have been, is

worlds apart from what we know of the domestics who ran the Third Reich.

Fascism knows only one superman: the State.

The State superman is the strength of the weak. This is why the desires of

an isolated individual can always fit I 'n with a role played impeccably in

the official spectacle. The will to power is an exhibitionistic will. The

isolated individual detests other people, feels contempt for the masses of

which he is a perfect specimen himself. He is, in fact, the most

contemptible man of all. Showing off, amidst the crassest sort of illusory

community, is his 'dynamism'; the rat-race, his 'love of danger'.

The manager, the leader, the tough guy, the mobster know little joy. Ability

to endure is their main qualification. Their morale is that of pioneers, of

spies, of scouts, of the shock-troops of conformity. "NO animal would have

done what I have done..." What is the gangster-trip? A will to appear since

one cannot be; a way of escaping the emptiness of one's own existence by

running greater and greater risks. But only servants are proud of their

sacrifices. Here the part rules the whole: sometimes the artificial being of

the role, sometimes the directness of the animal. And the animal does what

the man cannot do. The heroes who march past, colours flying, the Red Army,

the S.S., the U.S. marines, these are the same people who burnt and cut

living flesh at Budapest, at Warsaw, at Algiers. Army discipline is based on

the uptightness of the rank and file. Cops know when to snarl and when to

fawn.

The will to power is a compensation for slavery. At the same time it is a

hatred of slavery. The most striking 'personalities' of the past never

identified themselves with a Cause. They just used Causes to further their

own personal hunger for power. But as great Causes began to break up and

disappear, so did the ambitious individuals concerned. However, the game

goes on. People rely on Causes because they haven't been able to make their

own life a Cause sufficient unto itself. Through the Cause and the sacrifice

it entails they stagger along, backwards, trying to find their own will to

live.

Sometimes desire for freedom and for play breaks out among law and order's

conscripts. I am thinking of Salvatore Giuliano, before he was recuperated

by the landowners, of Billy the Kid, of various gangsters momentarily close

to the anarchist terrorists. Legionnaires and mercenaries have defected to

the side of Algerian or Congolese rebels, thus choosing the party of open

insurrection and taking their desire to play to its logical conclusion:

blowing their whole scene sky-high, and jumping into the dark.

I also have teenage gangs in mind. The very childishness of their will to

power has often kept their will to live almost uncontaminated. Obviously the

delinquent is threatened with recuperation. Firstly, as a consumer, because

he wants things he cannot afford to buy; then, as he gets older, as a

producer. But, within the gang, playing remains of such great importance

that truly revolutionary consciousness can never be far away. If the

violence inherent in teenage gangs stopped squandering itself in

exhibitionistic and generally half-baked brawls and rave-ups and only saw

how much real poetry was to be found in a riot, then their gameplaying, as

it became increasingly riotous, would almost certainly set off a chain

reaction: a qualitative flash. Almost everyone is fed up with their life.

Almost everyone is sick of being pushed around. Almost everyone is sick of

the lies they come out with all day long. All that is needed is a spark -

plus tactics. Should delinquents arrive at revolutionary consciousness

simply through understanding what they already are, and by wanting to be

more so, then it's quite possible that they could prove the key-factor in a

general social retake on reality. This could be vitally important. Actually,

all that's really necessary is the federation of their gangs.

So far the heart of life has been sought anywhere but in the heart of man.

Creativity has always been pushed to one side. It has been suburban; and, in

fact, urbanism reflects very accurately the misadventures of the axis around

which life has been organised for thousands of years. The first cities grew

up around a stronghold or sacred spot, a temple or a church, a point where

heaven and earth converged. Industrial towns, with their mean, dark streets

surround a factory or industrial plant; administrative centres preside over

empty rectilinear avenues. Finally, the most recent examples of

town-planning simply have no centre at all. It's becoming increasingly

obvious: the reference point they propose is always somewhere else. These

are labyrinths in which you are allowed only to lose yourself. No games, No

meetings. No living. A desert of plate-glass. A grid of roads. High-rise

apartment blocks.

Oppression is no longer centralised because oppression is everywhere. The

positive aspects of this: everyone begins to see, in conditions of almost

total isolation, that first and foremost it is themselves that they have to

save, themselves that they have to choose as the centre, their own

subjectivity out of which they have to build a world that everyone else will

recognise as their native land.

One can only rediscover other people by consciously rediscovering oneself.

For as long as individual creativity is not at the centre of social life,

man's only freedom will be freedom to destroy and be destroyed. If you do

other people's thinking for them, they will do your thinking for you. And he

who thinks for you judges you, he reduces you to his own norm and, whatever

his intentions may be, he will end by making you stupid - for stupidity

doesn't come from a lack of intelligence, as stupid people imagine it does,

it comes from renouncing, from abandoning one's own true self. So if anyone

asks you what you are doing, asks you to explain yourself, treat him as a

judge - that is to say, as an enemy.

"I want someone to succeed me; I want children; I want disciples; I want a

father; I don't want myself". A few words from those high on Christianity,

whether the Roman or the Peking brand. Only unhappiness and neurosis can

follow. My subjectivity is too important for me to take my lack of

inhibition to the point of either asking other people for their help or of

refusing it when it is offered. The point is neither to lose oneself in

oneself nor to lose oneself in other people. Anyone who realises that his

problems are ultimately social in nature must first of all find himself.

Otherwise he will find nothing in other people apart from his own absence.

Nothing is more difficult, or more painful, to approach than the question of

one's own self-regeneration. In the heart of each human being there is a

hidden room, a camera obscura, to which only the mind and dreams can find

the door. A magic circle in which the world and the self are reconciled

where every childish wish comes true. The passions flower there, brilliant,

poisonous blossoms clinging to and thriving on air, thin air. I create a

universe for myself and, like some fantastic tyrannical God, people it with

beings who will never live for anyone else. One of my favourite James

Thurber stories is the one where Walter Mitty dreams that he is a

swashbuckling captain, then an eminent surgeon, then a coldblooded killer

and finally a war hero. All this as he drove his old Buick downtown to buy

some dog biscuits.

The real importance of subjectivity can easily be measured by the general

embarassment with which it is approached. Everyone wants to pass it off as

their mind 'wandering', as 'introversion', as 'being stoned'. Everyone

censors their own daydreams. But isn't it the phantoms and visions of the

mind that have dealt the most deadly blows at morality, authority, language

and our collective hypnotic sleep? Isn't a fertile imagination the source of

all creativity, the alembic distilling the quick of life: the bridgehead

driven into the old world and across which the coming invasions will pour?

Anyone who can be open-minded about their interior life will begin to see a

different world outside themselves values change, things lose their glamour

and become plain instruments. In the magic of the imaginary, things exist

only to be picked up and toyed with, caressed, broken apart and put together

again in any way one sees fit. Once the prime importance of subjectivity is

accepted the spell cast upon things is broken. Starting from other people,

one's self-pursuit is fruitless, one repeats the same futile gestures time

after time. Starting from oneself, on the contrary, gestures are not

repeated but taken back into oneself, corrected and realised in a more

highly evolved form.

Daydreaming could become the most powerful dynamo in the world. Modern

technological expertise, just as it makes everything considered 'Utopian' in

the past a purely practical undertaking today, also does away with the

purely fairytale nature of dreams. All my wishes can come true from the

moment that modern technology is put to their service.

And even deprived of these techniques, can subjectivity ever stray far from

the truth? it is possible for me to objectify all that I have dreamt of

being. Everyone, at least once in his life has pulled off the same sort of

thing as Lassailly or Nechaev; Lassailly, passing himself off as the author

of an unwritten book, ends up by becoming a real writer, author of the

Roueries de Trialph; Nechaev, touching Bakunin for money in the name of a

nonexistent terrorist organisation, finally does get a real group of

nihilists going. One day I must be as I have wanted to seem; the particular

spectacular role I have so long wanted to be will become genuine. Thus

subjectivity subverts roles and spectacular lies to its own ends: it

reinvests appearances in reality.

Subjective imagination is not purely spiritual: it is always seeking its

practical realisation. There can be no doubt that the artistic spectacle -

above all, in its narrative forms - plays on subjectivity's quest for its

own self-realisation, but solely by captivating it, by making it function in

terms of passive identification. Debord's agitational film Critique de la

séparation stresses the point: "Normally, the things that happen to us,

things which really do involve us and demand our attention, leave us no more

than bored and distant spectators. However, almost any situation, once it

has been transposed artistically, awakens our attention: we want to take

part in it, to change it. This paradox must be turned upside down - put back

on its feet." The forces of the artistic spectacle must be dissolved and

their equipment pass into the arsenal of individual dreams. Once armed in

this way, there will no longer be any question of treating them as

phantasies. This is the only way in which the problem of making art real can

be seen.

3. Radical Subjectivity

Each subjectivity is different from every other one, but all obey the same

wilt to self-realisation. The problem is one of setting their variety in a

common direction, of creating a united front of subjectivity. Any attempt to

build a new life is subject to two conditions: first, that the realisation

of each individual subjectivity will either take place in a collective form

or it will not take place at all; and, secondly, that "To tell the truth,

the only reason anyone fights is for what they love. Fighting for everyone

else is only the consequence." (Saint-Just)

My subjectivity feeds on events. The most varied events: a riot, a sexual

fiasco, a meeting, a memory, a rotten tooth. Reality, as it evolves, sweeps

me with it. I'm struck by everything and, though not everything strikes me

in the same way, I am always struck by the same basic contradiction:

although I can always see how beautiful anything could be if only I could

change it, in practically every case there is nothing I can really do.

Everything is changed into something else in my imagination, then the dead

weight of things changes it back into what it was in the first place. A

bridge between imagination and reality must be built. Only a truly radical

perspective can give everyone the right to make anything out of anything. A

radical perspective grasps men by their roots and the roots of men lie in

their subjectivity - this unique zone they possess in common.

You can't make it on your own. You can't live your own life to the full in

isolation. But can any individual - any individual who has got anything at

all straight about himself and the world - fail to see a will identical to

his own among everyone he knows: the same journey leaving from the same

place?

All forms of hierarchical power differ from one another and yet all betray a

fundamental identity in their oppressive nature. In the same way, all

subjectivities are different from one another and yet all reveal a

fundamental identity in their will to total self-realisation. Only because

of this can one speak of a real "radical subjectivity".

There is a common root to every subjectivity, though all are unique and

irreducible: the will to realise oneself by transforming the world, the will

to live every sensation, every experience, every possibility to the full.

This can be seen in everyone, at different stages of consciousness and

determination. Its real power depends on the degree of collective unity it

can attain without losing its variety. Consciousness of this necessary unity

comes from what one could call a reflex of identity - the diametrically

opposite movement to that of identification. Through identification we lose

our uniqueness in the variety of roles; through the reflex of identity we

strengthen our wealth of individual possibilities in the unity of federated

subjectivities.

Radical subjectivity can only be based on the reflex of identlty. One's own

quest searches for itself everywhere in others. "While I was on a mission in

the state of Tchou", says Confucius, "I saw some piglets suckling their dead

mother. After a short while they shuddered and went away. They had sensed

that she could no longer see them and that she wasn't like them any more.

What they loved in their mother wasn't her body, but whatever it was that

made her body live." Likewise, what I am looking for in other people is the

richest part of myself hidden within them. Can the reflex of identity spread

naturally? One can only hope so. Certainly it's high time for it.

No one has ever questioned the interest men take in being fed, sheltered,

cared for, protected from hardship and disaster. The imperfections of

technology - transformed at a very early date into social imperfections -

have postponed the satisfaction of this universal desire. Today, planned

economy allows one to foresee the final solution of the problems of

survival. Now that the needs of survival are well on the way to being

satisfied, at least in the hyper-industrialised countries, it is becoming

painfully obvious, to say the least of it, that there are also human

passions which must be satisfied, that the satisfaction of these passions is

of vital importance to everyone and, furthermore, that failure to do so will

undermine, if not destroy, all our acquisitions in terms of material

survival. As the problems of survival are slowly but surely resolved they

begin to clash more and more brutally with the problems of life which have

been, just as slowly and just as surely, sacrificed to the needs of

survival. The chickens are all coming home to roost: henceforward,

socialist-type planning is opposed to the true harmonisation of life in

common.

Radical subjectivity is the common front of rediscovered identity. Those who

can't see themselves in other people are condemned for ever to be strangers

to themselves. I can't do anything for other people if they can't do

anything for themselves. It's along these lines that concepts such as those

of 'cognition' and 're-cognition', of 'sympathy' and 'sympathising', should

be re-examined.

Cognition is only of value if it leads to the re-cognition of a common

project - to the reflex of identity. To realise radical imagination requires

a varied knowledge, but this knowledge is nothing without the style with

which it is handled. As the first years of the S.I. have shown, the worst

crises within a coherent revolutionary group are caused by those closest by

their knowledge and furthest away by their lived experience and by the

importance they place upon it. Likewise, 'partisans'. They both identify

themselves with the group and get in its way. They understand everything

except what is really at stake. They demand knowledge because they are

incapable of demanding themselves.

By seizing myself, I break other people's hold over me. Thus I let them see

themselves in me. No one can evolve freely without spreading freedom in the

world.

"I want to be myself. I want to walk without impediment. I want to affirm

myself alone in my freedom. May everyone do likewise. Don't worry any more

about the fate of the revolution - it will be safer in the hands of everyone

than in the hands of political parties." So said Coeurderoy. I agree one

hundred per cent. Nothing authorises me to speak in the name of other

people. I am only my own delegate. Yet at the same time I can't help

thinking that my life isn't solely my own concern but that I serve the

interests of thousands of other people by living the way I live, and by

struggling to live more intensely and more freely. My friends and I are one,

and we know it. Each of us is acting for each other by acting for himself.

Honesty is our only hope.

4. The project of communication

Love offers the purest glimpse of true communication that any of us have

had. But, as communication in general tends to break down more and more, the

existence of love becomes increasingly precarious. It is threatened on every

side. Everything tends to reduce lovers to objects; real meetings are

replaced by mechanical sex: by the posturing of countless Playboys and

Bunnies. Really being in love means really wanting to live in a different

world.

Although the three passions underlying the threefold project of

self-realisation, communication and participation are of equal importance,

they have not been repressed to an equal extent. While creativity and play

have been blighted by prohibitions and by every sort of distortion, love,

without escaping from repression, still remains relatively the most free

experience. The most democratic, all in all.

Love offers the model of perfect communication: the orgasm, the total fusion

of two separate beings. It is a glimpse of a transformed universe. Its

intensity, its here-and-now-ness, its physical exaltation, its emotional

fluidity, its grateful acceptance of the value of change - everything

indicates that love will prove the key factor in recreating the world. Our

emotionally-dead survival cries out for multidimensional passions.

Lovemaking sums up and distils both the desire for, and the reality of, such

a way of life. The universe lovers build of dreams and one another's bodies

is a transparent universe: lovers want to be at home everywhere.

Love has been able to stay free more successfully than the other passions.

Creativity and play have always 'been granted' an official representation, a

spectacular acknowledgment which did its best to cut them off at their

source. Love has always been clandestine - "being alone together". It turned

out to be protected by the bourgeois concept of private life; banished from

the day, reserved for work and for consumption, and driven into the darkest

corners of the night; lit by the moon. Thus it partly escaped the major

mopping-up of daily activities. The same cannot be said for communication,

and it is precisely the ashes of false (daily) communication that choke the

spark of sexual passion. And today consumer society is extending

falsification further and further... into the reaches of the night...

People who talk about 'communication' when there are only things and their

mechanical relations are working on the side of the process of reification

that they pretend to attack. 'Understanding', 'friendship', 'being happy

together' - so much bullshit. All I can see is exploiters and exploited,

rulers and ruled, actors and spectators. And all of them flailed like chaff

by Power.

Things aren't necessarily expressionless. Anything can become human if

someone infuses it with their own subjectivity. But in a world ruled by

privative appropriation, the only function of the object is to justify its

proprietor. If my subjectivity overflows, if my eyes make the landscape

their own, it can only be ideally, without material or legal consequences.

In the perspective of power, people and things aren't there for my

enjoyment, but to serve a master; nothing really is, everything functions as

part of an order of possessions.

There can't be any real communication in a world where almost everything one

does is ruled by fetishes. The space between people and things isn't empty:

it's packed with alienating mediations. And as power becomes increasingly

abstract its own signals become so numerous, so chaotic, as to demand

systematic interpretation on the part of a body of scribes, semanticians and

mythologists. Brought up to see only objects around him, the proprietor

needs objective and objectified servants. Only subjective truth, as

historically it becomes objective, can withstand this sort of thing. One

must start with immediate experience itself if one wants to attack the most

advanced points to which repression has penetrated.

The main pleasure of the middle class seems to have been degrading pleasure

in all its forms. It wasn't enough to imprison people's freedom to fall in

love in the squalid ownership of marriage (interlarded of course with the

occasional one-night stand). It wasn't enough to set things up so that

dishonesty and jealousy were bound to follow. The great thing was to

sabotage people on the few occasions they really did meet.

Love's despair doesn't come from sexual frustration. It comes from suddenly

losing contact with the person in your arms; of both of you suddenly seeing

one another as an object. Swedish social democracy, as hygienic as ever, has

already got its own horrible caricature of free love out on the market:

one-night stands dealt out like a deck of cards.

How sickening these endless lies one says and hears! How much one wants to

be straight with someone! Sex really does seem to be our only break.

Sometimes I think that nothing else is as real, nothing else is as human, as

the feel of a woman's body, the softness of her skin, the warmth and wetness

of her cunt. Even if there were nothing else at all, this alone would be

enough for ever.

But even during really magical moments the inert mass of objects can

suddenly become magnetic. The passivity of a lover suddenly unravels the

bonds which were being woven, the dialogue is interrupted before it really

began. Love's dialectic freezes. Two statues are left lying side by side.

Two objects.

Although love is always born of subjectivity - a girl is beautiful because I

love her - my desire cannot stop itself objectifying what it wants. Desire

always makes an object of the loved person. But if I let my desire transform

the loved person into an object, have I not condemned myself to conflict

with this object and, through force of habit, to become detached from it?

What can ensure perfect communication between lovers? The union of these

opposites:

- the more I detach myself from the object of my desire and the more

objective strength I give to my desire, the more carefree my desire becomes

towards its object;

- the more I detach myself from my desire insofar as it is an object and the

more objective strength I give to the object of my desire, the more my

desire finds its raison d'etre in the loved person.

Socially, this playing with one's own attitudes could be expressed by

changing partners at the same time as one is attached more or less

permanently to a 'pivotal' partner. All these meetings would be the

communication of a single purpose experienced in common. I have always

wanted to be able to say: "I know you don't love me because you only love

yourself. I am just the same. So love me."

Love can only be based on radical subjectivity. The time is up for all

self-sacrificial forms of love. To love only oneself through other people,

to be loved by others through the love they owe themselves. This is what the

passion of love teaches; these are the only conditions of authentic

communication.

And love is also an adventure; an attempt to breakfree of dishonesty. To

approach a woman in any spectacular, exhibitionistic way, is to condemn

oneself to a reified relationship from the very first. The choice is between

spectacular seduction - that of the playboy - and the seduction exercised by

something that is qualitatively different - the person who is seductive

because he isn't trying to seduce.

Sade analyses two possible attitudes. On the one hand, the libertines of the

120 Days of Sodom who can only really enjoy themselves by torturing to death

the object they have seduced (and what more fitting homage to a thing than

to make it suffer?); or, on the other, the libertines of the Philosophy in

the Boudoir, warm and playful, who do all they can to increase one another's

pleasure. The former are the feudal-type lords, vibrant with hatred and

revolt; the latter, the masters without slaves, discovering in one another

only the reflection of their own pleasure.

Today, seduction tends to become increasingly sadistic. Sadism is inability

to forgive the desired person for being an object. Truly seductive people,

on the contrary, contain the fullness of desire in themselves; they refuse

to play a part and owe their seductiveness to this refusal. In Sade, this

would be Dolmancé, Eugénie or Madame de Saint-Ange. This plenitude can only

exist for the desired person if they can recognise their own will to live in

the person who desires them. Real seduction seduces only by its honesty. And

not everyone is worth seducing. This is what the Beguines of Schweidnitz and

their companions (13th century) meant by saying that resistance to sexual

advances was the sign of a crass spirit. The Brethren of the Free Spirit

expressed the same idea: "Anyone who knows the God inhabiting him carries

his own Heaven in himself. By the same token, ignorance of one's own

divinity really is a mortal sin. This is the meaning of the Hell which one

carries with oneself in earthly life."

Hell is the emptiness left by separation, the anguish of lovers lying side

by side without being together. Non-communication is always like the

collapse of a revolutionary movement. The will to death is installed where

the will to life has disappeared.

Love must be freed from its myths, from its images, from its spectacular

categories; its authenticity must be strengthened and its spontaneity

renewed. There is no other way of fighting its reification and its

recuperation in the spectacle. Love can't stand either isolation or

fragmentation; it is bound to overflow into the will to transform the whole

of human activity, into the necessity of building a world where lovers feel

themselves to be free everywhere.

The birth and the dissolution of the moment of love are bound to the

dialectic of memory and desire. At first, desire and the possibility of its

reciprocation strengthen one another. In the moment of love itself, memory

and desire coincide. The moment of love is the space-time of authentic lived

experience, a present containing both the past and the future. At the stage

of breaking-up, memory prolongs the impassioned moment but desire gradually

ebbs away. The present disintegrates, memory turns nostalgically towards

past happiness, while desire foresees the unhappiness to come. In

dissolution the separation is real. The failure of the recent past cannot be

forgotten and desire gradually melts away.

In love, as in every attempt to communicate, the problem is avoiding the

stage of breaking up. One could suggest:

- developing the moment of love as far as one can, in as many directions as

possible; in other words, refusing to dissociate it from either creativity

or play, raising it from the state of a moment to that of the real

construction of a situation;

- promoting collective experiments in individual realisation; thus of

multiplying the possibilities of sexual attraction by bringing together a

great variety of possible partners;

- permanently strengthening the pleasure-principle, which is the life-blood

of every attempt to realise oneself, to communicate or to participate.

Pleasure is the principle of unification. Love is desire for unity in a

common moment; friendship, desire for unity in a common project.

5. The erotic or the dialectic of pleasure

There is no pleasure which is not seeking its own coherence. Its

interruption, its lack of satisfaction, causes a disturbance analogous to

Reichian 'stasis'. Repression keeps human beings in a state of permanent

crisis. Thus the function of pleasure, and of the anxiety born in its

absence, is essentially a social function. The erotic is the development of

the passions as they become unitary, a game of unity and variety, without

which revolutionary coherence cannot exist ("Boredom is always

counter-revolutionary" - I.S. no. 3).

Wilhelm Reich attributes most of neurotic behaviour to disturbances of the

orgasm, to what he called 'orgastic impotence'. He maintains that anxiety is

created by inability to experience a complete orgasm, by a sexual discharge

which fails to liquidate all the excitement, all the foreplay, leading up to

it. The accumulated arid unspent energy becomes free-floating and is

converted into anxiety. Anxiety in its turn still further impedes future

orgastic potency.

But the problem of tensions and their liquidation doesn't just exist on the

level of sexuality. It characterises all human relationships. And Reich,

although he sensed that this was so, fails to emphasise strongly enough that

the present social crisis is also a crisis of an orgastic nature. If "the

source of neurotic energy lies in the disparity between the accumulatiorn

and the discharge of sexual energy", it seems to me that the source of

energy of our neuroses is also to be found in the disparity between the

accumulation and the discharge of the energy brought into use by human

relationships. Total enjoyment is still possible in the moment of love, but

as soon as one tries to prolong this moment, to extend it into social life

itself, one cannot avoid what Reich called 'stasis'. The world of the

dissatisfactory and the unconsummated is a world of permanent crisis. What

would a society without neurosis be like? An endless banquet. Pleasure is

the only guide.

"Everything is feminine in what one loves", wrote La Mettrie, "the empire of

love recognises no other frontiers than those of pleasure". But pleasure

itself doesn't recognise any frontiers. If it isn't growing, it is beginning

to disappear. Repetition kills it; it can't adapt itself to the fragmentary.

The principle of pleasure cannot be separated from the totality.

The erotic is pleasure seeking its coherence. It's the development of

passions becoming communicative, interdependent, unitary. The problem is

recreating in social life that state of total enjoyment known in the moment

of love. Conditions allowing a game with unity and variety, that is to say,

free and transparent participation in particular achievements.

Freud defined the goal of Eros as unification or the search for union. But

when he maintains that fear of being separated and expelled from the group

comes from an underlying fear of castration, his proposition should be

inverted. Fear of castration comes from the fear of being excluded, not the

other way round. This anxiety becomes more marked as the isolation of

individuals in an illusory community becomes more and more difficult to

ignore.

Even while it seeks unification, Eros is essentially narcissistic and in

love with itself. It wants a world to love as much as it loves itself.

Norman O. Brown, in Life Against Death, points out the contradiction. How,

he asks, can a narcissistic orientation lead to union with beings in the

world? "in love, the abstract antimony of the Ego and the Other can be

transcended if we return to the concrete reality of pleasure, to a

definition of sexuality as being essentially a pleasurable activity of the

body, and if we see love as the relationship between the Ego and the sources

of pleasure." One could be more exact: the source of pleasure lies less in

the body than in the possibility of free activity in the world. The concrete

reality of pleasure is based on the freedom to unite oneself with anyone who

allows one to become united with oneself. The realisation of pleasure passes

through the pleasure of realisation, the pleasure of communication through

the communication of pleasure, participation in pleasure through the

pleasure of participation. It is because of this that the narcissism turned

towards the outside world, the narcissism Brown is talking about, can only

bring about a wholesale demolition of social structures.

The more intense pleasure becomes the more it demands the whole world.

"Lovers, seek greater and greater pleasure," said Breton. This is a

revolutionary demand.

Western civilisation is a civilisation of work and, as Diogenes observed:

"Love is the occupation of the unoccupied." With the gradual disappearance

of forced labour, love takes on a greater and greater importance. It has

become the major resource to develop. And it poses a direct threat to every

kind of authority. Because the erotic is unitary, it is also acceptance of

change. Freedom knows no propaganda more effective than people calmly

enjoying themselves. Which is why pleasure, for the most part, is forced to

be clandestine, love locked away in a bedroom, creativity confined to the

back-stairs of culture, and alcohol and drugs cower under the shadow of the

outstretched arm of the law...

The morality of survival has condemned both the diversity of pleasures and

their union-in-variety in order to promote obsessive repetition. But if

pleasure-anxiety is satisfied with the repetitive, true pleasure can only

exist in terms of diversity-within-unity. Clearly the simplest model of the

erotic is the pivotal couple. Two people live their experiences as honestly

and as freely as possible. This radiant complicity has all the charm of

incest. Their wealth of common experiences can only lead to a brother and

sister relationship. Great loves have always had something incestuous about

them; one could deduce that love between brothers and sisters was privileged

from the very first, and that it should be worked on in every possible

manner. It's high time to break this, the most ancient and ugliest of all

taboos, and to break it once and for all. The process could be described as

sororisation. A wife and a sister all of whose friends are also my wives and

sisters

In the erotic, there is no perversion apart from the negation of pleasure:

its distortion into pleasure-anxiety. What matters the spring so long as the

water is pure? As the Chinese say: Immobile in one another, pleasure bears

us.

And, finally, the search for pleasure is the best safeguard of play. It

defends real participation, it protects it against self-sacrifice, coercion

and dishonesty. The actual degree of intensity pleasure reaches marks

subjectivity's grasp on the world. Thus, flirtatiousness is playing with

desire as it is born; desire, playing with passion as it is born. And

playing with passion finds its coherence in poetry, whose essentially

revolutionary nature can never be over-emphasised.

Does this mean that the search for pleasure is incompatible with pain? On

the contrary, it's a question of re-inventing pain. Pleasure-anxiety is

neither pleasure nor pain; it's just scratching yourself and letting the

itch get worse and worse. What is real pain? A set-back in the game of

desire or passion; a positive pain crying out with a corresponding degree of

passion for another pleasure to construct. A delay in full participation.

6. The project of participation

A society based on organised survival can only tolerate false, spectacular

forms of play. But given the crisis of the spectacle, playfulness, distorted

in every imaginable way, is being reborn everywhere. From now on it has all

the features of social upheaval and, beyond its negativity, the foundations

of a society of real participation can be detected. To play means to refuse

leaders, self-sacrifice and roles, to embrace every form of self-realisation

and to be utterly, painfully, honest with all one's friends (1). Tactics are

the polemical stage of the game. Individual creativity needs an organisation

concentrating and strengthening it. Tactics entail a certain kind of

hedonistic foresight. The point of every fragmentary action must be the

total destruction of the enemy. Industrial societies have to evolve their

own specific forms of guerilla warfare (2). Diversion is the only possible

revolutionary use of the spiritual and material values distributed by

consumer society: supersession's ultimate deterrent (3).

Economic necessity and play don't mix. Financial transactions are deadly

serious: you don't fool around with money. The elements of play contained

within feudal economy were gradually squeezed out by the rationality of

money exchanges. Playing with exchange means to barter products without

worrying too much about strictly standardised equivalents. But from the

moment that capitalism forced its commercial relationships on the world,

fantasy was forbidden; and the dictatorship of commodities today shows

clearly that it intends to enforce these relationships everywhere, at every

level of life.

The pastoral relationships of country life in the high Middle Ages tempered

the purely economic necessities of feudalism with a sort of freedom; play

often took the upper hand even in menial tasks, in the dispensing of

justice, in the settling of debts. By throwing the whole of everyday life

onto the battlefield of production and consumption, capitalism crushes the

urge to play while at the same time trying to harness it as a source of

profit. So, over the last few decades, we have seen the attraction of the

unknown turned into mass-tourism, adventure turned into scientific

expeditions and the great game of war turned into strategic operations.

Taste for change now rests content with a change of taste...

Contemporary society has banned all real play. It. has been turned into

something only children do. And today children themselves are getting more

and more pacifying gadget-type toys rammed down their throats. The adult is

only allowed falsified and recuperated games: competitions, T.V. sport,

elections, gambling... Yet at the same time it's obvious that this kind of

rubbish can never satisfy anything as strong as people's desire to play -

especially today when game-playing could flourish as never before in

history.

The sacred knows how to cope with the profane and deconsecrated game:

witness the irreverent and obscene carvings in cathedrals. Without

concealing them, the Church embraced cynical laughter, biting fantasy and

nihilistic scorn. Under its mantle the demonic game was safe. Bourgeois

power, on the contrary, puts play in quarantine, isolates it in a special

ward, as if it wanted to stop it infecting other human activities. Art is

this privileged and despised area set apart from commerce. And it will stay

that way until economic imperialism refits it in its turn as a spiritual

supermarket. Then, hunted down everywhere, play will burst out everywhere.

It was in fact from art that play broke free. The eruption was called Dada.

"The dadaist events awoke the primitive-irrational play instinct which had

been held down an the audience", said Hugo Ball. On the fatal slope of

plague and mockery Art dragged down in its fall the whole edifice which the

Spirit of Seriousness had built to the greater glory of the bourgeoisie. So

that today the expression on the face of someone playing is the expression

on the face of a rebel. Henceforward, the total game and the revolution of

everyday life are one.

The desire to play has returned to destroy the hierarchical society which

banished it. At the same time it is setting up a new type of society, one

based on real participation. It is impossible to foresee the details of

such, a society - a society in which play is completely unrestricted - but

one could expect to see the following characteristics:

- rejection of all leaders and all hierarchies;

- rejection of self-sacrifice;

- rejection of roles;

- freedom of genuine self-realisation;

- utter honesty.

Every game has two preconditions: the rules of playing and playing with the

rules. Watch children at play. They know the rules of the game, they can

remember them perfectly well but they never stop breaking them, they never

stop dreaming up new ways of breaking them. But for them, cheating doesn't

have the same connotations as it does for adults. Cheating is part of the

game, they play at cheating, accomplices even in their arguments. What they

are really doing is spurring themselves on to create new games. And

sometimes they are successful: a new game is found and unfolds. They

revitalise their playfulness without interrupting its flow.

The game dies as soon as an authority crystallises, becomes

institutionalised and clothed in a magical aura. Even so playfulness,

however lighthearted, never loses a certain spirit of organisation and its

required discipline. If a play leader proves necessary, his power is never

wielded at the expense of the autonomous power of each individual. Rather it

is the focus of each individual will, the collective counterpart of each

particular desire. So the project of participation demands a coherent

organisation allowing the decisions of each individual to be the decisions

of everyone concerned. Obviously small intimate groups, micro-societies,

offer the best conditions for such experiments. Within them the game can be

the sole ruler of the intricacies of communal life, harmonising individual

whims, desires and passions. Especially so since this game will reflect the

insurrectionary game played by the group as a whole, forced upon them by

their intention to live outside the law.

The urge to play is incompatible with self-sacrifice. You can lose, pay the

penalty, submit to the rules, spend an unpleasant quarter of an hour, that's

the logic of the game, not the logic of a Cause, not the logic of

self-sacrifice. Once the idea of sacrifice appears the game becomes sacred

and its rules become rites. For those who play, the rules, along with the

ways of playing with them, are an integral part of the game. In the realm of

the sacred, on the contrary, rituals cannot be played with, they can only be

broken, can only be transgressed (not to forget that pissing on the altar is

still a way of paying homage to the Church). Only play can deconsecrate,

open up the possibilities of total freedom. This is the principle of

diversion, the freedom to change the sense of everything which serves Power;

the freedom, for example, to turn the cathedral of Chartres into a fun-fair,

into a labyrinth, into a shooting-range, into a dream landscape...

In a group revolving around play, manual and domestic chores could be

allotted as penalties, as the price one pays for losing a point in a game.

Or, more simply. they could be used to employ unoccupied time, as a sort of

active rest; assuming, as a contrast, the value of a stimulant and making

the resumption of play more exciting. The construction of such situations

can only be based on the dialectic of presence and absence, richness and

poverty, pleasure and pain, the intensity of each pole accentuating the

intensity of the other.

In any case, any technique utilised in an atmosphere of sacrifice and

coercion loses much of its cutting edge. Its actual effectiveness is mixed

up with a purely repressive purpose, and to repress creativity is to reduce

the productivity of the machine repressing it. Work can only be

non-alienating and productive if you enjoy doing it.

The role one plays must be the role one plays with. The spectacular role

demands complete conviction; a lucid role, on the contrary, demands a

certain distanciation. One has to watch oneself over one's own shoulder, in

much the same sort of way that professional actors like to swop jokes sotto

voce in between two dramatic tirades. Spectacular organisation is completely

out of its depth with this sort of thing. The Marx Brothers have shown what

a role can become if you play with it. The only pity is that the Marx

Brothers were stuck with the cinema. What would happen if a game with roles

started in real life?

When someone begins to play a permanent role, a serious role, he either

wrecks the game or it wrecks him. Consider the unhappy case of the

provocateur. The provocateur is the specialist in collective games. He can

grasp their techniques but not their dialectic. Maybe he could succeed in

steering the group towards offensive action - for provocateurs always push

people to attack here and now - if only he wasn't so involved in his own

role and his own mission that he can never understand their need to defend

themselves. Sooner or later this incoherence in his attitude towards

offensive and defensive action will betray the provocateur, and lead him to

his untimely end. Add who makes the best provocateur? The play leader who

has become the boss.

Only desire to play can lead to a community whose interests are identical

with those of the individual. The traitor, unlike the provocateur, appears

quite spontaneously in revolutionary groups. When does he appear? Whenever

the spirit of play has died in a group, and with it, inevitably, the

possibility of real involvement. The traitor is one who cannot express

himself through the sort of participation he is offered and decides to

'play' against this participation,. not to correct but to destroy it. The

traitor is an illness of the old age of revolutionary groups. Selling out on

play is an act of treachery which justifies all others.

Tactics. Tactics are the polemical stage of the game. They provide the

necessary continuity between poetry as it is born (play) and the

organisation of spontaneity (poetry). Of an essentially technical nature,

they prevent spontaneity burning itself out in the general confusion. We

know how cruelly absent tactics have been from most popular uprisings. And

we also know just how offhand historians can be about spontaneous

revolutions. No serious study, no methodical analysis, nothing approaching

the level of Clausewitz's book on war. Revolutionaries have ignored Makhno's

battles almost as thoroughly as bourgeois generals have studied Napoleon's.

A few observations, in the absence of a more detailed analysis.

An efficiently hierarchised army can win a war, but not a revolution; an

undisciplined mob can win neither. The problem then is how to organise

without creating a hierarchy; in other words, how to make sure that the

leader of the game doesn't become just "the Leader". The only safeguard

against authority and rigidity setting in is a playful attitude. Creativity

plus a machine gun is an unstoppable combination. Villa and Makhno's troops

routed the most experienced professional soldiers of their day. But once

playfulness begins to repeat itself, the battle is lost. The revolution

fails so that its leader can be infallible. Why was Villa defeated at

Celaya? Because he fell back on old tactical and strategic games, instead of

making up new ones. Technically, Villa was carried away by memories of

Ciudad Juarez, where his men had fallen on the enemy from the rear by

silently cutting their way through the walls of house after house. He failed

to see the importance of the military advances brought about by the 1914-18

war, machine gun nests, mortars, trenches, etc. In political terms, he

failed to see the importance of gaining the support of the industrial

proletariat. It's no coincidence that Obregon's victorious army which wiped

out Villa's Dorados included both workers' militias and German military

advisers.

The strength of revolutionary armies lies solely in their creativity.

Frequently the first days of an insurrection are a walk-over simply because

nobody paid the slightest attention, to the rules by which the enemy played

the game: because they invented a new game and because everyone took part in

its elaboration. But if this creativity flags, if it becomes repetitive, if

the revolutionary army becomes a regular army, then you can see blind

devotion and hysteria try in vain to make up for military weakness.

Infatuation with past victories breeds terrible defeats. The magic of the

Cause and the Leader replaces the conscious unity of the will to live and

the will to conquer. In 1525, having held the princes at bay for two years,

40,000 peasants whose tactics had given way to religious fanaticism, were

hacked to pieces at Frankenhaussen; the feudal army only lost three men. In

1964, at Stanleyville, hundreds of Mulélists, convinced they were

invincible, allowed themselves to be massacred by throwing themselves on to

a bridge defended by two machine guns. Yet these were the same men who

previously had captured trucks and arms consignments from the A.N.C. by

pitting the roads with elephant traps.

Hierarchical organization and its counterpart, indiscipline and incoherence,

are equally inefficient. In a traditional war, the inefficiency of one side

overcomes the inefficiency of the other through purely technical

superiority; in revolutionary war, the tactical poetry of the rebels steals

from the enemy both their weapons and the time in which to use them, thus

robbing them of their only possible superiority. But if the guerillas begin

to repeat themselves, the enemy can learn the rules of their game; at which

point counter-guerilla can, if not destroy, at least badly damage a popular

creativity which has already hobbled itself.

If troops are to refuse to kow-tow to leaders, how can the discipline

necessary for warfare be maintained? How can disintegration be avoided?

Revolutionary armies tend to oscillate between the Scylla of devotion to a

Cause and tile Charybdis of untimely pleasure seeking.

Stirring pleas, in the name of freedom, for restraint and renunciation lay

the foundations of future slavery. But equally, premature rejoicing and the

quest for small pleasures are always followed closely by the mailed fist of

the bloody weeks of "restoring order". Discipline and cohesion can only come

from the pleasure principle. The search for the greatest possible pleasure

must always run the risk of pain: this is the secret of its strength. Where

did the old troopers of the ancien régime find the strength to besiege a

town, be repulsed ten times and still attack ten times more? In their

passionate expectation of festivity - in this case, it must be admitted,

largely looting and rape - of pleasure all the sweeter for having been

attained so slowly. The best tactics go hand in hand with anticipation of

future pleasure. The will to live, brutal and unrestrained, is the fighter's

deadliest secret weapon. A weapon which should be used against anyone who

endangers it: a soldier has every reason to shoot his officers in the back.

For the same reasons, revolutionary armies will be stronger if they make

each man a resourceful and independent tactician; someone who takes his

pleasures seriously..

In the coming struggles, the desire to live life to the full will replace

pillage as a motive. Tactics will merge with the science of pleasure - for

the search for pleasure is already pleasure itself. Lessons in these tactics

are given free every day. Anyone who is ready to learn, from his everyday

experience, what undermines his independence and what makes him stronger,

will gradually earn his colours as a tactician.

However, no tactician is isolated. The will to destroy this sick world calls

for a federation of the tacticians of everyday life. It's just such a

federation that the S.I. intends to equip technically without delay.

Strategy is collectively building the launching-pad of the revolution on the

tactics of individual everyday life.

The ambiguous concept of 'humanity' sometimes causes spontaneous revolutions

to falter. All too often the desire to make man the heart of a revolutionary

programme has been invaded by a paralysing humanism. How many times have

revolutionaries spared the lives of their own future firing-squad, how many

times have they accepted a truce which meant no more to their enemies than

the opportunity of gathering reinforcements? The ideology of humanity is a

fine weapon for counter-revolution, one which can justify the most sickening

atrocities (the Belgian paras in Stanleyville).

There can be no negotiation with the enemies of freedom, there's no quarter

which can be extended to man's oppressors. The annihilation of

counter-revolutionaries is the only 'humanitarian' act which can prevent the

ultimate inhumanity of an integrally bureaucratised humanism.

Lastly: power must be totally destroyed by means of fragmentary acts. The

Struggle for purely economic emancipation has made survival possible for

everyone by making anything beyond survival impossible. But the traditional

workers movement was clearly struggling for more than that: for a total

change in people's way of life. In any case, the wish to change the whole

world at one go is a magical wish, which is why it can so easily degenerate

into the crudest reformism. Apocalypticism and demands for gradual reform

end up by merging in the marriage of reconciled differences. It isn't

surprising that pseudo-revolutionary parties always end by pretending that

compromises are the same as tactics.

The revolution cannot be won either by accumulating minor victories or by an

all-out frontal assault. Guerilla war is total.

This is the path on which the S.I. is set: calculated harrassment on every

front - cultural, political, economic and social. Concentrating on everyday

life will ensure the unity of the combat.

Diversion. In its broadest sense, diversion is an all embracing re-entry

into play. It is the act by which play grasps and reunites beings and things

which were frozen solid in a shattered hierarchic array.

One evening, as night fell, my friends and I wandered into the Palais de

Justice in Brussels. The building is a monstrosity, crushing the poor

quarters beneath it and guarding, like a sentry, the fashionable Avenue

Louise - out of which, some day, we will make a breathtakingly beautiful

bombsite. As we wandered through the labyrinth of corridors, staircases, and

suite after suite of rooms, we discussed what could be done to make the

place habitable; for a time we occupied the enemies' territory; through the

peer of our imagination we transformed the thieves den into a fantastic

fun-falr, into a sunny pleasure dome, where the most amazing adventures

would, for the first time, be really lived. In short, diversion is the basic

expression of creativity. Day-dreaming diverts the world. People divert,

just as Jourdain did with prose and James Joyce did with Ulysses,

spontaneously and with considerable reflection.

It was in 1955 that Debord, struck by Lautréamont's systematic use of

diversion, first drew attention to the virtually unlimited possibilities of

the technique. In 1960, Jorn was to write: "Diversion is a game which can

only be played as everything loses its value. Every element of past culture

must either be reinvested in reality or be scrapped." Debord, in

Internationale Situationniste no. 3, developed the concept still further:

"The two basic principles of diversion are the loss of importance of each

originally independent element (which may even lose its first sense

completely), and the organisatlon of a new significant whole which confers a

fresh meaning on each element." Recent history allows one to be still more

precise. From now on it's clear that:

- as more and more things rot and fall apart, diversion appears

spontaneously. Consumer society plays into the hands of those who want to

create new significant wholes;

- culture is no longer a particularly privileged theatre. The art of

diversion can be an integral part of any rebellion against the nature of

everyday life;

- since part-truths rule our world, diversion is now the only technique at

the service of a total view. As a revolutionary act, diversion is the most

coherent, most popular and the best adapted to revolutionary practice. By a

sort of natural evolution - the desire to play - it leads people to become

more and more extreme, more and more radical.

Our experience is falling to pieces about our ears, and its disintegration

is a direct consequence of the development of consumer society. The phase of

devaluation, and thus the possibility of diversion, is the work of

contemporary history. Diversion has become part of the tactics of

supersession; an essentially positive act.

While the abundance of consumer goods is hailed everywhere as a major step

forward in evolution, the way these goods are used by society, as we know,

invalidates all their positive aspects. Because the gadget is primarily a

source of profit for capitalism and the socialist bureaucracies, it cannot

be used for any other ends. The ideology of consumerism acts like a fault in

its manufacture, it sabotages the commodity coated in it; it turns what

could be the material equipment of happiness into a new form of slavery. In

this context, diversion broadcasts new ways of using commodities; it invents

superior uses of goods, uses by which subjectivity can strengthen itself

with something that was originally marketed to weaken it. The problems of

tactics and strategy revolve around our ability to turn against capitalism

the weapons that commercial necessity has forced it to distribute. Methods

of diversion should be spread as an ABC Of The Consumer Who Wishes To Stop

Being So.

Diversion, which forged its first weapons from art, has now become the art

of handling every sort of weapon. Having first appeared amidst the cultural

crisis of the years 1910-25, it has gradually spread to every area touched

by social decomposition. Despite which, art still offers a field of valid

experiment for the techniques of diversion; and there's still much to be

learnt from the past. Surrealism failed because it tried to reinvest dadaist

anti-values which had not been completely reduced to zero. Any other attempt

to build on values which have not been thoroughly purged by a nihilistic

crisis will end in the same way; with recuperation. Contemporary

cyberneticians have taken their 'combinatory' attitude towards art so far as

to believe in the value of any accumulation of disparate elements

whatsoever, even if the particular elements haven't been devalued at all.

Pop Art or Jean-Luc Godard, it's the same apologetics of the junk-yard.

Diversion, self-critical language, is our only possible means of

communication. There are no limits to creativity. There is no end to

diversion.

XXIV THE INTERWORLD AND THE NEW INNOCENCE

The interworld is the no-man's land of subjectivity, where power's waste

products corrode and mingle with the will to live (1). The new innocence

frees the monsters inside us, pitting the interworld's stormy violence

against the old established order of things, which gave it birth (2).

On the fringes of uneasy subjectivity the canker of power eats away. There

thrives undying hate, the demons of revenge, the tyranny of envy, the

rancour of frustrated desire. It may be a marginal infection, but it

threatens every side; an interworld.

The interworld is the no-man's land of subjectivity. Its borders tremble

with the fundamental cruelty of cop and rebel, oppression and the poetry of

revolt. Halfway between its recuperation by the spectacle and its

revolutionary use, the dreamer's extra-space-time spawns monstrous creations

after the image of his own desires and that of power. The increasing poverty

of daily life has turned into a sort of public amenity suitable for every

kind of investigation, an open battlefield between creative spontaneity and

what corrupts it. As a faithful explorer of the mind, Artaud sums up

perfectly this evenly-matched struggle: "My unconscious is only mine in

dreams, but are the forms I see there going to come to birth or are they

some foul abortion I've spewed up? The subconscious is shaped by the

premises of my interior will, but I'm not really sure who reigns there; I

don't believe it's me, but rather a flood of conflicting desires which, I

don't know why, think in me and do nothing but struggle endlessly for total

possession over me. But I re-encounter every one of these perverse desires,

whose temptations treat me with such temerity, in the preconscious - only

this time all my conscious wits are about me, and although the perverse

desires break in waves over me, the important thing is that I feel myself

there... I feel therefore that if I travelled upstream, I ought to emerge in

my preconscious at the point where I could see myself evolve and desire."

Further on, Artaud says: "Peyote led me there."

The adventures of the hermit of Rodez sound off a warning. His break with

the Surrealist movement is a turning point. He charged them with getting

caught up in Bolshevism; with serving a revolution - which be it mentioned

in passing, drags Kronstadt's corpses along with it - instead of making the

revolution serve them. Artaud was absolutely right to blame the helplessness

of the movement on its failure to base its revolutionary coherence on its

richest truth - subjectivity before everything. But no sooner had he broken

with Surrealism than he veered off into solipsistic madness and magic. He

was no longer interested in realising his subjective desire by transforming

the world. Instead of externalising what lies inside, he did the opposite,

and made it holy, finding in the solid world of analogies the eternal primal

myth, to which revelation only the roads of impotence lead. Those who are

reluctant to cast out the flames that devour them are just asking to get

burnt, consumed, according to the laws of the consumable, in the Nessus'

shirt of ideology - be it of drugs, art, psychoanalysis, theosophy or

revolution, it never ever changes history.

The imaginary is the exact science of possible solutions, not a parallel

world granted the mind to compensate for its failures in outside reality. It

is a power that will fill the abyss separating inside and outside. A praxis

condemned to inaction.

With its ghosts, its obsessions, its vitriolic outbursts and its sadism, the

interworld seems to be a cage full of savage animals driven wild by

imprisonment. Anyone is free to go down there by means of dreams, drugs,

alcohol and other sense derangers. There's a violence there that's just

asking to be freed, and a climate in which one should steep oneself, if only

to attain this consciousness which dances and kills; what Norman O. Brown

calls dionysiac consciousness.

The bloody dawn of riots doesn't dissolve the monstrous creatures of the

night. It clothes them in light and fire, and scatters them through towns

and across the countryside. The new innocence is baleful dreams come true.

Subjectivity only constructs itself by destroying what hampers it, and the

violence necessary to this end is drawn from the interworld. The new

innocence is the lucid construction of annihilation.

The most peaceful of men are full of bloody dreams. We know the price of

treating solicitously those whom we can't strike down now, using kindness

when we can't use force. I owe a great weight of hatred to those who've

failed to break me. How can we liquidate hate without liquidating its

causes? In the barbarity of riots, the arson, the popular savagery, the

excesses that terrify bourgeois historians, we find exactly the right

vaccine against the cold atrocity of the forces of order and hierarchical

oppression.

In the new innocence, the interworld suddenly erupts and submerges

oppressive structures. The game of nothing-but violence is engulfed by the

everything-and violence of the revolutionary game.

The shock of freedom works miracles. Nothing can resist it, neither mental

illness, remorse, guilt, the feeling of powerlessness, nor the brutalisation

created by the environment of power. When a waterpipe burst in Pavlov's

laboratory, not one of the dogs that survived the flood retained the

slightest trace of his long conditioning. Could the tidal wave of great

social upheavals have less effect on men than a burst waterpipe on dogs?,

Reich recommends explosions of anger for emotionally blocked and muscularly

armoured neurotics. This type of neurosis seems particularly prevalent

today: it's survival sickness. The most coherent explosion of anger has a

great chance of being a general uprising.

Three thousand years of living in the shadows can't withstand ten days of

revolutionary violence. The reconstruction of society will simultaneously

reconstruct everyone's unconscious.

The revolution of everyday life will blot out ideas of justice, punishment

and torture, which are notions dependent on exchange and fragmentation. We

don't want to be judges, but, by destroying slavery, masters without slaves

recovering a new innocence and gracefulness in living. We have to destroy

the enemy, not judge him. Whenever Durruti's column freed a village, they

would assemble the peasants, ask which were the Fascists and shoot them on

the spot. The next revolution will do the same. With perfect composure. We

know there'll be no-one to judge us, nor will there ever be judges again,

because we will have gobbled them up.

The new innocence entails destroying an order of things that has always

tried to pin down the art of living and which today is threatening what

remains of authentically lived experience. I don't need reasons to defend my

freedom.

But at every moment power is legally defending me, (as I am legally

defending myself against it!) In this brief exchange between the anarchist

Duval and the policeman sent to arrest him, the new innocence can recognise

its spontaneous jurisprudence:

"Duval, I arrest you in the name of the law."

"And I suppress you in the name of freedom."

Things don't bleed. Those heavy with the dead weight of things will die the

death of things. Victor Serge recounts that during the sack of Razoumovskoe

the revolutionaries smashed some porcelain; and when they were criticised

for having done so, they replied: "We'll smash all the porcelain in the

world to transform life. You love things too much and people too little...

You love men too much the way you love things, and man you don't love

enough." What we don't need to destroy is worth saving: that's the most

succinct version of our future penal code.

XXV YOU'RE FUCKING AROUND WITH US? - NOT FOR LONG!

     (Address by the sans-culottes of the rue Mouffetard to the National

                       Convention, December 9th, 1792)

In Watts, Prague, Stockholm, Stanleyville, Gdansk, Turin, Port Talbot,

Cleveland, Cordoba, Amsterdam, wherever the act and wareness of refusal

generates passionate break-outs from the factories of collective illusion,

the revolution of everyday life is under way. The struggle intensifies as

misery becomes universal. What for years were reasons for fighting specific

issues - hunger, restrictions, boredom, illness, anxiety, isolation, deceit

- now reveal misery's fundamental rationality, its omnipresent emptiness,

its appalling oppressive abstraction. For this misery, the world of

hierarchical power, the world of the State, of sacrifice, exchange and the

quantitative - the commodity as will and representation of the world - is

held responsible by those moving towards an entirely new society that is

still to be invented and yet is already among us. All over the globe,

revolutionary praxis, like a photographic exposer, is transforming negative

into positive, lighting up the hidden face of the earth with the fires of

rebellion to ink in the map of its triumph.

Only genuine revolutionary praxis gives the organisation of armed revolt the

precision without which even the best proposals remain tentative and

partial. But this same praxis shows a rapid corruption the moment it breaks

with its own rationality. That rationality is not abstract but concrete

supersession of that universal and empty form, the commodity - and is alone

in allowing a non-alienating objectification: the realization of art and

philosophy in the individual's daily life. Such a rationality's line of

force and extension is born of the deliberate encounter of two poles under

tension. It's the spark struck off between subjectivity, extracting the will

to be everything from the totalitarianism of oppressive conditions, and the

historical withering way of the generalised commodity system.

Existential conflicts are not qualitatively different from those inherent in

the whole of mankind. That's why men can't hope to control the laws

governing their general history if they can't simultaneously control their

own individual histories. If you go for revolution and neglect your own

self, then you're going about it backwards, like all the militants. Against

voluntarism and the mystique of the historically inevitable revolution, we

must spread the idea of a plan of attack, and a means, both rational and

passionate, in which immediate subjective needs and objective contemporary

conditions are dialectically united. In the dialectic of part and totality,

the curved slope of revolution is the project to construct daily life in and

through the struggle against the commodity form, so that each phase of the

revolution is carried in the style of its final outcome. No maximum program,

no minimum program, and no transitional programme - instead a complete

strategy based on the essential characteristics of the system we want

destroyed.

Between the increasingly disorganised old society and the new society yet to

be created, the Situationist International offers an example of a group in

search of its revolutionary coherence. As with all groups bearing the seeds

of poetry, its importance is as a model for the new social organisation. It

must therefore prevent external oppression (hierarchy, bureaucratisation...)

reappearing inside the movement, by insuring that participation is

subordinated to the maintenance of real equality between all its members,

not as a metaphysical right, but on the contrary as the norm to attain. It

is precisely to avoid authoritarianism and passivity (leaders and militants)

that the group should unhesitatingly move against any compromise, drop in

the theoretical level or lack of practical activity. We can't tolerate

people whom the dominant regime so happily puts up with. Exclusion and

rupture are the only defences of coherence in danger.

In the same way, the project of centralising scattered poetry involves the

ability to recognise or encourage autonomous revolutionary groups,

radicalise them, and federate them without ever taking them over. The

Situationist International has an axial function: to be everywhere the ax

which popular agitation wields and which in turn amplifies the initial

movement. The Situationists will recognise these groups on the basis of

their revolutionary coherence.

The moment of revolt, which means now, is hallowing out for us in the hard

rock of our daily lives, days that miraculously retain the delicious colours

and the dreamlike charm which - like an Aladdin's cave, magical and

prismatic in an atmosphere all its own - is inalienably ours. The moment of

revolt is childhood rediscovered, time put to everyone's use, the

dissolution of the market and the beginning of generalised self-management.

The long revolution is creating small federated microsocieties, true

guerilla cells practising and fighting for this self-management. Effective

radicality authorises all variations and guarantees every freedom. That's

why the Situationists don't confront the world with: "Here's your ideal

organisation, on your knees!" They simply show by fighting for themselves

and with the clearest awareness of this fight, why people really fight each

other and why they must acquire an awareness of the battle.

                                (1963 - 1965)

                               raoul Vaneigem

 Just as in the case of a child, the first breath it draws after long silent

      nourishment terminates the gradualness of the merely quantitative

 progression - a qualitative leap - and now the child is born, so, too, the

 spirit that educates itself matures slowly and quietly toward the new form,

   dissolving one particle of the edifice of its previous world after the

  other. This gradual crumbling which did not alter the physiognomy of the

 whole is interrupted by the break of day that, like lightning, all at once

                    reveals the edifice of the new world.

                                    HEGEL

When I write down my thoughts, they do not escape me. This act reminds me of

   my strength, which I forget always. I teach myself in proportion to my

 enslaved thoughts. I strive only to understand the contradiction between my

                            soul and nothingness.

                                LAUTRÉAMONT

Control can never be a means to any practical end... It can never be a means

                to anything but more control... like junk...

                              WILLIAM BURROUGHS

 Sleepers awake. Sleep is separateness: the cave of solitude is the cave of

  dreams, the cave of the passive spectator. To be awake is to participate,

                 carnally and not in fantasy, in the feast.

                               NORMAN O. BROWN

APPENDIX

EXTRACTS FROM: SOME ADVICE CONCERNING GENERALISED SELF-MANAGEMENT

"Never sacrifice a present good to a future good. Enjoy the moment; don't

get into anything which doesn't satisfy your passions right away. Why should

you work today for jam tomorrow, since you will be loaded down with it

anyway, and in fact in the new order you will only have one problem, namely

how to find enough time to get through all the pleasures in store for you?

   Charles Fourier, Some Advice Concerning the Next Social Metamorphosis.

In their failure, the occupations of May 1968 created a confused popular

awareness of the need for change. The universal, feeling that total

transformation is just round the corner must now find its practice: the move

forward to generalised self-management through the setting up of workers'

councils. The point to which consciousness has been brought by revolutionary

high spirits must now become the point of departure.

Today, history is answering the question which Lloyd George asked the

workers, and the old world's servants have been echoing ever since: "You

want to destroy our social organisation, what are you going to put in its

place?" We know the answer now, thanks to the profusion of little Lloyd

Georges who advocate the State dictatorship of the proletariat of their

choice, and then wait for the working class to organise itself in councils,

so that they can dissolve it and elect another one.

Each time the proletariat takes the risk of changing the world, it

rediscovers the memory of history. The reality of the past possibilities of

a society of councils, which has been hidden by the history of the repeated

suppression of such a society, is revealed by the possibility of its

immediate realization. This was made clear to all workers in May; Stalinism

and its Trotskyist turds showed that, although they wouldn't have had the

energy to crush a vigorous council movement, they were still able to hold up

its emergence by sheer deadweight. Nevertheless, the workers' council

movement discovered itself as the necessary resultant of two opposing

forces: the internal logic of the occupations and the repressive logic of

the parties and trade unions. Those who still open their Lenin to find out

what is to be done are sticking their heads in a dustbin.

A great many people rejected any organisation that was not the direct

creation of the proletariat in the process of destroying itself as

proletariat, and this rejection was inseparable from the feeling that a

daily life without dead time was at last possible. In this sense the idea of

workers' councils is the first principle of generalised self-management.

May was an essential step in the long revolution: the individual history of

millions of people, all looking for an authentic life, joining up with the

historical movement of the proletariat fighting against the whole system of

alienation. This spontaneous unity in action, which was the passionate motor

of the occupation movement, can only develop its theory and practice in the

same unity. What was in everyone's heart will soon be in everyone's head. A

lot of people who felt that they "couldn't go on living the same old way,

not even if things were a bit better" can remember what it was like to

really live for a while and to believe that great changes were possible. And

this memory would become a revolutionary force with the help of one thing: a

greater lucidity about the historical construction of free individual

relationships, generalised self-management.

Only the proletariat can create the project of generalised self-management

by refusing to carry on existing as the proletariat. It carries this project

in itself objectively and subjectively. So the first steps will come from

the merging together of its historical battles and the struggle for daily

life; and from the awareness that all its demands are obtainable right away,

hut only if it grants them itself. In this sense the importance of a

revolutionary organisation must be measured from now on by its ability to

dissolve itself into the reality of the society of workers' councils.

Workers' councils constitute a new type of social organisation, one by which

the proletariat will put an end to the proletarianisation of all men.

Generalised self-management is simply the totality according to which the

councils will create a style of life based on permanent liberation, which is

at once individual and collective.

It is clear from the preceding that the project of generalised

self-management must involve as many details as each revolutionary has

desires, and as many revolutionaries as there are people dissatisfied with

their daily life. Spectacular commodity society produces the contradictions

which suppress subjectivity, but this also leads to the refusal which frees

the positivity of subjectivity; in the same way, the formation of councils,

which also arises in the struggle against general oppression, is the basis

for the conditions for a general realization of subjectivity, without any

limits but its own impatience to make history. So generalised

self-management means the ability of workers' councils to historically

realise the imagination.

Without generalised self-management, workers' councils lose all

significance. We must treat as a future bureaucrat, and therefore as a

present enemy, anyone who speaks of workers' councils as economic or social

organisms, anyone who doesn't put them at the centre of daily life: with the

practice which this involves.

One of Fourier's great merits is that he showed us that we must create in

the here-and-now - which means, for us, at the beginning of the general

insurrection - the objective conditions for individual liberation. For

everyone, the beginning of the revolutionary moment must bring an immediate

increase in the pleasure of living: a consciously lived beginning of

totality.

The accelerating rate at which reformism, with its tricontinental bellyache,

is leaving ridiculous little turds behind it (all those little piles of

Maoists, Trotskyists, Guevarists, 'revolutionary' ecologists) shows everyone

what the right, especially socialists and Stalinists, have suspected for a

long time: partial demands contain in themselves the impossibility of a

total change. Rather than fight one reformism and conceal another, the

temptation to turn the old trick inside-out like a bureaucrat's skin has all

the marks of the final solution of the problem of recuperation. This implies

a strategy moving towards general upheaval through more and more frequent

insurrectionary moments; and tactics involving a qualitative break, in which

necessarily partial actions each contain, as their necessary and sufficient

condition, the liquidation of the commodity world. It is time to begin the

positive sabotage of spectacular commodity society. As long as our mass

tactics are based on the law of immediate pleasure, there will be no need to

worry about the consequences.

It's easy to write down a few suggestions which the practice of liberated

workers will soon show the poverty of: inaugurating the realm of

gratuitousness at every opportunity openly during strikes, more or less

clandestinely at other times - by giving the products in factories and

warehouses away to friends and revolutionaries, making presents (radio

transmitters, toys, weapons, all kinds of machines), organizing give-aways

of the goods in department stores; breaking the laws of exchange and

beginning the abolition of wage-labour by collectively appropriating the

products of work, collectively using the machines for personal and

revolutionary purposes; devaluing money by generalised payment strikes

(rent, taxes, hire-purchase instalments, fares etc.); encouraging

everybody's creativity by starting up the production and distribution

sectors, perhaps intermittently, but only under workers' control, and

looking upon this as a necessarily hesitant but perfectable exercise;

abolishing hierarchies and the spirit of sacrifice, by treating bosses (and

union bosses) as they deserve, and rejecting militantism; acting together

everywhere against all separations; getting the theory out of every

practice, and vice versa by the production of handouts, posters, songs, etc.

The proletariat has already shown that it knows how to answer the oppressive

complexity of capitalist and 'socialist' states with the simplicity of

organisation managed directly by everyone and for everyone. In our times,

the problems of survival are only asked on condition that they can never be

solved; on the other hand, the problems of history which is to be lived are

stated clearly in the project of workers' councils, at once as positivity

and as negativity; in other words as the basis of a unitary-passionate

society, and as anti-State.

Because they exercise no power separate from the decision of their members,

workers' councils cannot tolerate any power other than their own. That's why

advocating universal demonstrations against the State won't mean the

premature creation of councils. Without absolute power in their own area,

and separated from generalised self-management, councils would necessarily

be empty of content and ready to mess around with all kinds of ideology.

Today, the only forces lucid enough to respond to the history that is made

with the history that is ready to be made will be revolutionary

organisations which can develop, in the project of workers' councils, an

adequate awareness of who are enemies and who are allies. An important

aspect of this struggle has already appeared before our eyes: dual power. In

factories, offices, streets, houses, barracks, and schools a new reality is

materialising: contempt must develop until it reaches its logical

conclusion: the concerted initiative of workers must discover that the

bosses are not only contemptible but also useless and, what is more, can be

liquidated without any ill effects.

Recent history will soon come to be seen by both revolutionaries and bosses

in terms of a single alternative; generalised self-management or

insurrectionary chaos; the new society of abundance or "things fall apart",

terrorism, looting, repression. Duel-power situations already illustrate

this choice. Coherence demands that the paralysis and destruction of all

forms of government must not be distinct from the construction of councils;

if the enemy have any sense at all they will have to adapt to the fact that

this new organisation of daily relationships is all that will be able to

stop the spread of what an American police specialist has already called

"our nightmare": little rebel commandos bursting out of subway entrances,

shooting from the rooftops, using the ability and infinite resources of the

urban guerilla to kill policemen, liquidate authority's servants, fan up

riots, destroy the economy. But it is not our job to save the bosses against

their will. All we have to do is prepare councils and make sure that they

can defend themselves by all possible means. In a play by Lope de Vega some

villagers kill a despotic royal official; when they are hauled before

investigating magistrates all that the villagers will say under examination

is the name of the village, Fuenteovejuna. The only thing wrong with the

Fuenteovejuna plan, beloved of Asturian miners, is that it echoes too much

of terrorism and banditry. Generalised self-management will be our

Fuenteovejuna. It is not enough for a collective action to avoid repression

(imagine the impotence of the forces of law and order if the bank clerks who

occupied their banks had appropriated the funds), it must also and in the

same movement lead towards a greater revolutionary coherence. Workers'

councils are order in the face of the decomposition of the State, challenged

in its form by the rise of regionalism and in its principle by sectoral

demands. The police can only answer its questions with lists of their

fatalities. Only workers' councils offer a definitive answer. What will put

a stop to looting? The organization of distribution, and the end of

commodity exchange. What will prevent sabotage and waste? The appropriation

of machines by the creativity of the collective. What will put an end to

explosions of anger and violence? The abolition of the proletariat by means

of the collective justification for our construction of daily life. The only

justification for our struggle is the immediate satisfaction of this

project: which is whatever defines us immediately.

Generalised self-management will have only one source of support: the

exhilaration of universal freedom. This is quite enough to make us

absolutely certain about some preliminary matters, which our revolutionary

organisations will have to get straight. Likewise, their practice will

already involve the experience of direct democracy. This will allow us to

pay more attention to certain slogans. For example, "All power to the

general assembly" implies that whatever escapes the direct control of the

autonomous assembly will recreate, in mediated forms, all the autonomous

varieties of oppression. The whole assembly with all its tendencies must be

present through its representatives at the moment when decisions are made.

Even if the destruction of the State prevents a revival of the farce of the

Supreme Soviet, we must still make sure that our organisation is so simple

that no neo-bureaucracy can possibly arise. But the complexity of

communication techniques (which might appear to be a pretext for the

survival or return of specialists) is just what makes possible the

continuous control of delegates by the base - the

confirmation/correction/rejection of their decisions at all levels. So base

groups must always have teleprinters, televisions, etc.: their ubiquity must

be realised.

The logic of the commodity system, sustained by alienated practice, must be

confronted by the social logic of desires and its immediate practice. As the

transformation of the world becomes identified with the construction of

life, necessary work will disappear in the pleasure of History-for-itself.

To affirm that the councils' organisation of distribution and production

will prevent looting and wholesale destruction of machinery and stores, is

to continue to define oneself solely in terms of the anti-State. The

councils, as the organisation of the new society, will do away with all

remaining separations by their collective politics of desire. Wage-labour

can be ended the moment the councils start functioning - the moment the

"equipment and supplies" section of each council has organized production

and distribution along the lines desired by the full assembly. At this

point, in homage to the best part of Bolshevik foresight, urinals built of

solid gold and silver can be built, and baptised "lenins".

One cannot, as Fourier did, rely exclusively on the. magnetic quality of the

first communes; but, at the same time, one cannot afford to underestimate

the power to seduce exercised by every attempt at authentic liberation. The

self-defence of the councils could be summed up by the maxim: "Armed truth

is revolutionary".

   (Extracts from a translation by Chris Whitbread of "Avis aux clvilisés

       relativement a l'autogestion généralisée" by Raoul Vaneigem in

           Internationale Situationniste no. 12, September 1969.)

The upholders of the profit hierarchy,

of social and bourgeois institutions

who never worked

but accumulated for thousands of years, bit by bit, the stolen goods,

and keep them holed up in certain caves of powers defended by all humanity,

with a small number of exceptions,

will be forced to deploy their energy

and therefore fight

and they will be incapable of not fighting

for it's their eternal cremation which is coming at the end of the war, this

apocalyptic war coming on.

                               ANTONIN ARTAUD

A FOOTNOTE ON PRACTICAL TRUTH

Raoul Vaneigem joined the Situationist International in 1961 and immediately

shared and developed its most extreme positions. The S.I. of the years 1961

to 1964, an important period for the S.I. and the ideas of the modern

revolution, was heavily marked by him, more perhaps than by any other. This

period saw the general formulation of the most total revolutionary program.

The revolution, the return of which the Situationists announced, was then

completely absent. A certain generality and abstraction, and the occasional

lyrical excess, found in The Revolution of Everyday Life and other texts of

the time, were the inevitable products of these precise conditions, and were

both justified and excellent. Modern history followed the course foreseen:

the Situationists entered with their epoch the increasingly concrete

struggles which continue to develop. Vaneigem was already not there.

Today [1975], the S.I. has, as far as we know, a membership of between two

and four. The only major text of the S.I. In five years is The Real Break in

the International (1972) by Debord and Sanguinetti, which has a good

critique of the contemplative attitude around and within the S.I. (the

ideology of situationism), but remains silent on the vital issues of

organisational practice, and the precise relationship of revolutionary

organisations to present historical struggles. (There is a very poor

translation available, called The Veritable Split in the International.)

The S.I. reached theoretical maturity in 1966 with the completion of the

major works by Debord and Vaneigem, The Society of the Spectacle and The

Revolution of Everyday Life; and the movement of occupations in May 1968 can

now be seen as the conclusion of the S.I.'s long practical research, without

being its supersession. The more important the objective place of the S.I.

in present history became, the more perilous its heritage for each member to

bear. The danger of spectacular integration as one more novelty was very

real. "An inevitable part of the historical success of the S.I. led it in

turn to be contemplated, and through such contemplation the uncompromising

critique of everything that exists came to be positively appreciated by an

everbroadening sector of impotence that had become pro-revolutionary." (Real

Break, thesis 22). Throughout history, the S.I. had always fought followers

and admirers as the inevitable bearers of confusion and hierarchy; in a

similar way as the Mediaeval hermetic groups seeking techniques of

liberation. In 1964 the S.I. members stated that "we absolutely refuse

disciples. We are only interested in participation at the highest level; and

we let loose upon the world those who are their own masters." (Le

Questionnaire, I.S. no. 9). It is also important that "Situationists have no

monopoly to defend or reward to count on," as Debord said in 1969 (I.S. no.

12, page 114).

Enthusiastic supporters of the S.I. had existed since 1960, but the first

significant "pro-situationists" because they were actually within the S.I. -

were the Garnautins, excluded soon after the Strasbourg scandal in 1966 (see

Ten Days That Shook The University by the S.I.). By this time, the era of

S.I. development when the megalomaniac tone was adopted as a reaction to

general incomprehension and hostility had passed. Its legacy was an absurd

Situationist prestige which was usually a stance to hide deficiencies, an

inability to experiment and take risks. This is not to say that there were

some for whom prestige was not well deserved.

But Vaneigem wanted to make of the S.I. not only a revolutionary

organisation, but one of sublime, even absolute, excellence. ("On the level

of the group, the purification of the centre and the elimination of residues

now seem to be completed... In the same way as God formed the reference

point of past unitary society, we are preparing to create the central

reference point of a unitary society bow possible." From The Totality for

Kids by Vaneigem, 1963.) His programme was formulated only to spare himself

all the fatigues and little historlcal risks of its realisation. Since the

goal is total, it's only envisioned in a pure present: it is already here as

a whole, or else it remains purely inaccessable. He remained in the S.I.,

propped up on his past authentic participation and the ever receding promise

of future accomplishment. He behaved as if intersubjective coherence would

one day fall fully grown from the sky on the Situationists' shoulders; but

it never did. While the language used became more and more wooden, the mass

of admirers flocked to "the image of extreme heroes gathered together in a

triumphant community". In this atmosphere, the tactical debate of 1969-70

got bogged down in boredom and bitterness, with numerous splits and

exclusions taking place. Vaneigem resigned in 1970.

In his Theses on 0rganisation (April 1968), Debord had said: "The S.I. must

now prove its effectiveness in an ulterior stage of revolutionary activity -

or else disappear." Well, to all intents and purposes, it has disappeared.

It had set itself precise tasks in a precise period, and was indeed an

historical phenomenon, in spite of the pro-situationist myth of an ideal

model revolutionary organisation; and its achievements have been vast. May

the Situationists cease to be admired as if they were superior to their

time; and may the epoch be terrified by admiring itself for what it is.

A number of groups around the world claim to continue - even to supersede -

the project begun by the S.I.; many have been unable to lift themselves

clear of the pro-situationist quagmire. Nonetheless, "the symptoms of

revolutionary crisis are accumulating by the thousand, and their seriousness

is such that the spectacle is now obliged to talk about its own ruin." (Real

Break, thesis lO). "What we have said about art, the proletariat, urbanism

and the spectacle is blared out everywhere minus the essential" (Vaneigem,

1970).

The Revolution of Everyday Life has entered a current of agitation which

continues. Its importance should escape no-one, for no-one, not even

Vaneigem, will be able to escape its conclusions.

We translated this book in 1972. The first few chapters had already appeared

in English as pamphlets, and needed little alteration; rough drafts of later

sections have travelled great distances and provided potent graffiti for

walls and. ephemera from the turbulent and expanding currents of

insurrection and agitation. We have used, with minor alterations, Chris

Gray's translations of Chapter XVIII (Section 4) and Chapter XXIII. The

former first appeared in King Mob Echo as Desolation Row (1968); both are

now included in his recent anthology Leaving The 20th Century (wherein is

included our translation of Chapter 5 of Debord's Society of the Spectacle).

It's time we united heads, hearts and bodies to render obsolete de Sade's

definition of society as "a collection of people whom boredom brings

together and stupidity modifies". It goes without saying that we have no

interests in the opinions of professional commentators or guardians of the

Holy Situationist Grail. If they remain satisfied with their roles, then the

book is beyond their comprehension. "To those who can't keep up with us we

prefer those who reject us impatiently because our language isn't yet

authentic poetry, that is, the free construction of daily life."

                               JOHN FULLERTON

                               PAUL SIEVEKING

The Revolution of Everyday Life

took the side of supersession by inciting proletarians to seize hold of the

theory drawn from what is lived and not lived every day; but the delay in

its insurrectionary use exposes it to a whole range of falsifications. The

diversity of its ideologists extend from subjectivists to nihilists, via

communitarians and apolitical hedonists. Consciousness without use can only

justify itself as a used-up consciousness. The best that the subjective

expression of the Situationist project was able to give during the

preparation for May 1968 and in understanding the new forms of exploitation

has since become the worst in intellectual reading. Radical theory belongs

to whoever improves on it. The evidence of the Traité's major theses must

now manifest itself in the hands of its anti-readers through concrete

results. Theory must bring violence to where violence already is.

(From Toast to the Revolutionary Workers - Postscript to the Traité by Raoul

                          Vaneigem, October 1972.)

                          [originally published by

                      PRACTICAL PARADISE PUBLICATIONS

and printed (extremely badly) by the community press, St.Pauls Road, London]

                   Do what you will this world's a fiction

                      And is made up of contradiction.

                                WILLIAM BLAKE

 We are not asking you to be humble or proud... Do not forget that you are a

  nocturnal amalgamation of caves, forests, marshes, red rivers, populated

 with huge and fabulous bbeasts who devour each other. It's nothing to show

                                 off about.

                                JEAN COCTEAU

                                    FIN?

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