I’ll give a brief discussion of Vaneigem’s account of power (as constraint, as mediation, as seduction) later, but for now a brief overview of Vaneigem’s vision of revolution. While acknowledging that The Revolution of Everyday Life, although the established English title for the book, is not a literal translation of Vaneigem’s title (Traite de savoir-faire a l’usage des jeunes generations [diacritics will be added]), which his translator (Donald Nicholson-Smith) suggests could be translated "The Facts of Life for Younger Readers," it points to what, I think, we read this book for---a sense of the Situationist vision of revolution.
Vaneigem sees the prima materia of revolution as the modern epidemic of “ survival sickness” (an idea derived from Kierkegaard’s “sickness unto death”) the sense that life is not worth living, having been drained of (false) religious transcendence by modern secularization, which makes the petty and stifling nature of everyday life all the more unbearable. The rise of consumer society exacerbates the misery:
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 men confined with increasing difficulty solely to the status of consumers” (162).
In Chapter Eighteen: “Spurious Opposition,” Vaneigem warns that while 'refusal' (which is a bit of jargon that I'll unpack in a later post) is ubiquitous in human history, it often takes forms that lead nowhere. He criticizes liberalism and socialism (and in a more cursory fashion Marxism and fascism) as ideologies that channel refusal into partial and hence self-defeating forms. Liberalism defends individual freedom in the abstract, but negates it in practice via the competitive struggle in the marketplace, where “one person’s liberty begins where the other’s ends.” Liberalism must therefore rely on the State and police to maintain the order and repression upon which the system depends. Socialism may eliminate economic competition as interference in individual freedom, but maintains a bureaucratic/managerial system that denies individual self-expression to workers. Vaneigem emphasizes that no political project that entails "renunciation" of any sort can be considered revolutionary.
The only truly revolutionary political aspiration is creation of a society that allows for the “total self realization” of each individual as a fully human person. In Chapter Twenty, Vaneigem outlines three essential elements of this true “revolution of everyday life.”
The first vital revolutionary element is creativity, which Vaneigem feels is a human universal, but always repressed (“imprisoned”) by hierarchical power, forced to take the form only of dreams. Still, “nobody, no matter how alienated, is without (or unaware of) an irreducible core of creativity, a camera obscura safe from intrusion fro lies and constraints”(191). The revolutionary use of creativity is to “disclose slave consciousness, consciousness of impotence, by releasing creativity’s magnetic power,” and thus to use “the laboratory of individual creativity” to transmute “the basest metals of daily life into gold through a revolutionary alchemy” (193).
This revolutionary alchemy also relies on spontaneity, “the true mode of being of individual creativity, creativity’s initial immaculate form.” Vaneigem warns here against spurious forms of spontaneity that spring from “internalized restraints” or become “co-opted” by the spectacle.”
“For me spontaneity is immediate experience, consciousness of a lived immediacy threatened on all sides yet not as yet alienated, not yet relegated to inauthenticity” “Consciousness of necessity is always what alienates us” (195). When being truly spontaneous, we “have the clear conviction that reality excepts us from necessity” (195)
Creativity, though equitably distributed to all humans, “only finds direct, spontaneous expression on specific occasions,” which Vaneigem calls “pre-revolutionary moments” that are sources of “the poetry that changes life and transforms the world” (197). “The task of a coherent revolutionary group, far from being the creation of a new type of conditioning, is to establish protected areas where the intensity of conditioning tends towards zero.” (199).
Regarding “poetry” (the third element in the revolution of everyday life), Vaneigem explains it consists of “the act which brings new realities into being, the act which reverses the perspective” (200). It is what makes true creative spontaneity possible.
“The new artists of the future, constructors of situations to be lived, will undoubtedly have immediacy as their most succinct—through also their most radical demand.” (194)
I remember this last quote from the earlier translation of Vaneigem as “The work of the artist in the future will be the creation of a truly spontaneous life,” which is less wordy, but perhaps should be modified to make it clear that by “life” here Vaneigem is speaking of the creation of a lived-space that makes possible for its occupants to recognize themselves as spontaneous, creative, fully human beings.
This brief synopsis, provisional and partial as it is, raises interesting questions about the relationship between Vaneigem’s perspective and Cornelius Castoriadis’ work on autonomy/creativity (published in Socialisme ou Barbarie prior to TROEL, I think) and Lefebvre’s notion of “lived space” in the (later) Production of Space. When reading Vaneigem’s discussion of the making of situations, I couldn’t help but think of Lefebvre’s “Change Life! Change Society! These phrases mean nothing without the production of an appropriate space” (to quote from memory). The Situationists accused Lefebvre of ripping off their ideas in the wake of 1968—I will have to see who has written on their relationship—there is probably new work since the last time I searched.
More to come…..
The photo is of Vaneigem, taken very recently. For more, see pages at notbored.org and nothingness.org.
