Revolution of Everyday Life

http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/The Situationist International Text Library An ongoing project of uploading pieces of the wealth of Situationist-related literature. Entire books, lengthy articles, excerpts from the journals Potlatch and Internationale Situationniste, and newspaper articles are just a few of the files to be found here.

"the revolution of everyday life" is absolutely beyond words, and for that very reason absolutely immune to all assimilation. it captures the main problem with life that we are all (perhaps even the most stupid of us) aware of but cannot quite put our finger on: a lingering emptiness, a 'nothing' where a 'something' should be. this is the magic of vaneigem's prose. he knows the real cause of it, and rightfully accuses us of ignoring and dawdling for so long: the social order and the alienation it causes. he advocates fierce rebellion, joyful suicide, above all collective revolution as an end to all isolation an ennui. vaneigem is not only a political revolutionary: he is a socioliogist, a great poet, a man of words and action. (although i'm sure he would hate me for calling him any of those things.) ultimately, he is himself, and this should be enough for us to change our lives completely. vaneigem wants no following, no idolatry; he wants what everyone really wants, change. vache, cravan, all the great dada and surrealist rebels are quoted at length in this impassioned tome which will only grow more and more important with age-actually, it really doesn't age. it is the NOW sitting in front of our eyes at every moment of every day embodied in a book. everyone in the world should read this book.

Building on the genius of Marx, Nietzsche and others, Vaneigem takes apart the complex spectacle of consumer society with the goal in mind of nothing short of every human being's self-realization. He's far more realistic than other thinkers, and has a firm grasp on how our everyday lives reflect and affect our social surroundings. His writing style is poetic and elegant, dense but never technical and dry. Roughly speaking, his hope lies in the subjectivity and uniqueness of every individual, living everyday life spontaneously and artistically, with the end in mind that we can all eventually liberate our individual selves and each other from social constraints and social objectification/commoditization. It's a revolution of love, not of violence -- of protest for the innocence and beauty of the human spirit. Although written in the late 1960's, his description only seems more accurate today, when the nihilism of money and consumer society are worse than ever. A must-read for any student of personal, emotional REAL LIFE ITSELF, this book has deeply strengthened my faith in philosophy and in the possibility for making society work in a healthier, saner and happier way.

My personal copy of this book is dog-eared, underlined, highlighted and, by now, largely taped together. It captures the spirit of the global counter culture movement of the late 60's but is oddly, more relevant now than 30 years ago. The poststructuralists tell us that criticism is impossible, subversion futile, and revolution a childish and reactionary dream. But these are the defeatest rationalizations of yuppie academics with middle class asperations of a slow comfortable death. If they had the nerve to write graffiti it would read 'If you can't beat them join them'. My favorite quote from the book: 'Some of us have fallen in love with the pleasure of loving without reserve - passionately enough to offer our love the magnificent bed of a revolution.' This book should be read in tandem with Guy Debord's 'Society of the Spectacle', published the same year. It will help clarify many of Debord's theses as well as provide an overview of Situationist thought.