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The Revolution A/Everyday Life Raoul Vaneigem The Revolution ifEveryday Life Translatedby Donald Nicholson-Smith Rebel Press 2001 Contents The Revolution ifEveryday .lift is a translation from French of Traitl de Translator's preface, 5 savoir-vivre It lusage des jeunes glnerations, which was first published by Author's preface to the first French paperback edition, 7 Gallimard in 1961. Introduction; Vaneigem's preface to the first French paperback edition was published by Part one: Power's perspective Gallimard in 1992. 1 The insignificant signified, 21 The impossibility of participation: power as sum This translation was first published in 1983 jointb of constraints Left Bank Books and Rebel Press. 2 Humiliation, 29 3 Isolation, 38 Second, revised edition published in 1994 by 4 Suffering, Left Bank Books and Rebel Press. 5 The decline and fall ofwork, 52 6 Decompression and the third force, 57 Reprinted 2001 by Rebel Press. The impossibility of communication: power as Translation © 1983, 1993 Donald Nicholson-Smith universal mediation (No copyright claims will be made against publishers of 7 The age of happiness, 67 non-profit editions) 8 Exchange and gift, 75 9 Technology and its mediated use, 83 ISBN 0994606101 7 10 Down quantity street, 88 11 Mediated abstraction, abstracted mediation, 94 The impossibility of realisation: power as sum Printed by of seductions Aldgate Press 12 Sacrifice, 107 Units 5 & 6 13 Separation, 117 Gunthorpe Street Workshops 14 The organisation of appearances, 123 3 Gunthorpe Street 15 Roles, 131 London E1 7RQ 16 The fascination oftime, 151 Cover design bv N Westin Survival and false opposition to it 17 Survival sickness, 159 18 Spurious opposition, 164 Transl.ator's preface Part two: Reversal of perspective 19 Reversal of perspective, 185 THIS TRANSLATION OF Raoul Vaneigem's Traite de savoir-faire a Creativity, spontaneity and poetry, 190 20 l'usage des jeunes generations was done a few years ago at the suggestion of Masters without slaves, 21 204 Free Life Editions, New York. Although Free Life ceased all publication The space-time of lived experience and the 22 before the book could be brought out, I would like to thank them for rectification of the past, 220 sponsoring the project and for assisting me in a variety ofways while work The unitary triad: self-realisation, 23 was in progress. communication, participation, 236 I am also indebted to earlier translators ofall or parts ofthe Traiti, among The interworld and the new innocence, 267 24 them John Fullerton and Paul Sieveking, who in 1972 published the only You won't fuck with us much longer!, 271 25 full-length version that I know of(London: Practical Paradise Publications). I have stolen shamelessly from all such precursors, and I am especially A toast to retJolutionary workers, 275 obliged to CW, CG and BE. Thanks are due too, for various forms of essential aid, to PL and YR in Paris; to RE and TJC in the United States; and to Rebel Press in London. I must also express my gratitude to Raoul Vaneigem, who authorised the translation and answered all my queries without betraying the slightest sign offatigue. The RetlOlution ofEveryday Lift is not a title I care for; I would have preferred The Rudiments ofSavoir-Vivre: A Guidefor Young Persons Recently Establishedin the World, or more simply The Facts ofLiftfor Younger Readers. The publishers are doubtless right, however, in preferring not to depart from the title by which the work has by now become known to the English-speak­ ing public. I have obstinately resisted the well-intentioned urgings of many people that I should overstep the role of translator and become an editor as well, adding footnotes, glosses, biographical sketches of 'obscure personages', etc, etc. Nobody, I am afraid, has persuaded me of the need for any such spoonfeeding of the reader. I wish it were not necessary to state (though I am quite sure it is) that my part in the publication of this book does not imply my adherence to 6 Translator's preface any or all ofits theses, much less my affiliation with any real or conjectured, 'Vaneigemist' or 'Debordist', post-, pro-, crypto-, neo- (or, for that matter, Prefoce to the first French paperback edition1 anti-) situationist tendency or clique. The ardent student ofthe Situationist International, who is not such a rara avis as common sense might lead one The everyday eternity oflife to expect, may readily ascertain that I was expelled from that organisation in 1967. That parting of the ways seemed to me then - and still seems to me thoroughly justified on both sides. Traite de savoir-vivre it l'usage des jeunes generations heralded the It is nonetheless my earnest hope that this new edition ofVaneigem's emergence of a radically new era from the bosom of a waning world. book will serve both to enlighten another 'younger generation' and, With the quickening of the current that has for a short while now been increasing the work's warts-and-all accessibility to English-language readers, carrying beings and things along, the Traite has grown, so to speak, ever militate against those absurd hagiographical impulses which mystify the more clairvoyant. Situationist International's doughty contributions instead ofrescuing them stratified past still clung to by those who grow old with time is ever from the clutches ofenemies and pillagers with a shared interest in consign­ more easy to distinguish from the alluvia, timeless in their fertility, left by ing them to oblivion. others who awake to themselves (or at least strive to) every day. I should like to dedicate this translation to Cathy Pozzo di Borgo. For me, these are two moments ofa single fluctuating existence in which the present is continually divesting itself of its old forms. Donald Nicholson-Smith A book that seeks to interpret its time can do no more than bear witness October 1982 to a history imprecise in its becoming; a book that wreaks change on its time cannot fail to sow the seeds of change in the field of future transfor­ mations. If the Traite has something of both, it owes this to its radical bias, Translator's note to the second Rebel Press/Left Bank edition to the preponderance in it ofthat 'self' which is in the world without being of the world, that 'self' whose emancipation is a sine qua non for anyone I HAVE TAKEN this opportunitytQl!l~kl!-a-considerable number of who has discovered that learning to live is not the same thing as learning to revisions to the translation. My thanks to MNR - and, once again, to survive. Rebel Press. In the early 19608 I conjectured that the examination of my own subjectivity, far from constituting an isolated activity, would resonate with D.N-S. other, like endeavours; and that if this examination was in tune with the September 1993 times, it would in some way modulate those times in harmony with our desires. To extend the ennui that textured my own everyday existence to a few others, and to enlist them in the dismal task of denouncing its causes, was not a little presumptuous on my part. But this consideration only increased the allure of betting on my presentiment that a passion for life was on the increase, a passion the impossibility of defining which contrasted dramati­ 8 Preface to the first French paperback edition Preface to the first French paperback edition 9 cally with the acuteness ofthe criticism then being directed at the conditions armour tor themselves at the verbal of militant terrorism. Later still ranged against it.2 without ever abandoning their incendiary rhetoric) they became career In 1968 the barrier of prevailing sensibilities was brutally shattered by bureaucrats and covered themselves with glory as cogs in the apparat the vivisection ofsurvival-a veritable alchemical opus nigrum. Thirty years of State and marketplace. on, consciousness is slowly opening itself up to a reversal of perspective in {> the world ceases to be apprehended as prey to a negative and begins instead to be ordered on the basis of a new positivity, on In the 1960s a mutation ofthe economy took hold whose effects are the basis of the recognition and expansion of the living forces within it. increasingly evident today. With the benefit of hindsight I can now see Violence has changed its meaning. Not that much more easily how I was able to take advantage, in effect, of a kind of offighting exploitation, boredom, poverty and death: the interregnum during which the old authority was losing its grip but the resolved no longer to fight them with the weapons ofexploitation, boredom, new had still not thoroughly consolidated its power-to rescue subjectivity poverty and death. For the first victim of any such struggle is anyone who general opprobrium which then covered it and to propose, as the engages in it full of contempt for their own life. Suicidal behaviour is basis ofa projected society, an enjoyment ofselfthat proclaimed itselfone with naturally an integral part of a system that battens on the dilapidation of enjoyment ofthe world. human nature as ofnature tout court. To begin with there were three or four ofus who partook of, and shared ancient cry "Death to the Exploiters" no longer echoes through amongst us, the passion for'constructing situations'. The way each culti­ the streets, it is because it has given way to another cry, one harking back vated this passion at that time depended on each's goals for his own to childhood and issuing from a passion which, though more serene, is no existence, but it has lost nothing of its urgency, as witness both the less tenacious.
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