Anarchy: a journal of desire armed. #39, Winter '94.
ESSAYS

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                 The Revolution of Everyday Life
                        by Raoul Vaneigem
                 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 revolution-
ary 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 in 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 precip-
itate 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 behavior. 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 organiza-
tion, 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 collec-
tive 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 perspec-
tive 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 kowtowing 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, paradoxi-
cally 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 de-
vouring 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 carica-
turing 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
tiderace 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 con-
sequently 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 ali 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 cyberne-
tician 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 des-
troyed 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? lt 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 interferenc-
es 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 con-
sumption. 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
Ch=82mal=82 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 Ch=82mal=82, there-
fore, the problem is how to rationalize exchange, how to make it
fair. The task of socialism, on this view, is to correct capital-
ism, 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 renoun-
ced 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 renuncia-
tions 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 dimen-
sion? 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 resis-
tance. lt may be applied to philosophy, where ontology bears
witness to the renunciation of being-as-becoming. lt 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. lt may be applied to all the dreams and
desires stolen, violated and twisted beyond recognition by
conditioning. To the basically radical nature of our spontane-
ous 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 Poincar=82, Roosevelt, de Valera, Stalin; never so
much as a mention of Geneva or Locarno, Abyssinia, Spain, China,
Japan, the Prince affair, Violette Nozi=82re....'' 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 unlivable.

                               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=FEthough
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 proletari-
at 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 revo-
lutionary ``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
rancor.

 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 exis-
tence. 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=20
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 en-
slaves 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 op-
pression, 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 adapta-
tion 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 politi-
cians 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.

                                4

 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 transcen-
dence 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 impossi-
ble: 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 Pens=82es 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,
Mallarm=82'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 degenera-
tion, 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; Mallarm=82 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 tenden-
cies. 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 impossibili-
ty 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 perspec-
tive, the exact point where movement, dialectics and time no longer
exist? Noon and eternity of the great refusal. Before it, the po-
groms; 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 conclu-
sion, 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 humor 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. lt 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 revitaliza-
tion 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 individu-
al 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 surreal-
ism 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 Lautr=82amont, all they
could do then was to write so much - and so well - about them as to win
for their heroes the honor 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!

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 The complete text of the Left Bank/Rebel Press edition of Raoul
Vaneigem's Revolution of Everyday Life is still out of print. We
hope to have copies of the upcoming new edition available from
C.A.L. (POB 1446, Columbia, MO. 65205-1446) for $12.00 postpaid
later this winter.


