Address to the Living — Chapter 3, Part 5 : Genesis of Humanity: From Intellectual Labor to Relaxed Knowledge

By Raoul Vaneigem (1989)

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Untitled Anarchism Address to the Living Chapter 3, Part 5

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(1934 - )

Raoul Vaneigem (Dutch pronunciation: [raːˈul vɑnˈɛi̯ɣəm]; born 21 March 1934) is a Belgian writer known for his 1967 book The Revolution of Everyday Life. He was born in Lessines (Hainaut, Belgium) and studied romance philology at the Free University of Brussels (now split into the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel) from 1952 to 1956. He was a member of the Situationist International from 1961 to 1970. He currently resides in Belgium and is the father of four children. (From: Wikipedia.org.)


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Chapter 3, Part 5

From Intellectual Labor to Relaxed Knowledge

Separate thought has only ever produced an intelligence of self-denying life.

From the combined triumphs of physics, chemistry, medicine, math, astronautics, biology, architecture, psychology, and sociology has not so much come happiness, but oppression and money. The sciences have propagated well-being throughout the world within the limits of supply and demand, taking human activity and pressing it back into market activity.

We have gotten a lot of hell for incriminating progress and the other side of its coin from those who are proud of having exploited and raped nature down to the atom, from those who tear an energy of death from a nucleus of life, an energy quite useful for illuminating our chanty-houses and healing the cancer that nuclear pollution causes. What kind of a favor can we expect from a “progress” that is brought about by a commodity process that is based on the pillage of everything living?

A Science of Exploiting Men and Nature

How can we be satisfied with a peace that only keeps war at bay as long as doing so satisfies mercantile interests?

How can we be content with a peaceful knowledge that the mere whiff of the scent of profits makes spin about in the opposite direction? Above all, how can we tolerate that creativity makes its inventions by following a thread of pleasures and then gets cut off with the knife of marketability? Electrical ampules, useless to free energies; so many patents bought from the inventors only to be destroyed; these are only the visible parts of a terror which is held aloft by a knowledge that is no longer secret but is now inherent in the secret reality of desires. Will creation, seeking out its poets, have to find instead only the pocket-calculators of cost price?

Reality Falsified

The economy has rearranged the universe according to its perspective; it has imposed its particular meaning on every eye, on thought, on gestures, on the spoken word, on the sensations — but its power isn’t so absolute that it prevents us from perceiving the part played by inviolate nature, outside its Medusa’s gaze.

A reality has been given to us as though it were the only one that existed, and still, in its rudimentary material and spiritual duality, it is only the reality fabricated by the work of exploiting nature, stretching all the way to the mechanical conditioning of the body. Its inhumanity had to be cut off in a scandalous way from the humanist pretensions that it produced in order that people might at last turn away from an abstract knowledge, and begin to try to come face to face with their desires. I have too much to make of the earth and of my life, hour by hour, to preoccupy myself anymore with the speculations that take the world to a place I don’t want it to go to. The real science we have to create is the science of self-enjoyment, hic nunc et semper[4].

The Wall of Separate Knowledge, Or the Hopelessness of Science

Knowledge has found itself to be separated from life as the producer of its desires, of the spirit of the body, and of the intellectual labor of manual labor. Thought has had nothing to get to know but abstract thought and abstract people, empty forms which concrete individuals do not enter into without emptying themselves. The thought of the economic era has spun in place for 10 thousand years, walled into a circle which fences off the reality of desires and of natural freeness.

A thought that excludes and denies life only moves forward by denying itself and excluding itself. The universal library of ideas has based its diversity on a constant banality wherein the old dresses itself up as the new, and the critical spirit disguises itself as a new conformism.

The assault on theology made by philosophy, its rebellious servant, translates the preeminence of the earthly economy onto its celestial representation, like the decline of the sacred and the victory of desacralized desires tell the story of the end of the agrarian structures and the conquest of the world by commodity modernity. Nothing really changes except the form of this invariable oppression.

Every time intellectuality has clarified the project of human emancipation, it has obscured it just as soon by taking the part of the spirit-mind over the chaos of matter — the dominion of mental inhibitions over the impulses of the body. From the beginning, every attempt at demystification has failed, disenchanted; they could feel early on that they were taking down one lie just to put up another.

The drama of separate thought is that it is nothing without the body, and yet it treats the body as if it was worthless to it. We know at what point religion got the last word in on the philosophies that supplanted it — at the very point where ideas became powerless to change life; and that was where it announced that fear and the consolation of dying was the final truth.

The feeling that one has a life to create has remained foreign to philosophy too, and foreign as much to the ideologies and the sciences as to the theologies. We know why intelligence has so often sparkled as soon as one comes to a dead-end: thinkers exorcize, by explaining things and beings, their desperately unexplored lives because they weren’t reducible to concepts. The fables of the gods, of heaven, of pure spirit, have been the object of more scrupulous study than has been the existence of human beings born on this earth. There’s no mystery of life, only a supposed “mystery” held up by work, which denies life and presses it down into a dark night were impulses become frightening monsters.

Doubtless, we should rejoice today that there is a knowledge being formed which is more focused on nature and on the body, but so much knowledge, though useful to life, is no less useless in the individual approach to the destiny one must create for oneself, and remains in the hands of people more concerned with prestige and business than they are impassioned by the alchemy of the original libido, through the transmutation of human needs.

It is a happy thing that the bankruptcy of power has brought with it a democratization of knowledge. Assuredly, culture is debited and paid off in installments, adjusted according to promotional sales. What is paid for only very slightly ever enters into the moments of happiness that we create.

On the other hand, what a wealth there is in the “city of comfort”, the Capernaum of the sciences, in the warehouses of separate thought; what a passionate curiosity will be provoked one day when people go through the accumulated bric-a-brac, encompassing and utilizing it in their approach to their pleasures.

Allergic to a Certain Knowledge

The inflation of abstract knowledge sends the knowledgeable away, both those who know everything about the world and nothing about themselves, as well as those ignorant ones who have everything to learn about their desires and cannot learn about them except through repressing them.

In the 1980s we saw new generations getting a kind of glory out of their ignorance and lack of culture, to the great chagrin of intellectuals carved from the rock of journalistic erudition. And didn’t it become their goal to receive nothing, since that was better than getting only a knowledge stripped of its use-value which served only as coin for making exchanges in the pointless transactions of authority and profits? If it was terribly despicable to have to educate oneself in order to earn money and honors, ridiculousness was added to contempt as soon as the compensation was neither guaranteed nor worth anything anymore.

But no matter how deplorable their ignorance, they happened also to end up clarifying the refusal of a knowledge imposed from without, distributed with compassionate looks in the name of the sovereign pontiffs, Marx, Freud, and whoever else. It was also a rejection of the economic criteria that hierarchized knowledge according to the demands of a job market, and of the servile attitude that comes from the degradation of creativity when it is made to go work some job.

Everyone can see much more clearly now to what point knowledge is whitewashed and people brainwashed in a system of social integration where everything ends up undertaken out of duty and not out of pleasure. If school-kids endure so much pain in order to learn and have to undergo whippings, imprecations, prayers, and seduction by power, it’s only because the exigencies of work and the effort that is required by the game of a awakened and marveling curiosity have nothing in common. As long as the science of education is based on the lucrative morality of work and not on the enjoyments that are the source of creation, the children who build sumptuous palaces with sand, earth, boards, cards and dreams, will reach adulthood and, with all the most expensive materials available to them as adults, will never build anything but cities and habitats in the form of barracks, factories, and old folks’ homes. And this is not just some small aberration of their education, but the natural result of the fact that children have an abstract knowledge imposed on them, when the children are the beings closest to life of all. Would anyone be surprised that school, set up to make men and women out of the boys and girls, instead produces abortions that grow old while they’re still young, as versed in the sciences as they are ignorant of what they truly want and desire?

Bring Knowledge Back to Life

Commodity expansion has never ceased paving the roads of knowledge further and further, and still neither they nor the boldest scientific discoveries ever seem to go any further than the distance the drawer springs out from the cash-register. Knowledge has restored the unity of the universe, discovering far off lands, unveiling macrocosms and microcosms. But that unity is only a false one, one that participates in the religious lie, marrying the earth to the heavens by force and substituting itself for the fundamental agreement between life and nature.

It was enough that the international market hit on hedonism for its new commodity in order that it could become clear to what extent science mocks desire when it escapes the packaging into which the imperatives of consumption fold themselves.

And then, since the progressive slipping from the sensual to the mental, from the lived to its representation, needed great gestures to sweep things together; it needed people to regain the naive curiosity of children and try to touch with their fingers what they wanted to get to know, mocking all the discourse.

We can’t make anything of a knowledge that remains foreign to the waltz of our regrets and joys. There’s too much pleasure to discover in the world by discovering ourselves to be content with reading and rereading endlessly the balance sheet of a universe where only numbers change, and where everything is reduced to numbers. It is indeed time now to introduce the magicians of infancy and dreams into the arsenal of the sciences, in order that so much inventive wealth isn’t paid for with our indigence. One exploration alone will have the privilege of opening up the doors of a dead horizon on the infinite expanses of the living; the adventure into the galaxy of desires.

The Scientific Truths of Power

A scientific truth that doesn’t inscribe itself into the incontestable progress of the human only expresses an inhuman truth and doesn’t merit being paid attention to.

Think about what a travesty it is that there isn’t a single infamy in history that hasn’t used knowledge and the sciences as a guarantee of its authority. Private property, the fatherland, competition, the survival of the strongest, God, inequality, racism, the inferiority of women, the excellence of nuclear energy — all these terrible things have been crowned with the laurels of truth and have incited great marveling at the “discoveries” that supported them. No one is surprised that the “proofs” that guaranteed them status as established facts were based on reasons even more peremptory than the economic imperatives of the time that confirmed their good basis.

The meaning of an observation, of an experience, or of a theory, are preexistent in the behavior of the observer, the experiencer, or the theoretician. That science participates in the exploitation of nature for profit — science is just work, too, after all — explains well enough why so many scientific truths proceed from an implicit contempt for life as enjoyment and creation.

This contempt has varied through different people and eras, but there are few examples of knowledgeable people whose morbidity, stiffness, asceticism, lack of generosity, and ignorance of love have not had their inventions and discoveries infected by some kind of ignoble germ.

The racist vanity of the linguists and biologists of the 19th century built up the “science” of race-inequality on foundations which were thought to be eminently rational. The progress of police perspicaciousness, the need to isolate dangerous elements from the social magma — these were the bases for the establishment of sociology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis as sciences. Medicine multiplies its successes by seeing the body as a complex machine whose secrets could be penetrated in the same way as the secrets of the earth could be delivered up to derricks and translated into stockquotes; they did this to such an extent that, guaranteeing the denaturation that produces cancer, it also produced, to try to heal that cancer, a lucrative pharmaceutical industry. There’s nothing, not even the supposedly eternal truths, that isn’t in a certain sense “fabricated” according to a spiritual sense of its meaning and place; thus we see universal gravitation perpetuating the idea of a divine clock, a mechanical perfection of the universe; thus we see the big bang start to smell of the god-hypothesis, that old fart under the covers; thus we see the development of genetic manipulation — and we needn’t wonder how the people who manipulate genes behave daily, and the place love has in their lives.

How can a extracted by suffering not be the reflection of a reality imposed at the price of pain and heartache? A science that needs to sacrifice men, animals, forests, landscapes, and ecological equilibria in order to progress is a science of death. A researcher who favors his function and his role over his life — like we see in these specialized “bosses”, full of bitterness and contempt, defending tooth and nail the petty territory of their specialization — never finds anything but future cemeteries.

Joyful Wisdom

Joyful wisdom is the free usage of knowledge by the will to live.

The culture market has accumulated a considerable sum of preprogramed experiences that we don’t know what to do with since most often we’re ignorant of our desires. It’s true that a knowledge that is sold and demands that one move away from oneself in order to buy it doesn’t really concern me at all. Markets change the products they offer, but they never offer anything to change life. However, there’s a lot to reclaim from this science that remains essentially foreign to us because it proceeds from familiar and separate thought, if our desires can turn the use of that science to its favor. Nothing must be thrown down the memory-hole any more except the imprint of death, which is the imprint of separation.

There’s no erudition, no exact knowledge, no speculation, no reverie that doesn’t follow the pattern of the fantastic geometries whose unsuspected practical application will be discovered one fine day; they are waiting to take shape in the diversity of individual destinies.

To the extent that the feeling of natural freeness prevails, concern with gaining knowledge in the domains that awaken curiosity with the sting of desire blazes a trail to the emotional charm of learning and teaching. It’s just a question of learning through indiscretion, and no longer through constraint.

It’s a part of children’s nature to ferret around everywhere, and show themselves to be curious about everything. But what kind of response do they get for their questions? We rebuke them, we tell them to be silent so we don’t have to oppose to them our embarrassed ignorance, even if it means later teaching them with scholarly ramblings on with computerized solutions, the utility of which is lost to them.

Because it participates in a passionate quest — a quest for the Grail of enjoyment and self-creation — joyous wisdom aspires to get to know everything and comprehend everything about the omnipresence of life, starting with the labyrinth of desires, of which everyone is the course and the center. We know the kind of sickening responses that are most often given to that abruptly posed question — what would you wish for, what would make you the happiest you could be? This question really addresses the intellect, and displeasingly recalls the dissuasive threat made to children as soon as they experience their desires plainly — “do you really even know what you want?” No, they don’t know; they’re trying to figure it out, but everything colludes to dissuade them, and later, they will have nothing but the “choice” between the heads or tails of one in the same renunciation — to have a lot of money, to get off on having peace of mind. But to be fully within one’s body and in the world?

Now that the child escapes economic castration a little more, we will doubtless see learning one day soon begin to base itself on that confidence that assures the feeling that one is loved for who one is, and not for one’s merits. No lesson is impressed into the mind if it doesn’t pertain above all to desires, and if it isn’t gone back over and constantly perfected. To understand is to take it upon yourself to satisfy your pleasures, and the pleasures of your peers, at least of those who understand in the same way. Knowledge doesn’t come from masters or disciples, it is part of the passion of love, which discovers and recreates the unity of intelligence and sensation.

From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org

(1934 - )

Raoul Vaneigem (Dutch pronunciation: [raːˈul vɑnˈɛi̯ɣəm]; born 21 March 1934) is a Belgian writer known for his 1967 book The Revolution of Everyday Life. He was born in Lessines (Hainaut, Belgium) and studied romance philology at the Free University of Brussels (now split into the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel) from 1952 to 1956. He was a member of the Situationist International from 1961 to 1970. He currently resides in Belgium and is the father of four children. (From: Wikipedia.org.)

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October 16, 1989
Chapter 3, Part 5 — Publication.

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