The Revolution of Everyday Life

Part 2, Chapter 25 : The Reversal of Perspective: You’re Fucking Around With Us? — Not For Long!
Chapter 25. You’re Fucking Around With Us? — Not For Long! In Watts, Prague, Stockholm, Stanleyville, Gdansk, Turin, Port Talbot, Cleveland, Cordoba, Amsterdam, wherever the act and wareness of refusal generates passionate break-outs from the factories of collective illusion, the revolution of everyday life is under way. The struggle intensifies as misery becomes universal. What for years were reasons for fighting specific issues — hunger, restrictions, boredom, illness, anxiety, isolation, deceit — now reveal misery’s fundamental rationality, its omnipresent emptiness, its appalling oppressive abstraction. For this misery, the world of hierarchical power, the world of the State, of sacrifice, exchange and the quantitative — the commodity as will and representation of the world — is held responsible by those moving towards an entirely new society that is still to be invented and yet is already among us. All over the globe, revo... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 2, Chapter 24 : The Reversal of Perspective: The Interworld And The New Innocence
Chapter 24. The Interworld And The New Innocence 1 On the fringes of uneasy subjectivity the canker of power eats away. There thrives undying hate, the demons of revenge, the tyranny of envy, the rancor of frustrated desire. It may be a marginal infection, but it threatens every side; an interworld. The interworld is the no-man’s land of subjectivity. Its borders tremble with the fundamental cruelty of cop and rebel, oppression and the poetry of revolt. Halfway between its recuperation by the spectacle and its revolutionary use, the dreamer’s extra-space-time spawns monstrous creations after the image of his own desires and that of power. The increasing poverty of daily life has turned into a sort of public amenity suitable for every kind of investigation, an open battlefield between creative spontaneity and what corrupts it. As a faithful explorer of the mind, Artaud sums up perfectly this evenly-matched struggle: “My unconscious... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 2, Chapter 23 : The Reversal of Perspective: The Unitary Triad: Self-Realisation, Communication And Participation
Chapter 23. The Unitary Triad: Self-Realization, Communication And Participation The repressive unity of power is threefold: coercion, seduction and mediation. This is no more than the inversion and perversion of an equally threefold unitary project. The new society, as it develops underground, chaotically, is moving towards a total honesty — a transparency — between individuals: an honesty promoting the participation of each individual in the self-realization of everyone else. Creativity, love and play stand in the same relation to true life as the need to eat and the need to find shelter stand in relation to survival . Attempts to realize oneself can only be based on creativity . Attempts to communicate can only be based on love . Attempts to participate can only be based on play . Separated from one another these three projects merely strengthen the repressive unity of power. Radical subjectivity is the presence — which can be seen... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 2, Chapter 22 : The Reversal of Perspective: The Space-Time Of Lived Experience
Chapter 22. The Space-Time Of Lived Experience The dialectic of decay and supersession is the dialectic of dissociated and unitary space-time (l). The new proletariat carries within itself the realization of childhood, which is its space-time . The history of separations is slowly resolved at the end of “historic” history . Cyclical time and linear time. — Lived space-time is space-time in transformation, and the role’s space-time is that of adaptation. — The function of the past and of its projection into the future is to outlaw the present. Historical ideology is the screen that comes between the will to individual self-realization and the will to construct history; it prevents them joining up and merging . The present is the space-time to be constructed; it entails the correction of the past. 1 As specialists organize the survival of the species and leave learned diagrams to program history, the wil... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Part 2, Chapter 21 : The Reversal of Perspective: Masters Without Slaves
Chapter 21. Masters Without Slaves Power is the social organization which enables masters to maintain conditions of slavery. God, State, Organization: these three words reveal well enough the amount of autonomy and historical determination there is in power, three principles have successively held sway: the domination principle (feudal power), the exploitation principle (bourgeois power) and the organization principle (cybernetic power) . Hierarchical social organization has perfected itself by desacralization and mechanization, but its contradictions have increased. it has humanized itself to the extent that it has emptied men of their human substance. it has gained in autonomy at the expense of the masters; (the rulers are in control but it’s the strings that make them dance), today, those in power are perpetuating the race of willing slaves, those whom Theognis said were born with bowed heads, they have lost even the unhealthy pleasures of domination. F... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Perspective of Power: Suffering
Chapter 4. Suffering Suffering caused by natural alienation has given way to suffering caused by social alienation, while remedies have become justifications . Where there is no justification, exorcism takes its place . But from now on no subterfuge can hide the existence of an organization based on the distribution of constraints . Consciousness reduced to the consciousness of constraints is the antechamber of death. The despair of consciousness makes the murderers of Order; the consciousness of despair makes the murderers of Disorder . The symphony of spoken and shouted words animates the scenery of the streets. Over a rumbling basso continuo develop grave and cheerful themes, hoarse and singsong voices, nostalgic fragments of sentences. ... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Perspective of Power: Roles
Chapter 15. Roles Stereotypes are the dominant images of a period, the images of the dominant spectacle. The stereotype is the model of the role; the role is a model form of behavior. The repetition of an attitude creates a role; the repetition of a role creates a stereotype. The stereotype is an objective form into which people are integrated by means of the role. Skill in playing and handling roles determines rank in the spectacular hierarchy. The degeneration of the spectacle brings about the proliferation of stereotypes and roles, which by the same token become risible, and converge dangerously upon their negation, i.e., spontaneous actions (1,2). Access to the role occurs by means of identification. The need to identify is more importa... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Perspective of Power: Mediated Abstraction and Abstract Mediation
Impossible Realization or Power as the Sum of Seductions Chapter 11. Mediated Abstraction and Abstract Mediation Today, reality is imprisoned in metaphysics in the same way as it was once imprisoned in theology. The way of seeing which power imposes, ‘abstracts’ mediations from their original function, which is to extend into the real world the demands which arise in lived experience; it resists the magnetic pull of authority. The point where resistance begins is the look-out post of subjectivity. Until now, metaphysicians have only organized the world in various ways; the point is to change it, by opposing them . The regime of guaranteed survival is slowly undermining the belief that power is necessary . This leads to a growing... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Perspective of Power: Humiliation
Impossible Participation or Power as the Sum of Constraints Chapter 2. Humiliation The economy of everyday life is based on a continuous exchange of humiliations and aggressive attitudes. It conceals a technique of wear and tear (usure), which is itself prey to the gift of destruction which it invites contradictorily . Today, the more man is a social being the more he is an object . Decolonization has not yet begun . It will have to give a new value to the old principle of sovereignty . 1 One day, when Rousseau was traveling through a crowded village, he was insulted by a yokel whose spirit delighted the crowd. Rousseau, confused and discountenanced, couldn’t think of a word in reply and was forced to take to his heels amid the jeers ... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Perspective of Power: Down Quantity Street
Chapter 10. Down Quantity Street Economic imperatives seek to impose on the whole of human activity the standardized measuring system of the market. Very large quantities take the place of the qualitative, but even quantity is rationed and economized. Myth is based on quality, ideology on quantity. Ideological saturation is an atomization into small contradictory quantities which can no more avoid destroying one another than they can avoid being smashed by the qualitative negativity of popular refusal . The quantitative and the linear are indissociable. A linear, measured time and a linear, measured life are the definitions of survival, or living on: a succession of inter-changeable instants. These lines are part of the confused geometry of... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)