The Revolution of Everyday Life

Author: Raoul Vaneigem
Year: 2001 (Rebel Press ed.; first published Traité de savoir-vivre, 1967)
Source type: book
Raw file: raw/books/vaneigem-2001-revolution-of-everyday-life.md

Summary

Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967) — with Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, the founding theoretical text of the Situationist International — is a passionate, aphoristic critique of everyday life under commodity capitalism. Vaneigem distinguishes survival (life reduced to the servicing of the commodity economy) from living (self-realization, communication, and participation). He analyzes how power operates as "a sum of constraints, mediations and seductions" — through humiliation, isolation, work, sacrifice, separation, and the organization of appearances — and then "reverses the perspective" toward a project of creativity, subjectivity, and the "unitary triad" of self-realisation, communication, and participation. His rallying cry is "Life First."

Key Claims

• Survival vs. living: "the grimy word 'life' concealed a reality long overlaid by that mere survival to which all life had been reduced by the cycle of the commodity." The man of survival is "ground up in the machinery of hierarchical power" but also "the self-united man, the man of absolute refusal."
• Power as sum of constraints, mediations, and seductions: power operates through humiliation, isolation, suffering, the decline of work, exchange and gift, mediated technology and abstraction, sacrifice, separation, the organization of appearances, roles, and the fascination of time.
• The everyday is the privileged terrain: "If there is one area where the achievement of consciousness comes into its own as a truly essential act, it is the realm of everyday life." "There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man's life than in all the philosophies."
• Recuperation: "Revolutions have never done anything but turn on themselves and negate themselves at the velocity of their own rotation." The commodity system, finding "generalised consumption more profitable than production," absorbs critique (even "the critique of the spectacle has now been travestied as 'critical' spectacle"), shifting from authoritarianism to seduction, puritanism to hedonism, exploitation to a "lucrative reconstruction of the environment." "Green, lest we forget, is also the colour of the dollar bill."
• 1968 and desire: May 1968 was "a genuine decanting... of that permanent revolution which is destined to usher in the sovereignty of life." "The desire to live is a political decision. Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?"
• Subjectivity and the reversal of perspective: "Everything starts from subjectivity, but nothing stays there." The project is to reconstruct both the self and society, "an enjoyment of self that proclaimed itself one with enjoyment of the world," toward a non-alienated, "authentically human" life.

Connections

Concepts: Everyday Life · Spectacle · Recuperation · Consumerism · Unitary Urbanism
Authors: Raoul Vaneigem · Guy Debord · Constant · Henri Lefebvre
Debates: Formal vs. Material Utopianism
Related source notes: The Revolution of Everyday Life's companion — The Society of the Spectacle (Debord) · An Illustrated Guide to Debord (Morgan & Purje) · Critique of Everyday Life (Lefebvre)

Direct Quotes

"There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man's life than in all the philosophies." (Ch. 1)

"The desire to live is a political decision. Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?" (Introduction)

"Revolutions have never done anything but turn on themselves and negate themselves at the velocity of their own rotation." (Preface, 1992)

"Green, lest we forget, is also the colour of the dollar bill." (Preface, 1992)

Open Questions

• Vaneigem insists on revolutionary, material transformation (against architecture's tendency to "avert revolution" as Le Corbusier hoped). How does this position the situationists against the architectural obsession of Geoffrey's sources?
• Compare Vaneigem's revolutionary demand with de Certeau's more sober account of "tactics" — do they share the everyday-as-resistance frame, or are their politics incompatible?