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: 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.)

The Perspective of Power: The Fascination of Time
Chapter 16. The Fascination of Time People are bewitched into believing that time slips away, and this belief is the basis of time actually slipping away. Time is the work of attrition of that adaptation to which people must resign themselves so long as they fail to change the world. Age is a role, an acceleration of ‘lived’ time on the plane of appearances, an attachment to things. The growth of civilization’s discontents is now forcing every branch of therapeutics towards a new demonology. Just as, formerly, invocation, sorcery, possession, exorcism, black sabbaths, metamorphoses, talismans and all the rest were bound up with the suspect capacity for healing and hurting, so today (and more effectively) the apparatus for ... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Perspective of Power: Isolation
Chapter 3. Isolation Para no sentirme solo por los siglos de los siglos All we have in common is the illusion of being together. And beyond the illusion of permitted anodynes there is only the collective desire to destroy isolation . — Impersonal relationships are the no-man’s land of isolation. By producing isolation, contemporary social organization signs its own death-sentence . 1 It was as if they were in a cage whose door was wide open without their being able to escape. Nothing outside the cage had any importance, because nothing else existed any more. They stayed in the cage, estranged from everything except the cage, without even a flicker of desire for anything outside the bars. it would have been abnormal — impos... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Reversal of Perspective
Part II. The Reversal of Perspective Chapter 19. The Reversal of Perspective The light of power is waning. The eyes of individual subjectivity cannot adapt to mere holes in a mask, which are the eyes of those fog-bound in shared illusion. The individual’s point of view must prevail over false collective participation. In total self-possession, reach society with the tentacles of subjectivity and remake everything startingwith yourself. The reversal of perspsctive is what is positive in negativity, the fruit which will burst out of the old world’s bud (1–2). One day Monsieur Keuner was asked just what was meant by “reversal of perspective”; and he told the following story. Two brothers deeply attached to one ano... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Perspective of Power: Sacrifice
Chapter 12. Sacrifice Where constraint breaks people, and mediation makes fools of them, the seduction of power is what makes them love their oppression. Because of it people give up their real riches: (a) for a cause that mutilates them [chapter twelve], (b) for an imaginary unity that fragments them [chapter thirteen], (c) for an appearance that reifies them [chapter fourteen], (d) for roles that wrest them from authentic life [chapter fifteen], (e) for a time whose passage defines and confines them [chapter sixteen]. There is such a thing as a reformism of sacrifice that is really a sacrifice to reformism. Humanistic self-mortification and fascistic self-destruction both leave us nothing — not even the option of death. All causes a... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)