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.)

Introduction I have no intention of revealing what there is of my life in this book to readers who are not prepared to relive it. I await the day when it will lose and find itself in a general movement of ideas, just as I like to think that the present conditions will be erased from the memories of men. The world must be remade; all the specialists in reconditioning will not be able to stop it. Since I do not want to understand them, I prefer that they should not understand me. As for the others, I ask for their goodwill with a humility they will not fail to perceive. I should have liked a book like this to be accessible to those minds least addled by intellectual jargon; I hope I have not failed absolutely. One day a few formulas will emer... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Perspective of Power: Exchange and Gift
Chapter 8. Exchange and Gift The nobility and the proletariat conceive human relationships on the model of giving, but the proletarian way of giving supersedes the feudal gift. The bourgeoisie, the class of exchange, is the lever which enables the feudal project to be overthrown and superseded in the long revolution . History is the continuous transformation of natural alienation into social alienation, and the continuous strengthening of a contradictory movement of opposition which will overcome all alienation and end history. The historical struggle against natural alienation transforms natural alienation into social alienation, but the movement of historical disalienation eventually attacks social alienation itself and reveals that it is... (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.)

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: Technology and Its Mediated Use
Chapter 9. Technology and Its Mediated use Contrary to the interests of those who control its use, technology tends to disenchant the world. Mass consumption society strips gadgets of any magical value. Similarly, organization (a technique for handling new techniques) robs new productive forces of their subversive appeal and their power of disruption. Organization thus stands revealed as nothing but the pure organization of authority . Alienated mediations make man weaker as they become indispensible. A social mask disguises people and things. In the present stage of privative appropriation, this mask transforms its wearers into dead things, commodities. Nature no longer exists. To rediscover nature means to reinvent it as a worthwhile adve... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)