This archive contains 27 texts, with 67,887 words or 417,338 characters.
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: 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 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.)
Dedication To Ella, Maldoror and those who helped this adventure upon its way. “I LIVE ON THE EDGE OF THE UNIVERSE AND I DON’T NEED TO FEEL SECURE.” “Man walketh in a vain shew, he shews to be a man, and that’s all.” We seem to live in the State of variety, wherein we are not truly living but only in appearance: in Unity is our life: in one we are, from one divided, we are no longer. While we perambulate variety, we walk but as so many Ghosts or Shadows in it, that it self being but the Umbrage of the Unity. The world travels perpetually, and every one is swollen full big with particularity of interest; thus traveling together in pain, and groaning under enmity: laboring to bring forth some one thing, som... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
The Perspective of Power: Survival Sickness
Survival and false opposition to it Chapter 17. Survival Sickness Capitalism has demystified survival. It has made the poverty of daily life intolerable in view of the increasing wealth of technical possibilities. Survival has become an economizing on life. The civilization of collective survival increases the dead time in individual lives to the point where the death forces are liable to carry the day over collective survival itself. The only hope is that the passion for destruction may be reconverted into a passion for life. Up until now people have merely complied with a system of world transformation. Today the task is to make the system comply with the transformation of the world. The organization of human societies has changed the wor... (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.)