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6 The Revolution of Everyday Life

Comrades whom you have offended make the bitterest enemies.

Baltasar Gracián

It was the start, if not of a beautiful friendship, then of a harmonious one, at least for a time. Raoul Vaneigem and Guy Debord met in 1960. Henri Lefebvre introduced them. They sealed their friendship Situationist style. Vaneigem: “My psychogeographic dérives with Guy Debord in Paris, Barcelona, Brussels, Beersel and Antwerp were exceptional moments, combining theoretical speculation, sentient intelligence, the critical analysis of beings and places, and the pleasure of cheerful drinking. Our homeports were pleasant bistros with a warm atmosphere; havens where one was oneself because one felt in the air something of the authentic life, however fragile and short lived. It was an identical mood that guided our wanderings through the streets, the lanes and the alleys, through the meanderings of a pleasure that our every step helped us gauge in terms of what it might take to expand and refine it just a little further…”¹

Among other things, they discussed the books they would write. Debord was nothing if not encouraging. He wrote to Vaneigem in 1965 that his manuscript is “perhaps the first appearance, in book form, of the tone, the level of critique, of those revolutionaries called ‘utopian’, that is to say, of the basic propositions for the overthrow of the totality of society.”² Vaneigem’s book got into print a little sooner than Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. Famous in English as The Revolution of Everyday Life, it was at first rejected by various publishers, including Gallimard. Then an article appeared in the press that claimed the Situationists were an influence on the Provo agitations then rocking Amsterdam. Raymond Queneau asked Vaneigem to resubmit it to Gallimard, and so it ended up with one of the most prestigious houses in France. If there was an author who anticipated the mood of May ’68, it was Vaneigem with his “lucidity grounded in my own desires.”³

In contrast to Clark’s melancholia, Vaneigem thinks of May ’68 as the revolution that never ended, a “genuine decanting, from the kind of revolution which revolutionaries make against themselves, of that permanent revolution which is destined to usher in the sovereignty of life.”⁴ Its significance lay less in the confrontation with the state than in the transformation of everyday life. It would not be a revolution within the economy, but a revolution against the economy. It would germinate in the pores of the old world and burst through the dead skin of politics. “One day, though, we’ll have to admit that May 1968 marked a complete break with the majority of patriarchal values…”⁵

All of which was finally too much for Debord and some of the others in the Situationist International, who retained a rather more Jacobin idea of revolution. After an exchange of not particularly edifying diatribes, Vaneigem resigned in 1970: “How did what was exciting in the consciousness of a collective project manage to become a sense of unease at being in one another’s company?” He wrote to his former comrades that he had no desire to see them again until after the revolution, much like Hölderlin’s Hyperion, who would not trouble himself with friendships that are mere fragments of a new life yet to dawn.⁶

Vaneigem left the Situationist International, which dissolved two years later. He did not stop writing. Often deploying pseudonyms, over the ensuing decades he periodically issued manifestos restating a small number of themes. Some of his best books were on heresies, as they brought together his unique talents.⁷ He studied Romance philology at the Free University of Brussels from 1952 to 1956. Then he taught at the École Normale in Nivelles, a small town in the Walloon region of Belgium, from 1956 to 1964, where a liaison with a student got him fired. He survived on editorial and hack writing jobs thereafter.

If Debord’s debut book of 1967 was a détournement of Hegel, Marx and the Marxisant writings of the moment, then Vaneigem’s reaches back to one of Marx’s precursors, Charles Fourier.⁸ Marx and Engels had an ambivalent relation to Fourier. Henri Lefebvre: “Like Fourier, Marx desired and projected the new life.” But they kept him at a distance, grouping him with utopian writers with whom he had little in common. They admired him chiefly as a satirist. And yet “Marx owes much more to Fourier than is generally admitted.”⁹ In drawing up his list of theoretical topics to deal with without pedantry or delay, Vaneigem listed an homage to Fourier, something he never quite carried out, unless one considers his whole life to be such.¹⁰

Charles Fourier (1772–1837) and G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) were both writers shaped by the French Revolution. Hegel perhaps had more enduring impact, for while Fourier had a number of disciples, most were more like Judas than the Apostles. They betrayed his larger vision. He was somewhat selectively read as a socialist prophet. His French followers joined forces with the Jacobin left in 1848 and went down with them. A statue in bronze of Fourier by émile Derré went up at the Place de Clichy in 1899, but his influence was decidedly on the wane by that time.

André Breton’s Ode to Charles Fourier (1947) opens with the author reminiscing about the day ten years earlier when he noticed that someone had placed a flower at the foot of Fourier’s statue. In 1941 the Germans melted down the statue and used the copper for the manufacture of munitions. Breton: “They’ve preferred the good old method.” Gone is “the immortal pose of the thorn-extractor.”¹¹

Breton, like his contemporary Theodor Adorno, was exiled by the war in America. Unlike Adorno, Breton did not think the concentration camps obliged him to forswear the poetic, but rather to delve even deeper into it, via Fourier’s “extreme tact in extravagance.” Caught between the futility of art for its own sake and the utility of art to Stalinism, what remained of the Surrealist movement turned to Fourier in the bleak years of the war and the fragile promise of the peace that followed. Breton: “Fourier they’ve scoffed but one day they’ll have to try your remedy whether they like it or not.” Breton revived interest in Fourier not so much as a socialist prophet of associative labor, but as the poet of liberated desire.

In March ’69, Pierre Lepetit, a teacher at the École des Beaux Arts, joined forces with some friends of the Situationists and restored Fourier’s statue on the Place de Clichy, or at least a plaster replica.¹² René Riesel, René Viénet and Alice Becker-Ho witnessed the installation. Lepetit’s statue bore the legend: “In homage to Charles Fourier from those who manned the barricades on the rue Gay-Lussac,” the spot where the Situationists took their stand against the police in May ’68.

The Fourier of liberated desire was somewhat at odds with the militant asceticism of the French postwar left. Roland Barthes mentions a study group on Fourier formed at the occupied Sorbonne in 1968 that was denounced as bourgeois by the militants. Fourier’s revolution was always in a minor rather than a major key, a revolution of everyday life rather than of the state. Barthes: “Marxism and Fourierism are like two nets with meshes of different sizes.”¹³

Fourier, with his weird fetishes and manic obsessions, is an easy prey for the new priests of psychoanalysis.¹⁴ Barthes rescued him from travesty by drawing attention to Fourier as a writer. He famously characterizes Fourier as a logothete, an inventor of a language. He anatomizes Fourier’s technique, which isolates itself from everyday language, articulates new rules for its assemblage and regulates the production of text, resulting in the fantastic repetition that characterizes his writing, which like that of the Marquis de Sade contains scene after scene with variations on the same game.

Raymond Queneau thought Fourier’s calculus of the passions was more sophisticated than Hegel’s dialectical logic. Walter Benjamin saw something machine-like in the meshings of his utopia. Italo Calvino imagined him, and not unkindly, as writing a vast computer program.¹⁵ Roland Barthes’ Fourier is the designer of wilder systems, which can never quite complete themselves and yet thrive on the very attempt. Time and again writers find ways to connect Fourier to their own passions. He has been successively a socialist prophet, a free-love utopian and then a writer’s writer.

A useful corrective to these Fouriers is that of Fredric Jameson, who finds instead an ontological Fourier, in which a new cultivation of the passions (superstructure) organizes freely associating labor (infrastructure). Jameson reconnects the older, socialist reading of Fourier as prophet of free labor with the surrealist reading of Fourier on liberated desire, while still paying attention to writing as a formal procedure which structures the relation of one to the other as an open-ended practice of systematizing without a system.

As Jameson reads Fourier, that which can be desired is the very basis of social structure, and not just of social structure, but of nature itself. Fourier is the most vigorous resister to the thought that something of desire has to be forsaken, that the condition of life is the tragic one of sacrificing desire on the altar of the real. Fourier is no moralist. Jameson: “The ethical or moralizing habit is above all what resists the great thought of immanence, what hankers after the luxury of picking and choosing among existents…”¹⁶

Where Debord perfected a style of almost absolute negation, Vaneigem learns from Fourier how to affirm the world: “I first read the selected texts, published by the Editions Sociales, in the early 1960s. I then read the version of the Nouveau monde amoureux edited by Simone Debout. One of the things that made Fourier a genius was that he revolutionized the world and the perception we have of it without labeling himself as a revolutionary. He expressed no judgments made on a moral basis. He acknowledges a world of domination. He takes the society as it is—with its desires and hidden passions. He creates the conditions that would lead to their harmonization and refinement. Thus, what in a logic of civilization would be a frenetic race for success (upward social mobility) and behaviors focusing on producing exclusion, is replaced, in a logic of harmony, by ludic imitation.”¹⁷

What Fourier and Vaneigem have in common is their refusal of necessity. Fourier: “The passions are proportionate to the destinies.” Vaneigem: “Love is the science of pleasures that organizes destinies.”¹⁸ Fourierist writing connects the totality of nature to the events of everyday life via the ubiquity of the passions. While there is always something outside the system, Fourier keeps extending the system sideways to include it, even if, in the process, something else falls out of its reach. The passion that drives Fourier to systematize is always reaching toward what it excludes with fresh gestures of welcome. This is his capricious and capacious beauty.

The limit to the Jamesonian reading is that while it frees Fourier from partial readings via labor, desire or language, the Fourier who spent his days trying to change the world is absent. Vaneigem has the merit at least of attempting to synthesize Fourier on the association of labor, on free love, and as visionary poet, with the praxis of everyday life. Vaneigem: “If cybernetics was taken from its masters, it might be able to free human groups from labor and from social alienation. This was precisely the project of Charles Fourier in an age when utopia was still possible.”¹⁹ It is not that Fourier is like a machine or a computer. Quite the reverse: the machinic and the algorithmic could be fragments of a Fourierist playground ready for self-assembly.

For Vaneigem it is a question of how poetry can be an activist mode in the world: “Poetry is an act which engenders new realities.”²⁰ Far more than the other Situationists, Vaneigem takes seriously the latent potentials of the Surrealist project: “Surrealism’s failure was an honorable one.”²¹ Vaneigem’s roots are more in the revolutionary Surrealism of his native Belgium than the Letterist movement Debord encountered in Paris. Via Vaneigem’s détournement of the Surrealists and the Surrealists’ of Fourier, a neglected strand for Situationist thought and action emerges. While Debord and Vaneigem were fellow travelers in their Situationist wanderings, in the end they belong to different camps. The nets through which they strained to understand—and change—modern history use meshes of different dimensions.

In the century after the French Revolution, and particularly after the emergence of the art market in the 1850s, the bourgeoisie tried to build a new transcendent myth out of the ruins of religion, an autonomous sphere of Art as redoubt from economy. The struggle for new mythological forms can be traced from David’s The Death of Marat to Manet’s Olympia. Vaneigem: “The ‘spectacle’ is all that remains of the myth that perished along with unitary society: an ideological organization whereby the actions of history upon individuals themselves seeking, whether in their own name or collectively, to act upon history, are reflected, corrupted and transformed into their opposite—into the autonomous life of the non-lived.”²² Where Clark traced the tactics of realist painters in and against the spectacle, Vaneigem records those of the romantic and Surrealist writers.

Three strategies confront the challenge of the bourgeois world’s autonomous art. One was a radicalizing of aesthetics from within: Stendhal, Nerval, Baudelaire. A second was the struggle to abolish art as a separate world and realize it in everyday life: Hölderlin, Lautréamont. The third was a systematic critique of aesthetics from that world from which it separated: Fourier and Marx. Dada came closest to a synthesis of the available strategies, but the defeat of the German revolution of 1919 doomed it to failure, too. Dada offered an absolute but abstract break with bourgeois art and life. Surrealism, at its worst, was a kind of reformist version of Dada, obscuring its negativity, restoring partial forms of revolt.

The Surrealists struggled against, and eventually collapsed into, the autonomous sphere of art. Vaneigem: “Hence Surrealism became the spectacularization of everything in the cultural past that refused separations, sought transcendence, or struggled against ideologies and the organization of the spectacle.”²³ And yet, not least through Breton’s intelligence and discretion, “the Surrealists made a promise which they kept: to be the capricious consciousness of a time without consciousness.”²⁴ Vaneigem appreciates Breton’s expulsions of unworthy members, even as he slyly notes “his tendency to choose people’s aperitifs for them.”²⁵

At their best, the Surrealists resisted both specialized art and politics, and hewed close to the discovery of the potentials of everyday life. While some capitulated to the art market, Benjamin Peret, Antonin Artaud, André Breton and Jacques Prévert waged a campaign against Surrealism as ideology. They extracted themselves from the allure of the Communist Party, whose deadly policies Peret saw firsthand as a volunteer in republican Spain. Vaneigem: “The foundering of this project under the helmsmanship of Stalinism and its attendant leftisms was to reduce Surrealism to a mere generator of what might be called the special effects of the human.”²⁶

Still, they pioneered a psychoanalysis freed from therapeutic pretensions. They remained guardians of dreams, even if they could not quite bring themselves to call for their realization in everyday life. From early on, René Crevel documented the persistence of non-life in the totality of human affairs: “All our life we circle around the suicide that legislators have condemned so that the earth might not be deserted.”²⁷ Crevel took his own life in 1935. His suicide note said simply, “disgust.” When they turned away from Stalinism, Breton and friends were left with nowhere to go except the rewriting of everyday alienation as cosmic mental theater, either on the epic scale of Artaud, or as Crevel’s chamber pieces.

Vaneigem gives the Surrealists more credit than does Debord for what they preserved through the dark times of the late thirties. They kept alive fragments of a project of emancipation, the trace of a theory of passionate moments, moments of love, encounter, subjectivity. Yet they turned such moments into an absolute, an illusory totality. They fell for the cult of woman, and for a hierarchy of spiritual over carnal love. Breton in particular failed to live up to Fourier’s lack of judgment about homosexuality, or so-called deviance in general.

The Surrealists constructed a new canon: the atheist priest Jean Meslier, the romantic extremist Comte de Lautréamont, the criminal poet Pierre-François Lacenaire, and the desiring machinery of Charles Fourier, among others. But they abandoned Dada’s quest for collective poetry and total negation in favor of the specialized domains of avant-garde politics and art. Vaneigem: “The discovery of Fourier might perhaps have underpinned an overall recasting of the movement, but Breton would always prefer Fourier the visionary, Fourier the poet of analogy, to Fourier the theorist of a radically new society.”²⁸ At war’s end there was not much left of Surrealism as a radical project. “They were Don Quixotes tilting against housing projects.”²⁹

Vaneigem finds the backbone of the movement in its poets, not its artists, who were usually to the right and quickly absorbed into the art market. They offered, moreover, not particularly interesting détournements of previous modernist advances: Joan Miró redid Paul Klee; Max Ernst redid Giorgio De Chirico. Even the best Surrealist writing on the everyday—Michel Leiris—descended into a sort of queer empiricism.³⁰ “Never opting firmly either for a poetry made by all or for the venality of the ruling system, Surrealism took something of both and produced an impoverished cultural hodgepodge.”³¹ One suspects Clark would not entirely disagree.