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The Revolution of Everyday Life
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Average Rating:  out of 13 Reviews
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Price: $22.95
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Sale: $15.26
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Manufacturer: Rebel Press
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EAN (European Article Number): 9780946061013
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Paperback
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Author: Raoul Vaneigem
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Publisher: Rebel Press
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Dewey Decimal Number: 320
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Publication Date: 2001-04-20
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Reading Level: 279
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Description: Finally, back in print again, the essential handbook for all of us still alienated by modern capitalism. Together with Debord, Vaneigem was the main theorist of Situationist ideas. He has the added benefit of being eminently more readable! An incredible work, more potent now than ever. "We have a world of pleasures to win, and nothing to lose but boredom.......You want to fuck around with us? Not for long."
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Customer Reviews
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Review Summary: Good ideas overstated, bloated presentation |
Date: 2007-07-18 |
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Details: This book, along with Debord's "Society of the Spectacle", forms the core of the theoretical output of the Situationist Movement which emphasized the necessity of spontaneous, joyous creative activity to overcome the alienation and oppression of mass consumer culture, giving inspiration to the youthful insurrectionists of Paris '68.
The book is peppered with witty, canny, and memorable aphorisms on revolutionary struggle, and its emphasis on spontaneous activity motivated by felt needs for freedom and self-expression was at the time an important corrective to the Stalinist model of the revolutionary as selfless, altruistic drone. Vaneigem and the situationists go overboard at times in emphasizing the revolutionary value of selfishness, pleasure and spontaneity-- the shortcomings of 1968 are the proof. These shortcomings have been stretched to the point of parody in Hakim Bey's "Temporary Autonomous Zone" and the writings of the Crimethinc collective, but there are important elements of truth in them.
The presentation of the ideas is hobbled by Vaneigem's writing style-- you have to slog through 5 pages of bloated abstractions before coming across one of the keen one-liners that make the book worthwhile-- I think the ideas come across much more powerfully as street graffiti than in a 200 page manifesto. For a more palatable presentation of situationist ideas, check out American situationist Ken Knabb's wonderful piece "The Joy Of Revolution", available online or in his book Public Secrets: Collected Skirmishes of Ken Knabb. |
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Review Summary: CAN DIALECTICS BREAK BRICKS? |
Date: 2007-06-27 |
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Details: The funds for cultural revolution rest in the coffers of a bankrupt society. That's not to say that change is meaningless. Raoul Vaneigem believes - along with the rest of the troupe from THE SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL - that if change comes from within the very culture being critiqued, then the only way to effect change is to change the way culture affects.
UNDERNEATH THE PAVING STONES - THE BEACH!
Urban renewel and changing the economic goal posts cannot prevent the inevitable exploding of the plastic society. Sometime. When the world becomes its own refuse the voices of refusal will echo down time until it pins the world against its own refusal.
If madness is the only remedy against the insanity of our contracting world, then THE REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE might be a good guide. Its truth will speak to anyone whose heart is passionate, whose soul is strong, and whose mind is as yet still taciturn; it will help them express the homily:
I TAKE MY DESIRES FOR REALITY BECAUSE I BELIEVE IN THE REALITY OF MY DESIRES. |
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Review Summary: injects heavy doses of adrenaline into our resolve |
Date: 2007-05-22 |
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Details: I concur wholeheartedly that this is momentous writing:
one that is even now more critical and urgent than 40 years ago, when it was first published.
Each page offers words-thoughts that ricochet long after their initial bang! Here's a sample:
+ to work for delight and authenticity is barely distinguishable from preparing for a general insurrection.
+ the surest chances of liberation lie in what is most familiar. Was it ever otherwise?...
the living reality of non-adaptation to the world is always crouched ready to spring...
it confronts you at each self-evasion, it grasps your shoulder, catches your eye, and the dialogue begins...
+ docility is no longer ensured by priestly magic, it results from a mass of minor hypnoses...
ideological hypnosis is replacing the bayonet.
+ people who talk about revolution without referring explicitly to everyday life,
without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constrains,
--such have a corpse in their mouth.
+ if the word 'innovation' means anything it means transcendence, not camouflage.
+ consume, consume: we take ashes for fire.
+ the young are already old and everything we are building is already a ruin.
+ the obligation to produce alienates the passion for creation.
+ affluent survival entails the pauperisation of life.
+ the dictatorship of quantified exchange (market value) colonized everyday life... the bourgeoisie traded in BEING for HAVING.
+ the fight is unfair. words serve power better than they do men...
at this moment language swoops down on living experience, ties it hand and foot, robs it of its substance, ABSTRACTS it.
+ the system of commercial exchange has come to govern all of people's everyday relations with themselves and with their fellows.
every aspect of public and private life is dominated by the quantitative.
+ ideology still has one trick up its sleeve--that of posing false questions,
raising false dilemmas and leaving the conditioned individual with the worry of sorting out which is the truer of the two.
+ even when it is co-opted and turned against its original purposes, poetry always gets what it wants in the end...
no poetic sign is ever completely turned by ideology.
+ the long revolution means that we have to build a parallel society
which can counter the dominant system until such time as it is strong enough to replace it.
+ the fight for language is the fight for the freedom to love, for the reversal of perspective.
the battle is between metaphysical facts and the reality of facts:
i mean between facts conceived statically as part of a system of interpretation of the world
and the facts understood in their development by the praxis which transform them.
And on and on the explosive phrases go, injecting heavy doses of adrenaline into our resolve.
Even though I take exception to Vaneigem's advocacy of violent resistance,
his book comes the closest to diagnosing the cause of our present narcosis and, even better,
grounds the revolutionary turning on the rich dirt of everyday life.
How could we ever think it would be otherwise? |
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Review Summary: "We have nothing in common except the illusion of being together." |
Date: 2007-05-09 |
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Details: No Amazon review can really do this masterpiece justice. This is simply one of those classics that will sweep you away, leaving you stunned that someone was able to so precisely articulate the mechanical alienation from self and palpable inner decay that you feel daily as you sit in your cubicle (wash, rinse, repeat) and mimic the farcical motions assigned to humans in modern industrial civilization--a hierarchical vaccum in which "survival" is contingent upon our economic value, obedience to Power and our ability to force others to either consume or produce. The dominance of the lie of economic value has poisoned every area of our lives and left us defunct as human beings, most notably stealing from us the innate urge to spontaneously create and give.
Vaneigem attacks the dead, vacuous nature of modern life with all of the venomous intensity conceivable. He does not misuse or mince words. Each sentence is filled to the brim with harsh truth, the sheer brute force of which will take your breath away.
[...].
I recommend at least printing it out to fully revel and enjoy the intensity, though! |
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Review Summary: intense |
Date: 2006-11-17 |
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Details: This is one of the most viscerally exciting political / philosophical books in history. You can't help but be swept up by the force of Vaneigem's appeals... and though one may not assent to all of his positions or specific interpretations, all in all you will have to say that he had managed to tap into something very true.
read it, ponder it... and get out and live. you have nothing to lose but your boredom. |
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