Raoul Vaneigem is one of those thinkers whose thinkige had a massive effect on me for a while - and then dropped away almost completely as other influences came along and my thinking grew more complicated.
Having initially believed The Situationists were a rock band, the ultimate subversive rock band (I first came across their name in a Melody Maker profile of Malcolm McLaren), I found Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist Internationale in Blackwells, the Oxford book shop, when I was up for interviews at colleges. I think I stumbled upon it in their huge cavernous basement. This must have been the same day that John Lennon's murder was all over the news. As one symbol of the Sixties dream died, I started an infatuation with another set of Sixties dreaming.
Over the next few months I read and reread the slim green large-size volume (that's my well-worn copy above). It's wonderfully illustrated with photographs of Situationist graffiti and Situationist comic strips and collages. And the selection of texts is well chosen and helpfully contextualized by Christopher Gray. I found myself gravitating towards the pieces written by Vaneigem, whose vision was more vitalist and desire-driven than the severe Guy Debord. In my copy, the Vaneigem essays like "Self-Realisation, Communication and Participation" (a deceptively mild and neutral title: it could be some Pelican volume about education policy or modernized management structures!) and "The Totality for Kids" (much more adrenalizing in tone!) are heavily marked up with pencil - in places almost every sentence struck me as profound and revelatory.
In this flush of enthusiasm, I also bought Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life - from Compendium in Camden if memory serves. But somehow I never got around to reading it. Other theory totems had entered my life, different Frenchmen. And I was already having doubts about the Situationist vision.
I had come across the John Berger quote about how the Situationists had no concept of tragedy and nodded. Their critique of the poverty of everyday life remains acute, albeit with some provisos and adjustments needed. But their ideas of how that would translate into politics are pure fantasy. "Whatever the eye sees and covets, let the hand grasp it!" - mouthed by one of the revolutionaries in a Situationist comic strip that I photocopied and stuck to my student bedsit wall - is actually Viking philosophy, something Mafiosos and Trumpers and libertarian tech-bros would cosign.
(Ah, it turns out Vaneigem actually created this comic strip - didn't know that! It first appeared in an American underground paper, Helix, in late '68 and then in a 1969 issue of Internationale Situationniste)
As for this panel, it's something a psychopath could agree with:
It's reminiscent of the famous Blake maxim
"Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires."
Which is generally taken as a libertine's rallying cry (Jeff Nuttall refers to it in his Sixties counterculture text Bomb Culture and mordantly notes that Ian Brady lived it out literally). But I have seen it interpreted to mean the absolute opposite of what it apparently says.
Then there's the problem with the idea of a life of perpetual play. It ignores the fact that much of life necessarily involves doing things you don't want to be doing. Childhood-as-idyll is supported by the invisible labour of parents and other responsible adults, who do the work of maintaining the protective space that enable it to exist.
There's three main problems with the utopia envisaged.
One is the question of production - what supports all this plenty, this infinite leisure. The Situationists get round this by talking of a fully automated economy. It's like a narrative short-cut, a cheat - like fantasy fiction where characters have a superpower or magical ability.
Another question is care. In any society, there are dependents - young children, the elderly, the sick, the mentally distressed. The physical and emotional labour of looking after them means that somebody has to dutifully do things they might rather not be doing, if they were leading the kind of radically selfish, pleasure-principled, impulsive, routine-free life that Vaneigem extolled. Doing things on behalf of others, sacrificing your own wants, is not only a socially necessary function but part of your growth as a human being. It is a higher fulfillment than simply pleasing yourself all the time.
Then there is the question of work itself. Life without meaningful work is empty - a permanent vacation would be a prison sentence. Any number of examples from literature or history show that decadence - a life of pure self-indulgence and caprice - is a dead end. If Vaneigem actually lived out his principles, he'd never have written those brilliant essays, or indeed the great number of books he did, including some that must have involved substantial research, like the one about the Free Spirits, those Christian mystical anarchist heretics of the Middle Ages.
Of course, there could be vastly less drudgery in the world, less exploitation and meaningless, repetitive, soul-deadening labour. But the satisfaction of a job well done, a task completed is undeniable. After all many of the things we consider play involve effort, discipline, teamwork etc - from children's games to sports. "Play" often mimes aspects of work: it's liberated work, maybe. The idea of "work" infuses dance culture - "work that body". Blake said exuberance is beauty; perhaps exertion is bliss, or can be.
Below are some passages that were edited out from my epic piece on Malcolm McLaren in the London Review of Books that wrestle with Vaneigem and Situationist from an all-grown-up perspective:
Severe in style and stern in tone, Guy Debord accentuated the negative and was ultimately destined for suicide. Raoul Vaneigem, whose writing pulsed with vivid vitalism and who’s still alive at age 87, was the “fun” Situationist. Like many others, I was particularly drawn to the Vaneigem texts in Leaving the 20th Century. Rather than conjuring a sense of the Spectacle’s multi-tentacled omnipotence, Vaneigem would write about the resistant power of desire. His assertion that a Mallarmé poem should be reason enough for revolution appealed to my teenage Romanticism, even though I’d never heard of Mallarmé and didn’t care much for poetry at the best of times.
“The Totality for Kids,” one of the Vaneigem essays reprinted in Leaving, originally appeared in Internationale Situationiste with the title “Basic Banalities.” Vaneigem’s drift here is similar to Max Weber’s line about disenchantment and modernity. Once, humans existed in a primordial state of sacred unity with Nature, and with other members of the tribe. But then, in grim succession, came the invention of class, market capitalism, the modern state, industrialism, bureaucracy, technocracy, and the mass media. Community and immediacy gave way to exchange-based economics, the specialization of roles, and the commodification and reification of all experience. “Totality” refers to how things once were, in the lost idyll, and how they’ll be again, after the revolution, when automation has eliminated all drudgery and we’ll live as Peter Pans in a future-paradise of nonstop play and pleasure. McLaren would turn this idea into a song, Bow Wow Wow’s 1981 single “W.O.R.K.”, which imagined microchips putting patriarchy out of business: “T.E.K. technology / is demolition of daddy.”
That’s why it’s “the totality for kids”. Totality means non-alienation: life without boredom, constraints, separation. Kids live there already, some of the time at least, mostly when they’re playing, rather than detained in school. Johan Huizinga’s 1938 classic Homo Ludens would have been an influence, and the Situationist emphasis on play chimed with currents in the counterculture, like agit-prop pranksters the Yippies. Rivaled by “take your desires for reality” and “it is forbidden to forbid”, probably the most famous Situationist graffiti slogan is “under the pavement lies the beach”. “Pavement” signifies the pedestrian surfaces of the city, escorting citizens to workplaces or shops, sites of entertainment or education, and, once every few years, to the voting booth. “Beach” means paradise – utopia as permanent vacation – another way of living that lurks latent, inches beneath the deadened skin of workaday routine.
“We are only concerned with the moments when life shatters the glaciation of survival,” Vaneigem wrote, describing the Situationists as an “almost alchemical, experimental group within which the realization of the total man can be started.” Another exhilarating Vaneigem essay in Leaving the 20th Century bears the deceptively dull and sensible-sounding title “Self-Realisation, Communication and Participation” and is taken from his first book, titled in English The Revolution of Everyday Life. Riffing about unshackled desire and radical honesty, calling for the end of hierarchy, roleplay and the concept of self-sacrifice, Vaneigem climaxes with the clarion call: “There are no limits to creativity. There is no end to subversion.”
That electrified 17-year-old me, but today I find neither assertion wholly convincing, or alluring for that matter. “No end to subversion” sounds a bit exhausting. The limits of creativity seem obvious: on the individual level, it can just dry up, for no apparent reason. The idea that each of us teems with inexhaustible inner riches and that it’s only our current social arrangements holding us back seems naive. Insufficiency might be baked into the human condition. John Berger identified the lack of a sense of, well, lack as the big flaw in Situationist thought. “They ignored the everyday fact of tragedy, both on a world and personal scale….,” he wrote in New Society in 1975, thereby missing “the need to find meaning in tragedy”.
Other holes can be poked. The equation of spectating with passivity and isolation would need some rethinking. For sure, watching TV can be vegetative and junkie-like. But anyone who’s lived in a couple, a family, or shared house knows how viewers make fun of – and fun out of – the shared experience of watching. The popular Channel 4 program Gogglebox turns this into entertainment, capturing the mocking wisecracks but also the emotional responses of families and friends as they watch that week’s notable programs. Debord no doubt would scorn Gogglebox as the Meta-Spectacle. But the Situationist belief that mass entertainments are necessarily lonely, soul-less affairs is belied by many of our experiences seeing films in packed cinemas, going to rock concerts, clubs or raves, attending large sports events. It’s here that their pronouncements have the tell-tale whiff of high-culture snobbery, redolent of those literary types who used to speak proudly of not owning a TV.
What’s wrong with passivity anyway? Independently of McLaren’s particular use of their ideas, Situationist ideas filtered into punk and postpunk through the do-it-yourself ethos. Groups like the Desperate Bicycles cried out that this was “no time for spectating” and urged young people to throw aside apathy, form their own bands, and self-release their own music. Making your own record or fanzine was an ethical imperative, an egalitarian counterblow to the hierarchy of professionalism and centralized media. But most of us, most of the time, are better off as “passive” recipients of superior work made by more creative others, rather than straining to assemble our own efforts. Immersive surrender to a great work of art is not subjugation; it’s liberation, an escape from the confines and limitations of your own self.
The Situationist critique would also need adjustment for the age of the internet, social media, and game culture. Platforms like TikTok and YouTube (slogan: “Broadcast Yourself”) require the conceptualization of The Spectacle 2.0. Disengagement, nonproductivity, the refusal to interact or generate content might actually be the subversive responses here. Even the ever-changing forms of “talking back” to mass-media – parodies, meme collages, fanfic, and other forms of punk-redolent iconoclasm, which conceivably fall under the Situationist category of détournement- might just be a whole new frontier of distraction: insubordinate and ludic impulses captured and converted into profit (“recuperated”, to use the Situationist term). The ever-flexible Spectacle triumphing again, enough to drive Debord to a second suicide.
Although the Situationists disdained popular culture, there is something “rock’n’roll” about their ideas and turns of phrase, like the slogan “La vie VITE”. They exalted youth and admired juvenile delinquency. The original French title of Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life is Traite de savoir-vivre a l’usage de jeunes generations – which roughly translates as Guide on How To Live for the Use of the Young Generation. That seems like a big nod to the widely felt sense of youth as a transnational class that had emerged to consciousness of its own power in the 1960s, turning the instinctive insurrection of the 1950s into ideology.
Compare Vaneigem’s “We demand everything” with Jim Morrison’s “We want the world and we want it now”. The Doors singer drank deeply from the same sort of philosophers and poets as the Situationists, which helps explain the claims he made in the group’s Elektra Records press release: “I like ideas about breaking away or overthrowing of established order — I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that seems to have no meaning.” Morrison’s successor Iggy Pop frenziedly strove to turn a spectacle (the rock band performing onstage) into a situation, through self-abasement and breaching the barrier between artist and audience: a Dionysian impulse expressed on the Stooges song “Fun House” in the lines “We been separated / A little too long… Livin’ in division.”
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