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| The appropriation of nature by man is precisely the venture we have
embarked on. It is the central, indisputable project, the issue that
encompasses all issues. What is always in question, at the heart of
modern thought and action, is the possible use of the dominated sector
of nature. The overall perspective concerning this use governs the
choices among the possible alternative directions presented at each
moment of the process; and also governs the rhythm and duration of
productive expansion in each sector. It is the absence of an overall
perspective or rather the monopoly of a single untheorized perspective automatically produced by the present power structure's boundless
economic growth that has caused the emptiness that has been the lot
of contemporary thought for forty years. The accumulation of production and of ever-improving technological capabilities is proceeding even faster than nineteenth-century communism predicted. But we have remained at a stage of superequipped prehistory. A century of revolutionary attempts has failed: human life has not been rationalized and impassioned; the project of a classless society has not yet been achieved. We have entered a never-ending growth of material means that remains at the service of fundamentally static interests, and therefore at the service of values everyone recognizes as long dead. The spirit of the dead weighs very heavily on the technology of the living. The economic planning that reigns everywhere is insane, not so much because of its academic obsession with organizing the enrichment of the years to come as because of the rotten blood of the past that circulates through its veins and is endlessly pumped forth with each artificial pulsation of this "heart of a heartless world!' Material liberation is only a precondition for the liberation of human history and can only be judged as such. A country's choice of which kind of minimum level of development is to be given priority depends on the particular project of liberation chosen, and therefore on who makes this choice-the autonomous masses or the specialists in power. Those who accept the ideas of some type of specialist organizers regarding what is indispensable may well be liberated from any privation of the objects those organizers choose to produce, but they will assuredly never be liberated from the organizers themselves. The most modern and unexpected forms of hierarchy will always remain costly remakes of the old world of passivity, impotence and slavery-the antithesis of man's sovereignty over his surroundings and his history- whatever may be the material forces abstractly possessed by the society. Because of the fact that in present-day society the domination of nature presents itself both as an increasingly aggravated alienation and as the single great ideological justification for this social alienation, it is criticized in a one-sided, undialectical and insufficiently historical manner by some of the radical groups who are half way between the old degraded and mystified conception of the workers movement, which they have superseded, and the new form of total contestation which is yet to come (see, for example, the theories of Cardan and others in the journal Socialisme ou Barbazie). These groups, rightly opposing the continually more thorough reification of human labor and its modem corollary, the passive consumption of leisure activity manipulated by the ruling class, come to the point of more or less unconsciously harboring a sort of nostalgia for work in its ancient forms, for the really "human" relationships that were able to flourish in the societies of the past or even in the less developed phases of industrial society. Moreover, this attitude fits in well with the system's efforts to obtain a higher yield from existing production by doing away with both the waste and the inhumanity that characterize modern industry. But these conceptions abandon the very core of the revolutionary project, which is nothing less than the suppression of work in the ordinary sense (as well as the suppression of the proletariat) and of all the justifications of previous forms of work. It is impossible to understand the sentence in the Communist Manifesto that says that "the bourgeoisie has played an eminently revolutionary role in history" if one ignores the possibility, opened up to us by the domination of nature, of eliminating work in favor of a new type of free activity, or if one ignores the role of the bourgeoisie in the "dissolution of old ideas," that is, if one follows the unfortunate tendency of the classical workers movement to define itself positively in terms of "revolutionary ideolgy". In "Basic Banalities" Vaneigem has elucidated the process of the dissolution of sacred thought and has shown how its function as analgesic, hypnotic and tranquilizer has been taken over, at a lower level, by ideology. Ideology, like penicillin, has become less effective as its use has become more widespread. As a result, the dosage has to be continually increased and the packaging made more ostentatious (one need only recall the diverse excesses of Nazism and of today's consumer propaganda). Since the disappearance of feudal society the ruling classes have been increasingly ill-served by their own ideologies: these ideologies (as petrified critical thought), after having been used by them as general weapons for seizing power, end up presenting contradictions to their particular reign. What in ideology was an unconscious lie (resulting from its having stopped at partial conclusions) becomes a systematic lie when certain of the interests it cloaked are in power and protected by a police force. The most modern example is also the most glaring: it was by taking advantage of the element of ideology present in the workers movement that the bureaucracy was able to establish its power in Russia. All the attempts to modemize an ideology-aberrant ones like fascism or consistent ones like the ideology of spectacular consumption in developed capitalism-tend toward preservation of the present, which is itself dominated by the past. A reformism of ideology in a direction hostile to the established society can never be effective because it can never get hold of the means of force-feeding thanks to which this society still commands an effective use of ideology. Revolutionary thought is necessarily on the side of the merciless critique of all ideologies-including, of course, that special ideology called "the death of ideologies" (whose title is already a confession since ideologies have always been dead thought), which is merely an empiricist ideology rejoicing over the downfall of envied rivals. The domination of nature implies the question 'For what purpose?' but this very questioning of man's praxis must concern itself with this domination, and in fact could not take place except on the basis of it. Only the crudest answer is automatically rejected: ... "To carry on as before, producing and consuming more and more," prolonging the reifying domination that has been intrinsic to capitalism from its beginnings (though not without "producing its own gravediggers"). It is necessary to expose the contradiction between the positive aspects of the transformation of nature-the great project of the bourgeoisie and its petty recuperation by hierarchical power, which in all its contemporary variants remains faithful to the single model of bourgeois "civilization" In its massified form, this bourgeois model has been "socialize" for the benefit of a composite petty bourgeoisie that is taking on all the capacities for stupefaction characteristic of the old poor classes and all the signs of wealth (themselves massified) that indicate membership in the ruling class. The bureaucrats of the Eastern bloc are objectively led to follow the same pattern, and as they produce more they have less need for police in maintaining their own particular schema for the elimination of class struggle. Modem capitalism loudly proclaims a similar goal. But they're all astride the same tiger: a world in rapid transformation in which they desire the dose of immobility necessary for the perpetuation of one or another variant of hierarchical power. The network of criticism of the present is coherent, just as is the network of apologetics. The coherence of apologetics is merely less apparent in that it must lie about, or give arbitrary values to, numerous contradictory details and variants within the established order. But if one really renounces all the variants of apologetics, one arrives at the critique that does not suffer from any guilty conscience because it is not compromised with any present ruling force. If someone thinks that a hierarchical bureaucracy can be a revolutionary power, and also agrees that mass tourism as it is globally organized by the society of the spectacle is a good thing and a pleasure, then, like Sartre, he can pay a visit to China or somewhere else. His errors, his stupidity and his lies shouldn't surprise anyone. Everyone finds their own level; other travelers, such as those who go to serve Tshombe in Katanga, are even more detestable and are paid in more real coin. The intellectual witnesses of the left, eagerly toddling wherever they are invited, bear witness to nothing so much as the abdication of a thought which for decades has been abdicating its own freedom as it oscillates between conflicting bosses. The thinkers who admire the present accomplishments of the East or the West, taken in by all the spectacular gimmicks, have obviously never thought about anything at all, as anyone can tell who has read them. The society they reflect naturally encourages us to admire its admirers. In many places they are even allowed to play their game of "Commitment," in which they opt (with or without regretful reservations) for the form of established society whose label and packaging inspires them. Every day alienated people are shown or informed about new successes they have obtained, successes for which they have no use. This does not mean that these stages in material development are uninteresting or bad: they can be reinvested in real life, but only along with everything else. The victories of our day belong to star-specialists. Gagarin's exploit shows that man can survive farther out in space, in increasingly unfavorable conditions. But just as is the case when the joint efforts of medicine and biochemistry enable a prolonged survival in time, this statistical extension of survival is in no way linked to a qualitative improvement of life. You can survive farther away and longer, but never live more. Our task is not to celebrate such victories, but to make celebration victorious - celebration whose infinite possibilities in everyday life are potentially unleashed by these very technological advances. Nature has to be rediscovered as a "worthy opponent!' The game with nature has to be exciting: each point scored must concern us directly. The conscious construction of a moment of life is an example of our (shifting and transitory) control of our milieu and of time. Humanity's expansion into the cosmos is at the opposite pole from the postartistic construction of individual life (though these two poles of the possible are intimately linked) - an example of an enterprise in which the present pettiness of specialist military competition comes into conflict with the objective grandeur of the project. The cosmic adventure will be extended, and thus opened up to a participation totally different from that of the specialist guinea pigs, farther and more quickly when the collapse of the miserly reign of specialists on this planet has opened the floodgates of an immense creativity which is presently blocked and unknown, but which is capable of leading to a geometrical progress in all human problems, supplanting the present cumulative growth restricted to an arbitrary sector of industrial production. The old schema of the contradiction between productive forces and production relations should certainly no longer be understood as a short term death warrant for capitalist production, as if the latter were doomed to automatically stagnate and become incapable of continuing its development. This contradiction must be construed as a judgment (which remains to be executed with the appropriate weapons) against this self-regulating production's niggardly and dangerous development, in view of the grandiose possible development that could be based on the present economic infrastructure. Only loaded questions are openly posed in the present society, questions that already imply certain obligatory responses. When people point out the obvious fact that the modem tradition is precisely one of innovation, they shut their eyes to the equally obvious fact that this innovation does not extend everywhere. In an era when ideology could still believe in its role, Saint-Just remarked that "in a time of innovation everything that is not new is pernicious:' God's numerous successors who organize the present society of the spectacle know very well what asking too many questions can lead to. The decline of philosophy and the arts also stems from this suppression of questioning. The revolutionary elements of modern thought and art have with varying degrees of precision demanded a praxis that would be the minimum terrain necessary for their developments praxis which is still absent. The other elements add new embellishments to the official questions, or to the futile questioning of pure speculation (the specialty of Arguments). There are many ideological rooms in the House of the Father, i.e. in the old society, whose fixed reference points have been lost but whose law remains intact (God doesn't exist, but nothing is permitted). Every facility is granted to the modernisms that serve to combat the truly modern. The gang of hucksters of the unbelievable magazine Planet, which so impresses the school teachers, epitomizes a bizarre demagogy that profits from the gaping absence of contestation and revolutionary imagination, at least in their intellectual manifestations, over the last nearly half a century (and from the numerous obstacles still placed in the way of their resurgence today). At the same time, playing on the truism that science and technology are advancing faster and faster without anyone knowing where they are going, Planet harangues ordinary people with the message that henceforth everything must be changed; while at the same time taking for granted 99% of the life really lived in our era. The daze induced by the barrage of novelties can be taken advantage of to calmly reintroduce retrograde nonsense that has virtually died out in even the most primitive regions. The drugs of ideology will end their history in an apotheosis of vulgarity that even Pauwels [editor of Planet], for all his efforts, cannot yet imagine. Ideology, in its various fluid forms that have replaced the solid mythical system of the past, has an increasingly large role to play as the specialist rulers need to increasingly regulate all aspects of an expanding production and consumption. Use value, indispensable still but which had already tended to become merely implicit since the predominance of an economy of producing for the market, is now explicitly manipulated (artificially created) by the planners of the modern market. It is the merit of Jacques Ellul, in his book Propaganda (A. Colin, 1962), which describes the unity of the various forms of conditioning, to have shown.that this advertising-propaganda is not merely an unhealthy excrescence that could be prohibited, but is at the same time a remedy in a generally sick society, a remedy that makes the sickness tolerable while aggravating it. People are to a great extent accomplices of propaganda, of the reigning spectacle, because they cannot reject it without contesting the society as a whole. The single important task of contemporary thought must center upon this question of reorganizing the theoretical and material forces of contestation. The alternative is not only between real life and a survival that has nothing to lose but its modernized chains. It is also posed within survival itself, with the constantly aggravated problems that the masters of survival are not able to solve. The risks of atomic weapons, of global overpopulation and of the increasing material impoverishment of the great majority of humanity are subjects of official alarm, even in the ordinary press. One very banal example: in an article on China (Le Monde, September 1962) Robert Guillain writes, without irony, on the population problem: "The Chinese leaders seem to be giving it fresh consideration and apparently want to tackle it. They are coming back to the idea of birth control, tried out in 1956 and abandoned in 1958. A national campaign has been launched against early marriages and in favor of family planning in young households!' These oscillations of specialists, immediately followed by official orders, reveal the sort of interest they really have in the liberation of the people just as completely as the opportunistic religious conversions of princes in the sixteenth century revealed the real nature of their interest in the mythical arsenal of Christianity. A few lines further, the same journalist suggests that "the USSR is not helping China because its available resources are now being devoted to the conquest of space, which is fantastically expensive!' The Russian workers have no more say in determining the quantity of surplus "available resources" produced by their labor, or in deciding whether that surplus is to be allotted to the moon rather than to China, than the Chinese peasants have in deciding whether they will have children or not. The epic of modem rulers at grips with real life, which they are led to take complete charge of, has found its best literary expression in the Ubu cycle. The only raw material that has not yet been tried out in this experimental era of ours is freedom of thought and behavior. It is necessary to distinguish, within the intelligentsia, between the tendencies toward submission and the tendencies toward refusal of the employment offered; and then, by every means, to strike a sword between these two fractions so that their total mutual opposition will illuminate the first advances of the coming social war. The careerist tendency, which fundamentally expresses the condition of all intellectual service in a class society, leads this stratum, as Harold Rosenberg remarks in his lyadition of the New, to expatiate on its own alienation without any action of opposition because this alienation has been made comfortable. But as the whole of modem society moves toward this comfort, which at the same time becomes more and more poisoned by boredom and anguish, the practice of sabotage can be extended to the intellectual terrain. Thus, just as in the first half of the nineteenth century revolutionary theory arose out of philosophy (out of critical reflection on philosophy, out of the crisis and death of philosophy), so now it is going to rise once again out of modern art-out of poetry-out of its supersession, out of what modern art has sought and promised, out of the clean sweep it has made of all the values and rules of everyday behavior. The living values of intellectual and artistic creation are denied as much as could be by the submissive intelligentsia's entire mode of existence, yet this intelligentsia wants at the same time to embellish its social position by claiming a sort of morganatic kinship with this creation of "values"!. This hired intelligentsia is more or less aware of this contradiction and tries to redeem itself by an ambiguous glorification of artistic "bohemianism". The valets of reification recognize this bohemian experience as a moment of qualitative use of everyday life, which is excluded everywhere else; as a moment of richness within extreme poverty, etc. But the official version of this fairy tale must have an edifying ending: this moment of pure qualitativeness within poverty must finally arrive at ordinary "riches". Poor artists have produced masterpieces which in their time had no market value. But they are saved (their adventure with the qualitative is excused, and even turned into an edifying example) because their work, which at the time was only a by-product of their real activity, later turns out to be highly valued. Living people who struggled against reification have nevertheless ended up producing their quota of commodities. Thus the bourgeoisie darwinistically applauds the bohemian values that have proved fit enough to survive and enter into its quantitative paradise. Everyone agrees to consider as purely accidental the fact that it is rarely the same people who possess the products at the stage of creation and at the stage of profitable commodities. The accelerated degradation of cultural ideology has given rise to a permanent crisis in this intellectual and artistic valorization, a crisis that dadaism brought out into the open. A dual movement has clearly characterized this end of culture: on one hand, the dissemination of false novelties automatically recycled with new packaging by autonomous spectacular mechanisms; and on the other hand, the public refusal to play along and the sabotage carried out by individuals who were clearly among those who would have been most capable of renewing "quality" cultural production (Arthur Cravan is a prototype of these people seen passing through the most radioactive zones of the cultural disaster, people who left behind them no form of commodities or memories). The conjunction of these two demoralizing forces does not cease to aggravate the malaise of the intelligentsia. After dadaism, and in spite of the fact that the dominant culture has been able to recuperate a sort of dadaist art, it is far from certain that artistic rebellion in the next generation will continue to be recuperable into consumable works. At the same time that the most elementary spectacular conmanship can draw on an imitation postdadaist style to produce all sorts of salable cultural objects, there exist in several modem capitalist countries centers of nonartistic bohemianism united around the notion of the end of or the absence of art, a bohemianism that explicitly no longer envisages any artistic production whatsoever. Its dissatisfaction can only radicalize with the progress of the thesis according to which "the art of the future" (the phrase itself is misleading since it implies dealing with the future in terms of present specialized categories) will no longer be valued as a commodity, since we are discovering that it is a subordinate aspect of the total transformation of our use of space, of feelings and of time. All the real experiences of free thought and behavior that succeed in taking shape in these conditions are certainly moving in our direction, toward the theoretical organization of contestation. In accordance with the reality presently beginning to take shape, we may consider as proletarians all people who have no possibility of altering the social space-time that society allots for their consumption (regardless of variations in their degree of affluence or of possibilities for promotion). The rulers are those who organize this space-time, or who at least have a significant margin of personal choice (even deriving, for example, from a significant survival of older forms of private property). A revolutionary movement is one that radically changes the organization of this space-time and the very manner of deciding its ongoing reorganization henceforward (and not a movement that merely changes the legal form of property or the social origin of the rulers). Already today the vast majority everywhere consumes the odious, soul-destroying social space-time "produced" by a tiny minority. (it should be specified that this minority produces literally nothing other than this organization, whereas the "consumption" of space-time, in the sense we are using here, embraces the whole of ordinary production, in which the alienation of consumption and of all life obviously has its roots.) The ruling classes of the past at least knew how to spend in a humanly enriching way the meager slice of surplus-value they managed to wrest from a static social production grounded on general scarcity; the members of today's ruling minority have lost even this "mastery". They are nothing but consumers of power - and that, moreover, nothing but the power of miserably organizing survival. And their sole purpose in so miserably organizing this survival is to consume that power. The lord of nature, the ruler, is dissolved in the pettiness of the exercise of his power (the scandal of the quantitative). Mastery without dissolution would guarantee full employment - not of all the workers, but of all the forces of the society, of all the creative possibilities of each person, for himself and for dialogue. Where then are the real masters? At the other extremity of this absurd system. At the pole of refusal. The masters come from the negative, they are the bearers of the antihierarchical principle. The distinction drawn here between those who organize space-time (together with their direct agents) and those who are subjected to this organization is aimed at clearly exposing the polarization that is hidden by the intentionally woven complexity of the hierarchies of function and salary, which give the impression that all the gradations are virtually imperceptible and that there are hardly any more real proletarians or real property owners at the two extremities of a social spectrum that has become highly flexible. Once this distinction is posed, other differences in status must be considered as secondary. It should not be forgotten, however, that an intellectual, or a "Professional revolutionary" worker, is liable at any moment to tumble irretrievably into integration - into one niche or another in one clan or another in the camp of the ruling zombies (which is far from being harmonious or monolithic). Until real life is present for everyone, the "salt of the earth" is always susceptible to going bad. The theorists of the new contestation can neither compromise with the ruling power nor constitute themselves as a separate power without immediately ceasing to be such (their role as theorists will then be taken over by others). This amounts to saying that the revolutionary intelligentsia can realize its project only by suppressing itself; that the "intellectual party" can really exist only as a party that supersedes itself, a party whose victory is at the same time its own disappearance. |