Critiques of Everyday Life by Gardiner Michael

Author:Gardiner, Michael
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781134829538
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Situationist critique in the service of demystification does not, therefore, rely on the postulation of a realm of abstract, transcendental values. Rather, it is an immanent critique because it seeks to ‘expose the appalling contrast between the possible constructions of life and its present poverty’. Utopia, according to Debord and Vaneigem, is about the realm of the possible, in the sense that the here and now contains within it all the necessary materials for a transfigured social existence. However, Situationist theory is future-oriented in that it refuses a romanticist nostalgia and anticipates the arrival of a new society and a new way of life. ‘The revolution of everyday life cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future’, as one SI text put it, paraphrasing Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire (1981e: 64). Such a revolution represents a triumph of the present and the future over the dead hand of the past, and a casting off of repetitive, stultified behaviour and the ethos of survivalism and sacrifice. In the non-spectacular society of the future, ‘work’ as it is currently understood would be abolished, and exchange-value would be replaced by use-value. The outlines of such non-commodified social relations could be glimpsed in the forms of gift-giving and ‘nonproductive expenditure’ found in premodern societies (Bataille 1988). For example, as an anonymous SI text argued, ‘real desires begin to be expressed in festival, in playful self-assertion, in the potlatch of destruction’ (198If: 155). This revolution, unlike all previous rebellions, would be marked by the abolition of work and a full flowering of the creative potential of daily life, and a supersession of capitalist isolation and possessive egoism. The return of authentic community would not, however, be marked by the tyranny of the group over the individual. As the SI understood it, community could only be based on the full participation of sovereign and free individuals. Liberated from the despotism of specialization, each person would be able to cultivate all the different sides of human nature and develop their full potentialities. The realization of true community was premised on the self-realization of each of its members, and with the ‘liberation of the inexhaustible energies trapped in a petrified daily life’ (Kotányi and Vaneigem 1981: 67). In Plant’s words, the SI envisaged the revolution as

the first freely constructed game, a collective transformation of reality in which history is seized by all its participants. Play, pleasure, and participation were to be the hallmarks of a new form of social organisation appropriate to a world in which the imperatives of survival no longer legitimise relations of domination, alienation, or the separation between the individual and the world. The euphoric fluidity of the revolutionary moment, in which experiences gain a tangible immediacy which makes a few days seem like years, comes out of the free and experimental play unleashed by the total rejection of existing rules. [The] joy of freely assumed roles is rediscovered in the midst of the contestation of those previously prescribed, and out of the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.