The Revolution of Everyday Life

The Revolution of Everyday Life is a 1967 book by Raoul Vaneigem, Belgian author, philosopher and former member of the Situationist International (1961-1970). In French the title of the work was more elaborate: Traité du savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations, or Treatise on Living for the Younger Generations. John Fullerton & Paul Sieveking, the first translators of the work into English, chose this alternative title. Though later translators such as Donald Nicholson-Smith prefer the original French title, publishers generally insist upon the latter title, by which it has become well-known in the English-speaking world.

The book was, along with Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, one of the most significant major works written by members of the Situationist International (1957-1972).

The book takes the field of "everyday life" as the ground upon which communication and participation can occur, or, as is more commonly the case, be perverted and abstracted into pseudo-forms. The author considers that direct, unmediated communication between "qualititive subjects" is the 'end' to which human history tends - a state of affairs still frustrated by the perpetuation of capitalist modes of relation and to be "called forward" through the construction of situations. Under these prevailing conditions, people are still manipulated as docile "objects" and without the "qualititive richness" which comes from asserting their irreducible individuality - it is toward creating life lived in the first person that situations must be "built" . So to speak, it is the humiliation of being but a "thing" for others that is responsible for all the ills Vaneigem equates with modern city life - isolation, humiliation, mis-communication - and toward creating new roles that flout stereotyped convention that freedom comes.

Contents of the Donald Nicholson-Smith translation (Rebel Press, 2003):

Translator’s Preface
Author’s Preface to the First French Paperback Edition
Introduction

Part One: Power’s Perspective

Chapter 1: The Insignificant Signified

The Impossibility of Participation: Power as the Sum of Constraints

Chapter 2: Humiliation
Chapter 3: Isolation
Chapter 4: Suffering
Chapter 5: The Decline and Fall of Work
Chapter 6: Decompression and the Third Force

The Impossibility of Communication: Power as Universal Mediation

Chapter 7: The Age of Happiness
Chapter 8: Exchange and Gift
Chapter 9: Technology and Its Mediated Use
Chapter 10: Down Quantity Street
Chapter 11: Mediated Abstraction, Abstracted Mediation

The Impossibility of Realisation: Power as Sum of Seductions

Chapter 12: Sacrifice
Chapter 13: Separation
Chapter 14: The Organization of Appearances
Chapter 15: Roles
Chapter 16: The Fascination of Time

Survival and False Opposition to it

Chapter 17: Survival Sickness
Chapter 18: Spurious Opposition

Part Two: Reversal of Perspective

Chapter 19: Reversal of Perspective
Chapter 20: Creativity, Spontaneity, and Poetry
Chapter 21: Masters Without Slaves
Chapter 22: The Space-Time of Lived Experience and the Rectification of the Past
Chapter 23: The Unitary Triad: Self-Realisation, Communication, Participation
Chapter 24: The Interworld and the New Innocence
Chapter 25: You Won’t Fuck With Us Much Longer!

A Toast to Revolutionary Workers

External links

The Revolution of Everyday Life online at www.nothingness.org.

The Revolution of Everyday Life

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