PERSPECTIVES FOR CONSCIOUS ALTERATIONS IN EVERYDAY LIFE
by Guy Debord
To study everyday life would be a completely absurd undertaking, unable
even to grasp anything of its object, if this study was not explicitly
for the purpose of transforming everyday life.
The lecture, the exposition of certain intellectual considerations to
an audience, being an extremely commonplace form of human rela tions in a
rather large sector of society, itself forms a part of the every day life
that must be criticized.
Sociologists, for example, are only too inclined to remove from every
day life things that happen to them every day, and to transfer them to
separate and supposedly superior spheres. In this way habit in all its
forms - beginning with the habit of handling a few professional concepts
(concepts produced by the division of labor) - masks reality behind
privileged conventions.
It is thus desirable to demonstrate, by a slight alteration of the
usual procedures, that everyday life is right here. These words are being
communicated by way of a tape recorder, not, of course, in order to
illustrate the integration of technology into this everyday life on the
margin of the technological world, but in order to seize the simplest
opportunity to break with the appearance of pseudocollaboration, of
artificial dialogue, established between the lecturer "in person" and his
spectator. This slight discomforting break with accustomed rou tine could
serve to bring directly into the field of questioning of every day life
(a questioning otherwise completely abstract) the conference itself, as
well as any number of other forms of using time or objects, forms that
are considered "normal" and not even noticed, and which ultimately
condition us. With such a detail, as with everyday life as a whole,
alteration is always the necessary and sufficient condition for
experimentally bringing into clear view the object of our study, which
would otherwise remain uncertain‹an object which is itself less to be
studied than to be altered.
I have just said that the reality of an observable entity designated
by the term "everyday life" stands a good chance of remaining
hypothetical for many people. Indeed, the most striking feature of the
present "Group for Research on Everyday Life" is obviously not the fact
that it has not yet discovered anything, but the fact that the very
existence of everyday life has been disputed from its very inception, and
increasingly so with each new session of this conference. Most of the
talks we have heard so far have been by people who are not at all
convinced that everyday life exists, since they haven't encountered it
anywhere. A group for research on everyday life with this attitude is
comparable in every way to an expedition in search of the Yeti, which
might similarly come to the conclusion that its quarry was merely a
popular hoax.
To be sure, everyone agrees that certain gestures repeated every day,
such as opening doors or filling glasses, are quite real; but these
gestures are at such a trivial level of reality that it is rightly
objected that they are not of sufficient interest to justify a new
specialized branch of sociological research. A number of sociologists
seem disin clined to recognize any aspects of everyday life beyond these
triviali ties. They thus accept the definition of it proposed by Henri
Lefebvre - "whatever remains afler one has eliminated all specialized
activities" - but draw a different conclusion: that everyday life is
nothing. The majority of sociologists - and we know how much they are in
their element in specialized activities, in which they generally have the
blindest faith! - recognize specialized activities everywhere and every day
life nowhere. Everyday life is always elsewhere. Among others. In any
case, in the nonsociologistic classes of the population. Someone said
here that it would be interesting to study the workers as guinea pigs who
have probably been infected with this virus of everyday life because
they, having no access to specialized activities, have only everyday life
to live. This condescending manner of investigating the common people in
search of an exotic primitivism of everyday life - and above all this
ingenuously avowed self-satisfaction, this naive pride in participating
in a culture whose glaring bankruptcy no one can dream of denying, this
radical inability to understand the world that produces this culture‹all
this never ceases to astonish.
There is in this an evident will to hide behind a development of
thought based on the separation of artificial, fragmentary domains so as
to reject the useless, vulgar and disturbing concept of "everyday life."
Such a concept covers an uncatalogued and unclassified residue of
reality, a residue some people are averse to confronting because it at
the same time represents the standpoint of the totality; it would imply
the necessity of an integral political judgment. Certain intel lectuals
seem to flatter themselves with an illusory personal partici pation in
the dominant sector of society through their possession of one or more
cultural specializations; these specializations, however, have placed
them in the best position to realize that the whole of this dominant
culture is manifestly moth-eaten. But whatever one's opin ion of the
coherence of this culture or of the interest of one or another of its
fragments, the particular alienation it has imposed on these
intellectuals is to make them think, from their position in the heaven of
the sociologists, that they are quite outside the everyday life of the
common people, or to give them an exaggerated idea of their rank on the
scale of human powers, as if their lives, too, were not impoverished.
Specialized activities certainly exist; they are even, in a given pe
riod, put to a certain general use which should be recognized in a
demystified manner. Everyday life is not everything - although its osmosis
with specialized activities is such that in a sense we are never outside
of everyday life. But to use a facile spatial image, we still have to
place everyday life at the center of everything. Every project begins
from it and every realization returns to it to acquire its real signifi
cance. Everyday life is the measure of all things: of the fulfillment or
rather the nonfulfillment of human relations; of the use of lived time;
of artistic experimentation; of revolutionary politics.
It is not enough to recall that the old stereotypical image of the
detached scientific observer is fallacious in any case. It must be
stressed that disinterested observation is even less possible here than
anywhere else. What makes for the difficulty of even recognizing a
terrain of everyday life is not only the fact that it has already become
the ostensible meeting ground of an empirical sociology and a concep tual
elaboration, but also the fact that it presently happens to be the stake
in any revolutionary renewal of culture and politics.
To fail to criticize everyday life today means accepting the
prolongation of the present thoroughly rotten forms of culture and politics,
forms whose extreme crisis is expressed in increasingly widespread
political apathy and neoilliteracy, especially in the most modern
countries. On the other hand, a radical critique in acts of prevailing
everyday life could lead to a supersession of culture and politics in the
traditional sense, that is, to a higher level of intervention in life.
"But," you may ask, "how does it happen that the importance of this
everyday life, which according to you is the only real life, is so com
pletely and directly underrated by people who, after all, have no direct
interest in doing so - many of whom are even far from being opposed to some
kind of renewal of the revolutionary movement?"
I think this happens because everyday life is organized within the
limits of a scandalous poverty, and above all because there is nothing
accidental about this poverty of everyday life: it is a poverty that is
constantly imposed by the coercion and violence of a society divided into
classes, a poverty historically organized in line with the evolving
requirements of exploitation. The use of everyday life, in the sense of
a consumption of lived time, is governed by the reign of scarcity:
scarcity of free time and scarcity of possible uses of this free time.
Just as the accelerated history of our time is the history of accu
mulation and industrialization, so the backwardness and conservative
tendency of everyday life are products of the laws and interests that
have presided over this industrialization. Everyday life has until now
resisted the historical. This represents first of all a verdict against
the historical insofar as it has been the heritage and project of an
exploi tative society.
The extreme poverty of conscious organization and creativity in
everyday life expresses the fundamental necessity for unconsciousness and
mystification in an exploiting society, in a society of alienation.
Henri Lefebvre has extended the idea of uneven development so as to
characterize everyday life as a lagging sector, out of joint with the
historical but not completely cut off from it. I think that one could go
so far as to term this level of everyday life a colonized sector. We know
that underdevelopment and colonization are interrelated on the level of
global economy. Everything suggests that the same thing applies at the
level of socioeconomic structure, at the level of praxis.
Everyday life, policed and mystified by every means, is a sort of
reservation for good natives who keep modern society running without
understanding it‹this society with its rapid growth of technological
powers and the forced expansion of its market. History‹the transfor
mation of reality‹cannot presently be used in everyday life because the
people of everyday life are the product of a history over which they have
no control. It is of course they themselves who make this history, but
not freely.
Modern society is viewed through specialized fragments that are
virtually incommunicable; and so everyday life, where all questions are
liable to be posed in a unitary manner, is naturally the domain of
ignorance. Through its industrial production this society has emptied
the ges tures of work of all meaning. And no model of human behavior has
retained any real relevance in everyday life. This society tends to
atomize people into isolated consumers, to prohibit communication.
Everyday life is thus private life, the realm of separation and
spectacle.
It is thus also the sphere of the specialists' resignation and failure.
It is there, for example, that one of the rare individuals capable of
understanding the latest scientific conception of the universe will make
a fool of himself by earnestly pondering Alain Robbe-Grillet's aesthetic
theories or by sending petitions to the President of the Republic in the
hope of convincing him to change his policies. It is the sphere of
disarmament, of the avowal of the incapability of living. Thus the
underdevelopment of everyday life cannot be characterized solely by its
relative inability to put technology to use. This trait is an important,
but only partial, consequence of the everyday alienation as a whole,
which could be defined as the inability to invent a technique for the
liberation of everyday experience.
In fact many techniques do more or less markedly alter certain
aspects of everyday life: the domestic arts, as has already been mentioned
here, but also the telephone, television, the recording of music on
long-playing records, mass air travel, etc. These elements arise
anarchically, by chance, without anyone having foreseen their
interrelations or consequences. But on the whole this introduction of
technology into everyday life - ultimately taking place within the frame
work of modern bureaucratized capitalism - certainly tends rather to reduce
people's independence and creativity. The new prefabricated cities
clearly exemplify the totalitarian tendency of modern capitalism's
organization of life: the isolated inhabitants (generally isolated within
the framework of the family cell) see their lives reduced to the pure
triviality of the repetitive combined with the obligatory absorp tion of
an equally repetitive spectacle. One can thus conclude that if people
censor the question of their own everyday life, it is both because they
are aware of its unbearable misery and because sooner or later they
sense - whether they admit it or not - that all the real possibilities, all
the desires that have been frustrated by the functioning of social life,
were focused there, and not at all in the specialized activities or
distractions. That is, awareness of the profound richness and energy
abandoned in everyday life is inseparable from awareness of the poverty
of the dominant organiza tion of this life. Only the perceptible
existence of this untapped rich ness leads to the contrasting definition
of everyday life as poverty and as prison; and then, in the same
movement, to the negation of the problem.
In these conditions, repressing the political question posed by the
poverty of everyday life means repressing the depth of the demands
bearing on the possible richness of this life - demands that can lead to
nothing less than a reinvention of revolution. Of course an evasion of
politics at this level is in no way incompatible with being active in the
Parti Socialiste Unifie, for example, or with reading Humanite' with
confidence.
Everything effectively depends on the level at which this problem is
posed: How is our life? How are we satisfied with it? Dissatisfied?
Without for a moment letting ourselves be intimidated by the various
advertisements designed to persuade us that we can be happy because of
the existence of God or Colgate toothpaste or the CNRS.
It seems to me that this phrase "critique of everyday life" could and
should also be understood in this reverse sense: as everyday life's
sovereign critique of everything that is external or irrelevant to itself.
The question of the use of technological means, in everyday life and
elsewhere, is a political question (and out of all the possible technical
means, those that are implemented are in reality selected in accor dance
with the goal of maintaining one class's domination). When one envisions
a future such as that presented in science fiction, in which interstellar
adventures coexist with a terrestrial everyday life kept in the same old
material indigence and archaic morality, this implies precisely that
there is still a class of specialized rulers maintaining the proletarian
masses of the factories and of fices in their service; and that the
interstellar adventures are nothing but the particular enterprise chosen
by those rulers, the way they have found to develop their irrational
economy, the pinnacle of specialized activity.
Someone posed the question, "What is private life deprived of?" Quite
simply of life itself, which is cruelly absent. People are as de prived
as possible of communication and of self-realization. Deprived of the
opportunity to personally make their own history. Hypotheses responding
positively to this question on the nature of the privation can thus only
be expressed in the form of projects of enrichment; the project of a
different style of life; or in fact simply the project of a style of life
. . . Or, if we regard everyday life as the frontier between the
dominated and the undominated sectors of life, and thus as the terrain of
risk and uncertainty, it would be necessary to replace the present ghetto
with a constantly moving frontier; to work ceaselessly toward the
organization of new chances.
The question of intensity of experience is posed today - with the use of
drugs, for example - in the only terms in which the society of alienation
is capable of posing any question: namely, in terms of false recognition
of a falsified project, in terms of fixation and attachment. It should
also be noted how much the image of love elaborated and propagated in
this society has in common with drugs. A passion is first of all
presented as a denial of all other passions; then it is frustrated and
finally reappears only in the compensations of the reigning spectacle. La
Rochefoucauld observed, "What often prevents us from abandoning ourselves
to a single vice is that we have several." This is a very constructive
observation if we ignore its moralist presuppositions and put it back on
its feet as the basis of a program for the realization of human capacities.
All these questions are of present significance because our time is
visibly dominated by the emergence of the project borne by the working
class - the abolition of every class society and the inauguration of human
history - and thus also dominated by the fierce resistance to this project
and by the distortions and failures it has encountered until now.
The present crisis of everyday life takes its place among the new
forms of the crisis of capitalism, forms that remain unnoticed by those
who cling to the classical calculation of the date of the next cyclical
crisis of the economy.
The disappearance in developed capitalism of all the old values, of
all the frames of reference of past communication; and the impossibil ity
of replacing them by any others before having rationally domi nated,
within everyday life and everywhere else, the new industrial forces that
escape us more and more‹these facts produce not only the virtually
official dissatisfaction of our time, a dissatisfaction particu larly
acute among young people, but also the self-negating tendency of art.
Artistic activity had always been alone in conveying the clan destine
problems of everyday life, albeit in a veiled, deformed, partially
illusory manner. Evidence of a destruction of all artistic expression now
exists before our eyes: modern art.
If we consider the whole extent of the crisis of contemporary society,
I don't think it is possible still to regard leisure activities as a
negation of the everyday. It has been recognized here that it is
necessary to "study wasted time." But let us look at the recent evolution
of this idea of wasted time. For classical capitalism, wasted time was
time that was not devoted to production, accumulation, saving. The
secular morality taught in bourgeois schools has instilled this rule of
life. But it so happens that by an unexpected turn of events modern
capitalism needs to increase consumption, to "raise the standard of
living" (if we bear in mind that this expression is completely
meaningless). Since at the same time production conditions,
compartmentalized and clocked to the extreme, have become indefensible,
the new morality already being conveyed in advertising, propaganda and
all the forms of the dominant spectacle now frankly admits that wasted
time is the time spent at work, which latter is only justified by the
hierarchized scale of earnings that enable one to buy rest, consumption,
entertainments - a daily passivity manufactured and controlled by
capitalism.
If we now consider the artificiality of the consumer needs
prefabricated and ceaselessly stimulated by modern industry - if we
recognize the emptiness of leisure activities and the impossibility of
rest - we can pose the question more realistically: What would not be
wasted time? The development of a society of abundance should lead to an
abundance of what? This can obviously serve as a touchstone in many
regards. When, for example, in one of those papers where the flabby
thinking of "leftist intellectuals" is displayed - I am referring to
France-Observateur - one reads a title like "The Little Car Out To
Conquer Socialism" heading an article that explains that nowadays the
Russians are beginning to pursue an American-style private consumption
of goods, beginning naturally with cars, one cannot help thinking that
one need not have assimilated all of Hegel and Marx to realize that a
socialism that gives way in the face of
an invasion of the market by small cars is in no way the socialism for
which the workers movement fought. The bureaucratic rulers of Russia
must be opposed not on the level of their tactics or their dogmatism, but
fundamentally, on the fact that the meaning of people's lives has not
really changed. And this is not some obscure fatality of an everyday life
doomed to remain reactionary. It is a fa tality imposed on everyday life
from the outside by the reactionary sphere of specialized rulers,
regardless of the label under which they plan and regulate poverty in all
its aspects.
The present depoliticization of many former leftist militants, their
withdrawal from one type of alienation to plunge into another, that of
private life, represents not so much a return to privacy, a flight from
"historical responsibility," but rather a withdrawal from the
specialized political sector that is always manipulated by others - a
sector where the only responsibility they ever took was that of leaving all
responsibility to uncontrolled leaders; and where the communist project
was betrayed and frustrated. Just as one cannot simplistically op pose
private life to public life without asking: what private life? what
public life? (for private life contains the factors of its negation and
supersession, just as collective revolutionary action harbored the fac
tors of its degeneration), so it would be a mistake to assess the alien
ation of individuals in revolutionary politics when it is really a matter
of the alienation of revolutionary politics itself. It is right to
dialectize the problem of alienation, to draw attention to the constantly
recurring possibilities of alienation arising within the very struggle
against alienation; but we should stress that this applies to the
highest level of research (to the philosophy of alienation as a whole,
for example) and not to the level of Stalinism, the explanation of which
is unfortunately more gross.
Capitalist civilization has not yet been superseded anywhere, but it
continues to produce its own enemies everywhere. The next rise of the
revolutionary movement, radicalized by the lessons of past defeats and
with a program enriched in proportion to the practical powers of mod ern
society (powers already constituting the potential material basis that
was lacking in the so-called utopian currents of socialism)‹this next
attempt at a total contestation of capitalism will know how to invent and
propose a different use of everyday life, and will imme diately base
itself on new everyday practices, on new types of human relationships
(being no longer unaware that any conserving, within the revolutionary
movement, of the relations prevailing in the existing society
imperceptibly leads to a reconstitution of one or another var iant of
this society).
Just as the bourgeoisie, in its ascending phase, had to ruthlessly
liquidate everything that transcended earthly life (heaven, eternity), so
the revolutionary proletariat - which can never, without ceasing to be
revolutionary, recognize itself in any past or any models - will have to
renounce everything that transcends everyday life. Or rather, everything
that claims to transcend it: the spectacle, the "historical" act or
pronouncement, the "greatness" of leaders, the mystery of
specializations, the "immortality" of art and its importance outside of
life. In other words, it must renounce all the by-products of eternity
that have survived as weapons of the world of the rulers.
The revolution in everyday life, breaking its present resistance to
the historical (and to every kind of change), will create the conditions
in which the present dominates the past and the creative aspects of life
always predominate over the repetitive. We must therefore expect that the
side of everyday life expressed by the concepts of ambiguity -
misunderstanding, compromise or misuse - will decline considerably in
importance in favor of their opposites: conscious choice and gamble.
The present artistic calling in question of language - appearing at the
same time as that metalanguage of machines which is nothing other than
the bureaucratized language of the bureaucracy in power - will then be
superseded by higher forms of communication. The present notion of a
decipherable social text will lead to new methods of writing this social
text, in the direction my situationist comrades are presently seeking
with unitary urbanism and some preliminary ventures in experimental
behavior. The central production of an en tirely reconverted industrial
work will be the organization of new con figurations of everyday life,
the free creation of events.
The critique and perpetual re-creation of the totality of everyday
life, before being carried out naturally by all people, must be under
taken in the present conditions of oppression, in order to destroy these
conditions.
An avant-garde cultural movement, even one with revolutionary
sympathies, cannot accomplish this. Neither can a revolutionary party on
the traditional model, even if it accords a large place to criticism of
culture (understanding by that term the entirety of artistic and
conceptual means through which a society explains itself to itself and
shows itself goals of life). This culture and this politics are worn out
and it is not without reason that most people take no interest in them.
The revolutionary transformation of everyday life, which is not re served
for some vague future but is placed immediately before us by the
development of capitalism and its unbearable demands‹the al ternative
being the reinforcement of the modern slavery‹this trans formation will
mark the end of all unilateral artistic expression stocked in the form of
commodities, at the same time as the end of all specialized politics.
This is going to be the task of a new type of revolutionary
organization from its inception.
GUY DEBORD
A tape recording of this talk was presented 17 May 1961 at a confer ence
of the Group for Research on Everyday Life convened by Henri Lefebvre in
the Center of Sociological Studies of the CNRS.
Référence: http://hamp.hampshire.edu/~cmnF93/debord.txt