yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
i tried to read raoul vaneigem's "revolution of everyday life". it's supposed to be the easier read of the situationist books but i found it incomprehensible and put it away after 100 pages. i guess i'm too thick for this kindof stuff. Here's a little bit I did like.

In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create. What spark of humanity, of a possible creativity, can remain alive in a being dragged out of sleep at six every morning, jolted about in suburban trains, deafened by the racket of machinery, bleached and steamed by meaningless sounds and gestures, spun dry by statistical controls, and tossed out at the end of the day into the entrance halls of railway stations, those cathedrals of departure for the hell of weekdays and the nugatory paradise of weekends, where the crowd communes in weariness and boredom? From adolescence to retirement each 24-hour cycle repeats the same shattering bombardment, like bullets hitting a window: mechanical repetition, time-which-is-money, submission to bosses, boredom, exhaustion. From the butchering of youth's energy to the gaping wound of old age, life cracks in every direction under the blows of forced labour. Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live. The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry. Already the front against forced labour is being formed; its gestures of refusal are moulding the consciousness of the future. Every call for productivity in the conditions chosen by capitalist and Soviet economy is a call to slavery.
 

vershy versh

Well-known member
i tried to read raoul vaneigem's "revolution of everyday life". it's supposed to be the easier read of the situationist books but i found it incomprehensible and put it away after 100 pages. i guess i'm too thick for this kindof stuff. Here's a little bit I did like...

Reminds me of Jacques Ellul,

“Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man's very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and to sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world.”​
 

kid charlemagne

Well-known member
@vershy versh

Spectacular government, which now possesses all the means necessary to falsify the whole of production and perception, is the absolute master of memories just as it is the unfettered master of plans which will shape the most distant future. It reigns unchecked; it executes its summary judgments. It is in these conditions that a parodic end of the division of labor suddenly appears, with carnivalesque gaiety, all the more welcome because it coincides with the generalized disappearance of all real ability. A financier can be a singer, a lawyer a police spy, a baker can parade his literary tastes, an actor can be president, a chef can philosophize on cookery techniques as if they were landmarks in universal history. Anyone can join the spectacle, in order publicly to adopt, or sometimes secretly practice, an entirely different activity from whatever specialism first made their name. Where ‘media status’ has acquired infinitely more importance than the value of anything one might actually be capable of doing, it is normal for this status to be readily transferable; for anyone, anywhere, to have the same right to the same kind of stardom.

Most often these accelerated media particles pursue their own careers in the glow of statutorily guaranteed admiration. But it sometimes happens that the transition to the media provides the cover for several different enterprises, officially independent but in fact secretly linked by various ad hoc networks. With the result that occasionally the social division of labor, along with the readily foreseeable unity of its application, reappears in quite new forms: for example, one can now publish a novel in order to arrange an assassination. Such picturesque examples also go to show that one should never trust someone because of their job. Yet the highest ambition of the integrated spectacle is still to turn secret agents into revolutionaries, and revolutionaries into secret agents.
 

kid charlemagne

Well-known member
The simple fact of being unanswerable has given what is false an entirely new quality. At a stroke it is truth which has almost everywhere ceased to exist or, at best, has been reduced to the status of pure hypothesis. Unanswerable lies have succeeded in eliminating public opinion, which first lost the ability to make itself heard and then very quickly dissolved altogether. This evidently has significant consequences for politics, the applied sciences, the legal system and the arts.

The manufacture of a present where fashion itself, from clothes to music, has come to a halt, which wants to forget the past and no longer seems to believe in a future, is achieved by the ceaseless circularity of information, always returning to the same short list of trivialities, passionately proclaimed as major discoveries. Meanwhile news of what is genuinely important, of what is actually changing, comes rarely, and then in fits and starts. It always concerns this world’s apparent condemnation of its own existence, the stages in its programmed self-destruction.
 

kid charlemagne

Well-known member
The most useful expert, of course, is the one who can lie. With their different motives, those who need experts are falsifiers and fools. Whenever individuals lose the capacity to see things for themselves, the expert is there to offer an absolute reassurance
 

kid charlemagne

Well-known member
u were right... i am only half way through comments on SotS, but there was no use in reading SotS before this..... i find comments way easier to read and more insightful
 

vershy versh

Well-known member
We've got a thread on Debord and co. if you're curious.

 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Where do we stand on Gide? On the one hand a giant of letters, Nobel Prize winner etc etc on the other hand a completely unrepentant paedophile. Got one of his books here, should I read it?
 

luka

Well-known member
i will read tonight ts eliot the wasteland and other poems, inspired by the film oppenheimer, more proof of the film's importance and influence...... @luka this is a approved poetry book?
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
OK I'm reading The Counterfeiters (as it's rendered in English) by Gide, so far good, neatly clever writing and loads of unbelievable coincidences of connection which mean all of the main characters are somehow related to each other.
In that respect it reminds me of Paul Auster's Moon Palace which has a typical Auster type joke in that the whole book keeps turning on ridiculous coincidences and then the main character reads a book and throws it aside in frustration complaining that the number of coincidences strains belief.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
OK I'm reading The Counterfeiters (as it's rendered in English) by Gide, so far good, neatly clever writing and loads of unbelievable coincidences of connection which mean all of the main characters are somehow related to each other.
In that respect it reminds me of Paul Auster's Moon Palace which has a typical Auster type joke in that the whole book keeps turning on ridiculous coincidences and then the main character reads a book and throws it aside in frustration complaining that the number of coincidences strains belief.
Interesting that you can see the influence of The Picture of Dorian Gray in the character of the dissipated lord who draws the youngsters into sin.

Gide was kinda mentored by Wilde at one point, for a certain time they were inseparable.
 

vershy versh

Well-known member
I think you'll like Cosmopolis, lots of talk of finance, how the market's absorbed everything. He published it in 2003 and it hasn't really aged at all. A bunch of people panned it at the time then the crash came five years later and they all came flocking back to say how right Don had been.
 
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