6 The Revolution of Everyday Life
Comrades whom you have offended make the bitterest enemies.
Baltasar Gracián
It was the start, if not of a beautiful friendship, then of a harmonious one, at least for a time. Raoul Vaneigem and Guy Debord met in 1960. Henri Lefebvre introduced them. They sealed their friendship Situationist style. Vaneigem: “My psychogeographic dérives with Guy Debord in Paris, Barcelona, Brussels, Beersel and Antwerp were exceptional moments, combining theoretical speculation, sentient intelligence, the critical analysis of beings and places, and the pleasure of cheerful drinking. Our homeports were pleasant bistros with a warm atmosphere; havens where one was oneself because one felt in the air something of the authentic life, however fragile and short lived. It was an identical mood that guided our wanderings through the streets, the lanes and the alleys, through the meanderings of a pleasure that our every step helped us gauge in terms of what it might take to expand and refine it just a little further…”1
Among other things, they discussed the books they would write. Debord was nothing if not encouraging. He wrote to Vaneigem in 1965 that his manuscript is “perhaps the first appearance, in book form, of the tone, the level of critique, of those revolutionaries called ‘utopian’, that is to say, of the basic propositions for the overthrow of the totality of society.”2 Vaneigem’s book got into print a little sooner than Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. Famous in English as The Revolution of Everyday Life, it was at first rejected by various publishers, including Gallimard. Then an article appeared in the press that claimed the Situationists were an influence on the Provo agitations then rocking Amsterdam. Raymond Queneau asked Vaneigem to resubmit it to Gallimard, and so it ended up with one of the most prestigious houses in France. If there was an author who anticipated the mood of May ’68, it was Vaneigem with his “lucidity grounded in my own desires.”3
In contrast to Clark’s melancholia, Vaneigem thinks of May ’68 as the revolution that never ended, a “genuine decanting, from the kind of revolution which revolutionaries make against themselves, of that permanent revolution which is destined to usher in the sovereignty of life.”4 Its significance lay less in the confrontation with the state than in the transformation of everyday life. It would not be a revolution within the economy, but a revolution against the economy. It would germinate in the pores of the old world and burst through the dead skin of politics. “One day, though, we’ll have to admit that May 1968 marked a complete break with the majority of patriarchal values…”5
All of which was finally too much for Debord and some of the others in the Situationist International, who retained a rather more Jacobin idea of revolution. After an exchange of not particularly edifying diatribes, Vaneigem resigned in 1970: “How did what was exciting in the consciousness of a collective project manage to become a sense of unease at being in one another’s company?” He wrote to his former comrades that he had no desire to see them again until after the revolution, much like Hölderlin’s Hyperion, who would not trouble himself with friendships that are mere fragments of a new life yet to dawn.6
Vaneigem left the Situationist International, which dissolved two years later. He did not stop writing. Often deploying pseudonyms, over the ensuing decades he periodically issued manifestos restating a small number of themes. Some of his best books were on heresies, as they brought together his unique talents.7 He studied Romance philology at the Free University of Brussels from 1952 to 1956. Then he taught at the École Normale in Nivelles, a small town in the Walloon region of Belgium, from 1956 to 1964, where a liaison with a student got him fired. He survived on editorial and hack writing jobs thereafter.
If Debord’s debut book of 1967 was a détournement of Hegel, Marx and the Marxisant writings of the moment, then Vaneigem’s reaches back to one of Marx’s precursors, Charles Fourier.8 Marx and Engels had an ambivalent relation to Fourier. Henri Lefebvre: “Like Fourier, Marx desired and projected the new life.” But they kept him at a distance, grouping him with utopian writers with whom he had little in common. They admired him chiefly as a satirist. And yet “Marx owes much more to Fourier than is generally admitted.”9 In drawing up his list of theoretical topics to deal with without pedantry or delay, Vaneigem listed an homage to Fourier, something he never quite carried out, unless one considers his whole life to be such.10
Charles Fourier (1772–1837) and G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) were both writers shaped by the French Revolution. Hegel perhaps had more enduring impact, for while Fourier had a number of disciples, most were more like Judas than the Apostles. They betrayed his larger vision. He was somewhat selectively read as a socialist prophet. His French followers joined forces with the Jacobin left in 1848 and went down with them. A statue in bronze of Fourier by émile Derré went up at the Place de Clichy in 1899, but his influence was decidedly on the wane by that time.
André Breton’s Ode to Charles Fourier (1947) opens with the author reminiscing about the day ten years earlier when he noticed that someone had placed a flower at the foot of Fourier’s statue. In 1941 the Germans melted down the statue and used the copper for the manufacture of munitions. Breton: “They’ve preferred the good old method.” Gone is “the immortal pose of the thorn-extractor.”11
Breton, like his contemporary Theodor Adorno, was exiled by the war in America. Unlike Adorno, Breton did not think the concentration camps obliged him to forswear the poetic, but rather to delve even deeper into it, via Fourier’s “extreme tact in extravagance.” Caught between the futility of art for its own sake and the utility of art to Stalinism, what remained of the Surrealist movement turned to Fourier in the bleak years of the war and the fragile promise of the peace that followed. Breton: “Fourier they’ve scoffed but one day they’ll have to try your remedy whether they like it or not.” Breton revived interest in Fourier not so much as a socialist prophet of associative labor, but as the poet of liberated desire.
In March ’69, Pierre Lepetit, a teacher at the École des Beaux Arts, joined forces with some friends of the Situationists and restored Fourier’s statue on the Place de Clichy, or at least a plaster replica.12 René Riesel, René Viénet and Alice Becker-Ho witnessed the installation. Lepetit’s statue bore the legend: “In homage to Charles Fourier from those who manned the barricades on the rue Gay-Lussac,” the spot where the Situationists took their stand against the police in May ’68.
The Fourier of liberated desire was somewhat at odds with the militant asceticism of the French postwar left. Roland Barthes mentions a study group on Fourier formed at the occupied Sorbonne in 1968 that was denounced as bourgeois by the militants. Fourier’s revolution was always in a minor rather than a major key, a revolution of everyday life rather than of the state. Barthes: “Marxism and Fourierism are like two nets with meshes of different sizes.”13
Fourier, with his weird fetishes and manic obsessions, is an easy prey for the new priests of psychoanalysis.14 Barthes rescued him from travesty by drawing attention to Fourier as a writer. He famously characterizes Fourier as a logothete, an inventor of a language. He anatomizes Fourier’s technique, which isolates itself from everyday language, articulates new rules for its assemblage and regulates the production of text, resulting in the fantastic repetition that characterizes his writing, which like that of the Marquis de Sade contains scene after scene with variations on the same game.
Raymond Queneau thought Fourier’s calculus of the passions was more sophisticated than Hegel’s dialectical logic. Walter Benjamin saw something machine-like in the meshings of his utopia. Italo Calvino imagined him, and not unkindly, as writing a vast computer program.15 Roland Barthes’ Fourier is the designer of wilder systems, which can never quite complete themselves and yet thrive on the very attempt. Time and again writers find ways to connect Fourier to their own passions. He