As Jameson reads Fourier, that which can be desired is the very basis of social structure, and not just of social structure, but of nature itself. Fourier is the most vigorous resister to the thought that something of desire has to be forsaken, that the condition of life is the tragic one of sacrificing desire on the altar of the real. Fourier is no moralist. Jameson: “The ethical or moralizing habit is above all what resists the great thought of immanence, what hankers after the luxury of picking and choosing among existents…”16
Where Debord perfected a style of almost absolute negation, Vaneigem learns from Fourier how to affirm the world: “I first read the selected texts, published by the Editions Sociales, in the early 1960s. I then read the version of the Nouveau monde amoureux edited by Simone Debout. One of the things that made Fourier a genius was that he revolutionized the world and the perception we have of it without labeling himself as a revolutionary. He expressed no judgments made on a moral basis. He acknowledges a world of domination. He takes the society as it is—with its desires and hidden passions. He creates the conditions that would lead to their harmonization and refinement. Thus, what in a logic of civilization would be a frenetic race for success (upward social mobility) and behaviors focusing on producing exclusion, is replaced, in a logic of harmony, by ludic imitation.”17
What Fourier and Vaneigem have in common is their refusal of necessity. Fourier: “The passions are proportionate to the destinies.” Vaneigem: “Love is the science of pleasures that organizes destinies.”18 Fourierist writing connects the totality of nature to the events of everyday life via the ubiquity of the passions. While there is always something outside the system, Fourier keeps extending the system sideways to include it, even if, in the process, something else falls out of its reach. The passion that drives Fourier to systematize is always reaching toward what it excludes with fresh gestures of welcome. This is his capricious and capacious beauty.
The limit to the Jamesonian reading is that while it frees Fourier from partial readings via labor, desire or language, the Fourier who spent his days trying to change the world is absent. Vaneigem has the merit at least of attempting to synthesize Fourier on the association of labor, on free love, and as visionary poet, with the praxis of everyday life. Vaneigem: “If cybernetics was taken from its masters, it might be able to free human groups from labor and from social alienation. This was precisely the project of Charles Fourier in an age when utopia was still possible.”19 It is not that Fourier is like a machine or a computer. Quite the reverse: the machinic and the algorithmic could be fragments of a Fourierist playground ready for self-assembly.
For Vaneigem it is a question of how poetry can be an activist mode in the world: “Poetry is an act which engenders new realities.”20 Far more than the other Situationists, Vaneigem takes seriously the latent potentials of the Surrealist project: “Surrealism’s failure was an honorable one.”21 Vaneigem’s roots are more in the revolutionary Surrealism of his native Belgium than the Letterist movement Debord encountered in Paris. Via Vaneigem’s détournement of the Surrealists and the Surrealists’ of Fourier, a neglected strand for Situationist thought and action emerges. While Debord and Vaneigem were fellow travelers in their Situationist wanderings, in the end they belong to different camps. The nets through which they strained to understand—and change—modern history use meshes of different dimensions.
In the century after the French Revolution, and particularly after the emergence of the art market in the 1850s, the bourgeoisie tried to build a new transcendent myth out of the ruins of religion, an autonomous sphere of Art as redoubt from economy. The struggle for new mythological forms can be traced from David’s The Death of Marat to Manet’s Olympia. Vaneigem: “The ‘spectacle’ is all that remains of the myth that perished along with unitary society: an ideological organization whereby the actions of history upon individuals themselves seeking, whether in their own name or collectively, to act upon history, are reflected, corrupted and transformed into their opposite—into the autonomous life of the non-lived.”22 Where Clark traced the tactics of realist painters in and against the spectacle, Vaneigem records those of the romantic and Surrealist writers.
Three strategies confront the challenge of the bourgeois world’s autonomous art. One was a radicalizing of aesthetics from within: Stendhal, Nerval, Baudelaire. A second was the struggle to abolish art as a separate world and realize it in everyday life: Hölderlin, Lautréamont. The third was a systematic critique of aesthetics from that world from which it separated: Fourier and Marx. Dada came closest to a synthesis of the available strategies, but the defeat of the German revolution of 1919 doomed it to failure, too. Dada offered an absolute but abstract break with bourgeois art and life. Surrealism, at its worst, was a kind of reformist version of Dada, obscuring its negativity, restoring partial forms of revolt.
The Surrealists struggled against, and eventually collapsed into, the autonomous sphere of art. Vaneigem: “Hence Surrealism became the spectacularization of everything in the cultural past that refused separations, sought transcendence, or struggled against ideologies and the organization of the spectacle.”23 And yet, not least through Breton’s intelligence and discretion, “the Surrealists made a promise which they kept: to be the capricious consciousness of a time without consciousness.”24 Vaneigem appreciates Breton’s expulsions of unworthy members, even as he slyly notes “his tendency to choose people’s aperitifs for them.”25
At their best, the Surrealists resisted both specialized art and politics, and hewed close to the discovery of the potentials of everyday life. While some capitulated to the art market, Benjamin Peret, Antonin Artaud, André Breton and Jacques Prévert waged a campaign against Surrealism as ideology. They extracted themselves from the allure of the Communist Party, whose deadly policies Peret saw firsthand as a volunteer in republican Spain. Vaneigem: “The foundering of this project under the helmsmanship of Stalinism and its attendant leftisms was to reduce Surrealism to a mere generator of what might be called the special effects of the human.”26
Still, they pioneered a psychoanalysis freed from therapeutic pretensions. They remained guardians of dreams, even if they could not quite bring themselves to call for their realization in everyday life. From early on, René Crevel documented the persistence of non-life in the totality of human affairs: “All our life we circle around the suicide that legislators have condemned so that the earth might not be deserted.”27 Crevel took his own life in 1935. His suicide note said simply, “disgust.” When they turned away from Stalinism, Breton and friends were left with nowhere to go except the rewriting of everyday alienation as cosmic mental theater, either on the epic scale of Artaud, or as Crevel’s chamber pieces.
Vaneigem gives the Surrealists more credit than does Debord for what they preserved through the dark times of the late thirties. They kept alive fragments of a project of emancipation, the trace of a theory of passionate moments, moments of love, encounter, subjectivity. Yet they turned such moments into an absolute, an illusory totality. They fell for the cult of woman, and for a hierarchy of spiritual over carnal love. Breton in particular failed to live up to Fourier’s lack of judgment about homosexuality, or so-called deviance in general.
The Surrealists constructed a new canon: the atheist priest Jean Meslier, the romantic extremist Comte de Lautréamont, the criminal poet Pierre-François Lacenaire, and the desiring machinery of Charles Fourier, among others. But they abandoned Dada’s quest for collective poetry and total negation in favor of the specialized domains of avant-garde politics and art. Vaneigem: “The discovery of Fourier might perhaps have underpinned an overall recasting of the movement, but Breton would always prefer Fourier the visionary, Fourier the poet of analogy, to Fourier the theorist of a radically new society.”28 At war’s end there was not much left of Surrealism as a radical project. “They