It is comforting to imagine that it is always someone else who is duped by the spectacle. Former movie star turned tabloid sensation Lindsay Lohan allegedly spent over one million dollars on clothes in a single year, and $100,000 in a single day, before consulting a hypnotist to try to end her shopping addiction. Lohan’s publicist denied the story: “There is no hypnotist, and Lindsay loves clothes, but the idea that she spent that much last year is completely stupid.”17 The alleged excess of an other makes the reader’s own relation to the spectacle of commodities seem just right. It’s all about having the right distance. For Debord, “no one really believes the spectacle.”18 Belief, like much else these days, is optional. The spectacle is what it is: irrefutable images, eternal present, the endless yes. The spectacle does not require gestures of belief, only of deference. No particular image need detain us any longer than this season’s shoes.
They call themselves the Bus Buddies. The women who travel the Adirondack Trailways Red Line spend five and even six hours commuting to high-paid jobs in Manhattan, earning much more money than they could locally in upstate New York. They are outlier examples of what are now called extreme commuters, who rarely see their homes in daylight and spend around a month per year of their lives in transit. It is not an easy life. “Studies show that commuters are much less satisfied with their lives than non-commuters.” Symptoms may include “raised blood pressure, musculoskeletal disorders, increased hostility, lateness, absenteeism, and adverse effects on cognitive performance.”19 Even with a blow-up neck pillow and a blankie, commuting has few charms.
For many workers the commute results from a simple equation between their income in the city and the real estate they can afford in the suburbs, an equation known well by the real estate development companies. “Poring over elaborate market research, these corporations divine what young families want, addressing things like carpet texture and kitchen placement and determining how many streetlights and cul-de-sacs will evoke a soothing sense of safety. They know almost to the dollar how much buyers are willing to pay to exchange a longer commute for more space, a sense of higher status and the feeling of security.”20 By moving away from the city, the commuter gets the space for which to no longer have the time. Time, or space? This is the tension envelope of middle-class desire. Home buyers are to property developers what soldiers are to generals. Their actions are calculable, so long as they don’t panic.
There are ways to beat the commute. Rush hour in São Paulo, Brazil features the same gridlocked streets as many big cities, but the skies afford a brilliant display of winking lights from the helicopters ferrying the city’s upper class home for the evening. Helipads dot the tops of high-rise buildings and are standard features of São Paulo’s guarded residential compounds. The helicopter speeds the commute, bypasses car-jackings, kidnappings—and it ornaments the sky. “My favorite time to fly is at night, because the sensation is equaled only in movies or in dreams,” says Moacir da Silva, the president of the São Paulo Helicopter Pilots Association. “The lights are everywhere, as if I were flying within a Christmas tree.”21
Many Paulistanos lack not only a helicopter, but shelter and clean water. But even when it comes with abundance, everyday life can seem strangely impoverished. Debord: “the reality that must be taken as a point of departure is dissatisfaction.”22 Even on a good day, when the sun is shining and one doesn’t have to board that bus, everyday life seems oddly lacking.
Sure, there is still an under-developed world that lacks modern conveniences such as extreme commuting and the gated community. Pointing to this lack too easily becomes an alibi for not examining what it is the developing world is developing toward. And rather than a developed world, perhaps the result is more like what the Situationists called an over-developed world, which somehow overshot the mark.23 This world kept accumulating riches of the same steroidal kind, pumping up past the point where a qualitative change might have transformed it and set it on a different path. This is the world, then, which lacks for nothing except its own critique.
The critique of everyday life—or something like it—happens all the time in the disintegrating spectacle, but this critique falls short of any project of transforming it. The spectacle points constantly to the more extreme examples of the ills of this world—its longest commutes, its most absurd disparities of wealth between slum dwellers and the helicopter class, as if these curios legitimated what remains as some kind of norm. How can the critique of everyday life be expressed in acts? Acts which might take a step beyond Emmalee Bauer’s magnum opus and become collaborations in new forms of life? Forms of life which are at once both aesthetic and political and yet reducible to the given forms of neither art nor action? These are questions that will draw us back over several centuries of critical practice.
Once upon a time, there was a small band of ingrates—the Situationist International—who aspired to something more than this. Their project was to advance beyond the fulfillment of needs to the creation of new desires. But in these chastened times the project is different. Having failed our desires, this world merely renames the necessities it imposes as if they were desires. Debord: “It should be known that servitude henceforth truly wants to be loved for itself, and no longer because it would bring any extrinsic advantage.”24 Here we have an example of what the radical sociologist Henri Lefebvre called historical drift, where “the results of history differ from the goals pursued.”25
The difficulty in the era of the disintegrating spectacle is to imagine even what the goal of history might be. Take the Tunisian revolution for instance. Mehdi Belhaj Kacem: “January 2011 is a May ’68 carried through all the way to the end. It is a revolution that has more in common with the Situationists … that is, a revolution carried out directly by the people, than with the Leninist or Maoist ‘Revolution’, in which an armed avant-garde takes over power and replaces one dictatorship with another…” Moreover, “for the first time in history it was the media—television, radio or newspapers—that played catch up to a new kind of democratic information … That is one of the major ‘situationist’ lessons of this revolution: an absolute victory over one ‘society of the spectacle.’ Which means that, tomorrow, others, and not only Arab dictatorships, might fall.”26
Let’s concede to Mehdi his optimism, speaking so soon after the events. Let’s concede also that he is probably correct in his assessment of the success in Tunisia of what are essentially Situationist organizational and communications tactics. One still has to wonder which way histories can drift once Big Brothers are deposed and exiled. Is to be freed from dictators the limit to the twenty-first century’s desires? As the Situationists wrote in the wake of the success and failure of the Algerian revolution some forty-odd years previously: “Everywhere there are social confrontations, but nowhere is the old order destroyed, not even within the very social forces that contest it.”27 As we shall see, revolutions are not exceptions, they are constants—but so too are restorations.
The critique of everyday life is the critique of existing needs and the creation of new desires. The everyday is the site of tension between desires and needs. It is where the productive tension between them either halts or advances. Today we may safely say it has come to a halt. Everyday life has been so colonized by the spectacle of the commodity form that it is unable to formulate a new relation between need and desire. It takes its desire for the commodity as if it were a need.
The attempt to revolutionize everyday life, to forge a new relation between need and desire, was decisively defeated. The emblem of that defeat is the signal year 1968. Even if the transformation that seemed so imminent at the time was impossible, now it hardly appears at all. And yet the everyday may still function as a fulcrum of critique, even if the work upon which such a critique might now build is not to be found in the optimism that effloresces in 1968, but the grim determination of those who lived through and beyond the moment of failure, and yet did their best to keep the critical edge sharp.
Taking the everyday as a site for critical thought has several advantages. For one thing, you’re soaking in it. It is not the special property of initiates of a particular kind of art or literature. It remains beyond the reach of even the most tactile and ductile of philosophies. Nor is it a domain walled off and subjected to the specialized tools of this or that