Preface to the first French paperback edition - Raoul Vaneigem

The Traite de savoir-vivre et l'usage des jeunes generations 1 heralded the emergence of a radically new era from the bosom of a waning world.

With the quickening of the current that has for a short while now been carrying beings and things along, the Traite has grown, so to speak, ever more clairvoyant.

The stratified past still clung to by those who grow old with time is ever more easy to distinguish from the alluvia, timeless in their fertility, left by others who awake to themselves (or at least strive to) every day.

For me, these are two moments of a single fluctuating existence in which the present is continually divesting itself of its old forms.

A book that seeks to interpret its time can do no more than bear witness to a history imprecise in its becoming; a book that wreaks change on its time cannot fail to sow the seeds of change in the field of future transfor­mations. If the Traite has something of both, it owes this to its radical bias, to the preponderance in it of that 'self' which is in the world without being of the world, that 'self' whose emancipation is a sine qua non for anyone who has discovered that learning to live is not the same thing as learning to survive.

In the early 1960s I conjectured that the examination of my own subjectivity, far from constituting an isolated activity, would resonate with other, like endeavours; and that if this examination was in tune with the times, it would in some way modulate those times in harmony with our desires.

To extend the ennui that textured my own everyday existence to a few others, and to enlist them in the dismal task of denouncing its causes, was not a little presumptuous on my part. But this consideration only increased the allure of betting on my presentiment that a passion for life was on the increase, a passion the impossibility of defining which contrasted dramatically with the acuteness of the criticism then being directed at the conditions ranged against it.2

In 1968 the barrier of prevailing sensibilities was brutally shattered by the vivisection of survival - a veritable alchemical opus nigrum. Thirty years on, consciousness is slowly opening itself up to a reversal of perspective in the light of which the world ceases to be apprehended as prey to a negative and begins instead to be ordered on the basis of a new positivity, on the basis of the recognition and expansion of the living forces within it.

Violence has changed its meaning. Not that the rebel has grown weary of fighting exploitation, boredom, poverty and death: the rebel has simply resolved no longer to fight them with the weapons of exploitation, boredom, poverty and death. For the first victim of any such struggle is anyone who engages in it full of contempt for their own life. Suicidal behaviour is naturally an integral part of a system that battens on the dilapidation of human nature as of nature tout court.

If the ancient cry "Death to the Exploiters" no longer echoes through the streets, it is because it has given way to another cry, one harking back to childhood and issuing from a passion which, though more serene, is no less tenacious. That cry is "Life First!" The refusal of commodities implicit in the shattered plate-glass windows of 1968 marked such a clear and public breach in a millennia-old economic boundary-line drawn around individual destiny that archaic reflexes of fear and impotence immediately obscured the insurrectionary movement's truly radical character. I say 'truly radical' because here at long last was a chance to make the will to live that exists in each of us the basis for a society which for the first time in history would attain an authentic humanity.

Many people, however, treated this moment as an opportunity to set up shop as merchandisers of opposition, ignoring any need to change behaviour wedded to the mechanics of the commodity's rule. Among the Traite's readers there were thus some who seized upon my account of a certain mal de vivre (from which I wanted above all to free myself) as an excuse for offering no resistance whatsoever to the state of survival to which they were in thrall (and which the comforts of the welfare state, its abundant and bitter consolations, had until then concealed from them).

It was not long before these people had run up new character armour for themselves at the verbal of militant terrorism. Later still (without ever abandoning their incendiary rhetoric) they became career bureaucrats and covered themselves with glory as cogs in the apparat of State and marketplace.

*

In the 1960s a mutation of the economy took hold whose effects are increasingly evident today. With the benefit of hindsight I can now see much more easily how I was able to take advantage, in effect, of a kind of interregnum during which the old authority was losing its grip but the new had still not thoroughly consolidated its power-to rescue subjectivity the general opprobrium which then covered it and to propose, as the basis of a projected society, an enjoyment of self that proclaimed itself one with enjoyment ofthe world.

To begin with there were three or four of us who partook of, and shared amongst us, the passion for' constructing situations'. The way each culti­vated this passion at that time depended on each's goals for his own existence, but it has lost nothing of its urgency, as witness both the inexorable advance of the life forces and the investments that an ecological neo-capitalism is obliged to make in them.

The last thirty years have visited more upheavals upon the world than several millennia that proceeded them. That the Traite should in the slightest way have contributed to the acceleration thus suddenly imposed upon events is in the end far less a source of satisfaction to me than sight of the paths now being opened up, within some individuals and some societies, that will lead from the primacy now at long last accorded to life to the likely creation of an authentically human race.

May 1968 was 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.

There has never been a revolutionary movement not governed from start to finish by the expanding empire of the commodity. The economy, with its iron collar of archaic forms, always smashed revolution by means of freedoms, modelled on the freedom of commerce, which because the inherent constraints of the law of profit swiftly become the building-blocks of new tyrannies.

In the end the economy picks up whatever it has put in at the outset, plus appreciation. This is the whole meaning of the notion of' recuperation'. Revolutions have never done anything but turn on themselves and negate themselves at the velocity of their own rotation. The revolution of 1968 was no exception to this rule. The commodity system, finding generalised consumption more profitable than production, itself speeds up the shift from authoritarianism to the seductions of the market, from saving to spending, from puritanism to hedonism, from an exploitation that sterilises earth and mankind to a lucrative reconstruction of environment, from capital as more precious than the individual to the individual as the most precious capital.

The impetus of the 'free' market has reunified the capitalist system by precipitating the collapse of bureaucratic, so-called communist, state capi­talism. The Western model has made tabula rasa of the old forms of oppression and instated a democracy of the supermarket, a self-service autonomy, a hedonism whose pleasures must be paid for. Its racketeering has exploded all the great ideological balloons of earlier so laboriously inflated from generation to generation by the winds of the political seasons. A flea market of religion has been set up alongside the sleaze merchants and the shopping centres. The system has realised in the nick of time that a living human being is more of a paying proposition than a dead human being or one riddled by pollutants. A fact proved, if proof were needed, by the rise of a vast market of the affections - an industry extracting profits from the heart.

Even the critique of the spectacle has now been travestied as 'critical' spectacle. With the saturation of the market for denatured, tasteless, useless products, consumers unable to proceed any farther down the road of stupidity and passivity find themselves propelled into a competing market where profitability is predicated on the suggestions of quality and 'natural­ness'. Suddenly we are obliged willy-nilly to demonstrate discernment - to retrieve the shreds of intelligence that old-style consumerism forebade us to use.

Power, State, religion, ideology, army, morality, the Left, the Right - that so many abominations should have been sent one another to the wrecker's yard by the imperialism of the market, for which there is no black and no white, might seem at first glance good reason to rejoice; but no sooner does the slightest suspicion enter one's mind than it becomes obvious that all forces have simply redeployed, and are now waging the same war under different colours. lest we forget, is also the colour of the dollar bill. The new and improved consumerism may be democratic, it may be ironic, but it always presents its bill, and the bill must always be paid. A life governed by a sanctioned greed is by no means freed thereby from the old tyranny of having to forfeit one's life simply to pay for it.

If there is one area where the achievement of consciousness comes into its own as a truly essential act, it is the realm of everyday where every passing instant reveals once again that the dice are loaded and that as per usual we are being taken for a ride.

From the agrarian structures that gave birth to the first City-States, to the world-wide triumph of the free market, the history of the commodity system has continually oscillated between a closed economy and an open one, between withdrawal into protectionism and embrace of the free circulation of goods. Each advance of the commodity has engendered on the one hand formal liberties, and on the other a consciousness enjoying the incalculably great advantage over those liberties of potential incarnation within individual, potential conflation with the very movement of desire.

The first reaction of the ideology of freedom which rode the wave of all past revolutions, from the communalist insurrections of the eleventh and twelfth centuries to 1789, 1848, 1871, 1917 and 1936, was to drown all libidinal exuberance in blood (such exuberance was in any case itself largely restricted to bloody violence as a way of letting off steam).

Only one revolution (apropos of which it will someday be acknowledged that, in sharp contrast to all its predecessors, it truly wrote finis to several millennia of inhumanity) did not end in the whirlwind of repressive violence. In fact it simply did not end at all.

In 1968 the economy closed the circle: it reached its apogee and plunged into nothingness. This was the moment when it abandoned the authoritar­ian puritanism of the production imperative for the (more profitable) market in individual satisfaction. The suffusion of attitudes and mores by permissiveness echoed the official world's recognition of pleasure - so long, of course, as the pleasure in question was a profitable one, tagged with an exchange value and wrested from the gratuitousness of real life to serve a new commodity order.

And then the game was over. Cool calculation had drawn too close to the heat of passion. The danger was that the will to live, aroused and denied simultaneously, would end by exposing the artificiality of the market's definition of freedom. Where was the silver-tongued lie that would serve business's ecological new look by promoting the timidest imaginable de-fence of life while still preventing individuals from reconstructing both their and their environment as part of an indivisible process? A fate that has enthralled fomentors of revolution from time immemorial dictated that the 1 968ers must eventually go where the economy beckoned: to modernity for the economy - and to ruin for them. If this fate was defied in 1968, it was thanks to a subjective consciousness of where real life lay. The rejection of work, sacrifice, guilt, separation, exchange, survival, so easily co-optable by an intellectual discourse, drew nourishment on this occasion from a lucidity that went far beyond contestation (or perhaps rather stopped far short of it) by hewing to the for a honing of desire, by remaining beholden to the evetyday childhood of a life locked in combat with everything that sought to exhaust and destroy it.

A consciousness severed from the living forces is blind. The dark of the negative at first obscure the fact that what seems like progress is working against us. The only consistency in the social analyses of our fashionable thinkers is the formidable tenacity with which they cling to their laughable claims. Revolution, self-management, workers' councils so many words held up to public opprobrium at the very moment when state power is put on the defensive by groups whose collective decision-making admits of no intrusion by political representatives, shuns all organisers or leaders and combats all hierarchy.

I do not mean to downplay the shortcomings of a practice of this kind, which has for the most part been confined to reactions of a defensive nature. It cannot be denied, however, that it is a manifestation, bearing no appel­lation d'origine controlee, of a type of behaviour that breaks utterly with the old mass movements: a coming together of individuals in no way reducible to a crowd manipulable at will.

Everyday life itself is even more full of shortcomings - one has but to consider how little light is shed on it by those who wander about at the whim of its pleasures and pains.

After all, the Judaeo-Christian era itself had to end before we found out that the grimy word 'life' concealed a reality long overlain by that mere survival to which all life had reduced by the cycle of the commodity, which mankind produces and which reproduces mankind in its own image.

There is no one who is not embarked upon a process of personal alchemy, yet so inattentive, so short-sighted are those who call their own passivity and resignation 'fate' that the magistery cannot operate in the light, cannot emerge from the atmosphere of putrefaction and death which characterises the daily grind of desires forced to deny themselves.

The feeling (inevitably a desperate one) of having fallen victim to a universal conspiracy of hostile circumstances is contrary to any will to autonomy. The negative is nothing but an excuse for resigning oneself never to be oneself, never to grasp the riches of one's own life. My goal, instead, has been a lucidity grounded in my desires; by continually illuminating the struggle between the living forces and living death, such a lucidity must surely combat the commodity's logic of etiolation.

As a sort of research report, a single book has neither the best nor yet the most insignificant role to play in the passionate day-to-day struggle to winnow out from my life whatever blocks or depletes it. The present work, Le Livre des plaisirs and L 'Adresse aux vivants may be seen as phases of a continuum in which a number of concordances have emerged between a mutating world and footholds secured from time to in the persistent attempt to create myself and reconstruct society at the same time.

The falling rate of a profit derived from the exploitation and destruction of nature has been the determining factor in the late-twentieth century development of an ecological neo-capitalism and of new modes of produc­tion. The profitability of the living forces is no longer founded upon their exhaustion but rather on their reconstruction. Consciousness of the life to be created progresses because the sense of things themselves contributes to it. Never have desires, returned now to their childhood, enjoyed such power within each individual to smash everything that turns them upside down, everything that denies them and reifies them and makes them into commodities.

Something is taking place today which no imagination has ever dared speculate upon: the process of individual alchemy is on the point of transmuting an inhuman history into nothing less than humanity's self-realisation.

September 1991

• 1Paris: Gallimard, Collection Folio/Actuel, 1992.
• 2The Traite was written between 1963 and 1965, and the manuscript sent to thirteen publishers, all of whom rejected it. The last refusal was from Gallimard, on whose reading committee the book was supported only by Raymond Queneau and Louis-Rene Des Forets. As it hap­pened, on the day the returned manuscript and Gallimard's rejection letter reached me, Le Figaro litteraire published an article decrying the influence of the situationists on the Provos of Amsterdam. That same evening Queneau sent me a telegram requesting that the manuscript be resubmitted. As a result I cut short a closing discussion of workers' councils as a social model (the book's second postscript, added in 1972, shows signs of an attempt to redress this). The Traite eventually appeared on 30 November 1967, six months before those 'events' which - precisely because their most innovative aspects are even now only just beginning to manifest themselves - are still not referred to as the Revolution of May 1968.

  When the book came out, many readers claimed vociferously that the state of economic well-being then prevailing flatly contradicted my analysis of survival. A comparable scepticism greeted Le Livre des plaisirs (Paris: Encre, 1979; English translation: The Book of Pleasures, London: Pending Press, 1983), published at a time when working and making money seemed to overshadow all other concerns. Likewise in the case of my Adresse aux vivants sur la mort qui les gouverne et l'opportunite de s'en difaire (Address to the Living Concerning the Death that Rules over Them, and the Opportuneness of the Present Moment for Ridding Themselves Thereof) (Paris: Seghers, 1990): the object of mockery now was no longer the critique of survival but rather the raising of the banner of a movement calling ever more clearly for "Life First!" In 1967 many people deemed the notion of the 'quality of life' vague and incomprehensible. It was not long before they were proved right, for a French government ministry shortly came into being with this very realm as its bailiwick. All the same, everything today suggests an urgent need, both individually and collectively, to give the quality of life practical definition and ensure its dominion. Much the same might be said of the notions of transparency, participation, reversal of perspective and creativity - which last term, incidentally, I was asked at that time to replace on the grounds that it 'doesn't exist'.