21 March 2013

A "Happy birthday!" to Raoul Vaneigem...

Raoul Vaneigem's Autogested Bio-impact

With so many books that Vaneigem has written, neither the Nothingness nor Bureau of Public Secrets sites has any by him from a post-1980 thirty-year period.

As well, few, have translated any of those texts, contributing to all of our loss, maintaining our ideology-guarded ignorance.

Not very strange, then, that the same book, "The Revolution of Every Day Life" keeps getting "re-translated" by the same Donald Nicholson-Smith, like the eternal releases of bad software from Microsoft or the ever-diminishing lifespan of Apple hardware, which follow the capital downward spiral into the netherworld of "always needs an upgrade"!

Meanwhile, the Debord descent from the human spirit down to the redundant excommunicating tasks of a Jesuit pope, ruling the hardline "correctness" of a self-oblivionated hierarchical "Situationist International", is missed as an "integral moment of the whole" by revering students and practitioners of ISMization who might as well be Catholic. In terms of their above-shoulders approach to "living the revolution" and in "missing the forest for the trees", I've noticed a presence -- in their self-digesting personas -- of an abhorrence for inductive reasoning.

This group, precisely because they are solely-and-souly deductive, work from an quantitatively-expanding self-delusion directly related to the quantity of just how mathelogically they approach the "limit" of infinity found in/as the near-absolutist Debordian view about "alienation", "inversion", and "reification" which he "synthesized"-in from his instructors' critiques as his own core, that is, from the views learned via from school instructors, Henri Lefebvre and Jean Hippolyte.

This "absolute", deployed to explain everything in the terms of The Spectacle, becomes as un-"scientific method" as you can get. It spectacularizes "the spectacle" into a 'doer' called The Spectacle, reifies "the reification process" into a 'doer' called Reification, and mediates "the mediation process" as a 'doer' called The Unmediated.

Sadly, in the "lives" of the self-ideologified, any use-value is inverted into "revolutionary" exchange-value, a lifestyle (socio-cultural commodity-role) which self-bloatedly spends its "free time" waving a mask called The Unmasking! The paranormality pushed by an disinterested George Noory ("Coast-to-coast AM") and these overly-interested anal retentives become each others images in a shadow world.

Is it any wonder that the OBD (One Big Debate) for these 'practicing dead' is the ponderously-suffocating "is there situationISM or not" as the core spectacle of their own spectacular recepticle-ness for all THINGS "revolution" and "practice".

Debord is and has been very relevant to both the critique of capital and anti-critique of, by, and for capital, as he left the "door open" with his own lack of rigor when it came to formally and contentually respecting mutuality, isocracy, and life itself.
He "let himself go" to the point of being a fuel-rod for the capitalist fissioning of life, into the choice between objectively "being dead" and subjectively "becoming lifestyle".

This includes "the revolutionary lifestyle" — commodity unextraordinaire — absurd except to those ensnared in a self-maintained ideological "inversion" of the reality "below the DMZ of the neck", "beyond the limits of the idea[l]", and "outside the milieu which accesses reality's footnotes ONLY from itself".

To commend this STILL-LIVING writer, Raoul Vaneigem, who had the guts and practiced principles to leave the imaginary ocean captained by "Captain Bligh" Debord on the S.S. Situationist, I would suggest reading the following:

Translated from the Post-1980s Period

  1. Greece: The Cradle of Another World — by Raoul Vaneigem and Yannis Youlountas; translated by NOT BORED! (February 20, 2012)
  2. What's Free is the Absolute Weapon — Siné Mensuel Interviews Raoul Vaneigem (January 06, 2012)
  3. Carnival Against Capital: A Comparison of Bakhtin, Vaneigem, and Bey — by Gavin Grindon (15 pages)
  4. Preliminary Notes on a Project for the Construction of Oarystis, the City of Desires — by Raoul Vaneigem (2002)
  5. The Resistance to Christianity — written by Raoul Vaneigem (1993), translated by NotBored (2006-2007)
  6. The Inhumanity of Religion — by Raoul Vaneigem (202-paged book published in French in 2000; currently being translated by NotBored.org; editing by Lust for Life tentatively begins in Winter 2007)

Translated from the Pre-1980s Period

There are, of course, some very valuable older texts:

  1. Contributions to the Revolutionary Struggle — by Raoul Vaneigem – edited by Lake County Anarchists (24 pages)
  2. The Revolution of Everyday Life — by Raoul Vaneigem – translated into English by John Fullerton and Steve Sieveking (182 pages; English 1972)
  3. Terrorism or Revolution — by Raoul Vaneigem (1972)
  4. Basic Banalities — by Raoul Vaneigem (April 1962; January 1963)
  5. The Book of Pleasures (HTML, PDF) — by Raoul Vaneigem (January 8, 1979)

Further Recommendations

I would also recommend translating these availed French texts texts of Raoul Vaneigem.

I would also recommend reading the critique of the reified Spectacle running the show as "Situationist" colonization in the at texts of Jean-Pierre Voyer.

My best wishes for "blowing out the candles" of this birth[less]day world.

1 comment:

  1. Great post. I was checking continuously this blog and I'm impressed!
    Extremely useful info specially the last part :) I care for such info much.
    I was seeking this certain info for a very long time.
    Thank you and good luck.

    My homepage :: Colon Cleanse

    ReplyDelete