Spectacular Times
Everyday Life
"People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth"
Raul Vaneigem, "The revolution of Everday Life"
Get up, go to work, come home, go to bed, get up, go to work, come home, go to bed, get up, go to work, come home, go to bed....
.... get up, go to work, come home, go to bed. How much longer can you keep it up? How much longer before you crack?
Our life becomes divided between "work" time and "free" time. Both are part of that grand illusion - the Spectacle. Within the Society of the Spectacle all time is spectacular time. Sometimes we are the commodity and sometimes the consumer. In our "free" time we buy back what we made during our "work" time. "Work" time and "free" time serve each other.
"Free" time is sacred.
"Work" time is sacred.
"Free" time.
"Work" time.
Real life is elsewhere.
Within Spectacular Time "work" time and "free" time are indistinguishable. The community is the barracks of industry. Is it your town - or do you just live there?
For whose benefit is your community being run?
Spectacular business helps develop the Culture, Philosophy and Morality of the Spectacle....
....and the morality of Spectacular business becomes the morality of the community.
Even at it's most liberal it reveals a view of the world which has been objectified to such an extent that a subjective view of the world is incomprehensible to it.
But when disaster strikes Spectacular business is ready to put it's mind to the problem in hand.
The spectacle has so succesfully infiltrated Everyday Life that an attack upon the Spectacle appears to be an attack upon Society. When attacked the Spectacle threatens us with the Spectre of Anarchy. Yet one ordinary non-revolutionary week-end is infinitely more bloody than a whole month of permanent revolution.
We start to dismantle the Spectacle by seizing back from the authorities the power to run our own lives. Once again to take control of the organisation of everyday life ourselfes - be it at individual level, in our home, our street, at our place of work, or in our community.
Confront the Spectacle with it's own irrelevance.