Raoul vaneigem biography of william shakespeare

The organization of appearances is a system for protecting the facts. A racket. lt represents the facts in a mediated reality to prevent them emerging in unmediated form. Unitary power organized appearances as myth. Fragmentary power organizes appearances as spectacle. Challenged, the coherence of myth became the myth of coherence. Magnified by history, the incoherence of the spectacle turns into the spectacle of incoherence (eg, pop art, a contemporary form of consumable putrefaction, is also an expression of the contemporary putrefaction of consumption) (1). The poverty of 'the drama' as a literary genre goes hand in hand with the colonization of social space by theatrical attitudes. Enfeebled on the stage, theatre battens on to everyday life and attempts to dramatize everyday behaviour. Lived experience is poured into the moulds of roles. The job of perfecting roles has been turned over to experts (2).

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The ideal world," says Nietzsche, "is a lie invented to deprive reality of its value, its meaning, its truth. Until now the ideal has been the curse of reality. This lie has so pervaded humanity that it has been perverted and has falsified itself even in its deepest instincts, even to the point where it bows down to values directly opposed to those which formerly ensured progress by ensuring the self-transformation of the present." The lie of the ideal is of course merely the truth of the masters. When theft needs legal justification, when authority raises the banner of the general interest while pursuing private ends with impunity, is it any wonder that the lie fascinates the minds of men, twisting them to fit its laws until their contortions come to resemble 'natural' human postures? And it is true that man lies because in a world governed by lies he cannot do otherwise: he is falsehood himself, he is trapped in his own falsehood. Common sense never underwrites anything except the decree promulgated in the name of everyone against the truth. Common sen

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The qualitative. I have already said that creativity, though equally distributed to all, only finds direct, spontaneous expression on specific occasions. These occasions are pre- revolutionary moments, the source of the poetry that changes life and transforms the world. They must surely be placed under the sign of that modern equivalent of grace, the qualitative. The presence of the divine abomination is revealed by a cloying spirituality suddenly conferred upon all, from the rustic to the most refined: on a cretin like Claudel as readily as on a St.John of the Cross. Similarly, a gesture, an attitude, perhaps merely a word, may suffice to show that poetry's chance is at hand, that the total construction of everyday life, a global reversal of perspective -- in short, the revolution -- are immanent possibilities. The qualitative encapsulates and crystallizes these possibilities; it is a direct communication of the essential.

One day Kagame heard an old woman of Rwanda, who could neither read nor write, complaining: "Really, these whites are incurably simple-minded. They have no brains at all." "How can you be so stupid?" he answered her. "I would like to see you invent so many unimaginably marvellous things as the whites have done." With a condescending smile the old woman replied, "Listen, my child. They may have learned a lot of things, but they have no brains. They don't understand anything." And she was right, for the curse of technological civilization, of quantified exchange and scientific knowledge, is that they have created no means of freeing people's spontaneous creativity directly; indeed, they do not even allow people to understand the world in any unmediated fashion. The sentiments expressed by the Rwandan woman -- whom the Belgian administrator doubtless looked upon, from the heights of his superior intelligence, as a wild animal -- are also to be found, though laden with guilt and thus tainted by crass stupidity, in the old platitude: "I have

Hans Ulrich Obrist: I just visited Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, who have written an appeal to Barack Obama. What would your appeal and/or advice be to Obama?

Raoul Vaneigem: I refuse to cultivate any relationship whatsoever with people of power. I agree with the Zapatistas from Chiapas who want nothing to do with either the state or its masters, the multinational mafias. I call for civil disobedience so that local communities can form, coordinate, and begin self-producing natural power, a more natural form of farming, and public services that are finally liberated from the scams of government by the Left or the Right. On the other hand, I welcome the appeal by Chamoiseau, Glissant, and their friends for the creation of an existence in which the poetry of a life rediscovered will put an end to the deadly stranglehold of the commodity.

HUO: Could we talk about your beginnings? How did your participation in situationism begin, and what was your fundamental contribution? At the outset of your relationship with the SI, there was the figure of Henri Lefebvre. What did he mean to you at the time? Why did you decide to send him poetic essays?

RV: I would first like to clarify that situationism is an ideology that the situationists were unanimous in rejecting. The term “situationist” was ever only a token of identification. Its particularity kept us from being mistaken for the throngs of ideologues. I have nothing in common with the spectacular recuperation of a project that, in my case, has remained revolutionary throughout. My participation in a group that has now disappeared was an important moment in my personal evolution, an evolution I have personally pressed on with in the spirit of the situationist project at its most revolutionary. My own radicality absolves me from any label. I grew up in an environment in which our fighting spirit was fueled by working class consciousness and a r

A Warning to Students of All Ages

By Raoul Vaneigem

[Note: this pamphlet was originally published in French in 1995. It was translated by JML with NOT BORED! in August 2000.]

Chapter 1: A warning to students of all ages.

The school, the family, the factory, the barracks, and, by proxy, the hospital and the prison, have been the inevitable passages by which commodity society has bent to its profit the destiny of the so-called "human" being.

The government that this society exercises over human nature, which is still in love with the freedom of childhood, puts in their proper places the growth and happiness that precede -- and delay to diverse degrees -- the familial enclosure, the workshop or office, the military institution, the clinic, the houses of the condemned.

Has schooling lost the repulsive character that it had in the 19th and 20th centuries, when it broke spirits and bodies upon the hard realities of efficiency and servitude, making it glorious to educate by forced labor, authority and austerity, and never by pleasure or passion? Nothing is surer, and it can't be denied that, in all the apparent eagerness of modernity, a whole lot of archaic ideas continue to scandalize the lives of schoolchildren.

Hasn't the scholastic enterprise obeyed, up to this very day, one dominant preoccupation: improve the techniques of training so that the animal would become a profitable investment?

No child crosses the threshold of a school door without being exposed to the risk of losing him or herself. Losing, that is, exuberant life, filled with new knowledge and marvels, that would be excited to receive nourishment, if it were not sterilized and made hopeless under the boring work of abstract knowledge. What a terrible affirmation, to see those shining looks so suddenly tarnished!

Here are four walls. The general consensus suits the hypocrites; within these walls, one is imprisoned, constrained, blamed,