In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create. What spark of humanity, of possible creativity, can remain alive in a being dragged out of sleep at six every morning, jolted about in suburban trains, deafened by the racket of machinery, bleached and steamed by meaningless sounds and gestures, spun dry by statistical controls, and tossed out at the end of the day into the entrance halls of railway stations, those cathedrals of departure for the hell of weekdays and the purgatory paradise of weekends, where the crowd communes in a brutish weariness? From adolescence to retirement each twenty-four-hour cycle repeats the same shattering bombardment, like bullets hitting a window: mechanical repetition, time-which-is-money, submission to bosses, boredom, exhaustion. From the crushing of youth’s energy to the gaping wound of old age, life cracks in every direction under the blows of forced labour. Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live.
— Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life. I first read Vaneigem (and thus, Debord), during my second year of undergrad, and to say that I was deeply influenced by Situationist thought seems something of an understatement. It was more like someone had thrown a stick of dynamite in my brain. And every once in a while I feel the need to return to their writings, if only for the simple pleasure of reminding myself that theory and praxis does not need to be as timid and boring as most leftists would like it to be.
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