Lands of All Play and No Work: Cockayne and the Abbey of Thélème

 

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes; those in parentheses either to lines of “the Land of Cockayne” or to chapters of Gargantua.   Translations from Rabelais are makeshift, but my own. 

 

      Eve and Adam were chagrined to discover that even in the Garden of Eden, there were rules, and in the twentieth century the Rolling Stones still complained “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”  St. John of the Cross adopted a contrarian approach, concluding that “In order to arrive at having pleasure in everything,/ Desire to have pleasure in nothing,” [1] but, several hundred years later, Freud treated the pleasure principle and its frustration as the most universal of motives.  People feel sufficient wistful longing for a world that never was, where limits no longer contain individual desire, that they have sometimes sketched dream-like pictures of impossible sensual utopias. 

     “The Land of Cockayne” (ca.1330) is contained in a book called the Kildare Lyrics which contains, for the most part, devotional and moralizing poems, an unsurprising subject matter as the collection was probably made by a Franciscan friar. Most are vigorous with vernacular and convey orthodox Christian sentiments, often in highly conventional treatments. [2]  The frolicking light-hearted tone of the first poem, “The Land of Cockayne,” is unique.  The poem is set “Fur in see bi west Spayngne,” perhaps in the neighborhood of the garden of the Hesperides, Hy-Brasil, or Tír na nÓg, the land of the ever-young.  In this land the residents enjoy uninterrupted pleasure (24), prominently including unlimited eating and drinking.  The catalogue of available culinary pleasures includes buildings made entirely of food and rivers of “oile, melk, honi and wine” (46).  A place of superabundant luxury, among the delights of Cockayne are precious gems on every side and the aromas of all the spices of the Orient. 

 

In the praer is a tre,

Swithe likful forto se.

The rote is gingeuir and galingale,

The siouns beth al sedwale,

Trie maces beth the flure,

The rind canel of swet odur,

The frute gilofre of gode smakke.

Of cucubes ther nis no lakke.  

                                                (71-78)

 What is more, fanciful whimsy is afforded free play.  There is no dirt, no flies, fleas, or lice (37).  In Cockayne the church windows are photochromic and adjust themselves to provide appropriate light.  The monks are so “heigh of mode” (125) that they flit about in the sky in play when they are not busy acting like stallions in teaching the nuns “a prayer,” “up and down” with “legs in the air” (165-167).

     In spite of the distractions, food is the primary appeal of the land.  In Cockayne cooked fowl fly to the diner to offer themselves.  Through the glorious plenitude of food in this land of wish-fulfillment one may glimpse the sometime rigors of a medieval diet.  The fascination with food is the obsession of the periodically deprived.  The dream of a full larder, often unrealized, had earlier found expression in the Classical cornucopia associated variously with Gaia, Plutus, Demeter, or Abundantia and the Dagda’s cauldron of plenty (the coire ansic) in Irish lore. 

     The speaker’s attitude toward this embarrassment of riches is unequivocal delight.  The monks flutter down from the sky for evensong, attracted by the exposed white buttocks of a “maidin,” (136) and the tone is altogether jolly.  Far from censorious, the poet’s attitude is “ribald,” with the sort of harmless innocence of adolescent fantasy difficult to imagine in the present era. 

     Though readers have sometimes taken the poem as a fiercely critical satire of clerical corruption, such a motive finds no support whatever in the text.  The poem opens with the speaker finding Cockayne so appealing, it is preferable even to Heaven.   

 

Þoȝ paradis be miri and briȝt.

Cokaygn is of fairir siȝt.

                                            (5-6)

(Though Paradise be merry and bright, Cockayne is a fairer sight.)

 And the poem ends with what looks very like instructions on how to “win” the prize of spending time in such a marvelous place.  One might atone for time in Cockayne by spending seven years wading in pig excrement but it sounds as though the author considers that a fair enough bargain.

 

Whose wl com þat lond to.

Ful grete penance he mot do.

Seue ȝere in swine-is dritte.

He mot wade, wol ȝe i-witte. ⁠

Al anon up to þe chynne.

So he schal þe lond[e] winne.

                                              (177-182)

(Whoever wishes to visit that land must perform a heavy penance.  Seven years in pigshit he must wade, up to his chin, you may well know, in order to win that land.)

 The poem ends with a prayer to God, not to protect Christians from worldly temptations, but rather kindly asking that the reader may one day enjoy the opportunity to experience Cockayne.

     Far from moralistic, the poem is an ebullient, light-hearted acknowledgement of the sensual inclinations of humans (indeed, of all organisms).  It no more implies acceptance of free love or gluttony than enjoyment of a Chaplin short requires endorsement of kicking people from behind.  Rather like the world of a silent film comic, the poet’s Cockayne is Carnivalesque; norms may be harmlessly transgressed in an interval of festive gaiety even if they revert to their default settings the next morning.  The low mimetic focus on appetite is far more conducive to comedy than to realism or idealizing, but the laughter is entirely hearty and sweet-tempered, far from the Swiftian “fierce indignation” of satire.. 

     The poem need not contradict the principles of a religious vocation.  Readers sometimes look for more consistency in literature than they do in life.  The same poet may write a tenderly respectful lyric and one of selfish lust, possibly even with the same evening in mind.  Both may be equally “true.”  The pious monk to whose book we owe the preservation of this poem may have seen no impropriety at all in having a wry laugh at the spectacle of human weakness.  “The Land of Cockayne” has preserved such a spell of sublime mirth in reaction to the human condition.  It is funny and warm and oh-so-human, the opposite pole from anything as serious as a polemic.     

     Two hundred years later, another presumably sincere monk, another Franciscan, in fact, at the beginning of his career, imagined an equally permissive territory, Gargantua’s Abbey of Thélème, where the sole rule of the order is notoriously “Do as you like” [3]  Far from being rooted in egoistic desire, this rule against rules expresses humility.  When Gargantua offers to reward his ally the valiant Friar John with the creation of a new and innovative religious establishment of his own design, the monk’s reply is charmingly modest: “But how” says the monk, might I be able to govern others when I am not able to govern myself?” [4]  Accordingly, Thélème invites both men and women to live together without any vows whatsoever. 

     Not only are the residents free from oppressive rules, they live in opulent luxury.  They go about in the finest clothes, covered with jewels.  Even their dressing is no chore, thanks to the attentions of their “masters of the wardrobe” [5].  They amuse themselves in a huge multi-story library.  Each is able to “read, write, sing, play musical instruments, and speak five or six languages” [6].  In addition, they enjoy the aristocratic amusements of hunting and hawking as well as agreeably passing time in each other’s society.  This is the greater pleasure, as they are all themselves beautiful people; neither men nor women may be admitted who are not “good-looking, well-built, and with a pleasant nature” [7].  The inscription over the abbey’s door invites “noble gentlemen” and “ladies of aristocratic birth” [8] while barring greedy professionals such as lawyers and usurers whose goal is the mean accumulation of wealth. Such mean money-grubbers are distasteful and likely to be ugly. 

     Moral excellence is bound up with intellectual achievements and aesthetic cultivation, indeed, with idleness, in this world in a fantasy of a sensitive and elegant ruling class, resembling nothing so much as the almost exactly contemporaneous world of Castiglione’s The Courtier.  It is as though Plato’s philosopher-kings did not have to bother with ruling, but could devote their entire lives to entertainments.  Contrary to history’s evidence, which has no lack or malicious and rapacious nobles, freedom makes them altogether virtuous.  “Because free people, well-born and educated, familiar with honest society, are by nature and impulse propelled always to virtuous acts and away from vice, by an impulse they call honor.“ [9]  The abbey is a post-industrial paradise in which people may develop their sensibility and, in fact, enjoy life without regard for the Reality Principle. 

     People in the “Land of Cockayne” found utter satisfaction in sensual delights of food and drink and love with only a few signifiers (like the beautiful tree, sweet odor, precious stones, and lovely birdsong   to betoken luxurious beauty. (67-100)  Placed in such a setting, with every appetite instantly satisfied, the reader might well imagine agreeing with the author’s encomium.

 

Þer n'is lond on erthe is pere.

Vnder heuen n'is lond iwisse.

Of so mochil ioi and blisse.

(21-⁠24)

            (No land on earth is its peer.  Under heaven there is no land, I                 know, of so much joy and bliss.)

      Since in Cockayne the only acknowledged human desires are physical, the tone is comic, in an ebullient Carnivalesque mode in which the human dependence on food and sex is ridiculous and insistent, but nonetheless endearing.  In the Abbey of Thélème the animal pleasures are taken for granted and the stress is on imaginative delights, culture, art, and civilized company, the sophisticated manipulative play with symbols that most distinguishes our species from the beasts.  Thus, while Rabelais’ tone is extravagant and fanciful, it contains as well a program for how to live life well that goes beyond a full belly, and among the fanciful and humorous elements notes of high seriousness are discernable. 

     While a dramatic contrast is evident between the riotous “low” aim of Cockayne’s utopia and the more “noble” and cerebral occupations of the Thélèmites, the two libidinal Edens have in common that each is enabled by the abolition of labor.  In Cockayne the unlimited availability of everything good means that competition need not exist.  There can be no motive for theft, no distinction between the industrious and the idle or, in the end, between the vicious and the virtuous when each individual is the recipient of superfluous unearned wealth.  The Abbey seems to be underwritten by Gargantua’s endless purse, so its residents need tend only to themselves.  The lifestyle of the inmates of Thélème is supported by an entire townful of workers: goldsmiths, jewelers, embroiderers, tailors, goldworkers, velvet-makers, tapestry makers, and upholsterers.” [10]  Of course, every high culture from ancient Athens through Heian Japan and Victorian England has been created by a leisure class of intellectuals and artists supported by the labor of others.

     Something not far from a land of “all play and no work” in which labor is pleasant and voluntary was conceived by William Morris in News from Nowhere and during the nineteen-sixties seemed actually possible to the theorists of “post-industrial society” [11], though working hours never shrank much and, in recent years, have been rising.  The work of Marshall Sahlins suggesting that hunter-gatherers who needed only to work fifteen to twenty hours a week to satisfy their needs were the original “affluent society” made the possibility of a largely work-free life more plausible.  

     In Genesis work seems to have arrived only to the fallen world where it seems very much like a punishment linked closely with mortality: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”  Perhaps the thrill of sexuality and the comfort of a good meal can only exist with the contrast of field-work or housework.  Even if pleasure cannot be experienced by one who does not feel pain as well, the thought of constant bliss (or at least well-being) is itself beguiling enough to inspire such dreams as the fabulous land of Cockayne and the wonderful Abbey of Thélème. 

 

  

1.  Ascent of Mt. Carmel 1.13.11.

 

2.  One poem “The Song of Michael of Kildare” identifies its author as "Frere Michel Kyldare,” and as a "frere menour."  Among the collection is a touching lullaby “Lollai, Lollai, litil child” and a verse reminiscent of Sei Shonagon “Five Hateful Things” beginning “Bissop lorles.”

 

3.  Ch 57 “Fay ce que vouldras.”

 

4.  Ch.  52  “Car comment (disait-il) pourrait-je gouverner autrui, qui moi-même gouverner ne saurrais?”

 

5.  Ch. 56 “Maîtres de garde-robes.”

 

6.  Ch. 57 “lire,  ecrire, chanter, jouer d’instruments harmonieux, parler de cinq et six langages.”

 

7.  Ch. 52 “belles, bien formées, et bien narturées.”

 

8.  Ch. 54 “Compagnons gentils” and “dames de haut parage.”

 

9.  Ch. 57 “Parce que gens libres, bien nés, bien instruits, conversant en compagnies honnêtes ont par nature un instinct, et aiguillon, qui toujours les pousse á faits vertueux, et retire de vice, lequel ils nommaient honneur.”

 

10.  Ch. 56 “orfèvres, lapidaires, brodeurs, tailleurs, tireurs d’or, veloutiers, tapissiers, et haut lissiers.”

 

11.  The term was popularized by Ivan Illich, Daniel Bell, and others after arising a few years earlier among the more utopian strains of leftists and cultural revolutionaries.  More recently, advocates of a guaranteed annual income have argued that not everyone need work.

The Radical Aesthete: Oscar Wilde's The Soul of Man Under Socialism

 

     Though only ten years have passed, some will recall already with nostalgia the iconic poster for Occupy Wall Street depicting a poised dancer, a leg raised in an arabesque atop Arturo Di Modica’s charging bull in bronze representing the fierce voracity of the capitalist class. [1]  The charm of the image arose from its play with structural oppositions: female/male, beauty/power, aesthetic/mercenary, in form sinuous/blocky, in attitude poised and elegant/aggressive and angry.  Such a dramatic contrast between art and money finds acceptance both among philistines to whom only wealth-seeking is a worthy activity and intellectuals and artists uninterested, even scornful, of economic activity.  For the former the arts at best are an optional taste and for the latter business could occupy only mediocre minds.  Friction between these attitudes periodically emerges, for instance, in the twentieth-century tensions between the Surrealists and the Communists in Europe or the Yippies and, say, Progressive Labor activists in the U. S.  

     One could scarcely imagine a more passionate advocate for the aesthetic than Oscar Wilde.  His flaunted hedonism and transgressive wit as well as his own class background and his place in society might suggest that he would be likely to be a defender of aristocratic privilege, but Wilde manages to turn this expectation, like so many others, on its head.  His “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” [2] succeeds as a novel and effective polemic for economic revolution without abandoning the characteristic epigrams and ironies familiar from his plays.  Moreover, he was able to construct a coherent argument for socialism while maintaining his provocative aestheticism. [3]  In a quite Wildean inversion, in his most important points he is on the mark when out of his field in politics, while his notions about art which he had made central to his value system, are neither reliable nor consistent.  

    He makes the essential point with appropriate broadness.  As capitalism is the source of poverty and other social ills, it must be overturned to make a real change. Wilde aims to “reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.” The first principle of the new society must be socialized ownership of the means of production.  “Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting private property into public wealth, and substituting co-operation for competition, will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and insure the material well-being of each member of the community.”  This alone is crucial; all else may be settled by democratic means. 

     His motive is to beautify his country, but this requires an alteration in the economic system.  The state of the urban slums in Wilde’s time was horrific.  Reader of not only Marx but also Dickens and Mrs. Gaskell will know the desperate straits in which many ordinary people found themselves.  Even for those with employment, workers are “compelled to do the work of beasts of burden, to do work that is quite uncongenial to them, and to which they are forced by the peremptory, unreasonable, degrading Tyranny of want.”  The result of these savage conditions is a poverty-stricken class possessing “no grace of manner, or charm of speech, or civilisation, or culture, or refinement in pleasures, or joy of life.”  One can not avoid seeing such wretches, “tramping about the streets in a state of disgusting misery, or whining to their neighbours for alms, or crowding round the doors of loathsome shelters to try and secure a hunch of bread and a night’s unclean lodging.”  To him it is nearly incredible that “a man whose life is marred and made hideous by such laws can possibly acquiesce in their continuance.”  If they do, it is surely because “misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering.”

     The affluent, on the other hand, due to their leisure, are “the real men, the men who have realised themselves, and in whom all Humanity gains a partial realisation.”  Yet at the same time, the system is profoundly unsatisfying even to the ruling class.  “The possession of private property is very often extremely demoralizing.”  Among its deleterious effects is to make the rich man tiresome.  “Property not merely has duties, but has so many duties that its possession to any large extent is a bore.”  For Wilde’s posing persona, nothing could be worse.  Yet, like most of the essay, it is not in the end a joke, for who could really be interested in enriching the boss, or in the financial concerns of another at all?  Display of wealth or designs on wealth are virtually always in poor taste.   Apart from requiring the exploitation of others the pursuit of money is ultimately disappointing even when successful, as it is based on a fundamental error.  “It has made gain not growth its aim.  So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be.”

    Though quite willing to sound like a genteel snob, Wilde’s motive is in fact that of all reformers whether they consider themselves aesthetes or not, a distaste for the sheer ugliness of capitalism which is, after all, centered in a repellant selfishness.  Yet at the same time he realizes that the game is in earnest and recognizes that such progress as the end of feudalism has come only through armed struggle, going so far as to say in his consistently aesthetic rhetoric, that “The very violence of a revolution may make the public grand and splendid for a moment.”  All force is not equivalent: “To the thinker, the most tragic fact in the whole of the French Revolution is not that Marie Antoinette was killed for being a queen, but that the starved peasant of the Vendée voluntarily went out to die for the hideous cause of feudalism.”  Apart from the suggestion that revolution is likely to arrive only through armed struggle (in contrast the programmatically gradualist Fabians [4]), though, Wilde says nothing about how the change in economic system is to arrive.   

     He quite properly attacks even the most well-meaning charity for prolonging rather than ending the system that produced the suffering the philanthropist seeks to ameliorate.  To him such efforts are “ridiculously inadequate” if not “impertinent.”  Reformers who call for anything less than social ownership of the means of production are displaying self-righteous vanity.  “It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property.”  In the ringing tones of the soapbox, Wilde asks, “Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table?  They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it.”  For Wilde what is ugly is therefore “immoral” and the Victorian slums offered plenty of nastiness, both aesthetic and ethical.

     If Wilde’s militance is explicit, so is his libertarianism.  He states categorically that “No Authoritarian Socialism will do.”  He adds “Authority and compulsion are out of the question.  All association must be quite voluntary.  It is only in voluntary associations that man is fine.”  (The reader notices the similarity of the use here of “fine,” with the earlier cited “grand and splendid.”)  Any authoritarian system would result, he says, in “Industrial Tyranny” as oppressive as that of the robber barons.  The twenty-first century readers may consider Wilde’s warnings well-considered, having witnessed Leninist “democratic centralism,” Stalinist and Maoist cults of personality, and even more extreme “ultra-left” manifestations such as the Khmer Rouge or the Sendero Luminoso. 

     He aligned himself with Kropotkin’s anarchism, calling the Russian "a man with a soul of that beautiful white Christ which seems coming out of Russia.” [5]  The keynote of the essay, the identification of individualism with socialism, while yielding insight with its provocative novelty generates weaknesses as well.  Some might worry that there is a contradiction in his definition: “The State is to be a voluntary association that will organise labour.”  This goal, so casually tossed off, ignores the tension (at best) between centralized planning and personal liberty.  Yet the reader does not notice in Wilde’s succeeding phrases, so balanced as to seem inevitable.  “The State is to make what is useful.  The individual is to make what is beautiful.”

     In general Wilde is little concerned with either the mechanisms that might bring a socialist revolution or the governing principles he would find ideal thereafter.  Much of his dreamier utopian rhetoric arises from his newfound anarchist loyalties.  It is all very well to say “Nothing should be able to rob a man at all” or “all authority is quite degrading,” but such absoluteness is elusive in practice.  It may be that best government for artists is none at all when it comes to encouragement of propaganda and discouragement of criticism, but many might find it a different matter if the issue were regulation of copyright and even outright social support of the arts as for other industries.  Wilde is surely willfully ignoring his own knowledge of human nature when he declares with confidence, “When each member of the community has sufficient for his wants, and is not interfered with by his neighbour, it will not be an object of any interest to him to interfere with anyone else.”  Perhaps having recently read Engels on The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, he tells us that “in communistic tribes jealousy is entirely unknown.”  Not just jealousy, it seems, will die out under socialism, but with it all forms of authority and of punishment.  As a part of ending coercion, “marriage in its present form must disappear” when women cease to be a commodity. 

     Wilde sounds something like an anarcho-syndicalist; he would have been sympathetic to the program of the I.W.W. which likewise envisioned a sort of voluntary organization of labor.  Considering the sensational success of his lecture to the miners in Leadville, Colorado [5], he might in fact have found a comrade in Big Bill Haywood.  Wilde’s program, however, unlike the Wobblies’, can only be workable with the assumption that unpleasant tasks can be all but eliminated by automation, a circumstance that would certainly be liberating were it possible.   Wilde claims that all “pleasureless activities” are “mentally and morally injurious to man.”  “Man,” he argues, “is made for something better than disturbing dirt.  All work of that kind should be done by a machine.” 

     Wilde maintains that the condition of the workers in the industrial age is paradoxically even worse than in times of less technology.   “As soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve.”  The root of the problem is capitalism.  “The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants.”  This analysis is quite accurate; the flaw is in the expectation that automation can render labor entirely optional and allow every individual to do as he or she pleases. 

     Fanciful as it sounds, this presumption is not peculiar to Wilde.    William Morris’s News from Nowhere, which had appeared the year before Wilde’s essay, likewise envisioned an end to marriage, schools, and coercion.  He, too, thought the magic of technology could undo the condemnation to labor laid upon Adam in the third book of Genesis, and his imagined future, as beautiful as Wilde’s, exhibits a similar dubious optimism. 

     While it may be true that modern people in developed countries spend more hours in work than hunter-gatherers, these utopian hopes are not wholly unfounded.  The mere fact that at the time of the Revolution over 90% of Americans were farmers whereas today the figure is only 1.3% indicates that our basic needs are today being met by the labor of a very few.  In the present inefficient system, another 12% are industrial workers.  Many of the rest are producing nothing but rather simply manipulating symbols on computer screens. 

     Prominent economists during the twentieth century shared portions of this happy vision of the of work’s coming obsolescence.  John Maynard Keynes in the ‘thirties predicted a fifteen-hour work week [6] and in the ‘fifties John Kenneth Galbraith said that automation was likely to “eliminate toil as a required economic institution.” [7]  During the ‘sixties, no shortage of prophets proclaimed the end of work, and, in more recent years, concepts such as the guaranteed annual income suggest that it is no longer necessary for everyone to have a job at all. [8]  Still, even a sympathetic reader must be troubled by Wilde’s easy progress from acknowledging that “civilisation requires slaves” to the prediction, vague and grand, that “there will be great storages of force for every city, and for every house if required, and this force man will convert into heat, light, or motion, according to his needs.”   

     If Wilde may be faulted for a failure to explain either how socialism might come to Britain or how production would then be organized, he must as well be credited with the novel insight fundamental to his essay: that socialism offers freedom and individualism in contrast to the slavish conformity required by capitalism.  Though Wilde will at times toss off whimsical throw-away paradoxes that bear little scrutiny, the equation of socialism and individualism is at once the most striking witty inversion of the essay and the heart of Wilde’s argument, the notion on which the practical value of Wilde’s ideas must stand or fall.

     This theme, announced with a bang in the first sentence which labels “living for others” as “sordid,” is repeated throughout.  “Socialism itself will be of value simply because it will lead to Individualism.”  Under capitalism the individual has “absolutely of no importance.”  The promise offered by change is as clear as the current defect: “With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism.”  “Individualism, then, is what through Socialism we are to attain to.”  This individualism will have nothing in common with exploitation; rather, it seems to Wilde to be altogether benevolent, allowing one to “freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating, and delightful in him,” and thus to experience the true pleasure and joy of living.”

     Wilde’s paean to evolutionary individualism, though using the new and “scientific” language of evolution, in fact betrays his enthusiasm more than it provides evidence. 

“It is to be noted also that Individualism does not come to man with any sickly cant about duty, which merely means doing what other people want because they want it; or any hideous cant about self-sacrifice, which is merely a survival of savage mutilation.  In fact, it does not come to man with any claims upon him at all.  It comes naturally and inevitably out of man.  It is the point to which all development tends.  It is the differentiation to which all organisms grow.  It is the perfection that is inherent in every mode of life, and towards which every mode of life quickens.  And so Individualism exercises no compulsion over man.  On the contrary, it says to man that he should suffer no compulsion to be exercised over him.  It does not try to force people to be good.  It knows that people are good when they are let alone.  Man will develop Individualism out of himself.  Man is now so developing Individualism.  To ask whether Individualism is practical is like asking whether Evolution is practical.  Evolution is the law of life, and there is no evolution except towards Individualism.  Where this tendency is not expressed, it is a case of artificially-arrested growth, or of disease, or of death.”

     Wilde’s strongest confirmation of this marvelous individualism is to cite artists as individualists who “have been able to realise their personality more or less completely.”  Absurdly claiming that “not one of these men ever did a single day’s work for hire,” he imagines that freedom from wage slavery will similarly illuminate the life of everyman, unleashing “the great actual Individualism latent and potential in mankind generally.”  The process is self-enforcing, since becoming oneself will also give a person pleasure.   “It is through joy that the Individualism of the future will develop itself.”  This will entail as well a flowering of loving actions since “when man has realised Individualism, he will also realise sympathy and exercise it freely and spontaneously.” 

     The reader may relish the wit of formulations like those in this passage.

 

A man is called affected, nowadays, if he dresses as he likes to dress.  But in doing that he is acting in a perfectly natural manner.  Affectation, in such matters, consists in dressing according to the views of one’s neighbour, whose views, as they are the views of the majority, will probably be extremely stupid. 

 

Wilde claims that under this new order everyone will realize the greatest and most natural potential possible.  Consumerism will come to an end since “Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things.  One will live.  To live is the rarest thing in the world.”  One can hardly avoid concurring with Wilde’s regret “that society should be constructed on such a basis that man has been forced into a groove in which he cannot freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating and delightful in him. —in which, in fact, he misses”

     Wilde’s concluding line hints in a way at his willful impracticality.  “The new Individualism is the new Hellenism.”  He may have in mind such lines as these from the well-known speech of Pericles during the Peloponnesian War.

The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbour for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty. [9]

     Wilde is well aware that he is propounding unlikely claims.  To his sensibility that fact simply provides evidence of his imagination.  Utopianism, far from useless fantasy, is the motive for every step forward.  “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.  And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail.  Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”

     A further defect of Wilde’s essay deforms its structure without affecting his central points.  Much of the latter half of “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” is devoted to a lengthy and polemical treatment of art with little relevance the socioeconomic topic under discussion.  In addition Wilde’s primary contention here, which he goes out of his way to demonstrate, is simply wrong.  Wilde characterizes art as the idiosyncratic product of a wholly individual vision, “the unique result of a unique temperament.  Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is.  It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want.”  Wilde is quite emphatic on this point: “if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.” [10]  In his view readers and viewers must become more like writers and painters.  They need only be receptive.  “Now Art should never try to be popular.  The public should try to make itself artistic.”  To him popular taste is regularly lack of taste.

     His assumptions ignore the fact that art always confirms as well as criticizes presuppositions; it abides by some conventions while twisting or ignoring others.  All art is at once derivative and innovative, just as every verbal expression is based on what the speaker has heard before while not exactly reproducing the earlier utterance, even if the words are unchanged.  Yet works and genres of art vary tremendously in their place on the continuum that stretches from predictability to novelty.  Oral literature and folk materials in earlier times and works produced as commodities for a mass audience will tend toward the familiar side of the spectrum, while works of “high art,” produced for a sophisticated elite, are more likely to be transgressive in both form and content.  Wilde ignores the very real function of art to confirm and reinforce social norms, insisting that every individual vision is inherently beautiful and worthy and novel as well.  He goes further yet, finding the artist’s individualism a summum bonum, and yet condemning as “egotism” any criticism from a member of the public with little regard for the individuality of the consumer of art.  By insisting on making novelty and self-expression the criteria for excellence, he ignores the value of a good deal of human artworks and a portion of the rest.

     He is motivated in part by the appealingly decadent reputation of art for art’s sake, but also by his counter-culture instincts.  He liked to épater la bourgeoisie when that very idea was more or less fresh [11] and gamely tossed back the suggestions that some works (such as his own) were “immoral,” “morbid,” and “unhealthy.”  The essay was published five days after he was imprisoned.  Wilde’s “Sonnet to Liberty” notes that the “roar” of the masses, even their “reigns of Terror” and “great Anarchies” “mirror my wildest passions like the sea.”  For Wilde there can be little doubt that the personal was indeed unavoidably political.

     The contribution of Wilde’s essay is twofold: by a sort of rhetorical jiu-jitsu he reverses the widespread misconception that collectivism restricts freedom and he ties the pursuit of socialism which some may question to the pursuit of pleasure from which dissent is less likely.  And he is quite right.  The effete writer agrees with the Marx of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 that socialism offers liberation not only from want but from alienation as well.  If liberty means anything, it requires an end to exploitation.  One cannot be happy while another is constantly picking his pocket.  Even if labor fell short of being the fulfilling joy that Wilde thinks possible, it would at least no longer be wage slavery. 

     The essay has lasting value for both philosophy and politics as well as for literature.  The fact that it is most wise when speaking of politics and most mistaken when treating art is a contradiction Wilde himself might have relished.  “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” sketches out how art and the individual could be the ally of ethics and the masses.  In the ‘sixties I liked to say that I was not agitating for the benefit of Blacks or the poor, but for my own.  I like to imagine Wilde, in all his lace and velvet, demonstrating for Black Lives Matter.  He surely would have found our recent president unspeakably vulgar.  His élan is enough to excuse his rosy hopes.  If some epigrams fall with a bit of a thud, others generate new knowledge.  Here, in particular, Wilde’s clear-sighted recognition that social ownership if the means of production is a precondition for individual liberty emerges from his inversions of his readers’ expectations.

     Wilde is an entertainer.  His writing is animated with charm and wit, ornamented with figures of speech, and gilded by a gleaming utopianism.  Let there be many socialisms, and among them the great-hearted self-interest advocated by Wilde. 

 

1.  Further tropes include a number of satiric variations of the original Adbusters image: one replaced the poster’s advice “bring tents” with “bring deodorant,” while others substituted different figures for the dancer: Bernie Sanders, an executive with an attaché case.  The trope that attracted the most attention was Kristen Visbal’s 2017 Fearless Girl bronze facing the bull, which, though it had been produced as part of an advertising campaign for an investment management firm, was considered feminist and progressive by many.

2.  The essay was published first in the Fortnightly Review for February of 1891 as “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.”  When it was issued as a book in 1895 the title was simply The Soul of Man, but the longer version has been preferred in most reprintings since.

3.  Aesthetic and political concerns were combined by other Victorians.  Among the first to come to mind are John Ruskin and Bernard Shaw.  Perhaps apart from Wilde the best example is William Morris.

4.  Wilde wrote this piece shortly after hearing Shaw lecture.  Shaw reportedly reacted, commenting “it was very witty and entertaining, but had nothing whatever to do with socialism.”

5.  In De profundis.  Kropotkin expressed in return a sympathetic interest in Wilde’s work. 

6.  Leadville was a boom town at the time, full of bars, brothels, and firearms.  Wilde provides an entertaining account in Impressions of America which includes the supposed barroom sign “Please do not shoot the pianist.  He is doing his best.”  As a gag about America, this line had already been circulating in Britain at least since 1879, first described as posted by a church organist in Arkansas, but then relocated west to California but still in a church in another English paper, and in 1882 in the Washington Post it is placed in a Leadville church.  Wilde simply adaptedz the proven joke to his uses. 

7.  Keynes, ”Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (1930) and Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958).

8.  Among many more recent works exploring the idea are Jeremy Rifkin’s The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era (1995) and Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (2015) by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams.

9.  This is Richard Crawley’s translation.

10.  The passage is really quite harsh.  “They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity.”

11.  The phrase has been used by a number of authors including Dumas père (in Le père la ruine).  The earliest usage seems to be in Alexandre Privat d'Anglemont’ Paris Anecdote (1855), p. 85.  In 1854 the phrase “il faut épater le public" appeared in Aristippe Felix Bernier de Maligny’s Nouveau Manuel Théatral: Théorique et Pratique.

Situationism Remembered

 

 

     The nostalgia I feel thinking about Situationism from the perspective of this twenty-first century is unfortunately a function of how these United States and France and much of the world has backslid since the movement’s glory days in 1968.  In America we have just eluded a fascist takeover by an utterly self-interested would-be tyrant.  In the sixties we told each other that Republicans were passé, that big business had learned how to work in concert with government, making the principal danger corporate liberalism.  Many spoke of ‘the post-industrial society,” and believed (as I do yet) that technology has produced a state of affairs in which all reasonable needs could be satisfied with very little work.  Much of the motive of the New Left was not material want as it had been when “Solidarity Forever” described labor as “outcast and starving,”  The Port Huron Statement founding SDS said American youth were “bred in at least modest comfort” and “housed now in universities,” but nonetheless felt alienated.  Yet at the same time Utopia seemed possible.  We little imagined that over fifty years later the ugly specters of overt racism, Nazism, unashamed sexism, and predatory capitalism would re-emerge as strong as ever and that the old working-class anxieties could once more be directed against scapegoats instead of bosses. 

     History has kept grinding on at the usual inexorable pace, but at a moment when all dreams were allowed, many, and among them the Situationists, imagined a modern Abbey of Thélème with its single rule: “Do as thou wouldst.”  The role of Situationists who in the uprisings of May of 1968, in particular their influence in the Atelier Populaire, which produced hundreds of posters and leaflets and gave Situationism very likely the greatest visibility of any artistic movement in social upheaval since the origin of capitalism. 

     Situationism was always a minute coterie, a splinter of a splinter.  The group was sparked by the encounter between avant-garde artistic formations and left-wing politics. [1]  In spite of the writers’ intentions, tendentiously radical literature has had negligible discernable influence on social change [2], yet the Dadaists and Surrealists, for example, felt a warmth (not always returned) toward revolutionary socialism.  In 1946 a Romanian émigré, Isidore Isou, made his place in the Modernist lineage clear when, in Lettrisme’s first public manifestation, he disrupted a performance of Tristan Tzara’s La Fuit, shouting "Dada is dead! Lettrism has taken its place!"  Guy Debord, the central figure of Situationism, joined in 1951, espousing a more radical Marxist position. 

     Through street art the Lettrists spread slogans such as “Never work!”  Debord led demonstrators who in October 1952 interrupted Charlie Chaplin’s press conference for his new film Limelight, and published a leaflet defending their action “Finis les pieds plats” (“No More Flat Feet!”) [3], causing a break with Isou.  In 1957 Debord and others announced the Situationist International.

     A few years later the “Situationist Manifesto” appeared [4] noting “the irresistible development of technology and the dissatisfaction of its possible uses in our senseless social life. “a lack of satisfaction in our senseless social lives” and calling for a “new human force,” totally rejecting “alienation and oppression” in “the current multiform crisis.”  The Situationist alternative is “a society which authentically ‘reorganizes production on the basis of the free and equal association of the producers’" in which everyone would be freed from work, assuring the “complete liberty to the individual.”  The guarantee of the liberty of each and of all is in the value of the game, of life freely constructed. The exercise of this ludic recreation is the framework of the only guaranteed equality with non-exploitation of man by man. The liberation of the game, its creative autonomy, supersedes the ancient division between imposed work and passive leisure.”  “Everyone will become an artist.”

    This utopian economic perspective is the true heart of Situationism, the intoxicating lure of total freedom, yet it manifests symbolically, its own art challenging the rituals of late capitalism, “the miserable pseudo-games of non-participation” and proposing “a better game, which more exactly is provoked by the human presence.”

     What such a liberating art would look like is not clear.  From Lettrisme the Situationists inherited a fondness for the abstract, but the left-wing elements of the formation staged a celebrated event when, on Easter Sunday of 1950, during a televised High Mass in Notre Dame Michel Mourre mounted the pulpit in Dominican robes and preached a sermon maintaining that God was dead and that the church was a “running sore on the decomposed body of the West.” [7]  Debord made several films with differing content.  His first film Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Howls for Sade) (1952) includes no images whatsoever.  His second Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time) (1959) juxtaposes images of Debord and his associates with scenes from mass culture. 

     Much of Situationist statements focus on social relations more than aesthetics, insisting that pre-revolutionary art must be subversive to be genuine.  Whereas the ruling class seeks to pacify the masses with “spectacle,” which signifies an altogether passive experience which displaces the individuals’ real lived experience.  Though posters and graffiti were surely their most influential media, the specific techniques most identified with Situationism are détournement (diversion) and dérive (drift).

     Détournement seeks to expose and overturn the ruling class’s mind control through, "turning expressions of the capitalist system against itself."  Though the device is an old one – the I. W. W. parodies of revival songs is just one example – the most familiar example associated with Situationism is the use of hyper-conventional images from old advertisements and comic strip panels, often from romance titles, with new text. [6]  One might view Abbie Hoffman as a master of the improvisatory détournement, applaud Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos (the Yes Men), and ask whether Sacha Baron Cohen is the form’s genius or its commodifier.      

     Debord defined the dérive as the art of wandering through urban space.  “In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” [8]  The dérive was an effort to experience one’s environment freshly without the blinders imposed by capitalist culture.

     The Situationist International was always very small, and their concepts would linger in obscure footnotes were it not for the energetic French movement of workers as well as intellectuals in 1968, during which what had been an obscure clique became widely influential.  Debord was perhaps exaggerating, but he had reason to boast that “the disorder that overtook the world in 1968 had its source at a few café tables, where, in 1952, a handful of somewhat strayed young people calling themselves the Letterist International used to drink too much and plan systematic rambles they called dérives.” [9]

    In 1966 the Strasbourg chapter of the French student union, the U. N. E. F., published a manifesto explicitly employing Situationist analysis “On the Poverty of Student Life: considered in its economic, political, psychological, sexual, and particularly intellectual aspects, and a modest proposal for its remedy.”  In politics, the students condemned the “licensed and impotent” left; in art they declared “art is dead, but the student is necrophiliac.”   They point toward the possibility of liberation.  “The only poetry . . . is the creativity released in the making of history, the free invention of each moment and each event: Lautréamont's poésie faite par tous -- the beginning of the revolutionary celebration. For proletarian revolt is a festival or it is nothing; in revolution the road of excess leads once and for all to the palace of wisdom. A palace which knows only one rationality: the game. The rules are simple: to live instead of devising a lingering death, and to indulge untrammelled desire.”

     Similar ideas swept through French campuses and in the spring of 1968 Situationists dominated the Occupation Committee of the Sorbonne and went on to establish The Council for the Maintenance of the Occupations (CMDO) which sought to bring workers into the movement for total liberation.  This group lasted only a very short time.  In 1972, reduced to two members, the Situationiste International dissolved itself.  [10]

     The “Situationist Manifesto” sounds something like a Bodhisattva when it says, “We await the turning point which is the inevitable liquidation of the world of privation, in all its forms. Such are our goals, and these will be the future goals of humanity."  The Situationists remind us that artists can influence history and that no demand is excessive.  Ask for everything.  We deserve it. 

 

 

1.      1. Even the exceptions tend to be not apolitical or centrist, but rather, like Pound, Marinetti, and Céline, to adopt extreme fascist views.

 2.  Reformist writing has sometimes attracted considerable readership.  The best American example is Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

3. The leaflet called for “the destruction of idols” and accused Chaplin’s admirers of “a unanimous, servile enthusiasm" while calling the actor himself an "emotional blackmailer, master-singer of misfortune.”

4.      In Internationale Situationniste #4 (June 1960).  The French text is available at https://www.ubu.com/media/text/si/Internationale_situationniste_4.pdf and the English translation I have used by Fabian Thompsett at https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/manifesto.html. 

 5.      See Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967).

 6.      Now that one commonly sees such “turned” images in merchandise like tee shirts and coffee cups, one must ponder whether critics such as Naomi Klein and Slavoj Žižek may be correct in arguing that such play with images might reinforce rather than reveal oppression.  It is doubtless significant that the comic panels of Roy Lichtenstein never alter the original text as the Situationists did.

 7.      Mourre, who had, when younger, been a Dominican, in this way recalled the intrusions of the young Blanquistes who interrupted mass in Notre Dame March 22, 1892, shouting “Long live the Republic!  Long live the Commune!  Down with the Church,” as well as when on November 17, 1918, Oberdada Johannes Baader declared that “Christ is a sausage” from the pulpit of the Berlin Cathedral.   The tradition continues with the performance by Pussy Riot inside Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior on February 21, 2012.

8.      Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” 1958.  Despite the language of “psychogeography,” the procedure sounds rather similar to the recreational strolls people have taken for many  years after using cannabis.

 9.      Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord.

 10.   The work of Situationist artists did not end.  In 1975 Gianfranco Sanguinetti working with Debord published a pamphlet titled Rapporto veridico sulle ultime opportunità di salvare il capitalismo in Italia (The Real Report on the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy) [57].  Claiming to be written by a major capitalist, the pamphlet made outlandish and satirical claims, such as that the ruling class was in fact responsible for ultra-left violence as part of a strategy to prevent communism.  The text was taken to be genuine, and, when the deception was revealed, Sanguinetti was obliged to flee Italy.

 

 

 

Situationist and situationist-influenced slogans of Paris in May of 1968

 

The collection below is available at http://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/graffiti.htm. 

These graffiti are drawn primarily from Julien Besançon’s Les murs ont la parole (Tchou, 1968), Walter Lewino’s L’imagination au pouvoir (Losfeld, 1968), Marc Rohan’s Paris ’68 (Impact, 1968), René Viénet’s Enragés et situationnistes dans le mouvement des occupations (Gallimard, 1968), Maurice Brinton’s Paris: May 1968 (Solidarity, 1968), and Gérard Lambert’s Mai 1968: brûlante nostalgie (Pied de nez, 1988).

     This translation by Ken Knabb is from the Situationist International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006). No copyright.

B U R E A U   O F   P U B L I C   S E C R E T S

 MAY 1968 GRAFFITI

  

In the decor of the spectacle, the eye meets only things and their prices.

Commute, work, commute, sleep . . .

Meanwhile everyone wants to breathe and nobody can and many say, “We will breathe later.”

And most of them don’t die because they are already dead.

Boredom is counterrevolutionary.

 

We don’t want a world where the guarantee of not dying of starvation brings the risk of dying of boredom.

 

We want to live.

 

Don’t beg for the right to live — take it.

 

In a society that has abolished every kind of adventure the only adventure that remains is to abolish the society.

 

The liberation of humanity is all or nothing.

 

Those who make revolutions half way only dig their own graves.

 

No replastering, the structure is rotten.

 

Masochism today takes the form of reformism.

 

Reform my ass.

 

The revolution is incredible because it’s really happening.

 

I came, I saw, I was won over.

 

Run, comrade, the old world is behind you!

 

Quick!

 

If we only have enough time . . .

 

In any case, no regrets!

 

Already ten days of happiness.

 

At every moment something is happening.

 

Live in the moment.

 

Comrades, if everyone did like us . . .

 

We will ask nothing. We will demand nothing. We will take, occupy.

 

Down with the state.

 

When the National Assembly becomes a bourgeois theater, all the bourgeois theaters should be turned into national assemblies.  [Written above the entrance of the occupied Odéon Theater]

 

Referendum: whether we vote yes or no, it turns us into suckers.

 

It’s painful to submit to our bosses; it’s even more stupid to choose them.

 

Let’s not change bosses, let’s change life.

 

Don’t liberate me — I’ll take care of that.

 

I’m not a servant of the people (much less of their self-appointed leaders).  Let the people serve themselves.

 

Abolish class society.

 

Nature created neither servants nor masters. I want neither to rule nor to be ruled.

 

We will have good masters as soon as everyone is their own.

 

“In revolution there are two types of people: those who make it and those who profit from it.” (Napoleon)

 

Warning: ambitious careerists may now be disguised as “progressives.”

 

Don’t be taken in by the politicos and their filthy demagogy. We must rely on ourselves.

Socialism without freedom is a barracks.

 

All power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

 

We want structures that serve people, not people serving structures.

 

The revolution doesn’t belong to the committees, it’s yours.

 

Politics is in the streets.

 

Barricades close the streets but open the way.

 

Our hope can come only from the hopeless.

 

A proletarian is someone who has no power over his life and knows it.

 

Never work.

 

People who work get bored when they don’t work.  People who don’t work never get bored.

 

Workers of all countries, enjoy!

 

Since 1936 I have fought for wage increases.  My father before me fought for wage increases.  Now I have a TV, a fridge, a Volkswagen.  Yet my whole life has been a drag.  Don’t negotiate with the bosses. Abolish them.

 

The boss needs you, you don’t need the boss.

 

By stopping our machines together we will demonstrate their weakness.

 

Occupy the factories.

 

Power to the workers councils. (an enragé)

 

Power to the enragés councils. (a worker)

 

Worker: You may be only 25 years old, but your union dates from the last century.

 

Labor unions are whorehouses.

 

Comrades, let’s lynch Séguy!  [Georges Séguy: head bureaucrat of the Communist Party-dominated labor union]

 

Please leave the Communist Party as clean on leaving it as you would like to find it on entering.

 

Stalinists, your children are with us!

 

Man is neither Rousseau’s noble savage nor the Church’s or La Rochefoucauld’s depraved sinner.  He is violent when oppressed, gentle when free.

 

Conflict is the origin of everything.

(Heraclitus)

 

If we have to resort to force, don’t sit on the fence.

 

Be cruel.

 

Humanity won’t be happy till the last capitalist is hung with the guts of the last bureaucrat.

 

When the last sociologist has been hung with the guts of the last bureaucrat, will we still have “problems”?

 

The passion of destruction is a creative joy. (Bakunin)

 

A single nonrevolutionary weekend is infinitely more bloody than a month of total revolution.

 

The tears of philistines are the nectar of the gods.

 

This concerns everyone.

 

We are all German Jews.

 

We refuse to be highrised, diplomaed, licensed, inventoried, registered, indoctrinated, suburbanized, sermonized, beaten, telemanipulated, gassed, booked.

 

We are all “undesirables.”

 

We must remain “unadapted.”

 

The forest precedes man, the desert follows him.

 

Under the paving stones, the beach.

 

Concrete breeds apathy.

 

Coming soon to this location: charming ruins.

 

Beautiful, maybe not, but O how charming: life versus survival.

 

“My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I’m not selling bread, I’m selling yeast.” (Unamuno)

 

Conservatism is a synonym for rottenness and ugliness.

 

You are hollow.

 

You will end up dying of comfort.

 

Hide yourself, object!

 

No to coat-and-tie revolution.

 

A revolution that requires us to sacrifice ourselves for it is Papa’s revolution.

 

Revolution ceases to be the moment it calls for self-sacrifice.

 

The prospect of finding pleasure tomorrow will never compensate for today’s boredom.

 

When people notice they are bored, they stop being bored.

 

Happiness is a new idea.

 

Live without dead time.

 

Those who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring

to everyday reality have a corpse in their mouth.

 

Culture is an inversion of life.

 

Poetry is in the streets.

 

The most beautiful sculpture is a paving stone thrown at a cop’s head.

 

Art is dead, don’t consume its corpse.

 

Art is dead, let’s liberate our everyday life.

 

Art is dead, Godard can’t change that.

 

Godard: the supreme Swiss Maoist jerk.

 

Permanent cultural vibration.

 

We want a wild and ephemeral music. We propose a fundamental regeneration: concert strikes, sound gatherings with collective investigation. Abolish copyrights: sound structures belong to everyone.

 

Anarchy is me.

 

Revolution, I love you.

 

Down with the abstract, long live the ephemeral. (Marxist-Pessimist Youth)

 

Don’t consume Marx, live him.

 

I’m a Groucho Marxist.

 

I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires.

 

Desiring reality is great! Realizing your desires is even better!

 

Practice wishful thinking.

 

I declare a permanent state of happiness.

 

Be realistic, demand the impossible.

 

Power to the imagination.

 

Those who lack imagination cannot imagine what is lacking.

 

Imagination is not a gift, it must be conquered.

(Breton)

 

Action must not be a reaction, but a creation.

 

Action enables us to overcome divisions and find solutions.

 

Exaggeration is the beginning of invention.

 

The enemy of movement is skepticism. Everything that has been realized comes from dynamism, which comes from spontaneity.

 

Here, we spontane.

 

“You must bear a chaos inside you to give birth to a dancing star.”  (Nietzsche)

 

Chance must be systematically explored.

 

Alcohol kills. Take LSD.

 

Unbutton your mind as often as your fly.

 

“Every view of things that is not strange is false.”  (Valéry)

 

Life is elsewhere.

 

Forget everything you’ve been taught. Start by dreaming.

 

Form dream committees.

 

Revolution is the active passage from dream to reality.

 

Dare! This word contains all the politics of the present moment.  (Saint-Just)

 

Arise, ye wretched of the university.

 

Students are jerks.

 

The student’s susceptibility to recruitment as a militant for any cause is a sufficient demonstration of his real impotence.  (enragé women)

 

Professors, you make us grow old.

 

Terminate the university.

 

Rape your Alma Mater.

 

What if we burned the Sorbonne?

 

Professors, you are as senile as your culture, your modernism is nothing but the modernization of the police.

 

We refuse the role assigned to us: we will not be trained as police dogs.

 

We don’t want to be the watchdogs or servants of capitalism.

 

Exams = servility, social promotion, hierarchical society.

 

When examined, answer with questions.

 

Insolence is the new revolutionary weapon.

 

Every teacher is taught, everyone taught teaches.

 

The Old Mole of history seems to be splendidly undermining the Sorbonne.  (telegram from Marx, 13 May 1968)

 

Thought that stagnates rots.

 

To call in question the society you “live” in, you must first be capable of calling yourself in question.

 

Take revolution seriously, but don’t take yourself seriously.

 

The walls have ears. Your ears have walls.

 

Making revolution also means breaking our internal chains.

 

A cop sleeps inside each one of us. We must kill him.

 

Drive the cop out of your head.

 

Religion is the ultimate con.

 

Neither God nor master.

 

If God existed it would be necessary to abolish him.

 

Can you believe that some people are still Christians?

 

Down with the toad of Nazareth.

 

How can you think freely in the shadow of a chapel?

 

We want a place to piss, not a place to pray.

 

I suspect God of being a leftist intellectual.

 

The bourgeoisie has no other pleasure than to degrade all pleasures.

 

Going through the motions kills the emotions.

 

Struggle against the emotional fixations that paralyze our potentials.  (Committee of Women on the Path of Liberation)

 

Constraints imposed on pleasure incite the pleasure of living without constraints.

 

The more I make love, the more I want to make revolution.  The more I make revolution, the more I want to make love.

 

SEX: It’s okay, says Mao, as long as you don’t do it too often.

 

Comrades, 5 hours of sleep a day is indispensable: we need you for the revolution.

 

Embrace your love without dropping your guard.

 

I love you!!! Oh, say it with paving stones!!!

 

I’m coming in the paving stones.

 

Total orgasm.

 

Comrades, people are making love in the Poli Sci classrooms, not only in the fields.

 

Revolutionary women are more beautiful.

 

Gilda, I love you! Down with work!

 

The young make love, the old make obscene gestures.

 

Make love, not war.

 

Whoever speaks of love destroys love.

 

Down with consumer society.

 

The more you consume, the less you live.

 

Commodities are the opium of the people.

 

Burn commodities.

 

You can’t buy happiness. Steal it.

 

See Nanterre and live. Die in Naples with Club Med.

 

Are you a consumer or a participant?

 

To be free in 1968 means to participate.

 

I participate.

You participate.

He participates.

We participate.

They profit.

 

The golden age was the age when gold didn’t reign.

 

“The cause of all wars, riots and injustices is the existence of property.”  (St. Augustine)

 

Happiness is hanging your landlord.

 

Millionaires of the world unite. The wind is turning.

 

The economy is wounded — I hope it dies!

 

How sad to love money.

 

You too can steal.

 

“Amnesty: An act in which the rulers pardon the injustices they have committed.”  (Ambrose Bierce)

[The definition in Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary is actually: “Amnesty: The state’s magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish.”]

 

Abolish alienation.

 

Obedience begins with consciousness; consciousness begins with disobedience.

 

First, disobey; then write on the walls. 

(Law of 10 May 1968) 

I don’t like to write on walls.

 

Write everywhere.

 

Before writing, learn to think.

 

I don’t know how to write but I would like to say beautiful things and I don’t know how.

 

I don’t have time to write!!!

 

I have something to say but I don’t know what.

 

Freedom is the right to silence.

 

Long live communication, down with telecommunication.

 

You, my comrade, you whom I was unaware of amid the tumult, you who are throttled, afraid, suffocated — come, talk to us.

 

Talk to your neighbors.

 

Yell.

 

Create.

 

Look in front of you!!!

 

Help with cleanup, there are no maids here.

 

Revolution is an INITIATIVE.

 

Speechmaking is counterrevolutionary.

 

Comrades, stop applauding, the spectacle is everywhere.

 

Don’t get caught up in the spectacle of opposition. Oppose the spectacle.

 

Down with spectacle-commodity society.

 

Down with journalists and those who cater to them.

 

Only the truth is revolutionary.

 

No forbidding allowed.

 

Freedom is the crime that contains all crimes. It is our ultimate weapon.

 

The freedom of others extends mine infinitely.

 

No freedom for the enemies of freedom.

 

Free our comrades.

 

Open the gates of the asylums, prisons and other faculties.

 

Open the windows of your heart.

 

To hell with boundaries.

 

You can no longer sleep quietly once you’ve suddenly opened your eyes.

 

The future will only contain what we put into it now.