Appendices
B – Bibliography
C – Critical Distance
E
– The Erotic
OS
– Ontology of the Spectacle
P – Preface
Q – The Quotidian
RC
– Refusal of Constraints
RP – Reversal of Perspective
RR – Reformist Responses/Rubbish
SD
– Self-Deprecation
TQ
– Tyranny of the Quantitative
[Ankur’s Appendices 1]

[Ankur’s Appendices 2]
Appendeix B: Works Cited and Works Internalized
All of the following books changed me – and thus, this thesis – to some degree or another. The only ones I felt the need to quote were Knabb’s anthology, Debord's
Society of the Spectacle and, of course, Vaneigem's Revolution of Everyday Life . The rest all appear somewhere in the thesis, misquoted, detourned, or otherwise abused – those who know and love them will take note.
works cited:
Debord, G. 1994. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books
Knabb, K. (ed). 1981. Situationist International Anthology. Berkeley: Bureau of Public
Secrets.
Vaneigem, R. 1994. The Revolution of Everyday Life. London: Rebel Press / Left Bank
Books works internalized:
Argueta, M. One Day of Life.
Bakunin, M. God and the State
Baudelaire, C. Artificial Paradises.
Baudelaire, C. Flowers of Evil and Paris Spleen.
Bey, H. Immediatism.
Bey, H. The Temporary Autonomous Zone.
Bordieu, P. Acts of Resistance.
Bordieu, P. On television.
Breton, A. Mad Love
Breton, A. Nadja
Carroll, L. Alice in Wonderland.
Chomsky, N. American Power and the New Mandarins.
Chomsky, N. Deterring Democracy.
Chomsky, N. Necessary Illusions.
Chomsky, N. Power and Ideology.
Chomsky, N. The Chomsky Reader.
Chomsky, N. Year 501.
Coffman, M. Collected Letters.
Cooper, M. Pinochet and Me.
CrimethInc. Days of War / Nights of Love
Debord, G. Comments on Society of the Spectacle.
Debord, G. In Girum
Debord, G. Panegyric
Debord, G. The Films of Guy Debord
Fromm, E. Marx's Concept of Man.
Gray, C. Leaving the 20th Century.
Jappe, A. Guy Debord.

[Ankur’s Appendices 3]
Katzen, M. The Enchanted Broccoli Forest Vegetarian Cookbook.
Kerouac, J. Dharma Bums.
Kerouac, J. On the Road.
Klein, N. No Logo.
Kropotkin, P. The Conquest of Bread.
Kropotkin, P. Mutual Aid.
Kundera, M. Slowness
Kundera, M. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Kundera, M. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Lasn, K. Culture Jam.
Lefeber, W. Inevitable Revolutions.
Lefebvre, H. The Critique of Everyday Life.
Leiws, T., Amini, F., and Lannon, R. A General Theory of Love.
Lukacs, G. History and Class Consciousness
Marcus, G. Lipstick Traces (on a cigarette): A Secret History of the 20th Century
Marcuse, H. One Dimensional Man.
Marcuse, H. Reason and Revolution.
Marx, K. and Engels, F. The Manifesto of the Communist Party.
Mehta, G. Karma Cola.
Neruda, P. Odes to Opposites
Plant, S. The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age.
Pynchon, T. Gravity's Rainbow
Pynchon, T. The Crying of Lot 49
Sadler, S. The Situationist City.
Tucker, R. The Marx-Engels Reader.
Vaneigem, R. The Book of Pleasures
Vaneigem, R. The Totality for Kids

[Ankur’s Appendices 4]
Appendix C
– Critical Distance
Though I've spent the majority of my intellectual activity in the past year focused on two or three Situationist books, what I've written in thesis reflects my personal experiences in the spectacle much more than my experiences in the literature. I verified the skeleton of theory that Vaneigem and Debord provide in the streets – in discussions and arguments with bus drivers, policemen, professors, waiters, Republicans, peasants, friends, lovers, and economics majors. Most important to my development were the conditions at Stanford University, where spectacular time and the art of noncommunication reign supreme. It was probably my frustration with what Stanford represents that pushed me to finish this thesis long after I felt I had enough.
Vaneigem writes:
"Marx writes ‘theory becomes a material force once it has got hold of the masses. Theory is capable of getting hold of men once it demonstrates its truth with regard to man, once it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp something at its roots. But for man the root is man himself.’ In short, radical theory gets hold of the masses because it comes from them in the first place."
Here we find Vaneigem arguing once again for the importance of the quotidian – but this time twisted towards the radically inclined. As he warns in his first chapter "those who speak of revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life... have a corpse in their mouth". He gives this quote to us by way of elaboration: To be revolutionary, to speak honestly of revolution, is to start from the masses, to understand the situation on the ground. If theory is to be radical, if theory is to have as its end a

[Ankur’s Appendices 5] radical upheaval in society, a radical change in the structures of oppression, a radical realignment of the social hierarchy, it must ground itself in the everyday life of the everyday woman. The quote is Vaneigem's one-line whack against the dead horse of
Bolshevism.
However, it's also much more. It's an exhortation to all who would study or analyze revolutionary impulses and movements to do so from the ground. Marx senses the limits to what one can learn and do while encased in an ivory tower; Vaneigem formalizes them: to be radical, theory must come from the masses . Theory must be immediate for both the theoretician and the masses – even if the two do not understand each other, they must feel the same weight, the same desire, the same historical moment.
For a theory of subjectivity, this necessity only amplifies. The writer, according to
Marx, must grasp subjectivity at its roots, which are none other than the writer herself.
Thus, the writer must write with lucidity about her own life. To do any less would be dishonest: inauthentic. It would be the counter-revolutionary analogue to plagiarism – to write about ideas which you do not essentially grasp (to write about ideas which do not make your eyes sparkle). Because of the importance of this immediacy, there is corresponding importance to demonstrate it. To communicate the author’s grasp of the material is to communicate the material's grasp of the author . The resulting work explores the relationship of the author to her material as much as it critiques the material objectively. To understand and to critique a theory that claims to be radical, which moreover claims to be radically subjective (Vaneigem's), is to write about one's own experience with the text – the degree to which the text resonates subjectively with the critical reader. To do anything less is to reify oneself.

[Ankur’s Appendices 6]
At this point, it seems natural to interrogate the idea of 'critical distance'. The idea that the examiner and the examined are two atomic entities which engage in a one-way relationship of objective criticism to produce an analytic, well-documented, and verifiable result. Such an idea is extremely important in the natural sciences, where personal bias could obscure the universality of nature. However, the above quote by
Marx, its interpretation by Vaneigem, and its application in this work conspire to argue the opposite for the humanities – the idea of critical distance has no place in a human interpretation of a text. Only the bourgeoisie’s pathetic incarnation of humanism – centered on woman as producer and consumer, supplier and demander – could allow for such an idea as critical distance, to better facilitate the exchange of ideas and to better ignore their use. If we, however, are interested in learning and in the quality of ideas (as opposed to their quantity), we must throw ourselves into our texts. To write an analysis that any (other) third-rate academic could verify is to fail. The relationship between the text and critic should be sufficiently nuanced, troubling, and dramatic to produce a work unique and unverifiable. Asking writers for anything less is as absurd as asking doctors to maintain critical distance from their patients or asking teachers to maintain critical distance from their students. To ask for critical distance is to ask for the author to reify and to censor herself: to a nip a potentially beautiful experience in the bud. It is to ask her to write not out of love for a text, but out of duty. I find such an idea profoundly counterrevolutionary.

[Ankur’s Appendices 7]
Appendix E
– The Erotic
Vaneigem's notion of love is protean indeed, encompassing empathy, joi de vivre , and perseverance in addition to its base of radical subjectivity. In one of his last sections,
"The Unitary Triad", Vaneigem enters into his only discussion of the erotic. In the erotic we find his highest level of love – the pleasure principle – which underlies the whole project of creative revolution and is subversive in its very essence to the spectacle.
Vaneigem defines the erotic as "pleasure seeking its own coherence" (Vaneigem
254). Within this notion of coherence is, once again, the totality – pleasure cannot be cordoned off into one sphere of life and kept absent from another. To live with pleasure to live with the pleasure principle at all times – though it may not always be realized, it is always present. Furthermore, Vaneigem founds the coherence of pleasure of the
"movement of the passions towards intercommunication, interdependence, and unity"
(Vaneigem 254). Thus, the erotic is not only the highest for of love – without which it cannot exist – but it also founded on creativity and play. Vaneigem's place for the erotic is truly revolutionary – rather than restricting pleasure to clandestine enjoyment, such as bedrooms, bars, and the like – he conceive of recreating the whole of social life as pleasure. Such a reorientation of the erotic outward is the ultimate wrecking ball towards the tottering edifices of spectacular society. Since Vaneigem bases "the concrete reality of pleasure" on the freedom to unite oneself with whomever, the realization of such pleasure can only lead to "the wholesale demolition of social structures". Platonic relationships drown under the howls of Bacchanalia. All taboos are broken. Vaneigem wants a wife-cum-sister – who is as charmingly close as family but with the eroticism of a lover – all of whose friends are wife-cum-sisters too. Such a conception total shatters

[Ankur’s Appendices 8] societal taboos and releases all constraints on pleasure. He seeks a life and death of debauchery. Oh, Vaneigem, where to begin?

[Ankur’s Appendices 9]
Appendix OS - Ontology of the Spectacle
In 1966, a group of radical students, dissatisfied with their social and ideological position within post-war capitalist society, published a pamphlet at the University of Strasbourg, in France. The pamphlet, which bankrupted the coffers of the Strasbourg student union, scathingly denounced every aspect of student life, claiming the French student "was already a very bad joke" (Knabb 317). These radicals, somehow elected to the presidency of the student union, then dissolved their offices, claiming "[the student union] was nothing more than a mechanism for integration into an unacceptable society" (Jappe 82).
This spirit of revolt, eschewing the "proper" bureaucratic channels for the efficient redress of perceived grievances, precisely indicates the attitudes of the pamphlet's authors, the Situationists.
By 1966, the Situationists had evolved from a mishmash of political, cultural, and artistic fringe groups to a coherent revolutionary organization
1
. Their immanent objective: a radical critique of both consumer capitalist and authoritarian socialist society in their respective totalities. The aforementioned pamphlet made great strides for their international recognition, as denunciations poured in from every hallowed sector of bourgeois society: church, state, professionals, reformists, and the university itself.
Manifestly behind the acerbic bombast of student life – that the "various institutions which govern his daily life" would only stop shitting in his face to come around and bugger him – the Situationists presented a rigorous analysis of the current worldhistorical state of capitalism, which they dubbed "the spectacle-commodity economy" 2 , or, as it continued to advance itself, merely "the spectacle"
3
. In the world of the spectacle,

[Ankur’s Appendices 10] the critique of which the Situationist International spent most of its intellectual time, the position of the student holds particular interest as a metaphor for the impossibility of life as a whole.
The student's primary social function, qua student, is the initiate (Knabb 320): as such, his process of learning within the university (institutional organization of ignorance) consists of internalizing the constraints, mediations, and seductions of the dominant ideology. Though the more vocally conservative sectors of society hail student life as an unprecedented time of experiment and freedom, the student persists in spending his time as conventionally as possible (and we all know society places no limits on conformism), "preferring the security of the strait-jacketed daily space-time organized for this benefit by the guardians of the system" (Knabb 323). The student, conventionally, spends his time in material and ideological consumption. More than any other target market in society, the student greedily consumes the cultural spectacle: falling at the feet of professors
4
, attending meaningless lectures and symposia
5
, and watching the latest
Godard
6
. Any attempt to circumvent the mass-produced cultural spectacle, the preferred pedagogy of the bourgeois student, meets with mediation. The student qua activist remains as counter-revolutionary as the student qua consumer, because his pathetic rebellion against the spectacle falls precisely into the dominant ideology, expressed as the dominant antagonism. Thus, the student can support the French Communist Party, join the Revolutionary Communist Youth, or read any number of fashionable "radical" magazines. Such a pitiful attempt at societal critique only succeeds as an indictment of the self – the student's attempt to escape spectacular cultural production progresses only so far as his understanding of life: which is to say, nowhere .

[Ankur’s Appendices 11]
At this point lucidity dawns on our metonymy: the summary effect of the spectacle for all its spectators – not just students – is the denial of life , and its subsequent replacement with life's image, mere survival. towards an ontology of the spectacle
Any discussion which ponders the summary effects of the spectacle begs for a definition of the term, spectacle. The Situationists use the term spectacle to describe the system of social relations concomitant with the highest level of consumer capitalism: the spectacle-commodity economy. Fundamentally, the Situationist make no claim as to the earthshaking originality of their theories, rather they have no desire to "launch novelties on the culture market". Guy Debord, primary theorist of the spectacle, thus declares
"Plagiarism is necessary. Progress demands it" (Debord §207), emphasizing the importance of understanding and re-appropriating the past for building a theory of the present. In this light, Situationist theory can be seen as a radical adaptation of what should be important in modern philosophy and revolutionary theory: therefore, any exposition of the spectacle must also be its ontology. I conceive of this ontology as building upon three distinct threads: early Marxian 7 thought, the importance of everyday life, and revolutionary play. My analysis tends to focus on the first. the spectacle through early marxian thought
The Situationists place themselves firmly within an early Marxian tradition of commodity criticism, often referred to as Marxian humanism, which focuses primarily upon the alienating effects of capitalism on man. The central thrust of such criticism

[Ankur’s Appendices 12] attacks capitalism not on the basis of practical evils (i.e. vitiation, the reduction of worker to what he needs to survive) but more on the notion than capitalism is inimical to human freedom. Though this strain of Marxian thought also shows prominently in Capital , it dominates Marx's earlier works, including the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 , Contribution to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: an Introduction , and
The German Ideology , from which I may occasionally quote. After Marx, in the first quarter of the twentieth century, two men famously carried the banner of Marxian humanism: Hungarian philosopher George Lukacs and Italian revolutionist Antonio
Gramsci. Because the Situationists acknowledge their heavy debt the ideas Lukacs presents in his 1923 treatise History and Class Consciousness , I cast him as the primary theoretical mediator between the Situationist critique of the spectacle and Marx's critique of capital.
For Guy Debord, self-proclaimed and widely recognized ringleader of the
Situationist International
8
, the spectacle parodied capital. Furthermore, the spectacle concluded the internal logic of capital, and thus the society of the spectacle sits at the highest, latest, stage of capitalism. Thus, as a book that parodies, extends, quotes, and plays with its Marxian (and Hegelian) ancestors, Society of the Spectacle is most accurately a work of detournement .
Detournement , a central Situationist technique, first originated in the wordplay of the poet Lautreamont, a central Situationist hero
9
. The Situationists formally reincarnate detournement
10
as "the integration of present or past artistic production into a superior construction of a milieu" (Knabb 45). Furthermore, within the old cultural spheres, detournement is "a method of propaganda, a wearing out and loss importance of those

[Ankur’s Appendices 13] spheres" (Knabb 46). Practically, detournement manifests itself as the "reuse of preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble" (Knabb 55), and often appears as collage, subvertising
11
, or parody. In literature, philosophy, or radical theory, detourned writing often takes the form of plagiarism. In a detourned sentence, the author modifies one or two words in an un-attributed quotation, thus producing a synthesis of his meaning alongside the negation of the old meaning.
Conceiving Debord's book as a detournement of Marx is not a novel endeavor; most evidently, the first line of his book directly parodies that of Capital
12
. Reading the spectacle as a detournement of capitalism presents a little more theoretical intrigue.
Debord translates the language of Marxian analysis to his own vocabulary, synthesizing his meaning with Marx's upon each term he appropriates, then edifies his version as the orthodox description of the current historical moment. In particular, I see Debord detourning two distinct ideas of Marx's analysis, through the lens of Lukacs, to arrive at his (Debord's) notion of the spectacle: capital as a social relation and the role of capital in shaping society.
1. from capitalism to the spectacle: capital as a social relation
"Capital is not a thing but a social relationship between persons mediated by things"
- Capital , p776
Marx comes to reveal the hidden. The brilliance of capitalism lies in its deceptive capacity – the objects we see as unremarkable, objective items and institutions (sweaters,
Leland Stanford's railroad) conceal a history of development from nature (naked sheep, decimated forests) through human social relations (sweatshops, Chinese immigrant

[Ankur’s Appendices 14] labor). The ideology of exchange naturally disassociates labor from its products, allowing
(limiting?) consumers to regard commodities as ahistorical, only thinking about their current market price. Hence objectivity – the objective market objectively determines the objective price by what it (the market) will objectively bear. Marx seeks to shred this veil of objectivity. In pointing out that capital has a social ontology beyond its objective mediators (things), Marx reveals the subjective alienation (forced) labor produces. This revelation changes the whole topology of discourse: no economist can persevere in discussing only the objectively quantifiable elements of political economy without addressing the essentially subjective character of the relation between worker and production.
Debord understands the brilliance of Marx's demystification of the commodity, and follows suit in exposing the image. His thesis, "the spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images"
(Debord §4), detourn s Marx's quote above. First, Debord re-conceives the fundamental unit of exchange as the image, not capital. From there, Debord reinterprets Marx's revelation for the spectacular age: just as capitalism sought to hide the alienation and reification implicit in the social function of the laborer , the society of the spectacle obscures the humiliation and isolation implicit in the social function of the spectator
13
.
Debord argues against a critique of the spectacle that focuses merely on the preponderance of images, because images are not the essential character of the spectacle
– passivity is. Rather, Debord analyzes the alienation of wrapping one's life up with images, especially images other people created. As Marx unveiled alienated labour as an essential feature of capitalism, Debord unveils the passivity of the professional spectator,

[Ankur’s Appendices 15] he who stares catatonically through the progression of his own history, as an essential feature of the spectacle.
2. from capitalism to the spectacle: how capital shapes society.
One of the best-popularized aspects of Marx's philosophy is the basesuperstructure metaphor that underlies his theory of historical materialism. Essentially,
Marx claims the social and political relations of society hinge upon society's underlying economic structure. That is, in an age where the instruments of production undergo revolutionary change, such as the origins of the Industrial Revolution, the concomitant social relations must likewise undergo a change: "they [must] be burst asunder; they were burst asunder" (Tucker 478). In theorizing this relationship, Marx does not impose a strict
1:1 relationship on forms and relations of production, but merely emphasizes "the economic structure of society" is the real basis on which a juridical and political superstructure arises, and to which definite forms of social conscience correspond"
(Fromm 217). As such, capital holds politics on a kite-string – though the latter is able to breeze this way and that, a release or contraction by the former – a break in the forms of production – causes immediate and drastic effects its charge.
In revising Mark's claim that capital shapes society to his own that the spectacle shapes society, Debord once again extends and negates Marx's position. Debord takes what he find valuable as his own – the notion that social relations are historically contingent on their economic bases – and adjusts the vocabulary to fit his own theoretical framework. Thus, capital becomes spectacle and 'economic basis' reads 'spectaclecommodity economy'.

[Ankur’s Appendices 16]
According to Debord, "the spectacle corresponds to the historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life" (Debord §42). If so, then the spectacle's colonial programme is faithfully imperial. It takes the raw goods of daily experience (man, woman, bread, wine) refines them in its image production factories
(stereotypes, televisions, churches, supermarkets) and sells them back to the natives at a vicious margin. From a Situationist perspective, in fact, the margin is incalculable.
Instead of living spontaneously, the spectacle's enforced passivity and commodity rule make us pay for what was once both free and priceless: the commodification and mediation of daily experience make life cheap and surviving expensive.
At this point of total colonization, the fact that society remains recognizable is a marvel itself. Society, "in its length and breadth", in Debord's words, "becomes capital's faithful portrait" (Debord §50). Not just any capital mind you, but Situationist capital, which is to say spectacle, or "capital where it becomes accumulated to the point of image" (Debord §34). In such a world, following Marx's move of separation and abstraction – divining the intricacies of the correspondence between political superstructure and economic base – becomes impossible. The spectacle – "the sun that never sets on the empire of modern passivity" (Debord §13) – now covers the entire globe, and gives no hints as to its anything .
Really, according to the spectacle itself, there is no ontology. The spectacle unilaterally imposes itself as the end of history, the eternal present, the end of autonomy, and the ultimate telos . In society of the spectacle, "the commodity contemplates itself in a world of its own making" (Debord §53).

[Ankur’s Appendices 17]
Such a description is grim indeed. The spectacle tightens the noose that capital rigged, further squeezing the life out of the proletariat. Of course, in the Situationist model we all melt into the psychological proletariat; not only do we lack control of the means of production, we have been robbed of the means of emotions. Within Marx's diachronical model, philosophers and workers alike had room to wiggle between the changing forms of production and their loosely tethered relations of production. The spectacle allows no margins but its own. In rewriting society as spectacular rather than economic, Debord stresses his own point: workers (and non-workers to a greater degree) are no longer immiserated in their lives, for they have abdicated life altogether. the spectacle and you
Starting in the "Organisation of Appearance", Vaneigem begins to dissect the machinery of the spectacle. He sees the narrative of the spectacle as working to ensure
"the coherence of myth" (its own) except for occasional punctures in the party story, at which point the "coherence of myth" turns into a frenzy to save the "myth of coherence":
"what had formerly had been taken for granted had suddenly to be vigorously asserted"
(Vaneigem 125). At such points, ruptures in the grand machinery like the Revolution of
May 1968, the spectacle hauls out support from its strongholds – economists, academics, government, the media – and prods those who ordinarily have no function but the maintenance of their own passivity to vociferously offer their own support. Of course, this careful organization falters more and more with the incredible fragmentation of the modern spectacle. The ubiquitous and fleeting character of modern ideologies – no longer simply the ideologies of church and state but those of Backstreet Boys and Pokemon

[Ankur’s Appendices 18] besides – are often contradictory. The spectacle has entered such a state of complexity as to have lost all calculation. As such, Vaneigem claims we are in the historical moment of the decomposition of the spectacle, and thus there is no better time to be re-proposing the virtues of life and love. Naturally, "the decomposition of the spectacle entails a spectacle of decomposition. It is in the logic of things the last actor should film his own death;"
(Vaneigem 126) there are no missed opportunities for production nor consumption within the spectacle.
Within such complexity, the spectacle maintains control over individual members of society through the notion of the role. The primitive idea of the role is that of alienation: to have man's thoughts and actions be produced externally then consumed internally. Rather than letting woman set his own priorities and decide his own habits, the spectacle pounces upon this opportunity for consumption – both material and ideologically. Witness mechanism of the sort: the university and the image. The university is an idea factory: the professors produce (or more often, recycle) ideas and the students move through as on a conveyor belt, consuming whatever is put in front of them.
Some universities, the more liberal ones, take flak from the establishment for allows their students to choose between three or four different conveyors belts, but the basic role of passive consumption remains the same. Image factories operate in much the same way, but "it is not through the dissemination of ideas that cinema, an its personalized form, television, win the battle for our minds." Rather, it is the dissemination of gestures: in watching an internalizing the models whose images are produced for our enjoyment, we understand the proper range of responses in a given situation. It's not just that every thirty-year old man has his hair cut like George Clooney; it's that every thirty-year

[Ankur’s Appendices 19] woman brushes her hair out of her eyes in the same anxious gesture like Meg Ryan.
According to Vaneigem, even our personal tics and idiosyncrasies are manufacture en masse .
This internalization of societal values – after a limited choice of which set of values we would like to internalize – formalizes as the role. The role is the atomic unit of the spectacle, which gets imposed upon every member of society in order to better shape that member's life. The phraseology is difficult because it's difficult to say whether the individual imposes such roles on herself or the spectacles does the dirty work by itself. In either case, Vaneigem sees roles as enemy foot-soldiers in the battle for our minds – we either internalize their virtues or prejudices or develop our own. For Vaneigem, to blindly accept a spectacular role is pick from "a museum of images, a showroom of stick figures"
(Vaneigem 128) – no matter which one we choose, we abdicate love and subjectivity for the shadow of a life. The antidote to such shallow living is direct, immediate (in the radical of sense of without mediation) experience: "Roles are eroded by the resistance put up by lived experience and spontaneity will eventually lance the abscess of inauthenticity and pseudo-activity" (Vaneigem 130). If that's the case, then why are roles so predominant, so seductive? Why, once one has come to the reversal of perspective, fall back into a role: the libertine, the philosopher, the leader, or even the radical? What is so seductive about the role?
Vaneigem begins to explore this question on the level of appearances. He points to the necessity of playing parts in certain situations, "parts which appear to answer our desires but which are really antagonistic to them" (Vaneigem 131). Vaneigem attributes the general feeling of "the absurdity of actions" to exactly this: the internalization of a

[Ankur’s Appendices 20] foreign, alienatory role. Even more insidious, Vaneigem notes that though the spectacle often pigeonholes certain personalities into certain roles: the teacher's pet, the high school poet, the drama queen, other's not directly assigned roles by the spectacle choose their own out of the mixed bag they've internalized through spectacular media. Thus, the great promise of socialism realized on the level of inauthenticity – to every woman his role!
For the first time in the history of man's oppression of man, the ruling power takes from the rich to give to the poor – bad luck that the handouts are shares of alienation and not bread! Here we seek the author's bitter poster-boy of the role, The Thirty-Five Year-Old
Man: "Each morning he starts his car, drives to the office, pushes papers, has lunch in town, plays pool, pushes more papers, leaves work, has a couple of drinks, goes home, greets his wife, kisses his children, eats his steak in front of the TV, goes to bed, makes love, and falls asleep. Who reduces this man's life to this pathetic sequences of cliches?"
(Vaneigem 133). The answer, of course, is that he himself does. It is by his own choice that he only orders drinks he's seen on TV, bases his pool game on The Color of Money , and choreographs his lovemaking to July's column in
Mens’ Health
. Each of his actions, no matter what he drew from where, comes to his live as a foreign commodity, and as such negates his internal desire to live and ends up alienating him. One can almost here
Vaneigem scoff "his pleasures are so mitigated, yet so demonstrative, that they can only be a facade". Which is precisely what perplexes Vaneigem – why give up the opportunity for direct, lived pleasure, the pleasure that we all – even the Thirty-Five Year-Old Man – daydream of every day, for a role? Such daydreams, when uncensored, have force untold:
"who can gauge the power of an impassioned daydream, of pleasure taken in love, of a nascent desire, of a rush in sympathy?" (Vaneigem 134).

[Ankur’s Appendices 21]
Vaneigem finds his answer in the double character of the role. For the passive woman, the role is not merely a threat to his own experience, it provides mediation against the chaos of the world, from what they might be missing. With a role, there is no doubt about the 'way of living'; it has been decided for you. In Vaneigem's words, "the role is at once a threat and a protective shield... they impoverish real experiences but also protect this experience from consciousness of its impoverishment" (Vaneigem 139).
Typical Situationist babble? Without roles, woman could collapse from fear of possibility. This is the onus of love, for a life in love with itself knows no limits and consequently knows no paths through the desert of life. As the Ivan Chtcheglov wrote in
1953 (Knabb 1):
"We are bored in the city, there is no longer any
Temple of the Sun...
And you, forgotten, your memories ravaged by all the consternations of two hemispheres...without music and without geography, no longer setting out for the hacienda...You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist.
The hacienda must be built ."
Love leaves us wandering, confused, parched, in want of shade – of the comfort of the role. Such a comfort is the illusion of an oasis, a seduction into the metropolis of policed roads that pave the spectacle. Those who eschew such illusions must find their own ways, rejoice in their own wanderings, build their own haciendas. Such a dramatic break, from the constraint over the role into the pure poetry of love, is a difficult maneuver at the least, tending towards mysticism and solipsism. Vaneigem's answer, another element at the core of the Situationist project, is play. To inject play into one's everyday role is to subvert it towards life and love. It is to detourn the role itself, and thus detourn everyday life. Precisely because the role is so ubiquitous, merely shrugging it off

[Ankur’s Appendices 22] would be a waste of potential, a missed opportunity for play. In detourning the role, we are negating its alienatory effect on us – it becomes ours once again – and we are transcending its manufactured meaning. Like Jacques Vache, who listed his famous talents then wrote "Now I am going to stay at home and let others explain and debate my personality in light of the above mentioned indications," (Vaneigem 140) Vaneigem impresses upon us the need to detach ourselves from our roles, to better turn them against those who perceive us through spectacular lenses (Vaneigem 150):
"If your role imposes a role on others, assume this power which is not you, then set this phantom loose... Do people want to discuss things with you?... Spit in their faces!”
Vaneigem's project is to maintain the protective aspect of roles for the time being, while simultaneously detourning their projective side. The idea that woman can and should be defined by a stereotype is "inherently ridiculous" (Vaneigem 150), so why not treat them as such? The detournement of the role is our best opportunity to wreak havoc on everyday life in the name of an honest desire to live.

[Ankur’s Appendices 23]
Appendix P - Author’s Fluffy Preface
Welcome.
I hope it is not too pretentious for me to proceed with a brief ontology of this paper, spiced with thankyou’s and acknowledgements to those friends and comrades who helped make this project a reality (misshapen though it may be). I justify the ontology not because it’s interesting but to demonstrate how wayward a process writing a thesis is – if
I am correct that the only people who will begin to read this are in the business of writing undergraduates theses themselves, then such a point may be well taken. I proceed with the acknowledgements not to acknowledge those who have had a small part in something incredibly beautiful (because, frankly, what proceeds is not something you're likely to find beautiful in many senses of the word), but because I'd merely like to indulge a few of my friends who'd like to see their names in print, and mortify those who do not.
This paper represents one stage in my continuing radicalization, a constant yet punctuated process. I first conceived of it during a directed reading the summer after my sophomore year with Rush, perhaps my first mentor at Stanford, on the history and philosophy of anarchist thought. At that point I would have titled it "The Anarchist
Speaks of Love" – I had never even heard of the Situationists. Following that summer, I served my junior year as a College Assistant in the inaugural year of Freshman
Sophomore College, where I received much encouragement from all my fellow staff

[Ankur’s Appendices 24] members, particularly Kristin and Pete. I would like to thank them as well. By spring of
2000, I had decided to write a comparative analysis of Situationist theory and its practice by Adbusters Magazine, and had received a URO grant to work with Adbusters the coming summer. Alex, Jean-Marie, and Laura were instrumental in providing with me an introduction to Adbusters , an arsenal of Situationist knowledge, and a Major Grant, respectively. It was that summer, during and after my walks to buy burritos at lunch with
James, that I realized I really didn't want to write about Adbusters . During Honors
College, I cemented that notion and dropped Adbusters from my thesis proposal, after consultation and encouragement from Zack, Matt, Mi, and Lila. I then proceeded to neglect my thesis for the entirety of autumn quarter, spending the majority of my intellectual capital at EBF happy hours.
It was when John Giuliano welcomed me to the Salvadoran village of Guarjila that I wrote most of what follows. I wrote it in house of Amelia Bonilla, with the companionship of her children, David, Erik, and Yanni. I thank them from the most radically subjective parts of my humanity (you'll have to keep reading to make sense of that joke, I'm afraid).
It became clear to me during that trip, and the months that followed it, that I had entered a stage of my life where I would be learning primarily from people – from professors, priests, chefs, and farmers – rather than books. With that clarity came a corresponding drop in desire to be part of any academic ritual, especially one that undertook academic criticism of philosophers who hated the business of academic criticism. Zack and Matt, once again, kept me going, as did the small number of soon-tobe-disappointed people who lied and said they wanted to read it when done.

[Ankur’s Appendices 25]
Vanessa is my best friend and Matt kept me honest from the beginning.
Last, I would like to recommend an immediate course of action to the reader.
There is a book, A General Theory of Love, which you may read. I got it from the
Vashon Island public library and so can you. The book is grounded in science, wellwritten, and organized – none of which I can honestly claim about my own. Nevertheless:
I recommended it for its similarities in intent to what I have written below. The doctors who wrote A General Theory of Love never explicitly mention late capitalism and probably will never come across The Revolution of Everyday Life (unless I send them this...). But their point and my own are the same: we live in a culture (the spectacle) where love is lost (to alienation and reification), and we are nothing without it. I, personally, would read their book before my own.
In any case, thank you.

[Ankur’s Appendices 26]
Appendix RC - Refusal of Constraints
Suffering holds the key to the prison of constraints. Vaneigem's chapter on suffering begins with a historical narrative of human suffering – its origin in natural alienation, its subsequent transformation into social alienation, and its eventual appropriation by the bourgeoisie. The revolutionary bourgeoisie, according to Vaneigem, kept the historical system of suffering in place and merely changed the names of the myths. All this history, of course, brings us to the spectacle, which Vaneigem characterizes as "an organisation of suffering, stemming from a social organisation based on the distribution of constraints" (Vaneigem 44). We suffer because we are the mercy of constraints – because we cannot live freely. The modern spectacle has evolved passed the point where the constraints need to be obvious and overbearing; there are few Gulags and
Pogroms in the first world any longer (and only one industrialized county still executes its own citizens). But though the constraints are less visible, they are more numerous – and how much bloodshed will it take to show that “a hundred pinpricks kill as surely as a couple of blows with a club" (Vaneigem 24)?
Please cross between the lines only when the little strange man permits you.
I'm sorry, but you'll have to tuck your shirt in to proceed.
No, you can't ask that question at this point in time.
The free speech hour is between twelve and one.
What are you smoking, young man?
I'm sorry, that area is closed and guarded at night.
Do you know how fast you were going? ad nauseum ... Of course, you and I will say, are some of these constraints not justified? Do they not serve the greater good? Yes, indeed they do. But Vaneigem does not contend that constraints are biased or anti-utilitarian, merely that they devalue humanity. Constraints apply to objects, not subjects. Thus, to be constrained is to be

[Ankur’s Appendices 27] objectified. You are yourself no longer, a human reveling in your humanity, but merely an object of constraints, listlessly wandering through your own existence in whichever manner is allowed . If woman were a subject, and treated as such, she would have restraint: in considering the safety of others, she would choose to curtail her speed. The prerequisite for such a world, a world often labeled "Utopian", is a mass reversal of perspective. Such a reversal would assert each person's subjectivity, so each woman could design her own goals and restraints with everybody else's humanity in mind. Once you stop seeing yourself as an object, stopping to see others as objects isn't far off.
Vaneigem challenges us to stop seeing such a world as Utopian, and to start seeing our world as Dystopian instead.

[Ankur’s Appendices 28]
Appendix RP - The Reversal of Perspective
"Reversal of Perspective", Vaneigem's first chapter in Book 2, contains the first words that don't focus upon the perspective of power, but rather give a voice to its opposite, its refusal, the perspective of reversal. In "Reversal of Perspective", Vaneigem maps out his vision for the future in his own unique vocabulary. As he says elsewhere, no one can know the details of a future society when still in prehistory, but everyone must know that such a society needs to exist to escape "man's domination by man" (Vaneigem
187).
Curiously, at this pivotal point of his book, Vaneigem choose to use Brecht's words instead of his own. He tells a story of Herr Keuner about two brothers who collect colored stones to represent intense moments in their lives. For Vaneigem, the unforeseen ending to the story represents a true reversal of perspective. From the perspective of power, that of the elders and notables, nothing should be amiss; a day like any other rises with the sun, while people still quibble over the idiocies of their daily lives. Most people share this perspective at first; only the two brothers concern themselves with the quality and intensity of their lives. Then slowly, with the counseling of an old man, they realize that their lives are nothing apart from their stones – that the intensity represented by each stone was the intensity of their lives; that nothing else mattered save the moments of triumph and tribulation of each day. When this realization caught fire amongst the town, amongst the people who shared the implicit perspective of power that daily life merely happened, should be met passively, and wasn't worth remarking on, there occurred a reversal of perspective. With reversal came the realization that the perspective of power, which the people had partaken of for so long, had used them to do the bidding of those

[Ankur’s Appendices 29] elders and notables. They thus sought to eliminate the perspective of power altogether, the same perspective that had from the beginning disparaged the importance of daily life.
Hence the looks of surprise on the faces of the elders and notables, securely positioned along the palisade.
Vaneigem codes a variety of warnings in this story. He warns of the swiftness and harshness of revolutionary justice, which need not be manifested in violence but must be executed completely. Any faltering of the totality – any impurity – gives rise to the fragmentary, the familiar stomping grounds of the spectacle. But where do we find love in Herr Keuner's story? What place does love have in the revolutionary's first moment, the reversal of perspective? For Vaneigem speaks directly to the conception of the revolutionary. One cannot change or eliminate power from its own perspective – all one sees are roses and green backs. The moment one can reverse the perspective, can see for oneself, can shed the illusion that the have and the have-nots share the same dreams and desires, at that moment one has attained Vaneigem's revolutionary consciousness. This reversal is not essentially new: the Marxian idea of class struggle incorporates the idea of shrugging the dominant ideology to see one's class interest revealed. In Vaneigem's version, however, capitalism has evolved to an ideological spectacle, such that the dominant ideology says it cannot be shrugged. As a substitute for class consciousness, I get to choose the flavor of the spectacle I like best: union-organizing, unemployment, or the Democratic Party.
As always with Vaneigem, we find love ever-lurking but hesitant to yet reveal itself. If love, as we defined it earlier, has roots with radical subjectivity – the desire for self-affirmation – then love's first stalk is the reversal of perspective. The reversal of

[Ankur’s Appendices 30] perspective leads to love through the transcendence of the spectacular dialectic between individual and collective good.
A spectacular dialectic (or spectacular antagonism) is a false dialectic constructed by the spectacle to give the illusion of possibility, to give hope of change. Such an antagonism manifests grandiosely as the mythic fight between American capitalism and
Soviet communism. Both grand illusions oppress woman through an appeal to her nature as a social animal that needs community and as a reflective animal that needs independence. The western, liberal, flavor privileges woman's individualism and preaches the lie of freedom, all the while promoting a subconscious collective obedience.
We are all individuals with our own hopes and fears, but all we all want Coca-Cola. "And there you have freedom!" respond the poor apologists of the spectacle, too drunk off their wealth to avoid the realization of their poverty: for perhaps people don't just want Coke, they want Pepsi and Fanta and a million others bromides with a million other colors. And that is what freedom is. The more authoritarian flavor, on the wrong side of the globe, privileges collective responsibility and preaches the lie of the equality. The commissar knows what will make you happy, and you will eat it, no, comrade? And if you don't, if you happen to disagree with the doctor's prescription, he will either shove happiness down your throat until you choke on it or silence your objections in a terminal manner.
Vaneigem vaults over this dialectic with the reversal of perspective; He eschews the perspective of power for the perspective of the self. Our friend in the supermarket can see herself as power does, as a consuming thing, and she can therefore shrug off such an enframing in favor of seeing herself as human. And her compatriot, choking on freedom, can throw up the stale bread and assert her write to bake her own. In the reversal of

[Ankur’s Appendices 31] perspective, each person maintains their individual perspective but can see the harmony of all other perspectives, writes Vaneigem at his most hopeful (Vaneigem 187). But the
Situationist dream is anything but a saccharin one – Vaneigem sees people united and in harmony in so far as they are revolting against reification and in their mutual quest to truly live – beyond that he gives us nothing. In Vaneigem's take on the manifesto, "To each according to his need" ceases to refer to economic concerns, roofs and tortillas, and becomes instead, "To each according to his passion for life".
Which brings us back to love. Love's shivering stalk sprouts in the reversal of perspective because transcending the dialectic of individual and community precisely affirms the self – thereby returning power to the camp of subjectivity. At the moment of the reversal of perspective, the revolutionary is born, and the revolutionary is born in love .
While Vaneigem isn't much for explaining the anecdotes that frequently fall into his text, the rest of the chapter serves as more of an elaboration of the concepts inherent in Herr Keuner's tale. Vaneigem links the reversal of perspective to other aspects of his work and the Situationist project in general. The first example worth nothing is his mention of detournement : "The function of conditioning is to assign and adjust peoples positions on the hierarchical ladder. The reversal of perspective entails a kind of anticonditioning. Not a new form of conditioning, but a new game and its tactics; the game of subversion ( detournement )". (Vaneigem 188)
Detournement , the manipulation of images and their meanings which entails both a negation and transcendence of the target image, is easily the most popular use of
Situationist theory today. Often used and seldom cited: millions see acts of 'billboard

[Ankur’s Appendices 32] liberation', read Adbusters, and laugh at doctored photos on the Internet. Image manipulation, guerilla theatre, musical terrorism, are all examples of detournement , as is any general hijacking of spectacular cultural apparati.
For Vaneigem, reversal of perspective ultimately reduces to personal detournement – for in rejecting the perspective of power and building one's own outlook, one detourns the meaning of selfhood. Rather than existing as a passive recipient for a foreign pre-fabricated meaning, the woman of reversal creates her own meaning, her own personal revolution. The question is "How"? Vaneigem proceeds by isolating the mechanisms which power uses to manipulate people, wrestle away subjectivity, and dominate life. These are precisely the subjects of the three major divisions in Book 1: constraints, mediation, and seduction. Once these techniques are exposed, woman can crush them like giant Salvadoran cockroaches. The woman of refusal is not yet free; but she is a revolutionary in her knowledge of her captivity and her subsequent desire for liberation.
Vaneigem further founds the reversal of perspective – the simple act of recognizing that your subjectivity entitles you to rights and thoughts separate from that of power – on the most natural instincts of woman. This reversal reclaims all the personal power appropriated by Power's perspective, and thus reinvigorates the revolutionary to live her ideas in place of merely thinking them. This infusion of power explains why
Vaneigem thinks the reversal of perspective can turn "knowledge into praxis, hope into freedom, and mediation into a passion for immediacy" (Vaneigem 188). For the reformist thinker, for the good liberal or academic Marxist, for the woman that gives money to the poor and hates the idea of suffering, nothing can liberate her more than the reversal of

[Ankur’s Appendices 33] perspective. It allows her to act on her ideas, to understand that her detest of other people's suffering is also a recognition of her own suffering, to understand her relationship to her possessions as being possessed by them.
As the "Reversal of Perspective" also introduces Vaneigem's more constructive
Book II, in which he discussion his ideas for reconstructing life outside of the spectacle, it introduces the backbone of the most critical chapter in his book, the Unitary Triad:
"The reversal of perspective] enshrines the victory of a system of human relationships grounded in three indivisible principles: participation, communication, and selfrealisation" (Vaneigem 188). Though Vaneigem spends plenty of time developing each of these ideas later on, he significantly places the reversal of perspective in a position to enshrine "the victory of a system of human relationships" which emerge from his revolutionary triad. Of course, this system of human relationship can be no other than another of his ideas of love. More developed than the base scenario of simple subjectivity affirmation, Vaneigem here explores the idea of love as the foundation of community: where human relationships conspire to bring people closer to each other instead of wedging them farther apart. The implicit comparison is to relationships allowed and promoted within the spectacle, which by their nature reify the participants. In such a spectacular relationship, Vaneigem holds sympathy – which translates to impetus to revolt – for both parties: masters and slaves. "Slaves are weak because they swear allegiance to those who govern them; masters, and God himself, are weak because of the shortcomings of those they govern. The master knows the positive role of alienation, the slave its negative one, but both are denied full mastery" (Vaneigem 204). This is no victory of human relationships – this is a victory of the spectacle. When alienated, both

[Ankur’s Appendices 34] masters and slaves are unable to live authentically, unable to appreciate their own subjectivity, unable to begin to realize their desires. But a true victory of human relationships, made possible by radical subjectivity and encompassing the harmonizing of various subjectivities – indeed one may call this love as well – can only exist after the reversal of perspective. For Vaneigem, love is the ultimate tool in the revolution, the key to the larder of human potential. This human potential, which energizes Vaneigem so, is precisely his unitary triad.
Again and again Vaneigem stresses the singular nature of everything revolutionary – his unitary triad is made of three indivisible principles which must be understood as one. The revolutionary must have total commitment and defend subjectivity at all costs. Any retreat or recourse to the partial is a victory of the fragmentary, the lapdog of the spectacle. The Situationists' conception of the spectacle is extremely complex, but one recurring theme is its unitary nature in causing separation. Its only unifying principle is its tendency to destroy unity in favor of an anarcho-capitalist war of ideas and mythologies, during which the meaning of all reduce to nil. Thus, only the spectacle itself has value, there no space outside of its antagonisms, created to pacify those who seek opposition. Hence, the spectacle consecrates National Public Radio, Ben and Jerry's ice cream, Apple Computer, and the Communist party as the official opposition. Meanwhile, the spectacular wheels keep on turning, grinding any real opposition – any opposition that attempts to grab hold of the unitary triad – into dust.
To review, "Reversal of Perspective" is Vaneigem's stage-management of the revolution. He introduces the most powerful tool in the re-appropriation of individual consciousness and collective collaboration, the true opposition to the collective

[Ankur’s Appendices 35] unconscious of capitalism and dearth of community spirit in communism. Most importantly for love, Vaneigem's reversal of perspective allows our lover in potentialis to see the fetters which in the darkness bind her, and therefore gives her the opportunity to shrug them off. The reversal of perspective fertilizes the soil of radical subjectivity. The next step, once the revolutionary lover – because the lover is the most revolutionary archetype, because love ultimately revolutionizes, as I am trying to demonstrate and understand – once the revolutionary lover begins to love herself, to analyze the dominant ideas which keep her from loving others, she liberates herself from ever-increasingly spectacular personal relations and avails herself to ever-increasingly developed forms of love.

[Ankur’s Appendices 36]
Appendix RR - Reformist Rubbish
The chronic unhappiness, humiliation, and despair of 1st world existence go neither unnoticed nor un-addressed. Vaneigem gives credit to the humanists for expressing their desire (and sometimes even acting upon it) to reduce the amount of suffering we feel. Unfortunately, because their critiques never escape the perspective of power, and thus cannot apprehend the essential nature of the situation, they can only make the problems of suffering worse (Vaneigem 35):
"Humanism merely upholsters the machine in Kafka's
Penal Colony. Blood upsets you? No more blood. No more
Guernica, no more Auschwitzes, no more Hiroshimas, no more
Setif. Hooray! But what about the impossibility of living, what about this stifling mediocrity and this absence of passion? What about the feeling of never really being inside your own skin? Let no one say these are points of secondary importance."
Here, Vaneigem compresses a fourfold critique into a single impassioned diatribe.
He at once levels a blow at reformist efforts to halt the bloodshed, reaffirms what is truly important (the quotidian), defends his desire to critique the affluent society in lieu of 'real suffering', and pushes for a more radical solution to the problems of suffering and humiliation.
In applauding the understandable desire never to repeat the massive acts of destruction which woman has leveled against itself as no other creature could, Vaneigem congratulates the reformists on comprehending the least difficult point of his critique – a future society should aim to eliminate man's oppression of man; an aim to which current governments seldom even pay lip service. Implicit in his applause lies a grave disapproval, a disapproval of the humanists' own humiliation, which prevents them from

[Ankur’s Appendices 37] understanding the importance of everyday life. Surely, a world without atomic bombs is a better one, but if it is a world without joy, we might as well die of radiation poisoning all the same – and hopefully more quickly. Vaneigem's argument here brings to mind the famous Situationist maxim he quotes in his introduction "Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails a risk that we shall die of boredom?" (Vaneigem 18). The economic reality through which we see the world, including ourselves, misses those aspects that cannot be counted. Thus, if woman has enough food, shelter, and money, she is considered well-provided for – is that not the promise of the welfare-state? But Vaneigem would rather see a psychological welfare program, to help people realize their own creativity, spontaneity, and poetry (to which he devotes a chapter in Book 2). Thus, his dictum "let no one say these are points of secondary importance" defends against the argument that anybody who spends so much time worrying about the tribulations of the middle class in the industrialized world can know nothing of suffering – can know nothing of hunger or cold or disease, precisely because of the welfare-state that Vaneigem attacks.
Vaneigem responds with the claim that mental health, the health of life and love, is just as important as basic 'human rights', and should be understood as such. If not, the clamoring masses of the third world are going to be even more unhappy when their countries develop into first world-type states. Alternately, as Vaneigem writes later, "who could dare to suppose that the peons and Indians of south America will be satisfied with land reform and lay down their arms when the best paid workers in Europe are demanding a radical change in their way of life? The revolt against the welfare state will set the minimum demands for the world revolution" (Vaneigem 74). That is, a revolt in

[Ankur’s Appendices 38] the most privileged sectors of the world will convince all those people less privileged that their time for revolt is long overdue. This, of course, is precisely the Situationist project – not a band aid like an international arms treaty or the donation of medical supplies to dying children, but a total revolution of the spirit, a realignment of priorities, and a reversal of perspective.
Anything less falls under the category of the "multitude of irrelevant struggles" and spectacular antagonisms which the spectacle favors in place of a true critique. The true struggle only sells in two flavors – the project to build the new world and the project to destroy the old one. Building the new world is Vaneigem's project – the project of love, poetry, and universal self-realization.

[Ankur’s Appendices 39]
Appendix SD - self-deprecation
1.
The impossibility of linearity: I admit, part of the poor organization of this work is my fault. But much of it is because neither Vaneigem nor I subscribe to the sort of linearity that conventional writing prescribes. Ideally this text would have a dozen or so chapters, all read in concert, and all relying on each other for understanding. It'd be some sort of self-referential matrix. Since I've been too busy writing the thesis to write the software to properly write the thesis, you'll just have to wait. Sorry.
2.
I have no delusions about quality. The majority of the text was born in a one-week period in El Salvador, without the aid or desire for a spell-checker. It stills bear those birthmarks. This is clearly not the best one could do with the material available.
However, it is the best I cared to do – for me the thesis writing process was a personal odyssey, and I got the point long before it became important to spell things correctly, cite the correct sources, and apply the correct degree of analytical rigor. As I understood more about what I was writing, I became increasingly concerned with living as opposed to editing.
I will say this: I hope that the few people who read (and grade) the following, the majority of whom will remark to themselves on finishing, "hmm, that's bad writing", do also think a while, reflect, and amend their original thought to, "hmm, that's bad writing, but at least it's inspired."

[Ankur’s Appendices 40]
Appendix TQ - Tyranny of the Quantitative
The spectacle represents a total realignment of priorities, a total inversion of life.
According to Debord and Vaneigem, 'life' in the spectacle is a victory of the image over reality, of the false over the true, the passive over the active, and the quantitative over the qualitative. Since the spectacle is characterized not by dialectic but by the domination of the whole of life by one of its parts, all qualities therefore becomes quantities. Debord and Vaneigem don't condemn the existence of numbers or economic theory – they merely point out that such quantitative elements have their place, and that place does not equal the whole of human existence. They lament the colonization of humanity and the deconsecration of daily life into mere economics, "From the point of view of constraint, daily life is governed by an economic system in which the production and consumption of insults tends to balance out" (Vaneigem 30). Here the Situationist indignation is threefold. Not only must everyday life submit to the laws of economics, it loses its sacredness through the act of comparison with an economic system. Furthermore, the economic system in question is a system of insults, instituted for the free exchange of unpleasantry and malfeasance. And who can deny the discomfort, the tension, the anxiety around other people? – the reluctance to ask the time in a supermarket or smile at a crossing pedestrian. Who doesn't feel excluded and pathetic when passing a group of laughing strangers – when more often that not the very laughter that shames us really serves to diffuse the itching discomfort of a group of 'friends'. This is the reality of humiliation – few analysts care to prove it statistically – a reality felt every day.

[Ankur’s Appendices 41]
And here also I find the tentacles of the quantitative creeping into my consciousness. Did I cite enough examples? What if they were hypothetical? On what page did Vaneigem mention these atrocities? Is there a refutation I should be addressing?
The answers to all such questions must be, of course, unsatisfactory. Exactly how many examples would prove without a doubt that the true currency of our society is the insult? Because the spectacle is a quantitative beast, it only speaks the language of quantity, and asks for all criticisms to be delivered in its own language. Indeed, the spectacle invites discussion on a quantitative level – Stalin, Roosevelt, Yeltsin, and
Clinton all would tell you more people were 'wealthier' at the end of their reigns than at the beginning, and all could produce the statistics to prove it
14
. To escape this illusion, I petition for a qualitative critique – based upon aspects of life and love that modern surveying hasn't quite been able to categorize. A qualitative critique, you say?
Impossible! Not scientific enough. Unreliable. I'm sorry, please go home, take some soma , and try again tomorrow.
More incredible is the vast span of this tyranny. Gradually and sometimes not-sogradually, all our thoughts translate into the language of the quantitative. According to
Vaneigem, "the only reconstruction of human relationships envisaged is one based on precisely this economic model" (Vaneigem 30). Thus, after not hearing from him in over a decade, my father’s first e-mail to me asks what I would like for my birthday. And with economic model comes economic language – did the idea of 'sunk cost' factor into your last break-up? Was how long you were together more telling than how uncomfortably? Is it worth investing your time in a friendship tonight, or are there more productive things you could be doing? Why do parents waste one hundred fifty thousand dollars for a 'good

[Ankur’s Appendices 42] education'? – they're hoping for a good return on investment! In such a language, no vocabulary exists for the honest appreciation of others' humanity: what is economic becomes what is .
Vaneigem's most biting example of this transformation is the handshake: "the handshake ties and unties the knot of encounters... with a liberality that makes up for a lack of conviction... its commercial overtones are not hard to find: the handshake clinches a deal” (Vaneigem 32-33). It's the perfect allegory for the reduction of human relationships to economic imperative. We don't share a handshake, like we might a meal or an embrace, but exchange one. The minimum contact necessary to preserve the illusion that I want to touch you, with a glorious power struggle built-in. Limp or Firm, two hands or one, too short or too long. All such considerations allow us to evaluate each other – whether partner or adversary – to measure each other. Indeed, the very idea of measuring a person's humanity stinks of the tyranny of the quantitative. It is a stench
Vaneigem fiercely opposes: "human relationships can hardly be discussed in terms of more or less tolerable conditions, more or less indignities. Qualification is irrelevant. Do insults like 'wog' or 'nigger' hurt more than a word of command? When he is summoned, told off, or ordered around by a policeman, a boss, an authority, who doesn't feel deep down, in moments of lucidity, that he is a darkie and a gook?" (Vaneigem 36)
Though tempting, I don’t Vaneigem's statement as a contribution to the futile discussion of priorities for the modern left: racism, classism, or anti-authoritarianism.
Rather, Vaneigem presents multiple ways of relating to people without humanity, and shows the ridiculousness of comparison. Submission to illegitimate authority wounds

[Ankur’s Appendices 43] one's humanity just as deeply as a racist slur – the feeling of humiliation is the same.
Vaneigem's quip about 'moments of lucidity' implies once again that until the reversal of perspective
15
– the moments when one truly understands the extent of power's manipulation are few and far between – we react with horror to outright racism but calmly and unquestioningly do as we're told; such is the delusion of power's perspective.
The areas of abrasive, ugly social interaction (racist hiring policies) merely serve to desensitize us to wealth of insults we must accept blindly to keep society running smoothly (1st class boarding calls). down quantity street
The rule of quantity over quality in the spectacle leaves no room for the lived experience of life. To demonstrate this thesis of "Down Quantity Street", Vaneigem evokes the pre-spectacular life of the idler, "enjoying at his leisure everything that can make passivity sweet". This man appreciates "a seraglio of beautiful women, witty and sophisticated friends, subtle drugs, exotic meals, brutal liquors, and sultry perfumes" for their luxurious quality. He does not need more and more beautiful women, more and more subtle drugs, nor an immense variety of friends – only the immediate enrichment of his life concerns him. Noble as he is
16
, he lives out his life purely, immediately, and subjectively, without thoughts of measuring or comparing his happiness.
Why, then, are there no idlers today? Why do we measure our experiences instead of live them? According to Vaneigem's theory of alienation, descended from Marx and
Lukacs, "only objects can be measured, which is why exchange always reifies"
(Vaneigem 89). As soon as woman measures her relationship to joy, her alcohol, or her

[Ankur’s Appendices 44] friends, her very relationships become reified. As soon as it makes sense to ask if spending an afternoon with the kids is worth missing three hours of salary, all afternoons are cheapened. Quality reduces to mere quantity. In this understanding, all experiences considered through the lens of exchange value are no longer worth living, and the only real living takes place in the past: "the memories of days gone by will be our consolation for living on" (Vaneigem 89). The present reality becomes a world without pleasure, for in the spectacle, quantity rules. As such, the pursuit of pleasure becomes the pleasure of pursuit, a disintegration of pleasure into "a panting succession of mechanical gestures, and one hopes in vain that their rhythm will speed up enough to reach even the semblance of orgasm" (Vaneigem 89). Vaneigem despairs that the disfigured husk of spectacular pleasure will never again reach orgasm
17
, which he considers "the perfect model of communication" (Vaneigem 248). In the place of true pleasure, Vaneigem faces its doppelganger: "the quantitative Eros of speed, novelty, and love-against-the-clock disfigures the real face of pleasure everywhere" (Vaneigem 89). Real pleasure, the pleasure of experiences enjoyed for their quality, unmediated by exchange or the economy of time, is nowhere to be seen, its visage clipped from old photographs like
Kundera's famous Commissar.
The Real Lie Here, the lie behind the disappearance of pleasure, is the spectacle's destruction of everything apart from itself. The possibility of a dialogue of ideas, of dialectic, of change, of future – all drowned in spectacular cement. By substituting quantity for quality, the spectacle created the "powerful illusion that a mere aggregate of possibilities was the basis of a multidimensional world" (Vaneigem 89). A truly multidimensional world, in which choices exist beyond mere spectacular antagonisms,

[Ankur’s Appendices 45] would be the death of the spectacle. In the choices we are sold, every team has the same sponsor: Pepsi versus Coke, Bush versus Gore, Capitalism versus Communism, Peace versus War – the spectacle always comes out on top.
Once again, as we saw with both reification and survival, the ideology of quantity can only be fought by love. Love has no inherent quantity; it's not a zero-sum game and it knows no upper bound. Rarely, you meet one of those people who understands these qualities of love, who understands the game of loving, and refuses to ration out affection like so many bread lines. Such a person loves and loves and loves – loves so many people that our first cynical response is disbelief: "how can she really care that much"? But revolutionary, boundless, love persists beyond cynicism, carries an irrefutable authenticity, an authenticity that breaks the chains of the quantitative ideology. Because love is rooted in the qualitative, it provides a perspective from which to analyze the senseless drive for quantity – for ever increasing friends, salaries, sports cars, and GNP. It is the only chink in "the system of commercial exchange that has come to govern all of people's everyday relations with themselves and with their fellows". Through love, we can relate to each other not as objects, reified by exchange – the notion that I'm worth only x amount of your time – but as subjects, immeasurable in our capacity to love. Love stops the insipid "measure of man" that equates one with her "capacity to produce or to make others produce, to consume or to make others consume" and resurrects a geometry of the qualitative, which equates woman with none other than herself.

[Ankur’s Appendices 46]
1 Try the article on page 17 of Knabb’s Anthology: “Report on the construction of situations...” for more on their formation
2 They have an interesting article on the Watts riots dubbed “the decline and fall of the spectaclecommodity economy”. It’s in the Knabb Anthology on page 153, or on Ken Knabb’s web-site at www.slip.net/~knabb
3 In “definitions” (Knabb 45), an article which appeared in IS#1, the authors define a number of their key terms, include situation, Situationist, and detournement. However, they do not define
‘spectacle’.
4 “’high-culture’ itself is being degraded in the assembly-line production of professors, all of whom are cretins, and most of whom would get the bird from any audience of highschoolers” (Knabb
321)
5 “And when the ‘gods’ who produce and organize his cultural spectacle take human form on the stage, he is their main public, their perfect spectator. Students turn out en masse to their most obscene exhibitions. When the priest of different churches present their amorphous dialogues or when the literary debris come together bear witness to their own impotence (five thousand students attending a f orum on ‘what are the possibilities of literature?’), who but students fill the halls?” (Knabb 323-324)
6 see “Role of Godard” (Knabb 175) for more on this topic
7 Throughout this paper, I will make a distinction between the words 'Marxist' and 'Marxian', opting in favor of the latter when referring to ideas which can be directly traced to Marx's test, because the former carries with it a host of political, empirical, and ideological baggage which I don't want to consider. I also note that when the Situationists were asked if they consider themselves Marxists, they responded "we are Marxists as Marx was when he said 'I’m not a
Marxist'".
8 Jean-Marie has informed me that no work of scholarship would be complete without pointing out the contradiction between Debord's ideas and his tyrannical behavior in everyday life
9 “Ever since men grew up and learned to read Lautremont, everything has been said” (from
Vaneigem’s introduction)
10 The definition that follows is technically the definition of 'detournement of preexisting aesthetic elements', but it’s pretty much the same thing.
11 See www.subvertise.org or my own web-site, revolution.stanford.edu
12 as “immense accumulation of spectacles” instead of “immense accumulation of capital”
13 you might want to read that sentence twice.
14 As a statistics professor of mine once said, “there’s lies, there’s damn lies, and then there are statistics”
15 You’re going to have to read that appendix too, I’m afraid. Of course, if you’re reading any of these appendices (save the pref ace) you’re probably grading this, and in that case you better be reading all of it. I mean, I wrote all of it, right? It’s only fair. Sorry.
16 Boo! Hiss! Boo!
17 There's probably some problem with his silent contention that it is the male orgasm in particu lar, but I'll leave that for somebody else’s life work.