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Station Spleen
In this station more than anywhere else, especially since the revolutionaries, everything has been said but few have taken advantage of it. Because theory is in itself commonplace it can only be of value to people who are not. Radical texts have become as routine as the work and consumption they denounce. Yes, we know it’s necessary to abolish the state and wage labor, to liberate our everyday lives, etc. But we become blasé. It becomes difficult to think for ourselves. Revolution is contained by overexposure.
Only exceptionally are our struggles open and clear. Usually we are entangled, implicated in what we want to fight. It’s easy, and comforting, to blame the capitalists or the bureaucrats or the police; but it’s only thanks to the passive complicity of the “masses” that those small minorities have any power. It’s not so much the “fault” of the unions or the mass media for falsifying workers’ struggles — after all, that’s their function — as of the workers who fail to themselves assure the communication of their own experiences and perspectives.
Bad enough that the system exploits us and hurts us and keeps us in ignorance. Worse is that it warps us, turns us into mean, petty, spiteful, cowardly creatures. Were we confronted with a single gross temptation to self-betrayal we might well refuse it. But little by little a thousand compromises wear away our resistance. We become incapable of any experimentation, for fear of disturbing the defenses we have built up to repress our shame. Even when we arrive at considering a critical action, we hesitate; we find so many objections — we are afraid of seeming foolish, afraid of being mistaken, afraid that our idea won’t work, or that if it does it won’t amount to anything.
Hypocrite reader, your blasé expression doesn’t hide the fact that you know very well what I’m talking about. You go from ideology to ideology, each containing just enough truth to keep you hanging on but fragmentary enough to keep you from confronting the totality concretely. Successively disillusioned, you end up believing in nothing but the illusory nature of everything. Cynical spectator, like everyone else you pride yourself on being “different.” You console yourself by despising the naïve, the provincial, the yokel, the person who still believes in God or in his job — whose caricatured submission is presented as a foil precisely to make you forget your own submission. You are even telling yourself right now that this applies to most people but not to you; while the person next to you thinks that it applies to you but not to him.
You vaguely imagine that somehow your life may get better. Do you really have any reason to believe that? Are you going to continue as you have until you die? Have you nothing to say? Have you no audacity, no imagination?
Dialogue must concern itself with the suppression of the conditions that suppress dialogue!
Let’s resolve the anachronistic “social question” so we can tackle more interesting problems!
Pettiness is always counterrevolutionary!
Station Spleen
Written By: Mime Debord
Fiction
In this station more than anywhere else, especially since the revolutionaries, everything has been said but few have taken advantage of it. Because theory is in itself commonplace it can only be of value to people who are not. Radical texts have become as routine as the work and consumption they denounce. Yes, we know it’s necessary to abolish the state and wage labor, to liberate our everyday lives, etc. But we become blasé. It becomes difficult to think for ourselves. Revolution is contained by overexposure.
Only exceptionally are our struggles open and clear. Usually we are entangled, implicated in what we want to fight. It’s easy, and comforting, to blame the capitalists or the bureaucrats or the police; but it’s only thanks to the passive complicity of the “masses” that those small minorities have any power. It’s not so much the “fault” of the unions or the mass media for falsifying workers’ struggles — after all, that’s their function — as of the workers who fail to themselves assure the communication of their own experiences and perspectives.
Bad enough that the system exploits us and hurts us and keeps us in ignorance. Worse is that it warps us, turns us into mean, petty, spiteful, cowardly creatures. Were we confronted with a single gross temptation to self-betrayal we might well refuse it. But little by little a thousand compromises wear away our resistance. We become incapable of any experimentation, for fear of disturbing the defenses we have built up to repress our shame. Even when we arrive at considering a critical action, we hesitate; we find so many objections — we are afraid of seeming foolish, afraid of being mistaken, afraid that our idea won’t work, or that if it does it won’t amount to anything.
Hypocrite reader, your blasé expression doesn’t hide the fact that you know very well what I’m talking about. You go from ideology to ideology, each containing just enough truth to keep you hanging on but fragmentary enough to keep you from confronting the totality concretely. Successively disillusioned, you end up believing in nothing but the illusory nature of everything. Cynical spectator, like everyone else you pride yourself on being “different.” You console yourself by despising the naïve, the provincial, the yokel, the person who still believes in God or in his job — whose caricatured submission is presented as a foil precisely to make you forget your own submission. You are even telling yourself right now that this applies to most people but not to you; while the person next to you thinks that it applies to you but not to him.
You vaguely imagine that somehow your life may get better. Do you really have any reason to believe that? Are you going to continue as you have until you die? Have you nothing to say? Have you no audacity, no imagination?
Dialogue must concern itself with the suppression of the conditions that suppress dialogue!
Let’s resolve the anachronistic “social question” so we can tackle more interesting problems!
Pettiness is always counterrevolutionary!