What is Raoul Vaneigem talking about in "The Space-Time of Lived Experience"?

Question

I know this is going to come across as vague, but I really have no idea what he's saying. Especially after part 3.

"Mobile within immobility, the time of unitary societies is cyclical."

What does that mean?

He just makes these abstract analogies which don't make sense (People and things follow their course, moving along a circumference whose centre is God), and then build on those analogies.

I understand if this question is downvoted, it's incredibly vague. I just don't even have a base enough understanding to know how to word what I mean.

Comments

That helps, lawrence, thanks.

This is a big problem I have with anarchist thought. In order to understand the primary texts (Society of the Spectacle, Revolution of Everyday Life, Theory of Bloom, etc) you have to have so much background knowledge of Hegel, Marx, and other philosophers who uses guilded, ultra-abstract reasoning that isn't intuitively understood, and often requires further background knowledge.

That being said, where do you think I should start with Hegel, materialism, and dialectics? I always hear about dialectics and, though I think I understand what it means (thanks to this website :-P), when it's used in analogy by Debord or Vaneigem I tend to get confused.

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That was an awesome explanation, lawrence. I want to ask what flip asked-- what are some good starting points for all that?

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flip, none of the three books you mention are anarchist. Theory of Bloom comes the closest since its authors reject the label Marxist, while neither Debord nor Vaneigem rejected it (Vaneigem at least when he wrote Everyday Life -- don't know about after). The love of Hegel derives from their love of Marx, and as semi-anti-authoritarian Marxists, they gravitated toward the early Marx, when he was mostly a philosopher and journalist rather than how he understood himself later, as a Scientist. Early Marx is almost impossible to understand without some grounding in Hegel, since Marx's goal was to turn Hegel on his head. I find Hegel, like Marx, so tedious that I have never finished any of either's work in its entirety. The main problem with Hegel is that he has a distinctly Christian teleological view of history: every conflict and subsequent resolution (which in turn creates a new conflict and subsequent resolution until the End of History [the Second Coming?]) occurs on a linear progression toward that End, the movement of the Spirit as it becomes more refined, less material. Marx's inversion is exactly that: Marx's cosmology is a teleological, but it's Matter rather than Spirit that is the ultimate reality into which history is unfolding. Onward, upward; bigger and better. Teleology elevates Ought into Is; it is fundamentally obscurantists and authoritarian. Obscurantist because nothing that doesn't fit into the Progressive Teleology is considered important or interesting, and authoritarian because those who have correctly discerned the patterns of history unfolding into the Telos have a duty to whip it on the rest of us poor idiots.

Skip Hegel, or look him up on Wikipedia. Dialectics simply means looking at a topic/challenge/problem from all possible angles and figuring out which analysis makes the most sense, has the most internal coherence. But to paraphrase Bob Black, "the dialectic" is what Marxists invoke when you catch them lying.

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Oh I know that those things aren't anarchist...but they have a very large presence in influencing how anarchists look at the world, so I tend to think of them as part of 'anarchist thought' or whatever.

Thanks for the response!

Answer 1

If you presume that Vaneigem is fundamentally a mystic (a person whose experiences are so sublime as to be nearly impossible to communicate to another person who hasn't had similar experiences), then his abstract excursions into poetic prose can be approached as symbols and metaphors rather than proper descriptions of a more or less agreed-upon reality.

Like most of the other Sits, he reveled in Hegelian dialectics to the point of near-Proudhonian contradiction as a goal. "Mobile within immobility" is a perfect example. It's not meant to describe a path, but is meant to fuck with your perceptions of reality, much like a Zen koan.

However, I can also understand the entire phrase as you quoted it to indicate that in unitary societies (ie, those where there is no dialectic, no movement of the spirit [Hegel], no development of the productive forces [Marx], and no progress toward liberation -- that is, they are static, immobile in revolutionary terms -- like feudalism), their inhabitants lack a vision of a liberated future (The Revolution), and so are immobile. The only motion is cyclical, following the seasons. For anyone interested in The Dialectic, this is intolerable precisely because there is no goal, no aim, no vision. Such societies produce only enough to replicate themselves, no more. For dialecticians, this mean there's no real culture, no real art (to be realized and suppressed). There are no stages of history because there's no history. Such societies are inward-looking, and therefore parochial and xenophobic. The visceral hatred of Marxists for peasants comes from this, but it's also older than that.

Hope I haven't just confused things more...