Raoul Vaneigem died this week. Vaneigem was a central figure of the Situationist International, which he was associated with between 1961 and 1970, when a fallout with Guy Debord saw them go separate ways.

Debord picked fights with everyone, but Vaneigem’s views, though perhaps more poetic than Debord’s, closely aligned with the Situationist pushback against the Spectacle. Vaneigem was a prolific writer, and his central Situationist text was The Revolution of Everyday Life (in French, the much more fanciful raité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations), in which we can find the passage in which Vaneigem explains that the commodity system turns life upside down by converting lived experience into labour and exchange, dovetailing with the idea that the Spectacle shoves representations of freedom, adventure, individuality, or rebellion down our throats, without us actually living those ideas.

I find it striking how, after the slow disappearance of the Situationist International from the revolutionary public discourse, the ideas of the Situationists describe today’s abuse of society by Big Tech so exceedingly well; we are trained to scroll to endless engagement bait, believing that the imagery we consume is the lived experience we see on our screens. We are kept docile, and manipulated, such that we are rendered harmless to those who impose their will on society, purely for their own gains.

Vaneigem himself actively pushed back against this superposition. In The Revolution of Everyday Life, he recounts how, one evening, he and some friends walked into Brussels’ Palais de Justice and wandered through its corridors, staircases, and rooms. As they moved through the building, they discussed how it might be made habitable, imaginatively converting the monumental courthouse from an apparatus of authority into a funfair or “pleasure dome”, reversing the expected relation between citizen and institution; instead of submitting to the courthouse’s scale and solemnity, the group treated the venue as raw material for play.

I doubt Vaneigem considered himself a walking artist, but in the scene above, he did document walking as one of the concrete bodily actions through which institutional space can be inhabited differently.

In 2024, Vaneigem published Vivre (Living), with Nicolas Kozakis, the culmination of ten years of collaboration on a series of films, one through images, the other through writing.

The images in the book show impressive yet mundane Greek landscapes, while the texts speak of the difficulties and challenges currently facing humanity, from the effects of aggressive capitalism and growing economic and social inequalities to environmental problems and existential concerns linked to contemporary anxieties, radically hostile to the devastating influence of Profit.

In it, Vaneigem writes:

Le monde est mon regard
Le désir guide mes pas
La vie est mon combat

I’m not impressed with the book’s own English interpretation of these lines. Here’s mine:

The world is my gaze
Desire guides my steps
Life is my struggle

Raoul Vaneigem passed away this week, at the age of 92.

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