Join the new world

So you've been jumping and jumping, but you keep finding yourself falling back into the void? Needless to say, escaping the void is no easy challenge. Negation of the spectacle is not enough in itself for spontaneity and self-realisation; life is not a gift, it must be conquered. Your primary weapon in this battle is creativity and imagination, the creativity every human being exerts at thousands of moments everyday. Indeed the role of the spectacle is to contain, redirect and commodify this human creativity through work and leisure; through production and consumption. The challenge is to learn to direct the creativity that even the least creative of persons has and let it explode in a subversive, radical, revolutionary and spontaneous manner.

Raoul Vaneigem offered us this invaluable advice in his book The Revolution of Everyday Life:

"The instant of creative spontaneity is the minutest possible manifestation of reversal of perspective. It is a unitary moment, i.e., one and many. The eruption of lived pleasure is such that in losing myself I find myself; forgetting that I exist, I realize myself. Consciousness of immediate experience lies in this oscillation, in this improvisational jazz. By contrast, thought directed toward lived experience with analytical intent is bound to remain detached from that experience. This applies to all reflection on everyday life, including, to be sure, the present one. To combat this, all I can do is try to incorporate an element of constant self-criticism, so as to make the work of co-optation a little harder than usual. The traveller who is always thinking about the length of the road before them tires more easily than his or her companion who lets their imagination wander as they go along. Similarly, anxious attention paid to lived experience can only impede it, abstract it, and make it into nothing more than a series of memories-to-be....

"All the same, the paths of spontaneity are hard to find. Industrial civilization has let them become overgrown. And even when we find real life, knowing the best way to grasp it is not easy. Individual experience is also prey to insanity -- a foothold for madness. Kierkegaard described this state of affairs as follows: "It is true that I have a lifebelt, but I cannot see the pole which is supposed to pull me out of the water. This is a ghastly way to experience things". The pole is there, of course, and no doubt everyone could grab onto it, though many would be so slow about it that they would die of anxiety before realizing its existence. But exist it does, and its name is radical subjectivity: the consciousness that all people have the same will to authentic self-realization, and that their subjectivity is strengthened by the perception of this subjective will in others. This way of getting out of oneself and radiating out, not so much towards others as towards that part of oneself that is to be found in others, is what gives creative spontaneity the strategic importance of a launching pad. The concepts and abstractions which rule us have to be returned to their source, to lived experience, not in order to validate them, but on the contrary to correct them, to turn them on their heads, to restore them to that sphere whence they derive and which they should never have left. This is a necessary precondition of people's imminent realization that their individual creativity is indistinguishable from universal creativity. The sole authority is one's own lived experience; and this everyone must prove to everyone else."

There is a process we must all go through. We must traverse from passive nihilist, to active nihilist, to revolutionary - to transcend nihilism altogether.

The notion that "everyone else is happy and stupid" is a myth. It is only your isolation and alienation that causes you to suspect this. The sad (yet brilliant) truth is lots of people are your equal and lots of people are just as unhappy as you are. Perhaps most everyone actually. When you change your point of reference for "everyone else" from their representation in the spectacle, TV, news etc. to the actual people around you, this observation becomes self-evident. Life is elsewhere and everyone else is elsewhere. Or in other words; down with telecommunication, long live communication!

One could say that it is solidarity that is the wind that catches us and allows us to take flight when we leap from the void of dead time. Solidarity, however, can only be felt if we are aware of it, if we lose ourselves in the present, in lived experience and participation in communion with those around us.