Reading Guy Debord and Hannah Arendt side by side in the past week, I was struck by how alive the former feels while the latter feels hollow and distant. Why is this? Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle helps me explain my own life and experience; he lays bare the alienation and inhumanity of the total commodification of human society and the domination of life by the spectacle. Debord and his Situationist comrades also give tools for changing our lives; see of course Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life. For me, this gets to the heart of theory’s purpose.
At its best, theory helps us explain our lives and experiences, deepens our understanding of society, and provides us tools to change both our own lives and the world. As Gilles Deleuze put it in a conversation with Foucault, “a theory is exactly like a box of tools. It has nothing to do with the signifier. It must be useful. It must function. And not for itself. If no one uses it, beginning with the theoretician himself (who then ceases to be a theoretician), then the theory is worthless or the moment is inappropriate.”
To bring this closer to our own times, I have been moved by the outpouring of writing about Aragorn!, the recently-deceased anarchist responsible for Little Black Cart, The Anarchist Library, and numerous other anarchist projects and infrastructure of the past two decades. (See CrimethInc.’s excellent elegy for him here. Though I disagree with much of his political approach, I particularly enjoy Aragorn!’s “Stories of the Raccoon People” and “Stories of the Bear People,” the first part of a planned series of Anarchist Myths.) In a wide-ranging oral history interview conducted in 2018, Aragorn! addresses his approach to theory, practice, and everyday life, particularly regarding the impact of the Situationists on his own life:
“The [Situationist International] Anthology, just that book and then Society of the Spectacle: that was a full decade of my life, to really understand all the threads and the connections and why that shit mattered. No, absolutely.”
Interviewer: “As you’re struggling through these difficult texts and wrapping your head around them, did you have sense of how those connected to your daily life and your immediate sense of engagement with the world?”
Aragorn!: “[…] For me the, the immediate question I ask any time I receive a new text is, is, how does this matter to my life? That’s always basically been my central project. The reason I became a publisher was because I wanted these things not just to be relevant to my life, but to share that enthusiasm with other people. For me, the idea, the beautiful idea, is about—how do you connect ideas to living?
[…] So early on, I said that all of the anarchist texts that I’ve read, perhaps some of the reason why it took me a long time to read them was because I really found every page to be a challenge: how do I put this into practice in my life?”
Of course, this is decidedly not the dominant approach to theory within the academy. Even the most radical Marxist academics are typically divorced from social struggle, political engagement, and attempts to “live the revolution.” And as Raoul Vaneigem reminds us, “people who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.”
As theorists and academics, we must work from within—or at least connected to—movements to change the world. Our own experience of struggle, of the creation of new ways of being and relating to each other, is necessary to produce theory which is useful to the movement. Just as important, we should take inspiration from Aragorn! and constantly ask how to apply theory to our everyday lives. Theory should be a tool for both individual and social transformation. If it isn’t, then what are we doing?