'… we enter into the social world of study, which is one in which you start to lose track of your debts and begin to see that the whole point is to lose track of them…'

Zerowork

'Are we Aristotle's enemies?'

'There is, then, a philosophy of "life" in Spinoza; it consists precisely in denouncing all that separates us from life, all these transcendent values that are turned against life, these values that are tied to the conditions and illusions of consciousness. Life is poisoned by the categories of Good and Evil, of blame and merit, of sin and redemption. What poisons life is hatred, including the hatred that is turned back against oneself in the form of guilt. Spinoza traces, step by step, the dreadful concatenation of sad passions; first, sadness itself, then hatred, aversion, mockery, fear, despair, morsus conscientiae, pity, indignation, envy, humility, repentance, self-abasement, shame, regret, anger, vengeance, cruelty…. His analysis goes so far that even in hatred and security he is able to find that grain of sadness that suffices to make these the feelings of slaves. The true city offers citizens the love of freedom instead of the hope of rewards or even the security of possessions; for "it is slaves, not free men, who are given rewards for virtue." Spinoza is not among those who think that a sad passion has something good about it. Before Nietzsche, he denounces all the falsifications of life, all the values in the name of which we disparage life. We do not live, we only lead a semblance of life; we can only think of how to keep from dying, and our whole life is a death worship.'

'… tout roman policier est bâti sur deux meurtres dont le premier, commis par l’assassin, n’est que l’occasion du second dans lequel il est la victime du meurtrier pur et impunissable, du détective qui le met à mort, non par un de ces moyens vils que lui-même était réduit à employer, le poison, le poignard, l’arme à feu silencieuse, ou le bas de soie qui étrangle, mais par l’explosion de la vérité.'

'Workers' rejection of wage labor drew from notions of freedom, independence, and citizenship, which they applied to the interconnecting areas of politics, society, economics, and the family. In the political arena, workers thought that equality was possible only if each member of the polity was economically independent. In the guise of the voluntary contract they perceived a compulsion that they believed made it impossible to exercise citizenship. Those who received wages could not possibly participate in civic life as the equals of their employers. Thus, the wage system would promote the formation of an aristocracy. In the late 1870s, for example, the labor editor J. P. McDonnell was discouraged to report: "After a century of political independence, we find that our social system is not better than that of Europe and that labor in this Republic, as in the European monarchies, is the slave of capitalism, instead of being the master of its own products." In economic terms, they believed that wages inevitably granted employees only a partial payment for their labor, leaving a portion of their work uncompensated. "In what does slavery consist?" asked the Mechanic's Free Press in 1830. "In being compelled to work for others so that they may reap the advantage." Finally, within the patriarchal family structure endorsed by male workers, masculine and feminine roles were sharply differentiated; the men were charged with breadwinning and the women with household responsibilities. If freedom was possibly only when workers owned their labor, neither men nor women could be free. On all these fronts, wage labor was a form of slavery and the growing army of wage laborers failed to qualify as free.

Most Americans believed independence to be possible only in a society of small producers. Many wondered, as Melvyn Dubofsky has asked, "how could a republican democracy built on the participation of economically independent freeholders and artisans endure in a society composed in the main of dependent wage earners?" Liberty and independence required that each worker receive the "fruits of his labor," that, as Abraham Lincoln declared, workers garner "the whole produce to themselves" and ask "no favors of capital on the one hand, nor of hirelings or slaves on the other." "God intended," said a union broadside of the 1850s, that every man should be "truly independent of his fellow and above the position of mere 'wage slaves.'"

Liberty was defined as complete ownership of one's own labor and, by extension, oneself. The notion of self-ownership was central to antebellum labor rhetoric and important well into the twentieth century. The "identification of the self and property," according to the literary critic Walter Benn Michaels, is "bourgeois." But valorization of self-ownership was not limited to America's middle class: workers too rested their economic understanding on this premise. Ira Steward, a machinist and labor leader from Boston, declared that under a regime of permanent wage labor, "there can be no freedom or self-ownership." Without these "natural and inalienable rights," he believed, the "self is destroyed."

The widespread popularity of the wage slavery metaphor in antebellum America linked disparate groups who shared little common ground other than an antipathy toward the wage system, including both southern defenders of chattel slavery and northern labor radicals. Free laborites and abolitionists considered wage labor acceptable only as a pit stop on the road to independent entrepreneurship and not as a permanent condition. Few antebellum Americans defended permanent wage labor; most agreed that it resembled slavery.'

'In France the political considerations of le grand siècle were hardly favorable to a systematic consideration of private or group interests in their relation to the public interest. Nevertheless, the career of the term intérêt resembled that of its English cousin. The idea of interest as it had been developed by the political literature since Machiavelli—the idea, that is, of a disciplined understanding of what it takes to advance one's power, influence, and wealth—came into common use early in the seventeenth century and was soon utilized by the great moralists and other writers of the period in their meticulous dissection of individual human nature. As the scene these writers were dealing with was typically the court of Louis XIV, the actors were "interested" in much the same categories as the sovereign himself: not only in wealth, but also and perhaps principally in power and influence. Hence interest was often used with a very inclusive meaning. Yet even then—and this is the point of convergence between the English and French histories—that meaning was being narrowed, by some process, to the pursuit of material, economic advantage. This can be inferred from the "Advice to the Reader" by which La Rochefoucauld prefaced the second edition (1666) of his Maximes:

By the word interest I understand not always an interest concerned with wealth (un intérêt de bien), but most frequently one that is concerned with honor or glory.

This warning against misunderstanding was the only point of real substance in a very short preface; clearly, for the average reader of the Maximes, the term "interest" had started to take on the more restricted sense of economic advantage.

Around the same time Jean de Silhon, Richelieu's secretary and apologist, also noted and deplored this evolution of meaning in a treatise in which he underlines the positive role played by interest in maintaining life and society. He lists a variety of interests—"Interest of conscience, Interest of honor, Interest of health, Interest of wealth, and several other Interests"—and then attributes the unfavorable connotation attaching to such expressions as un homme intéressé to the fact that "the name of Interest has remained attached exclusively, I do not know how (je ne sais comment), to the Interest of wealth (Intérêt du bien ou des richesses)."

How, in fact, can this drift be explained? Perhaps it was due to the old association of interest and moneylending; this meaning of interest antedates the one that is discussed here by several centuries. Possibly, too, the special affinity of rational calculation implicit in the concept of interest with the nature of economic activities accounts for these activities eventually monopolizing the contents of the concept. Returning to seventeenth-century France, one may also conjecture that, with power so concentrated and seemingly so stable at the time, economic interests constituted the only portion of an ordinary person's total aspirations in which important ups and downs could be visualized.

Actually Adam Smith stated the last point as a general proposition when discussing what he considered the overriding motive of man, namely, the "desire of bettering our condition":

An augmentation of fortune is the means by which the greater part of men propose and wish to better their condition. It is the means the most vulgar and the most obvious.…

Perhaps no other explanation is needed for the narrowing of the meaning of the term "interests" once the beginnings of economic growth made the "augmentation of fortune" a real possibility for an increasing number of people.

So much is clear now: when the interests of men came to be contrasted with their passions, this opposition could have quite different meanings depending on whether interests were understood in the wider or in the narrower sense. A maxim such as "Interest Will Not Lie" was originally an exhortation to pursue all of one's aspirations in an orderly and reasonable manner; it advocated the injection of an element of calculating efficiency, as well as of prudence, into human behavior whatever might be the passion by which it is basically motivated. But because of the just noted semantic drift of the term "interests," the opposition between interests and passions could also mean or convey a different thought, much more startling in view of traditional values: namely, that one set of passions, hitherto known variously as greed, avarice, or love of lucre, could be usefully employed to oppose and bridle such other passions as ambition, lust for power, or sexual lust.'

'This was the time when writers and poets were also trying to discover or rediscover true values. Their quest led them towards nature and towards imagination, into the realm of make-believe or that of basic primordial reality. Surrealism, naturalism, existentialism, each in its way put the stress on social 'reality' endowing it with the inherent potentialities of reality. This critical exploration of a familiar, misunderstood reality—everyday life—was thus related to humanism, and its claim to rejuvenate the former liberal humanism or to replace it by a new revolutionary form owed something perhaps to the post-Liberation climate. The new humanism did not aspire to enlist rhetoric and ideology in the cause of a reform of superstructures (constitutions, State, government) but to 'alter existence'.

Certain observations made at the time have become, after twenty years, sociological and journalistic commonplaces. In 1946, as today, the discrepancies in everyday life from one social class to another resulted more from the type of income received (wages, salary, fees, unearned income) and the manner in which it was administered and distributed, than from its size. A high standard of rationality was attained by the middle classes where the head of the household, husband or father, held the purse strings; he gave the woman, wife or daughter, a household allowance and put aside the remainder in the form of savings; if he did not economize and save but chose to enjoy the present rather than invest in the future he went counter to his conscience, his family and society. A typical middle-class family saved and invested at the least possible risk for the best possible income; the good father founded the family fortune or increased it, and it was transmitted by legacy, even though experience had proved that middle-class fortunes were dispersed by the third generation and that the only way to avoid this was to raise one's financial standard. Consumption was the wife's province—and the importace of her function is still increasing—though in 1946 it was still relatively limited.

In those days the peasantry still practiced a natural or closed economy; their means were extremely restricted; administration was divided equally between the woman, who was in charge of the house and out-houses (garden, chicken-run, etc.) and the man who took care of the cultivation of the land. Savings were in kind—seeds, preserved fruit, etc.—and were usually squandered at festivals. As for the working classes, they led a hand-to-mouth existence having neither the possibility nor the inclination to save; the husband's pay was handed over to the wife, usually untouched, and she allotted a small sum to her mate for personal expenses, if he was a good husband and she a good housewife. Such women spent without bargaining, paying what was asked for reasons of pride as much as of humility. The labourers did not stint; they had inherited from their peasant ancestry a taste for good food, good wine and a certain degree of comfort; a taste that had been eradicated from the lower and middle classes.

Such is the sociological content of the Introduction à la critique de la vie quotidienne; but the book goes further, attempting to capture a panoramic view, rather than to dwell too much on minutiae and on purely practical distinctions between communities and classes.

The result is a sort of contrasting diptych, where the first panel represents the misery of everyday life, its tedious tasks, humiliations reflected in the lives of the working classes and especially of women, upon whom the conditions of everyday life bear heaviest—child-bearing and child-rearing, basic preoccupations with bare necessities, money, tradesmen, provisions, the realm of numbers, a sort of intimate knowledge of things outside the sphere of material reality: health, desire, spontaneity, vitality; recurrence, the survival of poetry and the endlessness of want, a climate of economy, abstinence, hardship, repressed desires, meanness and avarice. The second panel portrays the power of everyday life, its continuity, the permanence of life rooted in the soil, the adaptation of the body, time, space, desire; environment and the home; the unpredictable and unmeasurable tragedy forever lurking in everyday life; the power of woman, crushed and overwhelmed, 'object' of history and society but also the inevitable 'subject' and foundation; creation from recurrent gestures of a world of sensory experience; the coincidence of need with satisfaction and, more rarely, with pleasure; work and works of art; the ability to create in terms of everyday life from its solids and space—to make something lasting for the individual, the community, the class; the re-production of essential relations, the feed-back already mentioned between culture and productivity, understanding and ideologies, which is at the bottom of all the contradictions among these terms, the battlefield where wars are waged between the sexes, generations, communities, ideologies; the struggle between the adapted and the non-adapted, the shapelessness of subjective experience and the chaos of nature; mediations between these terms and their aftermath of emptiness, where antagonisms are bred that break out in the 'higher' spheres (institutions, superstructures).'

'It's not about your music—it's about what makes your music your music.'