The Revolution of Everyday Life

s, and the electric chair is still neing used. The face of the world, lit up by power, is organised according to a metaphysic of reality: and it’s a sight for sore eyes to see the faithful philosophers showing off their new uniforms: technocrat, sociologist, specialist... The pure formwhich is haunting society is recognisable as the death of men. It is the neurosis which preceds necrosis, survival sickness spreading slowly as living experience is replaced by images, forms, objects, as alienated mediation transmutes experience into a thing; madreporises it. It’s a man or a tree or a stone... as Lautreamont prophesied. Gombrowicz at least gives due respect to Form, power’s old go-between, now promoted to the place of honour among pimps of State: “You have never really been able to recognize or explain the importance of Form in your life. Even in psychology you have been unable to accord to Form its rightful place. We continue to believe that it is feeling, purposes or ideas that govern our behaviour, considering Form to be at most a harmless ornamental addition. When the widow weeps tenderly beside her husband’s coffin, we think that she is crying because she feels her loss so keenly. When some engineer, doctor or lawyer murders his wife, his children or a friend, we suppose that he was driven to the deed by violent or bloodthirsty impulses. When some politician expresses himself vacuously, deceitfully or shabbily in a public speech, we say that he is stupid because he expresses himself stupidly. But the fact of the matter is this: a human being does not externalise himself in an immediate manner, according to his nature, but always through a definite Form; and this Form; and this Form, this way of being, this way of speaking and reacting, does not issue solely from himself but is imposed on him from outside. “And so the same man can appear sometimes wise, sometimes stupid, blood-thirsty or angelic, according to the Form which affects him and according to the pressure of conditioning...When will you consciously oppose the Forms? When will you stop identifying with what defines you?”