Quote of the Week

“In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create.”

Raoul Vaneigem (1934 –     )

Born in Belgium, Vaneigem studied philology (the study of written history) at the Free University of Brussels in the 1950’s. He and Guy Debord were the principal theorists of the Situationist International, which had wide influence on radical artistic and political thought in the 1960’s. His best known work, The Revolution of Everyday Life, expounds the situationist belief that capitalism promoted “passive second-hand individual expression through the consumption of commodities over directly lived experiences and first-hand fulfillment of personal desires” and inflicted profound damage on the quality of human life for both individuals and society.