"Reversal of Perspective", Vaneigem's first chapter in Book 2, contains the first words that don't focus upon the perspective of power, but rather give a voice to its opposite, its refusal, the perspective of reversal. In "Reversal of Perspective", Vaneigem maps out his vision for the future in his own unique vocabulary. As he says elsewhere, no one can know the details of a future society when still in prehistory, but everyone must know that such a society needs to exist to escape "man's domination by man" (Vaneigem 187).

Curiously, at this pivotal point of his book, Vaneigem choose to use Brecht's words instead of his own. He tells a story of Herr Keuner about two brothers who collect colored stones to represent intense moments in their lives. For Vaneigem, the unforeseen ending to the story represents a true reversal of perspective. From the perspective of power, that of the elders and notables, nothing should be amiss; a day like any other rises with the sun, while people still quibble over the idiocies of their daily lives. Most people share this perspective at first; only the two brothers concern themselves with the quality and intensity of their lives. Then slowly, with the counseling of an old man, they realize that their lives are nothing apart from their stones – that the intensity represented by each stone was the intensity of their lives; that nothing else mattered save the moments of triumph and tribulation of each day. When this realization caught fire amongst the town, amongst the people who shared the implicit perspective of power that daily life merely happened, should be met passively, and wasn't worth remarking on, there occurred a reversal of perspective. With reversal came the realization that the perspective of power, which the people had partaken of for so long, had used them to do the bidding of those elders and notables. They thus sought to eliminate the perspective of power altogether, the same perspective that had from the beginning disparaged the importance of daily life. Hence the looks of surprise on the faces of the elders and notables, securely positioned along the palisade.

Vaneigem codes a variety of warnings in this story. He warns of the swiftness and harshness of revolutionary justice, which need not be manifested in violence but must be executed completely. Any faltering of the totality – any impurity – gives rise to the fragmentary, the familiar stomping grounds of the spectacle. But where do we find love in Herr Keuner's story? What place does love have in the revolutionary's first moment, the reversal of perspective? For Vaneigem speaks directly to the conception of the revolutionary. One cannot change or eliminate power from its own perspective – all one sees are roses and green backs. The moment one can reverse the perspective, can see for oneself, can shed the illusion that the have and the have-nots share the same dreams and desires, at that moment one has attained Vaneigem's revolutionary consciousness. This reversal is not essentially new: the Marxian idea of class struggle incorporates the idea of shrugging the dominant ideology to see one's class interest revealed. In Vaneigem's version, however, capitalism has evolved to an ideological spectacle, such that the dominant ideology says it cannot be shrugged. As a substitute for class consciousness, I get to choose the flavor of the spectacle I like best: union-organizing, unemployment, or the Democratic Party.

As always with Vaneigem, we find love ever-lurking but hesitant to yet reveal itself. If love, as we defined it earlier, has roots with radical subjectivity – the desire for self-affirmation – then love's first stalk is the reversal of perspective. The reversal of perspective leads to love through the transcendence of the spectacular dialectic between individual and collective good.

A spectacular dialectic (or spectacular antagonism) is a false dialectic constructed by the spectacle to give the illusion of possibility, to give hope of change. Such an antagonism manifests grandiosely as the mythic fight between American capitalism and Soviet communism. Both grand illusions oppress woman through an appeal to her nature as a social animal that needs community and as a reflective animal that needs independence. The western, liberal, flavor privileges woman's individualism and preaches the lie of freedom, all the while promoting a subconscious collective obedience. We are all individuals with our own hopes and fears, but all we all want Coca-Cola. "And there you have freedom!" respond the poor apologists of the spectacle, too drunk off their wealth to avoid the realization of their poverty: for perhaps people don't just want Coke, they want Pepsi and Fanta and a million others bromides with a million other colors. And that is what freedom is. The more authoritarian flavor, on the wrong side of the globe, privileges collective responsibility and preaches the lie of the equality. The commissar knows what will make you happy, and you will eat it, no, comrade? And if you don't, if you happen to disagree with the doctor's prescription, he will either shove happiness down your throat until you choke on it or silence your objections in a terminal manner.

Vaneigem vaults over this dialectic with the reversal of perspective; He eschews the perspective of power for the perspective of the self. Our friend in the supermarket can see herself as power does, as a consuming thing, and she can therefore shrug off such an enframing in favor of seeing herself as human. And her compatriot, choking on freedom, can throw up the stale bread and assert her write to bake her own. In the reversal of perspective, each person maintains their individual perspective but can see the harmony of all other perspectives, writes Vaneigem at his most hopeful (Vaneigem 187). But the Situationist dream is anything but a saccharin one – Vaneigem sees people united and in harmony in so far as they are revolting against reification and in their mutual quest to truly live – beyond that he gives us nothing. In Vaneigem's take on the manifesto, "To each according to his need" ceases to refer to economic concerns, roofs and tortillas, and becomes instead, "To each according to his passion for life".

Which brings us back to love. Love's shivering stalk sprouts in the reversal of perspective because transcending the dialectic of individual and community precisely affirms the self – thereby returning power to the camp of subjectivity. At the moment of the reversal of perspective, the revolutionary is born, and the revolutionary is born in love.

While Vaneigem isn't much for explaining the anecdotes that frequently fall into his text, the rest of the chapter serves as more of an elaboration of the concepts inherent in Herr Keuner's tale. Vaneigem links the reversal of perspective to other aspects of his work and the Situationist project in general. The first example worth nothing is his mention of detournement: "The function of conditioning is to assign and adjust peoples positions on the hierarchical ladder. The reversal of perspective entails a kind of anti-conditioning. Not a new form of conditioning, but a new game and its tactics; the game of subversion (detournement)". (Vaneigem 188)

Detournement, the manipulation of images and their meanings which entails both a negation and transcendence of the target image, is easily the most popular use of Situationist theory today. Often used and seldom cited: millions see acts of 'billboard liberation', read Adbusters, and laugh at doctored photos on the Internet. Image manipulation, guerilla theatre, musical terrorism, are all examples of detournement, as is any general hijacking of spectacular cultural apparati.

For Vaneigem, reversal of perspective ultimately reduces to personal detournement – for in rejecting the perspective of power and building one's own outlook, one detourns the meaning of selfhood. Rather than existing as a passive recipient for a foreign pre-fabricated meaning, the woman of reversal creates her own meaning, her own personal revolution. The question is "How"? Vaneigem proceeds by isolating the mechanisms which power uses to manipulate people, wrestle away subjectivity, and dominate life. These are precisely the subjects of the three major divisions in Book 1: constraints, mediation, and seduction. Once these techniques are exposed, woman can crush them like giant Salvadoran cockroaches. The woman of refusal is not yet free; but she is a revolutionary in her knowledge of her captivity and her subsequent desire for liberation.

Vaneigem further founds the reversal of perspective – the simple act of recognizing that your subjectivity entitles you to rights and thoughts separate from that of power – on the most natural instincts of woman. This reversal reclaims all the personal power appropriated by Power's perspective, and thus reinvigorates the revolutionary to live her ideas in place of merely thinking them. This infusion of power explains why Vaneigem thinks the reversal of perspective can turn "knowledge into praxis, hope into freedom, and mediation into a passion for immediacy" (Vaneigem 188). For the reformist thinker, for the good liberal or academic Marxist, for the woman that gives money to the poor and hates the idea of suffering, nothing can liberate her more than the reversal of perspective. It allows her to act on her ideas, to understand that her detest of other people's suffering is also a recognition of her own suffering, to understand her relationship to her possessions as being possessed by them.

As the "Reversal of Perspective" also introduces Vaneigem's more constructive Book II, in which he discussion his ideas for reconstructing life outside of the spectacle, it introduces the backbone of the most critical chapter in his book, the Unitary Triad: "The reversal of perspective] enshrines the victory of a system of human relationships grounded in three indivisible principles: participation, communication, and self-realisation" (Vaneigem 188). Though Vaneigem spends plenty of time developing each of these ideas later on, he significantly places the reversal of perspective in a position to enshrine "the victory of a system of human relationships" which emerge from his revolutionary triad. Of course, this system of human relationship can be no other than another of his ideas of love. More developed than the base scenario of simple subjectivity affirmation, Vaneigem here explores the idea of love as the foundation of community: where human relationships conspire to bring people closer to each other instead of wedging them farther apart. The implicit comparison is to relationships allowed and promoted within the spectacle, which by their nature reify the participants. In such a spectacular relationship, Vaneigem holds sympathy – which translates to impetus to revolt – for both parties: masters and slaves. "Slaves are weak because they swear allegiance to those who govern them; masters, and God himself, are weak because of the shortcomings of those they govern. The master knows the positive role of alienation, the slave its negative one, but both are denied full mastery" (Vaneigem 204). This is no victory of human relationships – this is a victory of the spectacle. When alienated, both masters and slaves are unable to live authentically, unable to appreciate their own subjectivity, unable to begin to realize their desires. But a true victory of human relationships, made possible by radical subjectivity and encompassing the harmonizing of various subjectivities – indeed one may call this love as well – can only exist after the reversal of perspective. For Vaneigem, love is the ultimate tool in the revolution, the key to the larder of human potential. This human potential, which energizes Vaneigem so, is precisely his unitary triad.

Again and again Vaneigem stresses the singular nature of everything revolutionary – his unitary triad is made of three indivisible principles which must be understood as one. The revolutionary must have total commitment and defend subjectivity at all costs. Any retreat or recourse to the partial is a victory of the fragmentary, the lapdog of the spectacle. The Situationists' conception of the spectacle is extremely complex, but one recurring theme is its unitary nature in causing separation. Its only unifying principle is its tendency to destroy unity in favor of an anarcho-capitalist war of ideas and mythologies, during which the meaning of all reduce to nil. Thus, only the spectacle itself has value, there no space outside of its antagonisms, created to pacify those who seek opposition. Hence, the spectacle consecrates National Public Radio, Ben and Jerry's ice cream, Apple Computer, and the Communist party as the official opposition. Meanwhile, the spectacular wheels keep on turning, grinding any real opposition – any opposition that attempts to grab hold of the unitary triad – into dust.

To review, "Reversal of Perspective" is Vaneigem's stage-management of the revolution. He introduces the most powerful tool in the re-appropriation of individual consciousness and collective collaboration, the true opposition to the collective unconscious of capitalism and dearth of community spirit in communism. Most importantly for love, Vaneigem's reversal of perspective allows our lover in potentialis to see the fetters which in the darkness bind her, and therefore gives her the opportunity to shrug them off. The reversal of perspective fertilizes the soil of radical subjectivity. The next step, once the revolutionary lover – because the lover is the most revolutionary archetype, because love ultimately revolutionizes, as I am trying to demonstrate and understand – once the revolutionary lover begins to love herself, to analyze the dominant ideas which keep her from loving others, she liberates herself from ever-increasingly spectacular personal relations and avails herself to ever-increasingly developed forms of love.

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