I've said it before and I'll say it again: love brings home the war. Love, radically understood, cannot be a theoretical construct, but rather a direct and immediate relation to the self. Vaneigem expresses Situationist love in terms of immediacy, subjectivity, and authenticity – all of which he redefines to escape their spectacular connotations. In my estimation, love must overcome our daily humiliation by the spectacle – it must provide a sense of self-affirmation. Self-affirmation is the radical notion that woman can stand herself unequivocally – that she can come to terms with her own existence without resorting to the bromides of salvation, profit, or inebriation – all different flavors of the same ideological poison. It is a sense that the self has value, productivity, and use outside of any economic system. It is a sense that one’s happiness cannot be derived from the abundance of material goods nor the general approbation. In terms of love, it emerges as the processes of loving oneself, of finding love within oneself. Love's primacy is as indisputable as its necessity: without first finding love within herself, how can woman hope to find love anywhere else?

Vaneigem's re-appropriation of subjectivity casts a humanistic glaze on radical self-affirmation: you and I are subjects in our own lives, subjects who are defined by our unbridled passion to live. Thus, love and life are inextricably linked: if love is anything, it is a love of life. True, revolutionary, living then differentiates itself from mere survival; while the former actively expresses the unique passions and wills of the subject, the latter is the fulfillment of a role doled out by spectacular casting agents. The desire for life faces constant opposition in the spectacle, as constant pressure reduces life to the level of survival and exchange, where a woman matters only so far as she produces and consumes. The fact that the desire for life is so simple and yet so opposed attests to the hyper-development of the spectacle and the infancy of true radicalism. Authenticity, then, measures the degree to which woman remains autonomous and faithful to her passions, free of the internalized wishes instituted by some amorphous all-powerful economic system – but who wants to point fingers?

To answer my initial question – what is subversive about (this first layer of) love? – we first need to attend to its dialectical foe – the alienated condition of the self in the modern spectacle. Through a brief tour and analysis of the order of things, love's subversive nature becomes immediately apparent. Next, we must focus on love's effects in the realm of everyday life – how its resuscitation of the desire to live subverts the psychological "race to the bottom" of survival.

The distinctions we draw, I must reiterate, are anything but theoretical: subversion happens in the streets of everyday life. Every time we see ourselves as other, every time we see ourselves as an economic actor, every time we feel humiliated – these are the seeds of revolution. Rather than living in a world where we can only hate ourselves for own weakness, love allows us to walk peacefully in the streets of humanity, not fearing humiliation and not pushing our bad will onto every other helpless addict we see. The affirmation that I am a subject and should be treated as such – not to be knocked around like so many balance sheets by the grand accountant in the sky – this affirmation is liberation.

The construction of the alienated self was not a simple task. I isolate three major currents, once again, in this most spectacular of accomplishments. First we find humiliation, which Vaneigem places foremost among constraints on the human spirit. Vaneigem understands humiliation – radically and socially – as an internalization of spectacular notions of the self: the humiliated woman only knows herself as the spectacle knows her, and thereby creates herself in the spectacle's image. As such, the humiliated woman sees herself as an object – she is her own executioner. Secondly, the spectacular notion of happiness complements humiliation perfectly, preventing any disruption in the flow of alienation. In the spectacle, happiness can only be acquired from without, through the market of commodities. Happiness thus defined is illusory and, ultimately, unattainable – one simply needs more and more things to maintain the illusion of happiness. This rather ridiculous illusion owes its preservation to the final member of alienation's unholy trinity: the meanings of wealth and poverty. Because the importance of everyday life is overlooked in favor of the importance of things, the poverty of daily life is inconsequential in comparison to the wealth of objects that surrounds us. That is, the affluent suffer their poverty in relative silence. Of course, Vaneigem's redefinition of wealth and poverty offers no hope for the traditionally poor: it merely unmasks the fact that everyone is poor in the spectacle, either materially (i.e. hunger) or psychologically (i.e. depression).

Love first germinates in radical self-love, a far cry from the narcissism and isolationist individuality offered by the spectacle in its stead. As such, it is anathema to alienation, and subverts the latter at every stage. Love cultivates radical subjectivity, re-envisioning the self as more than a mere object. It thrives in authenticity – the understanding that happiness in life must be derived from the essential and unconstrained desires of the human spirit, which is to say, from within. Finally, love's grounding in the everyday realigns the true definitions of wealth and poverty – that no amount of material wealth can hide the acne of everyday poverty.

All this nitpicking over the basic humiliations of everyday life – handshakes, layoffs, voicemail, and coach – begs the question "why is this even important?" The received wisdom, according to Vaneigem, advises that "you have to face up to things" – which is precisely the problem. Consumer society wants us to face up to things, "the only available reality" (Vaneigem 32-33). Furthermore, the doctrine of things applies blindly, reducing people to the status of things as well. Vaneigem pinpoints reification, a pillar of spectacular society, as the very origin of humiliation: "The feeling of humiliation is nothing but the feeling of being an object" (Vaneigem 34).

Spectacular society, following in a grand aristocratic tradition, treats its 'subjects' as objects, to be manipulated at their ruler's will, prodded into believing they are beautiful and unique only insofar as they are needed to function, then abandoned when no longer useful. Objects can be calculated, evaluated, inspected, recycled – they have no intrinsic worth and only provide value in proportion to their utility. In this respect, the spectacle treats humanity as humans treat the environment. Hence, as humanity is imprisoned, devalued, objectified, so are the humans who lack it, physical freedom notwithstanding. Vaneigem does not claim that his race is handled like objects, only that we feel that way, and then ignore those feelings, through the payoffs of (mis)education.

In a society of the spectacle, the true powers behind whichever throne you choose (or are forced) to believe in – neo-liberalism, democratic socialism, Maoism, military dictatorship – are alienation and reification. Vaneigem attributes their success – that they manufacture enough humiliation to "keep the rabble in line" – to the spectacular notion of happiness. For him, the notion that people are truly happy in spectacular society is laughable – happiness is something possessed by others (Vaneigem 34). People are kept docile by the image of other people's happiness, by the lie that happiness exists and is attainable. The happy old American dream, reconditioned for the world: If I (choose one: work harder, drink more, buy newer toothpaste, prostrate myself to God or my supervisor), I too will experience happiness. This too, illustrates perfectly the perspective of power. Such a take on happiness is competitive, formulaic, reifying. Reifying because, as Vaneigem says "to define oneself by reference to others is to perceive oneself as other. And the other is always an object" (Vaneigem 34). Hence, even in our happiness, we are objectified and humiliated: there is little escape from power's tautology within power's perspective. Formulaic because no idea of happiness is unique or self-determined: it is all imitation of somebody else's imitation. Simulacra upon simulacra, and where has the spectacle buried the real? Competitive because it is vicarious: we steal our moments of life from the perceived happiness of others, who in turn thrive parasitically off of some other poor fool. And the punch-line is that nobody is really happy about anything – it's just one big circle jerk.

In fact, Vaneigem spells out the desperate circumstance that is the best one can do in such a constrained system – to choose your own humiliation, a fairy tale ending for a dystopic world. Given that humiliation is the de facto order of the day, "the more you choose your own humiliation, the more you live". In reading his bitter words, one can sense Vaneigem's disgust at the vulgar use of the term 'live', signifying only how well one adapts to the order of things, how well one resigns oneself to one's own unhappiness as an a newly-minted object.

Luckily, love doesn't play by the rules of humiliation – it allows us to seek and create our own happiness, to throw away the lenses of voyeurism and be one's own protagonist. Love is the leap needed to escape Xeno's paradox of humiliation – rather than choosing more and more tolerable humiliations, but never being able to escape, love carries us into life.

Vaneigem opens "The Age of Happiness" by parodying the (then) contemporary argument (which persists today) over the death of the proletariat. On one hand, neo-liberal economists insist it has "disappeared forever under an avalanche of sound systems, TVs, small cars, and planned communities", trying desperately to exorcise the spectre of revolution from their nightmares. On the other, Marxist fundamentalists, convinced by the ideology of the inevitable, drag out the maquiladoras in Southeast Asia and Central America for a pathetic show misery. "Nonsense," reply the economists in a booming chorus of optimism – they are but one generation behind in the grand karmic cycle of development, and (thank Friedman!) developing faster and easier than we ever did!

The real point of this tired argument is to root out the last humble proletarians and sell them a low-flo-shower-head. Hence, modern happiness according to Vaneigem: devoid of love or community, it rests contentedly on its own illusions.

Vaneigem destroys the myth of happiness in spectacular society, exposing "ideology of consumption" and the "consumption of ideology". The ideology of consumption reifies woman into consumer, inevitably chaining her personal happiness and well being directly to her collection of objects. Meanwhile, the consumption of this ideology, attacked later, claims happiness is found not in living, but in its opposite, merely surviving. For, though a subject may have a thirst for creativity, spontaneity, or poetry, an object only needs survival: food, shelter, and perhaps a diet Coke.

The coup pulled off by the economy of consumption mutated homo sapiens into homo consummator. Literally and symbolically, from woman who was concerned with thinking to woman whose primary occupation is consuming. Both activities, of course, distinguish us from the rest of the animal kingdom, though rather differently. On the upside, the ideology of consumption has brought about some measure of equality: "the dictatorship of consumer goods has finally destroyed the barriers of blood, lineage, and race" (Vaneigem 69). On the downside, the distribution of wealth hasn't undergone a parallel shift: while there may be an occasional black millionaire bopping around the country club, there as many hungry mouths down the block (on the East side, the West side, whatever damn side) as the golf balls he hits every Sunday afternoon. Even more disastrously, as we have seen before, "consumption, with its logic of things, forbids all qualitative differences and recognizes only differences in quantity between values and between people" (Vaneigem 69). Thus, as a person whose defining characteristic is the consumption of things, woman becomes a thing herself – defined by the degree and flavor of her consumption. For in the new economy, there is no qualitative difference between rich and poor – "to be rich nowadays means to possess a large number of objects" (Vaneigem 70). This development brings up a couple of important points for Vaneigem; firstly, that the current historical state is indeed new and different. In the feudal world – pre-revolutionary-bourgeoisie – a serf could only dream to live like a nobleman. The world was forever divided between masters and slaves. The bourgeoisie have since eliminated the masters and made all of mankind slaves: slaves without masters. Secondly, nobody is 'rich' in life. Again, historically, the masters lived rich and opulent lives, with much of their work taken care of by slaves. Now, everyone works like a dog and has only objects to show for it. The poor can barely subsist and the rich are content with mere survival.

Furthermore, the reification of woman into consumer evolves more and more rapidly to become increasingly specialized, increasingly constraining. Vaneigem notes venomously, "After being 'the most precious kind of capital' in Stalin's happy phrase, woman must now become the most valued of consumer goods" (Vaneigem 70). As a consumer good, woman has many forms, colors, and sizes. She passes through phases: the teenager, the college student, the professional, the aging hipster, and perhaps even the rebel. In each role, woman is not herself but a different type of object – all are equally removed from who she is as a person, but all provide equally compelling notions of happiness. Ah, the teenager! Vaneigem sets her up with "records, guitars, and Levis" (Vaneigem 70) to ensure the proper consumption pattern. And for the alternative type? Here we have folk songs, psychedelic tapestries, and drug paraphernalia. The yuppie, our favorite Johnny-come-lately to the world of consumption? Let's get you started with that pretty new VW bug and The Beatles Anthology, all eight videos in a nice box set! To every woman her role, and to every role its market! Even for the most precious of all roles, the rebel, the spectacle checks its inventory and chuckles. What could the rebel, playing the role of the anti-consumerist, possibly want? How about Situationist books in new additions by Zone Press? A Che Guevara T-shirt? Maybe a bumpersticker proclaiming obnoxiously "FUCK NEO-LIBERALISM"? No problem, ten for a dollar at register three, if you please. Oh yes, and son: No shoes, No shirt, No service...

The role of love in this idea of happiness is not difficult to pinpoint. In spectacular happiness, love's only place is as just another thing, or worse yet, just another image. There can be only the 'love' of things or the 'love' of the images. Therefore, to nurture a more authentic notion of loveis to nurture an idea outside the bounds of the spectacle. Since the spectacle seeks a totality, anything outside of the spectacle is immediately considered subversive. Thus love is already subversive in its non-thing-ness, before it even acts to liberate other people's subjectivities. However, love's most subversive role in the culture of happiness is the spoiler. Love is that which, paradoxically, presents us with our own unhappiness – demonstrating how the spectacular notion of happiness is contingent on reification. When woman understands herself as something other than an object, the spectacular idea of happiness collapses – things become mere things once more, having lost their ideological status as the purveyors of happiness.

Vaneigem deems such a period of dissatisfaction both necessary and transient. Like the revolutionary bourgeoisie themselves, who set about destroying their own historical condition, we must destroy spectacular happiness before we can rebuild true, revolutionary, happiness. The reconstruction movement is both personal and political – for Vaneigem, the impending revolution and the search for peace in everyday life are one and the same. On a world-historical scale, the fully-developed ideological spectacle, consumer-capitalism realizing its own godhead, is necessary for the total reversal of perspective that will bring about the harmonization of individual subjectivities that is revolution (or so the story goes). On a quotidian scale, the age of happiness gives way to the age of unhappiness, which is necessary to complete the reversal of perspective and invite love into one's everyday life to appropriate the meaning once controlled by a dictatorship of things.

Vaneigem's dialectical inversion highlights the incredible poverty of daily life in the spectacle, which both explains why everyday life is dismissed as unimportant (it simply wouldn't serve to be poor in something important) and marshals the necessity to re-appropriate one's priorities.

Vaneigem clarifies the relationship between the illusion of wealth and the reality of poverty as follows (Vaneigem 24):

Who could doubt that 35 years later, there are orders of magnitudes more gadgets, bigger (and worse mileage) family cars, and a constant stream of poor writing aimed at the mystification of the general public. But Vaneigem doesn't lament the mere presence of these things, or their accompanying images, in our life. As Debord notes, "the spectacle is not a collection of images" but "a social relationship between people that is mediated by images" (Debord §4). Each successive wave of things breaks alongside a corresponding wave of ideologies. The only important difference between a VCR and a DVD is the ideology that is packaged with each – the status they afford and the ease with which they facilitate escapism. These changes of ideology, as rapid and frenetic as MTV, become intolerable for Vaneigem's hypothetical consumer when she realizes they are merely illusions – that a digital camera may take clearer pictures, but won't make her into a better photographer (as advertised), that minty toothpaste won’t guarantee her more (and better) sex, as implied by the young exhibitionists who competed to plaster their bodies all over the environmentally unfriendly packaging.

One of Vaneigem's pastimes throughout his book – interspersed with elegies to radical subjectivity, playful chiasma, and old fashioned (for the secular left, anyway) Jesus-bashing – is exposing the poverty of affluent society. Here he attributes this poverty, structurally rooted in our inattention to everyday life, to a loss of illusions. When we derive our happiness, our emotional wealth, from "two fridges, a VW, TV, a promotion, time to kill" (or alternately: two houses, an Nissan SUV, IBM Thinkpad, stock options, spectator sports), we surely crash with the market when we realize that "there was no VW, only an ideology almost unconnected with automobiles". But this contradiction, this fall from dizzying ideological heights to the realm of lost illusions, is historically inevitable, according to Vaneigem. Just as Marx claimed the only way out of market capitalism was the fall of the bourgeoisie off the broken backs of the proletariat, Vaneigem claims the only way out of the spectacle is the fall from rapture to monotony. Only then can one grasp what Debord calls the essential principle of the spectacle: non-intervention. Only then can one fathom one's own poverty. At that point, Vaneigem points out, the analysts take to the streets, hurling rocks at the spectacle, jonesing for a taste of everyday life.

The damn thing about the spectacle is that it wants everything. It wants to create the world in its own image – its primary means is the same as its primary end: itself. Part of this (large) project unfortunately involves the subjugation of life to survival. That is, the promotion of economic imperatives as the only things worth worrying about – while unprofitable impulses such as creativity, spontaneity, and poetry wither away. More insidiously, the spectacle drills into its cadets the philosophy that survival comes first. As Vaneigem writes in a later work, The Book of Pleasures, if he were to designate a Situationist rallying cry, it would be Life First! Life unlived, discarded to the mediocrity of survival, is life denied. It is inauthenticity, the bane of the revolutionary lover. Inauthenticity's roots lie in happiness, as examined above and below, and the general passivity. Thus, it's loves duty to do away with both.

Beyond pure reification, Vaneigem sees spectacular happiness as evil in its promotion of survival. The spectacular gymnast lowers the bar of happiness from the project of the whole woman to the project of the woman who merely trudges along. Happiness, in a word famous for its ubiquity, becomes "okay". Vaneigem here flat-out contradicts Marx's prediction that the immiseration of the masses would first appear "in the sphere of goods necessary for survival" (Vaneigem 70). Au contraire, Oncle Karl! In the welfare state, there are more than enough beds, foodstamps, and umbrellas to go around. Smiles are the only things we lack

Vaneigem doesn’t see happiness in survival as one step on the path to happiness in life, but rather – dialectically –- thinks of survival as "always the enemy of real life" (Vaneigem 70). While life is a passionate undertaking, spontaneous and creative, survival is merely economic subsistence. Therefore, survival is not a state we can improve, but rather a state we must transcend dialectically. As the enemy of real life, survival represents death, and happiness in survival is happiness in death. All this becomes clear in looking at the fundamental truth of bourgeois society: "work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume; the hellish cycle is complete" (Vaneigem 70). In these terms, survival scarcely escapes with more meaning than biology. And yet, Vaneigem sees himself (accurately, I think) in a perceived "age of happiness". How does the negation of life coexist with perceptions of happiness? Situationists tend to answer "low expectations" more than the traditional "false consciousness".

People resign themselves to the reign of the spectacle – they are victims of their own passivity, unable to conceive – much less act toward – a world where the organization of misery was any different. Irrespective of whichever brand of the spectacle to which one pledges allegiance, it subsumes individual desires and affirmations to its own spectacular ego. The spectacle, in one sense merely a relationship among images, wants nothing less than the replication and assumption of these images, by everyone. Such a super-dominant super-ideology has no room for individual authenticity, nor any other traits that exist outside the domain of exchange-value.

With so many millions overworked and unemployed, simultaneously, there is no proposal for a reduction in hours, progress, the unerring direction of the machine. Fifty years ago, the standard of living was the same as it is now for the middle class, (plus or minus a few useless gadgets) but only one person in each household had to prostitute himself every day. Vaneigem quotes a French worker, "since 1936 I've been fighting for higher wages. My father before me fought for higher wages. I've got a TV, a fridge, and a VW. If you ask me, it's been a dog's life from start to finish" (Vaneigem 69).

Like the French worker who cannot dream beyond the Real, beyond the material conditions of what he – and his father before him – has been given, "the new proletarian sells his labour power in order to consume". Historically, man had to work long days to feed his family and buy the occasional drink; now woman works long days to consume an ideology, which alienates her even further. At the office and at the home, woman gets a double dose of alienation. Even more insidiously, to bankroll the economy of consumption, more and more immediate sectors of daily life have been colonized by the spectacle. We no longer need to touch the earth or to grow food – such work is dirty and tiring. Why cook when there is a restaurant down the street? And when you do – on those few state holidays when the restaurant is closed, why peel or cut your own vegetables when you can pull them pre-sterilized from the freezer? And why – oh why? – take the twenty-five seconds to make a card or write one single sentence of heartfelt affection when for a paltry three dollars, our friends at Hallmark can do it for us, for any occasion? By ceding whole areas of our daily life to mediation, we survive more efficiently and live less and less. Any time for reflection or meditation is seen as unproductive; time that could be used to bolster the economy, through production or consumption, work or television. Any time between people must be organized too around consumption – how many people have even heard of non-commercial recreation? Drugs, movies, bars, coffee, gyms, college, and national parks – recreation always has its price. Happiness has become a totally mediated reality; no longer an emotion one feels in oneself, but a pill one can purchase when one's supply runs low.

Here again love rots the boat. The idea of love is a discomforting one – it throws a wrench in the gears, changes the angles, and doesn't play by the Rules. People who develop love, through a spontaneous reversal of perspective, through transcendence of the spectacular notion of love, or through a betrayal of objects can no longer content themselves with mean conceptions of happiness. Love precludes the cult of things and the subservience to ideology, holding radical subjectivity at its center. More importantly, love – and the reversal of perspective it entails – allows one to see beyond what is given as (impossibly) Real into the realm of the (really) Possible. Happiness rests not in achieving the Possible, but in seeing it and acting towards it. Love rescues us from the belief that all of life lies in production and consumption, in things of ideology and in the ideology of things. Hence, love doesn't make woman more content, better adjusted, happier – as is commonly sold to us. The role of love is not to replacing aching hearts with whole ones and yellow teeth with bright white smiles. Love's function is exactly the opposite; to make woman less content with survival, to make woman increasingly disenchanted with the status quo, to make woman question her condition as a thing in a world of things. Love breaks hearts so they may mend whole. Love is a harsh and dreadful thing. Love is the midwife of the Possible.

Behind the rich velvet curtain of the spectacle, love exposes wealth to be poverty and poverty to be wealth. Love finds the priceless under every pricetag, and humanity behind every humiliation. Love exhumes life and deposes survival, resuscitates happiness from the throttle of consumerism, and makes the world safe for relaxation and contemplation. Love salves the soul, wins the war at home.

But the first layer of love alone is subversion unrealized, and can only amount to isolated lovers absorbed in their own subjectivity. To be truly subversive, we must understand radical subjectivity in its social context. Solid self-love allows us to interact peaceably with others, counteracting the effect of the spectacular encounter, where "wine turns to vinegar in the mouth". Love brings back the sweetness and nuance of personal interaction, rescuing it from humiliation. Most importantly, the understanding that, while humiliation objectifies humanity, love brings it back "becomes the basis for a combative lucidity in which the critique of the organisation of life cannot be separated from the immediate inception of the project of living differently" (Vaneigem 34). Love is subversive because it causes woman to live differently, because it is not merely a solipsistic project, but both personal and political, individual and collective. Love not only breaks constraints on the self, but also begins to bridge the gulf of isolation.