– Ella Fitzgerald singing He Loves, She Loves

Perhaps I should begin by explaining myself. When I write 'love', I don't mean the kind of frou-frou bullshit sold around primetime on Valentine's day. In our popular conception, love is pretty easy to understand: it involves good looks, halter-tops, and anorexic pre-pubescent girls. Beyond the obvious, love willingly embraces notions of sports cars, net worth, and tapas bars. Love, then, is both image and commodity: its presence revolves around superficial glimpses and purchasing power.

None of this is very subversive. But, then again, nothing in the spectacle can critique the spectacle, unless the spectacle specifically licenses (and markets) it to do so, as it does academic Marxists. Therefore, any revolutionary hopeful must redefine love before wielding it subversively: we need a revolutionary, 'Situationist love' to oppose the more common 'spectacular' variety. Unfortunately, concise definition isn't one of Vaneigem's strong points as a writer. Though he strictly delimits the boundaries of spectacular love from any revolutionary understanding, his particular revolutionary understanding (which I call "situationist love") tends to understand itself rather broadly,. Vaneigem defines and redefines love: the construction of the whole woman, the project of living immediately, just another drug. Love alternately signifies "amorous conquest", "the beauty of the erotic", and the path to unity.

To pin down a single definition of out Vaneigem's remoulade is somewhat of a chore: a hunt for what is essential amongst a whirlwind of aphorisms and denunciations. Instead, I present a layered model: love as an organism developing through three distinct stages. In each stage, love – the grandfather of anarchism – rejects societal straitjackets and follows its course. In every stage, love remains focused on the manifest and the quotidian – there is nothing theoretical about it. And in each stage, the spectacle provides its own options to 'progress' pass the antiquated needs of love and humanity.

The war begins at home – love at its root must be a love of the self. In its first incarnation, love must affirm one's desire to live, and to live freely at that. To love must be to love life. Secondly, as goes the self, so too goes love: because each self is unique, each love of the self must be unique in turn. Therefore, I define love – for starters – as follows: the radical subjectivity that affirms one’s desire to live most freely. Acting truthfully by love, then, is authenticity.

The idea here is not some sort of post-modern ethical bacchanalia – I'm merely trying to outline a scenario where people understand and appreciate themselves as valuable in themselves. In a society whose only yardstick is the dollar, the only appropriate value for the self should be, pace Mastercard, "priceless".

Unfortunately, true self-love affords individuals within the spectacle a little too much autonomy; i.e. it's bad for the economy. Where would the alienation industries (i.e. beauty, dieting, fitness, and entertainment) be without the prevailing insecurity? In place of radical subjectivity, the spectacle aims to soothe our ragged souls with offerings of rugged individuality, private property, and 'clothes that make the man'. Indeed, self-love subverts the culture of alienation by its very existence.

Revolutionary love, in its infancy, wields itself proudly in defense against humiliation and powerlessness, protecting the lover from the despair and resignation integral to everyday life in the spectacle. To embrace one's subjectivity is to interrogate the alienation inherent in spectacular life. Only once the lover – in my mind and life, synonymous with the revolutionary – succeeds in banishing alienation and loving himself can he share his love with others.

The predictable social byproduct of a collection of humiliated, insecure, rugged-individualists is isolation. If every man truly has his own castle, then – to be sure – the standard model comes fully equipped with drawbridge, moat, and a bevy of 'no trespassing' signs. Hence, love in its second incarnation must raze the walls of isolation – love must transform society into community. The leap itself is rather simple: once one understands one's own subjectivity – once one appreciates and give credence to one's own desires and feelings – extending the same validity to others comes fairly naturally. It requires nothing more than basic human empathy to re-envision garbagemen and waitresses as people with feelings, desires, and frustrations.

Remarkably, basic human empathy is pretty hard to come by. I conceive of this dearth as a congenital affliction to native sons of the spectacle: reification. Reification, the treatment of a subject as an object, of an individual person as a target market, consumer, employee, is a staple in our spectacular larder. During our rare and unwanted interactions with the outside world – while shopping, driving, or otherwise engaging in productive activity – people only matter insofar as they facilitate or ruin our day. Thus, the frazzled single mother of two rushing to pick up Anita from her dance lesson becomes "that bitch in the maroon Toyota" and the man in his 11th hour of running back and forth serving the upper-classes is only "that rude and inattentive waiter – looks like no tip for him". To critique isolation is to critique its structural premises in our society – of which reification is public enemy number one.

The pacifiers sold to adults who cry from isolation are as synthetic and unnatural as those made for children. Some objects, like the home theatre system, represent generations of increasingly spectacular modes of relating: from tribal story-telling to professionalization of the story-tellers to institutionalizing the break between performer and audience to totally mediated (read: recorded) performance to atomized audiences lost in universal solipsism (read: the ideology of the walkman). The next logical step is catatonia. Another technique modern the spectacle pushes on street-corners is the lavish care of consumable goods, both to satisfy the human need to cherish (while denying that selfsame need on a personal level) and to internalize the economy's passion for growth. Waxing cars and collecting stamps are manifestations of this twisted urge: the fetishism of the commodity exploiting the ghost of community. Ritualized religion, drug culture, and group ideologies often play this role as well, filling our longing for community with false (albeit cheaper) idols. Unfortunately for modern priests, dealers, and commissars, all illusions of the Old World are fast being supplanted by the omniscient logic of the market.

The third, and broadest, expression of love is the humanitarian love of the Unknown Soldier – the love of someone due solely to their existence and their humanity. This love – radical humanism – predicates upon an understanding of togetherness and shared responsibility. In Marx, the term is "species-being", in Dostoyevsky, "we are all guilty for everyone".

Because this love poses the greatest threat to spectacular promotions of individuality, non-participation, and success, it is most frequently vilified. The lapdogs of the system enjoy confusing a profound love of humanity with altruism, sacrifice, paternalism, communism, and other ideological nonsense.

In more explicitly political language – and nothing lends itself to political applicability like the everyday – the third layer of love embraces a Chomskian conception of ethics: one should take responsibility for the predictable consequences of one’s actions, irrespective of whether one can actually witness those consequences first-hand. In a society based upon the image, 'see no evil' becomes 'no evil' and the long chains of consumption and production in global capitalism become the perfect filters of ethical responsibility. A love of humanity that extends to coffee pickers in Colombia and garment workers in Los Angeles overrides the impulses of comfort, convenience, and consumption, as seen on TV.

Each of the above definitions of love subverts the ideology of the spectacle in its own way. Humiliation, isolation, and the veil of consumerism are as American as gasoline and apple pie. Though I'm tempted to make a superlative judgement – true radicalism lies only in the love of humanity – I think it's ultimately unsatisfying to do so. For to compare and to judge is to fall into twin spectacular abysses: the desire to quantify the qualitative and the inability to act without a universal assurance of one's action. Such impulses must be interrogated – if not discarded outright – in a quest to understand how much of the spectacle we internalize, even in the process of critique.

Au contraire, the three strands of love braid together in synergy. Without the first – and the refusal of constraints it implies – subsequent loves would be impossible. Without the second – perhaps the most frequent omission – one becomes mired in the theory of universal love but without applying it to everyday life: an asshole with the best of intentions. A failure to apply the theory of love to the reality of everyday life is the most immediate failure of all. And without the last, the first two would be unrealized, incomplete. Even if one manages to embrace one's own subjectivity and treat the people in one's everyday life with love and respect, the spectre of unseen suffering subverts the lover's conscience. In this I echo Vaneigem: "No love is possible in an unhappy world".

At each point, my notion of love grows rather than changes, with no meaning overriding any other. The story I tell in this thesis, with each chapter examining one layer of love, is a tale of the realization of love's potential, and therefore, our own.