Lipstick Traces (19 page)

As the century turned, the Commune dropped down into a footnote to the Second Empire, or floated free as an anarchist myth. It began to seem perfect, every failure absorbed into looming possibility: a work of art. In some ways that is just what it was.

The greatest and most prophetic work of art of the nineteenth century was Baron Haussmann’s redesign of Paris. In the 1850s and 1860s he cut the city up and put it back together. He straightened labyrinthine alleys, ran huge boulevards through the city like rivers (it was a joke that when he got done with the streets he would straighten the Seine), broke up the old craft districts, separated residences from workplaces, workplaces from places of leisure, neighborhoods from markets, class from class.

It is a truism that Haussmann’s boulevards were built to facilitate the circulation of troops, to make the barricades of the revolution of 1848 an impossibility. It is less obvious, but far more wonderful, that Haussmann changed a collection of self-contained villages into a grid for the circulation of autonomous commodities, a transit system to accommodate the new desire of capital to move, to parade. It was art—but, as the avant-garde would boast of itself from that time to this as it attempted to catch up with Haussmann, not art for art’s sake. Writing in 1985, Charles Newman caught the dynamic: “a good case can be made for capitalist consumer culture as the Avant-Garde of our time. As Gerald Graff puts it, ‘advanced capitalism needs to destroy all vestiges of tradition, all orthodox ideologies, all continuous and stable forms of reality in order to stimulate higher levels of consumption.’ Crisis becomes not a revolutionary but the ultimate capitalist metaphor.” But in truth capitalism left the essence of the old (hierarchy, separation, alienation) altogether in place, and raised instead a screen of continuous change, a show in which everything that was new was old as soon as it was pictured, and thus could be replaced by something even more falsely new—or so it looked to Guy Debord, who in
The Society of
the Spectacle
reached for the dynamic in uglier, harsher terms; who tried to bring the story back down to earth.

Whereas in the primitive phase of capitalist accumulation, “political economy sees in the
proletarian
only the
worker,”
who must receive the minimum compensation indispensable for the maintenance of his labor power, and never sees the proletarian “in his leisure and humanity,” this ruling class perspective is reversed as soon as the production of commodities reaches a level of abundance which requires a surplus of collaboration from the worker. The worker, suddenly redeemed from the total contempt which is plainly shown to him by all the forms of the organization and supervision of production, now finds himself, every day, outside of production, and in the guise of a consumer; with zealous politeness, he is, seemingly, treated as an adult. At this point, the
humanism of the commodity
takes charge of the worker’s “leisure and humanity,” because now political economy can and must dominate these spheres
as
political economy.

In other words, by Haussmann’s time capitalism had reached a point of critical mass. It had become so effective, and so voracious, that in order to maintain itself, which meant to extend itself, it had to grant the worker, in primitive capitalist times only a hammer or a nail, a degree of autonomy, so that the worker might swell the market for the commodity, the audience for the spectacle. The worker had to be granted a measure of surplus value, of free income and free time—otherwise capitalism would overreach itself and collapse. The secret of the fetishism of the commodity was that the commodity could talk, it could seem human, it could turn human beings into things. For the reifications contained in that secret to take their place in the human psyche, everyone had to learn how to listen—to hear what, in
Sister Carrie,
Theodore Dreiser had made his heroine hear.

When she came within earshot of their pleading, desire in her bent a willing ear. Ah, ah! The voice of the so-called inanimate. Who shall translate for us the language of the stones?

“My dear,” said the lace collar she secured from Partridge’s, “I fit you beautifully; don’t give me up.”

“Ah such little feet,” said the leather of the soft new shoes, “how effectively I cover them; what a pity they should ever want my aid.”

You are nothing unless you have everything: that was modernity. Modernity was the shifting of the leverage point of capitalism from production to consumption, from necessity to wish. It was a difficult project: all desires had to be reduced to those that could be put on the market, and thus desires were reduced to needs and experienced as such. As the situationists would argue, the modern capitalist project required the channeling of the potentially untrammeled desire in every human heart into a housekeeping of practical need, and the reduction of possibility into what they named “survival,” the reduction of life to “economic imperatives”—here, the buying of what you buy not because you subjectively desire it, but because it has been objectively proven that you cannot live without it. Listen, with the benefit of nearly a century, as Carrie couldn’t listen in her own moment: her new shoes imagine her in jeopardy, and suggest that they can rescue her, or, should she prove herself unworthy, that they might not. What is at stake is not her own desire, but her ability to breathe. A certain transubstantiation, swollen with theological subtleties and metaphysical niceties, is taking place: in this story, power belongs wholly to the commodity.

It was in this sense that the situationists, like Harold Rosenberg and the Frankfurt School critics, liked to speak of the paradox of the “proletarianization of the world.” They meant that when political economy dominates life, it turns everyone, the worker who has been made over into a consumer, the bourgeois who already was one, into a sort of proletarian, a mute object in the face of the talking thing: the “humanism of the commodity” means that the commodity becomes human as the human being becomes a commodity. But where others saw only hardening concrete, as a band of self-consciously modern revolutionaries the situationists thought they glimpsed a crack. They had come together—less than a dozen people, representing such spectral combines (aesthetic cults at the most, one-person art movements at the least) as “l’Internationale lettriste,” “il Movimento internazionale per una bauhaus immaginista,” and “Arte nuclare,” holding their first, tentative conference in Alba, Italy, in 1956—in the belief that they could find that crack, map it, pry it open until the old world disappeared into its hole. Their hunch was that abundance, banality, and boredom were modernisms not only as levers of bland tyranny, but as opportunities to discover new desires—desires that a truly modern “International” might
identify, publicize with all the weapons of satire, bluff, irony, and finally violence, and then stand ready to guide into a great common action, an irruption of negation, into a new world. “Proletarianization,” the tyranny itself, was itself the crack: when almost all were proletarians, almost all were potential revolutionaries.

As theorists, the situationists tried to see themselves as victims, no less proletarianized than anyone else. They tried to lift the weight of the world onto their shoulders, and then to feel out every way in which that weight was crushing them. Self-consciously superior only to the mindlessness of the condition they were forced to endure along with everyone else, they tried to refuse both the comforts of the past and of the grave. Melancholy and nostalgia are the wheels on which Rosenberg and the Frankfurt School turned their phrases; the situationists fought against both with every word, trying to banish sorrow for fury. As victims, they sought empowerment—and you can still feel it, the aggression and arrogance Malcolm McLaren tried to tell Peter Urban about, an empowerment that sometimes seems to turn into palpable fact, as infectious as a disease, in every good word the situationists wrote.

As revolutionaries, the situationists were gamblers—in their everyday lives, poker players, pinball players—and they placed their bet for a different world on the most subtle modernism in capitalist hegemony: the admission of subjectivity into the objectifying market. The commodity was king, but like the king who after generations of inbreeding ends his line as a mutant, the commodity was also a freak: it could talk, but it was stupid. The commodity could seduce, but it was also blind. It could bend Carrie’s ear, but it could not tell Carrie from you or me; in the world of the spectacle, all cats were gray in the dark, and it was always dark. Sooner or later Carrie would figure this out; resentment and rage would well up in a new desire to speak for herself, to make herself heard: I have everything and I am nothing; I am nothing and I should be everything. The situationist project was to make it sooner, before it was too late—before Carrie was ready for the rocking chair.

Objectivity, as Vaneigem defined it for the situationists, meant “I love that girl because she is beautiful”; subjectivity meant “That girl is beautiful because I love her.” If the central human faculty is the ability to consciously
want more than one can have, then emerging from it is the ability of each person to want something different from everyone else. Capitalism knew that, which is why every product appeared in endless variation. But each variant said the same thing, and, ultimately, no one hears the speech of the commodity in precisely the same way. In this discontinuity is the possibility that the refusal of one person to hear what everyone else hears can lead to the refusal of countless people to listen at all, and that is why a letter from an eleven-year-old girl broke the Möbius strip of Michael Jackson’s Victory tour. Rock ’n’ roll, which began as perhaps the purest example of laissez-faire capitalism ever known—“I am nothing and I should be everything,” said Sam Phillips as he founded Sun Records in Memphis in 1952, Syd Nathan as he founded King in Cincinnati in 1944, Don Robey as he founded Peacock in Houston in 1949 (maybe they said “I should have everything,” but the commodities they sold surely said “I should be everything”)—was a game of subjectivity in the objective marketplace. No matter how deeply buried, that rhythm could not be killed, and so the chickens came home to roost.

Modern capitalism was a tricky project: dangerous. Free income and free time might provoke desires the market could never satisfy, and those desires might contain a wish to go off the market. In the early and mid-1950s, laissez-faire rock ’n’ roll capitalism was so marginal that for all rational purposes it was off the market—and yet the desires it was able to excavate were to prove so powerful that the marginal anomaly soon enough invaded the market, made its own market, which by Michael Jackson’s time could be found at the heart of social life.

LaDonna Jones played out a fable, but one need not go back that far: her solitary intervention was a version of the mass intervention that today we call “the sixties.” “The ’60s’ is merely the name we give to a disruption of late-capitalist ideological and political hegemony,” wrote the leftist editors of a 1984 anthology on the period, “to a disruption of the bourgeois dream of unproblematic production, of everyday life as the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption.” The sixties were first of all fast times, boom times; as in Haussmann’s era, capitalism almost overreached itself. Too many people had too much of everything that was on the market, and so they had the leisure to think about what else they might want.

A decade after the formal end of the sixties, there would remain in the West a guilty memory of its incomplete disruptions, a fear of its unsatisfied chaos. As Debord said in 1978, demands for liberation and pleasure, all fragmented but still seeking the free field of autonomy and solidarity, were by then part of the fabric of life, and there was combat for and against them everywhere. But joined by then to an economy that seemed to be collapsing in all directions at once, the fear of chaos would double. Trumpeted like a horror movie by those seeking power, on the part of the voting majorities fear mandated a radical solution: a leap back over modernity, a return to a pre-modern economy, to the economic terrorism of the Thatcherist and Reaganist regimes.

The chaos of the sixties had come directly from the loosed spheres of “leisure and humanity,” the domination of which Debord had identified as central to both the continuation of capitalism as power and its continuation as hegemony. To a crucial degree, the speech of the commodity had been interrupted. The difference between the 1960s and the 1980s, Bob Dylan said in response to a question about the supposed “revival of the ’60s spirit” in such 1985 events as “We Are the World” and Bob Geldof’s Live Aid famine-relief concert, was that before “There were people trying to stop the show anyway they could . . . Then, you didn’t know which end the trouble was coming from. And it could come at any time.” Political economy had indeed failed to dominate the spheres of leisure and humanity, to dominate them “as political economy,” and so those spheres had to be forcibly restricted. The problem with the sixties was that people had come to take their leisure and humanity as rights; the Thatcherist and Reaganist project was to turn those things back into privileges. “The Tory solution to Britain’s economic recession,” Simon Frith wrote in 1984, when that recession was almost a decade into its history, when unemployment in the U.K. had climbed from the scandalous one million that elected the Tories to more than three million, “is a new version of the 19th century’s two nations. Growth is now supposed to come from the leisure goods industries. The new jobs will be low skilled and low paid; the non-affluent will service the affluent; the new working class will work on other people’s leisure.” He could also have said that, in Margaret Thatcher’s new U.K., which since 1979 had served as a harbinger of Ronald Reagan’s U.S.A., failed mass
strikes and riots in the poverty ghettos were not only costs of this new economy, but linchpins: social and economic exclusion organized as spectacle. “You could be next,” said the commodity that others could not afford to buy to those who could: “keep your nose clean.”