Lipstick Traces (23 page)

At first the book seemed entirely a conceit—precious. In fact it told a very specific story, and carried an affirmation that it was the only story worth telling: the book was bound in heavy sandpaper, so that when placed on a shelf it would destroy other books.

The story had to be pieced together, and then, as one followed up its clues, deciphered according to where it had come from and where it meant to go. Made out of detritus—so apparently random in its organization it communicated as detritus—the book was a history of the first year of the Lettrist International, a shifting group of young people living in Paris, as they were from June 1952 to September 1953—ex-students, ex-poets, ex-filmmakers, now lollards, runaways, drunks—who had banded together under one-line manifestos: “The art of the future will be the overthrow of situations, or nothing,” “The new generation will leave nothing to chance,” “We’ll never get out of this alive.” It was the secret history of a time that had passed—“without leaving a trace,” said the next to last page. But
Mémoires
was also made to fix the origins of the Situationist International, the far more visible group Debord, Jorn, and other European artists had formed in July 1957, their founding paper opening with the words “First of all we think the world must be changed”; as a memoir Debord’s book was also a prophecy. To follow its story, one needed information Debord withheld—even the words “l’Internationale lettriste,” which never appeared. But one also needed the ability to imagine a reinvented world: not merely a “provisional microsociety,” as the LI had liked to call itself, but a new, “situationist” civilization, shared by millions, finally covering the globe.

In this new world, the disconnected, seemingly meaningless words and pictures of
Mémoires
would make sense. They would make sense, first, as noise, a cacophony ripping up the syntax of social life—the syntax, as Debord put it in
The Society of the Spectacle,
of “the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself.” As the noise grew, those words and pictures would begin to link up—as graffiti on countless walls, shouts coming out of thousands of mouths, even as familiar streets and buildings one suddenly saw as if never before—and then, with the old syntax broken, these things would make a second kind of sense. They would be experienced not as things at all, but as possibilities: elements of what Debord called “constructed situations.”

These would be “moments of life concretely, deliberately, and freely created,” each one “composed of gestures contained in a transitory decor,” the gestures the “product of the decor and of themselves,” in turn producing “other forms of decor, and other gestures.” Each situation would be an “ambient milieu” for a “game of events”; each would change its setting, and allow itself to be changed by it. The city would no longer be experienced as a scrim of commodities and power; it would be felt as a field of “psychogeography,” and this would be an epistemology of everyday time and space, allowing one to understand, and transform, “the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”

Now the city would move like a map you were drawing; now you would begin to live your life like a book you were writing. Called forth by a street or a building, an ensemble of gestures might imply that a different street had to be found, that a building could be redesigned by the gestures performed within it, that new gestures had to be made, even that an unknown city had to be built or an old one overthrown. “One night, as evening fell,” Raoul Vaneigem wrote in
The Revolution of Everyday Life,

my friends and I wandered into the Palais de Justice in Brussels. The building is a monstrosity, crushing the poor quarters beneath it and standing guard over the fashionable Avenue Louise—out of which, someday, we will make a breathtakingly beautiful wasteland. As we drifted through the labyrinth of corridors, staircases, and suite after suite of rooms, we discussed what could be done to make the place habitable; for a time we occupied the enemy’s territory; through the power of our imagination we transformed the thieves’ den into a fantastic funfair, into a sunny pleasure dome, where the most amazing adventures would, for the first time, be really lived.

This was a daydream, Vaneigem cheerfully admitted—but “daydreaming subverts the world.” When this free field was finally opened by the noise of the exploding syntax, when the fall of the dictionary left all words lying in the streets, when men and women rushed to pick them up and make pictures out of them, such daydreams would find themselves empowered, turning into catalysts for new passions, new acts, new events: situations, “made to be lived by their creators,” a whole new way of being in the world. These situations would make a third kind of sense: they would seem sui generis, unencumbered by the baggage of any past, opening always into other situations, and into the new kind of history it would be theirs to make. And this would be a history not of great men, or of the monuments they had left behind, but a history of moments: the sort of moments everyone once passed through without consciousness and that, now, everyone would consciously create.

As Debord told the tale in
Mémoires,
this story was itself sui generis. Earlier variants were present in his pages—from the surrealists’ discovery of urban “magnetic fields” in the 1920s to Thomas De Quincey’s wanderings through London in the early nineteenth century, back even to the “Carte de Tendre” (Map of Feeling) of the seventeenth-century précieuses—but as blind baggage, which means “sealed book.” That was what the past ought to be,
Mémoires
said: would be, if the unidentified young men and women pictured in Debord’s pages, framed by Jorn’s blazing colors, could someday supersede dead time. Or had they already done it? Here, as if for the first time, the unnamed band moving from 1952 through 1953 was discovering that a world of permanent novelty could exist, and finding the means to start it up. These means were two: the “dérive,” a drift down city streets in search of signs of attraction or repulsion, and “détournement,” the theft of aesthetic artifacts from their contexts and their diversion into contexts of one’s own devise.
Mémoires,
with its meandering crossings and stolen words and pictures, was a version of both—just as both were art forms that, the LI believed, could not produce art but only a new kind of life.

As the half-century turned, the delinquent intellectuals of the LI saw the culture and commerce of the West as exiled Frankfurt School critics Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer had seen it at the end of the Second World War: a single system of suffocation and domination, “uniform as a whole and in every part.” As a benign match for the Stalinism of the East, capitalism completed a double reflection, which reduced everything outside itself to a nullity. With the world governed by what Harold Rosenberg called “the power trance,” art was put forward as the last redoubt of creativity and critical will, the note sounded with echoes of Thermopylae or the Charge of the Light Brigade: “What can fifty do,” Clement Greenberg wrote in 1947 of the New York abstract painters, “against a hundred and forty million?”

Such a cry sounds hysterical today, if it didn’t then; the rest of the United States was not against Greenberg’s fifty, it ignored them, and it had its reasons. The members of the LI had theirs. They had found their affinity in art, in a love of what art promised and a hatred for where those promises stopped, for the separate and privileged realm society reserved for beautiful, impotent dreams—but even the beauty, they thought, had been a lie for thirty years, before any of them were born. Somewhere between 1915 and 1925 art burned itself out in a war against its own limits, in a struggle to escape its redoubt, its museum, its amusement park, its zoo; since then there had been no art, only “imitations of ruins” in a “dismal yet profitable carnival, where each cliché had its disciples, each regression its admirers, every remake its fans.” The LI’s dreams of a reinvented world came from art, but the group was sure that, in its time, to make art was to lose its time; to claim an image or a line as one’s own, as a unique and eternal mark on the wall of a history written in advance, would be to perpetuate a fraud on the history the group meant to make. It would be to buy into myths of blessed genius and divine inspiration, to lend one’s hands to a system of individual hierarchy and social control; with God dead and art standing in his stead, it would be to maintain a religious illusion, fittingly trapped in the most magical of commodities. It would be to hold up heaven in a frame instead of pointing to it in the sky like a priest—and what was the difference? To make art would be to betray the common, buried wishes art once spoke for, but to practice détournement—to write new speech balloons for newspaper comic strips, or for that matter old masters, to insist simultaneously on a “devaluation” of art and its “reinvestment” in a new kind of social speech, a “communication containing its own criticism,” a technique that could not mystify because its very form was a demystification—and to pursue the dérive—to give yourself up to the promises of the city, and then to find them wanting—to drift through the city, allowing its signs to divert, to “detourn,” your steps, and then to divert those signs yourself, forcing them to give up routes that never existed before—there would be no end to it. It would be to begin to live a truly modern way of life, made out of pavement and pictures, words and weather: a way of life anyone could understand and anyone could use.

“Their underlying philosophy,” Christopher Gray wrote of the LI in
Leaving the 20th Century,
“was one of experiment and
play”
—but play with all of culture, and the city itself as the field. Why not? “Seek for food and clothing first, then the Kingdom of God shall be added to you,” Hegel said; it was time for the kingdom, past time. “Suffice it to say that in our view the premises for revolution, on the cultural as well as on the strictly political level, are not only ripe, they have begun to rot,” Debord and Gil J Wolman wrote for the LI in 1956. To the LI, what Hannah Arendt called the social question—hunger, the necessity of the body driving back the will to found freedom, a force that left every revolution promising the Kingdom of God defeated or travestied, short even of food and clothing—had, at least potentially, been solved. As the LI read the signs of postwar technics and abundance, as it read the ads, from now on anyone suffering privation would be a victim not of necessity but of a power trance, a trance that could be broken. Modern poverty was a poverty of passion, rooted in the predictability of a world society rich enough to manage both space and time—so
the group dismissed capitalism as an empty present, socialism as a future equipped to change only the past, and spoke instead of building “castles of adventure.” Walking the streets until they were too drunk to know which corner to turn, they tried to drive themselves into delirium, in order to emerge with a message of seduction: thus in 1953 Ivan Chtcheglov, nineteen, wrote a “Formula for a New Urbanism,” and called on his comrades to create their first city, “the intellectual capital of the world,” a sort of Fourierist Las Vegas, a surrealist Disneyland, an amusement park where people would actually live, a ville de tendre with districts and gardens corresponding “to the whole spectrum of feelings one encounters
by chance
in everyday life,” constructed realms of romance, confusion, utility, tragedy, history, terror, happiness, death, a city where “the principal activity of the inhabitants” would be “the
CONTINUOUS DÉRIVE
,” a drift through a landscape of “buildings charged with evocative power, symbolic edifices representing emotions, forces, and events from the past, the present, and the future. A rational extension of bygone religious systems, fairy tales, and above all of psychoanalysis into architectural expression becomes more urgent every day, as all the sparks of passion disappear,” Chtcheglov said—but in the city he imagined, “Everyone will live in his own cathedral. There will be rooms more conducive to visions than any drug, and houses where it will be impossible not to fall in love.”