Lipstick Traces (24 page)

Addressing himself only to the others in the LI, and for that matter writing under a pseudonym, “Gilles Ivain,” Chtcheglov was contriving a secret for his friends to share; at the same time he was writing a manifesto to change the world. “A mental disease has swept the planet,” he pronounced: “banalization . . . this state of affairs, arising out of a struggle against poverty, has overshot its ultimate goal—the liberation of man from material cares—and has become an obsessive image hanging over the present. Offered the choice of love or a garbage disposal, young people of all countries have chosen the garbage disposal.” To choose the garbage disposal was to embrace reification, to become a garbage disposal. But to choose love was to escape the prison of the alienated self, and so Chtcheglov’s lover, dreaming in his own cathedral, was not an isolate, not a babbling cripple hiding in his private Notre-Dame, but a citizen of a new world, ready to speak. He might say what the lover in Paul Auster’s 1986 mystery
The Locked Room
says: “By belonging to Sophie, I began to feel as though I belonged to everyone else as well. My true place in the world, it turned out, was somewhere beyond myself, and if that place was inside me, it was also unlocatable. This was the tiny hole between self and not-self, and for the first time in my life I saw this nowhere as the exact center of the world.” This is utopia, and utopia means “nowhere,” but within the LI all obvious absurdities and impossibilities were shrugged off (who says you have to choose between love and a garbage disposal?); the LI’s project was the rational extension of the fairy tale. That utopia, the exact center of the world, was where the LI meant to live.

“Ultimately,” Gray wrote, “all that was involved was the simplest thing in the world: wanting to make your dreams come true. And its enemies were equally simple: sterile subjective fantasy on the one hand and, on the other, its objective counterpart: the world of art.” Someday one would confront the final enemy, the existing order; the first battle, as Alexander Trocchi wrote in London in 1964, trying to recapture his days as a member of the LI, was “to attack the ‘enemy’ at his base, within ourselves.” Thus the aesthetes of the LI forbid themselves to make art—and in the same spirit they forbid themselves to work. As a provisional microsociety, they meant to live out the future in the present—in a future-present where the tools of mastery already in place in the most advanced societies would sooner or later make work redundant and leisure unlimited. This was the material base on which they floated their vision of a world of constructed situations; drifting through Paris, they looked for that world, and for their next meal.

The LI believed that by replacing work and entertainment with the dérive, art with détournement, and the productive social roles still enforced by a society living in the past-present with a “role of pure consumption”—the consumption, the LI meant, of “its time”—it could “reinvent everything each day.” Reinvent everything, or lose everything—as Debord said in 1972 (when the LI, in its day a group known mostly to itself, was an experiment Debord could imagine only he remembered), “Time frightens . . . it is made of qualitative jumps, irreversible choices, occasions which will never return.”

That was the burden assumed by those who committed themselves to a life of permanent novelty. Each day the members of the LI would walk the
streets not as prisoners of wages and prices, not as employees, shoppers, or tourists, but as travelers in a labyrinth revealed by their wish to find it. Each day they would case the spectacles of art and advertising, news and history, pillage bits and pieces, and make them speak in new tongues, in a counter-language, in every instance leaving a small hole in the great spectacle of social life, at least as it governed the group’s own space and time. Playing a “game of freedom”—a “systematic questioning,” Debord said, “of all the diversions and works of a society, a total critique of its idea of happiness”—the LI would become “the masters and possessors of their own lives.”

It was in fact a desperate search, in a utopia that contained its own contradiction, product of a wish that at once went beyond art and found itself returned to it: “When freedom is practiced in a closed circle,” Debord wrote in 1959, looking back on the LI in his film
Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps
(On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time), “it fades into a dream, becomes a mere representation of itself.” What looked like freedom might be no more than parole, Wolman wrote bitterly to the rest of the group in early 1953, after they rejected Debord’s plan for an attack on a girls’ reform school: “of course you dream at night if you can always sleep but life threatens there are cops at every turn and by the signs of the bistros the girls your age are scarred by youth.” It was a cruel search: “What was missing,” Debord said, “was felt as irretrievable. The extreme uncertainties of subsisting without working made excesses necessary and breaks definitive.” One after another, those who gathered around Debord were tossed out or dropped away. “Suicide carried off many,” he said in 1978, in his film
In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni,
then quoting
Mémoires
as it had quoted
Treasure Island:
“ ‘Drink and the devil took care of the rest.’ ” But from 1952 to 1957, as long as the LI lasted, others always took their place. You can see them, the International fully present around a single table, as the idea was set forth once again: revolution begins in a wish for right, which is a wish for justice, which is a wish for harmony, which is a wish for beauty. We cannot live without beauty, but art can no longer provide it. Art is the lie we are no longer living, and it is the trick, the false promise of beauty, the compensation for the destruction of harmony and right, that keeps everyone else from living. As a trick art must be suppressed, and as a promise it must be
realized
—and that is the key to revolution. Art must be superseded, and we, who have suppressed art in our own space and time, can make it happen. The new beauty can only be a beauty of
situation,
which is to say provisional, and
lived . . .

The Situationist International was founded on the conviction that this closed circle could be opened: that this new world, at first the private, almost abstract discovery of a separate few, could be explored, explained, publicized, and glamorized, until the demand for it would become overwhelming. Overwhelming, and common, as the situationists linked that demand to the inchoate manifestations of refusal and revolt they were sighting all over the planet—manifestations, they were certain, of an unfathomed dissatisfaction with the quality of life in modern society, scattered bits of a negation of its idea of happiness. They had a plan: drawing the finest talent from across Europe, then from around the globe, the SI would devote itself
simultaneously to “the ruthless criticism of all that exists” (Marx, 1843) and to “bringing to light forgotten desires, and creating entirely new ones” (Chtcheglov, 1953)—and then, the SI said in June 1958, in the first number of its journal
Internationale situationniste,
“we will wreck this world.” “Everyone must search for what he loves, for what attracts him,” they wrote then. On the way to the discovery of what you loved, you would find everything you hated, everything that blocked the way to what you loved. To walk down that street would be to find yourself on a terrain where the smallest obstacle demanded a total contestation of the existing order.

In the beginning this walk would take place as if on a battlefield in a war no one else understood was being fought. That was the burden passed to readers of “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” the SI’s virulent pamphlet on the riots in the black ghetto of Watts, California, in August 1965, a maelstrom that left more than thirty dead—and “the first rebellion in history,” the SI said with delight, pressing the dispute between love and the garbage disposal, “to justify itself with the argument that there was no air conditioning during a heatwave.” To most, it made no sense that when the far more impoverished blacks of Harlem and Newark were silent, the relatively comfortable blacks of Los Angeles were burning and looting, many with pride and joy. To the situationists, citing the boast of one Bobbi Hollon, a young Watts sociologist who swore “never to wash off the blood that splashed on her sandals during the rioting,” it made perfect sense. “Comfort,” they wrote, “will never be comfortable enough for those who seek what is not on the market.”

The SI was a group of critics; tipping back in their cafe chairs as others acted, they did not apologize. As Debord said years later, “Where there was fire, we carried gasoline.” “Theoretical criticism of modern society, in its most advanced forms, and criticism in acts of the same society already co-exist,” the SI said of Watts: “still separated, but both equally advancing towards the same realities, both talking about the same thing. These two critiques explain each other; neither is explicable without the other. Our theories of ‘survival’ and of ‘spectacle’ are illuminated and verified by actions which [today seem] incomprehensible . . . One day, these actions will in turn be illuminated by this theory.”

“The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy” was meant to be part of the event it analyzed. It was written in Paris in French, but translated into English and distributed in America before it appeared in Europe. The question the SI was raising would have been familiar to some in the U.S.A. in 1965: “How,” the situationists asked, in language little different from that of the 1962 Port Huron Statement, the founding paper of Students for a Democratic Society, “do people make history, starting from conditions pre-established to dissuade them from intervening in it?” But the answer the situationists gave might as well have come from Mars: “Looting is the
natural
response to the society of abundance—the society not of natural and human abundance, but of the abundance only of commodities . . . The looting of the Watts district was the most direct realization of the distorted principle, ‘To each according to his false needs’ . . . [but] real desires began to find expression in festival, in the
potlatch
of destruction . . . For the first time it is not poverty but material abundance that must be dominated.” This was delirious, and also seductive: seductive because it was telling. It was, the SI thought, the battlefield, and from June 1958 to September 1969 the pages of
Internationale situationniste
plotted its frontiers.

The situationists tried to see themselves as they saw the people of Watts: confronted with “the reality of a capitalism and a technology that render the individual powerless, except if he is a thief or a terrorist” (words written in 1987 by Stanley Hoffmann, distinguished professor of history, but in 1965 unthinkable outside small circles of fanatics). Thus they practiced intellectual terrorism, and inseparable from that practice was the theft of intellectual property. As a field guide, the pages of their journal were also a laboratory, a testing ground for the SI’s experiments with the counter-language, with détournement—which the situationists meant to move from new speech balloons on comic strips to a critique so magically true it would turn the words of its enemies back on themselves, forcing new speech even out of the mouths of the guardians of good and right. Like the dérive, this was the aesthetic occupation of enemy territory, a raid launched to seize the familiar and turn it into the other, a war waged on a field of action without boundaries and without rules; when in 1962 the SI discovered that one Wolfgang Neuss, a Berlin actor, had “perpetrated a most suggestive act of sabotage . . . by taking an ad in the paper
Der Abend,
giving away the identity of a killer in a television detective serial that had been keeping the public in suspense for weeks,” the group gleefully placed the tiny event on the same plane as it would the Watts riots. Making meaning—or unmaking it—went hand in hand with making history. Détournement was a politics of subversive quotation, of cutting the vocal cords of every empowered speaker, social symbols yanked through the looking glass, misappropriated words and pictures diverted into familiar scripts and blowing them up. “Ultimately,” Debord and Wolman had said in 1956, “any sign”—any street, advertisement, painting, text, any representation of a society’s idea of happiness—“is susceptible to conversion into something else, even its opposite.”