Lipstick Traces (25 page)

What if you could really make it happen? The spectacle was itself a work of art, an economy of false needs elevated into a tableau of frozen desires, true desires reduced to a cartoon of twitching needs. Spreading the bad paper of détournement until it began to turn up everywhere, the SI would devalue the currency of the spectacle, and the result would be a fatal inflation. Then a penny could be a fortune. The détournement of the right sign, in the right place at the right time, could spark a mass reversal of perspective. The one-way communication of the spectacle reduced all other speech to babble, but now the spectacle would fall back on itself; it would sound like babble, and everyone would see through it. The reversible connecting factor would be grasped, the string would be pulled, the tables would be turned, every yes
would become a no, every truth would dissolve in doubt, and everything would change. Then the SI, having styled itself “an obscure conspiracy of unlimited demands,” “a general staff
that does not want troops,”
would realize its dream of a New Jerusalem by disappearing into it: into a riot of social glossolalia, where the “freedom to say everything” would be inseparable from “the freedom to do everything.”
“We will only organize the detonation,”
the SI promised in 1963. “The free explosion must escape us and any other control forever.” And then
Mémoires
could be happily forgotten, as if it had never been. As a memoir that was also a prophecy, the book would have situated itself in advance as an artifact that, once realized, would remain as unknown as it would have proven itself fecund: the secret history of a time to come.

It was, it turned out, a sort of map to a territory that had ceased to exist, an account of adventures that had taken place there. “There was, then, on the left bank of the river—one cannot dip one’s foot twice in the same river, or touch a perishable substance twice in the same state—a neighborhood where the negative held court.” So Debord said to his camera in 1978, when the time to come had passed. “There,” he wrote a year later, “in 1952, in Paris, four or five unworthy people decided to search for the supercession of art.” He did not explain what this meant, or rather he explained in a distant way, putting quotes around another phrase one could have found floating in
Mémoires:
“The supercession of art is the ‘Northwest Passage’ of the geography of real life, so often sought for more than a century, a search beginning especially in self-destroying modern poetry.”

Debord was not, a quarter-century after the four or five had begun their search for transcendence, talking about poetry, not as one usually understands the word; he was talking about “social revolution,” a complete transformation of life as people actually lived it, every day. He was talking about what he had glimpsed in the insurrection of May ’68—a happenstance, he was now arguing, a month of noise, whose prefiguration could be seen in the interrupted narratives and fragmented representations of
Mémoires,
all transposed back into the vanished daily life of the four or five, the provisional microsociety. Recapturing the language of that self-destroying modern poetry, not to write it but to live it out and set it loose in the world—that, Debord was saying, was what the LI had been about. “Finishing off art; declaring in the heart of a cathedral that God was dead; plotting to blow up the Eiffel Tower—such were the scandals occasionally offered up by those whose way of life was the real scandal.” “The domain we mean to replace and
fulfill
is poetry,” the SI said in 1958; the revolution the SI wanted was going to “realize” poetry, and “realizing poetry means nothing less than simultaneously and inseparably creating events and their languages.” This was the future, and also the past, the whole world: “the moment of true poetry brings all the unsettled debts of history back into play.”

“The situationists want to
forget
about the past,” they said as they began, but they never did; the past was a treasure chest, now the lock, now the treasure. Michèle Bernstein was a member of the LI and the SI almost from the beginning to almost the end; in 1983 she sat in her airy living room in England and explained. “Everyone is the son of many fathers,” she said. “There was the father we hated, which was surrealism. And there was the father we loved, which was dada. We were the children of both.” They were “enfants perdus,” Debord often said, lost children, and so they claimed any fathers in whose faces they could recognize their own: the surrealists, the dadaists, the failed revolutionaries of the first third of the twentieth century, the Communards, the young Karl Marx, Saint-Just, medieval heretics—and all, as Debord and the others began talking in the 1950s, were moribund, forgotten, memories and rumors, manqué, maudit. All were, at best, legends—to the LI and the SI, part of a legend of freedom.

Moved forward through the 1950s and 1960s by Debord’s groups, given new names and a new shape, this was finally a legend almost too old to understand, let alone explain: a legend, Debord would helplessly, pathetically say in 1979, of “an Athens, a Florence, from which no one will be excluded, reaching to all the corners of the earth”—once again, as never before. Back, back, to a new Athens, a new Florence—and there, as Richard Huelsenbeck prophesied backward in Berlin in 1920, crowds would gather around every dialogue, dramas would be enacted in every street, and we would find ourselves in Homeric times. There, then, as Edmund Wilson prophesied forward
in Paris in 1922, we would discover for what drama our setting was the setting. Poetry would be realized: Lautréamont’s call, made in 1870, for a poetry “made by all.” We would feel the will to speak; discover what it was we wanted to say; say it; be understood; win a response. All at once we would create events and their languages, and live in permanence within that paradise. “We have to multiply poetic subjects and objects,” Debord wrote in 1957, in the founding paper of the SI, “and we have to organize games of these poetic objects among these poetic subjects. This is our entire program, which is essentially transitory. Our situations will be ephemeral, without a future: passageways.”

At its limit, those words are the legend of freedom: the promise that one’s words and acts will float free forever. Those words are themselves poetry; they can stay right where they are, in perfect balance, or they can lead anywhere, a motionless cause. In pursuit of a motionless cause—an idea of transformation so abstract it could hold its shape until the world was ready to be changed by it—the LI and the SI tried to act out a legend of freedom, and at the most that is all they are now. Always, no matter how incisive their ruthless critiques of whatever existed, there was that element of abstraction: an element that gave those critiques (whether applied by the LI to Guatemala in 1954 or by the SI to Watts in 1965 or France in May 1968) a bewitching, negative power, the hint of an event and a language to come, which still keeps the story the groups tried to tell alive. As I tell the story, it all begins, and must be judged against, what once happened in a nightclub and was returned to another—just as what happened in those nightclubs must be judged against what for certain moments was taken out of nightclubs, written on walls, shouted, played out in buildings and streets that were suddenly seen as never before. From one perspective the line is easy to draw, just a line—for example, the LI’s 1953 graffiti “
NEVER WORK
,” which reappeared as May ’68 graffiti, and was rewritten in 1977 for the Sex Pistols’ “Seventeen”: “We don’t work / I just feed / That’s all I need.” But that connection—a one-line LI manifesto, as featured in one-time situationist Christopher Gray’s
Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International
and passed down by Gray’s friends Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid to Johnny Rotten—is tradition as arithmetic. To find its story one has to disrupt the continuities of a tradition, even the discontinuities of a smoky, subterranean tradition, with a certain simultaneity. For example: if in pursuit of a negation of their society’s idea of happiness the Sex Pistols found themselves drawn again and again to the verge of dada glossolalia, into the realm of self-destroying modern poetry,
Mémoires
reached the same spot on purpose; though the convergence was no accident, neither was it exactly the result of a transference. Henri Lefebvre’s words are worth recalling: “To the degree that modernity has a meaning, it is this: it carries within itself, from the beginning, a radical negation—Dada, this event which took place in a Zurich cafe.” Lefebvre was making an argument, not posing a riddle; this negation, he was saying, had persisted, not as an art tradition canalized into an invulnerable future, but as an unsettled debt of history, extending into an unresolved past. It didn’t matter that as Lefebvre spoke in 1975 the Sex Pistols were forming, or that neither could ever acknowledge the other, as Lefebvre and Debord once acknowledged each other as comrades in an attempt to make a revolution out of everyday life: the Sex Pistols, taking the stage as an instinctive cultural impulse, with unknown roots in
Mémoires,
a studied cultural thesis, brought the debt back into play. As they brought it back into play, they increased it—and then, as soon as they consented to disappear from history, the debt according to its terms made them, too, a legend of freedom.

That bad paper is the only currency in this tale: lost children seek their fathers, and fathers seek their lost children, but nobody really looks like anybody else. So all, fixed on the wrong faces, pass each other by: this is the drift of secret history, a history that remains secret even to those who make it, especially to those who make it. In the Sex Pistols’ hands, and in the hands of those who turned up in their wake, all this appeared as a blind groping toward a new story, driven by the instinctive dada suspicion that ordinary language could not tell it. In Debord’s book, which presented itself as a groping, yet so carefully arranged that a lightly constructed page could have the same effect as a violent pause in a piece of music, it was a conscious attempt to use dada language to tell the story that language had passed down to him: a story, and a language, that contained the most abstract and ephemeral legend of freedom he knew.

It was a legend, Debord might have thought as he cut and pasted in 1957, that was part of a past, and part of a future, he had helped make. He had
lived it; whatever dada had been, now, from page to page in
Mémoires,
it was something else. Once, the legend had it, it was an experiment in self-destroying modern poetry. Now it was the struggle of a small band, moved by the notion that the language of self-destroying modern poetry was a key to social revolution, to raise fragments of experience (“The evening, Barbara” “our talk is full of booze” “Lights, shadows, figures,” one could pick out as
Mémoires
began) to the level of the book’s epigraph. “Let the dead bury the dead, and mourn them,” Debord quoted Marx, Marx writing in 1843 to his friend Arnold Ruge, just as Marx began by quoting Matthew, who was quoting Jesus, Marx then following with words Debord now made his own: “Our kind will be the first to blaze a trail into a new life.”