Lipstick Traces (4 page)

There is an alchemy at work. An unacknowledged legacy of desire, resentment, and dread has been boiled down, melted down, to yield a single act of public speech that will, for some, overturn what they have taken for granted, thought they wanted, decided to settle for. It was, it turned out, a twisted story.

This book is about a single, serpentine fact: late in 1976 a record called “Anarchy in the U.K.” was issued in London, and this event launched a transformation of pop music all over the world. Made by a four-man rock ’n’ roll band called the Sex Pistols, and written by singer Johnny Rotten, the song distilled, in crudely poetic form, a critique of modern society once set out by a small group of Paris-based intellectuals. First organized in 1952 as the Lettrist International, and refounded in 1957 at a conference of European avant-garde artists as the Situationist International, the group gained its greatest notoriety during the French revolt of May 1968, when the premises
of its critique were distilled into crudely poetic slogans and spray-painted across the walls of Paris, after which the critique was given up to history and the group disappeared. The group looked back to the surrealists of the 1920s, the dadaists who made their names during and just after the First World War, the young Karl Marx, Saint-Just, various medieval heretics, and the Knights of the Round Table.

My conviction is that such circumstances are primarily odd. For a gnomic, gnostic critique dreamed up by a handful of Left Bank cafe prophets to reappear a quarter-century later,
to make the charts,
and then to come to life as a whole new set of demands on culture—this is almost transcendently odd.

Connections between the Sex Pistols, dada, the so grandly named Situationist International, and even forgotten heresies are not original with me. In the early days of London punk, one could hardly find an article on the topic without the word “dada” in it: punk was “like dada,” everybody said, though nobody said why, let alone what that was supposed to mean. References to Malcolm McLaren’s supposed involvement with the spectral “SI” were insider currency in the British pop press, but that currency didn’t seem to buy anything.

Still, all this sounded interesting—even if for me “dada” was barely a word, only vaguely suggesting some bygone art movement (Paris in the Golden Twenties? something like that); even if I’d never heard of the Situationist International. So I began to poke around, and the more I found, the less I knew. All sorts of people had made these connections, but no one had made anything of them—and soon enough my attempt to make something of them led me from the card catalogue at the university library in Berkeley to the dada founding site in Zurich, from Gil J Wolman’s bohemian flat in Paris to Michèle Bernstein’s seventeenth-century parsonage in the south of England, from Alexander Trocchi’s junkie pad in London back to books that had stood on library shelves for thirty years before I checked them out. It took me to microfilm machines unspooling the unambiguous public speech of my own childhood—and it is queer to crank through old newspapers
for the confirming date of some fragment of a private obsession one hopes to turn into public speech, to be distracted by the ads, made so clumsy and transparent by time, to feel that, yes, the past is another country, a nice place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there, to happen upon the first dispatches on the overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala, to read the dead news as if it were a crummy parody of CIA disinformation, and then to pick up the day’s paper and follow the consequences: faces, says the reporter in 1984, three decades after Arbenz passed into microfilm, now removed from questionable citizens by means of bayonets, then hung on trees to dry into masks. Time marches on.

This was no heroic quest; some of those books deserved to sit for another thirty years. More than anything it was play, or an itch that needed to be scratched: the pursuit of a real story, or the pursuit of a non sequitur for the pleasures only a non sequitur can bring. Research makes time march forward, it makes time march backward, and it also makes time stand still. Two years and ten thousand miles later, I had before me the first numbers of
Potlatch,
a Lettrist International newsletter that was given away in Paris in the mid-1950s; in its mimeographed pages, “criticism of architecture” was presented as the key to the criticism of life. Renamed “M. Sing-Sing,” the great architect Le Corbusier was damned as a “builder of slums.” His Radiant City was dismissed as an authoritarian experiment in social engineering, a huddle of “vertical ghettos” and tower-block “morgues”: the true function of Le Corbusier’s celebrated “machines for living,” one read in
Potlatch,
was to produce machines to live in them. “Decor determines gestures,” said the LI; “we will build passionate houses.” With a megalomania that belied its smudgy typescripts, the LI was writing words that “Anarchy in the U.K.” would put in Bob Geldof’s mouth—that was easy enough to imagine. But remembering my Guatemalan time travels in the microfilm room, I wondered what, if anything, it meant for the Sex Pistols’ story that in the summer of 1954 the
Potlatch
writers (Gil J Wolman, Michèle Bernstein, the four others who at that moment were putting their names on the pages) had fixed on the CIA’s ouster of the reformist Arbenz as a central social fact, as a metaphor—a means to the language of the “old world” they said they were going to destroy, of the “new civilization” they said they were going to create.

Here were prescient versions of the next week’s news, as
Potlatch
brought Saint-Just back from the guillotine to render a “judgment in advance” on Arbenz’s refusal to arm Guatemalan workers against the inevitable coup (“Those who make a revolution by halves only dig their own graves”)—plus incomprehensible references to the Catharist heretics of thirteenth-century France and the latest discoveries in particle physics. And here too was the first note of what would become a recurrent situationist theme: the idea of “the vacation” as a sort of loop of alienation and domination, a symbol of the false promises of modern life, a notion that as CLUB MED—A CHEAP HOLIDAY IN OTHER PEOPLE’S MISERY would become graffiti in Paris in May 1968, and then, it seemed, turn into “Holidays in the Sun.” “Following Spain or Greece, Guatemala can now count itself among those countries suitable for tourism,” the LI wrote coolly, noting that the firing squads of the new government were already cleaning the streets of Guatemala City. “Someday we hope to make the trip.”

The question of ancestry in culture is spurious. Every new manifestation in culture rewrites the past, changes old maudits into new heroes, old heroes into those who should have never been born. New actors scavenge the past for ancestors, because ancestry is legitimacy and novelty is doubt—but in all times forgotten actors emerge from the past not as ancestors but as familiars. In the 1920s in literary America it was Herman Melville; in the rock ’n’ roll 1960s it was Mississippi bluesman Robert Johnson of the 1930s; in the entropic Western 1970s it was the carefully absolutist German critic Walter Benjamin of the 1920s and 1930s. In 1976 and 1977, and in the years to follow, as symbolically remade by the Sex Pistols, it was, perhaps, dadaists, lettrists, situationists, and various medieval heretics.

Listening to the records, it was hard to tell. Looking at the connections others had made and taken for granted (check a fact, it wasn’t there), I found myself caught up in something that was less a matter of cultural genealogy, of tracing a line between pieces of a found story, than of making the story up. As it emerged out of the shadow of known events it was a marginal story, each manifestation claiming, in its brief moment, the whole
world, and then relegated to a long number in the Dewey decimal system. Though almost silence as against the noise of wars and revolutions, it was a story seemingly endemic to the century, a story that repeatedly speaks and repeatedly loses its voice; it was, it seemed, a voice that only had to speak to lose itself.

As I tried to follow this story—the characters changing into each other’s clothes until I gave up trying to make them hold still—what appealed to me were its gaps, and those moments when the story that has lost its voice somehow recovers it, and what happens then. Long before I tracked down
Potlatch,
I’d come across an advertisement for it, titled “The Gilded Legend,” dated 1954, a page in
Les Lèvres nues,
a slick-paper, Belgian neo-surrealist review. “The century has known a few great incendiaries,” the ad read. “Today they’re dead, or finishing up preening in the mirror . . . Everywhere, youth (as it calls itself) discovers a few blunted knives, a few defused bombs, under thirty years of dust and debris; shaking in its shoes, youth hurls them upon the consenting rabble, which salutes it with its oily laugh.” Promising that
Potlatch
knew a way out of this dead end, the LI publicist was talking about what fragments remained of surrealist knives and dada bombs; now it seems to me that the Lettrist International (just a few young people who for a few years banded together under that name in a search for a way to amuse themselves, to change the world) was itself a bomb, unnoticed in its own time, which would explode decades later as “Anarchy in the U.K.” and “Holidays in the Sun.”

Such a claim is not so much an argument about the way the past makes the present as it is a way of suggesting that the entanglement of now and then is fundamentally a mystery.
Potlatch,
as it described itself, drew “its title from the name, used among the Indians of North America, of a pre-commercial form of the circulation of goods, founded on the reciprocity of sumptuary gifts”; the “non-saleable goods such a free bulletin can distribute are previously unpublished desires and questions, and only their thorough analysis by others can constitute a return gift.” This book grew out of a desire to come to grips with the power of “Anarchy in the U.K.” as music, to understand its fecundity as culture; it may be that the key to those questions is not that the Sex Pistols could have traced their existence to the LI’s gift, but that, blindly, they returned the gift—and in a form those who first
offered it, aesthetes who would have been appalled to see their theories turned into cheap commodities, would never recognize. If “Anarchy in the U.K.” truly did distill an old, forgotten social critique, that is interesting; if, in a new “potlatch,” in a conversation of a few thousand songs, “Anarchy in the U.K.” brought that critique to life—that is something far more than interesting.

This story, if it is a story, doesn’t tell itself; once I’d glimpsed its outlines, I wanted to shape the story so that every fragment, every voice, would speak in judgment of every other, even if the people behind each voice had never heard of the others. Especially if they hadn’t; especially if, in “Anarchy in the U.K.,” a twenty-year-old called Johnny Rotten had rephrased a social critique generated by people who, as far as he knew, had never been born. Who knew what else was part of the tale? If one can stop looking at the past and start listening to it, one might hear echoes of a new conversation; then the task of the critic would be to lead speakers and listeners unaware of each other’s existence to talk to one another. The job of the critic would be to maintain the ability to be surprised at how the conversation goes, and to communicate that sense of surprise to other people, because a life infused with surprise is better than a life that is not.

My wish to make sense of the outline I began with became a wish to make sense of the confusion the outline immediately produced: to make sense of such cryptic pronouncements, mysteries blithely claiming all the weight of history, as that made by Marxist sociologist Henri Lefebvre in 1975—

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.

Or that of the situationists in 1963: “The moment of real poetry brings all the unsettled debts of history back into play.” Was that line, I wondered, a clue to the promise of the Berlin dadaists in 1919?

dada is the only savings bank that pays interest in eternity.

Or to the appeal of the Sex Pistols’ most famous slogan, “NO FUTURE”? To the no-future chill in the face of lettrist Serge Berna as he posed for the
camera in 1952? To the manifesto of one Guy-Ernest Debord, running a few pages on in the same obscure volume that carried Berna’s portrait: “The art of the future will be the overthrow of situations, or nothing”? Or to the boast the situationists left behind in 1964:

While present-day impotence rambles on about the belated project of “getting into the twentieth century,” we think it is high time to put an end to the
dead time
that has dominated this century, and to finish the Christian era with the same stroke. Here as elsewhere, it’s a matter of breaking the bounds of measurement. Ours is the best effort so far to
get out
of the twentieth century.

We are already a long way from a pop song—but a pop song was supposed to be a long way from “I am an antichrist.” We are already at a point where an appeal to rock ’n’ roll will tell us almost nothing worth knowing, though this is, finally, a rock ’n’ roll story. Real mysteries cannot be solved, but they can be turned into better mysteries.

His teeth were ground down to points. So one heard, when Johnny Rotten rolled his r’s; when in 1918 draft dodger Richard Huelsenbeck told a polite Berlin audience gathered to hear a lecture on a new tendency in the arts that “We were for the war and Dadaism today is still for war. Life must hurt—there aren’t enough cruelties”; when in 1649 the Ranter Abiezer Coppe unfurled his
Fiery Flying Roll
(“Thus saith the Lord,
I inform you, that I overturn, overturn, overturn”);
when in 1961 the Situationist International issued a prophecy, a “warning to those who build ruins: after the town planners will come the last troglodytes of the slums and the ghettos. They will know how to build. The privileged ones from the dormitory towns will only know how to destroy. Much can be expected from the meeting of these two forces: it will define the revolution.”