Lipstick Traces (50 page)

Turning up again and again in the LI memoirs, always without attribution, in the group’s writing the phrase first appeared in
Potlatch
no. 16, 26 January 1955, in Debord’s “Educational Value,” a detourned dialogue between unnamed authors. The quote was credited two issues later to an oration by the great French preacher Jacques Benique Bossuet (1627–1704), who gave elegies for long-dead saints as if he were present to celebrate their funerals. This one was for St. Bernard—Bernard de Clairvaux, who in 1146 launched the Second Crusade. “We will not go on that crusade,” Bernstein wrote in
La Nuit
in 1961, when she and Debord were living in the Clairvaux dead end in the Marais district, and Debord too might have been answering St. Bernard’s eight-hundred-year-old call in
In girum:
“Would we, perhaps, have been a little less lacking in pity if we had found activities that merited the use of our energy already awaiting us, already formed? But there was nothing of the kind. The sole cause we could support was one we had to define and lead ourselves.”

So they did it through autoterrorism, intensifying the oppositions they carried within themselves. The contrived rage of “general strike” marked a negative that could be transcended only by contriving visions of a different
life; the bathos of “Bernard, Bernard . . .” sent the visionaries into exile. That was the idea. On the symbolist terrain of the LI, Saint-Just’s time-to-come, his promise of happiness, collapsed into Bossuet’s promise of sorrow, his time-to-pass; the wish for novelty fought against the certainty that nothing was new under the sun. As a clash of metaphors it was almost an event, repeated every day. The LI believed the old world had to be changed because its time had stopped, but within the matrix of the group that meant to live in a new world, time moved too fast—and that contradiction was the LI’s purchase on the world. For the sake of a future explosion, the members of the LI subjected themselves to the pressure of implosion. It was salutary, they thought, separating the true from the false, people no less than ideas. “Il s’agit de se perdre,” Debord wrote in
I.L.
no. 2: “what’s at stake is disappearance”—or, “self-destruction.” “Our concern was not a literary school, a renewal of expression, a modernism,” Debord and Wolman wrote in “Why Lettrism?,”
Potlatch
no. 22, 9 September 1955. “At issue is a way of life, one which will continue to pass through many explorations, many provisional formulations, and which itself belongs only to the provisional . . . we are waiting for many people and events to come. We have the advantage of no longer expecting anything from known activities, known individuals, and known institutions.”

It’s not easy to go into exile within a world one means to change. If something more than madness or suicide is the real goal, isolation, especially the isolation of a group, has to be searched for. To find it, the LI didn’t set up a commune in the countryside, or hole up in someone’s parents’ apartment, like the student Maoists in Godard’s 1967 film
La Chinoise,
which should have been called “What I Did on My Summer Vacation.” Instead, pursuing the dérive, the “technique of displacement without goals,” the band drifted through the streets among everybody else. “The spectacle is permanent,” Debord wrote in
I.L.
no. 2; Haussmann’s Paris was a city founded in spectacle, so Debord and the rest took it as an image they could distort, that they could subject to a détournement in acts. Walking through the city in twos or threes or solo, looking for its “microclimates,” its unmarked zones of feeling, they tried to hear their own voices beckoning from doorways still a block away, to catch the echo of a dead end in their mouths.

As everyday life it was a mystical quest: “We are bored in the city, there is no longer any temple of the sun.” That was Chtcheglov’s language: “And you, forgotten, your memories ravaged by all the sorrow of the map of the world, stranded in the Red Caves of Pali-Kao, without music and without geography, no longer setting out for the hacienda
where the roots call up the child and the wine is drunk down to fables from an old almanac.
Now that game is lost. You’ll never see the hacienda.
The hacienda must be built.”
This was the language the LI used after Chtcheglov’s exclusion: “we like to think that those who sought the Grail weren’t dupes,” they wrote in “36 rue des Morillons,”
Potlatch
no. 8, 10 August 1954. “Their DÉRIVE is worthy of us . . . The religious makeup falls away. These knights of a mythic western were out for pleasure: a brilliant talent for losing themselves in play; a voyage into amazement; a love of speed; a terrain of relativity.” This was the language Debord used in
In girum,
almost a quarter-century later: “It was a drift to great days, where nothing resembled the old—and which never stopped. Surprising meetings, stunning obstacles, grand betrayals, perilous enchantments.”

“It’s unheard of, an adventure like this in the midst of the 20th century . . .”

—detail from Guy-Ernest Debord,
Mémoires,
1959

As bathos it was just drunks trying to walk and think at the same time. As a use of time it was the shifting of the city back into the primeval forest, then into a haunted house more modern than anything modern architects ever dreamed of, a game of freedom in which the goal was not to score but to remain on the field, to consciously position oneself between past and future. “You can never know which streets to take and which to avoid,” says the narrator in Paul Auster’s 1987 novel
In the Country of Last Things
—she is speaking from the future, when the city has collapsed into an anarchy of killer gangs and flagellant sects, but the state of mind she is forced to
bring to her city is the state of mind the LI chose to bring to its own. “Bit by bit,” she says, “the city robs you of certainty. There can never be any fixed point, and you can survive only if nothing is necessary to you. Without warning, you must be able to change, to drop what you are doing, to reverse. In the end, there is nothing that is not the case. As a consequence, you must learn how to read the signs . . . The essential thing is not to become inured. For habits are deadly. Even if it is for the hundredth time, you must encounter each thing as if you have never known it before. This is next to impossible, I realize, but it is an absolute rule.” And that too is Chtcheglov’s kind of language, because on the dérive he took the lead. In the detourned characterizations of
In girum
Debord may be Zorro, Lacenaire, or even General Custer at Little Big Horn; Chtcheglov, except for a moment when Debord makes him into King Ludwig II, the mad castle builder of Bavaria, is always Prince Valiant.

“The
dérive
(with its flow of acts, gestures, strolls, encounters),” Chtcheglov wrote to Debord and Bernstein in 1963, “was
to the totality
exactly what psychoanalysis (in the best sense) is to language. Let yourself go with the flow of words, says the analyst. He listens, until the moment when he rejects or modifies (one could say
detourns
) a word, an expression, or a definition . . . But just as analysis [as a treatment complete in itself] is almost always
contra-indicated,
so the continuous
dérive
”—the everyday life of the Fourierist Disneyland that Chtcheglov had proposed ten years before—“is dangerous to the extent that the individual, having gone too far (not without bases, but . . .) without defenses, is threatened with explosion, dissolution, disassociation, disintegration. And so the relapse into what is termed ‘ordinary life,’ which is to say, in reality, ‘petrified life’ . . . In 1953–1954, we drifted for three or four months at a time: that’s the extreme limit, the critical point. It’s a miracle it didn’t kill us. We had a constitution—a bad constitution—of iron.”

In 1963 Chtcheglov was writing from an insane asylum; he was full of doubt. But in 1953 there was no doubt at all. “You don’t fault a theme park for not being a cathedral” is common sense, whether applied to an adventure movie or to a nineteen-year-old member of a provisional microsociety; to expose that fault, to drop the old world into its maw, was the goal
Chtcheglov had set for the LI—the search for the theme park where he and everyone else would live in their own cathedrals. He was sure the dérive was the way to find that new city, just as Debord was sure the dérive was the way to generate the conviction that the old city had to be destroyed, or the way to discover who was worthy of the task and who wasn’t—as Debord loved to hear Lacenaire say in
Les Enfants du paradis,
“It takes all kinds to make a world—or unmake it.” Debord hung his metaphors in the air; Chtcheglov was the first to live them out. “The powers that be,” Debord said in
In girum,
“are still unable to measure what the swift passage of this man has cost them.”

Making his movie in 1978, Debord bypassed the obvious confirmation: news footage of thousands of ’68ers barricading streets Chtcheglov had once walked alone. Instead there was another comic strip: Prince Valiant is lost, fleeing thunder and rain, looking for shelter. “He finds a tavern frequented by travelers from distant, mysterious lands . . . and while outside the storm rages, here stories are told of fabulous places, of marvelous cities surrounded by great walls . . . meanwhile, a haggard-looking man approaches the tavern, bearing new drugs. (Next week:
ROME FALLS
.)”

LI sticker, December 1955

On the dérive the members of the LI met, separated, spread out, came together, and tried to write down what they found, to map what they were calling the “psychogeography” of where they had been. They looked for new streets, which meant the oldest streets, as if the streets they thought they knew were judging their unreadiness to understand the secrets the streets contained. The dérive was a, way of positing boredom: streets one had walked again and again. Détournement—which finally meant applying the reversible connecting factor to any posited subject or object—was a way of fighting off boredom, and of criticizing it. On the dérive, objective acceptance (“I love that street because it’s beautiful”) could turn into subjective refusal
(“That street is ugly because I hate it”), which could turn into a glimpse of utopia (“That street is beautiful because I love it”).

The LI wanted to create a city of possibilities in the heart of the city of the spectacle. First, though, the group had to create a city of negations: to escape the city’s social elements of work and art, of production and ideology, to function as their antimatter. The new city would be a psychogeographical amusement park; before that, it would be an affective black hole. “The spectacle says nothing more than ‘That which is good appears, that which appears is good,’ ” Debord wrote in
The Society of the Spectacle.
In the LI’s city there would be nothing that was not the case. Someday, the LI was sure, the one-eyed light of the spectacle would be sucked into the black hole as if it had never been.

Isou would have smiled over Mension’s “general strike”—after all, it was no more than a particularly mindless version of Youth Front, “Our Program” reduced to the “units of gratuitousness” Isou had identified as the only goods that youth possessed. It was old news—but there was a difference. Isou thought gratuitousness was worthless because it could not be integrated into the “circuit of exchange.” Mension was insisting that no less than the stories the LI told around its table—the legends of preverbal sound poetry, the invasion of Notre-Dame, the blank movie, the raid on Charlie Chaplin—gratuitousness was a key to the black hole.

Isou thought units of gratuitousness had at least a pseudo-exchange value: they could be exchanged socially. Youth was drowning itself in violence and resignation because it was “super-exploited by the seniority system”; that was why Isou called youth into the streets to change the world—to fight, as Debord would say in
In girum,
“for a place in a total revolution, or—they are sometimes the same—a better place on the wage scale.” In the arithmetic of Isou’s “nuclear economy,” the sum total of the units of gratuitousness youth expended in compensation for its “nonexistence” precisely equaled what youth had to renounce in order to exist—to win any place, fixed or wished, in the social order. But in “general strike” the LI was posing
a question Isou had ignored: what if one refused to renounce one’s units of gratuitousness—acts that were not cowardly because they could not be justified—no matter what place in the social order they might be exchanged for? What if one experienced gratuitousness as freedom? What if one broke the circuit of exchange?