Lipstick Traces (51 page)

The LI, Debord said, lived “on the margins of the economy” and claimed “a role of pure consumption”; Isou said that without production there is no commodity one might consume. No commodity, the LI answered: time. It had stopped; the LI’s concern was to make it pass. Running above “general strike” in
I.L.
no. 2 was “manifesto,” signed by seven men and four women (Sarah, Berna, P.-J. Berlé, Brau, Dahou, Debord, Linda, Françoise Lejare, Mension, Papai, and Wolman), the grandest cohort the LI would ever muster, only three of whom would make it to the next year:

lettrist provocation always serves to pass the time, revolutionary thought lies nowhere else, we pursue our little racket in the restricted Beyond of literature, for lack of anything better, it is naturally to manifest ourselves that we write manifestos, a free-spirited way of life is a very beautiful thing, but our desires were fleeting and deceptive, it’s said that youth is systematic, the weeks reproduce themselves in a straight line, our meetings are by chance and our chancy contacts are lost behind the fragile defense of words, the world turns as if nothing has happened, in sum, the human condition no longer gives us pleasure.

Like Mension, the group went to the edge of nihilism, tried to turn away, and found the way blocked:

. . . all those who sustain anything merely contribute to police work, we know that all extant ideas and forms of behavior are insufficient, present-day society is thus divided between lettrists and informers . . . . there are no nihilists, only impotents. almost everything is forbidden us. the détournement of minors

—and here the word means “subversion,” “leading astray,” “corruption,” “seduction”—

and the use of drugs are pursued in the same way as all our more general efforts to transcend the void, many of our comrades are in jail for theft, we protest the punishment inflicted on those who have realized that it is absolutely unnecessary to work, we refuse to talk about it. human relationships must be grounded in passion, if not terror.

Twenty-six years later, in 1979, Wolman published a thick tabloid he called
Duhring Duhring.
On each of the sixty-four pages are fifty-four tightly cropped faces, more than three thousand in all: commonplace images of sitting politicians, dead statesmen, movie stars, subjects of famous paintings and sculptures, saints, comic-strip characters, revolutionaries, authors, every variety of celebrity. Each face is scored vertically with a blank strip, and then across the eyes with a word (“socialism,” “classes,” “owners,” “workers,” in one series; “embryo,” “territory,” “contempt,” “narrative,” in another). Many of the faces reappear throughout the production, picking up new words, and vice versa; the elements float across the newsprint.

The endless, seemingly random juxtapositions take in any story a daily might run. After a few pages, the reader is back in the middle of one of Debord’s definitions from
The Society of the Spectacle,
the spectacle as the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, even if that discourse is here reduced to babble, and its mouthpieces, the empowered and their stand-ins, the recuperators and the recuperated, left nearly unrecognizable, their identities scratched out by their social roles. It is a shaggy-dog story: if one puts down Wolman’s all-purpose gazette and picks up any other, words and faces leap out of their official contexts, current events and settled history now a scrabble of BrezhnevinvasionUncleScroogerights-Napoleonstruggle, all referents dissolved into a meaningless whole. The only irony—the tail that wags the dog—is that if this is a picture of public speech, and public speech is babble, that babble nevertheless rules the world.

Page from (Gil) Joseph Wolman,
Durhing Durhing
, 1979

There is a motto on the first page: “we were against the power of words—against power.” But
Duhring Duhring
is a permanent dada newspaper, which is to say immediately present, so I told Wolman I didn’t understand the use of the past tense: “we were.” “Because ‘we’ were the LI,” he said. “Because that time was real time.”

For a moment, in Wolman’s flat in 1985, time went backward: “He was twenty-seven,” read Wolman’s
Potlatch
obituary. He and Debord founded the group; for years, they outlasted everybody else. But in January 1957, four months after representing the LI at the First World Congress of Free Artists in Alba, Italy, where the first plans for a new, truly international organization were made, Wolman too was excluded.

In Alba, Wolman set forth the perspectives of the LI to such would-be planners of imaginary towns as Constant Nieuwenhuys of Holland, Asger Jorn of Denmark, Guiseppe Pinot-Gallizio and Ettore Sottsass Jr. of Italy, and Pravoslav Rada of Czechoslovakia, most of them painters with agents and galleries: “The course of negation and destruction that in an ever-accelerating manner is overtaking all traditional forms of artistic creation is irreversible.” Art was breaking up over a contradiction that was less aesthetic than social: “the result of new possibilities of action that can be seen all over the world.”

A global upheaval in economics and science was imminent. In the East as in the West, the means of production remained in the hands of ruling classes, but the question of production was almost settled. Soon the only limits on production would be those of social control, and those limits would not hold. What was at stake were the means of transformation. Wolman was saying that work was going to wither away in the face of technology, that abundance would be measured not in commodities but in time, that leisure was the real revolutionary question. Leisure would soon be the axis of civilization: a realm of potential happiness so complete that it would test the power of all the mechanisms of alienation to dominate it. A war would be fought over the meaning of life. If leisure was conquered, civilization would turn into a prison disguised as a pleasure dome. But if leisure was not conquered, it would serve as a base for a practice of freedom so explosive that no known social order could ever satisfy it.

In other words, as a social possibility the modernist dream of unlimited
mastery over the domain of necessity was already the only real aesthetic fact. Utopia, someone’s utopia, was near. Traditional art existed to map utopia, to represent moments of possibility or totality that in the domain of necessity came and went as phantoms—“For art comes to you proposing to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake,” said Walter Pater in 1873—but now the field of utopia was anyone’s everyday life, and moments could be made into history. That was why (as one could have read in
Potlatch
no. 5, a few inches down from the item on the Fujinomyia lipstick war) poetry had to be “seen in faces,” and why it was necessary “to create new faces,” why poetry had to be found “in the form of cities,” and why the LI promised to “construire de bouleversantes,” to construct by overturning: “The new beauty will be a beauty of
SITUATION
,
provisional
and lived.” People would live in their own cathedrals, or they would live in their own prisons; self-contained by a page or a frame, the prison was now all any poem or painting could invoke. Traditional art could only recuperate possibility, separating it from totality. To communicate this fact, the page had to be blank, the canvas had to be blank, the screen had to be blank: proof that art could only be walked and talked.

Such a proof matched its field. Everyday life was also blank. It was a government of stadiums and television programs, habit and routine, received gestures orchestrating a hegemonic conversation in which no one’s
words were one’s own. If art held itself back from the empty space of everyday life, it would disappear into its own emptiness—but if art disappeared, the impulse to create one’s own utopia would go with it, and time would stop for good. The conclusion was plain: art could save the world, but only if artists allowed the world to save art.

One version of utopia, of the mastery of space and time, was already present, Wolman said: the basic modernist nightmare, fruit of all the plans drawn up in the 1920s for a new city that would have made Haussmann’s Paris look like it was built by the Communards. On the terms of the spectacle, utopia was Le Corbusier’s “Radiant City,” the prison without walls —the “Christian and capitalist way of life” suspended in “definitive harmony,” Wolman said, the city of guilt and work presented as an “unchangeable fact.” Against this blinding light, Wolman used a line by Jorn to affirm the shadow city the LI had discovered on the dérive: “new, chaotic jungles, sparking experiences without purpose, devoid of meaning.” This city would be made not for the circulation of commodities but for the passing of time. It would be a playground for acts that were not cowardly because they could not be justified, a shifting of settings and conflicts that would kill off the characters in a tragedy in twenty-four hours—and who could resist it? It sounded like fun, wrecking the world, putting it back together the next day. “We will not work to prolong the mechanical civilizations that ultimately lead to boring leisure,” Chtcheglov had written. “We propose to invent new, changeable decors.”

Le Corbusier, drawing for the Voisin Plan, 1925

Haunted by key images from ancient times, our minds have remained far behind the sophistication of our machinery. Attempts to fuse modern science into new myths have gone nowhere. As a result, abstraction has invaded all the arts—contemporary architecture most of all. Pure plasticity, telling no story and making no movement, soothes the eye, and freezes it . . .

Past societies offered people an absolute truth and incontestable mythic symbols. The appearance of the idea of
relativity
in the modern mind allows one to glimpse the
EXPERIMENTAL
aspect of the next civilization, although that word doesn’t quite serve: say, more fluid, more “fun.” On the bases of this mobile civilization, architecture will be, at least in the beginning, a means of experimenting with a thousand ways of modifying life, with a view towards a synthesis today found only in legends.

This, Wolman was saying, was real leisure—leisure not as a compensation for work, not as a version of it, but as its annihilation—and this was why leisure was the real revolutionary question. To make this city of play, artists would have to reject the passive abstraction of all objectified, separate art, and leave their objects behind: “creation,” Wolman told his audience, “can now be nothing less than” the “complete construction of an atmosphere.”