Lipstick Traces (54 page)

“It wasn’t a question of loyalty,” Trocchi said; he raised his hands. “Guy has my loyalty. I loved the man.” Suddenly Trocchi turned away from me and shouted.
“Guy, Guy,”
he said, “
WHAT IS IT
?
I am talking to you now, even if you will never speak to me!”

We were in a fifth-floor walkup in a seedy section of Kensington. Trocchi had plans for screenplays, movies, a memoir; he made his living dealing third-class rare books out of a tiny stall on Portobello Road. His apartment was littered with syringes and busted ampules. The walls were hung with founding situationist Constant’s diagrams of his own new city: “In New Babylon, man has been freed from his burdens, builds life himself.” I copied the words into my notebook: this, I thought, was where the great project of transforming the world had ended up.

Even in the moment, the irony failed to cut very deeply, perhaps because Trocchi had already circled away from the great project. He was speaking again of its smallest version, where the desire to take over the world was first the desire to be in the world, a desire driven by the conviction that one cannot truly be in the world until the alienation of each from all has been vanquished, until necessity has been banished, until the world has been changed. Trocchi was talking again about the dérive—there, he said, for as long as it lasted, you were in the world as if you were changing it, and there were intimations of utopia everywhere you looked. “The difficulties of the dérive are those of freedom,” Debord wrote in 1956 in “Theory of the Dérive.” “It all rests on the belief that the future will precipitate an irreversible change in the behavior and the decor of present-day society. One day, we will construct cities for drifting . . . but with light retouching, one can utilize certain zones which already exist. One can utilize certain persons who already exist.” Even if he had been used, that was what Trocchi remembered most sweetly, so he talked about getting drunk, chasing oblivion into the black hole, the way out, the Northwest Passage. “There was a magical quality to Guy,” Trocchi said. He was almost smiling; the flux of emotion in the previous half-hour had confused both of us, but now he was happy. “Distances didn’t seem to matter to the man. Walking in London, in the daytime, at night, he’d bring me to a spot he’d found, and the place would begin to live. Some old, forgotten part of London. Then he’d reach back for a story, for a piece of history, as if he’d been born there. He’d quote from Marx, or
Treasure Island,
or De Quincey—do you know De Quincey?”

I used often, after I had taken opium, to wander forth, without much regarding the direction or the distance, to all the markets, and other parts of London, to which the poor resort on a Saturday night, for laying out their wages . . . Some of these rambles led me to great distances: for an opium-eater is too happy to observe the motion of time. And sometimes in my attempts to steer homewards, upon nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and headlands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphinx’s riddles of streets without thoroughfares,
as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters, and confound the intellects of hackney-coachmen. I could almost have believed, at times, that I must be the first discoverer of some of these
terras incognitae,
and doubted, whether they had yet been laid down in the modern charts of London. For all this, however, I paid a heavy price in distant years, when the human face tyrannized over my dreams, and the perplexities of my steps in London came back to haunt me.

By the summer of 1954 this was part of the LI’s myth—and just as the catacombs were really a symbol and the Northwest Passage was not really a place, the dérive too was now less a practice than a metaphor, capable of judging every word the LI wrote and, after that, every sentence the SI tried to pass. The LI believed in “continental drift” (geophysics today, but science fiction in 1954)—that is, as streets could be capes and headlands, and neighborhoods deserts or swamps, they all moved. They moved away from an unconsciously remembered wholeness—of “Pangaea,” the original supercontinent of two hundred million years ago, or “Nostratic,” the supposed common language of the Upper Paleolithic; of the Garden of Eden or Paris as a Commune—and into a dyslexia of separations. In his “Theory of the Dérive” Debord paused over a sociologist’s study on “the narrowness of the real Paris in which each individual lives,” citing the professor’s diagram of all the movements undertaken by one student in the course of an entire year: “With no deviations, her itinerary delineates a small triangle, the summits of which are the School of Political Science, her residence, and that of her piano teacher.” This, Debord said, was an example of “modern poetry, capable of provoking keen emotional reactions—in this case, indignation that it is possible to live like that.”

A year or so later, Debord cut up maps of Paris and pasted them into psychogeographical maps; they differ from the imaginary maps geographers have made of the fragmentation of Pangaea into the continents we take for granted only because Debord’s arrows point to unity as well as separation. But to recreate that unity—the whole world as a single round table—the separation had to be publicized. Before people would reject it, it had to be made undeniable. It had to be made into an event, and to be made into an event separation had to be intensified, turned into ruin and noise. The project
could begin, Debord wrote, with the construction of “an atmosphere of uneasiness”: with a small group of people, who might hitchhike “nonstop and without destination” during a transit strike to add to the confusion, or turn up on the streets in disguise, or publish plans for the raising of a house meant to be abandoned after its housewarming—“the greatest difficulty in such an undertaking is to convey through such apparently delirious proposals a sufficient degree of
serious seduction
 . . . We need to work toward flooding the market—even if for the moment only the intellectual market—with a mass of desires whose realization is not beyond the capacity of man’s present means of action on the material world, but only beyond the capacity of social organization as it stands.”

If the LI, playing its game of freedom, could spread desires for a way of life neither government nor the market could ever satisfy, then people would overturn them—or ignore them, finding satisfaction in a drift through the city’s Northwest Passage: “the future,” Debord said, “belongs to the passerby.” Psychogeography, as Asger Jorn defined it, was “the science fiction of urban planning”; maybe, to prove that separation was no more fated than the current status of the continents, you only had to tell the right story, and turn up the volume.

There is still sound in
Potlatch,
though you can’t really speak of turning it up—it’s already loud, in a peculiar way. With bits of news from the regular papers running into ultimatums and warnings, which shift into passwords, which themselves make up a secret language that presents itself as public speech, the loudness of the sound is in its aura of spontaneous generation. The voice seems to come out of nowhere, and no accounting of ancestors or familiars, even present on the page, can quite dim that sensation. The old news remains new because the world has turned as if none of it happened; the voice carries the shock of displacement, and it is strong enough to turn displacement into a value.

There’s no formal displacement in
Potlatch.
With screaming juxtapositions and colored type overlays exploding incoherent essays printed upside
down, Berlin dada journals were paper cabarets; this is not. This is just a sheet of carefully typed words forming grammatical sentences that make neat paragraphs following each other down conventionally sized pages. The displacement is invisible, a time-destroying voice coming off a stenciled piece of paper: a voice whose content is so disproportionate to its form that one or the other seems like a trick. Compared to
Potlatch,
the printed, illustrated numbers of
Internationale lettriste
are official culture; compared to them,
Potlatch
is a return to the clandestine newsletters that hundreds of French Resistance groups produced throughout the Occupation. “In a world where books have long lost all likeness to books,” situationist familiar Adorno wrote then, “the real book can no longer be one. If the invention of the printing press inaugurated the bourgeois era, the time is at hand for its repeal by the mimeograph.”

Guy-Ernest Debord, “The Naked City,” May 1957

The LI put out
Potlatch
from 22 June 1954 to 22 May 1957; no. 29, the final issue, 5 November 1957, carried the legend “Bulletin d’information de l’Internationale situationniste,” and the LI swallowed its tale. “We’re not interested in a fond place in your memories,” read “Potlatch, Directions for Use,” no. 2, 29 June 1954. “But concrete powers are at stake. A few hundred people haphazardly determine the thought of the epoch. Whether they know it or not, they are at our disposal. By sending
Potlatch
to people effectively positioned, we can interrupt the circuit when and where we please.” You found the thing on your desk, if you worked for a newspaper or the government, or maybe you found it in your mailbox: “Some readers have been chosen arbitrarily.” (“You picked names out of the phone book?” I asked Wolman. “Let’s not exaggerate,” he said. “We didn’t have a phone book. For that matter, we didn’t have a phone.”) Maybe you found it in the street, a throwaway, since the odds were at best one in two that those who got it read it: “You have a chance to be one of them.”

As Debord would say,
Potlatch
was a gift, an offering of “nonsalable goods”—“previously unpublished desires and questions, and only their thorough analysis by others can constitute a return gift.” It was an attempt to start a conversation—a conversation, though, in which everyone would want to take part and that could only end in the discovery of a new language, with a new subject, which was to say a new idea of social life.
“Potlatch
is the most engaged publication in the world,” no. 1 began, the letters slightly blurred, the keys of the typewriter obviously worn. “We are working toward the conscious and collective establishment of a new civilization.”

The LI was playing with another metaphor. The ethnographic dictionary defined “potlatch” as “to consume,” but the context the word called up was not commercial consumption but “consumed by the fire”: it meant a gift that had to be returned until there was nothing left to give. It was a Chinook word, used by the Kwakiutl of British Columbia, the Tlingit of Alaska, Amerindian tribes first studied by anthropologists at the end of the nineteenth century.

These tribes, the anthropologists discovered, had a strange practice: one chief met another and offered gifts. The second chief had to respond in kind, but on a higher plane of value. That was the potlatch. The game might begin with the presentation of a necklace and end with the burning of a town—with a tribe burning its own town, thus raising the obligations of its rival to an almost impossible level. The potlatch was part of a festival, accompanied by storied songs, dances, and the conferral of new names on the great givers (“Whose Property Is Eaten in Feasts,” “Causing Trouble All Around,” “The Dance of Throwing Away Property”); it could be a symbolic exchange of courtesies and pieties, brought forth by a wedding or a funeral, and it could be a symbolic war, an exchange of challenges and humiliations. There was something in it of D. H. Lawrence’s idea of democracy (“if you can call it an idea”): two people meeting on a road, and instead of passing by with eyes averted pausing, like Arthur and Lancelot, for a confrontation “between their very souls,” thus setting free the “brave, reckless gods” within—“Now, damn the consequences, we have met.” For one tribe to fail to rise to the provocation of another was to admit that it valued property, mere things, more than honor; a chief who distributed the wealth of his tribe was said to “swallow the tribes” that received it. “The ideal,” sociologist Marcel Mauss wrote in 1925 in
The Gift,
“is to give a
potlatch
and not have it returned.”