Lipstick Traces (57 page)

The declension of the last sentence is relentless: the alienated consumer of images brought into the spectacle as a participant in a war against herself, a war she will lose by identifying with the enemy, swallowing its images, and so consuming herself.

This was the bad world as the good—save for the blank irony of Bernstein’s tone, the passage is seamless. But the bad world was not seamless. “Consumers themselves become spectacular, as do any objects of consumption,” the SI wrote in “The Geopolitics of Hibernation,” with “perfectly reified man [taking] his place in the show-window as a desirable image of reification”; the “internal defect of the system” was “that it cannot perfectly reify people.” You could take your place in the show window, but you could not be at home there. So the bad world was full of cracks—and that was a story the SI told best in “The World of Which We Speak,” combing the papers for evidence that, among other things, the spectacle of participation was really “The Technology of Isolation.”

Page from “The Geopolitics of Hibernation,”
I.S.
no. 7, August 1962

In contemporary society, the whole body of technology—above all the means of so-called communication—is oriented towards the maximum passive isolation of individuals, towards their control by a “direct and permanent relationship”
that only works in one direction.
Orders to which one cannot reply are broadcast by every sort of
leader.
Some applications of this technique can be seen as contemptible consolation prizes for what is fundamentally absent—or, on occasion, as evidence of the absolutism of what is missing.

If you’re a TV fan, you’ll want to know about the most amazing television set ever made—because it can go everywhere with you. It was invented by the Hughes Aircraft Corp. of the U.S.A., and the design is completely new—you wear it on your head. It weighs 950 grams; you wear it like a pilot’s helmet, or a telephone operator’s headset. It has a tiny plastic screen which looks like a monocle, held 4 cm in front of the eye . . . Only one eye is used to look at the screen; the manufacturers promise that with the other you can look anywhere else, or even perform manual labor or write. (
Journal du dimanche,
29 July 1962)

The trouble at the coal mines has finally been settled, and it appears work will start again next Friday. Perhaps it’s the feeling of having participated in the debate that explains the almost unbroken calm that has reigned at the pit-heads and in the miners’ quarters for thirty-four days straight. Television and transistor radio contact maintained a direct and permanent relationship between the workers and their leaders—and, at the same time, forced them all to go home [to watch themselves on TV] when, before, they all used to gather at the union hall. (
Le Monde, 5
April 1963)

There’s a new cure for lonely travelers at the Chicago railroad station. For “a quarter” (1,25 F), a wax-covered robot shakes your hand and says: “Hello, my friend, how’re you doing? It’s been great seeing you. Have a good trip.” (
Marie-Claire,
January 1963)

“I no longer have any friends. I’ll never talk to anyone again.” Thus began the confession of a Polish worker who had just turned on the gas in his kitchen—recorded on his own tape recorder. “I am almost unconscious. There is no longer a chance that anyone will save me. The end is near.” These were the last words of Joseph Czternastek. (
A.F.P.,
London, 7 April 1962)

The good world for the LI was like heaven for the Cathars: a world where “the sacred was only the social, transfigured.” It was what in the 1930s Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin called “carnivalization”—a way of being in the world that laughed away “all that is finished and polished,” “all pomposity,” “every ready-made solution in the sphere of thought and world outlook.” How to get there was the subject of “Rational Embellishments to the City of Paris,”
Potlatch
no. 23, 13 October 1955.

It began as a scholastic revision of an old surrealist paper, Breton’s 1933 “Experimental Researches (On the Irrational Embellishment of a City).” Breton proposed a tradeoff between spectacles (“Notre-Dame? Replace the towers with an enormous glass cruet, one of the bottles filled with blood, the other with semen”); the LI was looking for an institutionalized disruption of everyday life, for Rimbaud’s “rational disordering of the senses” as a practical account of the errand, the appointment, the commute, the purchase. The LI leaped over Breton and back to the spirit of “What is Dadaism and what does it want in Germany?”; in the LI’s new civilization, the practical would be a question of the longest distance between two points. The LI’s ministry of leisure was issuing its first decrees.

—Open the metro at night after the trains stop running. Keep the corridors and tunnels poorly lit by means of weak, intermittently functioning lights.

—With a careful rearrangement of fire-escapes, and the creation of walkways where needed, open the roofs of Paris for strolling.

—Leave the public gardens open at night. Keep them dark. (In some cases, a weak illumination may be justified by psychogeographical considerations.)

—Put switches on the street lamps, so lighting will be under public control.

The ministry moved on to the churches:

Four different solutions were advanced and recognized as legitimate until they can be tested by
experiment,
when the best idea will win out:

—G.-E. Debord declares himself in favor of the total destruction of religious buildings, of every faith. (No trace would remain, and the spaces would be used for other purposes.)

—Gil J Wolman proposes that churches be preserved but emptied of all religious significance. They should be treated as ordinary buildings. Let children play in them.

—Michèle Bernstein insists that churches be partially destroyed, so that the remaining ruins would reveal nothing of their original purposes . . . The perfect solution would be to raze the churches and reconstruct ruins in their places. The first of these two solutions is proposed simply for the sake of expediency.

—Lastly, Jacques Fillon wants to turn the churches into
haunted houses.
(Use their current ambiances, accentuating the panic-instilling aspects.)

Having completed Michel Mourre’s interrupted sermon, the group went back to the secular.

—Keep the railroad stations as they are. Their rather moving ugliness greatly adds to the atmosphere of travel, which provides what slight attraction these buildings possess. Gil J Wolman demanded the complete suppression or falsification of all information about departures, destinations, schedules, etc.; this would encourage the dérive. After lively debate, the opposition backed down, and the project was adopted without dissent. Accentuate the aural ambiance of the stations by broadcasting arrival-
and-departure information originating from numerous other stations—and from various ports.

—Suppression of the cemeteries. Total destruction of corpses and all tombstones: no ashes, not a trace, shall remain. (Attention must be drawn to the reactionary propaganda which, through the most elementary association of ideas, this hideous survival of past alienation represents . . .)

—Abolition of the museums, and the redistribution of masterpieces in bars (put the work of Phillipe de Champagne in the Arab cafes in the rue Xavier-Privas; put David’s
Sacre
in the Tonneau in rue Montagne-Geneviève).

—Free and unlimited access to the prisons for everyone. Allow people to use them for vacations. No discrimination between visitors and prisoners. (To add to the fun, monthly lotteries would be held to pick visitors to be sentenced to actual jail terms.)

In “The Role of Writing,” also in
Potlatch
no. 23, the LI had already proposed the “subversion” of various streets by means of graffiti specifically appropriate to them (“If we don’t die here, will we go farther?” for rue Sauvage; for rue Lhomond, “Give it the benefit of the doubt”); now it affirmed the possibilities of creating civic confusion by the détournement of inscriptions on statues and monuments. It proposed an end to the “cretinization of the public” by various sorts of street names, announcing the erasure of all markers honoring “municipal officials, heroes of the Resistance,” all those bearing words plainly “vile (e.g., rue de l’Evangile),” all those carrying the names “Emile” and “Edouard,” and—

“What’s interesting about this,” said a friend of mine after looking over the LI’s directives, “is how half of it remained a pipe dream, and how half of it came true.”

“What do you mean?” I said, thinking of Bob Acraman’s three-day vacation in a Nazi prison camp.

“Doesn’t this remind you of anything? The graffiti? The gardens open at night, the lights flickering, people walking on roofs, streets with new names, all the transportation information completely scrambled? For a moment—really!—it seemed as if the prisons
would
open. The chapel in the Sorbonne was almost razed. There was even a leaflet demanding that Cardinal Richelieu be dug up and his bones tossed in the street. Of course there
were new inscriptions on the statues. Probably the last thing to happen would have been taking the paintings out of the Louvre—it’s easier to kill God than art. You see what I’m getting at?”

“What are you getting at?” I said, thinking of Johnny Rotten singing “Give the wrong time, stop a traffic line” as a route to anarchy in the U.K., about the weird split between the absolute demands in his voice and the triviality of his advice on how to realize them.

My friend had been to school in Paris; he was just remembering what it was like. “This is what happened in May ’68,” he said.

Another version of the LI’s “Rational Embellishments” happened at the University of Strasbourg in the fall of 1966. It was a small event, a series of student pranks, a sort of negationist panty raid—or, as a typical newspaper editorial put it at the time, “perhaps the first concrete manifestation of a revolt aiming quite openly at the destruction of society.” A panty raid as the end of the world—that was the reversible connecting factor if anything was.

There were three planes on which the imaginary revolution in the Strasbourg laboratory took place: the artistic plane of a work called
The Return of the Durutti Column,
the literary plane of a text titled
On the Poverty of Student Life,
and the tactical plane of the events that followed and the response they provoked. But in outline the story was simple. Bored with their classes and disgusted by the pettiness of left-wing youth-group politics, in the spring of 1966 five students proclaimed their desire to see the government-sanctioned student union ruined, stood for election to its offices, and amidst the overwhelming apathy of their peers found themselves voted in to run the show. During the summer break, friends of the surprised winners made contact with the SI through its post office box in Paris—the only way the group made contact with any-
one—and asked for a meeting. We have a piece of power, they said; we want to wreck it.

By 1957 a search for purity in motive and deed brought the Lettrist International to a state of immobilization, where there were only motives and no deeds; that was why the LI had to merge with others less pure, to take one step back. By 1966 the Situationist International reached the same pass. “The situationist project had taken on its definitive form,” Christopher Gray wrote in 1974 in
Leaving the 20th Century.
“The SI was to be a small, tightly knit group of revolutionaries devoted to forging a critique of
contemporary,
that is to say consumer capitalism—and to publicizing this critique by every form of scandal and agitation possible. Everything depended on universal insurrection. Poetry could
only
be made by everyone.” But the group had all but left the public space; the scandals it made took place only in its journal. With one-time allies like Henri Lefebvre spurned as imposters or thieves, with all the practicing painters and architects of the early SI years gone (some, like Jorn, resigned, the rest excluded), with anti-art exhibitions and plans to build new cities (or, failing that, to seize museums, even the headquarters of UNESCO) repudiated or forgotten, the SI had turned to a close reading of other people’s gestures of refusal—their protests, riots, wildcat strikes, their acts of random violence. Though it was a reading of increasing empathy and excitement, sometimes perceiving the ideas in other people’s minds far more completely than those people did themselves, coming off the page as a real conversation between actors and thinkers, it was of course a fabulist conversation, beginning in a refusal of art and now seeking its realization in events; even as the conversation expanded to take in the whole world, the news everyone talked about and the news no one but the speakers noticed, it became ever more aesthetic, a theory devouring its evidence. As they approached the climax of their story, the situationists were of the world but not in it: “What they had gained in intellectual power and scope,” Gray wrote in a
Leaving
draft he did not publish, “they had lost, or so it seems to me, in terms of the richness and verve of their own everyday lives. Numbers were drastically reduced . . . Their organization was no longer meaningfully international. It was Parisian. There was no longer any of their previous experimentation with architecture or living space.
Cultural sabotage too went by the board. They were permanently broke. The group turned inwards. There was little or nothing that didn’t seem reformist. Everything went into the perfecting of their analyses, into the savagery of their anti-philosophy: into their magazine. The drunken, tearaway exhuberance of their Lettrist days was replaced by living up to the role of an incredibly austere rejection of everything apart from rejection.” The Strasbourg students offered the SI a chance to go back to the world.