Lipstick Traces (61 page)

It was, in a haphazard way, an art project. It had its proximate roots: in 1968 McLaren and his partner-to-be Jamie Reid were on the fringes of King Mob, a group Christopher Gray formed in London after his exclusion from the SI. Taking its name from the murderous crowds that rampaged through London during the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780, opening prisons and putting criminals on the streets, the band attacked the spectacle-commodity society by smashing up Wimpy bars. In surging letters three feet high it painted the city walls with cryptic slogans: sometimes lines from Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode” (“
A GRIEF WITHOUT A PANG, VOID, DARK, AND DREAR, A STIFLED, DROWSY, UNIMPASSIONED GRIEF
”), sometimes just “
I CANT BREATHE
.” The group threw a potlatch in Selfridges’, with a man dressed up as Santa Claus giving away the department store’s toys to throngs of happy children; it accomplished Strasbourg-style détournement when the children were forced to witness the shocking sight of one of Santa’s helpers placed under arrest. In the pages of the short-lived sheet
King Mob Echo,
all the old talismans appeared once more: a reprint of Vaneigem’s celebration of dada, a photo of Rosa Luxemburg in her canal coffin, the colloquy between Suso and the Free Spirit, a letter to the London Central News Agency from Jack the Ripper (“I love my work”), cartoons of naked Ranters preaching, even a bitter rejection of “alternative culture” (“the Cabaret Voltaire on ice”) signed with the pen-name “Richard Huelsenbeck.” Then the times changed, the context in which all these things could communicate not pedantry but novelty vanished, and what once were metaphors became fugitive footnotes to a text no longer in print.

As with the already-old slogans the LI put on Paris walls in 1953, those who tried to carry this conversation into the next decade soon found that the phrases they were condemned to use were barely language at all. Damning his “revolting celebrity” as the black hand behind May ’68, Debord wrote an end to the SI, hoping to destroy the revolutionary commodity it had become. The SI’s multitude of new fans, he said, would never learn the answer to their most important question: what metallic color had been chosen for the cover of
I.S.
no. 13? “The more our theses become famous, we ourselves will become
even more inaccessible,
even more clandestine,” he said, and though he kept his word, it was only his; the year was 1972, and there was no more “we.” McLaren opened his King’s Road boutique and sold his May ’68 t-shirts. Reid started
Suburban Press,
a mimeographed journal devoted to an SI-style critique of the planned London suburb of Croydon. Gray put together
Leaving the 20th Century;
Reid designed it. And Reid printed up little red stickers, which he posted in supermarkets——but nobody was frightened. The last days, anyone could have figured, referred only to those of the story he was telling.

By 1975 the old talismans had come loose from their events; they were toys. Together, McLaren and Reid began to fool with them. Playing with legends of freedom picked up in art school, in news reports about May ’68, in
The Return of the Durutti Column,
in tales recounted in Gray’s book—playing with situationist notions of boredom as social control, leisure as work, work as a swindle, architecture as repression, revolution as festival—playing with the dadaist aggression and arrogance in the SI’s writing, with its millenarian strain, the sense that the world could be changed in an instant—and playing with the inversions of the new social facts, with mass unemployment in a welfare state as a new kind of leisure, and that kind of leisure as the bad conscience of a new kind of boredom—they invented a pop group. With “I am an antichrist,” the first line of the group’s first song, they restaged the invasion of Notre-Dame. Just as that forgotten event led to the foundation of a small band that went on to imagine and spark a wildcat general strike, a wildcat general strike is what McLaren, Reid, and Johnny Rotten restaged in the words and sounds that followed.

It was the restaging of another art project—for that, before and after all the elegant and absolutist theory, before and after the long and inspired argument with history, was what the situationist project had been. If the spectacle was bad art, the creation of situations was the good. “We have to multiply poetic subjects and objects,” Debord wrote in 1957, as the LI dissolved itself into the SI, “and we have to organize games of these poetic objects among these poetic subjects. This is our entire program”—and the entire program it was. In
Internationale situationniste
the facts of life were removed into a poetic dimension, where they could be reseen, and remade, by anyone, by everyone; during May ’68, it had seemed as if the game had begun. If you looked you could see it happen: every gesture was extended, every street redrawn, every building demolished and rebuilt, every word part of a new language. But this is also what happened with punk.

Listening to “Anarchy in the U.K.” years ago, all I wanted to know was why the record was so powerful. I have an idea now.

In my account of what McLaren and Reid made of the SI’s old art project—by 1975, dead letters sent from a mythical time—Johnny Rotten appears as a mouthpiece; I prefer to think of him as a medium. As he stood on the stage, opened his mouth, and fixed his eyes on the crowd, various people who had never met, some who had met but who had never been properly introduced, some who had never heard of some of the others, as Johnny Rotten had heard of almost none of them, began to talk to each other, and the noise they made was what one heard. An unknown tradition of old pronouncements, poems, and events, a secret history of ancient wishes and defeats, came to bear on Johnny Rotten’s voice—and because this tradition lacked both cultural sanction and political legitimacy, because this history was comprised of only unfinished, unsatisfied stories, it carried tremendous force.

All the demands that dada made on art, that Michel Mourre made on God, that the LI and the SI made on their time, came to life as demands on the symbolic milieu of pop music—demands that produced a voice it had never used. Because these demands were so disproportionate to the strictures the pop milieu had come to accept—strictures that produced entertainment as alienation and art as hierarchical dispossession—the milieu exploded. Because the milieu enclosed pop culture, obscure and hermetic incidents and ideas were taken up by countless ordinary people, and those incidents and ideas made a code those people did not know they were deciphering, a code which deciphered them.

With Debord, Huelsenbeck, Ball, Wolman, Chtcheglov, Mourre, Coppe, and more fighting for Johnny Rotten’s microphone, the pop market was flooded with desires it was not built to satisfy. Traditional rock ’n’ roll desires to make noise, to step forward, to “announce yourself,” were transformed into the conscious desire to make your own history, or to abolish the history already made for you. The situationists bet that such a pass would lead people to go off the market, but that is not what happened—rather, people drove deeper into the market, and the result was topsy turvy. Remade as punk, pop music returned a gift it never knew it had received—returned it on a higher plane of value, producing richer works of art than dada, the LI, or the SI ever did. But the gift also fell short of the gift to which it found itself returned, because in the tradition in question, art had
never been the goal, but “only an occasion, a method, for locating the specific rhythm and the buried face of this age . . . for the possibility of its being stirred.” Remaining always within the pop milieu, the symbol factory, punk was only art—and so as language, thought, or action it was swallowed by the chiefs who began the game. Measured against the demands its precursors made, punk was a paltry reflection; measured against the records the Sex Pistols and their followers made, the leavings of dada, the LI, and the SI are sketches of punk songs; all in all it is the tale of a wish that went beyond art and found itself returned to it, a nightclub act that asked for the world, for a moment got it, then got another nightclub. In this sense punk realized the projects that lay behind it, and realized their limits.

The story continued; it also changed. Because the story punk was telling was so old and so foreign—a story about art and revolution now playing itself out in a realm of amusements and commodities—every sound and movement seemed completely new. But the very intensity of this illusion, its vertigo, drove the story into the past, in search of an anchor.

“Nothing is true; everything is permitted.” So said Nietzsche, and Mourre, and numerous punks, and Debord, quoting Rashid al-Din Sinan, Islamic gnostic, leader of the Levantine Assassins, Sinan as he lay on his deathbed in 1192, unless it was 1193, or 1194—and apochryphal or not, the words make up the first line in the canon of the secret tradition, a nihilist catchphrase, an entry into negation, a utopianism, a shibboleth. If this was all Johnny Rotten’s songs finally said, the story would turn back on itself and die, choking on its own clichés. But in his most convulsive moments, Johnny Rotten said something more—what Hasan i-Sabbah II, chief of the Assassins in Iran, and Sinan’s spiritual master, said in 1164.

In that year, Hasan i-Sabbah II, legatee of the first Hasan i-Sabbah, founder of the Assassins, announced the millennium. In Alamut, the mountain fiefdom he ruled, he threw down the Koran and proclaimed the end of the law. With his subjects, in the Holy Hour, he turned his back on Mecca. In the midst of Ramadan, the Holy Fast, they feasted and rejoiced. “They spoke of the world as being uncreated and Time as unlimited,” wrote a chronicler; because “in the world to come there is no action and all is reckoning,” they declared that on earth “all is action and there is no reckoning.”

This is absolute freedom, the prize seized by the Cathars, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Lollards, John of Leyden, the Ranters, and Adolf Hitler: the end of the world. This is the fire around which the dadaists and Debord’s strangely fecund groups held their dances, and which consumed them—a fire, though, that can be heard in the words they left behind because of the noise the Sex Pistols made. In the dadaists’ manifestos and poems, in the LI’s détournement of the best news of the week, in the SI’s détournement of the news of the world, the fire is a reference point, properly footnoted but carefully marginalized; in the Sex Pistols’ music, no footnotes at all, the fire is central. The ancestors danced around it; their inheritors dove in.

In the act, the story doubles back and rewrites itself. All of the freedom of that twelfth-century blasphemy, and all of its terror, is in the Sex Pistols’ music, far more than it is in their precursors’ writing. This is what is happening in the last minute of “Holidays in the Sun,” and it is why no sane person would want to listen, or sing, for a minute more.

This is the secret the Sex Pistols told, and it is half of the story. The other half is a secret the Sex Pistols didn’t tell. Their ancestors did tell it, because they lived it out—or, because they were not punks but primitive philosophers, they glimpsed the secret before the fact, as Debord did. “This is our entire program,” he went on in 1957, “which is essentially transitory. Our situations will be ephemeral, without a future: passageways.”

I was drawn to this message, coded but not stated in punk, because in a small and anonymous way I lived it out myself. In the fall of 1964, in Berkeley, at the University of California, I was, day after day, for months, part of the crowd that made up the Free Speech Movement. In that event, which began as a small protest over rules and regulations, and which I now understand as a conversation, everything was at stake and, in one way or another, everyone took part. “I came here to go to business school,” a friend said—he couldn’t have been less interested in politics, in questions of how and why people make judgments on the ordering of their shared space and time, on what counts and what doesn’t according to those judgments—“and all we ever do is talk about this goddamn FSM!”

It was a period of doubt, chaos, anger, hesitation, confusion, and finally joy—that’s the word. Your own history was lying in pieces on the ground,
and you had the choice of picking up the pieces or passing them by. Nothing was trivial, nothing incidental. Everything connected to a totality, and the totality was how you wanted to live: as a subject or as an object of history. In enormous gatherings, people spoke out as they never had before; they did the same in gatherings of two or three.

As the conversation expanded, institutional, historical power dissolved. People did and said things that made their lives of a few weeks before seem unreal—they did and said things that, not long after, would seem even more so. A school became a terrain on which all emotions, all ideas and theories, were tested and fought over; it was scary and it was fun. Dramas were enacted; people gathered around poisonous speeches; one found oneself in Homeric times, and the metaphor was physical, the body politic. In the university’s Greek Theater, the entire community came together; before sixteen thousand people the president of the university gave a long, calming speech, so full of reasonableness it defused every mental bomb anyone had brought to the event. Then Mario Savio, the stuttering Demosthenes of the Free Speech Movement, walked toward the podium to deliver a response, police seized him and dragged him away, and what was left was nothing: it was as if the president of the university had never opened his mouth. There was only chaos. People who moments before had been lulled into a lovely sleep screamed their lungs out. It was the loudest noise I’ve ever heard, or made.