Lipstick Traces (8 page)

Boredom, to the situationists, was a supremely modern phenomenon, a modern form of control. In feudal times and for the first century of the Industrial Revolution, drudgery and privation produced numbing fatigue and horrible misery, no mystery, just a God-given fact: “In Adam’s fall so sinned we all,” and as for those few who knew neither fatigue nor misery, it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. As the situationists saw modernity, limited work and relative abundance, city planning and the welfare state, produced not happiness but depression and boredom. With God missing, people felt their condition not exactly as a fact, but simply as a fatalism devoid of meaning, which separated every man and woman from every other, which threw all people back upon themselves. I’m not happy—what’s wrong with me?

Fatalism is acceptance: “Que sera, sera” is always counterrevolutionary. But as the situationists understood the modern world, boredom was less a question of work than of leisure. As they set out in the 1950s work seemed to be losing its hold on life; “automation” and “cybernetics” were wonderful new words. Leisure time was expanding—and in order to maintain their power, those who ruled, whether capitalist directors in the West or communist bureaucrats in the East, had to ensure that leisure was as boring as the new forms of work. More boring, if leisure was to replace work as the locus of everyday life, a thousand times more. What could be more productive of an atomized, hopeless fatalism than the feeling that one is deadened precisely where one ought to be having fun?

The eight men and women who gathered in the Italian town of Cosio d’Arroscia on 27 July 1957 to found the Situationist International pledged
themselves to intervene in a future they believed to be on the verge of banishing both material necessity and individual autonomy. Modern technology had raised the specter of a world in which “work”—employment, wage labor, whatever tasks were performed because someone else said they had to be—might soon be no more than a fairy tale out of the Brothers Grimm. In a new world of unlimited leisure each individual might construct a life, just as in the old world a few privileged artists had constructed their representations of what life could be. It was an old dream, the dream of the young Karl Marx—every man his own artist!—but those who owned the present saw the future far more clearly than any of the sodden leftist sects claiming Marx’s legacy. Those who ruled were reorganizing social life not merely to maintain their control, but to intensify it; modern technics was a two-edged sword, a means to the domination of the free field of abundance and leisure that revolutionaries had fantasized for five hundred years. Thus boredom. Misery led to resentment, which sooner or later found its rightful target, those who ruled. Boredom was a haze, a confusion, and finally the ultimate mode of control, self-control, alienation perfected: a bad conscience.

In modern society, leisure (What do I want to do today?) was replaced by entertainment (What is there to see today?). The potential fact of all possible freedoms was replaced by a fiction of false freedom: I have enough time and money to see whatever there is to see, whatever there is to see others do. Because this freedom was false, it was unsatisfying, it was boring. Because it was boring, it left whoever was unsatisfied to contemplate his or her inability to respond to what, after all, was a hit show. It’s a good show, but I feel dead: my God, what’s wrong with me? It was leisure culture that produced boredom—produced it, marketed it, took the profits, reinvested them. So the world was going to be changed, announced the first number of
Internationale situationniste
in June 1958,
“because we don’t want to be bored
 . . . raging and ill-informed youth, well-off adolescent rebels lacking a point of view but far from lacking a cause—boredom is what they all have in common. The situationists will execute the judgment contemporary leisure is pronouncing against itself.”

The situationists saw boredom as a social pathology; they looked for its negation among sociopaths. In the pages of their journal, lunatic criminals
and rioters without manifestos sometimes seem like the only allies the writers are willing to embrace. The situationists meant to define a stance, not an ideology, because they saw all ideologies as alienations, transformations of subjectivity into objectivity, desire into a power that rendered the individual powerless: “There is no such thing as situationism,” they said for years. The world was a structure of alienations and ideologies, of hierarchies and bureaucracies, each of which they saw as a version of the other; thus they celebrated a madman’s slashing of a famous painting as a symbolic revolt against a bureaucratically administered alienation in which the ideology of the masterpiece reduced whoever looked at it to nothing. In the same way, they understood the responsible parade monitor who tried to keep people in check during a march against the Vietnam War as a bureaucratic ideologue enforcing a split between desire and comportment—and as much the enemy as General William Westmoreland, or for that matter Ho Chi Minh. Both the painting and the war were hit shows; whether a visit to the museum or a march in the street, both turned the spending of free time into the consumption of repression. The masterpiece convinced you that truth and beauty were someone else’s gift from God, the protest in favor of the struggle of the Vietnamese that revolution was a fact of someone else’s life. Neither could ever be yours, and so you left each show diminished, with less than you had brought to it. That, the situationists said again and again, was why the show had to be stopped, and could be: just as the tiny humiliations inflicted by the parade monitor were the essence of oppression, a fanatic’s exemplary act could prove that liberty was within everyone’s grasp.

The situationists announced themselves as revolutionaries, interested only in freedom, and freedom can mean the license to do anything, with consequences that are indistinguishable from murder, theft, looting, hooliganism, or littering—phenomena that, lacking anything better, the situationists were almost always ready to embrace as harbingers of revolution. But freedom can also mean the chance to discover what it is you truly want to do: to discover, as Edmund Wilson wrote in Paris in 1922, “for what drama one’s setting is the setting.” That too was what the situationists meant by leisure—and it was a lust not simply to discover but to create that drama that drove a twenty-five-year-old Parisian named Guy-Ernest Debord to gather artists and writers from France, Algeria, Italy, Denmark, Belgium, England, Scotland, Holland, and West Germany into the Situationist International in 1957. In 1975, with the defunct SI no more than a legend to a few one-time 1960s art students and student radicals, that drama was what McLaren was still seeking. What were the politics of boredom?

Debord wrote “Theses on the Cultural Revolution” for the first number of
Internationale situationniste:
“Victory,” he said, “will be for those who know how to create disorder without loving it.” As empty of disorder as rock ’n’ roll was in 1975, McLaren understood that it remained the only form of culture the young cared about, and at thirty in 1975, he clung to a sixties definition of young—youth was an attitude, not an age. For the young everything flowed from rock ’n’ roll (fashion, slang, sexual styles, drug habits, poses), or was organized by it, or was validated by it. The young, who as legal phantoms had nothing and as people wanted everything, felt the contradiction between what life promised and what it delivered most keenly: youth revolt was a key to social revolt, and thus the first target of social revolt could be rock ’n’ roll. Connections could be made. If one could show that rock ’n’ roll, by the mid-1970s ideologically empowered as the ruling exception to the humdrum conduct of social life, had become simply the shiniest cog in the established order, then a demystification of rock ’n’ roll might lead to a demystification of social life.

To structure the situation in this way took real imagination, even genius —it doesn’t matter whose it was. In the past, rock ’n’ roll as a version of revolt had always been seen by its fans as a weapon or, more deeply, as an end in itself, self-justifying: a momentary version of the life everyone would live in the best of all possible worlds. Pete Townshend, in 1968:

Mother has just fallen down the stairs, dad’s lost all his money at the dog track, the baby’s got TB. In comes the kid with his transistor radio, grooving to Chuck Berry. He doesn’t give a shit about mom falling down the stairs . . . It’s a good thing that you’ve got a machine, a radio that puts out rock and roll songs and it makes you groove through the day. That’s the
game, of course: When you are listening to a rock and roll song the way you listen to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” or something similar, that’s the way you should really spend your whole life.

So McLaren heard when a fellow student got up to sing “Great Balls of Fire”—in 1958, the act itself was a negation of social facts. But when rock ’n’ roll had become just another social fact, this was self-defeating, even on the level of the next good song. By 1975, Townshend’s Candideisms removed rock ’n’ roll from the social realities that gave the music its kick. In 1958, even in 1968, a simple rock ’n’ roll performance could open up questions of identity, justice, repression, will, and desire; now it was organized to draw such questions into itself and make them disappear.

Who could say that “Fire and Rain,” “Stairway to Heaven,” “Behind Blue Eyes,” and “Maggie May” were not affirmations of freedom as they were made, and oppressions as they were used? Only those who refused to believe that the affirmation where freedom is grasped is rooted in a negation where freedom is glimpsed—and those people did not include McLaren and the Sex Pistols. Thus they damned rock ’n’ roll as a rotting corpse: a monster of moneyed reaction, a mechanism for false consciousness, a system of self-exploitation, a theater of glamorized oppression, a bore. Rock ’n’ roll, Johnny Rotten would say, was only the first of many things the Sex Pistols came to destroy. And yet because the Sex Pistols had no other weapons, because they were fans in spite of themselves, they played rock ’n’ roll, stripping it down to essentials of speed, noise, fury, and manic glee no one had touched before.