Lipstick Traces

by Greil Marcus

  In the beginning this walk would take place as if on a battlefield in a war no one else understood was being fought. That was the burden passed to readers of “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” the SI’s virulent pamphlet on the riots in the black ghetto of Watts, California, in August 1965, a maelstrom that left more than thirty dead—and “the first rebellion in history,” the SI said with delight, pressing the dispute between love and the garbage disposal, “to justify itself with the argument that there was no air conditioning during a heatwave.” To most, it made no sense that when the far more impoverished blacks of Harlem and Newark were silent, the relatively comfortable blacks of Los Angeles were burning and looting, many with pride and joy. To the situationists, citing the boast of one Bobbi Hollon, a young Watts sociologist who swore “never to wash off the blood that splashed on her sandals during the rioting,” it made perfect sense. “Comfort,” they wrote, “will never be comfortable enough for those who seek what is not on the market.”

  The SI was a group of critics; tipping back in their cafe chairs as others acted, they did not apologize. As Debord said years later, “Where there was fire, we carried gasoline.” “Theoretical criticism of modern society, in its most advanced forms, and criticism in acts of the same society already co-exist,” the SI said of Watts: “still separated, but both equally advancing towards the same realities, both talking about the same thing. These two critiques explain each other; neither is explicable without the other. Our theories of ‘survival’ and of ‘spectacle’ are illuminated and verified by actions which [today seem] incomprehensible . . . One day, these actions will in turn be illuminated by this theory.”

  “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy” was meant to be part of the event it analyzed. It was written in Paris in French, but translated into English and distributed in America before it appeared in Europe. The question the SI was raising would have been familiar to some in the U.S.A. in 1965: “How,” the situationists asked, in language little different from that of the 1962 Port Huron Statement, the founding paper of Students for a Democratic Society, “do people make history, starting from conditions pre-established to dissuade them from intervening in it?” But the answer the situationists gave might as well have come from Mars: “Looting is the natural response to the society of abundance—the society not of natural and human abundance, but of the abundance only of commodities . . . The looting of the Watts district was the most direct realization of the distorted principle, ‘To each according to his false needs’ . . . [but] real desires began to find expression in festival, in the potlatch of destruction . . . For the first time it is not poverty but material abundance that must be dominated.” This was delirious, and also seductive: seductive because it was telling. It was, the SI thought, the battlefield, and from June 1958 to September 1969 the pages of Internationale situationniste plotted its frontiers.

  Illustration from “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” I.S. no. 10, March 1966

  The situationists tried to see themselves as they saw the people of Watts: confronted with “the reality of a capitalism and a technology that render the individual powerless, except if he is a thief or a terrorist” (words written in 1987 by Stanley Hoffmann, distinguished professor of history, but in 1965 unthinkable outside small circles of fanatics). Thus they practiced intellectual terrorism, and inseparable from that practice was the theft of intellectual property. As a field guide, the pages of their journal were also a laboratory, a testing ground for the SI’s experiments with the counter-language, with détournement—which the situationists meant to move from new speech balloons on comic strips to a critique so magically true it would turn the words of its enemies back on themselves, forcing new speech even out of the mouths of the guardians of good and right. Like the dérive, this was the aesthetic occupation of enemy territory, a raid launched to seize the familiar and turn it into the other, a war waged on a field of action without boundaries and without rules; when in 1962 the SI discovered that one Wolfgang Neuss, a Berlin actor, had “perpetrated a most suggestive act of sabotage . . . by taking an ad in the paper Der Abend, giving away the identity of a killer in a television detective serial that had been keeping the public in suspense for weeks,” the group gleefully placed the tiny event on the same plane as it would the Watts riots. Making meaning—or unmaking it—went hand in hand with making history. Détournement was a politics of subversive quotation, of cutting the vocal cords of every empowered speaker, social symbols yanked through the looking glass, misappropriated words and pictures diverted into familiar scripts and blowing them up. “Ultimately,” Debord and Wolman had said in 1956, “any sign”—any street, advertisement, painting, text, any representation of a society’s idea of happiness—“is susceptible to conversion into something else, even its opposite.”

  “As the SI says, it’s a far, far better thing to be a whore like me than the wife of a fascist like Constantine.” Detourned photo of Christine Keeler by situationist J. V. Martin, upon the marriage of Princess Anne-Marie of Denmark to King Constantine II of Greece. I.S. no. 9, August 1964

  Detourned comics, U.S., 1986

  What if you could really make it happen? The spectacle was itself a work of art, an economy of false needs elevated into a tableau of frozen desires, true desires reduced to a cartoon of twitching needs. Spreading the bad paper of détournement until it began to turn up everywhere, the SI would devalue the currency of the spectacle, and the result would be a fatal inflation. Then a penny could be a fortune. The détournement of the right sign, in the right place at the right time, could spark a mass reversal of perspective. The one-way communication of the spectacle reduced all other speech to babble, but now the spectacle would fall back on itself; it would sound like babble, and everyone would see through it. The reversible connecting factor would be grasped, the string would be pulled, the tables would be turned, every yes would become a no, every truth would dissolve in doubt, and everything would change. Then the SI, having styled itself “an obscure conspiracy of unlimited demands,” “a general staff that does not want troops,” would realize its dream of a New Jerusalem by disappearing into it: into a riot of social glossolalia, where the “freedom to say everything” would be inseparable from “the freedom to do everything.” “We will only organize the detonation,” the SI promised in 1963. “The free explosion must escape us and any other control forever.” And then Mémoires could be happily forgotten, as if it had never been. As a memoir that was also a prophecy, the book would have situated itself in advance as an artifact that, once realized, would remain as unknown as it would have proven itself fecund: the secret history of a time to come.

  IT WAS

  It was, it turned out, a sort of map to a territory that had ceased to exist, an account of adventures that had taken place there. “There was, then, on the left bank of the river—one cannot dip one’s foot twice in the same river, or touch a perishable substance twice in the same state—a neighborhood where the negative held court.” So Debord said to his camera in 1978, when the time to come had passed. “There,” he wrote a year later, “in 1952, in Paris, four or five unworthy people decided to search for the supercession of art.” He did not explain what this meant, or rather he explained in a distant way, putting quotes around another phrase one could have found floating in Mémoires: “The supercession of art is the ‘Northwest Passage’ of the geography of real life, so often sought for more than a century, a search beginning especially in self-destroying modern poetry.”

  Debord was not, a quarter-century after the four or five had begun their search for transcendence, talking about poetry, not as one usually understands the word; he was talking about “social revolution,” a complete transformation of life as people actually lived it, every day. He was talking about what he had glimpsed in the insurrection of May ’68—a happenstance, he was now arguing, a month of noise, whose prefiguration could be seen in the interrupted narratives and fragm
ented representations of Mémoires, all transposed back into the vanished daily life of the four or five, the provisional microsociety. Recapturing the language of that self-destroying modern poetry, not to write it but to live it out and set it loose in the world—that, Debord was saying, was what the LI had been about. “Finishing off art; declaring in the heart of a cathedral that God was dead; plotting to blow up the Eiffel Tower—such were the scandals occasionally offered up by those whose way of life was the real scandal.” “The domain we mean to replace and fulfill is poetry,” the SI said in 1958; the revolution the SI wanted was going to “realize” poetry, and “realizing poetry means nothing less than simultaneously and inseparably creating events and their languages.” This was the future, and also the past, the whole world: “the moment of true poetry brings all the unsettled debts of history back into play.”

  “The situationists want to forget about the past,” they said as they began, but they never did; the past was a treasure chest, now the lock, now the treasure. Michèle Bernstein was a member of the LI and the SI almost from the beginning to almost the end; in 1983 she sat in her airy living room in England and explained. “Everyone is the son of many fathers,” she said. “There was the father we hated, which was surrealism. And there was the father we loved, which was dada. We were the children of both.” They were “enfants perdus,” Debord often said, lost children, and so they claimed any fathers in whose faces they could recognize their own: the surrealists, the dadaists, the failed revolutionaries of the first third of the twentieth century, the Communards, the young Karl Marx, Saint-Just, medieval heretics—and all, as Debord and the others began talking in the 1950s, were moribund, forgotten, memories and rumors, manqué, maudit. All were, at best, legends—to the LI and the SI, part of a legend of freedom.

  Moved forward through the 1950s and 1960s by Debord’s groups, given new names and a new shape, this was finally a legend almost too old to understand, let alone explain: a legend, Debord would helplessly, pathetically say in 1979, of “an Athens, a Florence, from which no one will be excluded, reaching to all the corners of the earth”—once again, as never before. Back, back, to a new Athens, a new Florence—and there, as Richard Huelsenbeck prophesied backward in Berlin in 1920, crowds would gather around every dialogue, dramas would be enacted in every street, and we would find ourselves in Homeric times. There, then, as Edmund Wilson prophesied forward in Paris in 1922, we would discover for what drama our setting was the setting. Poetry would be realized: Lautréamont’s call, made in 1870, for a poetry “made by all.” We would feel the will to speak; discover what it was we wanted to say; say it; be understood; win a response. All at once we would create events and their languages, and live in permanence within that paradise. “We have to multiply poetic subjects and objects,” Debord wrote in 1957, in the founding paper of the SI, “and we have to organize games of these poetic objects among these poetic subjects. This is our entire program, which is essentially transitory. Our situations will be ephemeral, without a future: passageways.”

  At its limit, those words are the legend of freedom: the promise that one’s words and acts will float free forever. Those words are themselves poetry; they can stay right where they are, in perfect balance, or they can lead anywhere, a motionless cause. In pursuit of a motionless cause—an idea of transformation so abstract it could hold its shape until the world was ready to be changed by it—the LI and the SI tried to act out a legend of freedom, and at the most that is all they are now. Always, no matter how incisive their ruthless critiques of whatever existed, there was that element of abstraction: an element that gave those critiques (whether applied by the LI to Guatemala in 1954 or by the SI to Watts in 1965 or France in May 1968) a bewitching, negative power, the hint of an event and a language to come, which still keeps the story the groups tried to tell alive. As I tell the story, it all begins, and must be judged against, what once happened in a nightclub and was returned to another—just as what happened in those nightclubs must be judged against what for certain moments was taken out of nightclubs, written on walls, shouted, played out in buildings and streets that were suddenly seen as never before. From one perspective the line is easy to draw, just a line—for example, the LI’s 1953 graffiti “NEVER WORK,” which reappeared as May ’68 graffiti, and was rewritten in 1977 for the Sex Pistols’ “Seventeen”: “We don’t work / I just feed / That’s all I need.” But that connection—a one-line LI manifesto, as featured in one-time situationist Christopher Gray’s Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International and passed down by Gray’s friends Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid to Johnny Rotten—is tradition as arithmetic. To find its story one has to disrupt the continuities of a tradition, even the discontinuities of a smoky, subterranean tradition, with a certain simultaneity. For example: if in pursuit of a negation of their society’s idea of happiness the Sex Pistols found themselves drawn again and again to the verge of dada glossolalia, into the realm of self-destroying modern poetry, Mémoires reached the same spot on purpose; though the convergence was no accident, neither was it exactly the result of a transference. Henri Lefebvre’s words are worth recalling: “To the degree that modernity has a meaning, it is this: it carries within itself, from the beginning, a radical negation—Dada, this event which took place in a Zurich cafe.” Lefebvre was making an argument, not posing a riddle; this negation, he was saying, had persisted, not as an art tradition canalized into an invulnerable future, but as an unsettled debt of history, extending into an unresolved past. It didn’t matter that as Lefebvre spoke in 1975 the Sex Pistols were forming, or that neither could ever acknowledge the other, as Lefebvre and Debord once acknowledged each other as comrades in an attempt to make a revolution out of everyday life: the Sex Pistols, taking the stage as an instinctive cultural impulse, with unknown roots in Mémoires, a studied cultural thesis, brought the debt back into play. As they brought it back into play, they increased it—and then, as soon as they consented to disappear from history, the debt according to its terms made them, too, a legend of freedom.

  That bad paper is the only currency in this tale: lost children seek their fathers, and fathers seek their lost children, but nobody really looks like anybody else. So all, fixed on the wrong faces, pass each other by: this is the drift of secret history, a history that remains secret even to those who make it, especially to those who make it. In the Sex Pistols’ hands, and in the hands of those who turned up in their wake, all this appeared as a blind groping toward a new story, driven by the instinctive dada suspicion that ordinary language could not tell it. In Debord’s book, which presented itself as a groping, yet so carefully arranged that a lightly constructed page could have the same effect as a violent pause in a piece of music, it was a conscious attempt to use dada language to tell the story that language had passed down to him: a story, and a language, that contained the most abstract and ephemeral legend of freedom he knew.

  It was a legend, Debord might have thought as he cut and pasted in 1957, that was part of a past, and part of a future, he had helped make. He had lived it; whatever dada had been, now, from page to page in Mémoires, it was something else. Once, the legend had it, it was an experiment in self-destroying modern poetry. Now it was the struggle of a small band, moved by the notion that the language of self-destroying modern poetry was a key to social revolution, to raise fragments of experience (“The evening, Barbara” “our talk is full of booze” “Lights, shadows, figures,” one could pick out as Mémoires began) to the level of the book’s epigraph. “Let the dead bury the dead, and mourn them,” Debord quoted Marx, Marx writing in 1843 to his friend Arnold Ruge, just as Marx began by quoting Matthew, who was quoting Jesus, Marx then following with words Debord now made his own: “Our kind will be the first to blaze a trail into a new life.”

  THE ART OF YESTERDAY’S CRASH

  Believe it or not: once a man became famous by reciting poetry that had no meaning. It’s easy to believe; on this show, nothing is str
ange. The viewer sees a bit of film, a reenactment: two men dance hunched over on a shallow stage, peeping and chirping, while a third plays piano. Their movements are cramped; it’s boring. A man in a stiff costume with a high, striped toque on his head is brought out (the costume overwhelms his whole body, he can’t move, he has to be carried onto the stage and plopped down like a big prop); he reads out disconnected syllables in a heavy, lugubrious voice. This is boring too. It doesn’t make sense when volleys of fruit hurled by the unseen audience splatter the poet; it’s not worth it. The dancers come back and tote the man off the stage.

  RIPLEY’S BELIEVE IT OR NOT! (CC); 60 min. Included: hypnotism in medical science; Hugo Ball’s “sound poetry”; the five-year photographic journey of a red couch across America; Chef Klinmahon from Thailand; the space shuttle. (Repeat)

  —TV Guide, 17 April 1986

  Once, the viewer is told, this was a hit. You believe it. Chef Klinmahon throws food in the air to season it; he’s a hit. Freud used to hypnotize his patients; he’s still a hit. Hostess Marie Osmond lies on a red couch that has been trucked all over the U.S.A. to be photographed for an art book; it’s a hit, she’s not a hit, she’s divorced, and as an overpublicized exponent of traditional values she’s not supposed to be, but maybe some of the couch will rub off. The only problem is the space shuttle: no doubt when the program first aired, happy-go-lucky footage of astronauts floating strawberries in zero gravity and trying to catch them in their mouths was funny. Now, not too long after one space shuttle has blown up, blown up seven astronauts and whatever they had in their mouths along with them, it’s not funny. This is hard to believe; this is the sort of tasteless juxtaposition TV exists to avoid.