Lipstick Traces
Page 24
There is no lunacy people under the domination of an archetype will not fall prey to. If thirty years ago anyone had dared to predict that our psychological development was tending towards a revival of the medieval persecutions of the Jews, that Europe would again tremble before Roman fasces and the tramp of legions, that people would once more give the Roman salute, as two thousand years before, and that instead of the Christian Cross an archaic swastika would lure onward millions ready for death—why, that man would have been hooted at as a mystical fool.
So Jung explained:
There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life. Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution, not in the form of images filled with content, but at first only as forms without content, representing merely the possibility of a certain type of perception and action. When a situation occurs which corresponds to a given archetype, that archetype becomes activated and a compulsiveness appears, which, like an instinctual drive, gains its way against all reason and will.
Alben Barkley, Buchenwald, 24 April 1945
This was Jung’s account of Nazism. In it was the power principle Debord would grasp: the reversible connecting factor, the idea that the empty repetitions of modern life, of work and spectacle, could be detourned into the creation of situations, into abstract forms that could be infused with unlimited content. But the situationist idea was at bottom a dada idea, and Jung’s account of Nazism needs only an excision of its specific examples to serve as an account of what the dadaists sought in the Cabaret Voltaire. Dada was a protest against its time; it was also the bird on the rhinoceros, peeping and chirping, but along for the ride. Dada was a prophecy, but it had no idea what it was prophesying, and its strength was that it didn’t care.
Dada was a traffic accident; it was a cult. Dada was a mask, eyes without a face. Dada was a religion, spawn of ancient heresies. Dada was a war, but over souls, not bodies.
FOR SEVENTY
For seventy years dada has been tended like a holy flame. The same lines, the same photographs, have been trotted out again and again. The trick is to catch dada triviality (Russian folk-song nights, vellum folios of “The New Poetry”) along with dada mystery (the burden of Huelsenbeck’s helpless, never-ending exegesis); to catch what has always been obvious and what has always been out of reach. Typically Huelsenbeck, who gained entry into the New York psychoanalytic community by way of a didactic analysis with Karen Horney, put it best: “and so as a doctor I was a success,” he wrote in 1969, five years before he died, “and as a dadaist (the thing closest to my heart) I was a failure.” The point is not to ask what he meant; that was his business. The point is to ask what it would mean to live with that kind of phantom in your heart.
Strange things happened in the Cabaret Voltaire. The members of the band played themselves, but they also called up a Frankenstein monster to a hoodoo beat, which played them: a monster mash. Raoul Vaneigem replayed it for the situationists in The Revolution of Everyday Life:
Working to cure themselves and their civilization of their discontents—working, in the last analysis, more coherently than Freud himself—the Dadaists built the first laboratory for the revitalization of everyday life. Their activity was far more radical than their theory. Grosz: “The point was to work completely in the dark. We didn’t know where we were going.” The Dada group was a funnel sucking in all the trivia and rubbish cluttering up the world. Reappearing at the other end, everything was transformed. Though people and things stayed the same they took on completely new meanings. The reversal of perspective began in the magic of the rediscovery of lost experience.
Fixing the precedent for Debord’s reversible connecting factor, Vaneigem didn’t care what dada had been. Like the dadaists as they tried to say what they’d done, he was trying to find the limits of what their moment could be made to say. Attempting to put into play the central tenet of situationist theory—that the nature of social reality and the means to its transformation were to be found not in the study of power, but in a long, clear look at the seemingly trivial gestures and accents of ordinary experience—Vaneigem was glamorizing what once actually happened, not caring if it had or not. He was writing a how-to manual on revolution in modern society, a revolution to be made with the means available to anyone who at home felt like a tourist; with his glamorization in place, Vaneigem was calling on his readers, whoever they might turn out to be, to act it out. He was contriving a prophecy of May ’68, when so many of the lines in his book would be copied onto the walls of Paris, then across France, and then, as the years went on and the words floated free of their source, when the book had been lost in the vagaries of publishing and fashion, around the world. “ACT LOCALLY, THINK GLOBALLY,” I can read today on a bumper sticker in my hometown; Vaneigem wrote the words, though the person who bought the sticker will never know it.
Vaneigem wouldn’t mind. That was the idea. That was why each number of Internationale situationniste opened with an anti-copyright: “Any of the texts published in ‘I.S.’ may be freely reproduced, translated, or adapted, even without notice of their origin.” But if the situationists wanted readers freed from the authority of authors, what Vaneigem found in the Cabaret Voltaire was a father he could love: “amidst this upheaval,” he said, was the first realization of Lautréamont’s demand for a “poetry made by all.” Putting the pieces together, Vaneigem was living up to his patrimony by increasing it: if Huelsenbeck could get up and declaim his corny Negro poems and make the history books, then anyone could make those books irrelevant. Any spot could be a stage, and any stage could be a real terrain: anyone could make history. This was how much experience had been lost, and how much remained to be discovered: under the paving stones, no one knew what treasure might be found. “May ’68 was an enormous street theatre with the service personnel on strike waiting for it to happen,” Alain Tanner said of Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, his 1976 film about people who found themselves in that event and then found themselves cast out of history by its failure. “And much more important than the ‘events’ are the cast-offs, exactly insofar as this theatre brought out hopes and caused hidden desires to flower which have remained on the surface ever since.”
It isn’t hard to demonstrate that a few one-time art students purposefully coded a crude version of all this—a subterranean tradition of chimerical events and manifestos written in invisible ink—into the punk milieu in 1976 and 1977. It is less easy to demonstrate that, as a constellation of hidden desires, the time during which those desires remained hidden, and the magic of rediscovering both the desires and the time, all of this was blindly coded in certain rhythmic shifts and turns of phrase, so that each gesture and accent bespoke the negation of an old world and a reach for a new one—but that is why every good punk record can sound like the greatest thing you’ve ever heard. And that is why the dadaists never got over it: they saw the transformation of the world for a few days in a Zurich bar, and while they glimpsed fragments of that vision for the rest of their lives, they never again saw it whole. “Though people and things stayed the same they took on completely new meanings”: as the dadaists walked the clean streets of Zurich the day after the night before, they saw shoppers taking off their clothes, heard clerks saying blago bung instead of thank you very much, felt alleys rising into fire escapes that leaped over buildings which collapsed under the weight of the people pouring up the stairs. The dadaists sensed the power to think anything, to say anything, to do anything—but they kept quiet, talking only among themselves, storing up their doubt, their laughter, and their rage for the night to come, when they would pour it all out, when everything would be thought, said, and done.
That was the legend of freedom. Dada was the notion that in the constructed setting of a temporally enclosed space—in this case, a nightclub—anything could be negated. It was the notion that, there, anything might happen, which meant finally that in the world at large, transposed artistically, anything might
happen there, too.
It was not art—not exactly. One can look at Janco’s painting Cabaret Voltaire: behind the jumping crowd, the frozen dancers on the stage, and the man bent over the piano, the word DADA appears on the wall over the piano player’s head. It appears: it does not seem to have been written, painted, put there. On this wall, the word communicates not as a slogan, or even a talisman, but as an emanation—rising out of some primeval memory, the shout of a forgotten voice. That was culture, in the Cabaret Voltaire.
Arp: “We were given the honorary title of ‘nihilists.’ ” All they shared was the conviction that the world they were asked to accept was false. They were gratified by reviews accusing them of turning the legacy of Western civilization into manure; damned for their barbarism, the next night they tried to see how far they could take it. Legs were ripped off tables; they saw legs ripped off bodies. Glasses were smashed; they saw spectacles smashing, eyes lying on the ground. Blood was spilled; they swam in the river. It was a play, staged in competition with another theater. Ball, 16 June 1916: “The slaughter increases, and [people] cling to the prestige of European glory . . . they cannot persuade us to enjoy this rotting pie of human flesh they present to us . . . One day they will have to admit that we reacted very politely.” In 1918, in Berlin, that would be Huelsenbeck’s argument—his first rebuke to all that had happened in the Cabaret Voltaire, and all that hadn’t.
DADA WAS
Dada was nothing more than the theory and practice of the right place at the right time. What was new was the discovery that both could be created: that was the legend of freedom. What was old was the dim apprehension that whatever was created would outstrip its creators forever. That is the tone of every Cabaret Voltaire memoir, a sense of what those who were there didn’t see, the specter of a creature that stood head and shoulders above all present—and this, the conviction that there was something in the twentieth century that could never be understood or controlled, was the gnostic myth.
The ultimate justification of social control in the modern world was ancient: human beings were sinners, and that was why there was evil and suffering on earth. Human beings were sinners because Original Sin separated them from God; in that separation was the ubiquity and permanence of sin, its guarantee as the first principle of human life. This was the source of all other separations: patriarchy, authority, hierarchy, the division of humanity into rulers and ruled, owners and workers, the separation of every individual from everyone else, of oneself from oneself. But gnosticism, in its countless forms, over thousands of years, had always denied that any of this was so. There was no necessary separation of human beings from God, the gnostics said, because even as God created human beings, human beings created God, and whoever achieved this knowledge became “not a Christian, but a Christ.” The root of evil and suffering was ignorance of this first principle of human life—and such ignorance was the only sin. Most would wallow in it forever, because this was a knowledge that could not be learned but that had to be lived; it could be explored, but never exhausted. And this was the myth that dada had put back into play, the invulnerable sentence: one that could be understood but never explained.
WHEN
When in 1924 Henri Lefebvre dismissed dada as a pseudo-sorcery, solely the spirit that says no, the vain proclamation of the sovereignty of the instant, he knew he was right, but he also knew that he had not been in the right place at the right time. His snottiness was jealousy: only eight years late and he had missed it.
A half-century later, Lefebvre was no longer jealous; Tzara was dead, Ball was dead, Arp was dead, Huelsenbeck was dead, Hennings was dead, and Janco was forgotten. Still, though Lefebvre had indeed picked up the pieces, and put his name on the “Theory of Moments,” Lefebvre had yet to forget what he had missed. Reliving the legend in 1975, speaking into a tape recorder for an interviewer, Lefebvre forgot that just two years before he had cursed the legend: the “long line of failures, self-destructions and fatal spells,” the line he himself traced from the beginning of his friendship with Tzara to the end of his friendship with Debord. He forgot that in 1925 he signed his name to “Revolution, First and Forever!”—to what, even at the time, he recognized as a careerist imitation. He was a teenager when the dadaists took the stage, and now, as an old man, whose life’s work had been the investigation of “modernity,” he said so queerly that what was truly modern about modernity, what was actually new, what was really interesting, was not its works—technology, abundance, the welfare state, mass communication, and so on—but the peculiar character of the opposition modernity created against itself: an opposition he still called “Dada.”
It was, he was trying to say, a creature still standing head and shoulders above all present. He had seen it; like everyone else who heard the story, he had been there. He was only fifteen, a busboy, nobody knew his name, nobody gave him the time of day, but he felt it. Like anyone else he took the stage of the Teen ’n’ Twenty disco. Arms grabbed at his legs as he chanted his “Meaning of the Commune,” danced his never-published manifesto “You Will All Be Situationists,” pantomimed his La Matérialisme dialectique: a shuffle to the left, a shuffle to the right, then collapsing on the boards in his mask and borne into the wings as Ball banged out a Longines Symphonette “Favorite Moment” from the Appassionata, as advertised in TV Guide. At the end of every phrase Lefebvre shouted “umbah-umbah”; he kicked back. He spit out the pieces he had finished smashing. He killed a quarter of a century, he killed several centuries for the sake of what was to come—or just to see if he could get away with it. That was the faith of the dada religion: “Against an idea, even a false one, all weapons are powerless.”
THE CRASH OF YESTERDAY’S ART
In 1974 I was writing about Elvis movies. The films were so shoddy, I thought, they seemed to embody a whole new kind of cinema: the 1960 G.I. Blues was my example. “When Elvis strums his acoustic guitar,” I said, “an electric solo comes out. When bass and guitar are seen backing him, you hear horns and piano. When he sings, the soundtrack is at least half a verse out of synch . . . Someday, French film critics will discover these pictures and hail them as a unique example of cinéma discrépant. There will be retrospectives at the Cinémathèque, and not long after Elvis movies will be shown on U.S. public television, complete with learned commentary deferring to the French discovery and bemoaning America’s inability to appreciate its own culture . . .”
But one can never underestimate the Left Bank—where, in 1951, Isidore Isou launched his “Manifeste du cinéma discrépant,” well before anyone heard of Elvis Presley, and thirty years before I heard of Isidore Isou. The manifesto was the rallying cry of his film of that year, Traité de bave et d’eternité (Treatise on Slime and Eternity). “Our school,” Isou later wrote, “has gone beyond ‘synchronism,’ and even beyond ‘harmonious asynchronism’ ” (what, apparently, Elvis movies would begin to offer with G.I. Blues—Jailhouse Rock and other 1950s Presley films were synchronized), “and has revealed total antisynchronism, or discrepant montage, which breaks the, unity of the two ‘pillars’ of film, the sound and the picture, and presents them in divergence one from the other.”
Cinéma discrépant will have its moment in this tale—but first it is necessary to answer a question not often asked outside of France: who was Isidore Isou?
ISIDORE ISOU
Isidore Isou was born in Romania in 1925. He came from a petit-bourgeois Jewish family and he was raised as a prodigy. He read nearly everything, as he would never cease to tell anyone who read him (citing not only the authors he mastered but how many pages of each he chalked up), and at the age of seventeen, on 19 March 1942, he discovered a theory of culture and the meaning of life.
Isou began with a first cause: the motor of social evolution was not the instinct to survive, but the will to create. Creation was the highest form of human activity, and art was its essence; through the act of creation, the artist moved from the slime of unconscious existence to the eternity of hist
ory consciously made. By such an act, one became god—for it was only through the conscious creation of the world that God, the first artist, had established his own existence.
Within this circular ensemble of premises there was already a system, a set of rules: the first was that not even God was free from the laws of creation. Creation was never simply a matter of a purely subjective intervention against the slime; creation meant the recognition and the purposeful use of the “mechanics of invention.” All aesthetic forms, and the social formations they spoke for—political structures, temporal styles, modes of seemingly natural behavior—moved from a stage of “amplitude” (amplification) to a stage of decomposition. This was the history of human existence, and nothing could stop it; the point was to master it.
In the period of amplification, any new form (impressionist painting, industrial capitalism, bourgeois gentility, short skirts) works as a metaphor for life itself: the new form reaches out to incorporate the world, to transform it. Within the prism of the metaphor, life seems whole and full of meaning; then the new form reaches its limit, begins to decay, and life shrinks. One can see that God was the first victim of this first law of the mechanics of invention. Look at the Bible: out of the slime, paradise; then rot, corruption, the slime, a faint memory of a golden age.
In the inevitable period of decomposition, those forms devised to transform the world turn in upon themselves and implode. The form, once world-historical, becomes its own subject. History stops; action is replaced by an endless series of repetitions. As the form decomposes, symbolically, so does the world—it becomes sterile, inaccessible, worthless, unreal. Any aesthetic form could illustrate the necessity, but the novel will do: we move from Fielding, where a story, a creative account of the world, is in question, to Joyce, where communication itself is in question. The result is the post-Joycean novel, which asks no questions and communicates nothing: it is merely a set of empty gestures, a dead commodity, a thing whose only use value is its exchange value. We move from eternity (Fielding is still read, and, as you read him, you still feel the world changing) to slime (to believe that the present-day novel will be read in a hundred years is not to praise the novel but to condemn the world).