Lipstick Traces

by Greil Marcus

  Dalai Lama Says He Didn’t Start Riots The Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader, has rejected Chinese charges that he instigated the recent anti-Chinese riots in Lhasa and has accused Beijing of seeking a scapegoat for its own failures, a spokesman said yesterday.

  Tahi Wangdi, the spokesman in New Delhi for the Dalai Lama, said, “No one has instigated the trouble from outside.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle,

  3 November 1987

  The group blew apart. Some quit; others were kicked out. Those who remained continued the search for the hacienda, drifting from one odd bar to another, writing down incidents they tried to make strange. Not a word appeared until June 1954, when Debord, Wolman, Dahou, and two or three others ran off the first fifty copies of the new Potlatch and began mailing them out to whoever they thought might most want to read it, or most not want to. The LI never published Chtcheglov’s “Formula for a New Urbanism,” which would not see the light of day until June 1958, in I.S. no. 1, and by then Chtcheglov was already crazy.

  “He went mad,” Bernstein said in 1983. “But he was not mad. He had been excluded—he was convinced the Dalai Lama was controlling what was happening to us. And then, one day, he had a fight with his wife. He broke up a cafe, smashed everything. His wife—who was a swine—called the police. She called an ambulance. Because she was his wife, she was able to commit him. He was taken away to an institution, and given insulin shock. And electroshock. After that, he was mad. Guy and I went to visit him: he was eating with his hands, with saliva dripping from his mouth. He was mad—the way you know when someone is mad. The letters he wrote to us were babble. And he is still there, if he is not dead. He was very shortly sent to a halfway house, where he had freedom, where he could come and go. But he had developed the disease where he could not live outside of the asylum, where he could not stand to be anywhere else, where he did not want to be anywhere else.” Bernstein wrapped her arms around herself, making a straitjacket: “Whenever he came out, he became scared, and rushed back. So he took part in the asylum theater; he put on plays. And I think he is still there.”

  Moineau’s, 1953, by Ed van der Elsken

  It is not hard to imagine that Chtcheglov’s fall sealed the LI as a group. His destruction was an event, which gave the LI a tangible past, made the long year of doing nothing into a myth, into a story that could be told—made it real. The group had spent its time walking the streets, taking notes, then explaining its project to itself—that was all, from the attack on Chaplin to the first issue of Potlatch. “An art film on this generation,” Debord explained in On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time, his film on those months, “can only be a film about the absence of its real works.” But Chtcheglov’s absence was a real work: if the momentary seizure of Notre-Dame was the LI’s founding crime as legend (with Serge Berna, present in the cathedral, then within the LI, the group’s link to its imaginary past), Chtcheglov’s exclusion was the LI’s founding crime as act—a symbolic murder, since to the LI exclusion meant civil death. It was no help that in 1957, with the formation of the SI, Debord made Chtcheglov a “member from afar,” or that two decades later, in guilt and love, he made a film in which Chtcheglov was the hero; Chtcheglov’s exclusion had consequences, and they could not be undone. Even as violence and dementia, those consequences were a form of history, an unsettled debt charged to whatever future the LI might ennoble or fail. Unwanted and unforeseen, those consequences were a proof that the LI could make history: events that could not be taken back. If, simply by pursuing its own philosophy of yes and no, explaining itself and acting on its conclusions, one day sitting down to vote on who should remain and who should not, the group could wreck a life, then it could wreck the world.

  OUR TABLES

  “Our tables aren’t often round,” the LI wrote in “36 rue des Morillons,” “but one day, we’re going to build our own ‘castles of adventure.’ ” The group emerged from the year of the continuous dérive with a sense of necessity, relaxing its ban on work and committing itself to a regular publication schedule. It stepped out again with a less abstract, more playful sense of reality, gleefully chronicling the best news of the week. The members of the LI remained planners of an imaginary city, but now they were also its critics—they saw that all cities were imaginary, complexes of desires turned into geography or suppressed by it, and they saw that all cities could be explored. Thus the LI toured Guatemala City in 1954, full of firing squads, setting up for vacationers, a cheap holiday in other people’s misery; it visited the Catharist town of Beziers in 1209, on the day it was exterminated by the pope’s armies in the Albigensian Crusade (“Kill them all,” the papal commander said when a lieutenant asked him how believers in the True Church might be distinguished from the heretics, “God will recognize his own”); it crisscrossed the East End of London in 1888, guided by Jack the Ripper, “the psychogeographer of love.” The imaginary city was Haussmann’s Paris, a fantasy of commodities and their troops—and it was the belief that if one could find the right street, one could escape from that city into Chtcheglov’s.

  The Chronicles of Arthur relate how King Arthur, with the help of a Cornish carpenter, invented the marvel of his court, the miraculous Round Table at which his knights would never come to blows . . . The carpenter says to Arthur: “I will make thee a fine table, where sixteen hundred may sit at once, and from which none need be excluded . . .”

  —Marcel Mauss, Essai sur le don

  (The Gift), 1925

  In the SI Debord called this instant route to total change the reversible connecting factor; in the LI he named it the “Northwest Passage.” The metaphor wasn’t geographical, it was psychogeographical—it was psychogeography itself. It belonged to the history of the modern city and to the prehistory of the dérive; Debord found it in Confessions of an English Opium Eater, the memoir Thomas De Quincey published in 1821.

  “I remember long, wonderful psychogeographical walks in London with Guy,” Alexander Trocchi said in 1983, a year before his death. “He took me to places in London I didn’t know, that he didn’t know, that he sensed, that I’d never have been to if I hadn’t been with him. He was a man who could discover a city.” The two met in 1955 in Paris, where Trocchi, born in 1925 in Glasgow, was serving one god as a pornographer for Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press, another as the editor of Merlin, a somber avant-garde quarterly. Joining the LI, Trocchi had to cut all ties, break with his friends and employers: “I stopped speaking to them. I was to enter into a closed society, a clandestine group, which was to be my whole world.” He was near sixty when we met, and he looked forty; he was built strong, all power, his eyes set deep but piercing and clear. A huge, intimidating nose came out of his face like a claw. It was impossible to believe he had been a heroin addict for almost thirty years.

  Though Trocchi left Paris in 1956 for the United States, when the SI was formed Debord counted him a founding, active situationist. In 1960 Trocchi published Cain’s Book, an autobiographical novel in the form of a junkie’s journal: “Il vous faut construire les situations,” he wrote in the last pages. He was speaking of the fix: “systematic nihilism,” but also “a purposive spoon in the broth of experience.”

  For a long time I have suspected there is no way out. I can do nothing I am not. I have been living destructively towards the writer in me for some time, guiltily conscious of doing so all along, cf. the critical justification in terms of the objective death of an historical tradition: a decadent at a tremendous turning point in history, constitutionally incapable of turning with it as a writer, I am living my personal Dada. In all of this there is a terrible emotional smear. The steel of the logic has daily to be strengthened to contain the volcanic element within. It grows daily more hard to contain. I am a kind of bomb.

  This was the sort of person Debord wanted, but Trocchi never really returned. Cain’s Book made him famous in bohemian circles in Britain, and in 1962, in London, he began Project Sigma, an attempt
to unite every sort of dissident and experimental cultural tendency into an international corps of “cosmonauts of inner space.” Debord published Trocchi’s Sigma manifesto in I.S. no. 8, January 1963, but there followed the ambiguous note that it was “no longer as a member of the SI” that Trocchi pursued his “technique du coup du monde,” his “invisible insurrection of a million minds”—to Debord, Trocchi’s association with people like occultist Colin Wilson and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, both of whom Debord had long since dismissed as “mystical cretins,” was a resignation absent la lettre. To Trocchi, Debord’s demurral was an exclusion, and he never got over it.

  “Guy thought the world was going to collapse on its own, and we were going to take over,” Trocchi said in 1983. “I wanted to do that—to take over the world. But you can’t take over the world by excluding people from it! Guy wouldn’t even mention the names of the people I was involved with—Timothy Leary, Ronnie Laing. I remember the last letter he sent me: ‘Your name sticks in the minds of decent men.’ He was like Lenin; he was an absolutist, constantly kicking people out—until he was the only one left. And exclusions were total. It meant ostracism, cutting people. Ultimately, it leads to shooting people—that’s where it would have led, if Guy had ever ‘taken over.’ And I couldn’t shoot anyone.”

  “It wasn’t a question of loyalty,” Trocchi said; he raised his hands. “Guy has my loyalty. I loved the man.” Suddenly Trocchi turned away from me and shouted. “Guy, Guy,” he said, “WHAT IS IT? I am talking to you now, even if you will never speak to me!”

  We were in a fifth-floor walkup in a seedy section of Kensington. Trocchi had plans for screenplays, movies, a memoir; he made his living dealing third-class rare books out of a tiny stall on Portobello Road. His apartment was littered with syringes and busted ampules. The walls were hung with founding situationist Constant’s diagrams of his own new city: “In New Babylon, man has been freed from his burdens, builds life himself.” I copied the words into my notebook: this, I thought, was where the great project of transforming the world had ended up.

  Even in the moment, the irony failed to cut very deeply, perhaps because Trocchi had already circled away from the great project. He was speaking again of its smallest version, where the desire to take over the world was first the desire to be in the world, a desire driven by the conviction that one cannot truly be in the world until the alienation of each from all has been vanquished, until necessity has been banished, until the world has been changed. Trocchi was talking again about the dérive—there, he said, for as long as it lasted, you were in the world as if you were changing it, and there were intimations of utopia everywhere you looked. “The difficulties of the dérive are those of freedom,” Debord wrote in 1956 in “Theory of the Dérive.” “It all rests on the belief that the future will precipitate an irreversible change in the behavior and the decor of present-day society. One day, we will construct cities for drifting . . . but with light retouching, one can utilize certain zones which already exist. One can utilize certain persons who already exist.” Even if he had been used, that was what Trocchi remembered most sweetly, so he talked about getting drunk, chasing oblivion into the black hole, the way out, the Northwest Passage. “There was a magical quality to Guy,” Trocchi said. He was almost smiling; the flux of emotion in the previous half-hour had confused both of us, but now he was happy. “Distances didn’t seem to matter to the man. Walking in London, in the daytime, at night, he’d bring me to a spot he’d found, and the place would begin to live. Some old, forgotten part of London. Then he’d reach back for a story, for a piece of history, as if he’d been born there. He’d quote from Marx, or Treasure Island, or De Quincey—do you know De Quincey?”

  I used often, after I had taken opium, to wander forth, without much regarding the direction or the distance, to all the markets, and other parts of London, to which the poor resort on a Saturday night, for laying out their wages . . . Some of these rambles led me to great distances: for an opium-eater is too happy to observe the motion of time. And sometimes in my attempts to steer homewards, upon nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and headlands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such sphinx’s riddles of streets without thoroughfares, as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of porters, and confound the intellects of hackney-coachmen. I could almost have believed, at times, that I must be the first discoverer of some of these terras incognitae, and doubted, whether they had yet been laid down in the modern charts of London. For all this, however, I paid a heavy price in distant years, when the human face tyrannized over my dreams, and the perplexities of my steps in London came back to haunt me.

  By the summer of 1954 this was part of the LI’s myth—and just as the catacombs were really a symbol and the Northwest Passage was not really a place, the dérive too was now less a practice than a metaphor, capable of judging every word the LI wrote and, after that, every sentence the SI tried to pass. The LI believed in “continental drift” (geophysics today, but science fiction in 1954)—that is, as streets could be capes and headlands, and neighborhoods deserts or swamps, they all moved. They moved away from an unconsciously remembered wholeness—of “Pangaea,” the original supercontinent of two hundred million years ago, or “Nostratic,” the supposed common language of the Upper Paleolithic; of the Garden of Eden or Paris as a Commune—and into a dyslexia of separations. In his “Theory of the Dérive” Debord paused over a sociologist’s study on “the narrowness of the real Paris in which each individual lives,” citing the professor’s diagram of all the movements undertaken by one student in the course of an entire year: “With no deviations, her itinerary delineates a small triangle, the summits of which are the School of Political Science, her residence, and that of her piano teacher.” This, Debord said, was an example of “modern poetry, capable of provoking keen emotional reactions—in this case, indignation that it is possible to live like that.”

  A year or so later, Debord cut up maps of Paris and pasted them into psychogeographical maps; they differ from the imaginary maps geographers have made of the fragmentation of Pangaea into the continents we take for granted only because Debord’s arrows point to unity as well as separation. But to recreate that unity—the whole world as a single round table—the separation had to be publicized. Before people would reject it, it had to be made undeniable. It had to be made into an event, and to be made into an event separation had to be intensified, turned into ruin and noise. The project could begin, Debord wrote, with the construction of “an atmosphere of uneasiness”: with a small group of people, who might hitchhike “nonstop and without destination” during a transit strike to add to the confusion, or turn up on the streets in disguise, or publish plans for the raising of a house meant to be abandoned after its housewarming—“the greatest difficulty in such an undertaking is to convey through such apparently delirious proposals a sufficient degree of serious seduction . . . We need to work toward flooding the market—even if for the moment only the intellectual market—with a mass of desires whose realization is not beyond the capacity of man’s present means of action on the material world, but only beyond the capacity of social organization as it stands.”

  If the LI, playing its game of freedom, could spread desires for a way of life neither government nor the market could ever satisfy, then people would overturn them—or ignore them, finding satisfaction in a drift through the city’s Northwest Passage: “the future,” Debord said, “belongs to the passerby.” Psychogeography, as Asger Jorn defined it, was “the science fiction of urban planning”; maybe, to prove that separation was no more fated than the current status of the continents, you only had to tell the right story, and turn up the volume.

  THERE IS

  There is still sound in Potlatch, though you can’t really speak of turning it up—it’s already loud, in a peculiar
way. With bits of news from the regular papers running into ultimatums and warnings, which shift into passwords, which themselves make up a secret language that presents itself as public speech, the loudness of the sound is in its aura of spontaneous generation. The voice seems to come out of nowhere, and no accounting of ancestors or familiars, even present on the page, can quite dim that sensation. The old news remains new because the world has turned as if none of it happened; the voice carries the shock of displacement, and it is strong enough to turn displacement into a value.

  There’s no formal displacement in Potlatch. With screaming juxtapositions and colored type overlays exploding incoherent essays printed upside down, Berlin dada journals were paper cabarets; this is not. This is just a sheet of carefully typed words forming grammatical sentences that make neat paragraphs following each other down conventionally sized pages. The displacement is invisible, a time-destroying voice coming off a stenciled piece of paper: a voice whose content is so disproportionate to its form that one or the other seems like a trick. Compared to Potlatch, the printed, illustrated numbers of Internationale lettriste are official culture; compared to them, Potlatch is a return to the clandestine newsletters that hundreds of French Resistance groups produced throughout the Occupation. “In a world where books have long lost all likeness to books,” situationist familiar Adorno wrote then, “the real book can no longer be one. If the invention of the printing press inaugurated the bourgeois era, the time is at hand for its repeal by the mimeograph.”