by Greil Marcus
The Cathars believed that the cosmos was divided equally between the good God, the God of the Spirit, and Satan, the evil God, “Rex Mundi,” creator and king of the world. Heaven, the realm of the good God, was a place of affection and delight, a festive hearth; the earth was altogether the realm of Satan, and the good God could not save it, because he had not made it. Everything terrestrial was evil: “nature and matter were not and could not be the work of the good God,” Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie writes in Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, his 1975 study of the last Cathars. He cited a believer: “ ‘It is the devil and not God who makes the plants flower and bear grain.’ ” And it was Satan who made the human body grow and reproduce.
The Catharism of Montaillou was first and foremost a story, a myth. It was told over and over again, with variations, around the fire. To begin with there was the Fall. The Devil succeeded in leading astray some of the spirits surrounding the good God in Heaven. They fell from Heaven and were imprisoned here below by their seducer in vestures of earth, bodies of flesh, shaped in the clay of oblivion. These fallen souls sped madly from one deceased body to another, one vesture of decay into another.
This was life as a horror movie, a medieval Night of the Living Dead—but there was a way out. Someday the lost soul might find a body that could receive the Catharist sacrament of the consolamentum (consolation); then one would abjure all sin, a renunciation symbolized by one’s refusal of sexual intercourse and the eating of flesh, and the soul’s return to heaven, to the loving community where “the sacred was only the social, transfigured,” would be assured. Those who were willing to become parfaits (the perfect) would assume the sacrament in the prime of life, in order to administer it to the credentes (believers), who would wait until they were on the verge of death to receive it—which meant that in the meantime the credentes could live a life of total liberty. Since in the end one would be absolved of all the sins one had ever committed, some Cathars believed what the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Lollards, the Anabaptists, and the Ranters would preach in the centuries to come: that men and women could commit any sin, “and do whatever they please in this world.” The world was matter and it was vile, human beings were matter and they were vile—but with the consolamentum and one’s return to the world of the spirit, matter was naught. Only deliverance was true, and “until this moment”—which the consoled credente might hasten with the endura, a ritual suicide, a fast to the death—“all was permitted.” And all was for the greater good: each pious death, regardless of the filth it left behind, promised the day when the split that rent the cosmos would close. Once all the souls that had fallen from heaven had gone home, there would be nothing left on earth but bodies without souls; with no more souls to enter them, they would decay into nothing, and that would be the end of the world.
So this was the original meaning of the most distant element of the LI’s détournement of the news of the week: as the Cathars believed and scientists had finally proved, there was an absolute duality, a world of matter and a world of antimatter. But the juxtaposition of the antiproton and the Guatemalan coup produced new meanings. One could see that the Cathars themselves were antimatter—philosophically, because they were against matter; metaphysically, because as spirits imprisoned in a world of matter they could destroy that world; and historically, because finally it was not the world but the Cathars who were destroyed. Just as Arbenz’s reforms threatened capitalism and an independent Guatemala threatened the empire of the United States, the beliefs of the Cathars were a threat to Rome, and Languedoc was an independent province, outside the Kingdom of France—and so with the pope’s blessing the barons of the north embarked on the Albigensian Crusade, wiped out the Cathars, and soon fixed the borders of the modern nation where now, in 1954, one read “The Cathars Were Right.” But ironies, like metaphors, are turns of phrase, inversions, reversals—one might think the formal division of the universe was not all the Cathars were right about. If they could incarnate antimatter, others could as well.
Dada sought the social atom in the destruction of ordinary language; Isou found its particles in the poetry of the final element, then set them free in the ether, where their charges reversed, repelling old meanings, attracting new ones. The LI was talking to itself. The Cathars were prophets of the destruction of the visible world; so was the LI, which called that world the spectacle.
THAT IS
That is a version of the content of the early Potlatch, but nothing like its voice. On its own page, “The Cathars Were Right” is funnier and more ominous than I can make it. My translation is slow and détournement is always quick—a new world in a double take, in the blink of an eye.
The Potlatch voice is that of a small group of nobodies scrabbling for bits and pieces of old moments of liberation, for the detritus of what could have been, and since it never was still could be—no matter how old the words, the LI could still be the first to blaze a trail into a new life. Originality was not the point—it was an ideology of creation in a society determined to suppress creation, and in that society détournement was a principle of freedom. There was nothing new under the sun; that meant the materials of transformation were already present, everywhere and anywhere, in today’s papers, in yesterday’s books, and so the Potlatch voice is huddled and all-powerful, satirical and sentimental, a midnight secret told as a noontime shout, self-referential within a global frame of reference. Legend and fact turn into one another; the mythic becomes prosaic, and vice versa; pronouncements on all things under the sun are made in tones of common knowledge just out of reach of common sense. In certain moods, one can feel a jarring, tearing momentum in the pages, the momentum of a dream as it rushes toward waking—the most violent screed seems reasonable, the most rational argument communicates as a rant, and as one picks out the names at the bottom of a manifesto, the questions ask themselves: who are these people? Don’t they know what they’re saying sounds like a joke? Why do they sound as if they’ve already got it?
The writers offer a world they reject—a world that almost everyone outside the LI acknowledges as both past and future. The writers offer a world they believe in, but that world is out of reach—out of reach then, and out of reach now. As one reads Potlatch, so is the world one has always taken for granted. The evanescent quality of Debord’s later writing, his chiliastic serenity, is patent here: a voice speaking from a world one might want to make and then to live in, but also the voice of the mad professor in Eric Ambler’s spy thriller Cause for Alarm. The LI offers “. . . A New Idea in Europe”; the old man, professor of classical mechanics at the University of Bologna until Mussolini’s fascists drove him out, offers his unpublished masterpiece, hundreds of pages of whorls, faces, and high-school equations. The deposed professor has discovered a proof of perpetual motion; so has the LI. “Leisure is the real revolutionary question,” says the LI, right out loud, nobody listening; “The cube root of eight,” whispers the professor, “is God.”
Front page of Potlatch no. 5, 20 July 1954
THE WORLD
The world the LI rejected was ultimately fixed in the pages of Internationale situationniste. As with the gap between the Potlatch voice and its medium, the idea of happiness discovered in the LI would over the years prove endlessly disproportionate to the ultimate medium: society as it was already ordered, everywhere. Thus from 1958 to 1969 the SI set forth an irrefutable analysis of the spectacle-commodity society (“The thought,” Debord wrote in 1972, the year he formally dissolved what little was left of the group, “of the collapse of a world”), and today the twelve numbers of the situationist journal read like a western version of The Captive Mind, with all of its weariness and resignation replaced by a sense of an impending explosion—“an explosion,” as the SI once said of the art of the 1910s and 1920s, “which never took place.”
The SI’s writing is like a western version of Czeslaw Milosz’s account of the surrender of Polish intellectuals to Stalinism in two ways: because it came from t
he West and focused on it, but also because what the SI wrote is a western, a cowboy melodrama staged in a cathedral—a cathedral now gothic, ordained by God and full of the smell of his corpse, now ruined and rebuilt from the ground up. “Our position is that of warriors between two worlds,” Raoul Vaneigem told an SI conference in 1961: “one which we do not recognize, another which does not yet exist. We must precipitate the crash; hasten the end of the world, the disaster in which the situationists will recognize their own.” Shifting a word or two, Vaneigem was quoting the papal commander who ordered the extermination of the Cathars, with the SI taking the place of God, but it was only détournement: “Any sign is susceptible to conversion into something else, even its opposite.”
To write about the SI one has to use such slogans, or catch phrases like “the spectacle-commodity economy”—and to do so now is to loosen the SI’s hold on the world it promised to destroy, a hold that seems so sure as one reads what the situationists wrote in their time. At the heart of the essays on Watts or fallout shelters, the arguments are dressed in the armor of facts and scrupulous research, of history and sociology, but they are armed with the dispensations of poetry—the poetry of a title like “The Geopolitics of Hibernation,” of its orchestration by an ad for the “Peace o’ Mind” fallout-shelter company. As the symbolism of the shelter expands to take in Brasilia, a capital city protecting itself from its own country, or a state-sponsored nonalcoholic discotheque protecting its patrons from themselves, there is finally no ordinary argument at all, only an unstoppable re-contextualization of anything an argument might touch. The analysis is irrefutable not because it is true, any more than it is refutable because it is false, but because it so happily used a private language to distort a public world; the whole of that world’s negative truth could always be caught in an everyday moment.
Bernstein caught it in Tous les chevaux du roi, sending Geneviève, her narrator, off to a movie:
The afternoon loomed up empty before me. Luckily a theater on my street was playing a western so old I knew it had to be good. For a modest sum, I assisted in the invasions in China; in the efforts of an army triumphing without losses over backward terrorists, who hid in the underbrush, disavowed by everyone; in a presidential inauguration and an international tournament. Then the smile of Colgate toothpaste brought us to the feature; the lion roared on the screen; and the cowboy hero won his heroine in ninety minutes.
The declension of the last sentence is relentless: the alienated consumer of images brought into the spectacle as a participant in a war against herself, a war she will lose by identifying with the enemy, swallowing its images, and so consuming herself.
This was the bad world as the good—save for the blank irony of Bernstein’s tone, the passage is seamless. But the bad world was not seamless. “Consumers themselves become spectacular, as do any objects of consumption,” the SI wrote in “The Geopolitics of Hibernation,” with “perfectly reified man [taking] his place in the show-window as a desirable image of reification”; the “internal defect of the system” was “that it cannot perfectly reify people.” You could take your place in the show window, but you could not be at home there. So the bad world was full of cracks—and that was a story the SI told best in “The World of Which We Speak,” combing the papers for evidence that, among other things, the spectacle of participation was really “The Technology of Isolation.”
Page from “The Geopolitics of Hibernation,” I.S. no. 7, August 1962
In contemporary society, the whole body of technology—above all the means of so-called communication—is oriented towards the maximum passive isolation of individuals, towards their control by a “direct and permanent relationship” that only works in one direction. Orders to which one cannot reply are broadcast by every sort of leader. Some applications of this technique can be seen as contemptible consolation prizes for what is fundamentally absent—or, on occasion, as evidence of the absolutism of what is missing.
If you’re a TV fan, you’ll want to know about the most amazing television set ever made—because it can go everywhere with you. It was invented by the Hughes Aircraft Corp. of the U.S.A., and the design is completely new—you wear it on your head. It weighs 950 grams; you wear it like a pilot’s helmet, or a telephone operator’s headset. It has a tiny plastic screen which looks like a monocle, held 4 cm in front of the eye . . . Only one eye is used to look at the screen; the manufacturers promise that with the other you can look anywhere else, or even perform manual labor or write. (Journal du dimanche, 29 July 1962)
The trouble at the coal mines has finally been settled, and it appears work will start again next Friday. Perhaps it’s the feeling of having participated in the debate that explains the almost unbroken calm that has reigned at the pit-heads and in the miners’ quarters for thirty-four days straight. Television and transistor radio contact maintained a direct and permanent relationship between the workers and their leaders—and, at the same time, forced them all to go home [to watch themselves on TV] when, before, they all used to gather at the union hall. (Le Monde, 5 April 1963)
There’s a new cure for lonely travelers at the Chicago railroad station. For “a quarter” (1,25 F), a wax-covered robot shakes your hand and says: “Hello, my friend, how’re you doing? It’s been great seeing you. Have a good trip.” (Marie-Claire, January 1963)
“I no longer have any friends. I’ll never talk to anyone again.” Thus began the confession of a Polish worker who had just turned on the gas in his kitchen—recorded on his own tape recorder. “I am almost unconscious. There is no longer a chance that anyone will save me. The end is near.” These were the last words of Joseph Czternastek. (A.F.P., London, 7 April 1962)
THE GOOD
The good world for the LI was like heaven for the Cathars: a world where “the sacred was only the social, transfigured.” It was what in the 1930s Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin called “carnivalization”—a way of being in the world that laughed away “all that is finished and polished,” “all pomposity,” “every ready-made solution in the sphere of thought and world outlook.” How to get there was the subject of “Rational Embellishments to the City of Paris,” Potlatch no. 23, 13 October 1955.
BBC Announcer: What is it that draws people like “Mr. A.” to this way of life?
Psychiatrist: Most normal adolescents go through this phase . . . Some are almost certainly attracted by its very illegality. The same with murder: make it illegal, and it acquires a mystique. Look at arson. I mean, who can honestly say he’s never set fire to some great public building? I know I have!
—Monty Python’s Flying Circus,
“The Mouse Problem,”
The Worst of Monty Python, 1970
It began as a scholastic revision of an old surrealist paper, Breton’s 1933 “Experimental Researches (On the Irrational Embellishment of a City).” Breton proposed a tradeoff between spectacles (“Notre-Dame? Replace the towers with an enormous glass cruet, one of the bottles filled with blood, the other with semen”); the LI was looking for an institutionalized disruption of everyday life, for Rimbaud’s “rational disordering of the senses” as a practical account of the errand, the appointment, the commute, the purchase. The LI leaped over Breton and back to the spirit of “What is Dadaism and what does it want in Germany?”; in the LI’s new civilization, the practical would be a question of the longest distance between two points. The LI’s ministry of leisure was issuing its first decrees.
—Open the metro at night after the trains stop running. Keep the corridors and tunnels poorly lit by means of weak, intermittently functioning lights.
—With a careful rearrangement of fire-escapes, and the creation of walkways where needed, open the roofs of Paris for strolling.
—Leave the public gardens open at night. Keep them dark. (In some cases, a weak illumination may be justified by psychogeographical considerations.)
—Put switches on the street lamps, so lighting will be under public control.
&nbs
p; The ministry moved on to the churches:
Four different solutions were advanced and recognized as legitimate until they can be tested by experiment, when the best idea will win out:
—G.-E. Debord declares himself in favor of the total destruction of religious buildings, of every faith. (No trace would remain, and the spaces would be used for other purposes.)
—Gil J Wolman proposes that churches be preserved but emptied of all religious significance. They should be treated as ordinary buildings. Let children play in them.