Lipstick Traces

by Greil Marcus

  —Michèle Bernstein insists that churches be partially destroyed, so that the remaining ruins would reveal nothing of their original purposes . . . The perfect solution would be to raze the churches and reconstruct ruins in their places. The first of these two solutions is proposed simply for the sake of expediency.

  —Lastly, Jacques Fillon wants to turn the churches into haunted houses. (Use their current ambiances, accentuating the panic-instilling aspects.)

  Having completed Michel Mourre’s interrupted sermon, the group went back to the secular.

  —Keep the railroad stations as they are. Their rather moving ugliness greatly adds to the atmosphere of travel, which provides what slight attraction these buildings possess. Gil J Wolman demanded the complete suppression or falsification of all information about departures, destinations, schedules, etc.; this would encourage the dérive. After lively debate, the opposition backed down, and the project was adopted without dissent. Accentuate the aural ambiance of the stations by broadcasting arrival-and-departure information originating from numerous other stations—and from various ports.

  —Suppression of the cemeteries. Total destruction of corpses and all tombstones: no ashes, not a trace, shall remain. (Attention must be drawn to the reactionary propaganda which, through the most elementary association of ideas, this hideous survival of past alienation represents . . .)

  —Abolition of the museums, and the redistribution of masterpieces in bars (put the work of Phillipe de Champagne in the Arab cafes in the rue Xavier-Privas; put David’s Sacre in the Tonneau in rue Montagne-Geneviève).

  —Free and unlimited access to the prisons for everyone. Allow people to use them for vacations. No discrimination between visitors and prisoners. (To add to the fun, monthly lotteries would be held to pick visitors to be sentenced to actual jail terms.)

  In “The Role of Writing,” also in Potlatch no. 23, the LI had already proposed the “subversion” of various streets by means of graffiti specifically appropriate to them (“If we don’t die here, will we go farther?” for rue Sauvage; for rue Lhomond, “Give it the benefit of the doubt”); now it affirmed the possibilities of creating civic confusion by the détournement of inscriptions on statues and monuments. It proposed an end to the “cretinization of the public” by various sorts of street names, announcing the erasure of all markers honoring “municipal officials, heroes of the Resistance,” all those bearing words plainly “vile (e.g., rue de l’Evangile),” all those carrying the names “Emile” and “Edouard,” and—

  “What’s interesting about this,” said a friend of mine after looking over the LI’s directives, “is how half of it remained a pipe dream, and how half of it came true.”

  “What do you mean?” I said, thinking of Bob Acraman’s three-day vacation in a Nazi prison camp.

  “Doesn’t this remind you of anything? The graffiti? The gardens open at night, the lights flickering, people walking on roofs, streets with new names, all the transportation information completely scrambled? For a moment—really!—it seemed as if the prisons would open. The chapel in the Sorbonne was almost razed. There was even a leaflet demanding that Cardinal Richelieu be dug up and his bones tossed in the street. Of course there were new inscriptions on the statues. Probably the last thing to happen would have been taking the paintings out of the Louvre—it’s easier to kill God than art. You see what I’m getting at?”

  “What are you getting at?” I said, thinking of Johnny Rotten singing “Give the wrong time, stop a traffic line” as a route to anarchy in the U.K., about the weird split between the absolute demands in his voice and the triviality of his advice on how to realize them.

  My friend had been to school in Paris; he was just remembering what it was like. “This is what happened in May ’68,” he said.

  ANOTHER VERSION

  Another version of the LI’s “Rational Embellishments” happened at the University of Strasbourg in the fall of 1966. It was a small event, a series of student pranks, a sort of negationist panty raid—or, as a typical newspaper editorial put it at the time, “perhaps the first concrete manifestation of a revolt aiming quite openly at the destruction of society.” A panty raid as the end of the world—that was the reversible connecting factor if anything was.

  If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.

  —Scoop Nisker, radio signoff,

  KSAN-FM, San Francisco, 1969

  There were three planes on which the imaginary revolution in the Strasbourg laboratory took place: the artistic plane of a work called The Return of the Durutti Column, the literary plane of a text titled On the Poverty of Student Life, and the tactical plane of the events that followed and the response they provoked. But in outline the story was simple. Bored with their classes and disgusted by the pettiness of left-wing youth-group politics, in the spring of 1966 five students proclaimed their desire to see the government-sanctioned student union ruined, stood for election to its offices, and amidst the overwhelming apathy of their peers found themselves voted in to run the show. During the summer break, friends of the surprised winners made contact with the SI through its post office box in Paris—the only way the group made contact with any-one—and asked for a meeting. We have a piece of power, they said; we want to wreck it.

  By 1957 a search for purity in motive and deed brought the Lettrist International to a state of immobilization, where there were only motives and no deeds; that was why the LI had to merge with others less pure, to take one step back. By 1966 the Situationist International reached the same pass. “The situationist project had taken on its definitive form,” Christopher Gray wrote in 1974 in Leaving the 20th Century. “The SI was to be a small, tightly knit group of revolutionaries devoted to forging a critique of contemporary, that is to say consumer capitalism—and to publicizing this critique by every form of scandal and agitation possible. Everything depended on universal insurrection. Poetry could only be made by everyone.” But the group had all but left the public space; the scandals it made took place only in its journal. With one-time allies like Henri Lefebvre spurned as imposters or thieves, with all the practicing painters and architects of the early SI years gone (some, like Jorn, resigned, the rest excluded), with anti-art exhibitions and plans to build new cities (or, failing that, to seize museums, even the headquarters of UNESCO) repudiated or forgotten, the SI had turned to a close reading of other people’s gestures of refusal—their protests, riots, wildcat strikes, their acts of random violence. Though it was a reading of increasing empathy and excitement, sometimes perceiving the ideas in other people’s minds far more completely than those people did themselves, coming off the page as a real conversation between actors and thinkers, it was of course a fabulist conversation, beginning in a refusal of art and now seeking its realization in events; even as the conversation expanded to take in the whole world, the news everyone talked about and the news no one but the speakers noticed, it became ever more aesthetic, a theory devouring its evidence. As they approached the climax of their story, the situationists were of the world but not in it: “What they had gained in intellectual power and scope,” Gray wrote in a Leaving draft he did not publish, “they had lost, or so it seems to me, in terms of the richness and verve of their own everyday lives. Numbers were drastically reduced . . . Their organization was no longer meaningfully international. It was Parisian. There was no longer any of their previous experimentation with architecture or living space. Cultural sabotage too went by the board. They were permanently broke. The group turned inwards. There was little or nothing that didn’t seem reformist. Everything went into the perfecting of their analyses, into the savagery of their anti-philosophy: into their magazine. The drunken, tearaway exhuberance of their Lettrist days was replaced by living up to the role of an incredibly austere rejection of everything apart from rejection.” The Strasbourg students offered the SI a chance to go back to the world.

  We want to cause trouble, the students said, as much as we can—how? Do i
t yourself, the SI said, reminding them of something Debord had written years before: “A revolutionary organization must always remember that its objective is not getting people to listen to speeches by expert leaders, but getting them to speak for themselves.” You want to make trouble? Understand that just as everyday life is right here, in the successes and failures of our conversation, so are the premises for revolution. Revolution is not something that happens on the other side of the world, in China, Vietnam, Cuba—for you and for us that is just intellectual tourism, and as an opposition to the spectacle it can produce only a spectacle of opposition. So think globally, but act locally. Use the funds your fellows have so imprudently entrusted to your care; use the platform you’ve landed on. Write a critique of your own status, of students and the society they represent and serve—serve even when they flatter themselves they are its enemies. Disseminate your critique, and see what happens; if it is strong enough, something will. Use each edge of whatever scandal you can cause as a leg up on the next step; when one barrier breaks, go through it, and move on. Remember that though you are risking the careers society has planned for you, there is no protection in compromise, that the success of a scandal is the only safeguard for those who trigger it, that those who make a revolution by halves only dig their own graves. The students went back to Strasbourg; the fall term began.

  The opening act featured sociologist Abraham Moles—a “pinhead” cybernetician, the SI named him two years before—who was chased from his lecture hall by a barrage of tomatoes. Next came Strasbourg student André Bertrand’s The Return of the Durutti Column, a comic-strip account of the student-union takeover, named in homage to what Raoul Vaneigem had once proposed as the SI’s “guiding image”: a column of anarchist troops, as an ironically approving London Sunday Telegraph report on the Strasbourg affair explained, led by the Catalan revolutionary Buenaventura Durruti (Bertrand couldn’t spell), which in the early days of the Spanish Civil War “went from village to village destroying the entire social structure, leaving the survivors to rebuild everything from scratch.” The strip closed with the promise that students would “soon be able to procure the most scandalous publication of the century . . . ‘On the Poverty of Student Life, considered in its economic, political, psychological, sexual, and especially intellectual aspects, with a modest proposal for its remedy’ . . . a cardiogram of everyday reality which will allow you to choose your side: for or against the present misery, for or against the power which, by taking your history from you, prevents you from living. IT’S YOUR MOVE!”

  In an elegantly printed edition of ten thousand copies, a green-jacketed pamphlet appeared soon after—credited to the Association fédérative générale des étudiants de Strasbourg under the auspices of the Union nationale des étudiants de France, but in truth written by situationist Mustapha Khayati when the student conspirators proved unable to come up with their own statement—and what made it different from other radical manifestos of the time was that it was well-written, logical, all-encompassing, and devoid of intent to please, casting scorn on its audience like Huelsenbeck slashing his riding crop on the stage of the Cabaret Voltaire. “Apart from the policeman and the priest, it is safe to say that the student is the most universally despised creature in France,” the text began, and it went on to say why: in the society of the spectacle, the student was the “perfect spectator.”

  The words moved fast. Making slogans out of lines from Marx’s “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” (“to make shame more shameful still by making it public”), the essay boiled nearly a decade of situationist writing down to twenty-eight virulent pages, coolly and cruelly satirizing the university (“the institutional organization of ignorance”), professors, the “Idea of Youth” (a capitalist “publicity myth”), the “celebrities of Unintelligence” (Sartre, Althusser, Barthes), modern culture (“In an era when art is dead” the student was “the most avid consumer of its corpse”), not to mention the work ethic, the government, the economy, the church, and the family. As the silent partner of bourgeois hegemony, the traditional left went on the same scrap heap, from bereft anarchist combines to empowered Leninist, Stalinist, or Maoist Communist parties (‘“at the head’ of the revolution” because it had “decapitated the proletariat”)—but, Khayati said, “Let the dead bury the dead.” There was a new proletariat, defined not by labor or penjury, but made up of everyone “who has no power over his own life and knows it.” There was a new revolt, against all hierarchy and ideology, for autonomy and a history purposefully made: a war against the poverty of the commodity, for the riches of time. The revolt was still partial and confused, losing itself in the “pure, nihilist rejection” of juvenile delinquents or in “the mass consumption of drugs” (“an expression of real poverty and a protest against it: a fallacious religious critique of a world that has itself superseded religion”); it was also gaining consciousness of itself, seeking its theory as its theory found its practice. You could see it all over the world—in the West, Khayati said, with the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in 1964 (in 1966 that was an obvious note to sound), or in the East, with Jacek Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski’s antibureaucratic, anticlerical 1965 “Open Letter to the Polish Communist Party” (that was not obvious at all in 1966, though in 1980 the document would be read as a phantom charter for Solidarity)—to anyone who knew how to look, the facade of the old world was cracking and the moment had come to smash it, to “create at last a situation that goes beyond the point of no return,” to realize the goal of a poetry made by all in a permanent revolutionary festival, to “live without dead time and indulge untrammeled desire.” The text ended, and the discourse shot off into wonderland; the pamphlet lay in your hand, grinning like the Cheshire cat. The reaction could not have been more extreme if the student union had spent its money on guns.

  Professors, university administrators, city officials, labor-union leaders, editorialists, Communist Party functionaries, the business community, parents, priests, and left-wing and right-wing student groups united to denounce the misappropriation of public funds and the betrayal of positions of public trust—to combat, they said, the collapse of decency, morality, order, the university, and Western civilization itself. A smaller number rallied to the defense of the reprobates; the press waved the filmy bloody shirt of a demonic, fanatic, always mysterious band carrying the incomprehensible name “Situationist International” (“How many are there?” asked Le Républicain lorrain. “Where do they come from? No one knows”). The student-union officers capitalized on hysterical coverage in the international media to spread their publications across Europe, renamed the Association fédérative générale “The Society for the Rehabilitation of Karl Marx and Ravachol” (the latter a nineteenth-century anarchist bomber, whose song “Le Bon Dieu dans le merde” had been reprinted in I.S. no. 9 in 1964—“If you want to be happy / Name of God! / Hang your landlord, cut the priests in two / Name of God! / Damn the churches down / God’s blood! / And the good Lord in shit”), then scheduled a plebiscite on its dissolution, invited supporters to occupy the student office building, abandoned student stores and restaurants while urging students to steal books and food, and declared the campus psychiatric clinic a front for mind control, cut off its funding, and announced its abolition. At the University of Strasbourg in the fall of 1966, there was only one conversation, governed by the same principle of expansion that governed the conversation in Berkeley in the fall of 1964 or Poland in August 1980, in Durruti’s Barcelona in July 1936 or Huelsenbeck’s Berlin in January 1919: on Monday people began to question rules and regulations, the next day the institutions behind the rules, then the nature of the society that produced the institutions, then the philosophy that justified the society, then the history that created the philosophy, until by the end of the week both God and the state were in doubt and the only interesting question was the meaning of life.

  Though all of the actions of the rogue body were legal, after six weeks of chaos the courts stepped in
, closed the student union, and stripped the Strasbourg Five of their offices. “Disarmingly lucid,” the British section of the SI, Gray and three others, said of the judge’s summation—in Ten Days that Shook the University, the U.K. edition of the Strasbourg publications—for the judge had got it right:

  One only has to read what the accused have written for it to be obvious that these five students, scarcely more than adolescents, lacking all experience of real life, their minds confused by ill-digested philosophical, social, political, and economic theories, and bored by the drab monotony of their everyday life, make the empty, arrogant, and pathetic claim to pass definitive judgements, sinking to outright abuse, on their fellow-students, their teachers, God, religion, the clergy, and the governments and political systems of the entire world. Rejecting all morality and restraint, these students do not hesitate to commend theft

  —“They believe that all things are common, whence they conclude that theft is lawful for them,’ ” the British added in a footnote, quoting the Bishop of Strasbourg in 1317, on the Brethren of the Free Spirit—

  the destruction of scholarship, the abolition of work, total subversion, and an irreversible proletarian revolution with “unlicensed pleasure” as its only goal.

  This was détournement in acts, the British announced: proof of the “ability to both devalue and ‘reinvest’ the heritage of a dead cultural past . . . a student union, for example, recuperated long ago and turned into a paltry agency of repression, can become a beacon of sedition and revolt.” To Khayati, on the scene and speaking to reporters as “K.,” it was “a little experiment”; to the British it was “a modest attempt to create the praxis by which the crisis of this society as a whole can be precipitated . . . A situation was created in which society was forced to finance, publicise and broadcast a revolutionary critique of itself, and furthermore to confirm this critique by its reactions to it.”