by Greil Marcus
ONCE
Once it was a famous victory; more than twenty years later, the critique is frozen by its own rhetoric. Its very urgency, its leap toward a day that came and passed, stops its time and casts its words backward. But André Bertrand’s The Return of the Durutti Column now reads like a lost issue of Potlatch—or, rather, like the return gift Potlatch asked for. It doesn’t matter that Bertrand could not have seen the LI’s newsletter, which by 1966 had disappeared without a trace; enough of the Potlatch voice went into Internationale situationniste for Bertrand to recreate it whole. All of the LI’s adolescent self-regard is in his comic strip; so is the LI’s heedless simultaneity, its menace, and its faith in the cryptic slogan.
On the Poverty of Student Life was a polemic; The Return of the Durutti Column is a story, like Debord’s Mémoires told through the cut-and-paste of détournement, and told in a similar tone—as if it were the tale of a grand quest, recounted long after the fact by an old man to an awestruck child. There are craven villains, played by professors, bureaucrats, leftists of every stripe; there are “dashing adventurers,” the Strasbourg usurpers, the formal narrative of their exploits marked off in boxed captions to facsimiles of documents, a few newly drawn cartoons, but mostly to photos and art works scavenged from magazines and books, and now talking in comic-strip balloons. “The never-ending festival and its Dionysian debaucheries accompanied them everywhere,” says the sagaman of the heroes; there follows the text of a long letter from their landlord, accusing them of ending a party by pissing off a second-story balcony.
Bertrand was a situationist fan; not making art but playing with it, he worked with a fan’s obsessiveness, with a fetishistic love of forgotten signs and talismans. Thus he began at the beginning, in the middle of Hurlements en faveur de Sade, collapsing it into a single panel: in white speech balloons against a black screen, the Strasbourg cabal hatches its plan. The new Durutti Column enters a Trojan horse; then Lenin gets a balloon (“I could give a flying fuck about the JCR,” he says of a Trotskyist youth group), then Ravachol, speaking his own words: “I will never go back. The harm men do to each other fills me with horror; I hate their civilizations, their virtues, and their gods far too much ever to sacrifice anything to them.” “Little by little,” the chronicle of the vandals continues, “they became aware of those with whom they could make the wrecking of the social machine into a pitiless game. Thus it was that they began their palavers with the ‘occult International’ ”—the latter, the unnamed SI, pictured in one of the group’s favorite images, the banquet scene from the Bayeux Tapestry. Musing on Marx and the “critique of everyday life,” the king in Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapal placidly readies himself for the funeral pyre as eunuchs throttle his naked wives and concubines. Every few panels, children recite the LI’s primitive theories as the SI followed them up: by stealing goods simply to give them away, says a toddler, delinquents transcend the modern society of abundance and rediscover the first social order, “the practice of the gift.” A five-year-old explains that there is no need to produce or acquire, no need for competition or conflict—and “therefore no more need for laws, no more need for masters.” The coup is sealed with a grotesque medieval drawing of golem-like beggars, all of them drunk, one with twisted fingers as long as his rotting skull.
As it was distributed throughout Western Europe, in Great Britain and the United States, The Return of the Durutti Column was a four-page fold-out or a feature in an underground newspaper. One has to imagine it as it first appeared in Strasbourg, when the scandal had yet to take place—when the comic strip was a riddle blown up into huge posters and plastered as a mural across the city walls. One has to walk down the one-way street of the dominant idea of happiness (“Freedom,” John Kenneth Galbraith said in disgust twenty years later, when all roads seemed to lead to Rome and none away from it, “consists of the right to spend a maximum of one’s money by one’s own choice”); one has to imagine the street turned into a free field of noise.
Obscenities scream over the traffic. Next to a billboard selling the Colgate smile there is a poster of two toothbrushes happily discussing the coming war against something called “the old world.” There is a photo-cartoon arguing for money as the root of all evil and a second proposing a potlatch in its place. Along with the usual ads guaranteeing an elevator ride to the top of the social hierarchy, there are others explaining how to cut the cords. Covered in bubble bath, a starlet promotes not the film you’ve seen a hundred times but the end of the Christian era; then in a grainy, purloined movie still, two mounted cowboys talk philosophy. This last was the most distant element: out of all the panels in Bertrand’s production, it alone still communicates the deadpan, dreamtime incongruousness the whole show had in 1966. It was true fan’s work; it came from Bernstein’s novel Tous les chevaux du roi.
Once the SI had paid its bills with paintings Jorn and others turned over for sale; in 1960 there was no money. Bernstein determined to write a novel. She had worked in publishing; as a situationist she had written almost noir essays and polemics. She knew craft and story; she knew cliché, and how to extend clichés until they both held their shape and spoke new languages. So she contrived a book out of every fragment of popular fiction, from Bonjour Tristesse on up and down: a prefabricated bestseller, rooted in a parody of Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 classic Les Liaisons dangereuses, not coincidentally a 1959 hit film starring Jeanne Moreau. The book sold well enough for its publisher to request another, which Bernstein swiftly provided with La Nuit, using the same characters and the same plot, this time parodying the nouveau roman; a few years later, when Bernstein brought her publisher the manuscript of Debord’s “La Société du Spectacle,” he bought it too—though concerned that readers might take the title as a promise of show-business gossip.
No mention of Bernstein’s books ever appeared in any situationist publication; “They were jokes,” she said in 1983. Set in 1957, just before the founding of the SI, they are more than that: precise, flat, disturbing studies of restlessness and sloth, of people who have found a way to turn life into a game, where it is reduced to seduction and manipulation, a slow dance of self-deception, destruction, and waste. The tension is between Gilles, the gamesman, and Geneviève, his wife and pupil; the story is about Gilles’s need for pupils, for acolytes—for concubines to complement his wife, whose role it is to choose them. A sense of common dissatisfaction—the disenchantment of “a generation not lost, but tired”—hangs over the tale, cut off from anything that might free it from the bedrooms and cafes where it appears as simple neurosis and pretension; against the prison of private life, the phrase “Tous les chevaux du roi” represents redemption. The situationists loved Lewis Carroll, but the line is not an allusion to Humpty Dumpty; it comes from an old French ballad about a queen and her common lover, who one night steals into the king’s castle and lies with the queen in her bed: together they make a river, “and all the king’s horses could not cross it.” It is as deep and singular an image of revolution as there has ever been, but in Tous les chevaux du roi so distant an element it is barely an image at all.
Geneviève has found Gilles a woman named Carole, young, blonde, and credulous; in La Nuit, off at her western, the cowboys on the screen somehow remind her of Gilles and Carole, already lost in their new affair. But the central scene of the doubled story takes place early in Tous les chevaux du roi: the three sit in Gilles and Geneviève’s apartment, getting to know each other. Carole is confused; she understands that Geneviève has a normal job, but Gilles doesn’t seem to do any work at all. She asks him what he does; the answer Bernstein put in Gilles’s mouth—as rendered by Bertrand and put in the mouth of a cowboy, then translated for Ten Days that Shook the University by situationists Donald Nicholson-Smith and T. J. Clark—translated from French into English, but also out of Bernstein’s commercial vernacular and back into the LI’s secret language—sums up better than anything else the project Guy Debord began in 1952, a project that by the en
d of 1966 had only one more act to go. “What is it that you really do? I don’t understand,” says Carole. “What’s your scene, man?” says a cowboy in a white hat. “Reification,” say Gilles and a cowboy in a black hat. “It’s an important study,” Geneviève says. “Yes,” says Gilles. “I see,” says Carole. “It’s very serious work with thick books and a lot of paper spread out on a big table.” “Yeah?” says the first cowboy. “I guess that means pretty hard work with big books and . . .” “No,” says Gilles. “I walk. Mainly, I walk.” “Nope,” says the second cowboy. “I drift. Mostly, I just drift.”
THE REST
The rest of the story can almost be subsumed under what once passed for official history. It is mostly arithmetic: more than three hundred books about May ’68 were published in the year after that interesting event, and some were even published in the twenty years after that. Amazing, how quickly everyone from conservative philosopher Raymond Aron to media-crowned student-revolt spokesman Daniel Cohn-Bendit got their books on the market—it’s as if they knew how short the halflife would be. Like Marcel Janco in his last year, they were working against the clock—a dada clock, the same clock Janco began fighting in 1916, the clock that had already beaten him before that year was out. With most of their lives ahead of them, Cohn-Bendit and those with whom he shared the event wrote as if they knew nothing would ever measure up to what they had just seen and done—as if they knew that in a few years almost nobody, maybe not even themselves, would care one way or another. But if May ’68 has nearly vanished from official history, the part played by the situationists was all but excised from the beginning. That is because they made so many enemies—and because the absolute demands they made on the event left behind definitions of its success and failure so extreme that no reasonable account could address them without appearing sentimental, crazy, or ashamed. And that is why even the official history the SI made has remained a kind of secret history.
The event itself, though, did not play by the rules of history. There was no economic crisis; no question of political legitimacy had been raised by anyone with a forum commensurate to such a question. There was a modern, well-functioning capitalist welfare state, led by a man of enormous resilience and prestige, and there was, as a natural, hegemonic fact, the ever-present sense of what Lefebvre would later call the negation modernity carries within itself: a sense, as situationist René Viénet wrote just after May ’68, that “the familiar in alienated life, and in the refusal of that life, is not necessarily known.” In other words, there was a sleeping sense of mystery and displacement to which modernity could not afford to grant a language, and if that language was the one the situationists had been trying to create for so long, betting that the sleeping sickness could be cured as soon as its language was found, this was nothing new. What was new, in the year before the explosion, was a certain increase in pressure.
In the year after the Strasbourg scandal more than 300,000 copies of On the Poverty of Student Life found their way into print. Small groups modeling themselves on the Strasbourg example formed at colleges across France, and beseiged the SI with pleas for instruction: the SI’s only instruction was that they act autonomously, that they promote an insurrection that would matter to them, and some did. The Enragés, a handful of SI fans who named themselves after a radical faction led by Jacques Roux during the French Revolution, came together in early 1968 at Nanterre, a suburban extension of the University of Paris housing a prestigious, leftist faculty: Lefebvre, Alain Tourraine, Jean Baudrillard, Edgar Morin. The Enragés painted slogans on the walls (“LIVE WITHOUT DEAD TIME,” “BOREDOM IS ALWAYS COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY,” “EVERYTHING DISPUTABLE MUST BE DISPUTED,” “I TAKE MY DESIRES FOR REALITY BECAUSE I BELIEVE IN THE REALITY OF MY DESIRES”) and disrupted classes for two months straight. “The other day you consigned me to the trashcan of history,” Morin said to his students one morning. “HOW DID YOU GET OUT?” one of them screamed back. “I would prefer,” Morin said evenly, “to be on the side of the trashcans rather than on the side of those who handle them”—and just like that he turned into the embodiment of Bataille’s hideous bourgeoisie, the mask dropped from his suddenly sordid face, and he found himself standing in front of a hooting crowd that had fallen in love with the noise of its own words. “And in any case I prefer to be on the side of the trashcans rather than on the side of the crematoria!” Morin shouted, but nobody was listening. Morin imagined himself in Germany in the mid-1930s, when Nazi students drowned out professors who would soon be wearing yellow stars; the Enragés imagined themselves at the Convention in 1793, on top of the Mountain.
Panels from André Bertrand, Le Retour de la colonne Durutti, October 1966
Many students were outraged; some were thrilled. Some, led by Cohn-Bendit, seized the chance to launch calls for educational reform and the sexual integration of dormitories; that gave the press a scandal. Mass meetings were held; people began to criticize their studies, then the university, then the idea of the university itself. The Enragés hung a huge banner over the entrance to the campus: “NEVER WORK.” Soon nobody did—the trouble continued, the press coverage grew, and on May 2 the Nanterre dean closed the college. That same day he scheduled disciplinary proceedings against Enragé René Reisel, Cohn-Bendit, and six others for May 6, at the Sorbonne in Paris—and “What followed,” read the Le Monde account of the night of May 6, “surpassed in scope and violence everything that had happened in an already astonishing day.”
The conflict, as it unfolded over the next weeks, was less between people in revolt and the government they no longer acknowledged than between organized forces of orderly protest and the presence of dissolution. The public space was suddenly empty, a free field: practical proposals for the postponing of exams and the liberalization of university entrance requirements fought against the weird abstraction of reversible slogans (“THE MORE YOU CONSUME THE LESS YOU LIVE”), slogans that in the moment did not seem weird or abstract at all. Carefully monitored, nonviolent marches turned into a potlatch of tear gas, clubs, and incendiary bombs on one side, paving stones, barricades, burning cars, and Molotov cocktails on the other: “a kind of street fighting that sometimes reached a frenzy, where every blow delivered was immediately returned, and where ground that had scarcely been conquered was just as quickly retaken.” A one-day general strike called by the Communist Party trade-union bureaucracy (the pretext was a protest against police brutality, the motive a wage increase) became an open-ended general wildcat strike of ten million people against—against what? The workers who occupied their factories and soldered the doors closed were not acting in solidarity with the people rioting in Paris; like the people in Paris, they were taking the breakdown of authority as a chance to act for themselves. In a signal way, there were no words to match the gestures everyone understood. There was only public happiness: joy in discovering for what drama one’s setting is the setting, joy in making it.
On May 14 the Enragés and the SI federated. René Reisel was elected to the Occupations Committee of the Sorbonne, which at his insistence was constituted as a revolutionary council: an assembly in permanent session, open to all, every delegate subject to daily reelection or rejection. Some speakers asked for a humanization of the pedagogical apparatus; Reisel, a teenager, spoke for the abolition of the university, the commodity, the class system, wage labor, “the spectacle,” “survival,” the “suppression of art” and its “realization,” the expropriation of all property and power, and the recreation of the polity as a federation of autonomous councils answerable only to themselves. Acting in the name of the assembly, the Enragés and the SI began to link up with occupied factories, issued leaflets, and sent telegrams:
POLITBURO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE USSR THE KREMLIN MOSCOW/SHAKE IN YOUR SHOES BUREAUCRATS STOP THE INTERNATIONAL POWER OF THE WORKERS COUNCILS WILL SOON WIPE YOU OUT STOP HUMANITY WILL NOT BE HAPPY UNTIL THE LAST BUREAUCRAT IS HUNG WITH THE GUTS OF THE LAST CAPITALIST STOP LONG LIVE THE STRUGGLE OF THE KRONSTADT SAILORS
AND OF THE MAKHNOVSCHINA AGAINST TROTSKY AND LENIN STOP LONG LIVE THE 1956 COUNCILIST INSURRECTION OF BUDAPEST STOP DOWN WITH THE STATE STOP LONG LIVE REVOLUTIONARY MARXISM STOP OCCUPATION COMMITTEE OF THE AUTONOMOUS AND POPULAR SORBONNE.
That same day, May 17, they walked out of the Occupations Committee, damning its timidity and factionalism; along with some forty others the dozen Enragés and situationists formed the Council for Maintaining the Occupations, and until June 15 spread hundreds of thousands of copies of its posters, manifestos, and comic strips across the country and, translated into half a dozen languages, around the globe. “What we have done in France,” the Council said on May 30,
is haunting Europe and will soon threaten the ruling classes of the world, from the bureaucrats of Moscow and Peking to the millionaires of Washington and Tokyo. Just as we have made Paris dance, the international proletariat will again take up its assault on the capitals of all nations, on all the citadels of alienation. The occupation of factories and public buildings throughout the country has not only blocked the functioning of the economy, it has brought about a general questioning of the society. A deeply-rooted movement is leading almost every sector of the population to seek a real change in life. It is now a revolutionary movement which lacks only the consciousness of what it has already done in order to triumph.
The result, after de Gaulle rallied the voting majorities (after changing his mind about resigning—and, he and the SI agreed, leaving the nation to civil war), was educational reform for students, and a wage increase for factory workers. If, as René Viénet wrote, commodity time stopped in May, free time moved too fast to keep or master; almost instantly, the noise that for a few weeks sounded like the beginning of a new language turned into babble, and today it is hard to read.