by Greil Marcus
This was abstract, aesthetic; the frame of Lefebvre’s postwar thought was even more so. Moments, he said, appeared on a mysterious, unmapped territory he called “la vie quotidienne,” everyday life, a mode of being defined most readily in the negative: “Whatever remains after one has eliminated all specialized activities.” This was not life on the job so much as life on the commute—more than that, the fantasy life provoked by the dullness of the commute or the job. It was not one’s role as a wife so much as those small times when one’s role was somehow absent, and, for a few seconds, one reinvented oneself out of nothing society recognized as real. Everyday life was a realm of repetition, pettiness, depression; of boredom, mutely interrupted by seemingly meaningless desires for heroism, adventure, escape, revenge—freedom.
Lefebvre’s critics denied that save as a catalogue of any era’s tools and toilets (“Where the Greek woman heated stones, we simply turn on our gas range”), everyday life existed at all; speaking in 1961 at a conference convened by Lefebvre, Guy Debord called it “the measure of all things.” He was speaking by means of a tape recorder, “in order to seize the simplest opportunity to break with the appearance of pseudo-collaboration.” Dramatizing the habitual submission of the listener to the presence of the lecturer, or the confusion produced by the lecturer’s absence, he meant to “demonstrate, by a slight alteration of the usual procedures, that everyday life is right here.” The “intervention” was marginal, trivial—but it was in the realm of the marginal and the trivial that any critique of everyday life, and therefore any critique of social reality, began. Against the shining progress of technology and commerce, Lefebvre said, everyday life was “a backward sector” in the modern world—“a colonized sector,” Debord said—an affective Third World in the heart of the First. But this was a foreign country where everyone actually lived.
SAME THINGS DAY AFTER DAY TUBE—WORK—DINNER—WORK—TUBE—ARMCHAIR—T.V.—SLEEP—TUBE—WORK HOW MUCH MORE CAN YOU TAKE ONE IN FIVE CRACKS UP
—graffiti in Notting Hill, London, early 1970s, as reproduced in Londons Outrage no. 2, February 1977
Everyday life, as Lefebvre conceived it—first in Introduction à la critique de la vie quotidienne in 1947, then in many books over the next twenty years—was a milieu as unsatisfied as it was silent, as silent as it was ubiquitous: it was implicit in his work that outside of novels, poetry, and music—outside of art—moments no more had a language in the Soviet Union than they did in France. But if those moments could be given a language, a political language, they could form the basis for entirely new demands on the social order. What if one said no to boredom, and demanded surprise, not for a moment, but as a social formation?
This was not Marxism. Marx would have understood it: Lefebvre’s theories were rooted in Marx’s romantic 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, which in the late 1920s Lefebvre had translated and published. He bid the Party to pursue them; he was turned aside. The Soviet administrators of the canon deemed these early studies of alienation vaporous juvenilia, suppressed them, and Lefebvre went along, making his reputation in 1939 with Le Matérialisme dialectique. That was science. The theory of moments was heresy or, worse, babble; by 1958 it would lead to Lefebvre’s expulsion from the Party. But by then he had found other readers.
“The theory of moments converged with research on the creation of ambiance, of situations,” he told an interviewer in 1975: Lefebvre was back in 1957, 1958, when he was a Communist in name only and a situationist lacking only the name. “The idea of escaping from the combination of elements of the past—of repetition—was an idea that was at once poetic, subversive, and audacious. It already implied that this was a project with a difference. It isn’t easy to invent new pleasures, or new ways of making love . . . a utopian idea—but not really—since, effectively, we lived, we created a new situation, that of exuberance in friendship, that of the subversive or revolutionary microsociety in the very heart of a society which, moreover, ignores it.”
It was, Lefebvre said of his relationship with the new situationists, a “love story.” He spoke of “laying aside all mistrust, all ambition, all schemes . . . In an atmosphere of passionate oneness we would talk far into the night . . . We drank, sometimes there were other stimulants, and these nights had an earnestness, an affection—it was more than communication, it was a communion.” “Moments constructed as ‘situations’ can be considered moments of rupture, of acceleration, revolutions in individual everyday life,” the situationists wrote in 1960. Soon Lefebvre and Debord, traveling together through France, contrived the idea of the Commune as “festival.” “And then,” Lefebvre said, “naturally, without warning, times changed, love changed.” The situationists published their “On the Commune”; then Lefebvre published his “The Meaning of the Commune”; the situationists attacked it as base plagiarism; and Lefebvre would scorn the abstractions he had passed onto them. “I miss the friendship,” he said in 1975. “I don’t give a damn.” He went back and forth, as if he would never get over it. “I hardly read their attacks. Why attach any importance to it? The important thing is the period of effervescence, of discovery, of friendship, of something irretrievable; once it’s lost, it can’t be replaced.”
The Commune, Lefebvre and Debord decided, created a city free of planning, a field of moments, visible and loud, the antithesis of planning: a city that was reduced to zero and then reinvented every day. That was the agreement. The breach, by 1967, after Lefebvre and the situationists had not spoken for years, was that Lefebvre thought utopia was only art, and the situationists thought art on the level of utopia was life itself. “Realized art” was a situationist catchphrase; what it meant was “realized life.”
SOME BLAMED
Some blamed the Commune on art. “The minister of Public Instruction,” T. J. Clark says, “was quite clear in 1872 that ‘the orgy of songs produced during [the Commune]’ was partly to blame for the Communards’ depravity”—their trashing of the laws of the church, the workplace, the family. Thus the minister made the dead Commune “reason for reimposing censorship on the cafe-concert in an effort to prevent such things from occurring again.”
In the 1860s, when the Commune was only the paranoid dream of Louis Veuillot, some of those who heard Thérésa thought they heard a call to revolution. She was Poly Styrene: if this ugly fat woman could demand complete freedom, so could anyone. If she could lose and find herself in the rabble, so could you. “I’m part of it!” Complete freedom meant—no one knew. It was most readily defined in the negative: not this gap between the heaven promised in the new advertisements and the everyday satisfactions I can buy. Not this sense that when I leave my work for my family, and bring my family to a Sunday in the park, my leisure feels like work. Not this mad conviction that I’m a stranger in my own home town, that at work I feel like a machine, that in the park I feel like an advertisement, that at home I feel like a tourist. Why doesn’t my life match Thérésa’s demands on me? “People believed Thérésa posed some sort of threat to the propertied order, and certainly the empire appeared to agree with them,” Clark writes. Though she was invited to sing for the empress, the authorities “policed her every line and phrase” and “made no secret of the fact that they considered the cafe-concert a public nuisance.”
A public nuisance is a triviality. Officials who shut them down—be they those who monitored Thérésa, those who in 1956 permitted Elvis Presley to perform but without moving any part of his body, or those who banned Sex Pistols shows—generally give voice less to real fears than to a lust for free publicity. Still, Elvis Presley and the Sex Pistols changed the patterns of everyday life—raised its stakes—all over the world. If what they did led to no official revolutions, it made life all over the world more interesting, and life continues to be more interesting than it would have been had they never appeared. In a book about movements in culture that raised no monuments, about movements that barely left a trace—movements that cannot be refuted by “Ozymandias” bec
ause they were ephemeral from beginning to end—making life more interesting is the only standard of judgment that can justify the pages they can fill.
THE RESA’S
Thérésa’s performances, captured in the paintings, journalism, and police reports of her time, can be seen as incipient pop culture: not the timeless folk-culture-of-the-people, and not the commodified culture-for-the-people organized by the leisure sector of the capitalist market, but something in between. As Michael Jackson proved, neither nostalgia for the folk community nor the constant movement of the market can contain pop culture, though the market provides access to pop culture—the audience’s access to the artist, the artist’s access to the audience—and nostalgia, as a sense of what can be lost, powers it. Pop culture is a product—a show, a spectacle, a channeling of suppressed wishes into marketable form—and it is an impulse—a production of suppressed wishes that once released can call their own tune. In other words, Clark’s:
producing the popular is a risky business. What begins as a process of control and containment is too often liable to end in mob rule. That is the case because the “popular” is not simply a commodity made from dead, obedient materials—here a phrase, there a value—waiting to be worked over and decently represented. It is something done with actual violence to resistant forms of life; and those forms survive in Thérésa’s chorus and the audience she appeals to; they are always capable of recapturing the apparatus of production. In producing the popular, bourgeois society produces its opposite [the rabble], and for the most part it manages to make that opposite into an image—one withdrawn or provided at opportune moments. Yet the image itself . . . is inimical to everything the bourgeoisie most believes in, and its effects cannot be calculated as accurately as that class would wish. There is always the chance that a line or a phrase will be used by the singer to enforce fleetingly the kind of attention—the kind of collective vehemence—that Veuillot and the censor fear.
IN 1967
In 1967 the SI’s “On the Commune” were rich words to T. J. Clark, in 1984 Professor of Fine Art at Harvard University and author of The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers. In 1966, Clark joined the Situationist International; he was one of only seventy men and women, and only six from the U.K., to take the name in the fifteen years the group existed.
Unlike earlier books Clark wrote on art and politics, The Painting of Modern Life was explicitly situationist. He based much of it on the notion of spectacle—unlike most of those who were using the concept in 1984, he credited its theorist. “If once or twice,” Clark said, “my use of the word carries a faint whiff of Debord’s chiliastic serenity, I shall be satisfied.” Clark and Debord had been comrades once; excluded—expelled—from the group in 1967, Clark had not spoken to Debord for almost twenty years. Still, his book was a continuation of the work of a group that had effectively ceased to exist after the success and failure of May ’68, an event in which the group’s theories and prophecies were at once realized and dashed. Clark’s book was, as a fragment, a recovering of ideas twenty years gone, and yet as a work of history about a time a hundred and twenty years gone the distance of its subject often seemed merely formal. There was in the book a quiet sense of a trouble that could come at any time, as if the Sex Pistols had had their effect on Clark, as the SI had on the Sex Pistols. Transposed as a negative, Clark’s judgments on the popular, on the popular artist, on the possibilities inherent in the performance of an 1860s cafe singer, can be read as a version of the ambitions that the Sex Pistols began taking into London nightclubs in late 1975. And then they are not only judgments: they are also a version of what actually happened.
Such a version of what actually happened can advance the cabaret as a place where the conviction that “I am nothing and I should be everything” takes shape—as a place where revolution is born. As a member of a society where the values I was raised to believe in, values that, as I learned to make my own choices, I came to cherish, are every day insulted, mocked, and scorned, and on the part of those in power are every day progressively destroyed (checking the day’s mail: a congressman, “serving,” he says, “under the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ,” calls for the defeat of another on the grounds that the latter “has voted against the traditional American values which have helped build this country into the evangelistic arm it has become . . . Send another Christian to Congress”)—as such a person, I am filled with despair and disgust, I am filled with murderous fantasies, whenever I permit myself to stop and think for more than a few minutes at a time. I suppose I am drawn to the performing space because I imagine that there I might find my own kind of insult, mockery, and scorn, because there I might find my murderous fantasies dramatized and affirmed. But I am also drawn to it because as a laboratory of change it seems as good as any other; because I have found out that what is said there is sometimes said with more clarity and more mystery than what is said anywhere else; because I know that one can leave a nightclub with the feeling that nothing can ever be the same. But as I move off to a long look at those things that were, for a short time now long past, brought to bear in a few performances, performances played out on small stages or in the pages of obscure publications, it is worth attending to a version of the performing space as a place where revolution goes to die, where its spirit, to use a favorite situationist word, is “recuperated”: where the shout of what should be is absorbed into the spectacle of what is, where the impossible demand is brought back into the fold of expectation and result, where the disease of collective vehemence is cured; where “revolution” means a moment in which people say no, enter into festival, are then in one way or another pushed out of history, their moment dropped down into a footnote, or left to float free as an anarchist myth.
In February 1920, little more than a year after the November revolution of 1918, the Spartacist rising of 5 January 1919, and the murder ten days later of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, revolution reappeared in Berlin with Max Reinhardt’s staging of Danton, a play by Romain Rolland. The critic Kurt Tucholsky left the theater and wrote a poem, “Danton’s Death”:
Act Three was great in Reinhardt’s play—
Six hundred extras milling.
Listen to what the critics say!
All Berlin finds it thrilling.
But in the whole affair I see
A parable, if you ask me.
“Revolution!” the People howls and cries
“Freedom, that’s what we’re needing!”
We’ve needed it for centuries—
our arteries are bleeding.
The stage is shaking. The audience rock.
The whole thing is over by nine o’clock.
VERSION TWO
A SECRET HISTORY OF A TIME THAT PASSED
FACES
Johnny Rotten, 1977
Emmy Hennings, Munich, 1913
Hugo Ball, Zurich, 1916
Richard Huelsenbeck, Berlin, 1920
Ivan Chtcheglov, about 1954, from Guy Debord’s film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, 1978
From left, Michèle Bernstein, Asger Jorn, unidentified woman, Guy Debord, from Debord’s film Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps, 1959
Punk, London, late 1970s
Saint-Just at sixteen
LEGENDS OF FREEDOM
In December 1957, Guy-Ernest Debord, born in Paris on 28 December 1931, produced a book he called Mémoires. He didn’t write it. He cut scores of paragraphs, sentences, phrases, or sometimes single words out of books, magazines, and newspapers; these he scattered and smeared across some fifty pages that his friend Asger Jorn, a Danish painter, crossed and splattered with colored lines, blotches, spots, and drips. Here and there were photographs, advertisements, plans of buildings and cities, cartoons, comic-strip panels, reproductions of woodcuts and engravings, these too scavenged from libraries and newsstands, each piece as mute, all as estranged from any informing context, the
whole as much like glossolalia, as the spectral text.
At first the book seemed entirely a conceit—precious. In fact it told a very specific story, and carried an affirmation that it was the only story worth telling: the book was bound in heavy sandpaper, so that when placed on a shelf it would destroy other books.
The story had to be pieced together, and then, as one followed up its clues, deciphered according to where it had come from and where it meant to go. Made out of detritus—so apparently random in its organization it communicated as detritus—the book was a history of the first year of the Lettrist International, a shifting group of young people living in Paris, as they were from June 1952 to September 1953—ex-students, ex-poets, ex-filmmakers, now lollards, runaways, drunks—who had banded together under one-line manifestos: “The art of the future will be the overthrow of situations, or nothing,” “The new generation will leave nothing to chance,” “We’ll never get out of this alive.” It was the secret history of a time that had passed—“without leaving a trace,” said the next to last page. But Mémoires was also made to fix the origins of the Situationist International, the far more visible group Debord, Jorn, and other European artists had formed in July 1957, their founding paper opening with the words “First of all we think the world must be changed”; as a memoir Debord’s book was also a prophecy. To follow its story, one needed information Debord withheld—even the words “l’Internationale lettriste,” which never appeared. But one also needed the ability to imagine a reinvented world: not merely a “provisional microsociety,” as the LI had liked to call itself, but a new, “situationist” civilization, shared by millions, finally covering the globe.
