by Greil Marcus
As an organization that from 1958 to 1969 made unique public sense of great public events, and with the revolt of May ’68 even shaped them, the SI dwarfs the LI, even if the LI holds a deeper story: the fable behind the tale the SI told as fact. There was an absolutism in the LI the primitivism of the group conceals, but this is why Debord justified the LI’s dissolution into the impressive new federation with an argument titled “One Step Back.” “What we did can be put on the table; what we did was what we wrote,” Bernstein says of the SI; still, the violent glamor of what the SI wrote, its spectacular authority, conceals the primitivism of the SI itself. Because the SI worked to make its critique public while ensuring that its authors remained obscure—because its members (sometimes as many as twenty, sometimes, as in early 1968, less than a dozen) found a tone that let them speak as tribunes of an invisible empire—the group became mythical almost before it began, and remained spectral even in its most public moments; this is why its history, whether recorded in punk fanzines or academic journals, is full of myth, of accounts of “street theater” and symbolic Ürsprunges, of public pranks on the level of the intervention in Notre-Dame. As attributed to the SI, the events are fictions—but they were also real, made first in miniature and in secret by the LI, and then on stages of world history (albeit stages built in a day and taken down almost as quickly) by the SI’s readers, its fans, or its inheritors. That is because the spirit of such events, the LI’s wish for them not as interventions but as foundings, went into what the situationists wrote. And that spirit—as a totality, altogether absent in any other voice of the time—was at once enraged and playful, critical and willful, desperate and happy: “Ours is the best effort so far to get out of the 20th century.”
Writing that made me feel cheerier. There is no better antidote for the terrible feeling of powerlessness which clutches modern man by the throat than a vigorous exercise of the imagination. It is the allurements of the imagination which has allowed all those ragtag guerrilla movements of the last thirty years to succeed, that and the will to endure for the sake of the future. It is only the lack of the latter that has prevented me from accomplishing great things in my own right.
—Guy Vanderhaeghe,
My Present Age, 1985
BEGINNING
Beginning in 1957, the Situationist International was dimly perceived as a pan-European association of megalomaniacal aesthetes and fanatical cranks, despised on the left and ignored by everyone else. Then in 1966, with the takeover of the student union at the huge University of Strasbourg by a cabal of situationist fans (who used the union’s $500,000 budget to spread situationist propaganda all over the world), and in 1968, with the May days, the SI became famous as the “occult International” behind the explosion President de Gaulle blamed on a few people who “delight in negation,” though he never explained how it was that a few people could have brought his government to the verge of dissolution. A few people, as de Gaulle said, “in revolt against modern society, against consumer society, against technological society, whether communist in the East or capitalist in the West”—it was true enough. “The merit of the situationists,” the SI wrote in September 1969, in I.S. no. 12, the last number of its journal, “was simply to have pointed out the new focuses of revolt in modern society”—a revolt against that society’s idea of happiness, against the ideology of survival, a revolt against a world where every rise in the standard of living meant a rise in “the standard of boredom,” a world whose language was so impoverished by its own falsity that the smallest refusal could become a no everyone understood. “If many people did what we wrote,” the situationists wrote one last time, “it was because we wrote the negative we had lived, and that had been lived by so many others before us.” But if the negative the situationists wrote was a sort of hidden treasure of modern life (“another, evil Grail,” Debord said in In girum), the LI had drawn the maps.
The SI began with a “declaration of war against the old society”—in I.S. no. 1 culture was declared a walking corpse, politics a sideshow, philosophy a list of shibboleths, economics a hoax, art worthy only of pillage, statutory rights a renunciation, freedom of the press a consensual limit on discourse about the real and the possible. Made by writers from half a dozen countries, the attack was intricate and whole, keyed to the news of the day, dancing with theory, and illustrated with shots of models and bathing beauties. With every issue of the magazine, about one a year in runs of a few thousand copies, each number soberly printed and gleaming with a different metal-board jacket (I.S. no. 1 was gold, no. 12, purple), the attack spread. With a kind of resistant complicity, as if people who once were rational shoppers had become mad social scientists, the situationists decoded advertisements from the press, the cinemas, metro stations; then they made negative images out of “publicity-propaganda” photos of Haussmannized cities and citizens, until a shot of tens of thousands of Chinese performing a card trick that produced the gigantic face of Mao Tse-tung needed only the caption “Portrait of Alienation” to turn back on itself. They embarked on what they called “the correction of the past,” which meant the reconstruction of a new history out of forgotten utopian experiments and massacred rebellions, until soon enough the momentary revolutionary councils of Hungary 1956 or Berlin 1918 could seem like all the politics the future would need and next year’s election already a dead letter. Scabrous insults (“bidet scraping” can’t be topped, except perhaps by “coagulated undertaker’s mute”) took on a life of their own, as did a sort of philosophical delirium, the pursuit of a heretical, affective Marxism that did not so much disguise an irreducible lust for destruction as intensify and glamorize it. Situationist writing was a form of criticism, and it was a form of noise, directed with equal force against “all forms of social and political organization in the West and the East” and all those “trying to change them” (Le Monde, 1966): rulers, bureaucrats, technocrats, union leaders, welfare theorists, city planners, Leninists, artists, professors (“M. Georges Lapassade,” read almost a full page of I.S. no. 9, August 1964, “est un con”), students, capitalists, entertainers, royalty, Castroites, provos, surrealists, neo-dadaists, anarchists, the South Vietnamese government, its American masters, the North Vietnamese government, architects, existentialists, priests, and excluded situationists. Then detourned comic strips sent the SI’s voice out of the mouths of characters from Terry and the Pirates and True Romance, as if real people actually cared about the commodification of love and the reinvention of revolution; collections of newspaper clippings organized around situationist notions of leisure, religion, technology, mental illness, ordinary language, and violence (the extraordinary “The World of Which We Speak,” I.S. no. 9) bound power to a chair with its own lies, blinded it with its own images, and forced it to confess its terrible schemes: We have ways of making you talk . . .
The critique carried a sense of drama, of suspense. If once the claim that even King Kong and the Loch Ness monster were “collective projections of the monstrous total State” (Adorno, 1945) carried a note of dementia, now it all fit: as one read the situationists, the Godzilla of the spectacle rose up to freeze all potential subjects of history into objects, to reduce the energy of alienation to the stupor of reification, and then—
Then one might read about the symbolism of President John F. Kennedy’s fallout-shelter program, in “The Geopolitics of Hibernation,” about the salubrity of the Watts riots, in “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” about Mao’s cultural revolution as the latest trick of the Red Queen, in “The Explosion Point of Ideology in China,” or about the genius of an actor’s sabotage of a TV whodunit, in “The Bad Days Will End,” and suddenly it could seem as if all social facts were constructed illusions, that none was immune to the urgency of the SI’s language, that no private wish was separate from its call for a new world. But no matter how sophisticated or voracious the SI’s critique became, in every moment of crisis or opportunity, whenever the critique was taken off the
table and put into play, it almost automatically devolved back into the primitivism of the Lettrist International. And that was a spirit best caught by Debord, in 1953, the year he tried to asphyxiate himself, and the year Chtcheglov wrote his “Formula for a New Urbanism”: “Oblivion is our ruling passion.”
That meant opening oneself to a disgust so deep it might black out all routes of escape save madness or suicide—the dead end of an antiworld where the refusal of work and art guaranteed only self-loathing and solipsism. It also meant: we want to act; we don’t care what comes of our actions; this is our idea of happiness, a good way to live. Transposed into the negative, “Oblivion is our ruling passion” was an affirmation of absolute subjectivity; a version of Chtcheglov’s “Everyone will live in his own cathedral,” of Saint-Just’s “The only reason one fights is for what one loves,” of fighting for everyone else as the only way to make a city where one could find what one loved, or find out what that was—to make a city where one could discover for what drama one’s setting was the setting. Debord’s call to oblivion was the LI’s gold. In the SI, it would fuse with Saint-Just’s call to action, promising the solitary a festival: “Our ideas are in everyone’s mind.”
That was how the disgust of a few, even the refusal of one, could bring a government to the verge of dissolution—at the least, it was the conclusion de Gaulle could not afford to draw. As an attempt to reveal all the contradictions of the geopolitical and the world-historical, to find the string of the reversible connecting factor and then pull it, the work of the SI could always be boiled down to crude slogans, to “I TAKE MY DESIRES FOR REALITY BECAUSE I BELIEVE IN THE REALITY OF MY DESIRES,” to “I want to destroy passersby.” But the slogans were also cryptic, hinting at untold stories, carrying a whole way of being in the world in a phrase, and in the drama the SI wrote, the cryptic slogan, the legacy of the LI, was itself the reversible connecting factor: like LaDonna Jones’s letter to Michael Jackson, simply the right graffiti on the right wall, at the right time, in the right place. “[Our] work is not destined for the Louvre,” the LI wrote in Potlatch no. 19, 29 April 1955. The LI, said Bernstein, Dahou, Debord, Fillon, Vera, and Wolman, was merely tracing plans for wall posters.
AT THE START
“At the start it was barely a group at all,” Wolman said. We were in his third-story walkup in the rue du Temple in Paris, in an artist’s flat with only a single touch to mark the year, which was 1985: the word processor he used for concrete poetry. “It was a gathering of people who struck sparks off one another. Some, like Mension, never contributed more than a line: ‘No matter how you look at it, we’ll never get out of this alive.’ But that line was not nothing.” Wolman handed me a copy of Internationale lettriste, the LI’s first publication, running to four issues from late 1952 (an illustrated brochure denouncing Isou) to June 1954 (a one-slogan illustrated street flyer); this was the second number, like the early versions of the later Potlatch simply a piece of paper mimeographed on both sides. February 1953: Mension’s line was there, keeping company with a few others under the heading “fragments of research on a new comportment” (Wolman’s “the new generation will leave nothing to chance,” clumsier phrases from Debord and Serge Berna). Just above was “general strike,” also credited to Mension, though perhaps the chopped sentences, each one looking for a referent or a wall, signal a group authorship—certainly, it’s the voice of the group you hear.
I am the fly / I am the fly / I am the fly in the ointment / I can spread more disease than the fleas which nibble away at your window display.
—“I Am the Fly,” Wire, 1978
We’re the young generation / And we’ve got something to say.
—“Theme from The Monkees,”
the Monkees, 1966
there’s no connection between me and other people, the world began on 24 december 1934. i’m eighteen, the splendid age of reform schools and sadism has finally replaced god. the beauty of man is in his destruction, i’m a dream that loves its dreamer, every act is cowardice if it requires justification, i’ve never done anything, the nothingness we perpetually seek is nothing but our life, descartes is worth as much as a gardener, only one movement is possible: that i be the plague and award the buboes, all means to oblivion are good: suicide, deathly pain, drugs, alcoholism, madness, but we also have to abolish conformists, girls over fifteen who’re still virgins, the reputed well-adjusted, and their prisons, if some of us are ready to risk everything, it’s because we now know there is nothing to risk, and nothing to lose. to love or not to love, this man or that woman, it’s all the same.
The LI saw itself as a youth movement—the mean age in 1953 was about twenty-one—but not as a would-be mass movement with chapters and membership cards, like Isou’s Youth Front. It was symbolic, even to itself—or only to itself, since no one else was looking. As a youth movement the LI was a provisional microsociety, made up out of reflections of a distorted future and echoes of an imaginary past. Some were common coin: promises of a world of everyday technological mastery, household conveniences and leisure machines, which anyone could find in the ads of the time, and what the LI called the “defused bombs” and “blunted knives” of dada and surrealism, which anyone could discover “under thirty years of dust and debris.” But the rest came mostly from Debord, who constructed the symbolism of the group out of phrases and images cut from their contexts, puzzle pieces tossed on the table to find what referents they could, to change into metaphors or go blank. As Debord shaped the LI, the provisional microsociety was also a seance, a conversation between portents and ghosts, and he produced it as he would produce his Mémoires. He opened a route to the future for the LI with “Happiness is a new idea in Europe”; he blocked the road, turned the band back on itself, with a second line, a few words of premature requiem, pure bathos in Saint-Just’s face, or forced out of his mouth—“Bernard, Bernard, this bloom of youth will not last forever.”
Turning up again and again in the LI memoirs, always without attribution, in the group’s writing the phrase first appeared in Potlatch no. 16, 26 January 1955, in Debord’s “Educational Value,” a detourned dialogue between unnamed authors. The quote was credited two issues later to an oration by the great French preacher Jacques Benique Bossuet (1627–1704), who gave elegies for long-dead saints as if he were present to celebrate their funerals. This one was for St. Bernard—Bernard de Clairvaux, who in 1146 launched the Second Crusade. “We will not go on that crusade,” Bernstein wrote in La Nuit in 1961, when she and Debord were living in the Clairvaux dead end in the Marais district, and Debord too might have been answering St. Bernard’s eight-hundred-year-old call in In girum: “Would we, perhaps, have been a little less lacking in pity if we had found activities that merited the use of our energy already awaiting us, already formed? But there was nothing of the kind. The sole cause we could support was one we had to define and lead ourselves.”
So they did it through autoterrorism, intensifying the oppositions they carried within themselves. The contrived rage of “general strike” marked a negative that could be transcended only by contriving visions of a different life; the bathos of “Bernard, Bernard . . .” sent the visionaries into exile. That was the idea. On the symbolist terrain of the LI, Saint-Just’s time-to-come, his promise of happiness, collapsed into Bossuet’s promise of sorrow, his time-to-pass; the wish for novelty fought against the certainty that nothing was new under the sun. As a clash of metaphors it was almost an event, repeated every day. The LI believed the old world had to be changed because its time had stopped, but within the matrix of the group that meant to live in a new world, time moved too fast—and that contradiction was the LI’s purchase on the world. For the sake of a future explosion, the members of the LI subjected themselves to the pressure of implosion. It was salutary, they thought, separating the true from the false, people no less than ideas. “Il s’agit de se perdre,” Debord wrote in I.L. no. 2: “what’s at stake is disappearance”—or, “self-destruction.” “Our
concern was not a literary school, a renewal of expression, a modernism,” Debord and Wolman wrote in “Why Lettrism?,” Potlatch no. 22, 9 September 1955. “At issue is a way of life, one which will continue to pass through many explorations, many provisional formulations, and which itself belongs only to the provisional . . . we are waiting for many people and events to come. We have the advantage of no longer expecting anything from known activities, known individuals, and known institutions.”
It’s not easy to go into exile within a world one means to change. If something more than madness or suicide is the real goal, isolation, especially the isolation of a group, has to be searched for. To find it, the LI didn’t set up a commune in the countryside, or hole up in someone’s parents’ apartment, like the student Maoists in Godard’s 1967 film La Chinoise, which should have been called “What I Did on My Summer Vacation.” Instead, pursuing the dérive, the “technique of displacement without goals,” the band drifted through the streets among everybody else. “The spectacle is permanent,” Debord wrote in I.L. no. 2; Haussmann’s Paris was a city founded in spectacle, so Debord and the rest took it as an image they could distort, that they could subject to a détournement in acts. Walking through the city in twos or threes or solo, looking for its “microclimates,” its unmarked zones of feeling, they tried to hear their own voices beckoning from doorways still a block away, to catch the echo of a dead end in their mouths.
AS EVERYDAY
