by Greil Marcus
As everyday life it was a mystical quest: “We are bored in the city, there is no longer any temple of the sun.” That was Chtcheglov’s language: “And you, forgotten, your memories ravaged by all the sorrow of the map of the world, stranded in the Red Caves of Pali-Kao, without music and without geography, no longer setting out for the hacienda where the roots call up the child and the wine is drunk down to fables from an old almanac. Now that game is lost. You’ll never see the hacienda. The hacienda must be built.” This was the language the LI used after Chtcheglov’s exclusion: “we like to think that those who sought the Grail weren’t dupes,” they wrote in “36 rue des Morillons,” Potlatch no. 8, 10 August 1954. “Their DÉRIVE is worthy of us . . . The religious makeup falls away. These knights of a mythic western were out for pleasure: a brilliant talent for losing themselves in play; a voyage into amazement; a love of speed; a terrain of relativity.” This was the language Debord used in In girum, almost a quarter-century later: “It was a drift to great days, where nothing resembled the old—and which never stopped. Surprising meetings, stunning obstacles, grand betrayals, perilous enchantments.”
“It’s unheard of, an adventure like this in the midst of the 20th century . . .”
—detail from Guy-Ernest Debord,
Mémoires, 1959
As bathos it was just drunks trying to walk and think at the same time. As a use of time it was the shifting of the city back into the primeval forest, then into a haunted house more modern than anything modern architects ever dreamed of, a game of freedom in which the goal was not to score but to remain on the field, to consciously position oneself between past and future. “You can never know which streets to take and which to avoid,” says the narrator in Paul Auster’s 1987 novel In the Country of Last Things—she is speaking from the future, when the city has collapsed into an anarchy of killer gangs and flagellant sects, but the state of mind she is forced to bring to her city is the state of mind the LI chose to bring to its own. “Bit by bit,” she says, “the city robs you of certainty. There can never be any fixed point, and you can survive only if nothing is necessary to you. Without warning, you must be able to change, to drop what you are doing, to reverse. In the end, there is nothing that is not the case. As a consequence, you must learn how to read the signs . . . The essential thing is not to become inured. For habits are deadly. Even if it is for the hundredth time, you must encounter each thing as if you have never known it before. This is next to impossible, I realize, but it is an absolute rule.” And that too is Chtcheglov’s kind of language, because on the dérive he took the lead. In the detourned characterizations of In girum Debord may be Zorro, Lacenaire, or even General Custer at Little Big Horn; Chtcheglov, except for a moment when Debord makes him into King Ludwig II, the mad castle builder of Bavaria, is always Prince Valiant.
“The dérive (with its flow of acts, gestures, strolls, encounters),” Chtcheglov wrote to Debord and Bernstein in 1963, “was to the totality exactly what psychoanalysis (in the best sense) is to language. Let yourself go with the flow of words, says the analyst. He listens, until the moment when he rejects or modifies (one could say detourns) a word, an expression, or a definition . . . But just as analysis [as a treatment complete in itself] is almost always contra-indicated, so the continuous dérive”—the everyday life of the Fourierist Disneyland that Chtcheglov had proposed ten years before—“is dangerous to the extent that the individual, having gone too far (not without bases, but . . .) without defenses, is threatened with explosion, dissolution, disassociation, disintegration. And so the relapse into what is termed ‘ordinary life,’ which is to say, in reality, ‘petrified life’ . . . In 1953–1954, we drifted for three or four months at a time: that’s the extreme limit, the critical point. It’s a miracle it didn’t kill us. We had a constitution—a bad constitution—of iron.”
In 1963 Chtcheglov was writing from an insane asylum; he was full of doubt. But in 1953 there was no doubt at all. “You don’t fault a theme park for not being a cathedral” is common sense, whether applied to an adventure movie or to a nineteen-year-old member of a provisional microsociety; to expose that fault, to drop the old world into its maw, was the goal Chtcheglov had set for the LI—the search for the theme park where he and everyone else would live in their own cathedrals. He was sure the dérive was the way to find that new city, just as Debord was sure the dérive was the way to generate the conviction that the old city had to be destroyed, or the way to discover who was worthy of the task and who wasn’t—as Debord loved to hear Lacenaire say in Les Enfants du paradis, “It takes all kinds to make a world—or unmake it.” Debord hung his metaphors in the air; Chtcheglov was the first to live them out. “The powers that be,” Debord said in In girum, “are still unable to measure what the swift passage of this man has cost them.”
Making his movie in 1978, Debord bypassed the obvious confirmation: news footage of thousands of ’68ers barricading streets Chtcheglov had once walked alone. Instead there was another comic strip: Prince Valiant is lost, fleeing thunder and rain, looking for shelter. “He finds a tavern frequented by travelers from distant, mysterious lands . . . and while outside the storm rages, here stories are told of fabulous places, of marvelous cities surrounded by great walls . . . meanwhile, a haggard-looking man approaches the tavern, bearing new drugs. (Next week: ROME FALLS.)”
LI sticker, December 1955
On the dérive the members of the LI met, separated, spread out, came together, and tried to write down what they found, to map what they were calling the “psychogeography” of where they had been. They looked for new streets, which meant the oldest streets, as if the streets they thought they knew were judging their unreadiness to understand the secrets the streets contained. The dérive was a, way of positing boredom: streets one had walked again and again. Détournement—which finally meant applying the reversible connecting factor to any posited subject or object—was a way of fighting off boredom, and of criticizing it. On the dérive, objective acceptance (“I love that street because it’s beautiful”) could turn into subjective refusal (“That street is ugly because I hate it”), which could turn into a glimpse of utopia (“That street is beautiful because I love it”).
The LI wanted to create a city of possibilities in the heart of the city of the spectacle. First, though, the group had to create a city of negations: to escape the city’s social elements of work and art, of production and ideology, to function as their antimatter. The new city would be a psychogeographical amusement park; before that, it would be an affective black hole. “The spectacle says nothing more than ‘That which is good appears, that which appears is good,’ ” Debord wrote in The Society of the Spectacle. In the LI’s city there would be nothing that was not the case. Someday, the LI was sure, the one-eyed light of the spectacle would be sucked into the black hole as if it had never been.
ISOU
Isou would have smiled over Mension’s “general strike”—after all, it was no more than a particularly mindless version of Youth Front, “Our Program” reduced to the “units of gratuitousness” Isou had identified as the only goods that youth possessed. It was old news—but there was a difference. Isou thought gratuitousness was worthless because it could not be integrated into the “circuit of exchange.” Mension was insisting that no less than the stories the LI told around its table—the legends of preverbal sound poetry, the invasion of Notre-Dame, the blank movie, the raid on Charlie Chaplin—gratuitousness was a key to the black hole.
Isou thought units of gratuitousness had at least a pseudo-exchange value: they could be exchanged socially. Youth was drowning itself in violence and resignation because it was “super-exploited by the seniority system”; that was why Isou called youth into the streets to change the world—to fight, as Debord would say in In girum, “for a place in a total revolution, or—they are sometimes the same—a better place on the wage scale.” In the arithmetic of Isou’s “nuclear economy,” the sum total of the units of gratuitousness youth expended in comp
ensation for its “nonexistence” precisely equaled what youth had to renounce in order to exist—to win any place, fixed or wished, in the social order. But in “general strike” the LI was posing a question Isou had ignored: what if one refused to renounce one’s units of gratuitousness—acts that were not cowardly because they could not be justified—no matter what place in the social order they might be exchanged for? What if one experienced gratuitousness as freedom? What if one broke the circuit of exchange?
Perpignan, June 30 (France-Soir): At 4:30 this morning an auto accident near the village of Saises took the life of the Reverend Father Emmanuel Suarez, head of the Dominicans, and of Father Martinez Cantarino, the general secretary of the order . . .
—“The Best News ofthe Week,”
Potlatch no. 3, 9 July 1954
The LI, Debord said, lived “on the margins of the economy” and claimed “a role of pure consumption”; Isou said that without production there is no commodity one might consume. No commodity, the LI answered: time. It had stopped; the LI’s concern was to make it pass. Running above “general strike” in I.L. no. 2 was “manifesto,” signed by seven men and four women (Sarah, Berna, P.-J. Berlé, Brau, Dahou, Debord, Linda, Françoise Lejare, Mension, Papai, and Wolman), the grandest cohort the LI would ever muster, only three of whom would make it to the next year:
lettrist provocation always serves to pass the time, revolutionary thought lies nowhere else, we pursue our little racket in the restricted Beyond of literature, for lack of anything better, it is naturally to manifest ourselves that we write manifestos, a free-spirited way of life is a very beautiful thing, but our desires were fleeting and deceptive, it’s said that youth is systematic, the weeks reproduce themselves in a straight line, our meetings are by chance and our chancy contacts are lost behind the fragile defense of words, the world turns as if nothing has happened, in sum, the human condition no longer gives us pleasure.
Like Mension, the group went to the edge of nihilism, tried to turn away, and found the way blocked:
. . . all those who sustain anything merely contribute to police work, we know that all extant ideas and forms of behavior are insufficient, present-day society is thus divided between lettrists and informers . . . . there are no nihilists, only impotents. almost everything is forbidden us. the détournement of minors
—and here the word means “subversion,” “leading astray,” “corruption,” “seduction”—
and the use of drugs are pursued in the same way as all our more general efforts to transcend the void, many of our comrades are in jail for theft, we protest the punishment inflicted on those who have realized that it is absolutely unnecessary to work, we refuse to talk about it. human relationships must be grounded in passion, if not terror.
TWENTY-SIX
Twenty-six years later, in 1979, Wolman published a thick tabloid he called Duhring Duhring. On each of the sixty-four pages are fifty-four tightly cropped faces, more than three thousand in all: commonplace images of sitting politicians, dead statesmen, movie stars, subjects of famous paintings and sculptures, saints, comic-strip characters, revolutionaries, authors, every variety of celebrity. Each face is scored vertically with a blank strip, and then across the eyes with a word (“socialism,” “classes,” “owners,” “workers,” in one series; “embryo,” “territory,” “contempt,” “narrative,” in another). Many of the faces reappear throughout the production, picking up new words, and vice versa; the elements float across the newsprint.
The endless, seemingly random juxtapositions take in any story a daily might run. After a few pages, the reader is back in the middle of one of Debord’s definitions from The Society of the Spectacle, the spectacle as the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, even if that discourse is here reduced to babble, and its mouthpieces, the empowered and their stand-ins, the recuperators and the recuperated, left nearly unrecognizable, their identities scratched out by their social roles. It is a shaggy-dog story: if one puts down Wolman’s all-purpose gazette and picks up any other, words and faces leap out of their official contexts, current events and settled history now a scrabble of BrezhnevinvasionUncleScroogerights-Napoleonstruggle, all referents dissolved into a meaningless whole. The only irony—the tail that wags the dog—is that if this is a picture of public speech, and public speech is babble, that babble nevertheless rules the world.
Page from (Gil) Joseph Wolman, Durhing Durhing, 1979
There is a motto on the first page: “we were against the power of words—against power.” But Duhring Duhring is a permanent dada newspaper, which is to say immediately present, so I told Wolman I didn’t understand the use of the past tense: “we were.” “Because ‘we’ were the LI,” he said. “Because that time was real time.”
For a moment, in Wolman’s flat in 1985, time went backward: “He was twenty-seven,” read Wolman’s Potlatch obituary. He and Debord founded the group; for years, they outlasted everybody else. But in January 1957, four months after representing the LI at the First World Congress of Free Artists in Alba, Italy, where the first plans for a new, truly international organization were made, Wolman too was excluded.
In Alba, Wolman set forth the perspectives of the LI to such would-be planners of imaginary towns as Constant Nieuwenhuys of Holland, Asger Jorn of Denmark, Guiseppe Pinot-Gallizio and Ettore Sottsass Jr. of Italy, and Pravoslav Rada of Czechoslovakia, most of them painters with agents and galleries: “The course of negation and destruction that in an ever-accelerating manner is overtaking all traditional forms of artistic creation is irreversible.” Art was breaking up over a contradiction that was less aesthetic than social: “the result of new possibilities of action that can be seen all over the world.”
A global upheaval in economics and science was imminent. In the East as in the West, the means of production remained in the hands of ruling classes, but the question of production was almost settled. Soon the only limits on production would be those of social control, and those limits would not hold. What was at stake were the means of transformation. Wolman was saying that work was going to wither away in the face of technology, that abundance would be measured not in commodities but in time, that leisure was the real revolutionary question. Leisure would soon be the axis of civilization: a realm of potential happiness so complete that it would test the power of all the mechanisms of alienation to dominate it. A war would be fought over the meaning of life. If leisure was conquered, civilization would turn into a prison disguised as a pleasure dome. But if leisure was not conquered, it would serve as a base for a practice of freedom so explosive that no known social order could ever satisfy it.
In other words, as a social possibility the modernist dream of unlimited mastery over the domain of necessity was already the only real aesthetic fact. Utopia, someone’s utopia, was near. Traditional art existed to map utopia, to represent moments of possibility or totality that in the domain of necessity came and went as phantoms—“For art comes to you proposing to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake,” said Walter Pater in 1873—but now the field of utopia was anyone’s everyday life, and moments could be made into history. That was why (as one could have read in Potlatch no. 5, a few inches down from the item on the Fujinomyia lipstick war) poetry had to be “seen in faces,” and why it was necessary “to create new faces,” why poetry had to be found “in the form of cities,” and why the LI promised to “construire de bouleversantes,” to construct by overturning: “The new beauty will be a beauty of SITUATION, provisional and lived.” People would live in their own cathedrals, or they would live in their own prisons; self-contained by a page or a frame, the prison was now all any poem or painting could invoke. Traditional art could only recuperate possibility, separating it from totality. To communicate this fact, the page had to be blank, the canvas had to be blank, the screen had to be blank: proof that art could only be walked and talked.
Tokyo, July 14: The employees
of a silk merchant are currently engaged in a strike that has almost turned into a “war” between the employers and the population of the town of Fujinomyia, sixty-four kilometers from Tokyo.
The young employees of the “Omni Silk Spinning Company” factory, who live in dormitories under a strict set of rules and regulations, are protesting that the company does everything in its power to prevent them from marrying or having a normal love life, “ because of the possibility of a decrease in production.”
They complain that they are required to obtain permission from seven different officials in order to leave the factory or its environs, that they are forbidden to use lipstick or face powder, and that they must be in their beds by nine o’clock every night.
Mr. Kakuji Natsukawa, the director of the firm, is a Buddhist, and the young women protest that every morning they are forced to march in file on the grounds of the factory while singing Buddhist hymns.
The hymns are followed by other songs, such as “Today I Will Not Make Inconsiderate Requests,” and “Today I Will Not Complain.” (Combat, July 15)
—“The Best News of the Week,”
Potlatch no. 5, 20 July 1954
Such a proof matched its field. Everyday life was also blank. It was a government of stadiums and television programs, habit and routine, received gestures orchestrating a hegemonic conversation in which no one’s words were one’s own. If art held itself back from the empty space of everyday life, it would disappear into its own emptiness—but if art disappeared, the impulse to create one’s own utopia would go with it, and time would stop for good. The conclusion was plain: art could save the world, but only if artists allowed the world to save art.
One version of utopia, of the mastery of space and time, was already present, Wolman said: the basic modernist nightmare, fruit of all the plans drawn up in the 1920s for a new city that would have made Haussmann’s Paris look like it was built by the Communards. On the terms of the spectacle, utopia was Le Corbusier’s “Radiant City,” the prison without walls —the “Christian and capitalist way of life” suspended in “definitive harmony,” Wolman said, the city of guilt and work presented as an “unchangeable fact.” Against this blinding light, Wolman used a line by Jorn to affirm the shadow city the LI had discovered on the dérive: “new, chaotic jungles, sparking experiences without purpose, devoid of meaning.” This city would be made not for the circulation of commodities but for the passing of time. It would be a playground for acts that were not cowardly because they could not be justified, a shifting of settings and conflicts that would kill off the characters in a tragedy in twenty-four hours—and who could resist it? It sounded like fun, wrecking the world, putting it back together the next day. “We will not work to prolong the mechanical civilizations that ultimately lead to boring leisure,” Chtcheglov had written. “We propose to invent new, changeable decors.”
