by Greil Marcus
Le Corbusier, drawing for the Voisin Plan, 1925
Haunted by key images from ancient times, our minds have remained far behind the sophistication of our machinery. Attempts to fuse modern science into new myths have gone nowhere. As a result, abstraction has invaded all the arts—contemporary architecture most of all. Pure plasticity, telling no story and making no movement, soothes the eye, and freezes it . . .
Past societies offered people an absolute truth and incontestable mythic symbols. The appearance of the idea of relativity in the modern mind allows one to glimpse the EXPERIMENTAL aspect of the next civilization, although that word doesn’t quite serve: say, more fluid, more “fun.” On the bases of this mobile civilization, architecture will be, at least in the beginning, a means of experimenting with a thousand ways of modifying life, with a view towards a synthesis today found only in legends.
This, Wolman was saying, was real leisure—leisure not as a compensation for work, not as a version of it, but as its annihilation—and this was why leisure was the real revolutionary question. To make this city of play, artists would have to reject the passive abstraction of all objectified, separate art, and leave their objects behind: “creation,” Wolman told his audience, “can now be nothing less than” the “complete construction of an atmosphere.”
Perhaps, in their own abstraction, Wolman’s words floated in the air, to be carried off by whatever the weather was in Alba in September 1956—but if the LI’s utopia was abstract, its anti-utopia was not. As Wolman spoke, bits and pieces of the Radiant City, the new buildings the LI had called vertical ghettos and apartment-house morgues, were being raised all over the world: from Le Corbusier’s own “l’Unité d’habitation” in Marseilles, France, to the Godzilla homage of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis, Missouri. Because this work served “the worst forces of repression,” Wolman said, “it is going to completely disappear,” and so soon the Situationist International was formed to make it happen, even if all the group had to offer were cleanly printed words against reinforced concrete, odd theories that might someday be realized as graffiti, and Wolman was left behind.
After his exclusion from the LI, Wolman earned his living as an artist, making objects and selling them, but he stuck to the LI’s aesthetic—it was his as much as anyone’s. He tried to construct by overturning what was already there; he practiced only détournement, the idea that in a world that had yet to be changed only a distortion of the images everyone took for granted could equal the weight of the blank page. Wolman went back to the papers; in 1963, on his way to Duhring Duhring, he discovered scotch art. He took Scotch tape, laid it down over headlines, lifted the tape, removed the words, and smeared them back into pages that might have been composed under water. He made his own papers, many organized around a specific date, be it his own wedding day, André Breton’s death day, a May ’68 day, the best news of the week, but in his hands the liquid streamers said that the events they spoke for were more controlling than anyone suspected, and less real: the worst news of the week. Time swirled, too fast for anyone to keep up with it; it stood still, denying the possibility that any new story might be told. The news was that there was no escape from history, even if history was only a noise.
Wolman did it for years. He said that words were meaningless and that they ruled the world: the spectacle was permanent. And yet Wolman’s work communicated anything but surrender. It was a proof that what appeared to be was not, that the empowered facts of every day’s headlines were part of an old-world art project no less arbitrary than anyone’s poem. And it was this perspective that in 1979 led Wolman to fashion the line, “we were against the power of words—against power.” More than twenty years after his exclusion from the LI, he was still working out the group’s slogans.
“Why was he excluded?” I asked Michèle Bernstein, in 1957 one of those who voted Wolman out. “There are always two reasons for anything,” she said. “There is always the good reason, and there is always the real reason. But even if I remembered the real reason, I wouldn’t tell you.”
Gil J Wolman, untitled scotch art, 1974
BORN
Born in Paris in 1932, Bernstein grew up in Normandy; the war began when she was seven. Her parents had divorced long before, but her father was Jewish—though her mother remarried and gave Michèle the name of her gentile stepfather, that meant nothing to the Nazis. “Don’t ever let anyone at school know you’re a Jew,” Bernstein’s mother told her. The little girl’s response sums up the woman she became: “Guess what!” she immediately announced to her friends in a big stage whisper, out of earshot of her teachers. “I’m a Jew!”
In 1985 she didn’t tell the story idly. My wife and I were in Bernstein’s tiny Paris pied-à-terre, a room decorated mainly with books and a sign on the wall: “RUE SAUVAGE.” It was a relic from a street the LI once tried to save from demolition; the group thought the way the spirit of the street (“the most disruptive nocturnal perspective in the capital”) lived up to its name made it a psychogeographical lighthouse. Bernstein handed me a copy of Libération, the leftist daily for which she wrote a weekly literary column. The front page carried the latest news on the TWA airliner that Arab terrorists had highjacked to Beirut a few days before. I read the story: under orders, it said, a German stewardess had selected those individuals with “Jewish-sounding names” from the passenger manifest, and they had been removed from the plane to a then-unknown fate. The selection had been opposed by some crew members, who feared that “innocent people” —that is, people who were in fact not Jews, but whose names “sounded Jewish”—might be lumped with the presumptively guilty: real Jews. “Are you flying home on TWA?” Bernstein asked sweetly. Yes, we said. “Got your yellow stars ready?”
She was small, with close-cut gray hair and a round face. She looked a bit like Gertrude Stein, with all of the imperiousness gone from the mouth, the eagerness to judge replaced by happy eyes. She was not an obvious match for the woman whose LI and SI writings, and her two novels, can be caught in a few words: cold, cruel, severe, unforgiving. The most striking essays practiced intellectual terrorism (notably “No Useless Leniency,” I.S. no. 1, a defense of the strategy of, so to speak, recruitment through exclusion: “We have become stronger, and therefore more seductive”); the novels, both centering on “Geneviève” and “Gilles,” versions of herself and Debord, her husband from 1954 to 1971, were about people living it out.
“I was a very greedy and devious girl,” Bernstein said. “It’s hard to imagine, now, that Gil and I were ever involved in anything as aggressive as l’Internationale lettriste. Most of us turned out to be rather nice people! But I was absolutely sure we would all be famous—and that we would replace the old world with a new one, that we would make the social revolution.”
Bernstein enrolled at the Sorbonne; soon bored with her classes, she began wandering the streets, looking for kindred spirits. “One day I opened the door of a cafe—and I found my people. They were alcoholics—very young alcoholics, as we all were. They would come together in the afternoon; then there would be music, noise, talk, all through the night.”
The cafe was Chez Moineau, 22 rue de Four, a block from Saint-Germain-des-Prés. People from all over the world passed through. It was a haven for refugees, would-be artists, budding suicides, runaways and class cutters, petty criminals, dope pushers, bums, eccentrics (one old man regularly appeared in a Japanese warrior’s helmet from which, by means of a wire, he flew a pack of cigarettes), and the new Lettrist International, which is to say a table, where sat those Debord judged ready to change the world. “Some, like Serge Berna, already had their legends,” Bernstein said. “The rest became famous later on—oh, not all, not me, as you can see! It was not all lettriste. There were the nouveaux realistes and the realistes fantastiques. With us were Ivan Chtcheglov and Henry de Béarn—you can tell by the name, he came from a very noble family. Later he became a Gaullist; like so many, he finally became what he had been. Jean-Miche
l Mension”—Bernstein opened a book of Ed van der Elsken’s photographs, the 1981 Parijs!, to the page of Mension and Fred running down the street in their colored hair (“The punks invented nothing!” she said)—“was only with us for a moment. He was from a Communist family. Later he became a bureaucrat in the Parti communiste.
“Chtcheglov and de Béarn were living in a loft, and every night the light from the Eiffel Tower would shine in their eyes. They decided to blow it up”—not as a political act, not as a nihilist affirmation, but because it kept them awake—“and they were arrested. With the dynamite. It was in all the papers. I don’t know if they were really going to do it. Of course they had talked about it to everybody.”
Van der Elsken had a living to make. Like every other photographer in Paris, he took a lot of pictures of lovers embracing on rainy streets, but Moineau’s was his hangout as much as anyone’s. Though Debord forbade him on pain of violence to shoot the LI, van der Elsken roamed the room, aiming into the mirrors that covered the walls. In some ways, the pictures he got say as much about the LI as the manifestos the group was writing at its table—a fact Debord acknowledged when he clipped images out of van der Elsken’s first book, a photo-novel called Love on the Left Bank, and dropped them into Mémoires.
They are pictures of people at home in their milieu. Anonymous camera subjects step out of hundred-year-old bohemian clichés and become individuals, making demands on the people around them, and on whoever is looking at them. No matter how crowded a scene, there always seems to be more room in it; the hubbub never diminishes the autonomy of the noisemakers. Solitary figures look not isolated, but merely left alone. A terrific sense of expectancy moves in the room. There’s a feeling that anything can happen, at any moment: a fight, an embrace, a fit, an oath, a new face, a new idea.
The people van der Elsken shot were mostly destitutes—acolytes of a cult of voluntary poverty. In Potlatch no. 22 (“Vacation Issue”), the LI published “The Division of Labor,” an accounting of the temporary jobs its “theoreticians” found it necessary to take in order to stave off starvation while pursuing the theory of the abolition of work: “Interpreter, hairdresser, telephone operator, statistician, knitter, receptionist, boxer, writer-for-hire, real-estate agent, dishwasher, salesperson, mail carrier, African hunter, typist, filmmaker, turner, tutor, unskilled laborer, secretary, butcher, bartender, sardine packer.” Throughout the LI and SI years, Bernstein worked as a horoscopist (“I made it all up”), a race-horse horoscopist (“That too”), a publisher’s assistant, and finally a successful advertising director (“To us, you understand, it was all spectacle; advertising was not worse than anything else. We took our money where we could find it”). But that was later. In Moineau’s, money came from theft, begging, passing out advertising leaflets, escorting tourists, hauling crates, poker, dealing drugs, chess, scholarships, parental allowances. The sort of fight Mension and Fred picked meant jail, which meant a bed and a meal. Some people had rooms; others slept in the metro, on park benches, in all-night cinemas, or in the cafe. Hashish was smoked openly in Moineau’s; there was a lot of sexual conflict, a lot of fighting; the police made regular raids to round up girls under eighteen. People drank far more than they ate; the smiling, fifty-ish barmaid, as van der Elsken put it, “cleaned up their vomit.” One of his photos is unforgettable: a boy with his head down on a table, dead to the world, in front of him a dish with a few bills and a note. “I need 450 F [about $1.65] for a room to make love in,” it reads. “All gifts accepted. Don’t wake me up.”
Photos of other delinquents of the time show very different people. The “Edwardians”—the Teddy Boys, working-class London youths whose early-1950s imitation of fin-de-siècle English dandies was taken by the press as an act of violence, a disruption of class codes prefiguring a refusal of class status—arrange their bodies into nihilist manifestos. Each is a match for the pose Debord assumed in Ion, as if cool were somehow imprinted in those born in the 1930s. But looking at the pictures now, one sees a cool so still it truly is a kind of violence. The impression is that the slightest shift of hand or mouth would not merely alter the image but shatter it, and maybe the frame—the social frame—too. One can look a little harder, and see that, for the Edwardians, cool means the transcendence of the desire for pleasure, a transcendence producing the greatest pleasure of all, oblivion.
For all their depths, though, there is something creepily false in these photos. It’s the same quality captured a few years later in Larry Clark’s pictures of Tulsa speed freaks, or in Jurgen Vollmer’s pictures of the early Beatles in Hamburg. Here, one can watch the invention of pop culture, its reception, and its instant reinvention: a form of the reversible connecting factor. An image of negation is made in a song, in a movie (the first film to exploit the Spivs, precursors of the Edwardians, appeared in 1950), in a novel, in the cut of a coat, in a gesture; the new media transmit the image, and suddenly people all over the world are living it out. But because the content of the reversible connecting factor remains unexamined, not the sign of a new world but simply a sign of separation from the old, one can also watch the instant self-destruction of pop culture, and see cool freeze. The people in the pictures seem to be exchanging inheritance for genre, burying their nascent personalities in received images—images that might save them from a preordained future, that might burn off countless layers of conditioning and force an irruption of demand through centuries of acceptance, and all they do is fade into themselves. What wouldn’t they have given, one might think, to speak even as incoherently as Mension did in “general strike”! To speak even that incoherently, though, they would have had to at least vaguely considered concepts like “oblivion.” They would have had to have wanted to speak—to have been, like the LI, possessed by the need to explain themselves and to explain the world, a need that is antithetical to cool. They would have had to have understood that if they were making themselves up out of received images, as the LI tried to make itself up out of chosen images, then that was what they were doing.
They didn’t, and this is why so many of the pictures of these people seem staged: they were, though not necessarily by the photographers. Vollmer’s famous picture of John Lennon, posing in a Hamburg doorway around 1960 (reproduced on the cover of Lennon’s 1975 lp Rock ’n’ Roll), almost exactly recapitulates a once-famous newspaper photo of Edwardian Colin Donellan. Lennon cannot have missed it; his pose is almost evidence that, as a schoolboy, he had Donellan’s picture pinned on his bedroom wall.
“Colin Donellan, at 22 a convicted thief and burglar, has, since the age of eight, been in the hands of the police,” reads the caption in London’s Picture Post, 10 October 1953. “He has been to approved [reform] schools, Borstals [juvenile prisons] of varying degrees of severity, and an adult gaol”; he stands with his back against the window of a men’s wear shop, talking to a friend. Donellan is not looking at the camera; his clothes and hair are beautiful. He holds himself in menacing repose. In this carefully constructed moment, his eyes are empty; the scene is too perfect not to have been recorded. Donellan’s picture is that of someone waiting; he has taken his own picture by waiting for it to be taken.
Here one sees a set; in Moineau’s a setting. Before van der Elsken’s lens, the spirit is that of movement, interest, uncertainty. The girls and boys in Moineau’s seem oblivious of anybody but themselves; their peers seem to await a response, to offer themselves to a future they do not expect to make, to a history already judging them as deviants, anomalies, curios. Donellan and his pop-culture cousins seem to be auditioning for movies they’ve already seen; the people in Moineau’s seem to be having fun.
Colin Donellan, 1953
1953
1953 began around a table and ended with the table in pieces. By August, the fast time caught in Wolman’s letter to Brau had yielded to the deadly pace of I.L. no. 3, a lifeless broadsheet. “Indifference in the face of the suffocating values of the present is not permitted us, not when those values are guar
anteed by a society of prisons, and we live on their doorsteps,” Debord wrote dully in “To Be Done with the Comforts of Nihilism.” “We don’t want to participate at any price, or to accept our own silence, to accept . . . Red wine and negation in the cafes, the first truths of despair will not be the end of these lives, these lives so hard to defend against the traps of silence, against the hundred ways of TAKING SIDES.” Bossuet’s elegiac voice was already rising up, turning the echo of Saint-Just’s voice in Debord’s conclusion into a non sequitur: “We have to attest to a certain idea of happiness, even if we have known it to fail . . . We have to promote an insurrection that would matter to us.” Debord might as well have called for a revival of the Spanish Civil War—which, just a hairline rule to the left, he and the rest of the LI did. “The Middle Ages begin at the border,” they said in I.L. no. 3’s one dashing phrase, “and our silence seals it.” It was an admission that the LI’s own terrain had turned up empty.
