by Greil Marcus
Guy-Ernest Debord, “The Naked City,” May 1957
The LI put out Potlatch from 22 June 1954 to 22 May 1957; no. 29, the final issue, 5 November 1957, carried the legend “Bulletin d’information de l’Internationale situationniste,” and the LI swallowed its tale. “We’re not interested in a fond place in your memories,” read “Potlatch, Directions for Use,” no. 2, 29 June 1954. “But concrete powers are at stake. A few hundred people haphazardly determine the thought of the epoch. Whether they know it or not, they are at our disposal. By sending Potlatch to people effectively positioned, we can interrupt the circuit when and where we please.” You found the thing on your desk, if you worked for a newspaper or the government, or maybe you found it in your mailbox: “Some readers have been chosen arbitrarily.” (“You picked names out of the phone book?” I asked Wolman. “Let’s not exaggerate,” he said. “We didn’t have a phone book. For that matter, we didn’t have a phone.”) Maybe you found it in the street, a throwaway, since the odds were at best one in two that those who got it read it: “You have a chance to be one of them.”
As Debord would say, Potlatch was a gift, an offering of “nonsalable goods”—“previously unpublished desires and questions, and only their thorough analysis by others can constitute a return gift.” It was an attempt to start a conversation—a conversation, though, in which everyone would want to take part and that could only end in the discovery of a new language, with a new subject, which was to say a new idea of social life. “Potlatch is the most engaged publication in the world,” no. 1 began, the letters slightly blurred, the keys of the typewriter obviously worn. “We are working toward the conscious and collective establishment of a new civilization.”
The LI was playing with another metaphor. The ethnographic dictionary defined “potlatch” as “to consume,” but the context the word called up was not commercial consumption but “consumed by the fire”: it meant a gift that had to be returned until there was nothing left to give. It was a Chinook word, used by the Kwakiutl of British Columbia, the Tlingit of Alaska, Amerindian tribes first studied by anthropologists at the end of the nineteenth century.
These tribes, the anthropologists discovered, had a strange practice: one chief met another and offered gifts. The second chief had to respond in kind, but on a higher plane of value. That was the potlatch. The game might begin with the presentation of a necklace and end with the burning of a town—with a tribe burning its own town, thus raising the obligations of its rival to an almost impossible level. The potlatch was part of a festival, accompanied by storied songs, dances, and the conferral of new names on the great givers (“Whose Property Is Eaten in Feasts,” “Causing Trouble All Around,” “The Dance of Throwing Away Property”); it could be a symbolic exchange of courtesies and pieties, brought forth by a wedding or a funeral, and it could be a symbolic war, an exchange of challenges and humiliations. There was something in it of D. H. Lawrence’s idea of democracy (“if you can call it an idea”): two people meeting on a road, and instead of passing by with eyes averted pausing, like Arthur and Lancelot, for a confrontation “between their very souls,” thus setting free the “brave, reckless gods” within—“Now, damn the consequences, we have met.” For one tribe to fail to rise to the provocation of another was to admit that it valued property, mere things, more than honor; a chief who distributed the wealth of his tribe was said to “swallow the tribes” that received it. “The ideal,” sociologist Marcel Mauss wrote in 1925 in The Gift, “is to give a potlatch and not have it returned.”
The movements of a student in the 16th arrondissement of Paris over the course of a year, as published in I.S. no. 1, June 1958
Continental drift showing (top) Pangaea, 270 million years ago, (middle) Laurasia and Gonwonaland, 50 million years ago, and (bottom) later land masses
This was no cultural anomaly, Mauss said: the potlatch was an echo of the Golden Age, a survival of a once-universal form of exchange—at its deepest level, it was a form of communication between people who held nothing back. It was a protean economy of emotion and play, as suffused with faith as the modern market was with cynicism, and it was absolute: “We are here confronted with total prestation [payment] in the sense that the whole clan, through the intermediacy of its chief, makes contracts involving all its members and everything it possesses.”
It was no matter, to Mauss, that after all the skins and animals were gone the potlatch could end in an orgy of enslavement and human sacrifice—and no accident that Mauss was the nephew and collaborator of Emile Durkheim, theorist of the division of labor. Mauss saw the potlatch as a negation of division, as an affirmation of community. It was, he said, the first round table, “ ‘from which none need be excluded’ ”—or could be.
Reading Mauss’s book, polymath Georges Bataille found something very different: proof of a mythical id-economy of waste and loss hidden within the historical superego-economies of production and accumulation. In 1933, in “The Notion of Expenditure,” he brought the potlatch into the present, not as a quaint memory of wholeness but as a permanent psychology of dissolution.
Bataille seized on the potlatch as an expression of humanity’s ineradicable attraction to “recklessness, discharge, and upheaval”—“the immense travail,” he stated flatly, “that constitutes life.” He was writing self-consciously as a gnostic heretic, and that ineradicable attraction, he thought, was at the core of the heresy, deprived by Christianity and rationalism of all ordinary language, and now audible only in the bruitist languages of insanity, crime, dream, perversion, war, and revolution.
Bataille told a new story—a story not all that different from the story of the Martian genes in Five Million Years to Earth. Fleeing the absolutes of the potlatch, in which value derived from the possibility of total loss, humanity refounded civilization on the principle of utility and established a system of limits, where everything had its price. But whether civilization reproduced itself through barter, mercantilism, capitalism, or communism, it merely veiled humanity’s inherent hatred of utility and limits, disguising its lust for “unconditional expenditure,” for activities with “no end beyond themselves”—concealed the truth that oblivion was humanity’s ruling passion. The self-destructive man might be legion, but even at his most lucid, Bataille said, he imagines himself outside the human community, a crazy man: “It does not occur to him that society can have, just as he does, an interest in considerable losses, in catastrophes that, while conforming to well-defined needs, provoke tumultuous depressions, crises of dread and, in the final analysis, a certain orgiastic state.” In Mauss the potlatch was a shadowy performance of what, once, had been real life. Understood, it was a revelation of what real life would always be—even if that reality was now masked by a public culture of rational consumption, which hid the disfigurements of a secret culture, the bourgeois culture of family violence, adultery, incest, prostitution, lying, cheating, swindling, gambling, alcoholism, drug addiction, the modern dance of throwing away property.
All that was left of the public potlatch, Bataille said, was the humiliation the bourgeoisie offered the poor—a humiliation the poor could give back only through revolution, by offering themselves for destruction, asking for a greater destruction in exchange. But the triumph of the bourgeoisie was sealed by its culture, which ensured that the real life of expenditure and loss would be pursued “behind closed doors”—for the bourgeoisie distinguished itself from all other tribes “by the fact that it has consented to spend only for itself and only within itself.” The result, Bataille said, was the disappearance of “everything that was generous, orgiastic, and excessive,” and its replacement by a “universal meanness”—the gift of a class so certain of its hegemony, so successful in identifying its history with nature, that it had finally dispensed with its mask, and against all that it still concealed happily exposed its “sordid face, a face so rapacious and lacking in nobility, so frighteningly small, that all human life, upon seeing it, seems degraded.”
That was the ideal: the potlatch, the humiliation, that could not be returned. The poor, caught up in the promise that someday they too might spend only for themselves, could not respond. Neither could so-called revolutionaries, communists dedicated to production for the sake of use, blind to the passion for expenditure for the sake of loss. All, Bataille said, were prisoners of the fiction of utility—“and if a less arbitrary conception is condemned to remain esoteric, and if as such, in the present circumstances, it comes into conflict with an unhealthy repulsion, then one must stress that this repulsion is precisely the shame of a generation whose rebels are afraid of the noise of their own words.”
Bataille was laying down a challenge; twenty-one years later, the LI picked it up. All of these meanings were present when the group chose the word “potlatch” to name its second life—and in 1954 the group could find a meaning in the word that might have gone unnoticed two or three decades earlier. Everything the LI had to say, all of its yesses and noes, rested on the promise of a world of abundance; the potlatch tribes, Mauss and Bataille had noted almost in passing, already lived in it. Because they were rich in meat and hides, they could afford to play a game of real life. Like the LI with its unexplained “creation of situations,” the Kwakiutl and the Tlingit, with their ritualized exchange of affirmations and negations, reveled in abstraction; the potlatch was not merely a protean economy, it was a prophetic economy. As an absolute the potlatch was an exchange of everything that could not be put on the market; for it to function all commodities had to be taken off the market and raised above it, until the poorest trinket could symbolize the whole life of the tribe. So it would be, when the new civilization came into being; God would be dead, and everything would be sacred.
“Potlatch” was just a metaphor—a means of understanding the way the small becomes huge, of deciphering, say, the inexorably rising stakes of a confrontation between a husband and a wife (“the potlatch of complicity,” Bernstein wrote in La Nuit), or the apparent lunacy of people burning their own town (“the potlatch of destruction,” as the SI said of Watts), or the sudden expansion of a solitary refusal into an explosion: a few troublemakers, a few cops, a riot, the army, then the social order called into question. But metaphors are transformations, proofs of the arbitrary nature of language, grants of mystery to ordinary things—they are in other words incipient utopias. For the LI, the appeal of the potlatch metaphor was in its ability to simultaneously symbolize dissolution and community, in its suggestion that the commodity could lose the magic Marx had glimpsed in it. The table would once again be wood, still and powerless, but people would dance around it; that would be utopia, which would be a permanent potlatch of surprise. Walking the streets of the cities built for drifting, you’d meet other people; you’d exchange glances, then gestures, then words, arguments, agreements, insults, embraces. These situations would be open, made to be lived by their creators. Shaped by settings of reassurance and fear, there would be an intensity never before known in everyday life. You’d lose yourself in the oblivion of action; you’d know you were making it happen. Like John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in their fight at the end of Red River, you’d exchange love and hate, life and death; like the Tramp and the Flower Girl in the last shots of City Lights, you’d exchange terror and redemption; like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing “Night and Day” in The Gay Divorcee, you’d exchange hesitations and commitments, repulsions and attractions. Arlene Croce describes it:
Abruptly she turns and crosses the set; he blocks her. She crosses and he blocks her. She turns away, he catches her wrist, their eyes meet and he dances ingratiatingly. Again she turns, again he catches her and she walks into the dance. When she stands away, he pulls her by the hand and she coils against him, wrapping herself in her own arm, as the free hand holds that wrist. In this position, together as if cradled, they just drift . . .
This would be the new beauty, provisional and lived. Anything could happen; you would find out what happened next. There would be no repetition. Time would move, and you would sense the passing of time, the accumulation of events that cannot be taken back—the “necessary alienation,” Debord said—and with that sensation you would come alive, because you’d be making your own history. “The moment was temporary like everything is,” Paul McCartney once said of his years as a Beatle. “Nothing in life really stays. And it’s beautiful that they go. They have to go in order for the next thing to come. You can almost add to the beauty of a thing by accepting that it’s temporary.” To make this happen—that was what Debord meant by the wish “to realize the collective art of our time,” what the LI meant by “the perfecting of a complete divertissement.” From 1952 through May 1968, through all the furious, step-by-step demolitions of every dominant image of the good, behind them, all the obscure intimations of a new way of walking and a new way of talking, that was the situationist project—that was all it ever was.
Radio Announcer: Shoes for industry! Shoes for the dead! Shoes for industry!
Pitchman: Hi. I’m Joe Beets. Hey, what chance does a returning deceased war veteran have for that good-payin’ job, more sugar, and the free mule you’ve been dreamin’ of? Well, think it over. Then take off your shoes. Now you can see how increased spending opportunities means harder work for everyone—and more of it, too. So do your part today, Joe—join with millions of your neighbors, and take off your shoes.
Announcer: For industry!
—the dominant image of the good,
c. 1953, according to the Firesign
Theatre, Don’t Crush That Dwarf,
Hand Me the Pliers, 1970
I HAVE
I have tried to make the ethos the LI claimed into a narrative, to fill in the gaps, to make it at least half as clear as it was to Debord, Wolman, Bernstein, and the rest—inevitably, to make their old papers into something fit for rational consumption. They didn’t. The voice in Potlatch is unfailingly logical, but it’s the logic of people so caught up in their own vision that it can explain anything to them. For anyone else, there are gaps in the logic that can’t be closed, and the controlling gap was implicit in the medium itself.
In 1985 Debord republished the complete run of Potlatch in a brightly typeset, cleanly designed book with a purple cover; it gives a sheen of likelihood, of investment and return, to words that first trumpeted their messages of destruction and rebirth in a realm outside apparent possibility, dim and smudged on loose sheets of mimeo. The elegance of print empowers the most impossible sentence, translates its noise into at least a facsimile of discourse, but noise and powerlessness were a lot of what Potlatch was about. Those values were self-evident in the original form; in a book, they have to dismantle the orderliness of official culture all over again. Reading Potlatch today—especially the first nine numbers, when a weekly schedule held and the LI tried to say everything at once—is first of all confusing; even if one plumbs every allusion, what remains is spooky.
“A new civilization,” it says in no. 1; then in “All the Water in the Sea Couldn’t . . .” Debord laconically summarizes the latest news on teenage suicides, the execution of anarchists in Spain, the execution of a rebel leader in Kenya, and the corruption of various French littérateurs. What the latter need, Debord says, “is the Terror”—which is what the former have already gotten. That’s the implication, anyway (the reader is back in 1794, which has turned into 1954, except that 1954 has turned 1794 against its rightful inheritors); Debord does not explain.
A month later, with no. 5, 20 July 1954, the reader is back in the thirteenth century, which is also the future. “The Cathars Were Right,” announces a headline, running above a Combat item on an American physicist’s discovery of the anti-proton, which subsumes a few brief dispatches on the CIA’s coup against the democratic government in Guatemala; save for the headline and a subhead, there is no commentary from the LI.
“The proton is the nucleus of the hydrogen atom, and, in consequence, constitutes the basic element of all terrestrial ma
tter,” Combat says. “A proton and an antiproton—which will collide in mutual destruction. Thus the antiproton will be capable of annihilating all matter composed of protons. In essence, this will be ‘anti-matter.’ Nevertheless, it appears impossible for them to combine with enough force to destroy the planet.” A nice touch, that “Nevertheless”—although perhaps no solace to deposed president Jacobo Arbenz and his supporters, the silent subjects of the LI’s “Conclusion.” Le Figaro: “The new government of Guatemala will disallow the right of illiterates to vote.” Paris-Presse: “General Carlos Castillo Armas, head of the rebels who have gained victory in Guatemala, has been named president by the military junta.” L’Humanité: “Castillo Armas defines his politics: ‘The justice of the firing squad.’ ”
The Potlatch reader might have remembered the LI’s report in no. 1: Arbenz instituted a modest land-reform program, the United Fruit Company complained, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles proclaimed what the LI called a “crusade” against what Dulles called “the forces of evil,” the CIA organized a small group of Guatemalan military officers, and the LI called on Arbenz to “arm the workers.” He didn’t, troops were launched from Honduras, bombing commenced, the government fell, Arbenz escaped—so in no. 3 the LI brought on Saint-Just to curse him with the maxim that “Those who make a revolution by halves only dig their own graves.” Someone’s grave—the result was that, thirty years later, it was policy in Guatemala that any peasant found wearing glasses was to be shot on sight. That was the story the LI was telling in “The Cathars Were Right”—but what, the Potlatch reader might ask, did it have to do with the antiproton, and what did the antiproton have to do with the Cathars?
The LI was playing with history: “The Cathars Were Right” was a complex détournement, a set of reversals produced by the simplest juxtapositions. The only necessary tools were a few newspapers, a pair of scissors, a jar of paste, a sense of loathing, a sense of humor, and the notion that to be against power was to be against the power of words—it was a game, and like all games it had its rules. Détournement was a discourse of noise made out of “prefabricated elements”; the original elements, Debord and Wolman wrote in 1956 in “Methods of Détournement,” lose their original meanings in the flux of separation from their original contexts, but each element takes on a new meaning when combined with another, and the combination produces a meaning that supersedes its constituent elements. Titling is crucial; the most distant, out-of-place element is the most suggestive; the false author works on the conditioned reader like a psychoanalyst drawing out an analysand, playing on the reader’s vague recollection of the original meaning of the most distant element, so that the small becomes huge, an ancient memory a history—which is to say that, here, one was to vaguely recall that in the thirteenth century, in Languedoc, in southern France, the Christian heretics known as Cathars believed in gnostic dualism.
