Lipstick Traces (20 page)

It was as if Thatcher and Reagan had adopted a keynote of situationist theory: abundance is dangerous to power, and privation, if carefully managed, is safe. A mammoth debt encourages fear, which is never revolutionary; a high level of unemployment ensures a ready pool of strike breakers, translates the curse of a bad job into a blessing. “The transformation of the family man from a responsible member of society, interested in all public affairs,” Hannah Arendt wrote in 1945 in “Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility,”

to a “bourgeois” concerned only with his private existence and knowing no civic virtue, is an international modern phenomenon . . . Each time society, through unemployment, frustrates the small man in his normal functioning and normal self-respect, it trains him for that last stage in which he will willingly undertake any function, even that of hangman.

Arendt told a story: an SS member is recognized as a high-school classmate by a Jew upon the latter’s release from Buchenwald. The Jew stares at his former friend, and the SS man says: “You must understand, I have five years of unemployment behind me. They can do anything they want with me.”

To be sure, the rhetoric of the new rulers was both forgotten and ultramodern, crude and dreamily paradoxical. Commentators spoke with awe at the way Thatcher and Reagan denounced the hedonistic anarchy of the sixties as a moral wasteland responsible for economic disaster while simultaneously celebrating untrammeled capitalism as a personal quest for autonomy, self-realization, adventure, fulfillment, possibility, imagination, risk, and desire, literally taking fragments of May ’68 slogans into their mouths; the key words were adventure and risk. When an ever-growing number of families found their survival in question, “survival” ceased to function as an ideology, for an ideology is dominant to the degree that it falsifies, to the degree that it can float free of all real-world referents: both Thatcher and Reagan promised everything to anyone with the grace to leave the damned behind. At the same time, they spoke of the continuity that should have
been. As against the interruptions of the sixties, Reagan said early in his presidency, “We must mobilize every asset we have—spiritual, moral, educational, economic and military—in a crusade for national renewal. We must restore to their place of honor the bedrock values handed down by families to serve as society’s compass.” That was the rhetoric; working from a speech in which Reagan amended the Declaration of Independence to read “born free” rather than “created equal,” the political critic Walter Karp deciphered a reality so weird that almost no one understood it.

The republic’s historic assertion that “all men are created equal,” which Lincoln regarded as a stumbling block to tyranny, is also a stumbling block to National Renewal. That we are created equal has never meant that Americans were supposed to live alike. What it does mean, what it has always meant, is that the citizens of this republic cannot be treated in law and by government as mere social and economic functions. Yet this is exactly how the Reaganites propose to treat the citizens of the commonwealth. The administration intends to bestow wealth upon the wealthy because it is their function to invest in productive enterprises. The administration intends to impoverish the poor because it is their function to perform menial services and not be a drag on investors.

To release capitalism from its republican bondage is what National Renewal is all about. It is about nothing else . . . As a matter of course, the Reaganites hope to turn public education into class education by financing a middle-class exodus from the common schools. When they become schools for a class and not for the commonality, the American republic will have lost the only instrument capable of turning a mass of future jobholders into a plurality of citizens. The common schools of the republic are one of capitalism’s fetters, and so of course they must be broken.

Karp was not writing in some obscure radical journal printed in smudged ink on cheap paper; he was writing in
Harper’s.
Nevertheless he wrote with the maddened patience of one who knows the only words that can say what he means have been robbed of their meaning, turned inside out, discredited, then reempowered, passed into their opposites, and this was only 1981—in five years or so, what Karp was saying would sound really crazy, even though by then the facts to prove his case would be on the record. Digging deep into the back pages of the newspaper, you could learn that Terrel Bell,
Reagan’s secretary of education from 1981 through 1984, had written an article in which he told of “constant battles against a well-organized network of the far right—identifiable by their Adam Smith neckties—who [Bell said] ‘enjoyed . . . extraordinary privileges and automatic forgiveness from the White House’ . . . Bell says their ultimate goal was the destruction of public education and its replacement by a market-place system of private schools run by entrepreneurs.”

In 1986 this sounded even more paranoid than Karp’s entrail readings had in 1981. Pretty strange, you said as you read the item—especially that bit about the “Adam Smith neckties”—wonder who thought that one up? Sort of a “human-interest story,” like (scanning the paper) the two-headed baby in Peru (“The bishop declared that the baby contains two separate souls”) or pingpong-ball-sized UFOs in Brazil (“Fighter pilots pursued the phenomena until their aircraft ran out of fuel”). Karp knew none of this as he wrote—not the neckties, the baby, or the pingpong balls—but he pressed on as if he knew this was the context his words would find. “The Reaganites do not even care about the so-called free market, which is merely one of their confidence games,” he said, now almost ranting, shouting, what the Reaganites really cared about, he said, was

this: they want capitalism in America to become what Karl Marx thought it would be by nature—the transcendent force and the measure of all things, the power that reduces free politics to trifling, the citizen to a “worker,” the public realm to “the state,” the state to an instrument of repression protecting capitalism from the menace of liberty and equality, with which it grew up as Cain grew up with Abel . . . Marx’s description of capitalist society is the Reaganite prescription for America. That is the meaning of National Renewal.

But that was later. In the meantime, Haussmann’s project went forward. Paris became new; so did Parisians. The separations between work, family, and leisure forced by the new map of the city were internalized by the newly atomized, autonomous individuals of the new Paris—after all, the whole
notion of “individualism” was a modernism, a function of one’s subjective choice of what to do with free income and free time. The Commune was a comma in Haussmann’s sentence; he had won. Paris became a city of symbols, power, and desire. Social life was like a lottery: if everyone has a chance to buy a ticket, everyone has a chance to win, and since only one out of a million can win, the separation of the one from the million, of each from everyone, is complete. As commodities spun through their circuits, each person became, in fantasy, a ruler: the Commodifier. You could see it in the streets. It was as if Haussmann had answered Marx’s “All that is solid melts into air”—Marx’s awestruck judgment, in 1848, from
The Communist Manifesto,
on the transcendent force of capitalism, on capitalism as the measure of all things—with a Hobbesian boast: Ecce homo!

Behold man! It was Haussmann’s genius to open his invented city to the countryside, to ring the new city with parks and marinas. Work and domestic life had been severed, creating new markets for each; a new sector of enticing, seductive, organized leisure made a third separation, a separation that at once assuaged the dislocations of wage labor and domesticity, and provided a new market of its own. Against the inevitable alienations of capitalism (the language of my work cannot be translated into the language of my home; my work and my family turn my leisure into nervous babble), Haussmann set an autonomy of pleasure. A stroll in the park, a Sunday on the riverbank—as spectacles, such things represented free money, free time: freedom. More than that: the trees, the water, the flowers, the grass, they all said that Haussmann’s new city was not an interested construction but a natural fact. The language of the stones did not have to be translated; it was plain to all. If Haussmann had extended the division of labor into a division of life, he had also blessed it.

Haussmann’s work was what we call today urban renewal, city planning, gentrification, “urbanism”—“a rather neglected branch of criminology,” the situationists’ two-man Bureau of Unitary Urbanism wrote in 1961. “Urbanism doesn’t exist; it is only an ‘ideology,’ in Marx’s sense of the word”—a consensual limit on discourse about the real and the possible. It was an agreement about what constituted the language of the stones—in this case, architecture—and as an ideology, the agreement made everything outside itself seem unnatural. As consent it was a social compact, and as
a social compact it was “blackmail by utility . . . Modern capitalism dissuades people from criticizing architecture with the simple argument that people need a roof over their heads, just as television is accepted on the grounds that people need information and entertainment. People are made to overlook the obvious fact that this information, this entertainment, and this kind of dwelling place are not made for them, but without them and against them. The whole of urban planning can be understood only as a society’s field of publicity-propaganda—that is” (as Bob Geldof tried to say a quarter-century later), “as the organization of participation in something in which it is impossible to participate.”

The hallmark of any ideology is its invisibility as such: this is why, in 1986, a Reaganist fact could be less believable than its prophecy five years before. There were protests against Haussmann in his time; by the situationists’ time, his Paris was no longer a new city, but the only city: the model for modernity, the visible fact of modern life. If its ideology was invisible, how to fight it, how to begin speaking a new language, not of stones but of human beings? The “criticism of architecture” was a locus of what the situationists called “revolution,” and the situationists were vague: they spoke of “the coordination of artistic and scientific means of denunciation,” then of “situationist bases” for “an experimental life,” “acting as bridgeheads for an assault . . . fueled by all the tensions of daily life, on the manipulation of cities and their inhabitants.” They were clearest when they sounded most desperate: “We must spread skepticism toward those bleak, brightly colored kindergartens, the new dormitory cities of both East and West. Only a mass awakening will pose the question of a conscious construction of the urban milieu.”

Like all revolutionaries stranded in a present without revolution, the situationists looked back. It was the Paris Commune that represented
“the only realization of a revolutionary urbanism to date
—attacking on the spot the petrified signs of the dominant organization of life, understanding social space in political terms, refusing to accept the innocence of any monument.” As always with the situationists, one has to slow down: what do
monuments have to do with revolution? Debord, in
The Society of the Spectacle:

The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life brought into the definition of all human realization the obvious degradation of
being
into
having.
The present phase of the total occupation of social life by the accumulated results of the economy leads to a generalized sliding of
having
into
appearing,
from which all actual “having” must draw its immediate prestige and its ultimate function. Simultaneously, all individual reality has become social reality, directly dependent on social power, and shaped by it. It is allowed to appear only to the extent that it is
not.

Nothing that actually happens becomes real until it is represented in the spectacle that is social life—after which it becomes unreal, and passes into its opposite. As a revolutionary, Debord was a mathematician: insisting on the spectacle’s transformation of all things into their opposites, he spoke of a “reversible connecting factor” in modern society, the very thing that made modern society modern, the principle of negation growing within the structures of domination. This was the location of the revolutionary impulse on the new terrain of the spectacle, of social life as symbolism. If a monument was a symbol, the spectacle concentrated on a single point, then a demolition of symbols was the surest way to reveal the invisible terrain on which people actually lived.

The Communards, the situationists wrote with regret in “On the Commune,” did not destroy all symbols of the division of life. They refused to seize the National Bank. Repulsed by a battery of artists, they fell back from an attempt to burn Notre-Dame to the ground. But if the Communards did not forever erase the divisions of faith, work, family, and leisure—if they did not establish a world in which faith would be brought down to earth, work made pleasurable, family life suffused with the fervor of work, or dissolve all three into leisure—which, the situationists thought, could and should replace faith, work, and family with the free creation of situations, a new use of leisure, a true leisure, a festival wherein material survival, supposedly the provenance of work, and the continuation of the species, supposedly the provenance of family, and faith, supposedly the provenance of the religious illusion, would be natural by-products of each
individual’s everyday rediscovery of his or her own life in play (what do I want to do today?)—if the Communards did not do that, they did at least pull down the Vendôme Column.

One-hundred-and-forty-four feet tall, four feet taller than the Gdansk crosses, it was a symbol of the first Napoleon: of military glory, the territorial expansion of life as it already was, of domination celebrated as freedom. On 16 May 1871, on the motion of the painter Gustave Courbet, it was toppled onto a bed of straw and manure. To Haussmann’s “Ecce homo!” the Communards offered Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” The act was reimagined just short of a century later by Gerard Van der Leun: