Lipstick Traces (21 page)

Tonight, to the consternation of the duly delegated authorities, an unkempt mob of anarchists clad in body paint and fright wigs stormed the Houses of Parliament following their frenzied participation in the Intergalactic Sonic Sit-in at the Royal Albert Hall. After laying siege to the speaker’s podium, they used their cigarette lighters to fuse the works of Big Ben into a bronze statue of Smokey Robinson.

So do anarchist myths float free and, occasionally, touch down.

In 1967, a year before French students and workers reenacted the Paris Commune in the uprising of May ’68, about the time Gerard Van der Leun was contriving his fantasy, situationist notions about revolution were patent nonsense. “The situationists,” Henri Lefebvre wrote then,

propose not a concrete utopia, but an abstraction. Do they really believe that one fine day, or one decisive evening, people will look at each other and say, “Enough! To hell with work, to hell with boredom! Let’s put an end to it!”—and that everyone will then step into the eternal Festival and the creation of situations?

—Thérésa says, “let me hear you say
yeah!”
—

If this happened once, at the dawn of 18 March 1871, this combination of circumstances will not occur again.

The agreement, between an eminent sixty-six-year-old sociologist and young extremists drunk on their own theories, was as complete as the breach: the agreement that the Commune had been a rejection of “boredom” in favor of “festival.” Those words were not part of conventional critical discourse; they were part of a discourse that, once, Lefebvre and the situationists had invented together.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Lefebvre was the chief theorist of the French Communist Party, which many thought was on the verge of taking power. Perhaps the leading Marxist philosopher in France, he was a scientist with a tenure more valuable than any university could guarantee. But over the next decade he turned away from Marxist scientism, arguing that to change the world one had to think about changing life. Instead of examining institutions and classes, structures of economic production and social control, one had to think about “moments”—moments of love, hate, poetry, frustration, action, surrender, delight, humiliation, justice, cruelty, resignation, surprise, disgust, resentment, self-loathing, pity, fury, peace of mind—those tiny epiphanies, Lefebvre said, in which the absolute possibilities and temporal limits of anyone’s existence were revealed. The richness or poverty of any social formation could be judged only on the terms of these evanescences; they passed out of consciousness as if they had never been, but in their instants they contained the whole of life. Once, perhaps in the Middle Ages, every moment had been part of a visible totality, just as the language of religion was part of the language of work. In the modern world, where God was dead and the division of labor divided every sector of life from every other, each moment was separate, and none had a language. Still—what if one took a moment as a passageway to totality? What if one based one’s life on the wish to affirm the moment of love, or negate the moment of resignation?

This was abstract, aesthetic; the frame of Lefebvre’s postwar thought was even more so. Moments, he said, appeared on a mysterious, unmapped territory he called “la vie quotidienne,” everyday life, a mode of being defined most readily in the negative: “Whatever remains after one has eliminated all specialized activities.” This was not life on the job so much as life on the commute—more than that, the fantasy life provoked by the dullness of the commute or the job. It was not one’s role as a wife so much as those small
times when one’s role was somehow absent, and, for a few seconds, one reinvented oneself out of nothing society recognized as real. Everyday life was a realm of repetition, pettiness, depression; of boredom, mutely interrupted by seemingly meaningless desires for heroism, adventure, escape, revenge—freedom.

Lefebvre’s critics denied that save as a catalogue of any era’s tools and toilets (“Where the Greek woman heated stones, we simply turn on our gas range”), everyday life existed at all; speaking in 1961 at a conference convened by Lefebvre, Guy Debord called it “the measure of all things.” He was speaking by means of a tape recorder, “in order to seize the simplest opportunity to break with the appearance of pseudo-collaboration.” Dramatizing the habitual submission of the listener to the presence of the lecturer, or the confusion produced by the lecturer’s absence, he meant to “demonstrate, by a slight alteration of the usual procedures, that everyday life is right here.” The “intervention” was marginal, trivial—but it was in the realm of the marginal and the trivial that any critique of everyday life, and therefore any critique of social reality, began. Against the shining progress of technology and commerce, Lefebvre said, everyday life was “a backward sector” in the modern world—“a colonized sector,” Debord said—an affective Third World in the heart of the First. But this was a foreign country where everyone actually lived.

Everyday life, as Lefebvre conceived it—first in
Introduction à la critique de la vie quotidienne
in 1947, then in many books over the next twenty years—was a milieu as unsatisfied as it was silent, as silent as it was ubiquitous: it was implicit in his work that outside of novels, poetry, and music—outside of art—moments no more had a language in the Soviet Union than they did in France. But if those moments could be given a language, a political language, they could form the basis for entirely new demands on the social order. What if one said no to boredom, and demanded surprise, not for a moment, but as a social formation?

This was not Marxism. Marx would have understood it: Lefebvre’s theories were rooted in Marx’s romantic 1844
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,
which in the late 1920s Lefebvre had translated and published. He bid the Party to pursue them; he was turned aside. The Soviet administrators of the canon deemed these early studies of alienation vaporous juvenilia, suppressed them, and Lefebvre went along, making his reputation in 1939 with
Le Matérialisme dialectique.
That was science. The theory of moments was heresy or, worse, babble; by 1958 it would lead to Lefebvre’s expulsion from the Party. But by then he had found other readers.

“The theory of moments converged with research on the creation of ambiance, of situations,” he told an interviewer in 1975: Lefebvre was back in 1957, 1958, when he was a Communist in name only and a situationist lacking only the name. “The idea of escaping from the combination of elements of the past—of repetition—was an idea that was at once poetic, subversive, and audacious. It already implied that this was a project with a difference. It isn’t easy to invent new pleasures, or new ways of making love . . . a utopian idea—but not really—since, effectively, we lived, we created a new situation, that of exuberance in friendship, that of the subversive or revolutionary microsociety in the very heart of a society which, moreover, ignores it.”

It was, Lefebvre said of his relationship with the new situationists, a “love story.” He spoke of “laying aside all mistrust, all ambition, all schemes . . . In an atmosphere of passionate oneness we would talk far into the night . . . We drank, sometimes there were other stimulants, and these nights had an earnestness, an affection—it was more than communication, it was a communion.” “Moments constructed as ‘situations’ can be considered moments of rupture, of acceleration,
revolutions in individual everyday life,
” the situationists wrote in 1960. Soon Lefebvre and Debord, traveling together through France, contrived the idea of the Commune as “festival.” “And then,” Lefebvre said, “naturally, without warning, times changed, love changed.” The situationists published their “On the Commune”; then Lefebvre published his “The Meaning of the Commune”; the situationists attacked it as base plagiarism; and Lefebvre would scorn the abstractions he had passed onto them. “I miss the friendship,” he said in 1975. “I don’t give a damn.” He went back and forth, as if he would never get over it. “I
hardly read their attacks. Why attach any importance to it? The important thing is the period of effervescence, of discovery, of friendship, of something irretrievable; once it’s lost, it can’t be replaced.”

The Commune, Lefebvre and Debord decided, created a city free of planning, a field of moments, visible and loud, the antithesis of planning: a city that was reduced to zero and then reinvented every day. That was the agreement. The breach, by 1967, after Lefebvre and the situationists had not spoken for years, was that Lefebvre thought utopia was only art, and the situationists thought art on the level of utopia was life itself. “Realized art” was a situationist catchphrase; what it meant was “realized life.”

Some blamed the Commune on art. “The minister of Public Instruction,” T. J. Clark says, “was quite clear in 1872 that ‘the orgy of songs produced during [the Commune]’ was partly to blame for the Communards’ depravity”—their trashing of the laws of the church, the workplace, the family. Thus the minister made the dead Commune “reason for reimposing censorship on the cafe-concert in an effort to prevent such things from occurring again.”

In the 1860s, when the Commune was only the paranoid dream of Louis Veuillot, some of those who heard Thérésa thought they heard a call to revolution. She was Poly Styrene: if this ugly fat woman could demand complete freedom, so could anyone. If she could lose and find herself in the rabble, so could you. “I’m part of it!” Complete freedom meant—no one knew. It was most readily defined in the negative: not this gap between the heaven promised in the new advertisements and the everyday satisfactions I can buy. Not this sense that when I leave my work for my family, and bring my family to a Sunday in the park, my leisure feels like work. Not this mad conviction that I’m a stranger in my own home town, that at work I feel like a machine, that in the park I feel like an advertisement, that at home I feel like a tourist. Why doesn’t my life match Thérésa’s demands on me? “People believed Thérésa posed some sort of threat to the propertied order, and certainly the empire appeared to agree with them,” Clark writes. Though she was invited to sing for the empress, the authorities “policed her
every line and phrase” and “made no secret of the fact that they considered the cafe-concert a public nuisance.”

A public nuisance is a triviality. Officials who shut them down—be they those who monitored Thérésa, those who in 1956 permitted Elvis Presley to perform but without moving any part of his body, or those who banned Sex Pistols shows—generally give voice less to real fears than to a lust for free publicity. Still, Elvis Presley and the Sex Pistols changed the patterns of everyday life—raised its stakes—all over the world. If what they did led to no official revolutions, it made life all over the world more interesting, and life continues to be more interesting than it would have been had they never appeared. In a book about movements in culture that raised no monuments, about movements that barely left a trace—movements that cannot be refuted by “Ozymandias” because they were ephemeral from beginning to end—making life more interesting is the only standard of judgment that can justify the pages they can fill.

Thérésa’s performances, captured in the paintings, journalism, and police reports of her time, can be seen as incipient pop culture: not the timeless folk-culture-of-the-people, and not the commodified culture-for-the-people organized by the leisure sector of the capitalist market, but something in between. As Michael Jackson proved, neither nostalgia for the folk community nor the constant movement of the market can contain pop culture, though the market provides access to pop culture—the audience’s access to the artist, the artist’s access to the audience—and nostalgia, as a sense of what can be lost, powers it. Pop culture is a product—a show, a spectacle, a channeling of suppressed wishes into marketable form—and it is an impulse—a production of suppressed wishes that once released can call their own tune. In other words, Clark’s:

producing the popular is a risky business. What begins as a process of control and containment is too often liable to end in mob rule. That is the case because the “popular” is not simply a commodity made from dead, obedient materials—here a phrase, there a value—waiting to be worked over and
decently represented. It is something done with actual violence to resistant forms of life; and those forms survive in Thérésa’s chorus and the audience she appeals to; they are always capable of recapturing the apparatus of production. In producing the popular, bourgeois society produces its opposite [the rabble], and for the most part it manages to make that opposite into an image—one withdrawn or provided at opportune moments. Yet the image itself . . . is inimical to everything the bourgeoisie most believes in, and its effects cannot be calculated as accurately as that class would wish. There is always the chance that a line or a phrase will be used by the singer to enforce fleetingly the kind of attention—the kind of collective vehemence—that Veuillot and the censor fear.