Lipstick Traces (34 page)

Dada was nothing more than the theory and practice of the right place at the right time. What was new was the discovery that both could be created:
that was the legend of freedom. What was old was the dim apprehension that whatever was created would outstrip its creators forever. That is the tone of every Cabaret Voltaire memoir, a sense of what those who were there didn’t see, the specter of a creature that stood head and shoulders above all present—and this, the conviction that there was something in the twentieth century that could never be understood or controlled, was the gnostic myth.

The ultimate justification of social control in the modern world was ancient: human beings were sinners, and that was why there was evil and suffering on earth. Human beings were sinners because Original Sin separated them from God; in that separation was the ubiquity and permanence of sin, its guarantee as the first principle of human life. This was the source of all other separations: patriarchy, authority, hierarchy, the division of humanity into rulers and ruled, owners and workers, the separation of every individual from everyone else, of oneself from oneself. But gnosticism, in its countless forms, over thousands of years, had always denied that any of this was so. There was no necessary separation of human beings from God, the gnostics said, because even as God created human beings, human beings created God, and whoever achieved this knowledge became “not a Christian, but a Christ.” The root of evil and suffering was ignorance of this first principle of human life—and such ignorance was the only sin. Most would wallow in it forever, because this was a knowledge that could not be learned but that had to be lived; it could be explored, but never exhausted. And this was the myth that dada had put back into play, the invulnerable sentence: one that could be understood but never explained.

When in 1924 Henri Lefebvre dismissed dada as a pseudo-sorcery, solely the spirit that says no, the vain proclamation of the sovereignty of the instant, he knew he was right, but he also knew that he had not been in the right place at the right time. His snottiness was jealousy: only eight years late and he had missed it.

A half-century later, Lefebvre was no longer jealous; Tzara was dead, Ball was dead, Arp was dead, Huelsenbeck was dead, Hennings was dead,
and Janco was forgotten. Still, though Lefebvre had indeed picked up the pieces, and put his name on the “Theory of Moments,” Lefebvre had yet to forget what he had missed. Reliving the legend in 1975, speaking into a tape recorder for an interviewer, Lefebvre forgot that just two years before he had cursed the legend: the “long line of failures, self-destructions and fatal spells,” the line he himself traced from the beginning of his friendship with Tzara to the end of his friendship with Debord. He forgot that in 1925 he signed his name to “Revolution, First and Forever!”—to what, even at the time, he recognized as a careerist imitation. He was a teenager when the dadaists took the stage, and now, as an old man, whose life’s work had been the investigation of “modernity,” he said so queerly that what was truly modern about modernity, what was actually new, what was really interesting, was not its works—technology, abundance, the welfare state, mass communication, and so on—but the peculiar character of the opposition modernity created against itself: an opposition he still called “Dada.”

It was, he was trying to say, a creature still standing head and shoulders above all present. He had seen it; like everyone else who heard the story, he had been there. He was only fifteen, a busboy, nobody knew his name, nobody gave him the time of day, but he felt it. Like anyone else he took the stage of the Teen ’n’ Twenty disco. Arms grabbed at his legs as he chanted his “Meaning of the Commune,” danced his never-published manifesto “You Will All Be Situationists,” pantomimed his
La Matérialisme dialectique:
a shuffle to the left, a shuffle to the right, then collapsing on the boards in his mask and borne into the wings as Ball banged out a Longines Symphonette “Favorite Moment” from the
Appassionata,
as advertised in TV
Guide.
At the end of every phrase Lefebvre shouted “umbah-umbah”; he kicked back. He spit out the pieces he had finished smashing. He killed a quarter of a century, he killed several centuries for the sake of what was to come—or just to see if he could get away with it. That was the faith of the dada religion: “Against an idea, even a false one, all weapons are powerless.”

In 1974 I was writing about Elvis movies. The films were so shoddy, I thought, they seemed to embody a whole new kind of cinema: the 1960
G.I. Blues
was my example. “When Elvis strums his acoustic guitar,” I said, “an electric solo comes out. When bass and guitar are seen backing him, you hear horns and piano. When he sings, the soundtrack is at least half a verse out of synch . . . Someday, French film critics will discover these pictures and hail them as a unique example of cinéma discrépant. There will be retrospectives at the Cinémathèque, and not long after Elvis movies will be shown on U.S. public television, complete with learned commentary deferring to the French discovery and bemoaning America’s inability to appreciate its own culture . . .”

But one can never underestimate the Left Bank—where, in 1951, Isidore Isou launched his “Manifeste du cinéma discrépant,” well before anyone heard of Elvis Presley, and thirty years before I heard of Isidore Isou. The manifesto was the rallying cry of his film of that year,
Traité de bave et d’eternité
(Treatise on Slime and Eternity). “Our school,” Isou later wrote, “has gone beyond ‘synchronism,’ and even beyond ‘harmonious asynchronism’ ” (what, apparently, Elvis movies would begin to offer with
G.I.
Blues
—
Jailhouse Rock
and other 1950s Presley films were synchronized), “and has revealed total
antisynchronism,
or
discrepant montage,
which breaks the, unity of the two ‘pillars’ of film, the sound and the picture, and presents them in divergence one from the other.”

Cinéma discrépant will have its moment in this tale—but first it is necessary to answer a question not often asked outside of France: who was Isidore Isou?

Isidore Isou was born in Romania in 1925. He came from a petit-bourgeois Jewish family and he was raised as a prodigy. He read nearly everything, as he would never cease to tell anyone who read him (citing not only the authors he mastered but how many pages of each he chalked up), and at the age of seventeen, on 19 March 1942, he discovered a theory of culture and the meaning of life.

Isou began with a first cause: the motor of social evolution was not the instinct to survive, but the will to create. Creation was the highest form of human activity, and art was its essence; through the act of creation, the artist moved from the slime of unconscious existence to the eternity of history consciously made. By such an act, one became god—for it was only through the conscious creation of the world that God, the first artist, had established his own existence.

Within this circular ensemble of premises there was already a system, a set of rules: the first was that not even God was free from the laws of creation. Creation was never simply a matter of a purely subjective intervention against the slime; creation meant the recognition and the purposeful use of the “mechanics of invention.” All aesthetic forms, and the social formations they spoke for—political structures, temporal styles, modes of seemingly natural behavior—moved from a stage of “amplitude” (amplification) to a stage of decomposition. This was the history of human existence, and nothing could stop it; the point was to master it.

In the period of amplification, any new form (impressionist painting, industrial capitalism, bourgeois gentility, short skirts) works as a metaphor for life itself: the new form reaches out to incorporate the world, to transform
it. Within the prism of the metaphor, life seems whole and full of meaning; then the new form reaches its limit, begins to decay, and life shrinks. One can see that God was the first victim of this first law of the mechanics of invention. Look at the Bible: out of the slime, paradise; then rot, corruption, the slime, a faint memory of a golden age.

In the inevitable period of decomposition, those forms devised to transform the world turn in upon themselves and implode. The form, once world-historical, becomes its own subject. History stops; action is replaced by an endless series of repetitions. As the form decomposes, symbolically, so does the world—it becomes sterile, inaccessible, worthless, unreal. Any aesthetic form could illustrate the necessity, but the novel will do: we move from Fielding, where a story, a creative account of the world, is in question, to Joyce, where communication itself is in question. The result is the post-Joycean novel, which asks no questions and communicates nothing: it is merely a set of empty gestures, a dead commodity, a thing whose only use value is its exchange value. We move from eternity (Fielding is still read, and, as you read him, you still feel the world changing) to slime (to believe that the present-day novel will be read in a hundred years is not to praise the novel but to condemn the world).

Smashing the faith in genius, the belief that God blessed the artist with special powers and guided his hand toward some transcendent revelation, dada had revealed the process. After dada, all art sat in a compost pile, its mystifications sucked into the methane. There could be no real communication; all words had come loose from their meanings and floated free of their owners. Still, a compost pile was good for something: fertilizer. Along with the preordained stages of amplification and decomposition there was another possibility: that of “ciselant” (chiseling away). This was active, conscious decomposition, and it was the only means to active creation. The true artist, the true god, would position himself as a lever beneath the edifice of art. He would force it toward changes that were, because of inertia and fear, everywhere resisted—changes that the mechanics of invention demanded but that, without the intervention of the nascent god, would never come, at least not while the nascent god was around to enjoy them. That any given form contained within itself the seeds of its own transcendence did not remove the need for intervention; because all forms were human
inventions, this fact demanded it. Whatever had been made had to be unmade, and then made new. Civilization, Isou was sure, was mindlessly perpetuating the Last Days; without him, it would live them out forever.

Thus “lettrism”: “the avant-garde of the avant-garde.” Isou began with poetry, because as creation was the highest form of human activity, and art the highest form of creation, poetry was the highest form of art.

The amplifying stage of poetry, the seventeen-year-old Isou determined, ended with Victor Hugo. Then Baudelaire destroyed the anecdote in favor of the poetic form; Verlaine destroyed the poetic form in favor of the pure line; Rimbaud destroyed the line in favor of the word; Mallarmé perfected the word and turned it toward sound—and then, heedlessly overreaching the mechanics of invention, Tristan Tzara had destroyed the word in favor of the void: “Dada,” Tzara’s motto ran, “signifies nothing.” Isou corrected him: “nothing” was a stage, not a goal. Yes, the word signified nothing, a roomful of talkers was a roomful of confetti—so Isou would rescue the letter from the word. He would reenact and redirect a stage in the reduction of the word, and the world, to nothing: he would forcibly reduce the word to the letter, the pure sign, seemingly meaningless, in truth endlessly fecund.

He would set the sign loose in the ether. It would float past time, through history, in and out of consciousness, until it had repelled all old meanings—and then, with its charge reversed, it would begin to attract new meanings. The letter would be ready to form a new alphabet and a new language, a language that could say what had never been said, in tones that had never been heard. On the plane of the
mechanics of invention, this would mean that once again the creation of the anecdote, the telling of new stories, would be possible. Once stories could be told, they could be lived; because a story was an account of the world, a new world could be created. And because Isou was speaking not only of the history of poetry but of the poetry of history—of consciousness, which like memory is of time but not in it—this absolute transformation could happen in a flash. It would be like time travel in a 1940s radio play: “I will be gone for a thousand years,” says the scientist to his assistant, “but to you it will seem only like a moment.”