Lipstick Traces (48 page)

About the same time, new graffiti began to appear on the walls of the neighborhood:

LET US LIVE

  THE ETHER IS FOR SALE FOR NOTHING

    LONG LIVE THE EPHEMERAL

      FREE THE PASSIONS

        NEVER WORK

New, my eye, anyone on the Left Bank might have said—it was old-time surrealism, and a crude imitation at that. But the crudity was the point. The
surrealists had first launched such slogans in the 1920s, when revolution seemed inevitable; in the early 1950s, when revolution seemed impossible, the words were barely language at all. They made an inversion. The poor phrases were so primitively surrealist they were pre-surrealist. They said that surrealism had never happened, that everything remained to be invented from the beginning. “All those who attempt to situate themselves
after
surrealism,” read the first article in the first number of
Internationale situationniste,
June 1958, “once again discover questions which
predate
it.” In the Cabaret Voltaire, as Raoul Vaneigem would tell the story in
The Revolution of Everyday Life,
nothing, not the war, not the way you placed your beer glass on the table, stayed the same: “Everything was transformed.” That was the situation the Lettrist International set out to construct, but not in a cabaret; thus it began with living posters beating up people in the street. “The only modern phenomena comparable to Dada are the most savage outbreaks of juvenile delinquency,” Vaneigem said. He thought the role of the Situationist International was to apply “the violence of the delinquents on the plane of ideas.” The Lettrist International began by applying its ideas on the plane of delinquency. Running down the street in slogans, taking aim at the unconscious agents of the spectacle-commodity economy—it must have seemed like an idea at the time.

The LI did have an idea: “. . . A New Idea in Europe,” it titled a manifesto on 3 August 1954, reaching back for the phrase Saint-Just coined as he reported to the Convention of the Revolution on 13 vêntose, Year II—3 March 1794. “Happiness is a new idea in Europe,” said Saint-Just; “Leisure,” said Michèle-I. Bernstein, André-Frank Conord, Mohamed Dahou, Guy-Ernest Debord, Jacques Fillon, Véra, and Gil J Wolman in the seventh number of the LI bulletin
Potlatch,
“is the real revolutionary question.”

In any case, economic prohibitions and their moral corollaries will soon be completely destroyed and superseded. The organization of leisure—the organization of the freedom of a multitude a
little less
driven to continuous
work—is already a necessity for capitalist states just as it is for their marxist successors. Everywhere, one is limited to the obligatory degradation of stadiums or television programs.

It is above all for this reason that we must denounce the immoral condition imposed upon us: this state of poverty.

Having spent a few years
doing nothing,
in the common sense of the term, we can speak of our social attitude as avant-garde—because in a society still provisionally based in production, we have sought to devote ourselves seriously only to leisure.

If this question is not openly posed before the collapse of current economic development, change will be no more than a bad joke. The new society which once again takes up the goals of the old society, without having recognized and imposed a new desire—that is the truly utopian tendency of socialism.

Only one task seems to us worth considering: the perfecting of a complete divertissement.

More than one to whom adventures happen, the adventurer is one who makes them happen.

The construction of situations
will be the continuous realization of a great game, a game the players have chosen to play: a shifting of settings and conflicts to kill off the characters in a tragedy in twenty-four hours. But time to live will no longer be lacking.

Such a synthesis will have to bring together a critique of behavior, a compelling town planning, a mastery of ambiances and relationships. We know the first principles . . .

The LI’s theory of anti-economics was followed on the page by “The Best News of the Week,” a regular
Potlatch
feature:

Washington, D.C., July 29 (A.P.): In a speech delivered to a religious convention, Mr. Richard Nixon, the vice-president of the United States, declared that he believed those who imagined “a full bowl of rice” could prevent the people of Asia from turning toward communism were “gravely deluding themselves.”

“Economic well-being is important,” continued the vice-president, “but to claim that we can win the people of Asia to our side simply by raising their standard of living is a lie and a slander. This is a proud people, with a great record behind them.”

Thus did Richard Nixon add his voice to the growing Lettrist International chorus.

Armed with its theory, the LI had a practice. Writing to Jean-Louis Brau in the spring of 1953, Wolman summed it up:

Where were we when you left? Joël has been out of jail for some time: parole. Freedom too for Jean-Michel and Fred (in for speeding—under the influence, of course). Little Eliane came out last week after a dramatic arrest in a maid’s room somewhere in Vincennes. She was with Joël and Jean-Michel (need I say they were drunk), who refused to open the door for the police, who called in reinforcements. In the confusion, they lost the LI seal. Linda not yet tried—Sarah still in jail, but her sister, sixteen-and-a-half, took her place. There have been more arrests, for drugs, for who knows what—it’s getting boring. Then there is G.-E., who spent ten days in a sanitarium where his parents sent him after he tried to asphyxiate himself. He’s back now. Serge will get out of jail May 12. The day before yesterday I threw up in Moineau’s. The latest amusement in the quarter is to spend the night in the catacombs (another one of Joël’s bright ideas) . . .

This, the members of the LI tried to convince themselves, was a rehearsal for the revolution they had promised each other to make: the supercession of art and the end of work, a shifting of settings and conflicts that would kill off the characters in a tragedy and bring real people to life—the first revolution, the LI told itself, consciously based not in a critique of suffering in the dominant society but in a “total critique of its idea of happiness,” a critique in acts, a new performance of everyday life. Happiness was still a new idea in Europe, one-hundred-and-sixty years after Saint-Just heard himself condemned as a traitor to the revolution—after he, voice of the New Man, stood silent as he was driven overnight from the Committee of Public Safety to the guillotine. Since then all official revolutions had rested their case not on happiness but on justice, and on that rock they had broken to pieces or turned to stone. But weren’t all true revolutionaries driven by the desire for happiness—as Ivan Chtcheglov said for the LI in his “Formula
for a New Urbanism,” by a lust for a world in which it would be impossible not to fall in love? They had been embarrassed to admit it; those few instances in which they did admit it were expunged from the official record. What matters my happiness, against a multitude crying for food and clothing? It matters not, said the owners of the revolutionary tradition.

Jean-Michel Mension and Fred, 1953, by Ed van der Elsken

Taking up residence in “the catacombs of visible culture,” the LI stumbled on a notion that went back to the Free Spirit: “My happiness ought to justify existence itself.” So did the opposed first principles of justice and happiness turn into one; that, the LI thought, was what Saint-Just was talking about.

Born in 1767, executed in 1794, Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just was the prophet of the Republic of Virtue: of a virtue, dormant in every human heart, suppressed and twisted by the masters of the old world, which had to be drawn out of each new citizen—or enforced. Recognizing a new desire for happiness, for a moment Saint-Just had the power to impose it: the words with which he followed “a new idea in Europe” were “I propose to you the following decree.” He spoke on the stage of world history, one foot in Paris and the other in Sparta. He spoke to Lycurgus and Thucydides, to Lenin and Pol Pot, and he knew they would hear what he said. The LI spoke in a bar that sold franchise and solace along with beer and wine—“Cafe Megalomania,” the Berlin dadaists had called their version of the place. There the LI tried to recapture Saint-Just’s tone of voice, and it was hard to catch, austere and ecstatic, furious and still, the tone of the cryptic slogan: “The mind is a sophist who leads virtue to the scaffold.” You could puzzle that out for days, or you could look at Saint-Just’s face, at busts and engravings, but like the young man himself when his time was up, they said nothing. If one portrait was cold, all hard cheekbones and hooded eyes, the next was soft, the cheeks full and smooth, the eyes innocent. “To tell the truth, the only reason one fights is for what one loves,” said the philosopher of the Terror. “Fighting for everyone else is only the consequence.”

The LI, Eliane Brau wrote in 1968 (as Eliane Papai, she was the “Little Eliane” of Wolman’s letter), was “autoterrorist.” The group demanded that one practice terrorism on oneself—“a self-educational process,” Raoul Hausmann said of the psychology of the Berlin Dada Club, “in which routine and conventions have to be ruthlessly wiped out.” The LI worked hardest to maintain the conviction that nothing was more important, and so every person found unworthy of the game was excluded from it; Saint-Just, in whose ideal society banishment was to be the ultimate sanction, would have approved. Officially, the first to be removed were Isidore Isou, Gabriel Pomerand, and Maurice Lemaitre, who had never been present (claiming
rights to the words “lettrist” and “lettrism” after the Chaplin incident, the LI incorporated the founders only to expel them as traitors to their own ideas)—and then, in the year between Wolman’s letter to Brau and “. . . A New Idea in Europe,” Brau himself (“militarist,” read the second number of
Potlatch),
Serge Berna (“lack of intellectual rigor”), the emblazoned Mension (“merely decorative”), and even the visionary Chtcheglov (“mythomania, delirium, lack of revolutionary consciousness”). “It’s pointless to hark back to the dead,” Wolman wrote to seal the LI’s first execution list. As in certain fundamentalist sects, those who remained within the group were never to speak to any who had been shut out, or even of them. But Debord did, in 1978, in his film
In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni,
matching a picture of Chtcheglov to a blind quotation from
Julius Caesar.
Debord read it on the soundtrack: “ ‘How many times, through the ages, will the sublime drama we are creating be performed in unknown tongues, before an audience which is yet to be!’ ”

The years had burdened the words with irony, but they still held real wonder; tracing the theme, Debord put a comic-strip panel on the screen. “T
HE KNIGHTS OF PRINCE VALIANT IN SEARCH OF ADVENTURES
,” read the title: “
HE ADVANCES NEAR THE MYSTERIOUS GLEAM WHICH LIGHTS UP THE PLACE WHERE NOTHING HUMAN HAS EVER BEEN FOUND
.” Then Chtcheglov reappeared, and Debord spoke for himself: “It is said that merely by subjecting life and the city to his gaze, he changed them. In one year, he discovered the subjects of vengeance for a century.” That discovery was the LI’s drama, Debord was saying, and those subjects of vengeance its legacy.

It is this expressive contradiction—between nihilist acts so puerile as to cut themselves off from any philosophical justification, and a voice so classically sentimental it could ennoble the most puerile act; between a found ancestry carrying seeds of totalitarianism and mass murder, and a will to a negation containing “no promise other than that of an autonomy without rules and without restraint” (Debord,
In girum
)—that defined the Lettrist International. In a conversation that moves from the Cabaret Voltaire to the Sex Pistols, the LI is a culmination of the first side of the story and a source of the second. More vitally, the LI frames the possibility that each actor might speak the language of every other.

In this story, the LI is ground-zero, a vessel both empty and full. The LI
had a seal, which represented history—and which, before it was lost in a drunken moment, the group meant to apply to what philosophy it might derive from joy rides and nights spent in underground tombs. At the same time, the LI damned all those who believed in “leaving traces,” and it left few enough: in five years, less than three dozen skimpy newsletters, a clutch of fugitive essays, various renderings of détournement, some telephone-pole stickers, a slogan scratched on a wall. One can add a small pile of memoirs: Debord’s sandpaper-covered collage book, his films
On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time
(1959) and
In girum,
and Michèle Bernstein’s novels,
Tous les chevaux du roi
(All the King’s Horses, 1960) and
La Nuit
(1961)—queer memoirs, because while each cast back to the LI for subject or setting, none ever mentioned it.