Authors: Greil Marcus
We want to cause trouble, the students said, as much as we can—how? Do it yourself, the SI said, reminding them of something Debord had written years before: “A revolutionary organization must always remember that its objective is not getting people to listen to speeches by expert leaders, but getting them to speak for themselves.” You want to make trouble? Understand that just as everyday life is right here, in the successes and failures of our conversation, so are the premises for revolution. Revolution is not something that happens on the other side of the world, in China, Vietnam, Cuba—for you and for us that is just intellectual tourism, and as an opposition to the spectacle it can produce only a spectacle of opposition. So think globally, but act locally. Use the funds your fellows have so imprudently entrusted to your care; use the platform you’ve landed on. Write a critique of your own status, of students and the society they represent and serve—serve even when they flatter themselves they are its enemies. Disseminate your critique, and see what happens; if it is strong enough, something will. Use each edge of whatever scandal you can cause as a leg up on the next step; when one barrier breaks, go through it, and move on. Remember that though you are risking the careers society has planned for you, there is no protection in compromise, that the success of a scandal is the only safeguard for those who trigger it, that those who make a revolution by halves only dig their own graves. The students went back to Strasbourg; the fall term began.
The opening act featured sociologist Abraham Moles—a “pinhead” cybernetician, the SI named him two years before—who was chased from his lecture hall by a barrage of tomatoes. Next came Strasbourg student André Bertrand’s
The Return of the Durutti Column,
a comic-strip account of the student-union takeover, named in homage to what Raoul Vaneigem had once proposed as the SI’s “guiding image”: a column of anarchist troops, as
an ironically approving London
Sunday Telegraph
report on the Strasbourg affair explained, led by the Catalan revolutionary Buenaventura Durruti (Bertrand couldn’t spell), which in the early days of the Spanish Civil War “went from village to village destroying the entire social structure, leaving the survivors to rebuild everything from scratch.” The strip closed with the promise that students would “soon be able to procure the most scandalous publication of the century . . . ‘On the Poverty of Student Life, considered in its economic, political, psychological, sexual, and especially intellectual aspects, with a modest proposal for its remedy’ . . . a cardiogram of everyday reality which will allow you to choose your side: for or against the present misery, for or against the power which, by taking your history from you, prevents you from living. I
T
’
S YOUR MOVE
!”
In an elegantly printed edition of ten thousand copies, a green-jacketed pamphlet appeared soon after—credited to the Association fédérative générale des étudiants de Strasbourg under the auspices of the Union nationale des étudiants de France, but in truth written by situationist Mustapha Khayati when the student conspirators proved unable to come up with their own statement—and what made it different from other radical manifestos of the time was that it was well-written, logical, all-encompassing, and devoid of intent to please, casting scorn on its audience like Huelsenbeck slashing his riding crop on the stage of the Cabaret Voltaire. “Apart from the policeman and the priest, it is safe to say that the student is the most universally despised creature in France,” the text began, and it went on to say why: in the society of the spectacle, the student was the “perfect spectator.”
The words moved fast. Making slogans out of lines from Marx’s “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” (“to make shame more shameful still by making it public”), the essay boiled nearly a decade of situationist writing down to twenty-eight virulent pages, coolly and cruelly satirizing the university (“the institutional organization of ignorance”), professors, the “Idea of Youth” (a capitalist “publicity myth”), the “celebrities of Unintelligence” (Sartre, Althusser, Barthes), modern culture (“In an era when
art is dead”
the student was “the most avid consumer of its corpse”), not to mention the work ethic, the government, the economy, the church, and the family. As the silent partner of bourgeois hegemony, the traditional left went on
the same scrap heap, from bereft anarchist combines to empowered Leninist, Stalinist, or Maoist Communist parties (‘“at the head’ of the revolution” because it had “decapitated the proletariat”)—but, Khayati said, “Let the dead bury the dead.” There was a new proletariat, defined not by labor or penjury, but made up of everyone “who has no power over his own life and knows it.” There was a new revolt, against all hierarchy and ideology, for autonomy and a history purposefully made: a war against the poverty of the commodity, for the riches of time. The revolt was still partial and confused, losing itself in the “pure, nihilist rejection” of juvenile delinquents or in “the mass consumption of drugs” (“an expression of real poverty and a protest against it: a fallacious religious critique of a world that has itself superseded religion”); it was also gaining consciousness of itself, seeking its theory as its theory found its practice. You could see it all over the world—in the West, Khayati said, with the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in 1964 (in 1966 that was an obvious note to sound), or in the East, with Jacek Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski’s antibureaucratic, anticlerical 1965 “Open Letter to the Polish Communist Party” (that was not obvious at all in 1966, though in 1980 the document would be read as a phantom charter for Solidarity)—to anyone who knew how to look, the facade of the old world was cracking and the moment had come to smash it, to “create at last a situation that goes beyond the point of no return,” to realize the goal of a poetry made by all in a permanent revolutionary festival, to “live without dead time and indulge untrammeled desire.” The text ended, and the discourse shot off into wonderland; the pamphlet lay in your hand, grinning like the Cheshire cat. The reaction could not have been more extreme if the student union had spent its money on guns.
Professors, university administrators, city officials, labor-union leaders, editorialists, Communist Party functionaries, the business community, parents, priests, and left-wing and right-wing student groups united to denounce the misappropriation of public funds and the betrayal of positions of public trust—to combat, they said, the collapse of decency, morality, order, the university, and Western civilization itself. A smaller number rallied to the defense of the reprobates; the press waved the filmy bloody shirt of a demonic, fanatic, always mysterious band carrying the incomprehensible name “Situationist International” (“How many are there?” asked
Le
Républicain lorrain.
“Where do they come from? No one knows”). The student-union officers capitalized on hysterical coverage in the international media to spread their publications across Europe, renamed the Association fédérative générale “The Society for the Rehabilitation of Karl Marx and Ravachol” (the latter a nineteenth-century anarchist bomber, whose song “Le Bon Dieu dans le merde” had been reprinted in
I.S.
no. 9 in 1964—“If you want to be happy / Name of God! / Hang your landlord, cut the priests in two / Name of God! / Damn the churches down / God’s blood! / And the good Lord in shit”), then scheduled a plebiscite on its dissolution, invited supporters to occupy the student office building, abandoned student stores and restaurants while urging students to steal books and food, and declared the campus psychiatric clinic a front for mind control, cut off its funding, and announced its abolition. At the University of Strasbourg in the fall of 1966, there was only one conversation, governed by the same principle of expansion that governed the conversation in Berkeley in the fall of 1964 or Poland in August 1980, in Durruti’s Barcelona in July 1936 or Huelsenbeck’s Berlin in January 1919: on Monday people began to question rules and regulations, the next day the institutions behind the rules, then the nature of the society that produced the institutions, then the philosophy that justified the society, then the history that created the philosophy, until by the end of the week both God and the state were in doubt and the only interesting question was the meaning of life.
Though all of the actions of the rogue body were legal, after six weeks of chaos the courts stepped in, closed the student union, and stripped the Strasbourg Five of their offices. “Disarmingly lucid,” the British section of the SI, Gray and three others, said of the judge’s summation—in
Ten Days that Shook the University,
the U.K. edition of the Strasbourg publications—for the judge had got it right:
One only has to read what the accused have written for it to be obvious that these five students, scarcely more than adolescents, lacking all experience of real life, their minds confused by ill-digested philosophical, social, political, and economic theories, and bored by the drab monotony of their everyday life, make the empty, arrogant, and pathetic claim to pass definitive judgements, sinking to outright abuse, on their fellow-students, their
teachers, God, religion, the clergy, and the governments and political systems of the entire world. Rejecting all morality and restraint, these students do not hesitate to commend theft
—“They believe that all things are common, whence they conclude that theft is lawful for them,’ ” the British added in a footnote, quoting the Bishop of Strasbourg in 1317, on the Brethren of the Free Spirit—
the destruction of scholarship, the abolition of work, total subversion, and an irreversible proletarian revolution with “unlicensed pleasure” as its only goal.
This was détournement in acts, the British announced: proof of the “ability to both
devalue
and
‘reinvest’
the heritage of a dead cultural past . . . a student union, for example, recuperated long ago and turned into a paltry agency of repression, can become a beacon of sedition and revolt.” To Khayati, on the scene and speaking to reporters as “K.,” it was “a little experiment”; to the British it was “a modest attempt to create the praxis by which the crisis of this society as a whole can be precipitated . . . A situation was created in which society was forced to finance, publicise and broadcast a revolutionary critique of itself, and furthermore to confirm this critique by its reactions to it.”
Once it was a famous victory; more than twenty years later, the critique is frozen by its own rhetoric. Its very urgency, its leap toward a day that came and passed, stops its time and casts its words backward. But André Bertrand’s
The Return of the Durutti Column
now reads like a lost issue of
Potlatch
—or, rather, like the return gift
Potlatch
asked for. It doesn’t matter that Bertrand could not have seen the LI’s newsletter, which by 1966 had disappeared without a trace; enough of the
Potlatch
voice went into
Internationale situationniste
for Bertrand to recreate it whole. All of the LI’s adolescent self-regard is in his comic strip; so is the LI’s heedless simultaneity, its menace, and its faith in the cryptic slogan.
On the Poverty of Student Life
was a polemic;
The Return of the Durutti
Column
is a story, like Debord’s
Mémoires
told through the cut-and-paste of détournement, and told in a similar tone—as if it were the tale of a grand quest, recounted long after the fact by an old man to an awestruck child. There are craven villains, played by professors, bureaucrats, leftists of every stripe; there are “dashing adventurers,” the Strasbourg usurpers, the formal narrative of their exploits marked off in boxed captions to facsimiles of documents, a few newly drawn cartoons, but mostly to photos and art works scavenged from magazines and books, and now talking in comic-strip balloons. “The never-ending festival and its Dionysian debaucheries accompanied them everywhere,” says the sagaman of the heroes; there follows the text of a long letter from their landlord, accusing them of ending a party by pissing off a second-story balcony.
Bertrand was a situationist fan; not making art but playing with it, he worked with a fan’s obsessiveness, with a fetishistic love of forgotten signs and talismans. Thus he began at the beginning, in the middle of
Hurlements en faveur de Sade,
collapsing it into a single panel: in white speech balloons against a black screen, the Strasbourg cabal hatches its plan. The new Durutti Column enters a Trojan horse; then Lenin gets a balloon (“I could give a flying fuck about the JCR,” he says of a Trotskyist youth group), then Ravachol, speaking his own words: “I will never go back. The harm men do to each other fills me with horror; I hate their civilizations, their virtues, and their gods far too much ever to sacrifice anything to them.” “Little by little,” the chronicle of the vandals continues, “they became aware of those with whom they could make the wrecking of the social machine into a pitiless game. Thus it was that they began their palavers with the ‘occult International’ ”—the latter, the unnamed SI, pictured in one of the group’s favorite images, the banquet scene from the Bayeux Tapestry. Musing on Marx and the “critique of everyday life,” the king in Delacroix’s
Death of Sardanapal
placidly readies himself for the funeral pyre as eunuchs throttle his naked wives and concubines. Every few panels, children recite the LI’s primitive theories as the SI followed them up: by stealing goods simply to give them away, says a toddler, delinquents transcend the modern society of abundance and rediscover the first social order, “the practice of the gift.” A five-year-old explains that there is no need to produce or acquire, no need for competition or conflict—and “therefore no more need for laws,
no more need for masters.” The coup is sealed with a grotesque medieval drawing of golem-like beggars, all of them drunk, one with twisted fingers as long as his rotting skull.
As it was distributed throughout Western Europe, in Great Britain and the United States,
The Return of the Durutti Column
was a four-page fold-out or a feature in an underground newspaper. One has to imagine it as it first appeared in Strasbourg, when the scandal had yet to take place—when the comic strip was a riddle blown up into huge posters and plastered as a mural across the city walls. One has to walk down the one-way street of the dominant idea of happiness (“Freedom,” John Kenneth Galbraith said in disgust twenty years later, when all roads seemed to lead to Rome and none away from it, “consists of the right to spend a maximum of one’s money by one’s own choice”); one has to imagine the street turned into a free field of noise.