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LEGENDS OF FREEDOM
In December 1957, Guy-Ernest Debord, born in Paris on 28 December 1931, produced a book he called Mémoires. He didn't write it. He cut scores of paragraphs, sentences, phrases, or sometimes single words out of books, magazines, and newspapers; these he scattered and smeared across some fifty pages that his friend Asger Jorn, a Danish painter, crossed and splattered with colored lines, blotches, spots, and drips. Here and there were photographs, advertisements, plans of buildings and cities, cartoons, comic-strip panels, reproductions of woodcuts and engravings, these too scavenged from libraries and newsstands, each piece as mute, all as estranged from any informing context, the whole as much like glossolalia, as the spectral text.
At first the book seemed entirely a conceit--precious. In fact it told a very specific story, and carried an affirmation that it was the only story worth telling: the book was bound in heavy sandpaper, so that when placed on a shelf it would destroy other books.
The story had to be pieced together, and then, as one followed up its clues, deciphered according to where it had come from and where it meant to go. Made out of detritus--so apparently random in its organization it communicated as detritus--the book was a history of the first year of the Lettrist International, a shifting group of young people living in Paris, as they were from June 1952 to September 1953--ex-students, ex-poets, ex-filmmakers, now lollards, runaways, drunks--who had banded together under one-line manifestos: "The art of the future will be the overthrow of situations, or nothing," "The new generation will leave nothing to chance," "We'll never get out of this alive." It was the secret history of a time that had passed--"without leaving a trace," said the next to last page.
But Mémoires was also made to fix the origins of the Situationist International, the far more visible group Debord, Jorn, and other European artists had formed in July 1957, their founding paper opening with the words "First of all we think the world must be changed"; as a memoir Debord's book was also a prophecy. To follow its story, one needed information Debord withheld--even the words "l'Internationale lettriste," which never appeared. But one also needed the ability to imagine a reinvented world: not merely a "provisional microsociety," as the LI had liked to call itself, but a new, "situationist" civilization, shared by millions, finally covering the globe.
In this new world, the disconnected, seemingly meaningless words and pictures of Mémoires would make sense. They would make sense, first, as noise, a cacophony ripping up the syntax of social life--the syntax, as Debord put it in The Society of the Spectacle, of "the existing order's uninterrupted discourse about itself." As the noise grew, those words and pictures would begin to link up--as graffiti on countless walls, shouts coming out of thousands of mouths, even as familiar streets and buildings one suddenly saw as if never before--and then, with the old syntax broken, these things would make a second kind of sense. They would be experienced not as things at all, but as possibilities: elements of what Debord called "constructed situations."
These would be "moments of life concretely, deliberately, and freely created," each one "composed of gestures contained in a transitory decor," the gestures the "product of the decor and of themselves," in turn producing "other forms of decor, and other gestures." Each situation would be an "ambient milieu" for a "game of events"; each would change its setting, and allow itself to be changed by it. The city would no longer be experienced as a scrim of commodities and power; it would be felt as a field of "psychogeography," and this would be an epistemology of everyday time and space, allowing one to understand, and transform, "the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals."
Now the city would move like a map you were drawing; now you would begin to live your life like a book you were writing. Called forth by a street or a building, an ensemble of gestures might imply that a different street had to be found, that a building could be redesigned by the gestures performed within it, that new gestures had to be made, even that an unknown city had to be built or an old one overthrown. "One night, as evening fell," Raoul Vaneigem wrote in The Revolution of Everyday Life,
This was a daydream, Vaneigem cheerfully admitted--but "daydreaming subverts the world." When this free field was finally opened by the noise of the exploding syntax, when the fall of the dictionary left all words lying in the streets, when men and women rushed to pick them up and make pictures out of them, such daydreams would find themselves empowered, turning into catalysts for new passions, new acts, new events: situations, "made to be lived by their creators," a whole new way of being in the world. These situations would make a third kind of sense: they would seem sui generis, unencumbered by the baggage of any past, opening always into other situations, and into the new kind of history it would be theirs to make. And this would be a history not of great men, or of the monuments they had left behind, but a history of moments: the sort of moments everyone once passed through without consciousness and that, now, everyone would consciously create.
As Debord told the tale in Mémoires, this story was itself sui generis. Earlier variants were present in his pages--from the surrealists' discovery of urban "magnetic fields" in the 1920s to Thomas de Quincey's wanderings through London in the early nineteenth century, back even to the "Carte de Tendre" (map of Feeling) of the seventeenth-century précieuses--but as blind baggage, which means "sealed book." That was what the past ought to be, Mémoires said: would be, if the unidentified young men and women pictured in Debord's pages, framed by Jorn's blazing colors, could someday supersede dead time. Or had they already done it? Here, as if for the first time, the unnamed band moving from 1952 through 1953 was discovering that a world of permanent novelty could exist, and finding the means to start it up. These means were two: the "dérive," a drift down city streets in search of signs of attraction or repulsion, and "détournement," the theft of aesthetic artifacts from their contexts and their diversion into contexts of one's own devise. Mémoires, with its meandering crossings and stolen words and pictures, was a version of both--just as both were art forms that, the LI believed, could not produce art but only a new kind of life.
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