Read Online Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Greil Marcus
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than a seductive, subversive restatement of the obvious: “Our ideas are in everyone’s mind.” Our ideas about how the world works, about why it must be changed, are in everyone’s mind as sensations almost no one is willing to translate into ideas, so we will do the translating. And that is all we have to do to change the world.
Boredom, to the situationists, was a supremely modern phenomenon, a modern form of control. In feudal times and for the first century of the Industrial Revolution, drudgery and privation produced numbing fatigue and horrible misery, no mystery, just a God-given fact: “In Adam’s fall so sinned we all,” and as for those few who knew neither fatigue nor misery, it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. As the situationists saw modernity, limited work and relative abundance, city planning and the welfare state, produced not happiness but depression and boredom. With God missing, people felt their condition not exactly as a fact, but simply as a fatalism devoid of meaning, which separated every man and woman from every other, which threw all people back upon themselves. I’m not happy—what’s wrong with me?
Fatalism is acceptance: “Que sera, sera” is always counterrevolutionary. But as the situationists understood the modern world, boredom was less a question of work than of leisure. As they set out in the 1950s work seemed to be losing its hold on life; “automation” and “cybernetics” were wonderful new words. Leisure time was expanding—and in order to maintain their power, those who ruled, whether capitalist directors in the West or communist bureaucrats in the East, had to ensure that leisure was as boring as the new forms of work. More boring, if leisure was to replace work as the locus of everyday life, a thousand times more. What could be more productive of an atomized, hopeless fatalism than the feeling that one is deadened precisely where one ought to be having fun?
The eight men and women who gathered in the Italian town of Cosio d’Arroscia on 27 July 1957 to found the Situationist International pledgedthemselves to intervene in a future they believed to be on the verge of banishing both material necessity and individual autonomy. Modern technology had raised the specter of a world in which “work”—employment, wage labor, whatever tasks were performed because someone else said they had to be—might soon be no more than a fairy tale out of the Brothers Grimm. In a new world of unlimited leisure each individual might construct a life, just as in the old world a few privileged artists had constructed their representations of what life could be. It was an old dream, the dream of the young Karl Marx—every man his own artist!—but those who owned the present saw the future far more clearly than any of the sodden leftist sects claiming Marx’s legacy. Those who ruled were reorganizing social life not merely to maintain their control, but to intensify it; modern technics was a two-edged sword, a means to the domination of the free field of abundance and leisure that revolutionaries had fantasized for five hundred years. Thus boredom. Misery led to resentment, which sooner or later found its rightful target, those who ruled. Boredom was a haze, a confusion, and finally the ultimate mode of control, self-control, alienation perfected: a bad conscience.
In modern society, leisure (What do I want to do today?) was replaced by entertainment (What is there to see today?). The potential fact of all possible freedoms was replaced by a fiction of false freedom: I have enough time and money to see whatever there is to see, whatever there is to see others do. Because this freedom was false, it was unsatisfying, it was boring. Because it was boring, it left whoever was unsatisfied to contemplate his or her inability to respond to what, after all, was a hit show. It’s a good show, but I feel dead: my God, what’s
Boredom, to the situationists, was a supremely modern phenomenon, a modern form of control. In feudal times and for the first century of the Industrial Revolution, drudgery and privation produced numbing fatigue and horrible misery, no mystery, just a God-given fact: “In Adam’s fall so sinned we all,” and as for those few who knew neither fatigue nor misery, it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. As the situationists saw modernity, limited work and relative abundance, city planning and the welfare state, produced not happiness but depression and boredom. With God missing, people felt their condition not exactly as a fact, but simply as a fatalism devoid of meaning, which separated every man and woman from every other, which threw all people back upon themselves. I’m not happy—what’s wrong with me?
Fatalism is acceptance: “Que sera, sera” is always counterrevolutionary. But as the situationists understood the modern world, boredom was less a question of work than of leisure. As they set out in the 1950s work seemed to be losing its hold on life; “automation” and “cybernetics” were wonderful new words. Leisure time was expanding—and in order to maintain their power, those who ruled, whether capitalist directors in the West or communist bureaucrats in the East, had to ensure that leisure was as boring as the new forms of work. More boring, if leisure was to replace work as the locus of everyday life, a thousand times more. What could be more productive of an atomized, hopeless fatalism than the feeling that one is deadened precisely where one ought to be having fun?
The eight men and women who gathered in the Italian town of Cosio d’Arroscia on 27 July 1957 to found the Situationist International pledgedthemselves to intervene in a future they believed to be on the verge of banishing both material necessity and individual autonomy. Modern technology had raised the specter of a world in which “work”—employment, wage labor, whatever tasks were performed because someone else said they had to be—might soon be no more than a fairy tale out of the Brothers Grimm. In a new world of unlimited leisure each individual might construct a life, just as in the old world a few privileged artists had constructed their representations of what life could be. It was an old dream, the dream of the young Karl Marx—every man his own artist!—but those who owned the present saw the future far more clearly than any of the sodden leftist sects claiming Marx’s legacy. Those who ruled were reorganizing social life not merely to maintain their control, but to intensify it; modern technics was a two-edged sword, a means to the domination of the free field of abundance and leisure that revolutionaries had fantasized for five hundred years. Thus boredom. Misery led to resentment, which sooner or later found its rightful target, those who ruled. Boredom was a haze, a confusion, and finally the ultimate mode of control, self-control, alienation perfected: a bad conscience.
In modern society, leisure (What do I want to do today?) was replaced by entertainment (What is there to see today?). The potential fact of all possible freedoms was replaced by a fiction of false freedom: I have enough time and money to see whatever there is to see, whatever there is to see others do. Because this freedom was false, it was unsatisfying, it was boring. Because it was boring, it left whoever was unsatisfied to contemplate his or her inability to respond to what, after all, was a hit show. It’s a good show, but I feel dead: my God, what’s
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