Review printed (in edited form) in Tribune, 21/7/1989
"Nothing is true. Everything is permitted."
last words of Rashid al-Din Sinan, 1192
"And I want to be - Anarchy"
Johnny Rotten, 1976
"We live like lost children, our adventures incomplete"
Guy Debord, 1952
When the students occupied the Sorbonne, when John Lydon became Johnny Rotten, when the Crucial Three played Eric's - great moments. But what came before? Who were their ancestors? Greil Marcus has found them - tracing the secret lines of descent that run from the Gnostics and Cathars, through the Ranters and the Brethren of the Free Spirit, down into our own century: the century whose history includes Dada, Surrealism, Lettrism, the Situationist International, May '68 and Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers. This weird, beautiful book is a long strange trip through 800 years of heresy, letting us hear voices from different lands and centuries raising the same demands, even using the same words. The Anabaptist John of Leyden outlawed work; "never work," said the Situationists; "I don't work - I just feed," said John Lydon. The Situationists created May '68; Johnny Rotten created punk.
Well, the quote's wrong for a start: it's "I just speed". We are told that Jan Bockelson ("John of Leyden") outlawed work; we are also told that those who did work were executed, frequently by Bockelson in person- as were women who quarrelled with their husbands, or remained single when "of childbearing age". Sure, Bockelson abolished private property; so did the People's Republic of Albania in the mid-70s. And why does Marcus tell us about Bockelson? Because "John of Leyden" sounds a bit like "John Lydon". For this is the book's method: similarity means connection, and any similarity will do; a great chain of apparent likenesses links Cathar to Lettrist to punk to Dadaist to Gnostic. Add detailed accounts of the Orioles' first single, Michael Jackson's 1985 tour, the film Quatermass and the Pit and the careers of a number of serial killers, and the book's real subjects - the punks and the situationists - are all but buried.
Which is a shame: there are traces of a great fan's book on punk here. Unfortunately Marcus's enthusiasm is channelled through three distinctly shaky assumptions: that nothing very much came out of America; that the British punk scene was "a sort of giant answer record" to Anarchy in the U.K.; and that Johnny Rotten's singing was a semi-conscious articulation of the entire Situationist/Dada/Cathar heritage. Bad theory encourages bad observations: a 1982 Mekons track is "the first punk song... it's also the last"; the Slits produced "unmediated female noises never before heard in pop music"; after the chorus of God Save the Queen "a guitar lick ripped the song and whoever heard it in half". The power and the glory of punk, and the very heaven of its heyday, are ill served by rock-critic gush like this.
The Situationists fare better, though Marcus is keener on their Lettrist International forebears: he is very much impressed by the LI's achievement of spending 1953 walking around Paris and getting drunk without anyone in the group working (Withnail and I with slogans). The Situationist International combined diverse positions: a critique of architecture and town planning; a theory of everyday life as a cultural "backward sector" of society, taken from Lefebvre; a theory of the bureaucratic/capitalist unity of societies East and West, taken from Castoriadis; an endorsement, crucially, of the apparently total disaffection of the "hooligan". The result was a critique of modern society like no other. Situationist theory (and it's "situation -ist"; "situationism" came later, as a consequence of the SI's failure) can articulate any and every dissatisfaction with everyday life, and turn them into a desire for the revolutionary transformation of society. More, the SI did what Marcus fails to do: they looked at the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Cathars, the Dadaists et al and saw what they had lacked - the material base. The SI saw that only now, under developed capitalism, could the dreams of the heretics be realised; and that they could only be realised through collective, political action. It started to happen in May '68; the SI never got over the shock.
But it is the failure of the SI that Marcus, who devotes about a page to May '68, really sympathises with; just as, writing about Guy Debord (co-founder of both LI and SI), he stresses Debord's awareness both of the nobility of making absolute demands and of the near impossibility of anything coming of them. "What should be abolished continues, and we continue to wear away with it," Debord wrote; and, in a line from Bossuet which he quoted repeatedly over many years, "Bernard, Bernard, this bloom of youth will not last forever." Perhaps the best part of this book is its lucid Epilogue, where Marcus quotes a line from Debord's Lettrist days about "situations without a future" and suggests that the glory of the moment that could change the world is inseparable from the tragedy of the moment after, when the world has not changed. But there is more to it than that.
Brecht quoted Rosa Luxemburg as saying, "All revolutions are defeated, except the last one"; and all defeated revolutions, the Situationists added, serve as defence against the next one. So dada and punk, two great challenges to the organisation of society, are now labels for glass case and shop window; so Marcus' rediscovery of the Situationists, along with such more measured assessments as Peter Wollen's excellent essay in New Left Review 174, will help to make "situationism" next year's thing. After post- modernism and its "nothing is true; everything is permitted; so what?" a new craze is badly needed. Even this, though, can't hide the poverty of fashionable cultural and political debate, which is becoming glaringly apparent. It's almost as bad as the state of the music scene in 1975.
Review printed in New Statesman and Society, 13/1/1996
It's a bold title for a collection of ephemera: reviews of records, films, books. It's also a curious image, when you think about it: history as dustbin, as its own memory hole. "It's history": end of discussion. "Once something [...] is 'history', it's over, and it is understood that it never existed at all". 'History' swallows everything which hasn't borne fruit in the present; which means that, a lot of the time, 'history' is the denial of what we wanted to happen, what we had begun to think had started to happen. Reality is what's happening now; what's happened is what's on the news; the rest - is 'history'. "The result is a kind of euphoria, a weightless sense of freedom": a freedom to live without weight, without consequence. Without history.
Which, nevertheless, proceeds: consider "the idea that history might have its own directions, its own magnetisms, its own sense of time - that it's a force to be understood rather than a set of facts to be manipulated". A landscape built over with the "set of facts" currently in favour; still there, but you have to dig for it. "Any society's master-narrative is by definition an untruth"; to achieve "cultural awakening" is to realise "that what one has always been told is incomplete, backward, false, a lie." Hence the value of counter-factuals, imaginary alternative histories which open up the events and structures which actually underlie present day reality. A "fantasised subversion of the present, which, once perceived, then makes the past real": this careful formulation, with its weird balancing-act of fantasy and reality, is Marcus' summing-up of a thriller predicated on the US government being run by ex-Nazis, but it says a lot about his own style of writing.
An angry vigilance for the historically true and real runs through this collection, but it is always in danger of giving way to the project of building an alternative "master-narrative" - precisely what Marcus did in his Lipstick Traces, in which some useful work on punk and the Situationists is buried under 500 pages of free association and wilful misreading. In this collection an essay on historical accuracy, denouncing the misrepresentation of figures outside the scope of canonical history, concludes oddly by both endorsing and rejecting the criterion of falsifiability: "I was wrong, we will say, shamed by the evidence, and we will explain why; no matter what, we will say, I was right, and we will explain that too".
America, in particular, rouses Marcus to the mythic level. "Some of us want the security of knowing our great experiment has been a failure," Marcus writes scathingly of the response to Robert Altman's Nashville and E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime. To a non-American reader it's that, not particularly ironic, "our great experiment" which stands out: Marcus' real charge against a comfortable despair is that it precludes getting the experiment back on track. Nevertheless his interim conclusions are deeply pessimistic: the world of The Manchurian Candidate is "no longer the world we live in", not because of its hallucinatory political paranoia but because it supports "the idea of a life where private acts have public consequences". Elsewhere it seems that the rot set in earlier in the century: US complicity in the rehabilitation of ex-Nazis has resulted in a "legacy of broken limits [...] on which this society rests". Granted that the US state's various bouts of temporising with Nazism can't have done the US polity much good, the evidence for 'broken limits' isn't strong: intolerance of fascism was if anything even less apparent in the pre-war US than in Britain.
Another mythic terrain is popular culture, on which Marcus is deeply and productively ambivalent. He commends a film about "two of the myth-makers themselves" (Jan and Dean) for "[letting] the story tell itself as if it were itself real". As if it were itself real - not a string of nostalgia-jerking pop songs and funny hairstyles, but real events in ordinary people's lives: in other words, history. When it comes to the myth of pop culture, however, Marcus is a believer: "Pop culture is about shared access to feeling in a world that keeps people separate and feeling at a distance". Pop culture is at once part of everyday life and something transcendently other, realer than real: Marcus writes of "the unpredictable interplay between three-minute utopias of sound and ordinary life", of a pop song having "a quality of contingency, a setting of everything in doubt".
Yet if any pop song can revel in contingency, few can seem to set everything in doubt (everything?). The scale of Marcus' claims for popular culture draws him towards the traditional focus on masterpieces and mouldbreakers: not the Supremes but the Orioles, not Muddy Waters but Robert Johnson. Indeed, at one point Marcus seems to argue that taking pop culture seriously means taking it as seriously as high culture: not following radical art critics by "letting the social into the art", but first and foremost "freeing the art from the social". To say that Robert Johnson was a Delta blues singer is less important - even as a starting point - than to say that he was a genius. Other singers built the blues tradition; Johnson "refused to accept the limits of the blues tradition itself - a tradition that [...] at once inspired and limited his ability to make demands on life".
Johnson's achievement, then, was bound up with "a setting of everything in doubt": the "demands on life" which the blues expressed within its own formal limits were somehow transformed by Johnson's refusal to work within those limits, into something more potent, more intransigent. Or so Marcus feels: at this point we hit the buffers of a subjective approach, where it's hard to distinguish between art works which strike Marcus as having a "world-changing" quality and works which, well, change the world. I get the impression that Marcus feels that the two are much the same thing, give or take the right external circumstances - circumstances which aren't his concern. His real concern is the radical subjectivity which (perhaps) underlies them both: his heroes are those who, like the former situationist Guy Debord, "[refuse] to pretend the world has satisfied the demands [they] made on it", but "keep those demands loose in the world, to let the world be judged by them".