Partisans of Oblivion: A Situationist Novel

Guy Debord's best lines were ghostwritten.

They are most known from the pamphlet The Return of the Durutti Column, which along with The Poverty of Student Life catalyzed an uprising at the University of Strasbourg that would shortly unfold into the student occupations and general strike collectively known as 1968. Distributed free in 1966, the pamphlet was manifesto, oratory, comic. Its text was largely provided by the Situationist International and its leader, Guy Debord, the postwar period's most trenchant and implacable political philosopher (and surely the one whose thoughts have been the most caricatured).

One particular frame, a blank back and forth between Pancho and Cisco--"The Situationist Cowboys," as they would be known--has had a long and varied afterlife, leaping from student revolt to photocopied talisman to album art and T-shirt image for Manchester's Factory Records; of late it has shown up on the Poetry Foundation's website, making some point or another.

"What do you work on?" asks the first cowboy, in a white hat. "Reification," comes the answer. "I see," says white hat. "It's serious work, with big books and lots of papers on a big table."

"Nope," avers black hat, whom we understand to be speaking in the place of Debord. "I drift. Mostly I drift." The phrase itself is a ghost. It captures the insouciance that in our era can no longer be attached to radical politics, to the ruthless critique of what exists. And exactly because such a combination, so urgently wished for, can no longer be imagined without this phrase, it is doomed to circulate without relief, like Dante's Paolo and Francesca borne about endlessly on an awful wind that is the wind of history. Also, it's a great pickup line.

That's how it started near the beginning of All the King's Horses, Michèle Bernstein's 1960 roman à clef capturing the early hours of the Situationist International. In one version of Situationist myth, Debord talked Bernstein into writing a commercial novel, a knockoff of Françoise Sagan's madly successful midcentury chick lit. That suggests the style. It's a lark, a scam.

The slight plot can be as easily coordinated. It takes Dangerous Liaisons and the 1942 Marcel Carné film The Night Visitors--both of which involve a supernally merciless, sensual couple debauching innocents--and asks their bare bones to dance once more. Gilles, with the help of his lover Geneviève, seduces the dewy Carole, a Patricia Franchini manquée down to "the mussed bangs, the short blond hair, dressed like a model child in a white crewneck and a blue sweater." It's during the seduction that the famous exchange takes place between Gilles and Carole. Their affair, and Geneviève's corresponding liaisons (including with Bertrand the poet and mildly modern Hélène), provide the spare narrative. There is the promised drifting around Paris, a vacation to the provinces and then the fall rentrée, rifted with discreet sex and a few tears; the whole thing is over in 88 pages, with dalliances discarded and Gilles and Geneviève affirming their bond.

The pair are, of course, shades of Debord and Bernstein, founding members of the SI and for a time married. He famously never worked; she found occasional employment as a writer for hire--of, among other things, horoscopes for horses (practice for her later position as a literary critic). She would write a second novel, The Night, close in plot but far from the primal scene of the SI.

The novel ends with the words "I think we're late," but the SI was early: first as an artistic avant-garde whose ideas are still being digested (most especially that of détournement, a repurposing of phrases and images that would characterize postmodernism), and then as a roiling cadre of political theorists who early diagnosed late capitalism's domination of everyday life. They left no novels but this. Long out of print and sold to Situationist fanatics for astonishing prices in bookshop back rooms, All the King's Horses was reprinted in France four years ago. Perhaps on the basis of size alone, it was bound to leap the Atlantic only to land in the cargo-pants cult of Semiotext(e) pocket books. That series divides itself between "Foreign Agents" (tilted toward shards of French theory) and "Native Agents" (more along personal-is-political lines). All the King's Horses, officially part of the latter line, more or less splits the difference. This happenstance points toward much of what is remarkable about the SI: never has such a theoretically sophisticated band been so insistent in its demands for everyday life--not living so as to change the world but changing the world so as to live. Or, as they put matters early on, "the point is not to put poetry in the service of revolution, but to put revolution in the service of poetry." Life would be a practice of theory; this is the import of "Mainly I drift." It is a refusal of the life on offer: an absurd stroll, a dérive.

At the same time, few would dispute that the SI was all too conventional in some ways, not least in its group dynamics; this volume is charged beyond its internal pleasures not just because it might provide clues to the genesis of the SI but because it represents the only extensive contribution to the SI library written by a woman.

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