Lipstick Traces (38 page)

Typically, the twenty-five-year-old Isou set forth his ideas with heroic logic chopping and unparalleled dash:

Every politician defends the interests of one or another specifically defined “mass,” while subjugating to it the surging force which is our youth—and
those who manipulate the masses deny the suffering of youth as such. Their argument is this: “While the proletarian or the bourgeois”—the economic agent—“remains definitively within his condition, and finds himself obliged to defend his interests, youth is only a passing, fluctuating state. One is only young for
x
number of years.”

This assertion is false. Neither the proletarian nor the bourgeois remains definitively within his condition. Both die. They leave their place for another: death.

They will only be “proletarian” or “bourgeois” for
x
number of years.

The young, Isou said, were “slaves, tools . . . the property of others, regardless of class, because they have no real freedom of choice . . . to win real independence they must revolt against their very nonexistence.” And this revolt would be open to all:

We will call young any individual, no matter what his age, who does not yet coincide with his function, who acts and struggles to attain the realm of activity he truly desires, who fights to achieve a career in terms of a situation and a form of work other than that which has been planned for him . . . Any reform must begin with the millions of “pre-agents” who collectively comprise the “sickness of society.” So long as youth suffers in slavery, or is super-exploited by the seniority system, it will hurl itself into all the warlike follies and all the banalities which are permitted it as a compensation for its own non-existence. Those who know and love their places, whether proletarians or capitalists, are passive, because they don’t want to compromise themselves by appearing in the streets. They have goods and children to protect! The young, who have nothing to lose, are the attack—indeed, they are adventure. Let youth cease to serve as a commodity merely to become the consumer of its own elan.

Don’t consume your own elan
—in slightly different language (“
DON
’
T LET THE CAPITALISTS RIP OFF YOUR CULTURE AND SELL IT BACK TO YOU!
”), so said every underground newspaper of the late 1960s. For anyone who lived through those times, to read Isou’s statement today is to experience an unnerving displacement: because in 1950 Isou’s ideas were completely at odds with any other sociological formulation, because time has made the holes in his ideas so evident, and because displacement is the sensation that inevitably accompanies a confrontation with a first, living version of dead, received ideas.

Once ideas go into receivership, there is nothing that cannot be done with them. In a few years the youth market caught up with Isou’s notion of youth as a class: there was music, movies, clothes, books, even cars only for the young. Youth’s consumption of its own elan became a whole new economic sector; then that sector expanded, seizing the notion that youth was a concept, not an age, and generated the values used to sell anything to everybody else. As with Jacksonism, Marx’s metaphors were turned inside out: if the proletariat was the motor of history, and youth the new proletariat, a youth free of definition by age was the ever-idling motor of a world bent not on making history but on stopping it.

In 1984 Catherine Deneuve, born 1943, appeared on television to promote Youth Garde, a skin cream. “I’ve done a lot of living,” she said frankly, “and I have nothing to hide.” Translated from the franglais, the semiotics of her script did not merely suggest that Youth Garde would “guard” one’s youthfulness, that it would “keep one youthful”—rather, Deneuve was saying, youth could not be defined by age. Youth Garde, the blonde film star said (her face still striking, barely slipping around the edges, but squaring), was a spiritual product: not an elixir, but a talisman. Youth Garde, unlike other skin creams, hid nothing—it made what one had done, what one knew, what one was, glow.

The young, Deneuve argued, were those who’d done a lot of living and were ready for more. An inversion far more fabulous than Isou’s was taking place: merging experience and anticipation, years of suffering and an unbroken lust for novelty, Deneuve was insisting that in 1984 those over forty represented not a memory of youth but its avant-garde.

Sociology intensified semiotics. As Deneuve read her lines, her generation still made the biggest bulge on the census charts. As it had ruled the glamor principle of the go-go economy of the 1960s, it ruled the supposed scarcity economy of the 1980s. More than that: her generation had acted. It had fought for change: it was the generation of the soixante-huitards, the ’68ers. Everyone knew that the youth of 1984 were not young at all: they were scared. Faced with a world to accept and a life to surrender, they did nothing but beg for a career in terms of whatever work was planned for them. Deneuve’s unspoken subtext could have been written by Adorno:
“The hysteric who wanted the miraculous has thus given way to the furiously efficient imbecile who cannot wait for the triumph of doom.”

But those imbeciles were not Deneuve’s target audience, and there was a message even beneath her subtext. Symbolically if not physiologically, Deneuve and those to whom she spoke were past childbearing (in 1984, her son was a movie star in his own right). Under the banner of Youth Garde she and her generation signified the freedom to indulge untrammeled sexual desire without the wish for children—a wish that made the generations behind her slow and timid, paralyzed by the fear or the fact of families to protect. Deneuve and her comrades were free to act without consequences: to consume directly, for themselves.

Her TV spot was not an advertisement for a product. It was the reification of a market, and of an idea. To be young, Deneuve said, one must be old. If “this too will pass away” is the only absolute truth the human species has produced, “this too will be stood upon its head” is its corollary.

“Our Program” contained a more immediate contradiction, and it reflected Isou’s own inordinate personal ambition: the idea that the real motive force of modern revolt would be the will of the historical actor to “achieve a career in terms of a situation and a form of work other than that which has been planned for him.” That the transcendence of such a quandary is generally known as the “American Dream” may have been irrelevant in Europe in 1950, or even in 1968, and it may be irrelevant today. That no other wish could then or now be more easily bought off was not. At its center, Isou’s manifesto was not a call for revolution, for a clash between rulers and ruled; if “the millions of pre-agents” comprised “the sickness of society,” it was a blueprint for recuperation.

The slipknot was pulled almost immediately. There was one dramatic action: a raid by some thirty Youth Front members on the Auteuil orphanage, a Catholic institution notorious for brutality, and the result was riot, violence, and, for some, jail. But this was little more than a publicity stunt. Soon, again under the rubric “Youth Uprising,” with Isou’s approval lettrist Marc, O recast the open-ended “Our Program” into what Jean-Louis Brau, a member of Isou’s group at the time, would call “a ridiculous boyscoutism”:
demands that superior students be permitted to (1) skip grades, (2) leave school early, and (3) receive government grants for creative activities. One can imagine that Isou would have been happy with a seat on the awards committee; even after May ’68 he was still propounding the same solutions to the “youth question,” thesis for thesis, word for word. As Brau, speaking of the May days, mordantly put it, “The disciples of ‘Youth Uprising’ were not to be present when, finally, youth rose up.”

The perfect symmetry of Isou’s theories ensured that his new world would be self-limiting. For all the dialectical tension of amplitude and ciselant, it was a world in which the Messiah worked to see his revolutions take place in a controlled space. But theories cannot be kept on paper, and Isou’s call for the subversion of everything subvertible and the overthrow of everything overthrowable soon led to consequences he did not anticipate, and could not stop.

It began at the beginning. In 1950 Brau and his fellow lettrist Gil J Wolman invented a new kind of sound poetry, a real sound poetry in no way tied to made-up words or floating letters: Brau’s “Instrumentations verbales” and Wolman’s “Grands soufflés” (Big Breaths) or “Megapnèumes” (Superinflations). The shift from amplitude to ciselant has been described as the transition from “a giant sigh,” where the arts take “in oxygen, sunshine, and other nutrients which are transformed into a rich lifeblood,” to a “huge exhalation, the part of the sigh which signifies the consumption of all usable oxygen, expelling carbon dioxide, muscles full of lactic acids and the brain fatigued”; at first, offering elaborate theorems postulating the mechanics of “synthetic death,” this is what the Brau-Wolman poetry aimed to realize. Then the two leaped over Isou’s rules and made them seem quaint.

They did not return language to its constituent elements. They went back to its purely physical origins. They went out of history, past the inevitable distance of the conscious human being from the natural world—past Hegel’s definition of alienation, his definition of what it meant to be human. They knew what Hegel thought; they knew too that Marx had turned Hegel’s idea of alienation upside down by socializing it, fixing alienation in the distance of human beings from the world they themselves made, insisting
that in the recognition of that distance was the beginning of consciousness, in its refusal the beginning of revolt. As students, Brau and Wolman probably agreed—but from where they stood as poets, revolt somehow preceded consciousness, and superseded it. Posters went up—

—working from later recordings, one can imagine the scene.

Isou, Lemaitre, Pomerand, and the rest recite their scrambled letters. Words are separated from their meanings. The breach between humanity and its invented world is plain, but it is an old story, and it is incomplete: words shatter, but the letters hold their shape. Then Wolman, a twenty-one-year-old with a carefully trimmed moustache, stands on a table. He proceeds to create a pre-phonetic explosion that denies any lexical description. Unknown tongues flow from his mouth—not languages, but the linguistic organs as such, searching the air and slamming the cheeks and teeth.

Sound shoots out of the top of Wolman’s head. Hideous noises range the room. He has become a primeval Homo erectus on the verge of discovering speech but he remains unready to recognize it. The two dozen or so people in the Tabou lean forward: Wolman is creating an absence they can feel. The possibility that the human species could have gone on without language
is inescapable. Clicks, coughs, grunts, and broken moans reach crescendos and crumble; every nascent rhythm is defeated. Now it is the diaphragm that is speaking, then the nose, then the bowels. Suddenly Wolman seems to form an actual signifier, and panic invades his performance. Like a man trying to catch a fly in his fist, he struggles to hold onto the phonemes, but they escape.

On Isou’s terms—no matter that this poetry suggested that nothing was certain and everything possible—such “ultra-lettrist” experimentation was a sophomoric exaggeration, an infantile disorder: a heedless attempt, Isou wrote in words Phil Spector might have appreciated, to “smash the wall of sound.” The mechanics of invention did not allow for it; conscious decomposition could not go so far. One more step, and there would be nothing left but the void, a babble that could never find its way back to language—a call that only madness or suicide could satisfy. Still, though the lettrist movement was not casual—members might be fined, put in purdah, or even expelled for malingering—aesthetic pluralism remained in effect. With heat and without rancor, Isou, Lemaitre, Brau, and Wolman debated the question in issues of the lettrist review
Ur.