Free Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus

wrong with me? It was leisure culture that produced boredom—produced it, marketed it, took the profits, reinvested them. So the world was going to be changed, announced the first number of
Internationale situationniste
in June 1958,
“because we don’t want to be bored
 . . . raging and ill-informed youth, well-off adolescent rebels lacking a point of view but far from lacking a cause—boredom is what they all have in common. The situationists will execute the judgment contemporary leisure is pronouncing against itself.”
    The situationists saw boredom as a social pathology; they looked for its negation among sociopaths. In the pages of their journal, lunatic criminalsand rioters without manifestos sometimes seem like the only allies the writers are willing to embrace. The situationists meant to define a stance, not an ideology, because they saw all ideologies as alienations, transformations of subjectivity into objectivity, desire into a power that rendered the individual powerless: “There is no such thing as situationism,” they said for years. The world was a structure of alienations and ideologies, of hierarchies and bureaucracies, each of which they saw as a version of the other; thus they celebrated a madman’s slashing of a famous painting as a symbolic revolt against a bureaucratically administered alienation in which the ideology of the masterpiece reduced whoever looked at it to nothing. In the same way, they understood the responsible parade monitor who tried to keep people in check during a march against the Vietnam War as a bureaucratic ideologue enforcing a split between desire and comportment—and as much the enemy as General William Westmoreland, or for that matter Ho Chi Minh. Both the painting and the war were hit shows; whether a visit to the museum or a march in the street, both turned the spending of free time into the consumption of repression. The masterpiece convinced you that truth and beauty were someone else’s gift from God, the protest in favor of the struggle of the Vietnamese that revolution was a fact of someone else’s life. Neither could ever be yours, and so you left each show diminished, with less than you had brought to it. That, the situationists said again and again, was why the show had to be stopped, and could be: just as the tiny humiliations inflicted by the parade monitor were the essence of oppression, a fanatic’s exemplary act could prove that liberty was within everyone’s grasp.
    The situationists announced themselves as revolutionaries, interested only in freedom, and freedom can mean the license to do anything, with consequences that are indistinguishable from murder, theft, looting, hooliganism, or littering—phenomena that, lacking anything better, the situationists were almost always ready to embrace as harbingers of revolution. But freedom can also mean the chance to discover what it is you truly want to do: to discover, as Edmund Wilson wrote in Paris in 1922, “for what drama one’s setting is the setting.” That too was what the situationists meant by leisure—and it was a lust not simply to discover but to create that drama that drove a twenty-five-year-old Parisian named Guy-Ernest Debord to gather artists and writers from France, Algeria, Italy, Denmark, Belgium, England, Scotland, Holland, and West Germany into the Situationist International in 1957. In 1975, with the defunct SI no more than a legend to a few one-time 1960s art students and student radicals, that drama was what McLaren was still seeking. What were the politics of boredom?
    Anonymous situationist-inspired leaflet, London, early 1980s

DEBORD
    Debord wrote “Theses on the Cultural Revolution” for the first number of
Internationale situationniste:
“Victory,” he said, “will be for those who know how to create disorder without loving it.” As empty of disorder as rock ’n’ roll was in 1975, McLaren understood that it remained the only form of culture the young cared