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Demanding the Impossible 

The other day as I browsed in Temple Bar's Urban Outfitters, I came upon a T-shirt bearing a familiar design. It was a cartoon of a girl's head, bound almost completely in bandages, mummy-style. Her eyes were bulging psychotically, and there was a safety pin through her lips, fastening her mouth shut. The image was captioned "I'd rather not say". Nothing unusual, you might think. A shocking image like this is just the sort of thing that Urban Outfitters are always using to sell their pricey shirts. What's odd though, and what made me wonder at who might have been doing the thinking behind this piece of design, is the fact that "I'd rather not say" is not the original caption to that image. When the girl with the bandaged head made her first appearance, as a revolutionary poster on the Paris streets in 1968, the caption was "Une jeunesse que l'avenir inquiete trop souvent" (loosely, "A young girl disturbed by thinking too often of the future"). Perhaps it's not as catchy as the new caption, but it does make the political import of the poster clear.

Use of radical political imagery in fashion is nothing new of course - see Che Guevara - but this is something different, because the origin of the poster is a deeply unusual set of ideas shared by a small (and as we shall see, ever-shrinking) band of largely Parisian would-be revolutionaries who called themselves Situationists. Glorying in the overambitious name the "Situationiste Internationale", they were ignored during their ten-year existence and all but defunct after the 1968 "May Days", for which they may or may not have provided the ideological catalyst. Why then, if they were just an insignificant bunch of plotters and schemers, many of them long-dead, do they refuse to go away? Why do their images, catchphrases and methods seem to keep turning up in the oddest of places? Why, for example did I find that shirt in Urban Outfitters, or another the week before which bore their slogan "I am a cliche"? Why do journalists say, as if we know what they're talking about, that the likes of Chris Morris and The K Foundation engage in "Situationist Pranks"? Why did the Sex Pistols use their slogans and artwork for their last single Holidays in the Sun, or base the God Save the Queen sleeve on the bandaged girl poster? Why did Ian Brown name not one but two tracks (Corpses In Her Mouth and Beneath The Pavement, The Beach) on his debut album after their slogans? Why was Mark Lamarr's BBC series "Leaving The Twentieth Century" named after the only available anthology of their writings? Why did one Hillary Rodham say in her valediction to her graduating University class "Demand the Impossible', the French student wrote on a wall in Paris: We will accept nothing less"?

Like an historical time-bomb, it seems that Situationist ideas can go off at any time, right under our noses, and without us really knowing it. The beauty of Situationism, its advocates held, was that it was only saying out loud what every modern human being already feels. "Our ideas are in everybody's minds", they said. Then as now, they had a least half a point, or maybe more than that.

As a philosophy, it's fairly simple. By creating new situations, you confront people with unusual surroundings, which provoke them to think in new ways. This in turn shows them how constrained their thinking has been until now. Once they've tasted that freedom even briefly they'll never be able to go back to ordinary life. They will demand more from life, and a revolution will be inevitable. It's an idea that has had the occasional practical success. When Britain's miners went on strike in the 80's, their wives set up support groups. This was the first time most of them had ever been politically active, and it was often a liberating experience. Where years of feminism had failed, an unusual situation, the strike, had shown them their strength and offered them roles other than wife and mother. Many of them remain involved in unions and left-wing politics to this day.

For the SI, all art was a waste of time except architecture, which had a direct effect on how people live and interact. This once gave me what I thought was a great idea for a situationist statement. It would be a large clock, like the ill-fated Dublin Millennium Clock. It would be mounted in Grafton St., the heart of the Celtic Tiger, and would count down the seconds until the end of the economic boom. Set it for about 12 months ahead, put it outside Brown Thomas or one of the swankier bars, and let it count down. You could call it conceptual art if you wanted. In order to be truly successful, it would have to catch the imagination of the public, causing them to get more and more nervous as the dread date approached. Economics being what they are, this nervousness would become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Business confidence would be affected, consumer spending would plummet as people stored and saved for the tougher times ahead, and not long after the clock had finished its time on the streets, the boom would indeed be over. It's a pretty irresponsible thing to do, ruining everyone's fun just to make a point - that the boom, the economy, even money itself are fictions that only work because we choose to consider them real - and that's among the reasons that I never went to the Arts Council seek funding for the thing. The main reason was of course that it was only an idle idea cooked up in the pub, and I never intended going further with it.

Such lack of dedication would never have been a problem for the SI, and they wouldn't have been bothered by worries like damaging society either. I like to think the lads would have gone for my plan in a big way, had one of them been in the pub to hear my pitch. For them, destroying society was the whole point. It was fun, not because of the destruction part, but because of what you could get up to amongst the wreckage. You could build another society where people were truly free. Instead of the freedom we now have to say, change jobs or governments (negative freedoms, the Marxists call them), they dreamt of a world where we could sit down and ask ourselves what we really, really felt like doing, what would make us happy. And then we could just go and do it (positive freedom). Who in their right mind, they asked, really wants to spend 35 hours a week in their job? It's like the old line about how no-one, on their death-bed, regrets not spending more time at the office. And I suppose it is a little absurd if you think about it objectively: We devote five days a week to our employers and only keep two to ourselves. Only two days of our lives for us to have fun, go adventuring, to fall in love, have our hearts broken, express ourselves. Not in our world, said the SI. Once we've torn society down, everyday life will become a playground, each day an adventure. To fall in love, they said, was a revolutionary act. What could be more subversive to than deciding that you care more about another person than about your job, your car, your wide-screen TV?

The key brain behind the movement was Guy Debord, the key text, his "Society of the Spectacle". Thankfully, you don't have to read this to understand the ideas. The title, the catchphrase (as so often with situationism) is enough. Modern life is a spectacle, and we are reduced to spectators and consumers rather than active participants. We gorge ourselves on consumer luxuries, and tell ourselves "this is living".

They were deeply distrustful of conventional politics in all it's forms, because even the most radical political thinkers were still working within the framework of the organized state, which was missing the point. Instead of campaigning, the SI would merely use the existing machinery of pop culture. They loved slogans. Just daub them up on a wall somewhere, and let them get people thinking, that's all that needs to be done to forment the revolution. ("Our ideas are in everybody's minds", remember). "Never Work" was all over the Parisian streets in '68. "Soon to be picturesque ruins" was painted on the walls of banks and stockbroking firms. "Those who make a revolution by halves only dig their own graves" is another of theirs. It was the slogan that headed this website when it was first launched, and for me it's a classic of the form.

It has to be said that Situationism is hardly a coherent programme for a new way of life. For example, who'll be in charge of the hospitals while everyone else is enjoying that "revolution of everyday life"? In any case, for all their undoubted dedication they were not immune to the great disease of radical sects: the split. The back pages of Leaving the Twentieth Century list the SI's membership, which was about 70. By 1971, there were only three of them left. 19 resigned, 45 were "excluded" (usually for such heresies as being "too bourgeois") and 2 split off into the mainstream radical movement. As always with such splits, the more seriously they are taken by the protagonists, the more absurd they look to the outsider. I mean, there were only 70 of them. It'd be like the Progressive Democrats splitting into Provisionals and Officials. I only found out about the SI by accident, and my interest in it is more for my own amusement than an ideological one. The ideas are flawed but exciting, the slogans are clever and fun, the posters are good pieces of design (the bandaged girl is blu-tacked up in my bedroom) and the Sex Pistols connection appeals to my pop music trainspotter side. So it was all a bit of harmless fun by Left Bank arty types with nothing else to do, then. And yet.

"I am writing this from the courtyard of the Sorbonne. I look up to the roof, and flying in the wind is a sight I have never seen before: a flag with no decoration, no addition, no national symbol: a plain red flag. And I can't stop myself from shedding tears."

- May 16th 1968, "A Paris Journal", Anonymous.

In Nanterre, a small college outside the Paris, a few SI fans calling themselves "Les Enrages" manage to take over the Student's Union. They disrupt classes and the life of the University for over two months, ultimately demanding it's abolition. The University is indefinitely closed, and seven Enrages are called before a University board. When students in the Sorbonne University meet in the main quad to discuss these developments and show solidarity, the police are called in. Then the Sorbonne too is closed, and the students propose a day of demonstrations and marching. When the police baton-charge the marchers, they retreat and set up barricades. It is this, the reaction of the police, that makes the whole affair more than just another student protest. The day ends with the smell of tear gas in the air, and police hunting students through the streets and beating them with truncheons. The next day, another march and the students are joined by militant workers and other sympathisers. The next day the march is larger still, as the left-wing parties join in. When a march is driven back by police into the latin quarter, the marchers again set up barricades in anticipation of attack. The attack, when it comes, is even fiercer than two days earlier. It leaves many injured and several students ominously "missing". Seeing their chance amid the increasing chaos, the Trade Unions announce a General Strike. The government, realising it has a problem on its hands, gives way to the student's demands - things like the right of representation on the University board, which seem rather moderate in the light of what has happened over the last few days. They will seem ridiculously trivial in the light of what is about to happen.

The SI could have predicted that small government concessions wouldn't put an end to things. People have by now gained a taste for active politics, and the streets are filled with the sound of excited, exalted voices, arguing reforms and utopias, and singing the Internationale. Soon, factories are being occupied all over France, and Worker's Councils are demanding that they be given the right to run them themselves. Some of the councils appeal to the SI for advice, and are merely told that they should act autonomously. Nobody can quite believe what's happening, and no-one knows for how long it will last. Among the most eloquent pieces of graffiti is the one that says only "Quick!".

Despite the fame of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, aka "Danny the Red", there are no leaders. People are acting simply because they want to, because they have only just realised that they are able to; having made this discovery, it would be a crime not to act. On all sides, it is felt that France is on a knife-edge. For a brief, heady moment, it appears that a most unlikely thing is happening: an anarchist revolution in an industrialised western state, right in the middle of the Twentieth Century.

It didn't happen in the end of course, but official histories rarely convey just how close-run a thing it was. De Gaulle very nearly gave up on the whole thing, before pulling himself together to make a broadcast on live TV and open negotiations with the unions. This robbed the movement of it's energy, and all of a sudden the talk was about pay levels and University reform, rather than a modern Utopia. But had De Gaulle followed his first instinct and resigned, he and Cohn-Bendit both agreed that civil war would have ensued.

These days, it's hard to find a book on that remarkable story, because it is one that cannot be explained by reference to traditional revolutionary ideas. Even at the time, the non-French media (and the more conservative elements of the domestic media) mostly portrayed the "May Days" as a protest regarding university conditions, no different to what was happening around the world at that time. But what were people protesting against anyway? In effect, everything. Everyone agreed that they wanted an end to society as it stood, but no-one could agree on what to replace it with: that was what they were arguing and discussing in the streets. Academic historians won't touch a revolution that seems to have been inspired by a few dozen cranks with a pompous name, and has no guiding ideology other than "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore". Instead the story gets passed on by word of mouth, an unauthorised history.

The SI picked up on the ideas of mediaeval heretics and utopians, on Surrealist and Dadaist artifacts. They added to these fragments and left them to be discovered by punks, anarchists and crusties. Today, after 10 years of post-Cold War political stagnancy, the signs are that these hints and fragments have made it to the present day, and into the hands of the anti-globalisation movement. So when you see the protesters in Seattle or Genoa or Montreal, demanding a new and fairer world, think before you dismiss them. Inside the conferences the politicians pay lip-service to the environment, workers rights, and 3rd World debt, but even the most well-meaning of them limit their options to what is allowed by the system by which the world is governed. Outside, the protesters talk of what is possible if we get rid of that system. If you think that a new world is unrealistic, and the best we can do is to improve the one we're stuck with, remember Paris, and just how close it was. Be realistic: demand the impossible.

by
Fergal Crehan
9th August 2001

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