Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus

Author:Greil Marcus [Marcus, Greil]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780674034808
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2009-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

OUR PROGRAM

“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.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.