McKenzie Wark on Belgian Surrealist Marcel Mariën: 'The goal of writing is emancipation from habit'
At Public Seminar, an online extension of the New School for Social Research, McKenzie Wark writes about the little-known but more than relevant Belgian surrealist (slash precursor of OOO and the Situationists) Marcel Mariën. Wark explains it all:
In Mariën, as we shall see, there is a parallel to [Guy] Debord’s theoretical and practical activity. Both were interested in the commodification of everyday life, the rise of leisure and the spectacle, and the decline of traditional working class agency. But where Debord opted for council communism and the negation of the spectacle in insurrectionary direct action, Mariën had a rather more subtle and indeed surreal conception of the aesthetics of politics.
But first, one thing Debord and Mariën really had in common was what Debord called détournement. His famous programmatic text on it (co-authored with Gil Wolman) actually appeared first in [Mariën's journal] Les lèvres nues. Probably without knowing it, Debord was repeating approaches to writing Paul Nougé had already developed before the war. Nougé took détournement much further, however. He even rewrote a Baudelaire poem (‘La Geante’) in which the only change was the addition of a comma.
Nougé’s anti-literature, a chunk of which Mariën reprinted in Les lèvres nues, is key background to Théorie de la revolution mondiale immediate. For Nougé, as for Mariën and Debord, writing is not a representation of the world but an action within and against it. Nougé, who had trained as a chemist, saw writing as a kind of controlled but risk-taking experiment. Writing, like chemistry, works on real materials and tries to produce chemical reactions from mixing its readymade elements in new compounds. For Mariën, this meant a writing that tried to maximize its effects.
The goal of writing is emancipation from habit. Its aim is to produce disturbing or perturbing objects, made out of everyday and banal materials, but monstrous and explosive. The writer’s goal is not to be loved but to be hated, refused, censored. For Mariën it’s a matter of combining cultural and political provocations, whereas Debord’s incendiary texts rather let go of the avant-garde tradition of cultural provocation. Where Debord’s détournement is mostly of the the techniques of modernist art and classical French, Mariën was rather more interested in appropriating the seductive techniques of street-corner con artists and nightclub singers.
Also well worth the read here is the selection of aphorisms that indicate Mariën's "rather literal surrealist physicality" and distinctive wit. Such as:
“We laugh, but never at the same time as you.” (11)
“Lies hammer through the truth.” (103)
“To the reader: — you bore me.” (118)
“We would do well to remember that the only way for a poet to have any relations with the public is to turn his back on it.” (56)
[...]
Those among the left who are pessimists about our species being are rather rare. There’s a tendency (clearest perhaps in Badiou) to think we are fallen angels who can be restored to the heavens. That’s the essential position of the optimists. Pessimists know us to be nothing more than monkeys with aspirations. But perhaps only Leopardi and Chamfort were able to combine pessimism about our species-being with a progressive political vision. One where even us mere mammals might better live out our days. I think Mariën share[s] in that perspective:
“Vultures die last.” (93)
“Life is a butcher’s shop where they only sell fish.” (95)
“Being, Nothingness and Baby.” (96)
Read the piece in full at Public Seminar.