“His instincts,” says Marcus, “are basically cruel his manner is intransigent…. Yet his slight physical stature belied a ferocious intellect and messianic personality, one that Marcus in Lipstick Traces identifies in young rebels from eighteenth-century blasphemer Saint-Just to punk rocker Johnny Rotten. In the photos throughout The Tribe, Debord is bespectacled and a bit short, resembling a young Woody Allen. It was in this capacity that Mension met Guy Debord, the bookish filmmaker who would later become the chief theorist of the SI. There he met the Lettrists, a movement of poets and painters founded in the late 1940s by Isidore Isou in response to the growing impotence of Surrealism, and taught them to smoke hash, snort ether and consume heroic amounts of alcohol. Jean-Michel Mension was a petty criminal and teenage drunk who hung around the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood of Paris from 1952 to 1954. City Lights, meanwhile, has published what is the inaugural volume of its “Contributions to the History of the Situationist International and Its Time,” a long conversation with Jean-Michel Mension called The Tribe. The most recent anthology, Beneath the Paving Stones: Situationists and the Beach, May 1968, includes three major Situationist pamphlets, along with eyewitness accounts, photographs, poster art, leaflets and other documents of France’s almost-revolution. Kept alive by a stream of reprints, anthologies and retrospectives from mostly anarchist presses, the Situationist critique continues to gain fresh adherents. It also plays a role in shaping the movement for global justice (or the “antiglobalization movement,” as its critics like to call it), from Naomi Klein’s book No Logo to the magazine Adbusters to the proliferating network of Independent Media Centers. Today, Situationism exerts considerable–though often unacknowledged and depoliticized–influence over academic discourse and artistic practice in many media. Nearly forgotten after their dissolution in 1972, the Situationist legacy was recovered in 1989 with the publication of Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, which purported to trace the subterranean relationships between medieval heresy, nineteenth-century utopianism, Dada, Surrealism, Situationism, soul music and punk rock.
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