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Title: The Merchants of Life Author: Val Basilio Date: 2000 Language: en Topics: Argentina, commodification, Diavolo in corpo, France, Sacco and Vanzetti Source: Personal communication with the translator Notes: From Diavolo in corpo #3, November 2000
Thirty years ago, a Belgian situationist — whose decayed radical
subjectivity is now in an advanced state of decomposition — noted in his
most famous work that: “Power, if only it were human, would be proud of
the number of potential encounters it has successfully prevented.”
One of the encounters that was avoided according to the suggestive
proposition of the author was that of the French anarchist Albert
Libertad with the Italian artist Giorgio di Chirico. The former —
burning his identity documents — the latter — drawing heads without
faces. Both are understood as denouncing the operation of organized
annihilation carried out by the social order in its confrontations with
the individual. Better not to have a name or a face than to be a mere
reflection of social conventions. The refusal of the identity that is
assigned to us by the state is the first step to affirming our
individuality. Starting from completely different experiences and
presuppositions, the anarchist and the artist had arrived — each in his
own way — at analogous conclusions.
But this play of affinities never came together and the encounters
missed on the terrain of the reappropriation of our existence does not
stop at this single case.
Anyone who might be interested in curbing the process of commodification
that is transforming all of our life into a vast supermarket — where
adventure is booked in a travel agency, the appetite is satisfied with
pre-cooked meals ready in five minutes, creativity serves only to
decorate advertising posters and play consists more than anything else
of operations of exchange — will certainly find the correspondence of
aims between deeds and persons from the same era, but different
continents, interesting.
Argentina,1927. Here, as in many other parts of the world, the night of
August 22 is a night of vigil. On the plaza and in the houses, thousands
of people are waiting. They wait to find out if the United States has
effectively executed Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the two
Italian anarchists accused of robbery and murder and condemned to death
on the electric chair. Never had such an act produced so many
repercussions in the world. Arrested in May of 1920, the two anarchists
were tried and condemned in July of the following year in spite of the
alibi that excused them and the numerous witnesses brought forward by
the defense. An impressive campaign in favor of their liberation was
begun through out the world involving thousands and thousands of people
with very different ideas. In Argentina as well, protest demonstrations,
meetings and direct attacks were not lacking: against the US embassy,
against the monument to Washington and against American enterprises such
as Ford. And, of course, the initiatives in favor of the two anarchists
multiplied with the approach of the prophetic date.
The dawn of August 23 found thousands of people still awake, thronging
the newsstands in order to read the morning papers. The news flowed from
mouth to mouth between the general disbelief and dismay. The law had
won. Sacco and Vanzetti had been executed. The announcement of their
murder would provoke protest demonstrations everywhere with clashes and
incidents. In Argentina, a general strike is called by the central
workers on this day. People pour out into the streets as incidents break
out on all sides. The names of the two anarchists have become a symbol
of the struggle against the outrages of power throughout the world.
This is the situation in which a businessman from Buenos Aires, one
Bernardo Gurevich, head of the tobacco firm “Combinados”, gets the idea
to put a new brand of cigarettes on the market at an economical price
intended for the workers. In order to draw attention to the product and
attract sales, Gurevich has the brilliant notion to call the cigarette
“Sacco and Vanzetti”. The business initiative is not appreciated.
Speculating on the death of the two anarchists? Mingling the smoke of
their bodies burnt on the electric chair with that of cigarettes?
Transforming the tears shed for their death into ink for fattening a
bank account? Enclosing the rage of others between the dusty lids of a
snuff-box? Making an advertising gimmick of the symbol of the struggle
against the state? On November 26, 1927, a powerful charge of dynamite
destroys the establishment of “Combinados”. The attack is attributed to
the same anarchist who was held responsible for other dynamite attacks
in support of Sacco and Vanzetti, namely Severino di Giovanni. The
damage caused by the explosion is huge. That very day, the businessman
who came up with the original idea decides to withdraw the brand of
cigarette called “Sacco and Vanzetti”.
France, 1930. About a half a century has passed since the publication of
the Chants of Maldoror by Lautreamont, a book which has subsequently
been greeted as “the most radical book of all western literature”. This
book had gone through many changes of circumstance and might have been
destined to fall into oblivion if it had not attracted the attention of
the surrealists who get the credit for the recovery and recasting of its
author. Already in the spring of 1919, even before building the
surrealist movement, Andre Breton had edited the publication of the
Poesies of Isadore Ducasse (Lautreamont’s given name). In 1927, another
surrealist, Philippe Soupault, had edited the first edition of the
Complete Works, which would stir up a hornet’s nest of controversy. The
surrealists would make a kind of precursor, an extreme model, of
Lautreamont. For the young in search of a new existence, the work of
Lautreamont had nothing to do with literature. The torrential
imagination of the “man of Montevideo”, his iconoclastic fury, could
only constitute an incitement to revolt, the overcoming of this world,
an affirmation of one’s individuality. Lautreamont sits at Sade’s side
on the peak of the Black Olympus of the surrealists.
Thus, it is not at all surprising if they don’t seem to take pleasure in
the news of the imminent opening of a new Parisian nightspot, the “Bar
Maldoror”. The shopkeeper enterprise wanted to make a menu of Evil, to
serve blasphemous imprecations at its tables. It wanted to satisfy the
customers’ stomachs rather than consume them with doubt. It wanted to
quench the fire that burned in the throats of the clients rather than
set it to their hearts. It wanted to make people pass a pleasant evening
rather than making them all go into a rage. It wanted to make many
instead of overturning the world. It was too much.
Already, a few years earlier — in that same 1927 which was shaken by the
news of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti — the surrealists had sent
an open letter to the committee for the reconstruction of a monument to
the poet Rimbaud (a monument that had been destroyed during the first
world war) in Charleville, the city of his birth. In that letter, one
could read: “Hypocrisy extends its dreadful hand toward the people that
we love in order to make them serve in the conservation of that against
which they have always fought. It is evident that we are no longer
deceived about the range of such enterprises of confiscation, we do not
alarm ourselves ore than is necessary at your shameful and habitual
maneuvers, persuaded as we are that a force of total fulfillment
animates everything that has truly been inspired in the world against
you. To us it matters little...that some profit is drawn from the most
subversive intelligences, since their marvelous poison will continue to
penetrate into the minds of the young in order to corrupt or expand
them.” Three years later, this literary outpouring of fatalistic wrath
would fortunately give place to an action stripped of aestheticism. At
the opening of the “Bar Maldoror”, Andre Breton and his comrade were
there and the completely laid waste to the place. The owner had no
choice but to change the name of his business. The name of Lautreamont
was saved from the slime of commerce.
In the face of this determination to prevent money from realizing its
commerce over individuals desiring only to see it disappear, in the face
of this strenuous defense of the spirit of revolt against the assaults
that have come from the shopkeepers’ spirit, in the face of these
vigorous attacks against mercantile logic, chance does not dwell on how
much separated the protagonists of these actions. It is better to leave
all the pathetic demands for improbable property rights to the militant
and artistic rabble. It is enough to know that, in spite of appearances,
the communicating vessels of dream and action have met on the terrain of
hatred for all commodification, even if only for a moment. It doesn’t
matter what it is: the memory of two executed comrades, the work of a
writer, the taste of a meal, the natural environment, an idea. That
which is from the heart is an expression of life. And it is never too
late to recall that life cannot be reduced to an object of commercial
exploitation. It has no price, it only has the claim of having a
meaning. Today we are so thoroughly surrounded by commodities, adapted
to the act of perpetually putting our hand in our wallet in order to get
what is already ours, that nothing seems to touch us any more, nothing
seems to come from our hearts. One cannot be filled with love for a
plastic wrapped object. We remain with only our indifference, every
emotion in us extinguished. When all human expression has been brought
back inside the boundaries in which commercial exploitation is possible,
when nearly nothing that could not be an object of lucrative activity
has survived, when the amount in one’s bank account is the best calling
card, it is time that brutality takes the upper hand over indifference
and resignation.
Christ drove the merchants out of the temple with violence. We know his
reason: only god had the right to establish the price of life.
Contrarily, what happened in Argentina and France during these years
cleared the board of both the merchants and the temple. It is only a
question of taking the advise of a German philosopher and starting to
stretch out a hand.