From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945-1962 9780822353560, 9780822353713, 2013042836

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Art During War and the Potentialities of Decolonial Representation
I. Fragments and Façades: André Malraux and the Image of the Past as the Future of the Present
1. Fragments; or, The Ends of Photography
2. Façades; or, the Space of Silence
II. Between Resistance and Refusal: The Language of Art and Its Publics
3. Sonic Youth, Sonic Space: Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of Deterritorialization
4. La France Déchirée: The Politics of Representation and the Spaces In-Between
III. Reidentification: Seeing Citizens Being Seen
5. “The Eye of History”: Photojournalism, Protest, and the Manifestation of 17 October 1961
6. Looking Past the State of Emergency: A Coda
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

FROM A NATION TORN

OBJECTS / HISTORIES: Critical Perspectives on Art, Material Culture, and Representation A SERIES EDITED BY NICHOLAS THOMAS Published with the assistance of the Getty Foundation.

FROM A NATION TORN Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945–1962 Hannah Feldman

Duke University Press

Durham and London 2014

© 2014 Duke University Press

All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Designed and typeset in Adobe Garamond and Trade Gothic by BW&A Books, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Feldman, Hannah. From a nation torn : decolonizing art and representation in France, 1945–1962 / Hannah Feldman. pages cm. —  (Objects/Histories) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8223-5356-0 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-5371-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Art—Political aspects—France—History—20th century. 2. Art and state—France—History—20th century. 3. Decolonization—Social aspects—France—History—20th century. I. Title.

II. Series: Objects/histories.

n72.p6f45 2014 709.44'09045—dc23 2013042836

This book was made possible by a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

To the family that sustained me throughout the writing of this book— Jorge, Lola, and Addie. Thank you.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments xiii INTRODUCTION

Art during War and the Potentialities of Decolonial Representation

I

FRAGMENTS AND FAÇADES: ANDRÉ MALRAUX AND THE IMAGE OF THE PAST AS THE FUTURE OF THE PRESENT

1

Fragments; or, The Ends of Photography

2

Façades; or, The Space of Silence 41

1

19

II BETWEEN RESISTANCE AND REFUSAL: THE LANGUAGE OF ART AND ITS PUBLICS 3

Sonic Youth, Sonic Space: Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of Deterritorialization 77

4

La France Déchirée: The Politics of Representation and the Spaces In-Between 109

III REIDENTIFICATIONS: SEEING CITIZENS BEING SEEN 5

“The Eye of History”: Photojournalism, Protest, and the Manifestation of 17 October 1961 159

6

Looking Past the State of Emergency: A Coda

Notes

221

Bibliography Index

305

271

201

ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1

Maurice Jarnoux, photograph, André Malraux, published in Paris Match, 1950 20

2.1

Unknown photographer, Hôtel de la Fare, 14 place Vendôme, Paris, 1962

47

Unknown artist, “Range of old Moorish Buildings at Algiers to be pulled down to make room for the Boulevard de l’Impératrice,” 1861 56

2.2

Unknown photographer, album photograph of French Cavalry on the Boulevard de la République, Algiers, 1880s 57 2.3

2.4–2.6 2.7–2.10

Julien Duvivier (dir.), film stills from Pépé le Moko, 1937 59 Gillo Pontecorvo (dir.), film stills from Battle of Algiers, 1966 60–61

L’atelier Parisienne d’Urbanisme, Map showing secteurs sauvegardés generated by the Malraux law in relation to the historic walls of Paris 64

2.11

2.12 and 2.13 Unknown photographer, Église Saint Gervais before and after the implementation of the loi Malraux, 1957 and 1983 66–67

Louis Arretche, Paul Vitry, Michel Marot, and Maurice Minost, Plan de sauvegarde et de mise en valeur du Marais (PSMV ), 1965 72–73 2.14

Plate 11, Plan de Turgot, engraving, 1739

2.15

73

Isidore Isou, flow chart, “Schèma II: L’évolution du matériel poétique,” Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique, 1947 83 3.1

3.2–3.7

Isidore Isou, film stills, Traité de bave et d’ éternité, 1951

88–89, 92, 95

3.8

Isidore Isou, poésie graphique, “Cris pour 5,000,000 de juifs égorgés,” 1947 96

3.9

Gabriel Pomerand, page from the artist’s book Saint ghetto des prêts, 1950 100

3.10

Maurice Lemaître, page from Canailles, 1950 101

4.1

Brassaï (Gyula Halasz), gelatin-silver print, Graffiti, circa 1935–1950

110

4.2

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglé, décollage, Ach Alma Manetro, 1949

111

Harry Shunk and János Kender, photograph, Raymond Hains near a sign that states “Défense d’afficher,” rue Laplace, Paris, 1961 112 4.3

ix

illustr ations

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglé, photogram of unfinished film, Défense d’afficher—Loi du 29 juillet 1881, 1950 114

4.4

Raymond Hains, La palissade des emplacements réservés, as installed in the “Salle des Informels” at the first Paris Biennale, 1959 117

4.5

4.6 and 4.7 Raymond Hains, La palissade à de Feugas, Manifeste du 3 octobre 59 et la poubelle de l’ école des Beaux Arts de Blois, 1959–1996 118 4.8 Harry Shunk and János Kender, photograph, Raymond Hains with L’entremets de la palissade de Raymond Hains, 1960 120

Gilles Raysse, photograph, Raymond Hains at the Festival du Nouveau Réalisme, 1961 121

4.9

4.10 and 4.11

Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglé, details, Hépérile éclaté, 1953

122

Harry Shunk and János Kender, photographs, Raymond Hains on the street with political graffiti, 1961 124–125

4.12–4.14

Harry Shunk and János Kender, photograph, Raymond Hains in his apartment at 26 rue Delambre, Paris, 1961 127

4.15

4.16

Raymond Hains, décollage, Cet homme est dangereux, 1957

129

Harry Shunk and János Kender, photograph, Raymond Hains, Cet homme est dangereux, 1957, as installed at the opening of La France déchirée, 1961 129 4.17

Galerie Colette Allendy, cover and inside, invitation to Photographies hypnagogiques, an exhibition of works by Raymond Hains, 1947 132 4.18 and 4.19

4.20

Raymond Hains, gelatin-silver print, Chimère d’Arezzo, 1947

4.21

Raymond Hains, gelatin-silver print, Le conquérant, 1947

4.22

Raymond Hains, décollage, Paix en Algérie, 1956 135

133

133

4.23 Unknown graphic artist, poster advocating a “oui” vote in the constitutional referendum of 28 September 1958 136

Unknown graphic artist, poster advocating a “oui” vote in the referendum of 8 January 1961, concerning Algerian auto-determination 137

4.24

Agence-France Presse (Afp), photograph, Charles de Gaulle with his arms raised in a “V” for “victory,” Constantine (Qusantînah), 4 June 1958 137

4.25

4.26

Raymond Hains, décollage, C’est ça le rénouveau?, 1959 145

4.27 and 4.28 Harry Shunk and János Kender, photographs, Raymond Hains on the street with political graffiti, 1961 147, 149

Harry Shunk and János Kender, photograph, pedestrians and onlookers outside Galerie J during the opening of La France déchirée, 1961 151

4.29

Harry Shunk and János Kender, photograph, gallery-owner Janine Restany installing a work by Jacques Villeglé in the exhibition La France déchirée, Galerie J, Paris, 1961 152

4.30

x

Commemorative bronze plaque on the Quai du Marché Neuf commemorating Algerians killed during the peaceful demonstration of 17 October 1961, 2011 161 5.1

Jean Texier, photograph, graffiti on the Quai de Conti, November 1961: “Ici on noie les Algériens” (Here we drown Algerians) 162 5.2

illustr ations

Harry Shunk and János Kender, photograph, onlookers at the opening of the exhibition La France déchirée, 1961 153

4.31

France-Soir, map of the Algerians’ points of departure into Paris for the demonstration of 17 October 1961, published 19 October 1961 172

5.3

174

Unknown photographer, the Algerian demonstration of 17 October 1961

5.4

Gustave Caillebotte, oil on canvas, Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877. Art Institute of Chicago 176

5.5

Brassaï (Gyula Halasz), gelatin-silver print, Boulevard des Italiens, 1933

5.6

176

5.7 Brassaï (Gyula Halasz), gelatin-silver print, Les grands boulevards, pedestrians in front of a poster for the film “Le Diable au Corps,” circa 1947 177 5.8 Unknown photographer, demonstrators in front of the cinéma Berlitz, 17 October 1961 178

Gaston Paris, photograph, Le cinéma Berlitz, 1955

5.9

181

5.10 Roger Berson, photograph, Le Palais Berlitz, showing the exhibition poster for Le Juif et la France, 1941 182 5.11 and 5.12

Roger Berson, installation views, Le Juif et la France, 1941

183

Unknown photographer, cover of Paris Match, “Nuit de troubles à Paris,” published 28 October 1961 187

5.13

5.14–5.17 Raymond Darolle and Gérard Ménager, photographs documenting the Algerian demonstration of 17 October 1961, as printed in Paris Match, 28 October 1961 188–191 5.18 Elie Kagan, photograph, Abdelkader Bennehar, Algerian demonstrator, injured and on the ground, Nanterre, 1961 194 5.19 Elie Kagan, photograph, arrested demonstrators, Paris, Métro Place de la Concorde, 17 October 1961 196 5.20 6.1

René-Jacques, photograph, Place de la Concorde, circa 1955

Dennis Adams, installation detail, The Algerian Annex, 1989

6.2–6.5

Michael Haneke (dir.), film stills from Caché, 2005

198 203

206–208

Jean-François Deroubaix, photograph, “Fifth Night of unrest in Clichy-sous-Bois (Seine-Saint-Denis),” 31 October 2005 212

6.6

Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (dirs.), video still, Europa 2005–27 Octobre, 2006 216 6.7

xi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For as long as I have been working on this book—which feels like as long as I can remember—I have been looking forward to writing the acknowledgments that will preface it. The gratitude I feel to the many friends, family members, colleagues, and students who generously supported this project or sustained its writing in one way or another has long both moved and motivated me, and I am honored finally to render my thanks publicly. They may be small recompense for what some of the individuals below have done for me and for this book, but they are heartfelt and profound all the same. The research and writing of this book was made possible by financial support from a number of institutions, including the J. Paul Getty Trust, which funded a crucial postdoctoral fellowship at the Getty Research Institute, and Northwestern University/The Graduate School, which awarded me a Faculty Research Grant. At Northwestern, I have also benefited from awards from the Residential College Faculty Research Assistant Fellowship Program and from the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. Doctoral grants from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Ambassade de France aux États-Unis (Bourse Chateaubriand), and the SPFFA (Bourse Marandon) provided essential support for early research forays. Researching this book took me frequently to France, where I am grateful to archivists, librarians, and specialists at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), the Bibliothèque Kandinsky at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA), the Bibliothèque documentaire internationale contemporaine (BDIC), the Musée de l’histoire contemporaine, the Musée d’art modern de la Ville de Paris, the Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris, and the Keystone-Eyedea archives. Years ago Nathalie and Georges-Philippe Vallois, Eric Mircher, and Alain Cueff allowed me access to their archives, and I remain grateful for their generous assistance. In New York, access to documents and images at the Museum of Modern Art and at the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation certainly benefited this publication. Last but not least, Dennis Adams—a phenomenal artist, but also an archivist in his own

xiii

acknowledgments xiv

fashion—deserves special thanks for his generosity in sharing with me not only details regarding his own work, but illuminating insights into the issues that underlie our mutual interests in France during the decades of decolonization. Versions of the arguments about décollage presented in chapter 4 have been published as “Of the Public Born: Raymond Hains and La France déchirée” in October 108 (2004), 73–96; and as “Words, Actions, Inactions, and Things: Reality Between La Résistance and L’ insoumission,” in New Realisms, edited by Julia Robinson (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 41–52. Thanks here are due Julia Robinson for her support of the latter publication. Components of the arguments I make in chapter 5 have been published in “Flash Forward: Pictures at War,” which was published in Photography’s Orientalism: New Essays on Colonial Representation, ed. Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013), 153–170. I wish to acknowledge Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan as well as Laura Santiago for their important suggestions regarding that essay, many of which have migrated into these pages as well. Materials from this book have been presented at a variety of talks and conference papers over the years, and I am grateful to my audiences for having so carefully engaged my arguments. Whether or not they remember, a few individuals offered sustaining engagement and support at these fora, and I wish to thank them here: André Dombrowski, Josh Cole, Gregg Bordowitz, Josh Shannon, Dan Wang, Matthew Jesse Jackson, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Saloni Mathur, Rebecca Zorach, Nasser Rabat, Chris Pinney, and Anne Wagner. My gratitude as well for the supportive criticism proffered by members of an all too shortlived writing group that included Terri Weisman, Meredith Davis, Jason Weems, and Hérica Valladares. Whatever form it has taken now, the seeds of this book were planted in my brain during my years as a PhD candidate at Columbia University. I warmly thank my former advisors Rosalind Krauss and Benjamin Buchloh as well as Jonathan Crary and Barry Bergdoll for having provided me with the tools—not to mention the will!— necessary to think about vision, space, and art in the particular ways that I try to in these pages. Although I was not fortunate enough to have studied with her officially, Rosalyn Deutsche provided an incredibly incisive reading of the doctoral dissertation that sparked this book, and I am grateful for her ongoing interest in the work, as her own writing has been a source of constant inspiration for me. No matter how great the debt I feel to my professors at Columbia, I must also say that the learning I did there was equally inspired by conversation with friends and colleagues, including especially George Baker, TJ Demos, Roger Rothman, Margaret Sundell, Candice Breitz, Stephanie Schwartz, and Nicoletta Leonardi. A dear friend and an essential interlocutor since graduate school, Rachel Haidu deserves all my gratitude for her unflinching support of this manuscript and for the multiple readings she has given its many iterations. The strengths of my argument are due to her incisive intelligence. The weaknesses, of course, remain my own. Claire Gilman has also, since the beginning, been a constant and loyal friend and a close intellectual ally.

acknowledgments

Since arriving at Northwestern, I have been fortunate to participate in the exciting intellectual project that animates my department’s commitment to art historical study. I have also enjoyed some of the most wonderful colleagues imaginable, both in art history and across campus, especially in the Programs in Comparative Literary Study and Middle Eastern and North African Studies, with which I am also affiliated. For their key support, several colleagues deserve special mention. Holly Clayson has been a true friend, a tremendous interlocutor, and a very patient mentor-model. She has also made me laugh more times than I can remember, and deserves extra thanks for that. Stephen Eisenman has also pushed and prodded me to be a better and more careful thinker for years, and I thank him for his enduring faith in my capacities. Christina Kiaer and David Van Zanten also merit special thanks for their encouragement and support, and Christina as well for her important friendship since we both arrived at Northwestern in the same year. My (no-longer-junior-colleagues) Huey Copeland, Krista Thompson, and, for a joyous three years, Cecily Hilsdale, made going to work as fun as it was also intellectually stimulating. For their friendship, which has sustained me as much as their scholarship has provided me with models from which to learn, I thank them endlessly. Thanks as well to Jesús Escobar, Ann Gunter, Rob Linrothe, Claudia Swan, Christina Normore, Sarah Fraser, and Hamid Naficy, who counts as one of us, too. Conversations at Northwestern with Doris Garraway, Bonnie Honig, Sam Weber, Domietta Torlasco, Brian Edwards, Josef Barton, Peter Hayes, Laura Hein, Kelly Kaczynski, Lane Relyea, Dylan Penningroth, Jessica Winegar, Rebecca Johnson, Robert Harriman, Emily Maguire, and Dilip Gaonkar have also been important to the ideas articulated here. At Northwestern, I have also benefited from a roster of tremendously impressive students and advisees, and they too have provided decisive intellectual contributions to this work as well as reasons to keep doing it. I am pleased to thank especially Lily Woodruff, Chad Elias, Jennifer Cazenave, Madelaine Eulich, Angelina Lucento, Alison Fisher, Min Lee, David Calder, Emma Chubb, Faye Gleisser, Brynn Hatton, Erin Reitz, and Rory Sykes. Rhonda Saad was an especially important advisee, and I will always miss her keen intellect and great humor. This book would never have been printed were it not for a few very dedicated people at Duke University Press, and many thanks are due the incredibly patient and supportive editorial team there. I am especially grateful to Ken Wissoker for his calm, gentle prodding, and for his long-standing interest in this project, and to Jade Brooks for her expert advice and help over the years. Although I understand little of how it works, I am honored to be included in the Mellon Foundation–funded Art History Publishing Initiative and grateful for the financial support AHPI has provided this book. The anonymous reviewers who read earlier drafts of the manuscript provided truly galvanizing suggestions for improving the manuscript. I hope they will see in these pages my earnest efforts to respond to their criticisms and points of interest. Monica Rumsey deserves special thanks for copyediting my all too frequently over-burdened sentences, and both Chris Crochetière and Barbara Williams

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acknowledgments xvi

at BW&A Books need to be acknowledged for having so carefully overseen the production of this book. Over the years, I was the beneficiary of much excellent research assistance, but Max Allison, Hannah Green, and Luke Fidler merit special mention. Luke in particular is to be thanked for having so tirelessly assisted me throughout the final stages of readying the book for production and publication. Conversations with friends and colleagues—whether about the arguments in this book or not—over the past many years have nurtured my thinking immeasurably and improved my life exponentially. I owe my gratitude to more people than I can certainly name here. Nonetheless, I will try. In no particular order, Rachel Haidu (again), Judith Rodenbeck, Cecily Hilsdale, Nell Andrew, Lyle Massey, Julia Bryan Wilson, TJ Demos, Paul Jaskot, Keith Topper, Darby English, Carrie Lambert Beatty, Noit Banai, Hannah Higgins, Kader Attia, Terry Smith, Carol Duncan, Steven Nelson, Iftikhar Dadi, Andrew Hemingway, Liz Kotz, Thierry de Duve, Ali Behdad, Tony Cokes, Esra Akcan, Mary Roberts, Carolin Behrmann, Ann Marie Yasin, Michael Rakowitz, Devon Fore, Lori Waxman, Adam Lehner, Janet Kraynak, Tanya Simon, Julia Meltzer, David Thorne, Nathalie Bouzaglo, Jon Sachs, Stephanie Smith, Miguel Amat, Liz Mermin, Linda Rattner, Jessie Labov, Stephanie Freedman, Darrell Halverson, and Kevin Bell: thank you all. Each of you helped at pivotal moments and in essential ways. Elliot Reichert also deserves more than a note of thanks here, not only for his early help with various research matters, but for the long and rewarding conversations on these and other, more important topics that we have developed since. I am profoundly grateful to my family, and especially the loving women who supported me and endured my disappearances through the many years of writing this book. Thanks especially to my mother, Linda Lowell, for her unrelenting faith and constant strength, and also to Bayla Kraft and Nancy Urruchi for their care. Jackie Allen, Barry Feldman, Alcides Coronado, and Eva Oviedo have also all helped. My beautiful and brilliant nieces, Sofia and Eleanor McDermott, also deserve thanks for all that they have taught me and all the reasons—flying pigs and others, too— they have given me to hope. Thanks to their parents, Nancy Coronado and James McDermott, as well as to my own aunt and uncle, Rona and Allen Goodman. Finally, and most important, during most of the many, many years that this book was researched, written, revised, and revised again, I was lucky enough to enjoy the constant companionship of three truly outstanding creatures, human and canine. Their love and their unique intelligence bettered every page and every sentence, albeit in different ways. To the bullies, Lola and Adelaide, and to their human, Jorge, I offer my greatest thanks. I could not have done this without them, nor would I have wanted to. I dedicate this book to them, and to the great memory of our small and strange family, even though I know Addie would have preferred a walk, Lola a Kong toss, and Jorge so much more, still. —HF

INTRODUCTION: Art during War and the Potentialities of Decolonial Representation

DÉCHIREMENT/LACERATION (cruel, painful).—This term helps accredit the notion of History’s irresponsibility. The state of war is masked under the noble garment of tragedy, as if the conflict were essentially Evil, and not a (remediable) evil. Colonization evaporates, engulfed in the halo of an impotent lament, which recognizes the misfortune in order to establish it only the more successfully. GUERRE/ WAR.—The goal is to deny the thing. For this, two means are available: either to name it as little as possible (most frequent procedure); or else to give it the meaning of its contrary (more cunning procedure, which is at the basis of almost all the mystifications of bourgeois discourse). — Roland Barthes, “African Grammar,” The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, 1957

his is a book about war, although it will make no reference to specific battles, or really anything of much military concern. Instead, it is a book that proposes to consider the ways in which the experience of war motivates the production and justification of culture, as well as why we have been unable to see this effect. It focuses on the development and deployment of aesthetic practices and theories in France from the late 1940s throughout the 1960s, a place and a period about which we already assume we know a great deal. This assumption notwithstanding, the impetus to write about the specific intersections of spatial and visual culture during this period arises from a simple fact: whereas the field of modern European art history circumscribes these decades as being “post-war,” their reality was anything but, especially in France. Indeed, it was during these decades that France fought the longest wars of the twentieth century, wars that were, not coincidentally for the arguments I make in these

T

1

introduct ion 2

pages, intended to preserve a dwindling colonial empire. It follows that the art of this period is not “post-war” as we have come to understand it. Instead, it is an art that was created within, shaped by, and fully legible only in the historical context of an ongoing war— or wars, as the case may be. It is, therefore, art we need to understand as “art during-war.” In focusing on this distinction, this book aims to understand the specific and historical ways in which the art and visual culture of this time were situated as essential and elaborate components of a feedback loop that taught people to see not only the art made during their time but to understand the spaces—material and discursive—in which it circulated, or from whence it drew.¹ My object of study therefore includes not only art objects proper (and improper, as suggested below), but also the ways in which and the places where art itself was positioned to engage, if not also construct, the audience with or for whom it would attempt to generate meaning. More than a question of simple semantics, this transition from “post” to “during” is significant not only for the comprehensiveness of how we understand the midtwentieth century and the kinds of claims that were made by and for art at that time, but also for the ways in which we understand and see the construction of history more generally. Over the course of this book’s exposition, I suggest that the periodization of the twentieth century into two tidy segments divided by the “post” that precedes references to the Second World War as a generic “war” in the term “post-war” has had the unintended effect of naturalizing our historical remove from this moment to the point of calcification and of fixing the geographic certainty that places the former Western Europe at the center of the period’s cultural production. The consequences of such reification are far more significant than a matter of dating or charting aesthetic developments and transactions across the disruptive event that we have always understood war to be, and for good reasons. As Roland Barthes reminds us in the passages cited above, the linguistic strategy that motivates— or motivated in 1957—the representation of war works either to deny it categorically or to obfuscate it by asserting it as its own opposite. In this way, war becomes “pacification,” and “déchirement,” the tearing apart of a people that it produces, is marked as a lamentable but unavoidable fact of history. When Barthes indicts this phenomenon as the operational logic behind most bourgeois mystifications, he offers us the tool to similarly undermine the equally “cunning” chronological inversion that has replaced the ongoing temporality of war, the “during,” and indeed the interminable present that Maurice Blanchot names in his own account of “writing the disaster,” with the retrospective finality of “post.” ² Despite his caution, however, the historical categorization of “post-war” has managed to absorb and so naturalize once again the rhetoric—Barthes’s allusion is specifically to the state’s rhetoric—that meant to perform the ideological work of transforming a time of being “at” war into a time marked by being “after” war. For art historians of the “post-war” period, interpreting art practices and works in exclusive reference to the major axis of the Second World War has meant, first and foremost, distancing ourselves and the objects of our study from other contemporane-

introduct ion

ous histories. Among these, this book is principally concerned with the crucial points of ideological intersection and overlap between the moment of French reconstruction after the Second World War, the consolidation of an emergent Europe, and, most significantly, decolonization and the wars fought to achieve it in much of Africa and Asia from the mid-1940s through the mid-1960s, or what I will hereafter refer to as the decades of decolonization. Having distanced ourselves and our objects from the complications of this history beyond its relationship to a state of war we presume to be “post” means that we have not fully seen the complete picture, either as it pertains to the interconnectedness of the episodes of state violence that marked this period or as it pertains to the debates about aesthetic practice and representation that forcibly accompanied them. While it is true that twentieth-century art history as a discipline has done little to acknowledge the claims of the colonized that emerged with urgent immediacy and with heightened visibility during these decades, it is also true that the field has been impaired in doing so because we have not seen the carefully constructed articulations of visuality that were developed to alternately frame and obscure these claims.³ In the long term, this situation has also meant that we have not always registered the impact that these articulations have had on charting visual practice, both in the geopolitical centers of empire and the cultures that developed there. But that point is beyond the parameters of this Introduction. In 1957, when Barthes was writing his weekly columns for the magazine Les lettres nouvelles— essays that would later form his Mythologies—France was embroiled in a significant war, even if, at that time, the official parlance to which Barthes alludes did not name it as such.4 For the purpose of refocusing the lens through which we view the French mid-century from one preoccupied with the condition of being “after” to one attentive to the conditions of existence “during,” it is helpful to recall a few historical facts that similarly reframe the decades in question. In particular, it is instructive to remember that the uprisings that would eventually culminate in the 1954–1962 Algerian War of Independence actually began in 1945, precisely on 8 May, a date much better celebrated in Western histories as “Victory in Europe Day” (VE Day), as the surrender of Nazi Germany to the Allied Powers came to be called at the time. So, just as one moment of violence and genocide was ending and precisely as it was being celebrated with pageantry and parade, another episode in what the historian Abdelmajid Hannoum has recently coined a “violent modernity” was beginning. Rather than discontinuous and contained, the history of war in France during the decades of decolonization would prove ongoing and perpetual.5 The centrality of this continuity to Algerian representations of the Algerian War of Independence is underscored by the dramatic re-enactment of the Sétif uprisings in Rachid Bouchareb’s Hors la loi (Outside the Law, 2010). As Bouchareb’s film shows with the painstaking realism celebrated in so many docudramas and the artistic productions that mimic them, on 8 May 1945 several thousand Algerians, many of whom had fought alongside Allied troops and whom Bouchareb thus shows costumed in uniform, amassed in Sétif to join the VE Day celebrations that were taking place on

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the streets of cities and towns across Algeria in much the same fashion as across metropolitan France.6 In Algeria, however, local colonial authorities only allowed Algerian participation in these celebrations on the condition that those assembled refrain from articulating any overt political platforms. When, instead, several people among the thousands assembled began chanting demands that the anti-colonialist leader, Messali Hadj, be freed from arrest in France, and calling for what Ferhat Abbas’s Manifeste du peuple algérien (1943) insisted be an “Algérie libre et indépendante,” the colonial police became nervous and eventually shot at a 26-year-old man carrying a green banner with a red star and a crescent moon, symbols of Algerian nationalism that would eventually constitute the Algerian flag. Violence broke out between the protestors and the police, and spread quickly to produce a generalized clash between native Algerians and European settlers that left approximately one hundred European settlers dead. In response, General Charles de Gaulle, then provisional leader of the French government and its future president, authorized the army—including militias stationed in nearby Guelma, foreign legion troops, and reserves of Senegalese and Moroccans summoned from nearby Oran—to intervene and restore peace. The military assault subsequently launched against the people of Sétif and the surrounding towns was so complete and so overwhelming that, in February 2005, the French ambassador to Algeria, Hubert Colin de Verdière, was forced to acknowledge it as a “massacre” in which, according to historians’ estimates, approximately 8,000 Algerians died (although this number, according to some accounts, represents fewer than one quarter of the actual number of dead).7 The stakes surrounding what this history means in France today are suggested by the fact that when Bouchareb’s film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010, riot police had to be called in to quell the protests against what some French audiences understood as the film’s biased and prejudicial account of the events in Sétif. For the purposes at hand, then, what happened in Sétif underscores the fact that, at the same time Europe was celebrating its liberation from Fascism and the end of six years of devasting war, French forces were already being redeployed, this time against— and not in defense of— a population that was also ostensibly governed under France’s authority and flag, even if it was not ascribed the full benefits of the rights otherwise ascribed its citizenry. Shortly after the Sétif massacre, French forces would also find themselves fighting a war to maintain the far eastern reaches of their empire in the First Indochinese War, or what is sometimes called the FrenchVietnamese War (1946–1954). The brutal defeat of the French by the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954— significantly, for France and its militaries, the same year the Algerian War of Independence officially began—marked not the end of a single war so much as the consolidation of a pattern of intervention that the French would come to repeat again and again in the series of wars, conflicts, and skirmishes in which they engaged, in order to maintain an empire that, before the Second World War, had been second in size only to that of Great Britain. The official declaration of the Algerians’ militarized demands for independence

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would not come until 1 November 1954, even though these demands had been long in the making.8 The Algerian War of Independence was eventually fought from 1954 until 1962, not only between the French army and the Algerian Armée de libération nationale (ALN) and Front de libération nationale (FLN), but also among factions of rival Algerian nationalists in both France and Algeria, and eventually between the French government and the organized paramilitary of right-wing opponents to Algerian independence led by French far-right Army generals who called themselves the Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS). The scope of such a war can only be properly grasped in terms of the many kinds of conflicts, armed and otherwise, that comprised it. Culture, as this book argues, figured chief among these conflicts. Along with its political and historical significance, however, such a culture tends to wither in the histories based on, if not actually constructed by the term “post-war.” Thus, this book turns to the possibilities of how this culture might have been seen otherwise in order to investigate how we might better re-see it now. In this introductory chapter, I focus on the immediate origins of the Algerian War of Independence, not because I want to suggest that they were the most important events of the thirty-year period under analysis in this book (although for some this is certainly the case). Rather, the Algerian War of Independence is of signal importance for this study of decades previously thought to be “post-war” because it establishes the contest between the French state as a false guarantor of rights and the significance of the claims made by those anxious to achieve their rights as sovereign political subjects, in excess of the statist provisions that have been so central to analyses of subalternity within colonial modernity. The Algerian War of Independence is also pivotal as a litmus test for the state’s imposition of the law as a means to deny— rather then ensure— such claims, and therefore also a key moment in the essential turn to extra-juridical means to implement and develop political invisibility. For the story that transpires during the decades of decolonization analyzed here, the art they occasioned, and how this art was deeply if inversely tied to debates about political representation, it is critical that these extra-juridical means often focused on the institutions that comprised the public sphere and the sites that comprised urban public space. Indeed, it was on 3 April 1955, almost a year after the declaration of Algerian independence by the FLN, that the French National Assembly voted to approve a law that would allow for the declaration of a “state of emergency.” This law allowed the government to censor or otherwise limit and control all the institutions of the public sphere, including the press, and also curtail or restrict public assembly. Such measures were further augmented by the decree of “Special Powers” in 1956, which not only enabled greater restriction of expression, but also prepared for the violation of human rights, such that internment camps and torture centers became logical and legal tools of the French wars to maintain the empire, just as they had been such important components of the National Revolution in Nazi Germany. Ultimately and rather famously, factions of the French military attempted a coup in Algiers on 13 May

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1958, in response to what many in the Army (and the settler populations with whom they were increasingly aligned) perceived as the metropole’s vacillation regarding the maintenance of the Algerian territories as an integral component of France’s geopolitical territory. This failed coup led to the collapse of the metropolitan government and, with it, the Fourth Republic. For France, such a collapse triggered an important shift in the configuration of governmental responsibilities of republicanism vis-à-vis the populations that the state was meant to “represent” and whose interests it was meant to serve. Along with this transformation, which was most immediately visible in the enhanced authority assigned to the president as elected sovereign, the problem of representing the past and the present as a means to envision and enact a future became central components of reestablishing French hegemony. Culture, in turn, would become a primary locus of this effort, as well. This book focuses on the site where these two mobilizations of culture as contestatory device and culture as normalizing control meet—literally, in the physical space of Paris. It does so in order to recontextualize and thus better understand a range of French visual practices during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s in light of the challenges that decolonization wrought on theories of representation, both political and pictorial, and the tacit implications that decolonization would have for official as well as unsanctioned French remembrances of the recent past, public. While decolonization and colonial remembrance are significantly opposite in their intent, it might nonetheless be said that they share a significant structural similarity at their core; indeed, each is organized around the ambition to shape and determine (at least in the short run) a national public. In this instance, the decolonizing processes that were set in motion by the events in Sétif and culminated in the Algerian War of Independence necessitated novel regimes of visuality to negotiate and influence the new modalities of public belonging that the war introduced. This was especially true in the way these modalities would be articulated in regard to the consolidation of memories surrounding the recent experience of the Second World War. By asserting the centrality that the Algerian War of Independence had on visual culture and the public experiences that it would enable within the boundaries of metropolitan France, my analysis here intends to highlight the significance of subaltern political agendas on establishing modern French visual and spatial culture. It does so with an eye to looking both forward and backward, so that we see the importance of these agendas in the early moments of decolonization as well as in the decades after independence had been achieved in Algeria (and in many other former colonies). This expanded history also means keeping the experiences of the 1940s—war, genocide, and occupation chief among them—in view as they explicitly impacted how historical experience would come to be represented in later decades. These experiences also reflected how definitions of national belonging would be forcefully articulated in relation to a long history of French universalist republicanism, understood at the time as having been sullied first (or worse, only) by the ideological interruption of the Vichy regime, when the French government colluded with the German occupation of their own country. In the context of the arguments that follow, and in light of this expanded histori-

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cal view of what we might call the “long 1950s,” I should clarify that in the above allusion to “subaltern political agendas,” I mean to invoke both those of the colonized populations of French empire—in this case mostly Algerians— as well as those among the French populace who were equally interpellated and shaped by a dominant French cultural project that attempted to represent their experience on their behalf. My use of the term “subaltern” therefore adheres to its use by Ranajit Guha in his essay, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India.” Guha uses the term to designate the broadest category of people who are defined in distinction to, but not dependent upon, the official governmental, economic, and juridical authority ascribed to the “elite.” 9 For Guha, one of the most important aspects of this term is that it establishes a category that is relational and always constructed in negotiation with shifting platforms of power. Within the narrative that this book charts, therefore, the Ashkenazi Jews living in Paris were certainly subaltern in their relationship to the state’s articulation of public memory in the mid-1940s, even though they also maintained the colonial authority of elites in relation to other populations, and even as their experiences have now come to occupy an emphatically central place in dominant historical (and art-historical) narratives. Because, however, the principal concern of this book is with representation—both political and pictorial, so to speak—it also bears emphasizing that my investments in the political agendas of the subaltern classes is not that of a historian or even of a sociologist, although I draw on work in both areas of expertise. My aim, nonetheless, is not to expose or identify the production of specific identitarian agencies heretofore unseen. Rather, following important advances made by Dipesh Chakrabarty and more recently by Achille Mbembe, I hope to lay the groundwork necessary to explain how such elisions of subaltern agendas themselves have been naturalized within histories of modernity and the disciplinary strictures upon which they depend.¹0 “Provincializing France,” as Mbembe and Chakrabarty would have it, means seeing it again: seeing it as it was and as it labored to picture itself during a history we have otherwise allowed to become myth— according to the logic of Barthes’s analysis— as well as seeing it with or alongside the history of its colonial past and in concert with the place of its colonial interventions. As Chakrabarty inveighs, such a project means writing a “history that deliberately makes visible, within the very structure of its narrative forms, its own repressive strategies and practices, the part it plays in collusion with the narratives of citizenships in assimilating to the projects of the modern state all other possibilities of human solidarity.” ¹¹ While popular and scholarly narratives of modern art, modern aesthetics, modern literature, and even modern urbanism have long taken France and its capital as their central example—with good reason, given the ideological articulation of French statecraft around the universalist ideals about representability so valorized by perceptions of modern subjectivity—my interests in returning to Paris during this period diverge significantly from those around which these narratives have largely been structured over the past fifty years.¹² Following Chakrabarty’s challenge to “make visible” the collusions of the cultural theories we invent and in deference to the material at hand,

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I should emphasize that this study has no interest in dislodging French cultural production from the central position it enjoys in the historiography of modernity. Rather, it intends, as Mbembe instructs, reimagining this history as transnational, as equally rooted in the experiences of the colonies as it is in those of the metropole. Doing so means redefining what France means in order to expand the purviews of how we understand the modern that issues from it without compromising the complex realities of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism that sometimes render recent models of “alternative” modernities somewhat utopian. Indeed, the integrity of the French nation as equivalent to the “hexagon” that is defined by its physical borders has already been persistently challenged by the interests and claims articulated by those excluded from the categories of belonging that France, like other nation-states, has developed in accordance with the self-interest of modern democracy and its adherence to the contradictory principles of collective consensus and liberal individualism. Some of those challenges make my point: that the history of French art and visual culture has also always been the history of Algerian art and visual culture. Here, too, a second clarification is helpful and important, because I do not propose to rewrite French art as Algerian art. While this might be an interesting project, it actually runs counter to the methodological stakes of the arguments I am making here, which focus instead on the complex relationship between national productions and thus on the forces that come to negotiate, represent, and constitute such cultural nationalisms. These, in part, are what Mbembe suggests are always in flux when he insists we now recognize that “every nation is now transnational and diasporic. The crucible in which the nation is being forged is as much outside its territorial borders as inside. The distant, the elsewhere, and the here-at-home meet.” ¹³ While the project of creating a more inclusive canon of modernism by incorporating art made by Algerians alongside their European counterparts exceeds my study, it is certainly work that other scholars can and should undertake. This is also true of recuperating the women who, as artists and activists, labored alongside the men described here. What this book intends to do, in place of such recuperative or corrective projects, is to understand France through the fundamental tears and contradictions at the heart of empire, just as it proposes to understand culture, regardless of whether it is attributed to an “Algerian” maker or a “French” one, as also always subject to the transnational conditions of the subjects who produce it and those who are produced by it. As much as France is the target of this book’s analysis, then, so too is the model of culture that has been used to buttress the very model of the nation-state’s representation of itself that has allowed us to imagine something like a hexagonal France in the first place. In the chapters that follow, I contend that the visibility and invisibility of various populations, subaltern or otherwise—French, Algerian, pied-noir, Jewish—within the geopolitical entities formed and re-formed by the shifting borders and allegiances forged after the end of the Second World War, indeed “after Sétif,” were the result of actions and agents that, until now, we have not been able to see within the purview

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of art and visual cultural analyses of the period. These actions cannot be dislodged from their ideological embeddedness in the Europeanization that began in earnest with the establishment of the European Common Market, and in response to the assertion of American military and moral hegemony against the threat of global communism. But it was also during this time that Western nations began to increase the stakes of their engagement in the conflicts regarding those territories that had been divvied up after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, thereby establishing the new parameters of an emergent global politics concentrated on the particularity of a given place. Of particular interest to this study is how these historical elements influenced the articulation of the very same aesthetic and urban models that we have since come to naturalize and rationalize as self-evidently modern. The impact that such simultaneously temporal and spatial contests for self-representation had on the production of cultural meaning cannot be underestimated. And, in order to understand them more fully, we need to historicize what has long motivated the very impulse not to acknowledge them as significant. For art historians, taking up this double perspective allows us to focus on global histories that rehistoricize and recontextualize—that is, fundamentally reinterpret—the assumptions about abstraction and figuration, spectacle and reality, speech and text, politics and ethics that pervade the disciplinary preoccupation with this period. To begin with the most basic question: what were the mechanics by which those unacknowledged within ascendant discursive enterprises effected images of themselves or otherwise attempted to represent their own experience? In accessing what the political theorist Hannah Arendt would generalize as the “public space of appearance”— and which she, like the other figures in this book’s analysis, abandons to the world of men— such subjects challenged contemporaneous theorizations of the public sphere as an enlightened space of rational, language-based exchange, and thereby also resisted the imperial logics generated through that same sphere.¹4 But, how did they do so, and in what forms? Another question might be: who could constitute a public or a publicly recognized subject within the short-lived Fourth Republic, or the Fifth, which followed it? For whom did they do so? In what kind of space and in what kind of temporality? To answer these questions, the chapters of this book trace an arc from the administrative control of urban (and ostensibly public) space to its reoccupation by those subjects positioned by the statist apparati as “invisible.” In so doing, this book demarcates how both official and invisible modes of occupation drew upon the past even as they formulated alternative projections of the future. To some degree, this means challenging the kinds of visual production that have entered the canonical understanding of the period with those that have not, in order to understand the processes that the former privilege. Thus, while this is a book about art, it deliberately understands that term broadly, considering work made in a variety of media, and by a host of differently schooled players. In order to avoid reinforcing the hierarchical division between advanced artistic practice and popular experiences and practices throughout the mid-twentieth century, the phrase “decolonizing art,”

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which I use throughout this book, deliberately plays on the double valence of the word “decolonizing.” Here it is intended in both its adjectival form, wherein the art is part and parcel of the historical contest fought over decolonization, and as a verb, wherein the action being named shifts to our own attempts to “decolonize” the field of art and its history in accordance with efforts to differently imagine alternative representational possibilities. In what follows, therefore, I endeavor to shift the ascription of agency away from individual artists and intellectuals and instead toward communities and crowds, as is consistent with my claim that decolonization was the motivating and animating factor of these practices. This means exploring and using two archives, the one official, the other popular and ephemeral, and doing so in ways that mine the contradictions between the two as sources of productive re-imaginings. This book’s expanded disciplinary reach is thus not without its own tactical ambition. To place a politics of cultural memory outside the dominant institutions of the archive or the museum (and beyond the artifacts and art objects that fill them) suggests new genealogies for the visual practices of the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries. The goal here lies not simply in indicating that the history and the voices of the subaltern have been occluded in the visual histories of a particular period, but rather that such silencing actually constitutes our historically received concept of the visual. To attempt to reawaken those voices or to prepare for that reawakening is to revise and renew the visual as a sensorial process, one that is linked to the processes of speech and sound and their duration in space, and so a constituent component of experience and its realization. Of necessity, then, this book investigates the points at which theories of political representation crossed paths with theories and models of aesthetic representation. Thus, visual— and to a lesser degree, aural—production is treated here within the context of contemporaneous art criticism, but also in concrete relationship to the broader debates about citizenship and representational democracy that decolonization occasioned. In these contexts, it should be emphasized that neither my skills nor my interests are those of a historian per se. In the pages that follow I am less interested in correcting the historical record or indeed replacing one written around French names with another written around those of Algerians or other subalterns. Rather, I am interested in analyzing the processes by which these debates about belonging and the nation have been—and continue to be—represented, especially insofar as these representations turn on non-representation or invisibility. From a Nation Torn is written in three parts, which roughly follow a chronology from the mid-1940s through the end of the Algerian War of Independence in 1962, with a brief, concluding consideration of the legacy left by these events and a nod to how we might model a practice of decolonial looking in the present.¹5 In addition to their chronological order, the three parts of this book correspond to three different representational modalities— space, language, and image— and to the ways in which each modality is both contingent upon and constitutive of experience. At the same time, each part of the book negotiates the impossibility of locating a precise or exact correspondence between representation and experience in a world predicated

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exclusively on visual engagement. That is to say, each chapter’s analysis turns on understanding the shifting historical reasons why the visual cannot be understood without recourse to other cultural and political realms that interact with it. With that in mind, the first part of the book considers how urban space is generated according to the logic of pictorial aestheticization; the second considers avant-garde techniques squarely in dialogue with the semiotic and acoustic properties of language, in its filmic, literary, and spoken iterations; and the third considers the photographic image that haunts both of these first two categories. Part I, “Fragments and Facades: André Malraux and the Image of the Past as the Future of the Present,” grounds the book’s assessment of public experience in an analysis of the changing physical spaces of Paris throughout the decades under consideration. This I understand as quite literally setting the stage for the possibilities of imagining or picturing public participation on both the national and the individual level that animate the next two parts of the book. In this section of the book, I theorize what it would mean to consider the actual parameters of such participation as having been determined in advance by urban models developed in Paris during the Vichy period (1940 to 1944) as well as in the North African capitals that had been built or rebuilt according to the standards of French imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first chapter, “Fragments; or, The Ends of Photography,” examines the mid-century ambitions to “restore” central Paris that were articulated by André Malraux, France’s first minister of culture (1959–1969). I understand these ambitions through the lens of the decontextualized, photographybased aesthetic models that Malraux cultivated in the obsessive revisions to which he put his seminal treatise Les voix du silence, from 1937–1951. Refuting standard readings of Malraux’s written work as simply an exemplum of high-modernist method or as an exclusive discourse about the institutions of the museum and/or photography, this chapter defines instead what I call Malraux’s “amnesiac aesthetics.” Underlying this aesthetic and the urbanisms it would eventually enable when Malraux would become France’s first minister of culture (1959–1969) is a model of historical experience that simultaneously refutes both the possibility of knowledge about the past and cognizance of the conditions of the present. I argue that such a model is deeply implicated in the crises of the nation that were occasioned by the end of the Second World War and beginning of the Algerian War of Independence. While Malraux was presented as a preservationist, his urban visions actually extended his radically decontextualized aesthetics to the real space of the city as it was used and experienced by inhabitants of all backgrounds, but particularly those who could be identified as foreign. This created what I call a “space of silence,” which was profoundly rooted in Malraux’s understanding of both the semiotic spacing of the museum and the fictional capacities of the photographic apparatus, the device upon which his entire aesthetic model depends. In this attention to fiction and the semiotics that sustain it, the first chapter also frames how the succeeding chapters treat language—in both its sonic and its visual properties—within the space of the city.

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Finally, it frames the ways in which the photographic image and the near-incessant re-theorizations of its function complement and sometimes complicate the way language is discussed in the rest of the book. By redefining large swaths of urban space as subject to the conservation principles previously ascribed to monumental architectural patrimony, Malraux’s urban vision placed the city of Paris at the core of debates regarding the French national imaginary and its relationship to the long durée of the past. In fact, Malraux’s model did so at precisely the same moment that the French nation was being transformed by the Algerian War of Independence. These considerations constitute the material focus of chapter 2, “Façades; or, The Space of Silence.” Here, I suggest that Malraux’s “amnesiac aesthetics” inscribed onto the restoration of central parts of Paris the same effort to render invisible that would characterize the state’s response to the recent history of anti-imperial opposition and did so in order that the city might symbolically elide the visible evidence of a failed colonial project, both materially and in terms of the various populations that inhabited the restored areas. In so doing, the silence that Malraux hoped to engender through an aesthetic model would come to speak volumes. Part II of this book, “Between Resistance and Refusal: The Language of Art and Its Publics,” continues to assess the relationships between the 1940s and the early 1960s—that is to say, between the end of the Second World War (and the Holocaust, which so often stands as a synecdoche for the longer war) and the official end of the Algerian War of Independence in 1962. In this case, however, rather than focus on the official discourse of governmental and bureaucratic interventions (even as mediated by aesthetic theories), the discussion here focuses on the specific optic of the so-called advanced art practices that explicitly engaged with a legacy of avant-garde production even as they attempted— and often failed—to subvert the institutional and geographic parameters upon which this history had been founded. In particular, chapter 3, “Sonic Youth, Sonic Space: Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of Deterritorialization,” establishes the roots of the representational crises regarding vision, language, and the city in the processes of decolonization that had begun in the late 1940s, but which were often occluded by discourse meant to universalize the experience of the Shoah as the defining catastrophe of modern history and as the grounds of eventual European consolidation. In this chapter, I analyze the multimedia work— including poetry, film, and performance—produced by a group of artists affiliated with the Paris-based movement known as Lettrism. The work of Isidore Isou, a Jewish exile from Romania (where he had survived the extermination camps to the East) and other Lettrists in Paris attempted to create a “spatialized” language that they hoped would circumvent traditional language’s embeddedness in routine, everyday perception and its calcification as the result of the consolidation of national boundaries throughout the first half of the twentieth century. I argue that it was the Lettrists’ hope that this reconceptualization would engender new tools of discourse and, in so doing, enable communication and representation beyond the limitations of spaces demarcated by national language. In this, they aimed to foment a deterritorialized

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language based on the shared experience of sonic immersion and immediacy. Similar efforts are addressed in relationship to Isou’s film, Traité de bave et d’ éternité (Treatise on Drool and Eternity, 1952), which aspired to inscribe representations of war into a site of presumptive peace. By 1961, Paris would become the literal site of violence that Isou’s representational gambits had tried to remind viewers it was, either metaphorically or by association. Chapter 4 thus further examines urban articulation and expression within this context, taking a more acute focus on the Algerian War of Independence as it came to be represented in the metropolitan capital. While it maintains the focus on both the subject and the object conjured by the same broadly conceived aesthetic registers of Isou’s Lettrism, the fourth chapter, “La France déchirée: The Politics of Representation and the Spaces In-Between,” turns to a more strictly conventional art practice. It looks at décollage, a process by which an artwork is created by tearing pieces away, rather than adding them on. This pictorial innovation was created in 1949 by Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglé when they mounted an accumulation of vandalized street posters onto canvas. This chapter takes particular focus on La France déchirée (Torn Apart France), a 1961 exhibition of Hains’s and Villeglé’s décollage that meant to make reference to the political divisions then tearing at the nation as a result of the wars of independence in Indochina and Algeria. Here, I explicitly examine the particular problems of representing, experiencing, and ultimately contesting what contemporary political speech and popular discourse tried to dismiss as a non-war. This leads me to investigate the possibility of a viable public sphere and representational politics as they were constructed in two basic arenas: 1) the art objects produced by the décollagistes; and 2) the challenge that décollage presented to the semi-private space of the gallery. I argue that Hains’s and Villeglé’s 1961 installation of décollages— culled from political posters torn by Parisian passersby during the accelerated history of decolonization with which this book is concerned— engages in a critique of both institutional space and universalist, participatory democracy, pointedly helping us to see the limitations of both as they were experienced during the period under discussion. Moreover, the model of aesthetic practice generated by their art leads to a consideration of how French leftists could and did use aesthetic practices to generate spaces of appearance in which the claims of citizens upon the nation-state and its vessels might be better heard or seen. Such an analysis forces an explicit comparison with the techniques and tactics understood as viable means of articulating an “engaged” art during the historical period of the French Resistance, which I do in order to demonstrate how these tactics are not as historically stable as we have come to understand them in the overarching periodization of a mythic “post-war” production. It also provides an opportunity to further trace the impact that photography would continue to have on aesthetic thinking throughout the period, a leitmotif that runs through the book. The third and final part of the book, “Reidentifications: Seeing Citizens Being Seen,” turns to the models of seeing and listening generated by those subjects that

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implicitly, and at times explicitly, give rise to and inform the practices studied in the first four chapters, emphasizing how it is incumbent upon viewers themselves to learn to see these practices as such. To this end, chapter 5, “‘The Eye of History’: Photojournalism, Protest, and the Manifestation of 17 October 1961,” returns the reader to the public space of the street and to the stakes of Malraux’s “aesthetics of amnesia.” This chapter considers a manifestation (a peaceful demonstration) in 1961 by tens of thousands of Algerians in the city of Paris against a curfew imposed by the prefect of police, Maurice Papon.¹6 The photographic capture of the brutal suppression that marked the French response to this Algerian demonstration allows me to position it as a visual cultural event on the same order as any other mode of representation, and in specific dialogue with the image of the city— authored, so to speak, by such efforts to “silence” and to scotomize as suggested by Malraux’s revisionist urbanism. Rather than dwell on the question of whether these images do or do not objectify or appropriate the experience of the subjects they depict, and rather than celebrate them as photographs “taken” by authorial agents, I read them as an effort to make room for an Algerian subjectivity within something other than the silent space otherwise allotted to them. The model of photographic possibility that I develop here encourages a reconsideration of the politics of picturing in a period largely understood to be coincident with the spectacularization of everyday life and which, as such, is associated with a presumed need to denigrate the claims of certain genres of photographic practice. In brief, this tendency marks the transition between so-called modern and post-modern aesthetics, both of which, I want to underscore in this book, result in the same visual aporias, precisely because they repeat the same incapacity to see the colonial conditions at their core. The book’s final chapter presents a retrospective glance at these aesthetic dynamics as mapped across the first five chapters and as newly parsed in more recent visual practices. This chapter focuses on the film Caché (Hidden, 2005), directed by Michael Haneke, analyzing it as a series of tableaux generated by an image-maker, rather than as a narrative made by a filmmaker. This last chapter also examines a twelve-minute digital video, Europa 2005–27 octobre (2006), directed by Danièle Huillet and JeanMarie Straub, who drew on the tradition of the cinétracts circulated as models of leftist agitation in the 1960s. The importance of the dialogue staged by these two works, each of which tells us how to look at contemporary experience as history, is triangulated with an analysis of The Algerian Annex, by Dennis Adams, as it was installed at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1989. This analysis is underscored from the point of view of 2005, which I argue was a momentous year in the history of the “postcolony” as Mbembe has defined it, which is to say not at all as a place “after” or free from the effects of colonization.¹7 It was in 2005, after all, that the French government responded to urban insurrections that began just outside of Paris by issuing a state of emergency in accordance with laws first developed to contain colonial dissent. In this retrospective view, “Looking Past the State of Emergency” serves as a coda to the questions posed throughout the book about representation and visibility by pro-

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posing a model of reception based on a different articulation of the ethics of seeing, looking, and watching. It also brings the book’s arguments about the period of decolonization to bear on France’s contemporary problems of integrating, symbolically and literally, ethnic and racial others within the national public today. Such integrations, I suggest, are in accord with what we have learned to see as the claims made on behalf of a decolonized visibility. REMEMBERING THE PRESENT

In telling this story, and indeed in telling the many stories from which it is formed, this book aims to respond to the galvanizing challenge presented by the art historian David Joselit: that we reimagine our ambition in writing art history as one organized toward the imperative of writing something like a work of political science.¹8 As I understand it, this means reading art objects and the visualities they engender as primary sites of theorization and analysis, rather than as secondary or tertiary epiphenomena. It also means understanding them as essential sites of conflict and evaluation. More than just a question of rhetoric, to “decolonize art,” as this project proposes, is to generate new platforms from which to understand, critique, and theorize the very same image culture(s) that we presume we know so well. It also demands that we reimagine the roles that diverse visual vocabularies play in enacting public participation, a core component of political theory and practice. As opportunities to figure and refigure public modalities of belonging and participation, the aesthetic practices I examine were not merely secondary effects. Rather, they were a primary ground upon which the conditions of coloniality and postcoloniality were imagined and contested. Indeed, through the various regimes of the spatial, the linguistic, the sonic, and the visual—and through the resulting politics of publicness they all engendered or refused—colonizer and colonized fought a pitched battle. The stakes of this battle, I argue, were nothing less than the continuing ascendancy of colonialism or the incipient decolonization of a subaltern multitude. By repositioning the stakes of achieving visibility— or what we might think of as perceptibility—in this way, this book disengages the phenomenon of being seen from the myopic stronghold that Guy Debord’s construction of “the spectacle” as monocular and unidirectional has long had over the period’s analysis. Instead, this book spatializes and temporalizes the phenomenon of being seen, insisting upon its multiple and material vantage points as sites of engaged political practice. Most of this book’s writing has been nearly coincident with the situation that some have referred to as “the war on terror,” and which others have decried as a “permanent” or “perpetual” war.¹9 The imperative to understand my work as a reader of aesthetic objects in relationship to this war— as informed by the fact that I have lived through and during it—has motivated the work and the analysis I present here. Over the course of the past many years that I have studied materials from the 1950s and 1960s, I have seen there signs of the present that struck me simultaneously as all too familiar and yet all too unthinkable, even as I continued to hear their echo in news

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from Iraq or Afghanistan on my radio or see their doubles in the photographs, for example, issuing from Abu Ghraib that arrived with such frequency into my inbox. In light of the urgencies of our own moment, it has become increasingly impossible, not to mention perhaps unethical, not to acknowledge what it was that I, trained as a proper modernist, had learned not to see, or worse, learned to deliberately ignore in this earlier period. In this book, therefore, I attempt to reverse the effects of that blindness; to imagine that making, receiving, arguing, presenting, and postulating during history means maintaining more than simply a sense of being contemporary to, but instead, of being contemporary with, and engaging in. As the philosopher and literary theorist Maurice Blanchot, who figures so prominently in this book, wrote in a retrospective glance toward his own position in the period of history analyzed here: We are on the edge of disaster without being able to situate it in the future: it is rather always already past, and yet we are on the edge or under the threat, all formulations which would imply the future—that which is yet to come—if the disaster were not that which does not come, that which has put a stop to every arrival. To think the disaster (if this is possible, and it is not possible inasmuch as we suspect that the disaster is thought) is to have no longer any future in which to think it. It is time to see beyond the disaster. Let us instead look at what the disaster, such as it has been thought, did not see.²0

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FRAGMENTS AND FAÇADES: André Malraux and the Image of the Past as the Future of the Present

FRAGMENTS; OR, THE ENDS OF PHOTOGRAPHY

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For the world itself has taken on a “photographic face”; it can be photographed because it tries to be absorbed into the spatial continuum which yields to snapshots. —Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography” (1927) in Mass Ornament, 1995

ears before France would experience the interruption of German occupation during the Second World War and long before the French would be required to come to terms with the shame resulting from the subsequent years of Vichy collaboration; when the French prime minister, Léon Blum, and his Popular Front promised to reform the nation under the hopeful banner of socialist cooperation; and when Algeria seemed a permanent extension of the so-called hexagone française, André Malraux, the French novelist, art theorist, and eventual minister of cultural affairs, diverted his attention from chronicling revolution to embark upon the long process of analyzing what he called then “the psychology of art.” ¹ His musings about the coordinates of a primary, universal language of artistic practice—first published in the journal Verve in 1937— quickly became something of an obsession for him.² The 1937 essay was promptly followed by similarly-themed forays, such as “Psychologie des renaissances,” ³ and, in 1938, by “De la représentation en Orient et en Occident.” 4 Having only just begun, Malraux proceeded to fuse these articles into a larger work, expanding and redistributing the exposition that would ultimately constitute the three volumes of La psychologie de l’art, published in sequence as Le musée imaginaire (1947), La création artistique (1948), and La monnaie de l’absolu (1949). Still not finished, Malraux again reworked and transformed these volumes, illustrating them with hundreds of new, carefully selected photographic reproductions, and reorganizing them until, with the addition of a fourth volume, Les métamorphoses d’Apollon, they took the shape of the 1951 publication Les voix du silence, translated two years later into English as The Voices of Silence.5 (Fig. 1.1.) Taken as a whole, these four volumes contribute little to the analysis of particu-

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Figure 1.1. Maurice Jarnoux, photograph, André Malraux standing over an array of images on the floor of his office, as published in Paris Match, 1950. © Maurice Jarnoux / Paris Match. Image courtesy of Scoop (Hachette Filipacchi Associés).

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lar art works or particular periods of art production. As such, they barely partake in the category of what has become institutionalized in American universities as the discipline of “art history,” although the universalizing accommodations that Malraux provides are finding worrisome new fashion, if not also purchase, as the discipline attempts to rethink itself in the new universalisms attached to the rhetoric of globalizing the university and art worlds that append it.6 It is instead as a historical document that Les voix du silence is of interest to this study of visual and cultural politics in the era of decolonization. Authored by the man who would become France’s first minister of culture and who would accordingly wed the idea of the French nation to its cultural production in unprecedented ways, Les voix represents a tenacious effort to decontextualize the art object from the constraints of any spatio-temporal specificity and liberate it instead as pure form through comparison and stylistic association with other objects. As such, the book provides poignant testimony to the ways in which visual culture, most broadly put, was enlisted as fertile ground on which to stage ideological debates about knowledge of the past and therefore of national belonging in the years following the Second World War and during the ensuing wars fought to preserve France’s colonial empire. Indeed, embedded within the historically bracketed aesthetic program we have come to identify with the shorthand catch-all “modernist,” Malraux’s treatise on the autonomous power that he identifies as “style”— and which he evokes through a juxtaposition of photographic details of cultural objects linked to all periods, places, and purposes—harbors a deep-seated teleology that posits abstracted form, ideally French and almost exclusively dating from before the First World War, as the final, irreducible recipient of meaning. This bias has been repeated to the point of naturalization within canonical formulations of twentieth-century art history that culminate in considerations of the return to these celebrated forms during the so-called post-war period. Anglophone efforts to discern the potential importance of Malraux’s project to its own epoch have focused primarily on the first and most-read of the four volumes, Le musée imaginaire, and on the implications of Malraux’s models for contemporaneous developments in museological practice. Translated as “the museum without walls,” the meaning of the titular phrase shifts in the English from an emphasis on the imaginary realm of the collective mentality that Malraux meant to designate as grounds for a collective unconscious (in the revived manner of Henri Bergson or even JeanPaul Sartre) to one focused on a material world of architectural spaces that might actually be configured “without walls.” 7 As Rosalind Krauss has noted, this change in focus diverges from the critique that Malraux himself proffered about the museum’s responsibility for having shifted the analysis of art from one based on visual singularity to the kind of repeatability more commonly associated with a semiotic regularity that is reinscribed in the museum’s emphasis on chronological development and stylistic juxtaposition. Those critics who focus on the museum in Malraux’s title or even on the more abstract idea of the collection, to the exclusion of the images on which it might be based, only recapitulate the bias of the English mis-translation and thus

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continue to obscure a crucial aspect of Malraux’s project, which puts at least equal focus on the image that lies at the heart of the French word imaginaire. In what follows, I want to insist on the significance of this “image” within Malraux’s program and to thereby re-open his text to an expanded analysis, one that redirects us toward a reading of French visual culture in the years following the Second World War that not only exceeds, but also historicizes the decontextualized modernist model developed during this time. In so doing, we can situate Malraux’s model as both a product of as well, perhaps, as a constructive force behind the colonial violence that permeated the decades during which he was writing and revising his study and putting its conclusions to work. For if Malraux’s thinking about the museum is indeed concerned with what Krauss describes as the institution of the museum as a “space neutralized by efforts to range and to classify,” we cannot forget that space is not, at least at this point in his career, the primary victim of his taxonomical obsession.8 Before turning his attention to actual spaces, and urban ones at that, Malraux would have to wait until 1959, when Charles de Gaulle would appoint him to serve as France’s first minister of state charged with cultural affairs and thereby entrust him with the revival of the French arts and the rejuvenation of the French capital at the precise moment that France was experiencing the two most significant spatial disruptions of the twentieth century: the concomitant disintegration of its overseas empire and the rapid urbanization experienced within its continental borders. This time would also coincide primarily with the period of the Algerian War of Independence, an overlap that I will illustrate as crucial to Malraux’s model of historical thinking over the course of this and the following chapter. For the time being, then, the “space” Malraux describes in Les voix du silence— whether or not it was meant to be literalized as a book of photographs, as Malraux would do in La sculpture mondiale, or carried around in the recesses of something Malraux imagined might constitute a collective human unconscious—is the space designated by the borders of images, and, more particularly, images of images, including anything of art historical significance that can be photographed and then reproduced. In other words, what Malraux is concerned with here is the space of photography, or the imagistic space that photographic reproduction enables: a space of façades and fragments. The strange, mono-categorical taxonomy that Malraux develops to understand the photographic fragments on which he bases his arguments renders all cultural artifacts, including paintings and sculptures, as infinite variations of the same ontological truth about the similarity of form communicated by the photographic image. As such, Malraux’s rage to classify reveals a profound aversion to that alterity, cultural and historical, that makes artifacts resist homogenization and, indeed, that makes experience resist abstraction. Far, in fact, from offering a discussion on the exclusive subject of the museum or its implicit modernist attributes, Malraux’s Les voix provides nothing less than a fully articulated, negative discourse on the photographic image and its relationship to history. Such a discourse eventually

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forms the bedrock of Malraux’s model of urban space, which similarly articulates itself through an equally negative discourse, this time on the composition of the public and its relationship to national belonging and republican representation. Given that Les voix is primarily about the photographs that might constitute and certainly enable the musée imaginaire, it is all the more surprising that, of the several silent voices that the four volumes ventriloquize, the most suspiciously muted is that of photography itself. Strictly speaking, photography as a medium in its own right is almost entirely excluded from Malraux’s narrative, named in only a handful of references, each of which precludes assessing photography as an art form unto itself. Instead, we might understand Malraux’s text as performing a precise inversion of the formula that Eduardo Cadava coined—“there is no thinking of history that is not at the same time a thinking of photography” 9—to describe the essay upon which Malraux so heavily drew and with which Hal Foster positions Malraux in dialectic engagement in his own analysis of Malraux’s text.¹0 That essay is, of course, Walter Benjamin’s seminal “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” which Malraux would have read in translation in 1936 when it was first published by Pierre Klossowski in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, the Paris-based journal of the Frankfurt school in exile.¹¹ It was only a few weeks following this publication, in fact, that Malraux would first use Benjamin’s important expression “aestheticizing war,” a reference he repeated at a dinner held by the Nation magazine in his and Louis Fischer’s honor.¹² In both instances, Malraux’s charge about the dangers of “the total militarizing of the nation” that might produce such an aestheticized state of war was levied at the fascistas in Spain and the kind of cultural practice both he and Benjamin would have agreed, at least at this moment, that Fascism propagates.¹³ Returning to Les voix, we might say that in this text there is no thinking about photography that is not at the same time a thinking about history. Indeed, Malraux’s thinking through photography and the photographic capture of reality is, conversely, a way to think about history, even if his investments in historical knowledge and its import precisely contradict those that Benjamin outlines in his “Work of Art” essay. In Malraux’s hands, photography, or more precisely the photographic image, is made to be both the starting point that enables him to recast and re-root histories— artistic and otherwise— and, importantly, the vehicle that enacts their transformation and relocation from the realm of the material to that of the imaginary, where pictures circulate independently of the objects or the events they describe. In this separation of objects from the imagistic referents meant to elaborate upon them, Malraux celebrates the severance of historical and culturally determined objects from the contexts that might otherwise circumscribe and help to define them. As such, he aligns his view of art in opposition to the more acutely phenomenological and even almost kinesthetic strain of thinking that we see in Benjamin’s text. Instead, he chooses a more metaphysical mystification, which the German would have abhorred. Malraux’s erasure of the contextual in favor of a universal abstraction grounded in the

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photographic optic is the prerequisite for a colonial project that rests precisely, and especially in Malraux’s case, on the authority inherent in surveying and ordering the world and its history from the totalizing vantage point of the museum.¹4 Of course, neither Malraux nor Benjamin was the first or the last figure to think through the relationship between history and photography. Before turning to the specifics of Malraux’s treatment of the apparatus that is photographic reproduction, it is helpful to position his work in dialogue with another model that also explicitly addresses the issues that infuse his reflections. Years, in fact, before Malraux embarked upon the “Psychology of Art” project, and almost as if in cautionary anticipation of the eventual consequences of the aesthetic program it would come to articulate, Siegfried Kracauer had also seized upon what he, too, understood to be the negative relationship between historical knowledge and the photograph, insisting that the “flood” of photographs present in contemporaneous media actually leads to a diminishment of knowledge. “Never before has an age been so informed about itself,” Kracauer proclaimed in his 1927 essay, “Photography,” only to quickly turn such prophetic diagnosis on its back: “Never before has a period known so little about itself.” ¹5 Kracauer explains the troubled marriage of photographic reproduction and historical specificity by reminding us, as Malraux would also do, about the shared origins of the nineteenth-century inventions of both photography and the museum. To these two developments, Kracauer links the advent of specifically historicist analysis, which he also roots as originating in the nineteenth century, and which he also understands as a false means to true knowledge. It is in this triadic relationship—museum, photographic technology, and historicism—that Kracauer locates the keys to his argument that humans’ attempts to master their world have achieved limited results. For Kracauer, the photograph constitutes the spatial equivalent of the temporal determinism embedded in historicist narrativity. Both work to evaporate the actual context and lived circumstances of events by overdetermining, in the one, a necessarily sequential relationship—what we might call cause and effect— and in the other, a singular view onto a multifaceted object. In his most famous example, a grandmother becomes visible and so remembered only in the publicity photograph that positions and so fixes her as a movie diva. Multitudes of divergent memories are lost in the name of preserving this one photographic view, which roots time in the spatial confines of what we know in the present. The photograph thus universalizes singularity at exactly the same time that it strips specificity of its particularity. Within the logic of this model and in order for what Kracauer imagines to be the actual historical worth and significance or memory-value of an event to be revealed, the spatial certainty of the image—what Kracauer calls its “surface coherence”— must be interrupted, since it is this cohesion that traps the photograph in one moment in time, always and already a fragment of a larger whole.¹6 Such fragmentation results in the preservation of nothing more than the fact of an object or a person’s existence at a given time, rendering unnecessary the decontextualized details of the moment which, no matter their completeness in the image, are always excluded from

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conjecture back toward the plenitude of the real. To disrupt such false coherence of time and place, Kracauer advocates in favor of the entirely different kind of fragmentation that he describes as characteristic of cinematic montage. The suture necessary to weave disparate sequences and images together would, in his view, disrupt the historicist determination of a concatenated narrative in favor of asyntactic contingency, which might then reflect new or previously invisible realities back to a humanity that had heretofore found itself too convinced of its own inevitable advance on nature. However—and again as if condemning Malraux’s musée imaginaire even before its conception—Kracauer warns against the inevitable consequences of photography precisely in terms that arise from the dangers he attributes to collecting. He warns that “all spatial configurations,” by which he means to include those manifest in the photograph alongside those contrived by the museum, eventually become “incorporated into the central archive in unusual combinations which distance them from human proximity,” no matter how they are montaged.¹7 For Kracauer, the archive and the museological collections that mimic it actually distance humanity from knowledge of itself that might otherwise include, for instance, the appreciation of history and the cultural differentiation upon which knowledge rests. On the contrary, Malraux celebrates such collections, locating in the proliferation of images that constitute the archive an increasingly abstracted capacity toward pure knowledge as it might be rendered without historical limitations or respect for the facts of cultural difference. So, for example, where Kracauer sees distance and loss, Malraux finds occasion for a universal aesthetic experience and so the basis of a commonality that exceeds nations, cultures, or indeed the events often called upon to define both. It is not without significance that this kind of universalist approach to visual experience was precisely how the museum itself was theorized at the moment of its own origins, at which point it, too, placed a heavy claim on the discursive triumvirate of image, photography, and history. Like Kracauer’s suspicion about the other nineteenth-century innovations of photography and historicism, which, again, he worried would threaten to sever man from historical consciousness, the museum as an institution has been subject to similar critique for the ostensibly dehistoricizing impulse manifest in its willingness to sever objects from their cultural milieus and pin them on the white walls of institutionalized credibility. Yet, as generations of institutional critique both within and without the art world have labored to make visible, to describe museum space as dehistoricized is not quite accurate. The museum does not, in the end, render mute the objects it collects, though Malraux’s imaginary museum does so when it claims that the fragments it organizes are equivalent to “voices of silence.” Instead, the “real” museum endows the objects it collects with a particular voice, puts them to work, and, through a combination of internal contextual framing, description, and spatial juxtaposition, makes them attest to a certain story. Rather than presenting objects as unrelated to history, the museum organizes its objects and the history they are meant to evidence from what Didier Maleuvre has cannily demonstrated is “the standpoint of a supra-

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historical, transcendental notion of what this history is—from a principle of rigid identity above and beyond diversity.” ¹8 From this standpoint, qualities of similitude and sameness are highlighted through the juxtaposition and proximity of objects in order to confirm the specific narratives that the museum chooses to construct. While the nineteenth-century museum tended to present itself as self-identical to the image of a nation and its people as formed by a particular history and attached to a unified collectivity, we see here how it also heralded a model of universality, even as the actual purchase of such a grand claim is rendered null and void by the specificity of the national imaginary put on display. And so it is as well with Malraux’s pretension toward a global aesthetic order, which— despite the transnational collection he proposes in his imaginary museum—is still organized from the point of view of France and, as we shall see, the time of an eternal present. In the study alluded to above, Maleuvre points to the examples of the nationalizing agendas of historical museums—the Louvre in Paris (1793), the Prado in Madrid (1820), the National Gallery in London (1824), and the Altes Museum in Berlin (1830)—pointedly reminding us that these institutions came into being at the precise moment of the cultural secularization of history, when the nation itself replaced both the crown and the altar to become the legitimate vessel of transmitting knowledge of its own past to its populace. Significantly, during this early moment, the works exhibited in these collections were not exactly the same as the royal collections from which they had generally been confiscated. As is best demonstrated by the selection of works actually exhibited at the Louvre when it was first dedicated as a public museum in 1793, art objects in the French national collections, for example, were put to work in promulgating the specific visions of the new republican nation and the democratic ideals proclaimed in the wake of the French Revolution. Situated in this lineage, Malraux’s text, whether we take it as a museum in and of itself or as a description of an imaginary one, indubitably participates in a much longer history of generating an image of the national past— emphatically in this instance, a French republican past—in light of the needs of the contemporaneous present. Even more specifically, we see in it an example of the very strange transformations imposed on the idea and facts of the French past during the doubled sequence of national revisionism that frames the historical formulation of Malraux’s musée throughout the 1940s and 1950s and, with it, the reorganization of the French left. Over the course of these two decades and the historical events they witnessed—including not only the Second World War (1939–1945), but also the end of the French Mandate in Lebanon and Syria (1945), the First (or French) Indochinese War (1945–1954), the uprisings and violent repressions in Madagascar (1947), the Suez Crisis (1956), the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), and the gradual attribution of autonomy to other parts of North and West Africa (starting in 1956)—the leftist models of cultural “resistance” and intellectual “engagement” that had been so central to both the fight against Franco’s Fascists in the 1930s and against the Nazi occupation of France began to crumble. Such waning was fueled even further by the diminished strength of the leftist bulwark, the Communist party, following the revelation of Soviet abuses

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after 1956 and the rise of anti-colonial movements. In place of such models, a variety of new tactics were developed by left-leaning, elite cultural practitioners as well as by subaltern subjects— several of which are explored in subsequent chapters—to articulate new means of political and aesthetic representational practices. In tandem with and in response to those new tactics, the French state also developed its own strategies, even nodding now and again toward extra-national models, such as those presented by the cultural and economic entity of a unified Europe or even the pretense of global humanity on which, ironically, the national claims of hegemonic authority were subsequently anchored. In this expanded context of what I call the decades of decolonization, it is not insignificant that the particular photographic model of history that Malraux’s text calibrates elides any singular national past in favor of a globalized totality that is claimed as generically human and therefore as emblematic of a universal cultural inheritance. In order for such a vision to take hold, however, the signs of difference or deviation that might be visible in photographic documentation had to be reimagined, just as the actualities of space and place that these objects presented otherwise had to be ignored. Such, in fact, were precisely the projects that Georges Duthuit, a Byzantinist turned Matisse scholar, denounced in Malraux’s endeavor when he declared that “Malraux tait l’espace réel” (Malraux silences real space).¹9 First published in Les lettres nouvelles in 1954, Duthuit’s vehement critique of Les voix du silence was expanded into a three-volume tome, just like the object it rebuked. The main thrust of Duthuit’s Le musée inimaginable (The Unimaginable Museum) is similar to my own critique, and suggests that the museum Malraux imagines to be facilitated by photographic representation severs objects from their own history in order to render them mute participants in the one he wants to construct around the temporality of the present. Duthuit’s eloquent denunciation, however, merits extended citation not only for its own merits, but also for its echo with how theorists like Kracauer had thought about photography. The museum, writes Duthuit, is born from a rupture and it is through this rupture that its nature is most easily defined, as its existence is derived from an immense laceration: we tear the products of art from life like nails from flesh. Once, they were an integral part of a present totality; they are now nothing more than fragments condemned to inertia: disoriented, incomplete, rootless. This state is signaled to us harshly by the unbridgeable chasm opened between their disappearance and our endurance, that gate which closes on them at the hours required by the regulations. There are always visiting hours for cemeteries, but living things communicate at any time. It is forbidden that the beautiful prisoners act on us; having left at their feet the bouquet of admiration that they still merit, we have nothing left but to return to our watches and our calendars.²0 For Duthuit—who had participated in the Collège de Sociologie (a collective formed by Georges Bataille) and who was also a historian of Byzantine art—the excision of the object’s original history invalidates the claims to aesthetic pleasure that Malraux

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wants to reconfigure in the name of human capacity. Of course, as a Louvre-affiliated art historian, Duthuit’s condemnation (and his own insistence on the priority of an object’s historical embeddedness) is not without its own conceptual biases. Perhaps because of this role, however, Duthuit is best able to expose the ideological undercurrents of Malraux’s photographic appropriation of the art and cultures of the world, which he compares to the enthusiasm of the colonizer and the sociological imperatives of imperial conquest. As Duthuit notes, Malraux’s description of his museum is indeed riddled with “les mots de conquête, d’annexion, de possession” (the vocabulary of conquest, of annexation, of possession).²¹ Indeed, Duthuit finds Malraux’s museum guilty of inaugurating a new order of decontextualized aesthetics, one quite removed from the historical parameters he has come to understand as implicit in his own engagements with art objects. With the benefit of hindsight, we might today understand Duthuit’s perspective as a critique of what was, in the 1950s, still only a nascent globalization, but one that was already masquerading as a process of global leveling based on timeless characteristics of similitude. What was nascent as globalization in the decades of decolonization was nevertheless acutely and resolutely still colonial, and therefore also significantly different from its twenty-first-century manifestations. Under the present economic order, it has become somewhat commonplace that culture is determined less by the sanctions of nations than it is by the administrative and economic control of multinational corporations. And yet, artists are increasingly asked to represent and stand in for the histories of national and extra-national traumas, as attested by the repeated focus on exile and statelessness as thematic motifs of today’s biennial circuit. By contrast, what is compelling about this earlier moment’s conflation of humanist inheritance and colonial impulse is the determination to elide those traumas as they were acutely experienced on a global level in the wake of the Second World War, when the histories, for instance, of African colonization and European Fascism came face to face. While thinkers, artists, and even politicians were trying to model new notions of subjectivity that would account for the shifts in Enlightenment-era preoccupations generated by the recent experiences of the Second World War, they were simultaneously creating shortcuts to reclaim pasts not yet tainted by the catastrophes still being enacted by statist authorities across the globe. For the museum that Malraux modeled as a microcosmic encapsulation of a reimagined world order, the primary appeal of the photographic image was, similarly, the possibility of a non-specific and perpetually present simultaneity that it offered through its own act of severing the appearance of an object from its context. Unlike a traditional museum— one with walls, as it were—Malraux asserts that his musée imaginaire would be so grand “that it makes any historical knowledge it calls for seem superficial.” ²² Instead of history, Malraux proffers the musée imaginaire as a vista onto a vast and interminable present. Malraux explains this displacement with precisely the kind of historicist justification that Kracauer would have lamented: “We interpret the past in the light of what we understand.” ²³ In such a view, difference—

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including that of histories, nations, classes, and religions— collapses onto itself, leaving in its place a smooth continuum of seamless style. In Malraux’s aesthetics, for example, El Greco becomes legible only via the insights gained from abstract painting, and eventually even a contemporary artist like Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, 1913–1951) is made to explain work by Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) that predates his own. During Malraux’s later tenure as minister of state charged with cultural affairs, he would continue to insist upon such anachronistic relations of influence and priority, causing the art and film critic Annette Michelson to comment on Malraux’s vexing of the American art world, itself busily asserting its own “triumph.” ²4 In elaborating further her claims about the cultural hegemony Malraux meant to establish with the creation of provincial art centers and the Paris Biennale, Michelson also suggests that Malraux’s implausible chronologies of “stylistic transformations” obscured actual historical relations, rendering the minister of culture himself “the most conspicuous victim of the distortions and deceptions of his Imaginary Museum!” ²5 To enact this shift from the realm of data and knowledge to that of the imaginary, where the image, not yet circumscribed by the contingencies of signification, might be thought to circulate freely, Malraux relies on a carefully constructed scaffolding of the image in and of itself. The elaboration of this support merits a closer look, since it is herein that Malraux makes the bridge from a uniquely aesthetic model to one that he can (and later will) apply equally to the built environment of the city. If the cost of the image’s independence from the object’s original context and its capacity to signify a historical past is the coin of silence that Malraux celebrates in his book’s title, the currency in which this liberation is purchased is the photograph. As suggested above, while photography structures the entire development of Malraux’s argument, it is almost never addressed directly as such in Les voix. In fact, only on page seventeen does Malraux first name the medium upon which his entire proposal depends. At this point in his text, he limits photography to an exclusively mimetic, reproductive function, referring to it only off-handedly as painting’s “printing press,” ²6 a definition that recalls Charles Baudelaire’s famous 1859 conception of photography as the “handmaid to the arts,” a “memory tool” useful for little more than stimulating the mind of the artist so that he— and Baudelaire’s artist is definitely a “he”—might best re-create in his studio all that he had experienced on the street, in the flash, the blur, and the whir that epitomized for him the conditions of modern life.²7 Late as it is, Malraux’s introduction to photography as a medium comes only through his discussion of yet another painter and only in order to clarify the ontological truth of art more broadly put. Here, Malraux writes as if time has stood still since Baudelaire’s day—which, after all, is exactly his point. He stages a comparison between a reproduction of Henri Rousseau’s painting The Customs Post, which depicts the site where the artist worked as a douanier (customs officer), to an anonymous photograph taken of the same location “in Rousseau’s time” as the caption names the blurry black-andwhite photograph Malraux also reproduces. The comparison emphasizes the con-

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trast between the painting’s expressivity and therefore its bridge to exclusively “folk” tendencies and imaginative practices, and the realistic capacities of the photograph, which Malraux asserts actually delimit its historical connectedness, rendering it circumscribed and not-expressive.²8 Several important maneuvers are at work in this comparison. First, Malraux’s nod to the idea of “folk” suspends the productive associations of what might have been called by other critics the masses or the popular, which Malraux here explicitly replaces with allusions to the idealized expressivity of a non-urban, non-elite population. Whereas in the 1937 speech alluded to above, Malraux had celebrated the democratic, if not communistic properties of film and fiction as uniquely suited to oppose Fascism, in his 1951 text, he is careful to disallow the possibilities of what might otherwise or elsewhere seem to have been celebrated as a legitimate popular art and, in particular, a popular art actually connected to the articulation or expression of reality.²9 Describing the shifts that technological modernization has produced, he writes—not insignificantly for the discussion at hand—that “once the songs sung at home were replaced by the radio, woodcuts by the magazine photograph, and the tales of derring-do by the detective story, there was talk of an art of the masses; that is to say, art was confused with the methods of fiction.” ³0 By 1951, Malraux is interested, it would seem, in communities other than those of the “folk,” and in different means to engage them than the photographic or anything otherwise mass-produced since these are tainted with the negative association conferred by the “methods of fiction.” There is, he writes, “no longer any popular art because there is no longer a ‘people.’” ³¹ The other, perhaps even more important, maneuver in the above passage concerns the specific positioning and repositioning of photography so that it can be simultaneously objective and yet also available to the subjective abstractions to which Malraux will later put it. Indeed, as with the caption of the tollhouse photograph—in which the image is named only for its inherent documentary capacity to show a place that is better represented by art— only oblique references to photography as it was broadly conceptualized in a Baudelairian vein during the late-nineteenth century present the medium throughout Malraux’s text. “Photography,” Malraux declares, “which started in a humble way as a means of making known acknowledged masterpieces to those who could not buy engravings, seemed destined merely to perpetuate established values.” ³² Justifying such outmoded models even as he prepares to depart from them, Malraux explains later in the text, however, that instead of following such a destiny, photography—no matter its limitation in reproducing only that which is real— actually ends by imposing changes upon the color, texture, and dimension of an artwork. In other words, it establishes new realities and thereby creates new values. In the photographed work of art, he explains, what was once large becomes small; what was once painted with lapis lazuli becomes another shade of grey; and so forth. Instead of lamenting such transformations as signs of loss or diminishment, however, Malraux celebrates them. In his eyes, it is only through the imposition of those for-

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mal qualities enhanced and equalized by virtue of the fragment and the close-up that we can discover the shared elements of a common style between such works of art and, by the same token, a commonality in the human parameters of the here and the now. The medium that Malraux claims originated to reproduce the specifics of an art work and perpetuate its established values is thus made to render those same values nonspecific and not unique. While Malraux begins by critiquing photography in line with those of his nineteenth-century forerunners, who saw it as a strictly evidentiary and thus scientific tool, he ends by aligning photographic reproduction with what he calls the “fictitious arts,” and which he has already denigrated as associated with the same “folk” that he has asserted no longer actually exist. For Jean-François Lyotard, such an assertion aligns Malraux’s theory of photography with those that articulate the “expressive” qualities of the medium. But here Lyotard errs in confusing Malraux’s discussion of cinema with his qualifications regarding the “fictitious” aspects of photography.³³ For Malraux, chief among the “fictitious aspects” of photography is the fragment and the particular fragment that is the detail as it is revealed by photographic reproduction. Such details transform the representation of the objects they depict, and, in so doing, subordinate reality to the imaginative powers of a visual practice. As a result, in Malraux’s final analysis, photography is displaced from what had originally been posited as its affirmative relationship to the material real. Its indexical characteristics, celebrated since refinements to the photographic apparatus in the nineteenth century, are disavowed in favor of imaginary ones. The photograph is thereby presented, both in Malraux’s text and in the book’s abbreviated captions (which eschew any but the most nominative functionality in titling the images he uses to illustrate his exposition) as taking pieces of reality and transforming them, reducing what might have been evidentiary to a series of views onto theoretically endless and simultaneous fragments, all of which float in a timeless realm freed from signification. This kind of decontextualized “imaginary-ness” is what Lyotard confuses with what might constitute the medium’s “expressivity,” and which Malraux instead located in film. Given the care with which Lyotard constructs his own reading, not to mention his investments in the postmodern modalities of expressive articulation that might underpin such a mode, it may come as something of a surprise to his readers that, in the grand total of the two full pages Malraux devotes to the discussion of both still and moving photography as actual art forms unto themselves, he specifically claims that the photograph, unlike the moving picture, “had no scope for fiction.” ³4 For Malraux, it would seem that fiction is not the same as fictitious, which in his account is meant to designate instead the realm of the imaginary or the fragmented. For the Malraux of Les voix as opposed to the novelist of the pre-war days, fiction is defined exclusively by the cinema and what is located therein as an expressivity constituted of sequential frames in juxtaposition. Through these and not through the fact of photographic capture, he asserts, cinema participates in the production of narratives.³5 In such a way, Malraux makes fiction correspond to the telling of things that happen

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over time and that inherently must have taken place, at least in part, in the past. By contrast, Malraux refuses the photograph precisely this capacity to testify to a different temporal moment. Through this kind of photographic decontextualization, a dematerialization is thus enacted, such that the stasis of pure form can be eternalized, made timeless, and emptied of any attachment either to history or to narrative. In place of Roland Barthes’s famous assertion that the tense of the photograph is always the past preterite, the “that has been,” Malraux leaves us with a seamless photographic present.³6 Photographic images cannot testify or evidence traces of the past because the vision they offer is always fictitious and imaginary, a snapshot of a fragmented and dehistoricized present. In the changed conditions of art appreciation, enabled for Malraux as for Walter Benjamin by the doubled decontextualization from original site to museum and from museum to reproduction, “Count-Duke Olivares has become pure Velázquez.” “What do we care,” asks Malraux, “who the Man with the Helmet or the Man with the Glove may have been in real life? For us their names are Rembrandt and Titian.” ³7 As if nodding to Benjamin’s 1936 description of the transformation from cult values to exhibition values in the “Work of Art” essay, Malraux notes that a Romanesque crucifix, for example, was not meant as a sculpture by those who first made it or who worshiped at its feet, adding however the careful correction to Benjamin that “we have only a vague idea as to what the aura emanating from a Sumerian statue consists of . . . We interpret the past in the light of what we understand.” ³8 Whereas Benjamin took these changes as the starting point for a materialist dialectic regarding the possibility of merging the political and the aesthetic through changing modalities of visual perception, Malraux uses his understanding of photographic decontextualization described above to frame the collection he proposes as one organized around notions of style and trademark. These become harbingers of that specifically painterly authenticity that Benjamin critiqued in 1936, and which the modernist art practices that Malraux celebrates would increasingly exploit. In celebrating the removal of the “man with the helmet” from the register of historical knowledge about the past and the implications that such knowledge might have for the reading of a painting—traces of class or nation, for example—not to mention the other visual material that might equally, if not more so, constitute aesthetic practice, historical or otherwise, Malraux elevates style above any other category or artistic capacity. The capacity to communicate context or experience is, of course, part of what Benjamin laments as lost when he decries the destruction of the particular aura he understands as still locatable in early photography, an aura directly tied to the human subject, to the “something [that] remains that does not testify merely to the art of the photographer . . . . something that is not to be silenced, something demanding the name of the person who had lived then, who even now is still real and will never entirely perish into art.” ³9 For Benjamin, this aura—which should not be confused with the aura that he suggests emanated from an artwork in the years before technological reproduction—is specifically locatable in the subject’s experience. The stakes of forsaking such experience, at least according to Benjamin, risk Fascism and the oppression it engenders.

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While claiming that the consequences of Malraux’s having abandoned the historical roots that anchor photographic signification can lead to the multiple manifestations of Fascism against which Benjamin warned may risk hyperbole, I nonetheless maintain that the model of the past’s relationship to the present, which Malraux’s aesthetic espouses, is not without significance in regard to the crises in public memory that France would experience throughout the 1950s and after. Such crises were deeply implicated in a history of and recuperation from the recent past and all the Fascist realities that both the regime of Philippe Pétain (chief of state at Vichy, 1940– 1944) and the Nazi occupation had brought to bear on the French Republic. They were, however, further perpetuated by the ways in which these events ended in masking the experiences that the French occupation of its colonies would augur. Speaking abstractly, it is possible to understand the French memory crises throughout this period as having been resolutely organized around the refusal to allow for the representation of recent experience broadly construed. Instead, contemporaneous formulations of the nation insisted upon the articulation of silence, even as that silence began to touch upon the contemporary unfolding of events surrounding the often violent decolonization of North Africa. As these events transpired, there would be no shortage of people willing to compare the tactics of de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic government—in which Malraux was a very visible player, as will be elaborated below— with those of the Fascists. I would argue, in fact, that the rush toward representational silence that Malraux’s text espouses is not only shaped by but will eventually come to configure the official French response to historical events. A look at the series of titles that frame Malraux’s project—for indeed Le musée imaginaire is but one— suggests the negative rapport between historical events and Malraux’s thinking. Indeed, the textual transformations that mark the fourteen years between Psychologie de l’art and Les voix du silence coincide with some of the more dramatic efforts of the French state to rewrite, redraw, and certainly re-imagine its identity. In seeming parallel, Malraux’s publication of his “psychological” treatise in 1937 allows that the belief systems represented by the work of art might indeed be culturally specific. And yet, in his final 1951 version, references to historical context or its value are entirely absent. For example, in the early, unpublished drafts of his 1937 project, Malraux describes the childlike figure of Christ’s body in Italian Renaissance painting as deeply connected to the cultural particularities of Renaissance Catholicism and its relationship to the sexualized body. Such detail is elided in subsequent edits and does not appear in the final, public version of Les voix de silence in 1951.40 Indeed, it is quite a different thing to elaborate upon the psychology of, or generated by, art objects than it is to impose upon them the condition of silence, a condition which, by 1951, could no longer be exclusively associated with things so benign as the allegedly mute surface of a painting or a statue, as Malraux’s celebrations did in regard to both.4¹ It was, after all, precisely in early January of 1951 that the French National Assembly enacted the first of three amnesty laws drafted to reintegrate into the mainstream of French society those who had been convicted of collaborating

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with the Germans during the Vichy regime. Specifically, the January 1951 law granted clemency to all those who, just after the liberation, had been punished with dégradation nationale in response to their prosecution for the charge of l’ indignité nationale, or “civic unworthiness.” A second law, passed in 1953, restored voting rights and eliminated the designation of “national degradation” entirely, thereby ending the period of the post-war épuration (purge) and preparing the grounds for national reconstruction. By 1956, when the 1953 law came into full effect, only sixty-two of the 40,000 people who had been incarcerated for having collaborated in 1945 remained in custody.4² By 1964, there were none.4³ In French law, as Henry Rousso and others in his wake have asserted in accordance with debates that continue to echo those first articulated in intellectual circles during the late 1940s, amnesty is defined as “legal forgetting” (l’oubli juridique). Accordingly, the 1951 amnesty law and its 1953 successor both promised to alter the country’s own perception and production of its past, granting the state the authority to silence the past and thereby prepare for a condition of national amnesia that would come to include a willful refusal of the present as much as a denial to recognize the past.44 And so, while Malraux was writing historical context out of the “psychology” or inner workings of art, the ground was being prepared for the history of France’s fate during the Second World War to be rewritten, for the myth of the Resistance to be universalized, for the Liberation to be established as a new beginning, and for France to reposition itself as the undisrupted pinnacle of a universal Western cultural heritage. And all of this despite the rather violent demonstrations of the failures of the universalist tenets of the Revolutionary screed, “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” in the contemporaneous fight over Indochina’s sovereignty, not to mention Algeria’s. We could then say that Malraux’s will to rename the “psychologie de l’art” as a “voix du silence” runs parallel to and perhaps collides in the national effort that historian Tony Judt has described as having produced “a strange self-induced amnesia, strange in that it took place in broad daylight, so to speak, and in the face of common knowledge of the truth.” 45 Locating Les voix as such speaks to the ways in which historical repression is enacted through a gamut of practices, criminal and legal, real and discursive, and—most importantly for this study— cultural as well. Here, Malraux’s model works to delegitimize the claims that art has on reality and representations thereof and also to challenge the authority of documentary means to establish historical fact. His model also directs us toward an important point of continuity between the early moments just after the Second World War and the near-decade of fighting that constituted the Algerian War of Independence when Malraux would come to have occasion to implement his aesthetics. In particular, Malraux would come to materialize his aesthetic’s reliance on an understanding of the image itself as a conduit to naturalize, if not produce, the model of an eternality freed from the constraints of time or place, as cultural policy. As had been the case after the end of the Second World War, when the war to maintain Algeria’s status as integral to the French nation ended, measures of legal revision and suppression were again instated. Just as the

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French, in the early 1950s, had been forced to determine how to address the treatment of Vichy collaborators, in 1962 they needed to resolve eight years of what had been an incontestably dirty war. The French use, for example, of the same tactics of internment and torture during the Algerian War of Independence that the German SS had employed during the occupation of France, was highlighted by a ruling issued in the trial of Klaus Barbie for his role in the extermination of French Jews. In response to the caution by Barbie’s lawyer, Jacques Vergès, that convicting his client of crimes committed against humanity in the name of Germany during the Nazi occupation of France might open analogous questions about the nature of actions taken in the name of France during the occupation of Algeria, the French court determined that what could be identified and prosecuted as a crime against humanity would henceforth be limited to those crimes committed “in the name of a State practicing a policy of ideological hegemony.” 46 Since the French state refused to see the occupation of North Africa as advancing anything like ideological hegemony, crimes committed by representatives of the French state in Algeria could not be prosecuted as crimes against humanity. In fact, war crimes and torture committed by French conscripts during the Algerian War of Independence would also be officially “forgotten” through what began anew as a second series of amnesty laws related to the “events” in Algeria.47 Technically, this amnesty had already been suggested by the terms of the Evian Accords (1962), which stipulated that there would be no disciplinary or discriminatory action taken against anyone for actions committed prior to the cease-fire that the treaty proclaimed. In 1968, even those factions of the Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS) that had fought against both Algerian nationalists and the French government in order to keep Algeria French would likewise be pardoned and released from prison. If they had been exiled, they were invited to repatriate, like Jacques Soustelle who, as governor general of Algeria from 1955–1956, had been a staunch advocate of integrating the Muslim communities in Algeria, but eventually reversed his platform by 1960 when he joined the OAS. By that time, however, new and even more powerful cultural vehicles would be implemented in order to complement, if not exceed, legislative amnesia. Again, culture and its dissemination figured as chief among them. Consider, for example, that until a 1983 decree, twentieth-century history as taught in French high school classrooms ended with the liberation of France and the victory of Allied forces in the Second World War. As a result, neither Maghrebins (North Africans) nor their children or other former French colonial subjects who were educated in Paris were necessarily taught about the wars for Independence—wars to which their parents likely contributed in one way or another—let alone the issues that had motivated the battles and their outcome.48 It bears adding that similar efforts to rewrite contemporary history had been made in the 1950s and 1960s, not only by governmental authorities but also by the intellectual left as well. In the 1950s, the stakes of such efforts had been not only to camouflage France’s tainted past in relationship to the Second World War, but also

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to obscure the continuing present of the Soviet Union and the atrocities committed under Joseph Stalin (from 1922 to 1952), all of which were a source of ignominy for the Parti communiste français (PCF).49 One such instance of revisionism involved a PCF member, Emmanuel Mounier, who wrote that the working-class suburb of Montreuil was “a spread out concentration camp, whose inmates thought themselves liberated in 1936 . . . and who once again see the barbed wire closing in on them, the guard posts reoccupied, and behind them the invisible army of the powerful taking up again, silently, position after position.” 50 Considering Mounier’s statement, Tony Judt comments on our willingness to let such historical slippages stand: that if we allow Montreuil to be a called a “concentration camp,” then we must ask “what were Mauthausen or Belsen?” In other words, “If Billancourt becomes a ‘Gulag,’ what words will serve to describe the life of those who at the very time Mounier was writing were working and dying in Kolyma?” 5¹ Setting aside for the moment the interest in the city and its stratification of working classes (especially immigrants) and leisure classes into suburb and center that Mounier’s text evokes at the early date of 1950, Judt’s questions help to illuminate the pervasiveness of what might at best be called the dehistoricizing impulse, and at worst the thorough amnesia, that categorized the Fourth Republic’s efforts at Reconstruction, efforts that thereby established the parameters of thinking about the immediate past and which persisted well into the Fifth Republic. All of this is to say that the kind of historical de-specification articulated by André Malraux in Les voix du silence, his treatise on photographic reproduction, was a modus operandi of both the state and the left, right, and center that variously opposed and supported it. And this remains true at least through the rallying cry of the soixante-huitards: “nous sommes tous des juifs allemands” (we are all German Jews). Of this utterance, much has been said in defense of its use in the France of 1968. Most compelling is Jacques Rancière’s appropriation of the term as evidence of both the kind of disidentification that enables political action and the agonistic subjectification to which those who engage in such disidentification must submit.5² Much is important in this model, to which I will return in subsequent chapters, but here it bears noting that Rancière does not address what it means that such disidentifications often come on the heels of historical refusal and on the backs, so to speak, of those whose subject position of disenfranchisement (here, the “German Jew”) the empowered choose to claim as the basis of their own empowerment. As for Malraux, it is tellingly only in the revisions he published in the pivotal year of 1951 that he makes any reference to the specifics of the actual historical moment in which he writes. In a brief reference to Flemish art, for instance, Malraux uncharacteristically mentions the significance of Protestant resistance to Spanish Catholic domination that is manifest in the paintings he wants to analyze. However, as if to belittle the significance of this resistance to those aesthetic properties he prefers to isolate and generalize as “style,” Malraux adds that “even today you will hear people talking, as of quaint figures on picture-postcards, of a nation that put up a stout resistance to Hitler’s hordes and has led the world in post-war reconstruction.” 5³ The

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historical specificity of the past few years is put in parentheses, leaving the state of things in a continued flow, as if they had always been as they are.54 The “quaint” Dutch, it would seem, have simply always resisted. Such a reduction of events to the order of postcard figures parallels the incessant purging of social and political referentiality from what Malraux’s text isolates as true art because it is locatable as pure form. Even the Resistance, to which Malraux imagined himself an important contributor, gets short shrift in an aside about the hopes and desires of contemporary cinema audiences, which Malraux insists are made up entirely of those “brothersin-arms” who had been united in the Resistance.55 A quick allusion to Adolf Hitler is counterbalanced by an equally brief mention of Joseph Stalin, demonstrating that historical events are as susceptible to Malraux’s ahistorical typology as are aesthetic and cultural products.56 In a classifying system ordered around the imposition of the same—“we understand the past through that which we understand”— and generative of an incessantly recuperative, homogenizing present, one dictator can and must equal another.57 But it is clearly in the shadow, if not actually under the sign of, precisely the events of this history that Malraux rewrites La psychologie de l’art into Les voix du silence. In what he calls his “mythopoetic” biography of the minister, Lyotard describes Malraux’s rewriting of the ideas present in this text over yet another twenty years, concluding— and this time I agree with his conclusions—that Malraux’s obsession was fueled by the idea that “the map of the museum must be remade, its calendar adjusted to the latest beginnings.” 58 In 1947, for instance, when the first volume of La psychologie de l’art was published as Le musée imaginaire, the latest “beginnings” included not only the experiences of defeat and collaboration that had marked the Second World War for the French and that had to be respun to tell of a new nation emerging from the Resistance and subsequent Liberation, but also and equally significantly for the story with which this book is concerned, the beginning of the final disintegration of the French colonial empire. To a large degree, this necessitated recasting the story of that empire’s creation, as well. The museum as it had come into existence in the late nineteenth century would constitute a fine site for such revisioning. No less an agent in the dissemination of contemporary events than minister of information in de Gaulle’s provisional government (November 22, 1945—January 22, 1946), Malraux had become a man whose political aspirations would have brought him into a decided opposition vis-à-vis the proclamation of Vietnamese independence in 1945, the subsequent mobilization of the French army to retake Saigon, and the continued French distortion of the alliance between Nazi Germany and Tunisia, performed in order to justify the French re-annexation of the latter as a protectorate in 1943.59 As minister of information, Malraux acted as de Gaulle’s public spokesman, charged with translating to the public what happened behind the closed doors of the Ministerial Council. He also controlled the supply of paper rationed to the various newspapers, a task that enabled him to legitimize what some perceived as de facto censorship, despite the new minister’s repeated insistence that the practice was aimed

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at reestablishing the democratic principles of fair market pricing. In this instance, Malraux’s logic went as follows: were he to authorize a publication but not allocate it adequate paper, the publication would be compelled to obtain paper from the black market, and would thereby drive up the market price. Subsequently, it would become inevitable that only the wealthiest publications would persist, and so censorship based on economic privilege would have been adopted, even if inadvertently.60 As such defensive posturing would seem to evidence, by 1945 Malraux had become intricately embroiled in the project of giving precise form to the government’s version of the events unfolding as history and assuring the conditions of this version’s dissemination. Les voix should be understood as part and parcel of this enterprise. Indeed, it was published on the heels of Malraux’s first efforts at “democratizing culture,” the likes of which would come to mark the enduring ambition of his tenure as Minister of Culture some twenty years later. It was, in fact, as minister of information in de Gaulle’s provisional government that Malraux had first initiated the project of photographing 100 works of art to send as reproductions to the provinces, a project which certainly flavored his conception of his musée imaginaire.6¹ Malraux’s life was also bound by the historical exigencies of colonial politics. Although the author of Les voix would have been loath to admit it, rather than uphold the principles of pure form as evidence of art’s autonomy from the measure of man, his own biography demonstrates the degree to which life and art are mixed. After the French stock exchange collapse in 1921 and the souring, in 1923, of the Mexican mining stocks that had until then provided for his income, Malraux and his young bride Clara Goldschmidt had traveled to Indochina, which at that time consisted of the French colony of Cochinchine and the four protectorates of Laos, Cambodia, Annam, and Tonkin. There, they had begun a business of trafficking statues stolen from local temples.6² Keenly aware of the market value of these ancient artifacts, Malraux had sold them at great profit to American buyers eager to possess such tokens of exoticism. After having plundered the Temple of Banreàï-Srey in 1924, Malraux was arrested by the colonial police, and it was only through Clara’s maneuvers back in Paris and her appeal to such intellectual luminaries as André Breton that the future minister was released from prison.6³ Possibly as a result of his lingering hostility toward the colonial police after his imprisonment, Malraux subsequently became a vocal supporter of the burgeoning Vietnamese rights movement and began to publish a small newspaper first called L’Indochine and then L’Indochine enchaînée (Indochina Enchained). Such journalistic efforts were never concerned with advocating a sovereign Vietnam, however, and Malraux remained content with advocating the universalist premise that the Indochinese should be entitled to the same rights as their French counterparts within the broad empire. It is not clear whether Malraux, given his brief career as an art thief, would have considered the rights to property and to cultural determination among the sovereign rights he then championed for the Vietnamese, but it is clear that, several decades later, his vision of the musée imaginaire was built on the spoils of what was a rapidly

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deteriorating imperialism.64 In his museum, the booty of Eastern shrines and idols would be married to photos of medieval church spires and nineteenth-century paintings that Malraux did not intend to let France “lose” as it had “lost” its actual empire. If these shrines and idols could no longer be the property of the French, they could at least be deracinated, dehistoricized, silenced, and so, in Malraux’s perverse logic, made the collective inheritance of “humanity.” Culture, and specifically French culture, would continue to uphold the ideal of the universal, and it would matter little if the objects used to bolster this universality were already claimed by a foreign people or a foreign past. Malraux’s post-1945 domestic politics would suffer the same radical reversals as his foreign ones. Just before becoming a minister within de Gaulle’s first presidential cabinet, Malraux would make an official break with the Communist Party, the ideals of which he had long since abandoned and to which, technically, he had never been a subscribing member. Whether or not the public vehemence with which he announced this split was calculated to obtain a position in de Gaulle’s government is unclear. What is certain, however, is that the vision he now held for France— a mirror of the one promoted by the general himself— demanded a reinvigoration of the unified and potent model of the French nation according to the universalist principles upon which the Republic was purported to have been founded. As Lyotard suggests, it was thus necessary for Malraux to rewrite not only his own beginnings and those of the nation, but also the beginnings of his text, and in fact, those of the imaginary museum it comprised. It does not matter if one cites, as is commonplace in the Malraux literature, Malraux’s primary influence as the comparative technique of the Blaue Reiter Almanach, employed by the German Expressionists as early as 1912 and introduced to Malraux in the 1920s; or if one describes his inspiration as contemporary German and Soviet film, which shaped Malraux’s experience in the 1930s as film director and publisher of the Louvre’s Photographic History of Art; or finally if one locates the threads of Malraux’s project in his 1923 introduction to collage through Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler.65 The origins of Malraux’s early project lay in the Popular Front and the cpf (French Communist Party), of which Malraux had claimed himself an ardent admirer.66 The musée imaginaire, he had thought then might indeed provide a means of creating “art’s widest possible audience,” of showing people far and wide the beauty of objects that they might otherwise never see.67 Art, clearly rooted in the past and yet defined as inherently without history, would therefore have been made accessible to “chaque enfant de France” (every French child), just as the French statesman Jules Ferry (1832–1893) had famously proposed in regard to education.68 So, too, would aesthetic form have been made part of the long arc of la civilisation française and the civilizing missions it was assumed to have brought to those places it occupied. But neither Malraux’s politics nor his ideals remained nearly so populist. By the time he ascended to one of the most powerful positions in the Fifth Republic, and by the time he became responsible for the actual means by which culture might be

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made public, Malraux would mobilize his preoccupation with a descriptive aesthetics into a proscriptive definition. His taxonomical obsession with the singularity of form would find a new space from which to tear down walls as he turned his attention from the immaterial realm of decontextualized photographs to the material realm of the city. In so doing, he would reorganize not only the image of French culture, but also the space in which that culture took shape, and thereby the parameters of who was permitted to constitute its public. The singular would once again be upheld in the name of the universal, and art—instead of serving a public—would come to limit and proscribe it.

FAÇADES; OR, THE SPACE OF SILENCE

2

Little does it matter if a cathedral chapel is reconstituted in a museum, stone by stone, for we have begun by converting our cathedrals into museums.— André Malraux, Les voix du silence, 1951

he Fourth Republic, unstable since its founding on 13 October 1946, was brought to a rather sudden and dramatic end following the Crise de mai 1958, when a group of French generals seized power from the local government in Algiers. Responding to the cry of “Vive de Gaulle,” issued by General Raoul Salan from Algiers, where the Army had announced its assumption of authority, General Charles de Gaulle emerged from political retirement on 15 May 1958, indicating his readiness to establish a government. In turn, the National Assembly invested de Gaulle as the last prime minister of the Fourth Republic on June 1. Their action, passed by an overwhelming majority, was prompted by the Assembly’s increasing fear of the threat intoned by the generals’ forces, who were preparing to attack Paris from Corsica (which they had seized easily on 24 May), along with the realization that André Le Troquer, president of the National Assembly, might well invite a left-leaning figure to establish a new Popular Front–like coalition government. Only one day later, the Assembly voted overwhelmingly to confirm the conditions under which de Gaulle had brokered his return to political service, namely that he be given the right to recast the constitution in order to bolster national unity, to diminish the power of the various political parties, and to enforce the power of a central authority.¹ The new prime minister was thus granted full powers for a period of six months and entrusted with rewriting the constitution, with the sole stipulation that it conform to the letter of French democracy and therefore be subject to a referendum in lieu of a parliamentary confirmation. As he had done after the Liberation in August 1944, de Gaulle once again invited André Malraux to join his government as minister of information and thereby to assume responsibility for administering the dissemination of news about current events,

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in particular information about de Gaulle’s own return to power. But the unpredictability of Malraux’s stance toward the question of Algerian independence was put in doubt, for instance, by a letter condemning the government’s 1957 seizure of Henri Alleg’s account of his torture in a French detention center in Algiers that Malraux had co-signed in the French journal l’Express as recently as April 1958. The letter led to Malraux’s replacement a few months later by Jacques Soustelle, an anthropologist and professor, and the assistant director of the Musée de l’homme.² As noted in chapter 1, Soustelle had governed Algeria from 1955 to 1956, first as an ardent reformer but eventually as one committed to hard-line maintenance of French Algeria, a stance that made him a safer choice than Malraux for the highly visible position, especially following the May Crisis in which Soustelle had played an important part.³ In January 1959, following de Gaulle’s ascension to the freshly invigorated seat of president of the newly created Fifth Republic, he appointed Michel Debré as prime minister. Malraux was reappointed to the government, presumably to add sparkle if not also an illusory widening of the political spectrum. While it was not at first clear what post Malraux would hold, it was finally decided that he should legislate the one thing he knew best: culture.4 Accordingly, in July 1959, Debré and de Gaulle named Malraux the first ever minister of state charged with cultural affairs.5 The charge of this brand new ministry was nothing less than to make “the masterpieces of humanity, and especially of France, available to the largest number of Frenchmen; to secure the largest audience for our cultural heritage; and to prioritize both the works and the spirit that enrich it.” 6 With its emphasis on the “masterpieces of humanity,” the wording of such responsibility might well have been culled from Malraux’s own musée imaginaire; yet it could not communicate the irony that the same man, who had been arrested in 1924 for stealing national heritage artifacts and fragments of low-relief sculptures from the Temple of Banreàï-Srey in Angkor; was now to be endowed with the responsibility of protecting France’s own patrimony. Implicit in the creation of this new ministry was the task of redefining not only culture in general and French culture in particular, but also the state’s specific relationship to mobilizing it for national ends. As Herman Lebovics has suggested, between 1870 and 1914, the Third Republic had focused on the conception of its own emphatically Latinate civilization in order to distinguish the French nation from and defend it against the perceived barbarity of Germany’s more modern-oriented idea of “Kultur.” 7 Of course, such a maneuver was also in keeping with the tools mobilized to justify the annexation of Algeria as an integral part of France. Lebovics explains, however, that it was only after the First World War that the French— seeing the need to enfold the populations of an expanding empire into the political realities of contemporary life—began to calibrate a simultaneously linguistic and social definition of la culture française. This, then, became the means by which the French government aspired to extend the ideals and practices of their “civilization” to those of Africa and Asia. In the years following the Second World War, when the hegemony of French Latinate civilization would be newly re-challenged by both the dissolution of the

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French political and economic empire and the ascent of American cultural and economic hegemony, the parameters of French culture would once more require redefinition in relationship to the populations meant both to enjoy and to actually be defined by it—which is to say that the imperial mandate to conquer in the name of an alleged civilizing mission would have to be revised. Now, culture itself would become both the agent and the object of conquest. In the expression coined by Todd Shepard in his exceptional account of the impact that the Algerian War of Independence would have on shaping not just French intellectual life but also the nation’s undergirding political structures, the French would need to “invent decolonization” and make it as seamless, natural, and desirable as the original colonization it now proposed to undo.8 To a certain degree, this would mean once again severing culture from the appearance of being colonial, and it is to this end that I propose Malraux’s universalizing theory of art came to bear in his particular political contribution to the new French state. Indeed, an argument could be made that Malraux’s longstanding fascination with and reflections upon the musée imaginaire’s abstraction of art would prove to be a defining force in generating the variant of cultural nationalism espoused in the first decade of the Fifth Republic, especially since he would be the minister charged with overseeing it. The preeminent reason for the compatibility of two such apparently disparate projects—the one, after all, relies on a global debt usually anathema to nationalistic formulations of culture—lies in the attitude toward historical specificity required by both Malraux’s drive to exalt art as style and France’s need to redirect its national image. Both projects assume a negation of history as event and a negation of the imbrication of experience in the material realm. In the first case, any thinking about actual historical contingencies promises a lethal undoing of Malraux’s celebration of surface, precisely because the specificity of production and reception allow and, more importantly, insist on a differentiation between art objects. Such specificity always evokes the singularity of the event and all that constitutes it as local and unique, thus dissolving the illusion of sameness that is central to the musée imaginaire’s conception of style.9 In the second case, the remembrance of historical events perturbs the linear progress toward a future national integrity, especially in France’s case, where a new focus on culture was meant to obscure recent imperial failings while protecting itself against their implications. Thus, we might imagine it as if the national imperative to forget chose Malraux’s musée imaginaire and its attitude toward the past as the ideal for the new, profoundly cultural, France, united under the sign of homogeneity and reinvigorated universalism. In such a way and just as the drive toward envisioning a singular style had excised particularity from the musée imaginaire, the process of constructing official French culture in decolonizing France becomes synonymous with the evacuation of historical specificity from representations of the past or of distant foreign territory. The mechanics of how such amnesiac aesthetics came to be enacted would, however, as the following pages document, require quite a few sleights of the new minister’s hand. As Herman Lebovics tells it, once Malraux was assigned the mandate to recast

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French culture, he was eager to “cut a scar on the map” and thereby inscribe his own fame indelibly within the long history of French civilization and, increasingly, French culture as it was coming to be rewritten.¹0 What is most compelling in Lebovics’s use of this phrase to describe Malraux’s aspirations is that it emphasizes the spatial and corporeal targets of Malraux’s attempt to fix otherwise pictorial and previously imaginary problems. Indeed, Malraux’s first years in his post as minister of culture were marked by attempts to revive French culture both quantitatively— expanding the domain of his ministry from a primary focus on letters and literature to one that embraced not only the traditional beaux-arts, but also film, theater, the museums of France, and the ambiguous Maisons de la culture— and spatially, in regard to the organization of the nation’s cultural institutions themselves. While Malraux’s plan for generating a reorganized French culture began with the redistribution throughout the country of France’s cultural goods (many of which, of course, had been pillaged from colonized lands just as the images in the musée imaginaire had been culled from all parts of the globe) in order to create his Houses of Culture in every province, it also depended upon the reassertion of Paris as a hub of a new global culture. The two movements were not entirely dissimilar. Today, when funding for arts projects and even urban renovation comes from multinational corporations and prestige is doled out to ever more trenchant brand names and logos, such high hopes for assigning cultural production to nation-states might seem a bit antiquated. But during the period under analysis here, doing so was still a valid practice. Moreover, it was a necessary one. To be viable in the newly reconfigured parameters of the political geography generated by the Cold War, France had to articulate an alternative cultural modality to those proposed by the Soviet Union and the United States. To do so, however, the country first had to redeem itself from the blows that history had dealt it, including the disastrous embarrassment not only of German occupation (collaboration was not yet, or better, not yet again, a political focus), but even more significantly, it had to justify itself in terms of the Marshall Plan (also known as the European Recovery Program, ERP), and the accelerating dissolution of its colonial grip in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. Before Malraux’s ministry existed, there had been no budget for large-scale projects of “cultural affairs.” ¹¹ Nonetheless, as Daniel J. Sherman has suggested, Malraux’s budgets were not generated from scratch so much as they were appropriated and consolidated from funds that had previously been ascribed to the other ministries, principally those of “public instruction,” which were eventually consolidated under the Ministry of Education. It was these ministries that had been charged with the caretaking of national culture prior to the creation of Malraux’s post.¹² Sherman thus cautions against Lebovics’s over-reading the fiduciary evidence as proof of a new emphasis on cultural dissemination, in and of itself. His warnings are well taken, and yet the idea that such projects as Malraux developed might have been funded earlier under the heading of “public instruction” meant that they were subject to a vast amount of competition for a limited amount of funds. Furthermore, the idea

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that “cultural affairs” needs to be separated from “public instruction” begins to suggest that, despite any pretense to the opposite, the principal address of French national culture after 1958 would no longer be dedicated to the national public per se, regardless of Malraux’s rhetoric about redistributing France’s cultural goods across the provinces. It also suggests that culture, as such, was no longer about the project of “instruction” but rather something else entirely. All of this comes to bear significantly on one of the primary platforms on which Malraux would ground his ascent as minister of culture. As briefly suggested in chapter 1, it was in 1959, fresh into his first year as the minister charged with overseeing the dissemination of French culture, that Malraux inaugurated the first Manifestation biennale et internationale des jeunes artistes, or the Paris Biennale, as it later came to be known.¹³ The suggestion that such an event should be hosted in the capital had come from the art critic and curator Raymond Cogniat, who had been responsible for the French pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1958.¹4 True to Malraux’s internationalist and regenerative aspirations, he and Cogniat (whom Malraux appointed as the biennial’s délégué général to the ministry) determined that the exhibition would showcase the work of artists under the age of thirty-five, all of whom would be invited from forty different nations by a select group of ambassadors, also aged under thirty-five. For the French component, selections were to be made by groups of four juries. The first of these comprised seven important art critics of the “nouvelle génération;” ¹5 the second included ten artists who represented several of what Cogniat understood to be important national art institutions.¹6 The third jury, consisting of a twenty-five member administrative team, was presided over by Jacques Jaujard, Malraux’s secrétaire général (and director of the French National Museums during the Nazi occupation); while the fourth jury was comprised of regional officials, a singular nod to the idea that France had as much investment in its provinces as it did in foreign nations. Finally, to be shown alongside all this work by young artists were examples of artwork made by three generations of established masters during their youth, in particular during three generational shifts: The first group included painters under age thirtyfive at the dawn of the twentieth century, in 1900; the second group, the generation of 1914, were age thirty-five before the beginning of the Great War; and the third group were painters who turned thirty-five between 1915 and 1930.¹7 All of these details demonstrate the degree to which the biennial was conceived as much more than a minor event. They also demonstrate Malraux’s understanding of the important connection to the French past, in particular its avant-garde successes, as essential to the promotion of a future-oriented aesthetic. As explained in Malraux’s introduction to the short catalogue that accompanied the exhibition, the biennial initiative was meant to show that if France were no longer to be the dominant site of artistic production— a status already attributed to the young art capital of New York—it would at least continue its claim to being a premier host and sponsor of the arts. In some ways, such a state of affairs was even more appealing because, under these specific auspices, it would allow France to continue to assert its national

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pride, both locally and globally, thereby further enhancing the new cultural role that Malraux imagined for the nation. Malraux writes: In no other city where whole streets run along a river that borders book-sellers’ (bouquinistes) stands and bird merchants’ stalls do the canvases of the greatest masters routinely contrast with the works of beginners—the genius of yesterday set against the hope of today. It is only here that painting seems to sprout from between the paving stones. . . . These paintings that the living world has just sent to Paris pay the respect of all paintings to the city about which the future world will say, long after it has disappeared: “There, painting lived in liberty.” ¹8 It is precisely in this simultaneous embrace of the global and the aesthetic that Malraux pinpoints what he will uphold as the new signs of France’s reinvigorated cultural reputation, but it is also herein that he manages to root both in the celebrated images of Paris’s old-fashioned existence, to wit the book-sellers and bird-sellers he names specifically in this address. Ever the master rhetorician, he makes great historical allusions by suggesting that “there,” in Paris, liberty exceeds the threats posed to it elsewhere. Although he is speaking of painting, in 1959, such inflated diction cannot avoid evoking memories of other threats to liberty: Fascism, Soviet-style oppression, or the excesses of unmitigated consumerism. That Malraux elevates aesthetic freedom to this level makes clear the ideological weight he imposes on culture. Malraux’s preoccupation with the image of Paris was not limited to the ephemeral exhibition of art, and much as the Biennial attempted to enjoin the city’s new function as an art host replete with recognizable emblems of its illustrious past as the site of an equally illustrious production, so too did Malraux’s other early aesthetic plans take on the image of the city itself as a means to represent the nation metonymically. In other words, Malraux’s interest in the imaginary spatial coordinates of a “museum without walls” finally assumed material form when Malraux joined ranks with Pierre Sudreau, the new minister of construction and urbanism, and turned his sights to the urban spaces of France, hoping to locate in them the keys to a new cultural superiority.¹9 In December of 1961, for instance, he contextualized the need to restore France’s architectural patrimony in light of the fact that other countries, of which he singled out the United States, had exactly such projects under way.²0 Malraux’s international barometer usually directed him toward cultivating internationalist pretentions, such as those centered around visibility within the European Economic Community (founded in 1957), and so he and Sudreau were easily able to agree that the grayed façades of Parisian buildings presented not only a structural risk to the city, but an aesthetically determined political handicap as well. Unwilling and, moreover, unable to finance the costs of cleaning the streetscape itself, the government thus resurrected a law from 1852, which stated that owners must “keep the façades of the buildings in a good state of cleanliness.” ²¹ However, in 1959, as the so-called private interests of capital become increasingly important to the cultural value of public space (and vice versa), the state passed additional laws that enabled property owners to shift the bur-

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Faç a de s; or , t h e Spac e of S i l e nc e Figure 2.1. Unknown photographer, “ravalement,” or whitewashing of the

den of paying for the ravalement (cleaning or resurfacing), Hôtel de la Fare, 14 place Vendôme which they were obliged to do at least once a decade, to (built circa 1702), 1er arrondissement, their tenants. This took the form of heretofore illegal rent Paris, France, September 1962. increases applied over long periods of time. As a result, not © Roger-Viollet / The Image Works. only did wealthier streets like the Champs-Elysées and the rue de Rivoli benefit from privately funded sandblasting in accordance with this law, but many of the greyer, dingier façades in what were the poorer working-class districts also saw rent hikes to finance new, gleaming façades and the eventual neighborhood improvement that went with them. Based on these changes, Malraux boasted to the writer and journalist Roger Stéphane that he had changed the color of Paris (see Figure 2.1).²² Only a few years

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later, in 1966, even some delegates to the National Assembly would speak of how much Malraux had done to rebuild the city, thereby further confirming his preoccupation with the importance of the material surface as substance.²³ For Malraux, as well, the importance of such superficial improvements was tremendous. It extended not only to the literal saving of Paris’s public face— an important aspect of tourist appeal and resulting financial revenue, after all—but also to a metaphorical one, wherein the symbolic strength of the Fifth Republic would be reflected from the gleaming surfaces of the newly whitened, significantly pre-nineteenth-century buildings.²4 The whitewashing of the city and the attendant implication that a “white” Paris was a “rebuilt” Paris cannot be fully understood without at least a cursory acknowledgment of how such symbolic associations of color played an important part in contemporary debates about whether or not the Algerian populations— settler, Arab, and Berber alike—were French.²5 This is not to suggest a simplistic parallel between the color of buildings and of skin, but rather to indicate the degree to which the visual played a role in processes of imagining national coherence in multiply diverse realms. In addition to literally wiping away the traces of the years by sandblasting a building, this symbolic investment in “whitening” correlates very specifically with the French emphasis on assimilation and the continued refusal to account for the different ethnic traditions that had come to comprise the new nation.²6 Thus, just as the French government had concerns about the invisible difference of the French Jew, which had led to pronounced legislation regarding public spaces during and just after the Vichy regime and the associated collaboration with the German occupiers (1940–1944), one might also say that during and throughout the period just after the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962), the French people had another identity crisis, this one centered around the problem of visible difference. We might even suggest that this crisis is still perpetuated in France today, wherein, for example, debates and legislation regarding Muslim women’s head-coverings have revived concerns about the political implications of visible non-integration.²7 Just as the fear of visible difference might be said to underlie the symbolic connotations of Malraux’s whitewashing of the city of Paris, so might we understand his investment in fixing France’s image as one of a nation dedicated to a long tradition of restoring architectural moments to their past glory, as well as a means to augment the national reputation. In November of 1959, Malraux took his campaign to accomplish an updated version of this task to the National Assembly, pleading for the funds necessary to extend the principles of ravalement to historical monuments and buildings associated with state institutions. In a speech replete with his usual ministerial hyperbole, he declared that “the situation of historical monuments in France is dramatic . . . it will require a significant budget to remedy it.” ²8 Arguing against the dirt, decay, and neglect that, in his view, threatened to ruin this patrimony, Malraux insisted that the blighted condition of the architectural treasures of the Paris region represented a crisis of national proportion, but therefore presented an ideal opportunity to reassert the national reputation. In his zeal to restore the glory of a na-

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tion humbled by military occupation—the German occupation of France, of course, but also, by 1959, the increasingly disastrous French occupation of Algeria, which had recently come to be frowned upon by such international concerns as the United Nations General Assembly ²9—he singled out the former royal stomping grounds at Versailles, Vincennes, Fontainebleau, the Grand Trianon, and Chambord, as well as the Invalides and the cathedral at Reims (Notre-Dame de Reims), as places worthy of immediate attention. The resulting legislation, called la Loi des sept monuments (Law of the Seven Monuments), awarded Malraux the right not only to sandblast the façades of some of the Paris region’s most famous tourist destinations and other symbolically potent buildings, like those of the Foreign and Navy Ministries, but also, and less visibly, to reorchestrate their interior architecture. In Malraux’s estimation, and according to this plan, monuments like Versailles were “built for the king, conquered by the people, saved by the nation.” ³0 Implicit in this statement is an extremely concise articulation of the oft-rehearsed idea that the ultimate beneficiary of the French Revolution was the nation and the conglomeration of citizens to whom it endowed— selectively of course—the rights of, liberté, égalité, fraternité. But, more specifically, in this context, I would suggest that this statement also reminds us of the minister of culture’s careful adaptation of specific pasts to the necessities of the present. A brief overview of restoration practices throughout modern French architectural history demonstrates the significance of Malraux’s restorative impulse, while it also signals the important differences in his program from previous efforts. Dating from the years immediately after the French Revolution in 1789, when the vandalism of historic and religious buildings became an everyday component of altering the symbolic structure of public life, French preservationist policies have always been tied to the simultaneous facts of destruction and symbolic reconstruction of new national symbols. Indeed, the quote from Les voix du silence with which this chapter begins might just as easily have been uttered in the post-Revolutionary fever when cathedrals across the young Republic were desacralized in the name of Republican consolidation. Beginning with the entry on “Restoration” in Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc’s Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XI e au XVI e siècle (1854–1869), most architectural historians have agreed that the restoration of monuments is a modern phenomenon that begins with the French dramatist, historian, and archaeologist Prosper Mérimée and the establishment of the Commission des monuments historiques in 1837. During the so-called July Monarchy (the constitutional monarchy under the reign of Louis-Philippe I, 1830–1848), Mérimée commissioned Viollet-le-Duc to restore some of what were, at that time, crucial structures in France’s nascent understanding of its architectural patrimony and its civic roots, in particular the Abbey of la Madeleine at Vézéley.³¹ At that time, the invention of a liberal, romantic historiography concerned with establishing the legitimacy of the French state labored to re-identify the medieval epoch as the origin of modern France. With that in mind,

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Viollet-le-Duc’s arguments on behalf of the structural rationalism of Gothic architecture supported the search for an indigenous culture to uphold over and against what was then articulated as the imported style of classicism. The program of monumental preservation thus became a state concern and, as of 1840, all constructions deemed “architectural monuments” were inventoried and made publicly available in the form of a national registry. The nationalizing imperatives manifest in the identification of monumental narratives continued into the Second Republic (1848–1851) and then the Second Empire (1851–1870), when the shift from the idealization of Gothic architecture and to the valorization of the classical found equal motivation in the efforts being made at that time in Egypt and North Africa to legitimize French occupation through the new logic of a shared Roman past. This is not to say that the same preservationist impulse that would be codified by the Commission des monuments historiques in 1852 was enacted equally in France and Algeria, where, indeed, despite the careful recording of some sites, others were being willfully destroyed according to the needs, real and perceived, of the French to establish the image of their place there.³² In mainland France, however, the Commission issued a decree intended to protect not only the buildings it deemed “historical monuments,” but also the perspectives and vistas that led onto them and emerged from them. This large-scale valorization of the “view” during the period of Paris’s realization as the modern city par excellence—nothing less than “the capital of the nineteenth century” ³³—was the first legislation concerned with the purely visual appearance of exclusively urban space. This legislation can be considered an important forerunner to Malraux’s plans for the historic centers of French cities a century later, and a significant component of the historical parameters that frame the nineteenth century as one given to the consolidation of both modernist urban aesthetics and the colonial enterprise, which, in this case, seems deeply inherent to them. In Paris, the civic planner Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann famously engineered an urbanism of dégagement based on similarly freeing the city’s monuments of architectural and urban “clutter” in order to make them more accessible to visual consumption. His plans, however, crumbled under widespread criticism and the weight of an enormous financial scandal. The cost of demolishing so many buildings had been so extravagant that the Commission des monuments historiques set the task of re-deciding which remaining buildings would have to be protected from future destruction, regardless of the sightlines with which they did or did not interfere.³4 The Commission was in possession of few funds, however, and it was not until 1889, after much lobbying on the part of the so-called Society of the Friends of Parisian Monuments and its honorary president, Victor Hugo, that a new, national preservation law declared it illegal to alter any monumental building without the approval of what was then known as the ministry of Beaux-Arts. All such nineteenth-century provisions and listing rules were finally codified in the law of 31 December 1913, which required the preservation of both public and privately held landmarks as well as what it loosely described as the “visual space” around them. Such consideration of these “vi-

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sual spaces” led to a gradual inclusion of and protection for the buildings surrounding architectural monuments. A final law, passed during the Vichy regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain, consolidated this history in 1943, establishing 500-meter zones of protection surrounding all monuments. Within this zone nothing could be built or destroyed without official approval.³5 Far from representing a restorative moment in French architectural history, however, urban planning took a more proactive role under Pétain’s rule, even if ultimately very few plans were enacted due to the financial strain already placed on French coffers by funding the German war. As urban historian Rosemary Wakeman has argued, the policies espoused by the Vichy regime conceived of urban revival both as a necessary antidote to modernist planning and as a simultaneously integral part of future French greatness. It was, in other words, “a concocted brew of passéiste (backward-looking) traditionalism and technocratic modernization.” ³6 By the time Malraux arrived on the scene in the late 1950s and 1960s, politicians were once again, or, perhaps better, still acutely aware of the potential for irreversible change that was being enacted upon the Parisian urbanscape by a raze-and-build mentality that had evolved throughout decades, if not centuries, of political jockeying between municipal and state authorities, not to mention foreign occupation. This time, however, the mentality was attributed, foreseeably, to the United States and to the consumption-facilitating urbanism thought to be practiced here. Indeed, it had been the model of the American city and the planning that inspired it that had most significantly influenced the thinking of architect Raymond Lopez, who, with the Municipal Council president, Bernard Lafay, presented in 1954 what they called the “Solutions to the Problems of Paris,” but which became more commonly known as the Lafay Plan.³7 While this plan preserved the central sections of Paris, it otherwise heralded what Lopez predicted would be a “new Haussmannian era,” complete with massive infrastructural transformation, expansion, and, of course, the requisite and corresponding destruction that famously, if perhaps somewhat exaggeratedly, had come to be synonymous with urban planning in Paris during the Second Empire.³8 The idea that the city that had once gone so far as to entertain propositions as radical as the plan developed by Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris) for a 105-meter tower at the site of the Gare d’Orsay would now consider a plan like Lafay’s began to cause anxiety for the would-be Prosper Mérimées of the French Senate in the late 1950s and 1960s. These preservationists cringed at the threat such changes might pose, even if, ironically, what they feared was the loss of the monumental vistas preserved in Paris since the days when Haussmann had made them one of the most important aspects of the city (and when this was achieved, precisely, by destroying large swaths of the urban fabric). Even when the plans proposed to leave the central core of Paris intact in its monumentality, the preservationists—the ranks of whom were also filled with intellectuals and artists—feared modernization and the housing crisis it addressed would come at the cost of the nation’s cultural capital. On the one hand, France’s entry into the European free-market economy was imperative to its fu-

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ture; but on the other hand, conservative elements feared it might invalidate notions of the French nation based on tradition and culture.³9 In an impassioned expression of this concern, Senator Abel Durand spoke to his fellow Senators in support of Malraux’s preservation policies, echoing the Minister’s own emphasis on French architectural legacy as an integral component of France’s cultural capital and as a relevant administrative matter for the state. But for Abel Durand, as for many others, the policy of restoring monuments to their former grandeur according to The Law of the Seven Monuments was not enough to combat the threat to France manifest by the increasing signs of a new American hegemony in the economic, political, and especially cultural arenas. Durand told, for instance, of his pressing fear that French monasteries were already being rebuilt stone by stone, “pierre par pierre,” 40 in American museums, as indeed they had been in a medieval monastery complex known as The Cloisters in New York City.4¹ Of course, Durand’s claims rehearsed a siege mentality that turned a blind eye to the state’s own very active implication in the destruction of metropolitan urban space, not to mention the architectural treasures that dotted its countryside. In fact, the Americans were not responsible for destroying French architecture and urban space, as attested by the Lafay Plan (which was ultimately re-drafted in 1959 as the Plan d’urbanisme directeur to reflect the opinions of a broad base of architects, put into practice in 1961, and eventually codified as law in 1967). Indeed, it was the French themselves who implemented these changes, although it is true that the rapid destruction of such neighborhoods as the working-class quarter in the thirteenth arrondissement (near the Rue Nationale), the Front de Seine in the fifteenth, and even the neighborhood surrounding the old Gare de Montparnasse was done in the name of bringing France into the new world of capital exchange dominated by Americanstyle production and consumption, not to mention that of the West German recovery closer to home.4² The elite housing and office buildings made possible by clearing these areas promised to fit France’s entrance into the European Common Market in 1957 better than the degenerated slums they replaced. The same logic chaperoned the construction in 1958 of the new office district—begun, now famously— outside the city on the grounds of former tenement housing en route to Neuilly at La Défense. The destruction of the neighborhoods in which the new, ostensibly more “modern” complexes were to be built involved more than the clearing out of decrepit buildings, both industrial and residential. It is herein that the destruction enacted in the name of modern French conservation and its colonial urbanism counterpart (discussed below in greater detail) most clearly anticipate the significance of Malraux’s urban projects as measures taken during a specific epoch of decolonization. In Paris, for example, as many as 90,000 people had been evacuated from their homes under the legal pretense of improving living conditions and hence improving “living use” in what had been condemned as îlots insalubres, or unhealthy pockets in the center of the city.4³ Areas so designated were thought to be plagued with greater death rates from tuberculosis, overcrowding, etc., and had been a preoccupation of French ur-

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banists for some time. At least that is what we are meant to conclude from the frequency with which public health was volleyed as a justification to demolish the urban fabric of the city. Similar projects, of course, had been undertaken by the French in Algiers, where planners had “sought to sanitize what was perceived as unsanitary,” throughout precisely the same century of modernization.44 For public figures such as Abel Durand, however, the issue was more clearly one regarding French cultural status. Sparing no rhetoric, Durand pleaded with Malraux, demanding before the assembled Senate that, “in the name of Les voix du silence,” Malraux stop the French “conquerors” from becoming conquered.45 Again, Durand is speaking of what he mistakenly presumes to be the Americans, but his invocation of Malraux’s aesthetic model from 1951 (as well as his novel Les conquerants, 1928) cannily suggests—with a touch of irony, but not a whit of critique—the imperial mentality that underlies the colonial “conquests” that had enabled the conglomeration of images in Malraux’s museum. Damning as this would have been in 1960, during the violent peak of the three-way fight over Algerian independence in both the metropole and in Algeria, the most telling aspect of Durand’s encouragement is that it must be in the specific name of Les voix that Malraux stop the rampant destruction and modernization of architectural patrimony. In other words, Durand’s invocation presupposes the significance that the decontextualized image would come to have for the urbanism that Malraux will eventually encourage in the name of precisely such pastlooking preservation. In so doing, Durand’s plea also further evidences the way of seeing that Malraux’s aesthetic theory had conditioned, a way of seeing—if not also of looking—that resolutely disparaged both context and texture. Malraux’s plans to preserve entire neighborhoods began to take shape during his later campaign to obtain more funds from the Senate and the National Assembly. The goal was to preserve not only the important monuments for which he’d already lobbied, but also the urban context that surrounded them, and other similar areas. While Rosemary Wakeman’s recent research is especially focused on urban planning during the Vichy period, her study demonstrates that Malraux’s vision was not novel unto itself, as is attested by not only Vichy planning but also by the continued debate about the planning of Paris during the Fourth Republic. However, the argument that Malraux articulates is important to more than just the history of urbanism and urban preservation. It prepares the way for the visual parameters of urban space— and not just space itself—to become the explicit site of debate about how and who might constitute a national public. It is crucial in this regard that Malraux’s plan for neighborhood preservation takes as its founding example the quartier du Marais in central Paris. While components of that quarter had been the subject of intense debate ever since the future of l’ îlot insalubre 16 had become a subject of debate in the 1940s, little had been done either to preserve or destroy this area, which borders the Seine between the churches of Saint-Gervais and Saint-Paul in the southernmost part of the Marais.46 There is one notable exception to this rule, which took place during the

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Vichy period. As with so many exceptions, however, this one merely proves the rule, and indeed, it was during Vichy that the expropriation and destruction of buildings in this part of the Marais began in September 1941.47 Between 1941 and 1943, when limited funds and the turning tides of the Second World War led to the abandonment of Vichy’s urbanism and so, too, of the Marais project, 143 buildings were cleared. At this point, of course, the majority population in the area consisted of Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe. After the July 1942 raid and deportation of significant percentages of Paris’s Jewry, this population would be even more effectively cleared from central Paris, and less than 3 percent would survive the Holocaust to return to Paris after the Liberation. The Vichy approach to the Marais is significant in both its similarities to and differences from what Malraux would propose two decades later, a proposal rooted less in pure destruction than in reconstruction masked as preservation. The differences, and the support Malraux garnered where others had failed, might well be credited to the fact that the earlier decades did not have as their guiding principle the ethicomoral model of aesthetics that Malraux’s art theory had provided. Nor did they have to attend to the compelling historical conditions of decolonization. As René Mestais, head of Service techniques de topographie et d’urbanisme, made clear in 1943 when he presented several of his second-wave slum-clearing plans to the Salon des urbanistes, most Marais residents were then provincial French who had migrated to Paris.48 According to Rosemary Wakeman’s summary of Mestais’s arguments, the resulting conditions were as if “the French nation itself was systematically being destroyed by a ghastly urban environment that swallowed up all hope.” 49 And this is where the particular perversion of Malraux’s preservationist impulse becomes clear, although only through an ironic inversion that redefines who and what could be visible in the urban environment and who might, as such, count as belonging to the French nation. Taking advantage of recently reconfigured legislation regarding the economics of urban investment and restoration, Malraux was able to pitch his preservationist policies to financial as well as political conservatives.50 Aesthetic conservatives such as Abel Durand were clearly already on board, having been seduced by the logic of Malraux’s aesthetic platform. According to the terms of the new fiscal policies, rather than being the exclusive responsibility of public concerns, post-1958 urban renovations would be assigned to the economic interests of Sociétés d’ économie mixte (SEM), organizations born from a cross-section of public, urban funds and private investments.5¹ Under the laws governing the SEM, the municipal council could legally appropriate land if individual owners were not cooperative, but the SEM agency was obliged to invite the owners’ participation. Clearly such a model of investment fomented confusion between public and private, social good and individual profit.5² In particular, the fact that such mixed funds would come to finance a piece of what Malraux had argued was an integral component of the national patrimony troubles conceptions of history as public domain. In essence, what gets deemed historical is also that which becomes the property of private concerns, and therefore not at all the

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collective domain of what we might think of as a public, particularly not a national public. Such an effect, of course, recalls the collecting impulse articulated in Les voix and thus suggests the important links between the two along the lines of ideology and praxis. As Malraux did with the mythic museum, in which he wanted to root a universal capacity to make and see art, so did his vision of Paris would depend upon manipulating bits and pieces of the urban fabric to complete one man’s vision of aesthetic history and so to bolster the case he wanted to make for the specific universality of French culture. While, on the one hand, Malraux’s vision of Paris depends on his skewed model of the historical as detemporalized through the images that transmit it, the publics it constructed likely also took important precedent— at least ideologically—in the “urban experiments” that were, in fact, conducted not only on the streets of Paris over the century of urban preservation and destruction, but, even more significantly, in the very different manifestations of the same in the colonial capitals of Africa and, significantly, North Africa. Of course, even within this territory, it must be said that not all colonial urbanisms were the same. Consider, for example, how the résident général of Morocco, Hubert Lyautey, and his first architect, Henri Prost, differentiated what would become a twentieth-century, modernist urbanism within the parameters of Empire from its nineteenth-century precedents in Algeria. Lyautey had arrived in Casablanca in 1912, the year that Morocco became a French protectorate, and famously decided not to follow the urban policies already in place in Algeria, where the monuments and the urban fabric built by the Ottomans had already been destroyed by a military administration ignorant of local custom and anxious to assert symbolic mastery over the landscape.5³ Instead, Lyautey proposed to leave the old city intact, and to develop a second or “dual” city beyond its limits. Ever critical of the ramifications of the segregation—which, writing in 1980, she does not hesitate to liken to Apartheid and all that the term might have meant in that year—that “dual city” urbanism eventuated, Janet Abu-Lughod is careful to note, however, that decisions like Lyautey’s were always presented as aesthetic and appreciative, even when that appreciation might have been equally motivated by the respect for the “profit in tourism” that the unreconstructed older quarters of the city would have generated. She also notes that Lyautey himself would elevate such aesthetic decisions as the “duty of the state” and representative of “an economic interest of the first order.” 54 In this way, and in part through the advances made by what we might also describe as an urbanism of simultaneity, Lyautey and Prost reimagined how the overseas territories might serve as “laboratories for modernism,” where ideas could be realized that were either too expensive or too risky to be undertaken in the metropole.55 This approach was codified by the Plan d’urbanisme in 1919, which stipulated that master plans must be generated to develop cities of substantial populations (upward of 10,000) throughout the territories. Many, if not most of these plans were implemented in Morocco in the villes nouvelles, new towns developed for European settlers on lands appropriated under the guise of the “public purpose” allegedly served

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Figure 2. 2. Unknown artist, engraving, “Range of old Moorish Buildings at Algiers to be pulled down to make room for the Boulevard de l’Impératrice,” Illustrated London News, 1861. Collection of the author.

by European settlement.56 Modern in every sense of the word, including standard conveniences and featuring aspects of zoning already introduced in the metropolitan capital, these new Moroccan cities were all but prohibited to Muslim residents, even elites, a prohibition that supports Abu-Lughod’s arguments about the apartheid aspects of such spatial segregation. However, while Lyautey and Prost made much of how “dual city” planning— enabled in equal parts by preservation and new construction—would correct the architectural destruction that had laid waste to some of the central sections of Algiers since the French occupation as early as 1830, an argument might be made that the social effect of such “urban apartheid” was much the same as in Algiers, where the burgeoning settler populations also tended to congregate in sections of the city other than the Casbah.57 And just as the French military in the 1830s had razed neighborhoods and the commercial and communal structures on which they depended in the walled city of Algiers—the most famous example being the Souk-el-Kebir market, cleared to make way for the Place Royale (renamed Place d’Armes and then Place du Gouvernement)—to create the roads necessary for military transport, so too did planners during the Second Empire embark on major urbanization projects in that city, in anticipation of doing the same in Paris. In fact, long before the modern-

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Faç a de s; or , t h e Spac e of S i l e nc e Figure 2.3. Unknown photographer, albumen print, French Cavalry on the Boulevard de la République (formerly Boulevard de l’Impératrice), Algiers, 1880s. Collection of the author.

ist architect Le Corbusier dreamt of transforming Algiers into the French capital of modern Africa, the architects working under Napoleon III, led by Charles Frédéric Chassériau (1802‒1896), strove to make Algiers a beacon of the Emperor’s version of liberal modernity in the Mediterranean (see Figures 2.2 and 2.3). The centerpiece of this project was the famous Boulevard de l’Impératrice, which boldly announced Algiers as confident, open, and prosperous through the the airy, white arcade that faced the sea and thereby oriented the city to France just beyond. The boulevard’s design aimed to symbolically transform Algiers from the “ville de guerre” or military camp it had been, to a city of free exchange, a city of pleasantness, a “ville du libre-échange” or a “ville de plaisance.” By proclaiming the city’s modernity and universalism, Chassériau’s projects more fully secured the destruction of the remaining integrity of Algiers’s Arabo-Ottoman appearance and, as Nabila Oulebsir has described it, the city became “more French than Moorish” (plus française que mauresque).58 That may well have been the point, at least insofar as is suggested by the orientation of the boulevard’s façade toward France. We can certainly see the visual and social contrasts manifested between the “dual cities” that were being thus cultivated in Algiers in the popular imagery that proliferated throughout the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth: stereopticon

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views, studio views, and especially postcards. While all of these media are ephemeral, their impact on the image of Algiers as it came to be imagined throughout (and after) its occupation by the French is indisputable. All the same, no other representations have come to imprint the view of Algiers in the French, if not global, imaginary so much as two important films made about it in the mid-twentieth century, Pépé le Moko (1937), directed by Julien Duvivier and, even more famously, The Battle of Algiers (1966), directed by Gillo Pontecorvo.59 Following the logic of what I will argue below is Malraux’s final transformation of image into urban reality, it could even be said that these two films have had an enormous impact in structuring, retrospectively, Algiers’s urban space. The images that they project have come to infiltrate reality, creating, in effect, yet another “dual city,” this time as imparted through the comparison between image and site. Pépé le Moko— shot almost entirely at the Pathé studios in Paris, with sets designed by Jacques Kraux (though the ending sequence at the marina was shot on site)—was an exceptional popular success, both in France and abroad.60 Ostensibly about Pépé, a French thief—played to great fame by Jean Gabin in his prime—who has sought refuge from the police in the clandestine spaces of the Algerian Casbah, the film also serves as an analogy for Parisian superiority, just as it presents and legitimates a touristic fascination with the “Arab World.” For the purposes of the discussion at hand, what is perhaps most interesting about this film is that Pépé presents the Casbah as both a world separate from the French city— degraded, collapsed, unsafe—but also a trap from which there is no escape. Indeed, the film opens with a close-up of a map of Casbah, from which the camera zooms out in order to reveal that the map is hung on the wall of police headquarters (see Figures 2.4 and 2.5). Here, a French officer lectures his troops for having failed to return Pépé to the metropolitan authorities. In defense, the local police explain that, hidden in the labyrinthine, “lice-infected anthill” that is the Casbah, Pépé is out of their sight and beyond their reach. Space is thus represented as outside French control, and, indeed, Pépé continues to evade the French police by using the celebrated network of Casbah rooftops. At the same time, however, Pépé himself longs for Paris, which becomes personified for him in the figure of Gaby, a beautiful Parisienne (Mireille Balin), who is a tourist in the same Casbah that the police claim they can’t enter, and from which Pépé spends much time gazing across the Mediterranean (see Figure 2.6). His actual girlfriend, Inès, reminds him that he is safe only in the Casbah, because there he is already in a prison of sorts. Indeed, when he leaves the Casbah, he dies. This image of the Casbah as a trap dominates the official perception throughout the film even though the Casbah that the viewer sees is warm and accommodating, populated not only by tourists like Gaby, but also by a roster of people from all nationalities and locales that the police carefully delineate as not being Algerians. This local population remains for them invisible, hidden even beyond the walls of those parts of the city allocated them.6¹ The Casbah itself, not to mention its role in facilitating the spread of the na-

Figure 2.4. Julien Duvivier (dir.), film still from Pépé

Figure 2.5. Julien Duvivier (dir.), film still from Pépé le

le Moko, 1937, showing a close-up of a map of the

Moko, 1937, showing a scene in police headquarters,

Casbah.

with a map of the Casbah on the wall in the background.

tionalist insurgency, might well be the central character of Pontecorvo’s film, The Battle of Algiers (1966), written with Franco Solinas at the behest of the Front de libération nationale (FLN). The story line is based on the account written by the actual FLN leader, Yacef Saadi. It tells the story of the 1957 urban uprisings in Algiers and casts mostly nonprofessional actors in roles modeled after historical figures in the revolutionary war.6² Here, in Pontecorvo’s representation of Algiers during the Algerian War of Independence, and during what Figure 2.6. Julien Duvivier (dir.), film still from Pépé le has become—in no small part thanks to this Moko, 1937, showing Jean Gabin as Pépé looking out film—its most famous episode, we see the ex- over the Casbah rooftops toward France. treme consequences of the separation of urban space and the literalization of the “jail” that Inès suggests to Pépé that the Casbah must be. Through its very carefully constructed mise-en-scène, meant to reduplicate the effects and affects of the documentary newsreel, the film establishes for the viewer the dramatic contrast between the open spaces of the seaside boulevards and Place du Gouvernement at the base of the Casbah and the claustrophobic quarters where the Algerians in the film live, both hidden and hiding (see Figure 2.7). Indeed, the film begins with a depiction of the most claustrophobic of all such spaces, with revolutionary leader Ali La Pointe (Brahim Haggiag) and three collaborators hidden in a small safe room behind a wall, behind a bed, within a narrow house in the upper Casbah (see Figure 2.8). That they are trapped is demonstrated not only by the closeness of the space they occupy, but also by the fact that their hideout is being lined with explosives by troops under the direction of the character of Colonel Mathieu (Jean Martin). 59

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Similarly, Pontecorvo makes much of the checkpoints that were established around the Casbah when French police and military units sealed it off in order to isolate insurgent cells, such as those on which the fictional depiction of La Pointe’s foursome was based (see Figure 2.9). These barricades of barbed wire and sandbags prevented Algerians from entering those parts of town where European settlers lived, suggesting the ultimate representation of bifurcated or “dual” urban space. In contrast, it is freedom of movement and openness of view ascribed to the character of French Colonel Mathieu (based on an array of French generals, and not just General Jacques Massu, as is often asFigure 2.7. Gillo Pontecorvo (dir.), film still from Battle of Algiers, sumed), that serve as the hallmarks 1966, view of “Alger 1954” as Pontecorvo shot it in 1965. of his specifically European identity Figure 2.8. Gillo Pontecorvo (dir.), film still from Battle of Algiers, (see Figure 2.10). When, in the film’s 1966, showing Ali La Pointe (far right, played by Brahim Haggiag) most famous sequence, three Algeand others hiding in a “safe room” in the Casbah. rian women (Djamila, Zohra, and Hassiba) assume the visible trappings of this identity, they too are allowed to pass—literally and metaphorically— into the European city. Of course, within the fantastic and ideological rendition of history that the film delivers, it seems to be the city itself—if not, in fact, the very same restricted spaces—that delivers the crowds of indefatigable celebrants who emerge as if from nowhere at the very moment when the film and the revolution it chronicles seem to be over. In Algiers, it might be said that such models of spatial separation as are dramatized here resulted not merely from the police maneuvering that Pontecorvo emphasizes or from the technologies of surveillance that he is careful to illuminate supported such control. Instead, it would seem that they had been created urbanistically and reinforced repeatedly throughout the French occupation. This explains, at least in part, why Pontecorvo’s heroization of the city has come to serve as such an effective symbol of decolonization. At the time of Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko—which, it might be argued, was in and of itself responsible for generating the view that Pontecorvo’s film set out to match and to counter— such separations had most recently been codified by what would come to be called the “Prost plan.” Drafted in 1931 by the same

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architect and urban planner Henri Prost as mentioned above in discussing Moroccan redevelopment plans, along with René Danger and Maurice Rotival, then revised in 1933 and 1934, this plan was the legally mandated response to the French Plan d’urbanisme (1919) discussed above. The Prost plan divided Algiers into four zones, separating commerce, industry, residential spaces, and areas of architectural preservation. Provisions were made to suggest that residents of the areas marked for preservation, in particular those of the Casbah, would be responsible for maintaining their own residences to the standards outlined by the plan. Bordering the Casbah, the Marine Quarter became a central focus of the plan, as the designers saw in it lit- Figure 2.9. Gillo Pontecorvo (dir.), film still from Battle of Algiers, tle that corresponded to the modern 1966, police blockade and checkpoint at the foot of stairs in the needs of communication and trans- Casbah. portation. It is possible that they also Figure 2.10. Gillo Pontecorvo (dir.), film still from Battle of Algiers, saw in it the concentration of cosmo- 1966, wide-angle view of General Mathieu and troops on parade in politans and migrants that Pépé le the “European city.” Moko had already tried to symbolically “displace” to the Casbah.6³ As Lyautey’s pronouncements about Morocco had intimated in 1912, and as the Prost plan codified in 1934, whole neighborhoods (and not just blocks) in French North Africa were thus made available to large-scale preservation efforts (and in Algiers, often at the private cost of local inhabitants). This was done precisely in order to evidence, if not also exploit, the historic and cultural past that the colonial state hoped to appropriate as grounds for its own elevated stature. While it is subject to a different history and a different urban ontology, the lesson of Casablanca, for instance, helps here to illuminate how such preservationist policies could be, and arguably were, enacted at the expense of actual history. In Casablanca, French architects and preservationists after Prost had been charged with the task of determining the typology of indigenous architecture and codifying it according to their own principles of what was valuable and worth preserving. These typologies and preferences were, in turn, preserved and protected at the cost of not allowing for any building that violated such “historic” appearance. The segregation of the population that en-

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sued when some neighborhoods were preserved and others were not, as well as the French unwillingness to bring amenities or modern “improvements” to the indigenous neighborhoods, was accordingly camouflaged under the lofty rhetoric of respecting and preserving indigenous culture. It did not hurt, either, that the sheen of historic authenticity projected by the exoticized isolation of these neighborhoods proved to be an enticement to the burgeoning wave of tourists venturing out to visit the new colonial possessions or collecting their images in the form of the same kinds of tourist postcards and photographic images that began to proliferate in abundance at this time.64 Eventually, this tourist appeal would be rearticulated in the development of a hybrid architecture that was not so far away, in fact, from what Prost would call “an architecture of surface,” and which was put to work in the articulation of distinctly colonial urban formations.65 New construction—both governmental and private—within these formations would also come to be built with Orientalist (and, at times self-reflexively Orientalizing) flourishes of so-called indigenous motifs: white stucco, mihrabs (recessed niches to indicate the direction of Mecca), and colorful tiles. All these were incorporated into what were proposed to be European ideals: regularity, rectilinear axes, monumental vistas, without consideration for the original purpose, symbolism, or value of the indigenous culture from which they were drawn. To put the effects of such hybrid spatial practices schematically, it could be said that such architectural and urban appropriations disrupt the threads of communal or cultural relationships to the past as it is rooted in the specificity of place. Those architectural emblems of the pre-colonial (or at least pre-French occupation) past that did remain and that were even preserved were cultivated under the codifications of foreign principles and ideals. Abstracted one step further, it could also be said that the history that predated European colonization was thus re-envisioned by Europeans according to an image of what the past might have been had it been as perfected as colonial values would allow. The ascent of French colonial and imperial identity took root in exactly this kind of cultural erasure, such that the substitution of the culture of the other could always be ascribed to the civilizing process, both in the overseas territories and, as I will now address, on the European continent. The practices were consistent, though of course not identical, across the empire. In fact, the notion of modernity as always representing a loss for those who are modernized from without, and who are therefore never accorded an agency in their own development, depends on this very premise. Modernity remains squarely in the power of one group to see and then simultaneously apply and occupy. Such literal and physical appropriations return us to the aesthetic proposals of Malraux’s imaginary museum and the colonial, which is now to say modernist visuality embedded in it. Indeed, just as Georges Duthuit had complained in Le musée inimaginable that Malraux’s musée imaginaire depended on imperial conquest to amass a “global” repertoire of objects to abstract as style, an argument could be made that Malraux’s eventual proposal to “preserve” entire sections of Paris drew upon the imperial habits of colonial urbanisms equally rendered as style. These were modified in their application,

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according to the long-standing French tradition of preserving monuments, the decades of debate that had pitted the standards of progress and cleanliness against those of tradition (as described above), and the habits strangely wrought by the Vichy episode. Malraux’s proposals thus charted new urban ground, or rather, re-charted the very old ground of Paris for a new ideological purpose. Whereas previous articulations of landmark preservation had emphasized the importance of a particular architecture, historical event, or historical figure, Malraux’s commemorative practice exceeded these parameters. Instead, we might say that the target of Malraux’s ambitions lay in enhancing the image of French sovereignty—both political and cultural— and not just historical prestige as had concerned the Vichy planners, while also allowing for a continued modernization process, much as his forerunners Lyautey and Prost had done in Morocco and Algeria. In essence, his model of the city—wherein only some neighborhoods were deemed historical, and within those, only some buildings deemed significant—would allow the metropolitan French to have their cake and eat it too. Indeed, Malraux’s distance from the typical practices of preservation was infused by the desire to eclipse the actual events and products of history with their images. We have already seen this tendency at work in his celebration of the fragments he collected in his musée imaginaire in 1951. The change here is that, emboldened perhaps by lessons gleaned from colonial urbanism, Malraux now proposes to erase the event from the actual archive that is urban form, an archive that the French Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre would labor to make clear actually becomes truly spatial only when it is “produced” by human use. The eponymous law Malraux proposed, eventually codified in August 1962, attempted to appropriate for the state this capacity as previously ascribed not only to local urban authorities, but more significantly, to the very people such authorities were meant to represent. Instead, it would be assigned to the state and to its private funding partners. In thus creating an image of France’s future, Malraux would change the facts of the Parisian present and past. The careful language of Malraux’s law provides the first clue as to how these temporal acrobatics would be enacted. According to the law, the quarters and neighborhoods to be “protected”— encapsulated for the purpose of Malraux’s proposal in the Marais, where a full 75 percent of the extant buildings predated 1871, as compared to only 27 percent in the rest of Paris— are to be called secteurs sauvegardés, or, safeguarded sectors (see Figure 2.11).66 These were to consist of areas or ensembles of buildings whose preservation is deemed desirable for either historical or aesthetic reasons. Once designated as a safeguarded sector by a joint agreement of the Ministries of Housing and Culture, the area is “restored” according to steps laid out explicitly in the law. First, a team of architects develops a plan that binds and limits all subsequent development according to an aesthetic principle that remains frozen in the ideological present. Then, the mayor of the town or the commune establishes an ad hoc SEM committee (in the case of the Marais, for example, the city of Paris would eventually come to own 51 percent of SOREMA, the Societé d’ économie mixte pour la restauration

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Figure 2.11. Map showing the 1962 secteurs sauvegardés [shaded in red] in relation to the historic walls of Paris, as published

du Marais) that details the financial arrangements necessary to implement the plan.67 The law further stipulates— plan de sauvegarde et de mise en valeur and here is the rub—that each secteur sauvegardé must du Marais, Paris Projet 23 –24 (1983). take as its aim the desire to “conserve, restore, and enhance Enceintes du centre historique de Paris. an area by the re-instatement, modernization or demolition 1 January 1970. © Apur. of buildings with a view to the transformation of living and working conditions.” 68 The words “demolition” and “transformation” in this section of the law should give pause since, as we have seen, Malraux’s plan was ostensibly conceived and originally promoted as a means to ensure the preservation of entire neighborhoods and not, in fact, the destruction that had haunted the preservationists and which had begun, albeit piecemeal, under the Vichy regime in the same Marais sections. Clearly, the opposite concept of neighborhood preservation, wherein restoration means the re-formation through demolition, if necessary, lay just under the surface of Malraux’s rhetoric. Such urban practices—influenced, as I have suggested above, from similar management of pre-colonial urban forms in North African cities—would transform the approach and planning of urban space in France, if not, in fact, in much of the by L’atelier Parisienne d’urbanisme, Le

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Western world as well.69 According to the codifications of this law, minute sections of the urban fabric would be made eligible for monumentalization, as entire neighborhoods became the focus of renovation and were consequently made to remain static in the historic present. To better understand this process and the ideological issues that animated the impulse at its core, it is instructive to take a closer look at the Marais in order to assess exactly what it represented that might have been, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, so simultaneously worrisome and desirable to the historical vision of France that was held by the minister of culture and the state. As both the neighborhood for which the law was written and the first area to benefit from the legal protection of the so-called Malraux law, the Marais quarter was, at that time, a neighborhood of marginal economic activities and similarly marginalized inhabitants. Today, it is inarguably one of Europe’s priciest art and fashion centers. But in 1962, the year the law was passed— and this hardly seems coincidental—the Marais was one of the most densely populated areas of the city, at almost three times the average of other parts of Paris. The fact that there was a considerable housing shortage at the time would hardly therefore have presented a logical reason to dismantle it piecemeal. In fact, as suggested above, the debate about what to do with the whole district had been a concern of planning throughout the years following the Second World War, and often the question involved— as it did with îlots eleven and sixteen, which had been repeatedly condemned as insalubrious—public health concerns, which were clearly reduced by the 1960s. According to the policy of Vichy urbanism described above, in 1941 it was suggested that parts of this area be razed, which would soon be the case as well for the nearby streets that framed the Beaubourg platform.70 Subsequently, throughout the Fourth Republic, various plans were floated to clear the area and preserve only the neighborhood’s great hôtels (mansions) and churches, as if to create around these historic buildings an open-air museum in precisely the same manner that Haussmann had done around Notre-Dame in the nineteenth century. However, during the Fourth Republic, protests from all aspects of the political (and aesthetic) spectrum had convinced the administrative authorities that it would be better to proceed more cautiously in this particular part of the city. The municipal council of Paris approved plans to develop a Cité internationale des arts, and ideas were floated to repurpose the area’s mansions as centers of culture and learning under the auspices of universities and libraries. At roughly the same time and drawing on proposals he had first developed in collaboration with Jean-Charles Moreux in 1938 and 1941, the architect Albert Laprade developed a similarly-hewn model of façadisme. Two examples of his proposals were later reprised in 1957, each concerned with “reconquering” the city— as Prefect Sudreau’s model would have it—without sacrificing extant architecture.7¹ The proposals focused specifically on the informal, squatting structures poised over the church and cemetery of St-Gervais-et-St-Protais (see Figures 2.12 and 2.13).7² According to urban historian Rosemary Wakeman, Laprade’s model of corrective urban reform could engender only a tainted “historicist remembering,” the likes of which we have seen in the first chapter were so central to Sieg-

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Figure 2.12. Unknown photographer, structural accumulations surrounding Église Saint Gervais before the secteur sauvegardé was established by the loi Malraux. Published in Albert Laprade, “Aménagement des Quartiers Historiques,” Urbanisme 55 (1957): 26. See “Ilôt rue François Miron avant réhabilitation (bâtiments occupant la cour) et vue après,” in PSMV du Marais; difficultés de gestion et d’application. Améliorations et modernisations nécessaires,–octobre 2003– février 2004. 1 / 1/ 0000, © DOC . © Apur.

fried Kracauer’s condemnation of human enterprise.7³ And, yet, as we also saw then in Malraux’s art theory, this was precisely the model that Malraux’s policies would legalize and reify. I am interested here in the shift from plan to realization that distinguishes Laprade’s proposed façadism—which was never realized—from the strategies Malraux would help codify as law. In keeping with this book’s focus on decolonizing art and the representational practices from whence it is derived, I want to suggest we understand this shift in relationship to the historical conditions of decolonization. Indeed, the reasons that Malraux’s law is so important for this study concern another population of the Marais, one significantly less often addressed in the literature about Paris in those same decades, most of which tends to categorize the Marais as always having been the former Jewish area of the city. Indeed, this is the history best memorialized in the renovated streets surrounding the Rue des Rosiers as they exist today, repeatedly punctuated by extensive plaques and commemorative installations about the deportation of French Jews.74 As alluded to above, after the forced evacuation of the Ashkenazi Jews from the Marais during the Second World War, the area became home to large peripheral populations, many of whom could find little opportunity to live elsewhere in the city. Even more specifically, by the time Malraux launched his 66

Gervais, “restoration” following implementation of the “Plan de sauvegarde et de mise en valeur du Marais.” L’atelier Parisienne d’urbanisme, Le plan de sauvegarde et de mise en valeur du Marais, Paris Projet 23 –24 (1983). © DOC . © Apur.

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Figure 2.13. Unknown photographer, Église Saint

campaign to “save” the Marais, the area had also become home to a significant number of Algerian workers, many of whom had found housing in the small hotels of the Rue du Roi-de-Sicile.75 Census figures estimate the number of Algerians to be 10,800, though this is likely conservative, given both the resistance many might have had to the suggestion of being surveyed in such a manner and the practical difficulties of accurately assessing such numbers.76 Many of those counted had migrated to (technically, within) France just after the Second World War and before the 1954 outbreak of the Algerian War of Independence.77 In any case, this number represents a greater density of Algerians than in any other arrondissement in central Paris. While it is true that the Algerians had never fully integrated into metropolitan cultural life in Paris, they were perceived as an increasing problem during the years of the Algerian War of Independence when urban terrorism—propagated by both sides, or rather all three if we consider the police, the FLN, and the OAS— spread to Paris, and with it the brutality of a quasi-military police force. While this topic is further addressed in chapter 5, suffice it to say for now that, as newly important targets of extreme police brutality and harassment, the Algerians of Paris became increasingly subject to supervision and control, as well as to the propaganda of racism and intolerance. When they were not actually arrested for fear of imminent terrorist attacks, 67

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they were feared and resented for their visible linguistic, cultural, and religious differences. France, as de Gaulle had claimed so emphatically and programmatically in his 1944 speeches celebrating the Liberation of Paris in 1944, was not a unified country. In 1961 as in 1944, this meant that visible instances of disunity would be hard to accommodate within a nation intent on presenting itself as whole and un-torn. As shall be discussed in chapter 6, some might suggest that they still are. It was in the middle, then, of the long and divisive war for Algerian independence and roughly coincident with both the eruption of violence on the streets of Paris in 1960 and de Gaulle’s gradual concession that Algeria would have to be let go, that Malraux began his campaign to protect the façade—literal and metaphorical— of French history by preserving the entire quarter of the Marais in order to consolidate the country’s national image around the picture of an untained past. The symbolic coincidence is limited to the extent that Malraux’s legislation was never directed explicitly toward quelling social disruption in Paris, although it should go without saying that Malraux would not have been the first (or the last) to conceptualize urban form as a means to control populations; this, indeed, was one of the primary lessons of colonial urbanism. When Malraux’s fixation on an image of the French past was displaced onto the actual organization of urban space, however, it unmistakably fostered the neutralization of that space for any purposes other than the dissemination of an imperialist brand of aesthetic and cultural nationalism. Indeed, the terms of this neutralization were part and parcel of the Malraux law, the fine print of which indirectly declared the first casualties of the renovation of French culture to be the residents of the Marais. According to the terms outlined in Article 6 of the law, tenants and occupiers could not object to the plans slated for their building by the master plan for the neighborhood. Indeed, they could be forced to leave, as many of them were throughout the period of redevelopment, especially after a final and aggressive police occupation in 1977. The discrepancies between the law’s treatment of the landed and working classes is revealed by the fact that an owner of a leased property was allowed to repossess his or her (even “its,” if the owner was a corporation or a business) property if it had to be evacuated. Commercial and industrial leases were to be resumed at a set percentage of market rates or else the original holders of the lease would be remunerated the costs associated with displacement.78 Tenants evicted from already overcrowded living spaces, on the other hand, were promised only temporary housing. In fact, however, even such temporary housing did little to guarantee these residents a place in the city. Despite incessant promises to the contrary, when the first operational area of the Marais was taken up and readied for its massive facelift, only 56 percent of the residents were relocated to provisional housing in either the same safeguarded section or in a neighboring arrondissement.79 The rest were promised a later opportunity to be considered for newly created housing— outside the city and in most cases far away from their place of work— once it was built. While the intent and circumstances of Lyautey’s Morrocan “experiments” were certainly different, it would seem that his “dual city” planning had found a place in the metropole, only

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now the “nouvelles villes” were to be the domain of the displaced poor and the foreign.80 And, even still, this new housing—usually in one of the growing number of grands ensembles or large apartment complexes built in the suburbs of the city—was not always available. Numbers of families ended up homeless, their names languishing on long lists of those still promised new homes. The less fortunate ended in the notorious bidonvilles, or shantytowns, that had existed on the outskirts of the city ever since Baron Haussmann first had his way with the wrecking ball, but which became more and more associated with North African populations during the decades of decolonization.8¹ Living conditions in these bidonvilles were so stark that it would not surprise many if Frantz Fanon’s famous claims about the compartmentalization of the colonial world had been written while looking out at one of these slums.8² In writing that “the colonial world is a world cut in two,” Fanon could certainly have been thinking of Algiers, where he had lived for some time, but he could equally have been thinking of Paris, and that is precisely the point. The idea that the “colonist’s sector is a sector built to last, all stone and steel,” or that its “trash cans constantly overflow with strange and wonderful garbage, undreamed-of-leftovers,” speaks to the plenitude that might have been thought to characterize the metropolitan center from the point of view of the bidonville, no matter if it were in Algiers or in Paris. Here, there is a “world with no space, people are piled on top of one of the other.” And, as opposed to the world of plenty that sits just adjacent to it, “the colonized’s sector is a famished sector.” From here, to paraphrase Fanon, the colonized subject gazes with lust at the colonist and his life.8³ Also, per Fanon’s pronouncements as articulated in his incendiary essay, “On Violence,” here, as in the colonies proper, the colonists carefully controlled the border between the two worlds. During the Algerian War of Independence— as Bourlem Guerdjou’s film Vivre au paradis (1999) suggests with such narrative detail in its even-handed mélange of stories about immigrants’ hopes and dashed dreams of assimilation with accounts of the radical and radically suppressed demonstration of 17 October 1961—the Paris bidonvilles were subject to frequent and violent police searches.84 As much as the administration feared the concentration of Algerians in any particular place, there were also benefits to be enjoyed, like the isolation and containment that such removed shantytowns provided their investigations.85 Displacement and isolation were tools of war like any other. When the Marais was “restored,” those who were provided temporary housing were given absolutely no guarantee that they could come back and resume living in their former residences once the renovations were completed. As Malraux was canny enough to have anticipated years before in his own career as a thief of historical artifacts, the past sells. The rents in the what came to be called the quartier historique du Marais were significantly higher, and many former inhabitants were thus permanently displaced.86 And so, we might say, was Paris once again “whitewashed.” Of course the comparison with the ravalement of the city’s façades is metaphorical, but it suggests nonetheless a continued emphasis on surface and visual appearance. The

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words of Georges Duthuit’s indictment of Malraux’s musée imaginaire now take on a haunting tone in relationship to the Minister’s imposition of his aesthetic models onto actual urban space: “Did industrious and prosperous people live in these lands that you devastate? What does it matter, since they served you to found an empire?” 87 Whereas neighborhood renovation had once been proposed in the name of health and sanitation, it was now performed in the name of a past that was meant to guarantee a specific definition of future greatness, one that was indelibly marked with the style of a perfected and fragmented past. It is crucial here to recognize that the significance of this transformation is that it rendered what had been material as image, and what had been historical as culture. Indeed, many of the occupants to take up residence behind the restored façades of the historic hotels of the Marais in the 1970s and 1980s were new cultural institutions: museums, art centers, and archives. As the architects Louis Arretche, Paul Vitry, Michel Marot, and Maurice Minost— hired by the city in 1965 after the legal designation of the Marais as a safeguarded sector— explain in the preface to their “Plan de sauvegarde et de mise en valeur du Marais,” “it can happen sometimes that the architectural value of the houses examined is weak or debatable, but it is in their ensemble that the irreplaceable harmony of these quarters resides, it is in the alignments, the perfection of the facades, that the soul of these block resides.” 88 Strikingly evocative of the language employed in Malraux’s articulations of the musée imaginaire’s collection of fragments and surface details, this reflection on what constitutes the “soul” of a neighborhood never takes into account the area’s inhabitants. This largely poor, ostensibly immigrant population (though some had lived in the Marais since the end of the nineteenth century) represents the type of historical subject that the planners’— and Malraux’s—ideas of “harmony” and “soul” excise. These same subjects would later reemerge as the objects of discourse set on recouping the everyday as a category of lived experience and so too of analytical practices, such as those described by Michel de Certeau and Pierre Mayol, who championed the neighborhood as an “invention” of the people and the communities that inhabit it.89 As for how his plans to safeguard an area concern the problem of ownership and private property, Malraux claims such rights to ownership invalid in the face of the collectivity of the nation, which—in contradistinction to the way de Certeau and Mayol understood things—now claims the neighborhood as patrimony much as it claims monumental architecture. As he put it in defending his preservation plans to the Senate, “These monuments are the witnesses of our histories.” 90 Such claims echo the rhetoric that the colonial regime and its planners used to legitimize their annexation and arbitration of colonized lands in the name of the “public,” while the notion of a possessive inventory recalls Malraux’s ambition to include all possible objects in his musée imaginaire. And so, while this “selling” of a reorganized space as the past held no advantages for the area’s original inhabitants, the new spaces it created would prove to be important to the cultural image of the nation. This image was then to be deployed exactly as Malraux had predicted in his speech to the National Assembly on 23 July 1962, when he presented the final version of his “Project of the law completing

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legislation regarding the protection of French historic and aesthetic patrimony and to facilitate restoration.” 9¹ During this speech, he argued frequently and vehemently for preserving the city in terms of its image, the likes of which, he claimed, might be found in the imaginary realm of dreams.9² This conflation of the imaginary with the image provides an indication of how Malraux’s model of urban restoration and its particular suitability for the rich architectural heritage of the Marais was not so far from the project Malraux had cultivated all those years before in Les voix, when he asserted that all humanity itself could defy its own demise through the traces of the art it would leave behind. France, a nation recently divided, was available to the same sleight of hand. Just as the legislative assemblies had reconceived the recent past as a historical shell through the measures of juridical forgetting, and just as Malraux had removed cultural forms from their contexts in Les voix, the city could be turned into a mere façade, a fragmented view onto the surface of a wall. Like the reproduction of an artwork, real space could also be made flat, fictional, and still. And here, in the city, and through the mechanism of urban planning, this could be done without any kind of intermediary reliance on actual photographs. Recalling the celebratory phrase of Prost, certainly this represents an “architecture of surface” if ever there was one.9³ Indeed, as the 1965 plan to “safeguard” and “reclaim” the Marais best demonstrates, Malraux’s restoration was to be a reclamation of surfaces only (see Figure 2.14). Apparently, there was more that this old section of Paris needed to be cleaned of beyond the spectacle of otherness that had been manifest in the Algerian population that once lived and worked there, often in small-scale manufacturing firms set up in the courtyards of abandoned mansions. The plans that the architects drew up after careful study and consideration of the existing neighborhood did not preserve the neighborhood as it was or even as it had come to be. Rather, relying on exactly the same kind of dégagement so infamous throughout French urbanism, but now renamed curettage, they planned to “clean out” the inner courtyards of the buildings in order to make way for green spaces and underground parking lots. That is, they planned to remove the “accretions” that had been built up by history in favor of what would become codified by the cultural venues that moved in as more properly French lifestyles and cultural routines. What is equally important is that the urban planners’ designs aimed to return the Marais as completely as possible to the way it had been when the neighborhood was recorded on the so-called Turgot plan of 1739, when the rational alignments and perfected façades that are so celebrated as exemplary components of an enlightened urbanism and the associative emblems of a beneficent regime were most visible (see Figure 2.15). It was as if the urban decay initiated during the Third Republic— precisely when France was consolidating its colonial holdings in North Africa—was to be stricken from the record just like the memory of the colonial wars which had only recently ended. Thus both a crucial aspect and an unavoidable result of Malrauxian restoration becomes clear: that Malraux’s discourse on the image insists that urban space is an

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Figure 2.14. Louis Arretche, Paul Vitry, Michel Marot, and Maurice Minost, Plan de sauve-

aesthetic object, and that this displacement onto the city of aestheticist ideals in turn reprioritizes space, so 1965. From L’atelier Parisienne d’urbanisme, that all functions within it must take place under the Le plan de sauvegarde et de mise en valeur sign of a specifically cultural nationalism. The aesthetic du Marais, Paris Projet 23 –24 (1983). 1 January 2004. © Mairie de Paris. Image courtesy of the musée imaginaire, in itself internationalist and Apur. dehistoricizing, becomes a primal force behind the definition of itself that France offers its own populace and the rest of the world in the late twentieth century. The power of this linkage only reinforces the idea of France as nation. For even as it disseminates an idea of culture as an ahistorical force, it purposefully saturates its own physical and ideological space with the hallmarks of that culture. The image, this time as culture itself, claims identity with real physical space. Le plan de sauvegarde et de mise en valeur du Marais was rewritten in 1976, after the Groupe de travail de patrimoine monumental suggested that the slow proggarde et de mise en valeur du Marais, PSMV,

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ress of renovation was costing the city too much just as Paris was beginning to take on new administrative importance. Additional tax concessions were made to increase private speculation and a number of buildings were redesignated for public, in this case, governmental, use in order to justify the continued large outlays of public funds.94 The Malraux law, criticized for the social havoc it had wrought, became a dead letter in terms of urban redevelopment.95 But still, if we look today at what the Marais has become— and if the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl is right when he notes that in the modern period, we use our monuments to tell our history—then in the perfectly white walls of the Marais, in all those carefully preserved galleries and so many carefully cleared courtyards, we can see the important legacy of the early history of the Fifth Republic and how it responded to the colonial legacies of the French state before it.96 These spaces signal the moment when the past was replaced by a valorization of image that represented a specifically modernist historicity, one that was mobilized in order to universalize the idea of France precisely as its real global empire began to recede. This transformation of metropolitan urban space was undergirded by lessons learned through colonial urbanism, as is evident in the separationist policies designed to control populations and to consolidate metropolitan prestige and wealth. At first glance, it would seem that Malraux’s plan to designate specific areas, including the less magnificent architectural examples within them, as historic, and therefore to protect them by law was radically at odds with the decontextualizing impulse he had demonstrated in his photographically enabled musée imaginaire. It would seem as though Malraux’s proposals had been intended to preserve all those details of origin and use value—the “aura” described by Walter Benjamin—that he 73

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Figure 2.15. Detail of the Plan de Turgot, engraving, 1739. Image from Wikimedia Commons, http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plan_de_Turgot.jpg.

had once so readily expunged in his aestheticization of culture as form. In fact, Malraux’s model— as borne out by nothing less than the history and planning of the first safeguarded sector described above—retains the same dehistoricizing aesthetic of the fragment and the surface in order to ensure the invisibility of alterity within the urban fabric of the capital city. This movement toward ahistoricity in the early 1960s was nothing if not laden with political effects. The attention to surface embodies exactly the political negligence and hostility meted out to the peripheral cultures that had been hidden behind the façades of the Marais. In his plans to restore the city, Malraux, like the restorer Viollet-le-Duc before him, created a fictitious image of its original condition. Yet unlike Viollet-le-Duc, who approved of structural transformations during renovation in order, precisely, to mark the passage of time between the original and the restored building, Malraux’s vision depended on halting time and purging it of any indication of geo-temporal or even cultural disruption. As an emblem of the past, Paris—preserved like a fossil mounted on an archaeologist’s wall— could speak only of the present. Distance and time were collapsed and the city became yet another fragment of a spatially unified temporality, ready to have its picture taken, ready to be put, as with so many other images, into the pages of culture’s great archive. More than just the dubious accomplishment of an individual or even the state apparatus that eventually enabled the translation of his vision into material fact, Malraux’s strict reification of the image of the past as the future of the present within and upon the space of the city corresponds to a longer history of French efforts to concretize a national, if not inherently colonial, model by which the otherwise fluid mechanics of territorial experience might come to construe the terrain of belonging and self-identifying experience. 74

BETWEEN RESISTANCE AND REFUSAL The Language of Art and Its Publics

SONIC YOUTH, SONIC SPACE Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Acoustics of Deterritorialization

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The change undergone by the concept of literature— which those attempts marked by the names “the New Novel,” “New Criticism,” “Structuralism” have helped to render spectacular in France—is not in immediate relation to the “Second World War,” having been in the process of becoming long before; however, it found the accelerated confirmation of the fundamental crisis in the war, the change of an era that we do not yet know how to measure for lack of a language. Which amounts to saying, in the crisis that keeps getting deeper and that literature also conveys according to its mode, war is always present and, in some ways, pursued. Which amounts to saying that the war (the Second World War) was not only a war, a historical event like any other, circumscribed and limited with its causes, its turns, and its results. It was an absolute. This absolute is named when one utters the names of Auschwitz, Warsaw (the ghetto and the struggle for liberation of the city), Treblinka, Dachau, Büchenwald, Neuengramme, Oranienburg, Belsen, Mathausen, Ravensbrück, and so many others. What happened there—the holocaust of the Jews, the genocide against Poland, and the formation of a concentration camp universe—is, whether one speaks of it or whether one does not speak of it, the depths of memory in the privacy of which, henceforth, each one of us, the youngest as well as the most mature, learns to remember and to forget.— Maurice Blanchot, “War and Literature,” 1971

n 1950 Maurice Jarnoux photographed André Malraux at work in his office studiously contemplating the photographic fragments that had allowed him to reimagine the cultures of the world as if a museum without walls (see chapter 1, Figure 1.1), and which would eventually inform his revisioning of the French capital as a city of nothing but. By the same year, Isidore Isou’s Lettrism had already become a well-known fixture in an emergent Parisian art scene intent on rejuvenating avant-garde tactics in studied refusal of both the cultural dominants

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from which Malraux’s aesthetics had derived and the establishment to which they would subsequently contribute. Illusory as it turned out to be, Isou’s midtwentieth-century celebrity was achieved through careful manipulation of both high and low ends of this cultural spectrum, much as Malraux’s had been achieved through careful suspension of both the left and right polarities of the political one. Whereas, however, Malraux had aspired to offer the nation an image of itself built on the illusion of spatial coherence and historical continuity, Isou— a Romanian Jew, born Ioan-Isidor Goldstein in Botosani, Moldavia, in 1925 and self-exiled to Paris twenty years later— aspired to de-territorialize exactly such spatial suppositions and the false presumptions of semiotic correspondence upon which they were based. The Lettrist platform he modeled proposed an artistic critique aimed at both the ascendancy of print and photographic media over direct experience, which he took to be most immediately available vis-à-vis manipulations to the sonic register or its representation. Dependent as much on dogged persistence as on the occasional media scandal, Isou’s critique was especially notable in that it was first articulated from within the very same literary and visual parameters it set out to destabilize. Joined at first by two equally young French Jews, also newly arrived in the capital, Gabriel Pomerand (born Pomerans) and Maurice Lemaître (born Bismuth)—whom Isou would call his “disciples,” ¹—Isou aimed to use sound and the graphic notations meant to communicate it as the basis for a differently “spatialized” language, one that did not correspond to the strict parameters of national boundaries and was neither exclusively visual nor textual. He hoped that such a language would also circumvent the embeddedness of traditional language in everyday routines of perception, be they spatial or visual. It was imperative that this language find an aural realization, as it was through sound and its manipulations that the Lettrists hoped the experience of urban and national space could be reinvented. From this reinvention, the Lettrists planned to engender new tools of discourse that would enable communication and community beyond the limitations of territoriality, especially as the latter had come to be inscribed in literary language. In this expectation, however, Isou’s avant-gardist stance met its limitations when it pitted itself against an institutional culture embodied by such figures as Malraux. Like Malraux’s pas de deux between the aesthetics of an imminent globalization wrought by colonial conquest and a hegemonic French cultural nationalism, the deterritorialized language that Isou’s Lettrism imagined could exceed neither the institutional contexts of the artistic and literary world of Paris nor the imperial constructs that bolstered their presumed authority, even as these were both being challenged by anti-colonial conflicts. As such, Isou was subject to and would eventually perpetuate the same bait-and-switch that, since the advent of modern aesthetics, has taken French traditions as the source for impossible universalisms. As I will demonstrate, Lettrism was unable to exceed the limitations of a colonially circumscribed France as a container for the aurally-defined community it imagined, and ultimately failed to make good on the more utopian aspects of Isou’s proposals. This failure was explicitly enmeshed in the movement’s simultaneous in-

s on ic you t h, s on ic spac e

vestment in communicating the particularities of a specific subaltern experience and in the hope that such a recuperative identitarian politics could successfully reintegrate excluded bodies into national ideals. In Isou’s case, and indeed in that of the other young artists with whom he worked most seriously in the late 1940s, this subaltern identity aligned with that of the (almost exclusively male) Ashkenazi Jew and was understood as synonymous with the experiences of European Jewry during not only the Second World War but also throughout its immediate aftermath in both Europe and, in Isou’s writings, in the newly established Jewish state of Israel. As such, Lettrism provides an object lesson about how avant-gardist attempts to speak for and in the voice of difference can and often do perform the same insistence on aesthetic dogmas—here, as rooted in colonial universalisms—that permeate the very cultural and national institutions they hope to undermine. The abstractions, ideals, and disjunctures in which Isou took refuge in order to avoid such misappropriations did not prevent him or those with whom he worked from ultimately recapitulating this error in the quest for a new means of cultural belonging that would accommodate the model of their and others’ cultural-linguistic difference. Within a now-standardized history of visual and cultural production in France during the 1950s and 1960s, Isou and the youthful energy that the young exile generated when he arrived in Paris are most frequently invoked in reference to the splinter constellations of the Lettrist International (LI) and the Situationist International (SI), which Guy Debord founded in 1952 and 1957 respectively, joined in the latter effort by other defectors from the LI.² Certainly, much scholarship has detailed the SI’s significance for cultural histories of the period, so it need not be reiterated here. In fact, one might go so far as to suggest that the sheer volume of near-hagiographic attention Debord has received since Elizabeth Sussman’s important exhibition on the SI (at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, 1989) has worked to distort our understanding of Lettrist production proper.³ But the movement deserves to be evaluated on its own terms rather than on those that Debord established when he broke from Isou’s group. This is especially true of the early work that Isou and his followers produced between 1946 and 1951. These years mark the two media scandals that Isou orchestrated in order to introduce himself to lettered elites: the first was staged in Paris in 1946, where Isou presented himself as a performer, poet, and eventually as a theorist; the second event involved a more international audience in Cannes, in 1951, when Isou made his debut as a filmmaker. During these five eventful years, Isou pointedly honed his aesthetic doctrine around what he proposed was the ostensible semiotic purity of the individual letter as a vehicle of unmediated articulation. The possibility that such discrete units of aural expression could exist outside of the conventional purposes to which they had been put found echo in the corresponding privilege that Isou ascribed to the category of “youth” in an economic model based on what he explained was a presumed externality to the regular demands of capitalist production and consumption.4 On the basis of such suppositions about purity and externality, he elaborated a multi-

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media platform aimed at rejuvenating not only artistic production but also the conventional forms of signification and representation on which it relied, and by which it was experienced. These platforms are perhaps most productively demonstrated by his first book, Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et une nouvelle musique (Introduction to a New Poetry and a New Music, 1947) and his first film, Traité de bave et d’ étérnité (Treatise on Drool and Eternity, 1951), each of which corresponds to one of the two staged media scandals. Isou’s focus on purifying language by stripping it of customary semiotic association was certainly not unique in the period. Following the rise and spread of Fascism in Europe and of totalitarianism in the Soviet Union, language and other means of representation had come to be mistrusted by leftist artists and producers, who saw them as inseparable from the instrumentalization to which such means of communication had been put, especially by the administrative gymnastics of state-generated propaganda. It was, therefore, through a reconfiguration of language’s function itself that many formulated their ideas of what a revolutionary art would have to look like and, especially in Isou’s case, how a revolutionary art would sound. The triangulated relationship that Lettrism subsequently forged between linguistic signification, image-making, and the concept of audience provide important texture and dimension to the cultural landscape of Paris during the late 1940s and early 1950s, which is to say precisely the same decades when André Malraux’s musée imaginaire entered the public sphere, when his urban façadism would begin to remake public space, and when photography as Malraux had imagined it would continue to remake the image of the world. At the same time, efforts to renew language were also impacted during these years by the transnationalisms emerging from the model of a European community that sought to cohere beyond the differences of language and culture against the economic and political superpowers of the Soviet Union and the United States. It is equally important to remember that these decades also saw the fruition of decolonization as a historical process. Nationalist sentiment, of course, was on the rise in much of the colonized world, including in Africa and Indochina, areas of special import for the French. In Indochina, for instance, it was precisely on the heels of the Second World War that France re-occupied Indochinese territory, setting off the Viet Minh rebellion that would eventually lead to the First Indochinese War (or French-Vietnamese War), fought primarily in what is now Northern Vietnam from 1946 to 1954. While a good deal has been written about efforts to re-create language “after World War II” according to what was then perceived as the inherent inadequacy of language to communicate the scale of the devastation inflicted during the Second World War, less has been said about how such efforts themselves factored into the subsequent crises of language during decolonization, when language would become an essential ground on which the battle for self-determination would be fought, and through which it would be both refused and defended in the metropole. In this context, Isou’s model— and that of other self-designated Ultra-Lettrists, including François Dufrêne and Gil J. Wolman, early members of Isou’s entourage

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before becoming involved in décollage, the LI, and SI respectively—takes primary value as a transitional model through which artists labored to generate new conditions of a public communicability based on interrupting the normative conjunction between signifier and signified, or what Maurice Blanchot upheld as “the space of literature,” wherein meaning is made according to convention.5 The risk for the Lettrists would be that the experiences communicated by these new means were rarely, if ever, able to transcend the spatial parameters of the very languages that shaped them. And so, despite efforts to deterritorialize the conditions of everyday and traumatic experience, these interventions—moored in the aftermath of a politics of engagement that had fed into and was subsequently reinforced by the same models of artistic resistance that were once so central to efforts to oppose the rise of European Fascism— often ended by bolstering the linguistic priority upon which the colonial apparatus depended in its efforts to naturalize its ubiquity and to legitimize its claims to cultural superiority. The media scandals that frame the period under consideration in this chapter exemplify a number of Lettrism’s preoccupations with the techniques and tactics of the historical avant-garde, even as they demonstrate Isou’s willingness to exploit the institutionalized publicity mechanisms of what Jürgen Habermas would define as the “bourgeois public sphere.” 6 Isou garnered much media attention after his boisterous interruption of Michel Leiris’s prefatory remarks to a performance of Tristan Tzara’s La fuite: poème dramatique en quatre actes et un épilogue (Escape: Dramatic Poem in Four Acts and an Epilogue) at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in January 1946 (at which Tzara was present), by announcing: “Enough of this old stuff. Dada is dead!” Indeed, it was only as a result of the public attention he gained from this calculated disruption that the aspiring author was able to persuade the literary giants Jean Paulhan and Gaston Gallimard to publish his first and most important book, Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique.7 Having upstaged the most venerable of old-guard Dadaists to unleash his own variety of poetic performance, the young provocateur conferred upon himself both the audacity and the seriousness needed to rouse the attention of the intellectual and leftist media, and thereby to penetrate the French literary elite. At the same time, Isou also courted a more popular audience among those he identified as “youth” and who frequented the underground cafés and cabarets of the Latin Quarter. He plastered the streets surrounding the boulevards Saint-Michel and Saint-Germain to announce his upcoming readings at such popular café-night spots as the Salle des sociétés savantes and Le Tabou,8 boasting that in conjunction with these events, “twelve thousand youth will charge the streets to make the Lettrist revolution.” 9 His engagement with both audiences would be held in careful dialectic, even as his work grew increasingly removed from the tradition of specifically French poetics with which he had so pointedly aligned himself in celebrating the history of modern poetry, which he modestly defined in the subtitle of his Introduction à une nouvelle poésie, as extending “from Baudelaire to Isou.” Although Introduction à une nouvelle poésie was published in 1947, Isou claims to

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have written the text while he was still living in his native Romania, and before he decided to travel to Paris, declining the offer of paid passage to Palestine from the World Jewish Congress in Geneva.¹0 The book charts the specific development of modern poetics that had led to Isou’s preoccupation with letters. In the text, Isou explains that, while some of the burden for what he takes to be the death knell of language is attributable to contemporaneous events—including, for instance, the realities of war and exile that dominated other accounts of those eager to discern how to write “after Auschwitz,”—he finds more specific fault in the realm of cultural innovation. It is, in particular, on poetic innovation that he lays the greatest blame, claiming that poets continue to “élargissent les mots chaque année” (enlarge words each year) even though “les mots ont déjà tant de ravaudages qu’on les porte en loques” (words are now so bandaged that we wear them like rags).¹¹ Tattered and bandaged as a result of having been stretched beyond their normal limits to accommodate new experiences and new representation tropes, words are simply no longer capable of adapting to new uses. In order for culture to advance, Isou insists, they must instead be replaced. As with the Surrealist and Dadaist artists before him, Isou believed that the experiments he proposed in form, if pushed far enough, would eventually and necessarily undermine the very structures on which society was based, thereby leading to an affirmative rebuilding of that society and a correspondingly complete social revolution.¹² Before such revolution could be achieved, all “enemies of creation” must be destroyed. Chief among these were not only the Dadaist practices he had decried during the Tzara performance as so much “old stuff,” but also the Surrealist and Socialist Realist work then championed by the established avant-garde as the competing, but equally legitimate, heirs to the Resistance and to the political aspirations of the French Communist Party (CPF).¹³ Each of these was accordingly positioned as a dominant model of engaged or committed practice and thus available to assault by younger “revolutionaries” like the one Isou imagined himself to be. Isou’s understanding of poetic production corresponds to the model he outlines for cinema and all the other arts, and which he understands as operating through oscillating periods of generation and destruction. He names these periods amplique (amplic or expansive) to designate how aesthetic practices absorb external influences; and ciselant (chiseling or reductive) to describe efforts to purify the form by paring away the excesses of prior innovation. While poetry is the first form that Isou analyzes in his effort to draft the Lettrist model, this is not because he, like Jean-Paul Sartre, wants to emphasize the separation between artistic forms and media as the literary luminary and leftist leader had done in his Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (What Is Literature? 1947). In this book, Sartre makes a seminal case for the inherent politics of nonabstract poetic writing, asserting it as the primary means toward an engaged practice. To the contrary, Isou’s theory of chiseling as a reduction to pure form upholds the integration of not only of other genres of writing, but also of other media. In fact, part of his aesthetic platform involves rebuilding culture based on the interrelatedness of all expressive forms.¹4 In these forms he locates the possibility for abstraction to generate meaning on precisely the same order as that of Sartre’s preferred realism.

s on ic you t h, s on ic spac e Figure 3.1. Isidore Isou, flow chart, “Schèma II: L’évolution du matériel poétique,” Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). Image courtesy Catherine Goldstein.

By the late 1940s, Isou was confident that the only means to initiate a new amplic phase in poetic, and hence all communicative artistic production, was to complete what had already been almost a century’s worth of avant-gardist experimentation. In Isou’s model, which he charts as the diagrammatic “Schèma II: L’évolution du matériel poétique” (Scheme II: The Evolution of Poetic Material), such experimentation had succeeded in purifying poetic language somewhat but had failed to dismantle it fully so that it might be rebuilt anew, no matter if in poetic experimentation or in its filmic equivalent (see Figure 3.1). The chiseling phase of modern poetry, Isou explains, began after Victor Hugo had taken off with Charles Baudelaire’s refusal of the “anecdote” (as Isou refers to content) in favor of the poem’s form. Such chiseling had continued apace through Paul Verlaine’s “annihilation” of the form of the poem in favor of that of the line, and Arthur Rimbaud’s subsequent “destruction” of the verse for the word. Parallel efforts to purge poetic form of external influence are manifest in what Isou considers to be Stéphane Mallarmé’s preference for the word’s visual qualities over its linguistic ones and Tristan Tzara’s disaggregation of meaning and language in favor of what he understood as a profoundly abrupt chaos.¹5 It bears 83

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noting at this juncture that the lineage on which Isou draws is written in French, even when, as with Tzara, it is not written by French authors. Indeed, in his Introduction à une nouvelle poésie, Isou asserts the priority of French letters and French culture, almost in spite of himself.¹6 Having traced the teleological evolution of poetic form through the historical avant-garde, Isou positions his own practice as ready to exceed what he more explicitly names in his Introduction à une nouvelle poésie as the Dada artists’ erroneous pursuit of verbal nonsense when formal attributes of linguistic form were still left to refine. Seizing upon the last of these, Isou isolates the single typographic mark of the letter as the first element to be expanded in the initiation of a new amplic phase, one that would be based on something other than the preponderance of the printed text’s reliance on the word—le mot— as the building block of meaning. Whereas the printed form of words had come to encapsulate and dominate the arc of literary history, the poetics of the future as Isou envisioned them would need to take a different form. At the core of this new form, Isou’s Lettrism proposed the signifying capacity of the letter—la lettre— as the most basic unit upon which meaning could be rebuilt. As such, the letter would take priority over the word as the “degree zero” of communicative action, rooted in an acoustic space shaped by publicity instead of privacy, experience instead of representation, and distracted confusion rather than contemplative or focused absorption. Isou grounds his distinction regarding these terms in an understanding of the word as overwhelmingly and terminally graphic. Thus the word has become fixed in the explicitly plastic representation of concepts already designated by linguistic convention and continually perpetuated as such. The word is therefore a limiting and experience-diminishing vehicle, incapable of accommodating change or evolution. It is, he asserts in the manifesto that precedes the main exposition of his Introduction à une nouvelle poésie, “the first stereotype.” ¹7 Operating from the perverse principle that argues if a tree falls in the forest and is not seen or heard, it did not fall, he builds on this assessment to lament that, without linguistic representation, things and the relationships they engender would cease to exist. “Sensations without words in the dictionary,” he suggests, “disappear.” ¹8 In this model, conventional language— at least in its printed form and the codifications that have ensued— assumes the function of determining and limiting reality instead of re-presenting it. Isou’s consideration of the word’s graphic fixity is rooted in what he understands as the longer arc of printing’s technological advance. He bemoans this history (and the rise of the media culture it has produced) for having deprived the word of its function by removing it from the public realm of speech and relegating it to the private realm of the book.¹9 For Isou, the printed word—nothing more than an accumulation of letters— should never have been understood as signifying anything more real than the sound elements for which it serves as a notation. Maintaining that the word has instead absorbed the impoverishing conditions that wed it to the printed page, Isou argues that any quest for a new public language must be built from pure pho-

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nemes and so must be spoken. This judgment echoes Isou’s assessment that language need not bolster visual meaning, anticipating the experiments by later avant-gardists who considered the printed text as little more than an event score for potential performance and action. To re-obtain value as a means of communication, the printed representation of language must be sounded out, so that it may be heard. As such, it must be based on non-significant emblems, such as letters. Isou proposes that sounding this new language would assure the binding of self and other in a dialogic relationship defined by presence and immediacy. For Isou, such sounding would cancel the deadened reach and the totalizing facticity of the word by evoking articulations of sound more in sync with the immediacy of sensation. Letters are cues and not signs; unlike words, they operate only in combinatory relationship with other letters in order to produce sounds and, often, the movement of the body parts necessary to make them. If the word, as the emblem of normative or traditional poetic meaning, had become incapable of expanding any further in order to adapt to the changes of modern life, the letter had not, in Isou’s eyes, achieved the same kind of fixity. Elsewhere, for example, Isou asserts that one pathetically stammers the word “airplane” in a feeble attempt to name the formidable significance of the transformations enacted in the field of transportation.²0 On the other hand and most simply put, letters were still dynamic in their association because they had never meant anything other than the sounds they were meant to evoke. Whereas the letter’s own inherent reliance on its graphic form could not be refused— a fact that figured as the subject of much of the Lettrist painterly production during the 1950s—Isou was content this that graphic mark fixed nothing.²¹ Malleable according to invention rather than fixed according to convention, graphic symbols, letters and the sounds they evoke thus pervade and animate Isou’s aesthetic principles, and in particular his hope that expression might exceed the cultural boundaries of conventional language. Deeply committed to the notion of a recuperable, originary purity that is implicit in such a model of signification, Isou’s preoccupations with the technologies of reproduction and communication were not restricted to print. In 1951, on the occasion of the Cannes International Film Festival, he launched his attack on the specific “enemy of creation” that he understood to be cinema in all its permutations. It was here that he debuted at least certain aspects of his unfinished film, Traité de bave et d’ étérnité (Treatise on Drool and Eternity). While the Cannes Film Festival was not yet the high-glamour, red-carpet phenomenon it is today, at the time of this— only its fourth official—iteration, the festival already marked the importance of cinema in the midtwentieth century, and did so in a way that underscored what was just then emerging as an important form of transnational cultural exchange. Originally launched in 1939 as a counter to the Fascist ambitions manifest in the contemporaneous iteration of the Venice Film Festival, which was launched in 1932, the French festival was officially inaugurated in 1946. The burgeoning internationalist pretensions of the festival at Cannes can be traced even in the posters advertising the event: Georges C.

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Chavannes’s design for the 1949 festival features the ecstatic dance of a dark-haired woman dressed in a twisted cavalcade of national flags and colors beneath a similarly hued strip of 35mm celluloid, while Jean Don’s composition for 1952 brandishes an even greater variety of national flags, now reimagined in the form of twisted film stock rising forth from a Grecian urn. Such international expansions make sense in light of international arrangements such as the Blum-Byrnes agreement, by which the United States forgave some French war debt in return for opening French cinema houses to American movies.²² In 1951, when Isou’s Traité was screened outside of the principal competitions, the international roster included Vittorio De Sica’s Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan), which shared the Grand Prix with the Dutch film Spiegel Van Holland (Mirror of Holland, directed by Bert Haanstra), and the Swedish film Fröken Julie (Miss Julie, directed by Alf Sjörberg). Joseph Mankiewicz’s Hollywood extravaganza All About Eve took home a Special Jury Prize, and Bette Davis earned the Best Actress award, thereby marking one end of what art historian Andrew Uroskie has invoked as the festival’s imperative to negotiate the proper aesthetic trajectory of twentieth-century cinema between popular features like this and those pictures he classifies as “film art.” ²³ Members of the media who flocked to the festival in Cannes in 1951 were fascinated by the figure of outlier that Isou cast there. They could not resist, however, joining general audiences in publicly and vehemently excoriating Isou’s efforts.²4 Such media attention only augmented Isou’s celebrity as an iconoclast and, accordingly, heightened the curiosity of the intellectual classes, a fact he would instrumentalize in future advertisements for the film. A bemused Jean Cocteau, for example, though not officially a member of the jury, awarded Isou a specially created Prix des spectateurs d’avant-garde for the film and, a year later, a complete but abbreviated version of the film enjoyed a three-week run in Paris at the famous Studio de l’Étoile on the rue Troyon in the wealthy and well-trafficked area of the seventeenth arrondissement. Cocteau himself designed the poster for this high-profile event, thereby associating the film aesthetically and creatively with his own, far more successful ventures.²5 According to media scholar Vincent Kaufman, it was only the soundtrack of Traité de bave et d’ étérnité that had been “screened” at Cannes, and this only for a few minutes before audiences began to boo and otherwise indicate their displeasure.²6 Whether this is true or whether the audience simply did not have the patience to wait for the delayed image-track remains somewhat immaterial, because the isolated soundtrack, which begins with the rhythmic chanting of a Lettrist symphony, is in and of itself independent of the film’s imagerial content. Much as he’d hoped to divorce spoken sound from its printed referent through the reliance on individual letters as opposed to complete words, here Isou aimed to develop what he referred to as a “cinéma discrepant” in the separation of the aural and visual components of cinematic representation. Such a discrepant cinema was meant to exploit the corresponding discordance between sound and image to interrupt the kind of syntagmatic meaning that normally structures cinematic narrative, and which, in Isou’s eyes, had

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rendered it no more an effective tool for social advancement than the more aesthetically celebrated works by other “enemies of creation.” For Isou, such discrepancy, which he championed as nothing short of a military-inspired tactic of dividing and conquering, was meant to unhinge the sound and image tracks—which he names the “two wings of cinema”— such that no logical or necessary relationship could rejoin the two and no hierarchy could be established between textual and visual registers.²7 Seeing would be as important as reading, and both were to be given equally to the ulterior projects of listening and hearing. Such effects, of course, parallel Isou’s ongoing attempts to disconnect signs and their signification in written and spoken language. Revised over the course of the year after Cannes, the final version of Isou’s Traité takes form as three “chapters”—“Le principe (The idea),” “Le développement (The development),” and “La preuve” (The proof )—meant to articulate, defend, and enact Isou’s model of discrepant cinema. Across the span of these three chapters, Traité oscillates between a self-professed manifesto on cinematic form, issued as a three-way voice-over meant to simultaneously narrate and present the internal monologue of the protagonist Daniel (played by Isou) and the construction of a unique aesthetic object in its own right. Cut into all this are the sounds of a “public debate” or open-lecture at a ciné-club (clearly a recording of a lecture Isou had given or hoped to give), recitations of Lettrist poetry—including the aforementioned Lettrist symphony, which resurfaces at various moments in the film as if to underscore the sonic immediacy that underlies Lettrist aesthetics—performances by individual poets, including François Dufrêne (later a décollagiste), and a detailed, if not anodyne and inconsequential, narration describing the protagonist Daniel’s various romantic adventures. For the most part, the images on screen do little to situate or explain the sonic dimensions of the film, nor do they advance a conventional narrative, Daniel’s romantic adventures notwithstanding. Instead, they tend to fixate on banal sequences, like the long takes of Isou (as Daniel) walking along the boulevard Saint-Germain, and are stitched together in flagrant refusal of the standard codes of cinematic diegesis— establishing shot, detail; shot, counter-shot; action, reaction— or continuity and narrative development (see Figure 3.2). Now and again, the image sequences are interrupted by extensive expository intertitles, which again remind the viewer that language takes a visible, material form when it is read, and is, in this way, also staked within the hierarchical order that normally privileges sound and image. Isou’s original 35mm footage is also frequently interrupted by bits of found film stock, including clips of literary celebrities and a good deal of excerpted rushes he had allegedly gleaned from the trash bins of the Services cinématographique des Armées (Cinematic Section of the Armies, SCA), which had recently relocated to Fort d’Ivry in Ivry-sur-Seine.²8 Produced by the Army for popular consumption in the form of newsreels, such sequences were intended for propagandistic efforts, to communicate the mounting tensions in Indochina in terms controlled by the French Army. So, here, for example, in excerpted clips that Isou weaves into his montage, we are made privy to scenes depicting the pomp and circumstance of an imperial political cere-

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Figure 3. 2. Isidore Isou, film still, Traité de bave et d’éternité, 1951, showing Isou walking along a boulevard in Paris. Figure 3.3. Isidore Isou, film still, Traité de bave et d’éternité, 1951, showing Isou’s manipulation of found footage of a political ceremony. Figure 3.4. Isidore Isou, film still, Traité de bave et d’éternité, 1951, showing a ruined village in Indochina.

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mony and the mechanistic movement of French troops marching through rural areas (see Figure 3.3).²9 We are also introduced to local Vietnamese culture, in the form of fishermen at work and fragments of temples and villages in ruins (see Figures 3.4 and 3.5). Intercut with the footage from the boulevard Saint-Germain, these images from a site of war have the uncanny effect of destabilizing both the temporal and spatial particularity of Paris, which otherwise appears uniformly grey, abandoned, and near lifeless. Exactly unlike the pageantry of the ceremonies, be they military or political, that Isou weaves into his film, his wanderings along the Boulevard SaintGermain take no specific direction or focus (see Figure 3.2). We might read the effect of splicing these banal wanderings into the propaganda segments as also disruptive to the presumptive order of the Indochinese sequences, rendering them as futile as Isou’s wanderings, or as inexplicable as the other montaged sequences, which are just as likely to vacillate between oppositional pairs—the heights of residential buildings and the irregular paving stones on the ground, for example, or the church of Saint Germain-des-Prés and a Vietnamese temple— as to repeat some sequences at random. In some instances, the same clips are repeated upside down and in reverse. Most importantly, they are often scratched through in what remains the most literal demonstration of Isou’s theorization of the “ciselant,” or chiseling phase of aesthetic development, wherein an artistic genre is reduced to its most essential qualities. Here, we see such chiseling put into effect by Isou literally carving into the celluloid of the 35mm film itself, deliberately scratching out faces and also gouging links between frames such that the “absent” image renders itself just as positively as the one otherwise captured in the film medium. So, too, does this image move and vibrate as the film sequences are projected. Within the terms of Isou’s prognoses, such chiseling marks the penultimate stage of a creative cycle built on destruction and re-creation, to which, he argues, that all art forms and the societies from which

effects of Isou’s “ciselant” technique and scratched celluloid.

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Figure 3.5. Isidore Isou, film still, Traité de bave et d’éternité, 1951, showing the

they are generated must conform. The images in this part of the film are not placed so as to be logically related, and they are ultimately written over by Isou’s marks and so undone by this violence to the film stock itself. This is not to say that the image is not important in Isou’s work. In fact, whereas critics have traditionally seized upon the mechanics of the voice-over as the central component of the film, it is instead the images that set up the most important demonstration of Isou’s Lettrist principles.³0 As explained by the mechanics of the “chiseling” phase of Isou’s aesthetic model and as demonstrated in the first instance of Isou’s deliberate and dramatic scratching of the film stock, the marks made on the film’s celluloid reduce its capacity to capture and register an image in its most primary quality as material ground to an imposed figure. The scratched frames that punctuate the film’s visual component are first seen at the beginning of the film’s second chapter, “The development.” As the commentator embarks on a tale of Daniel’s sexual pursuits, the images on screen diverge even more markedly from the soundtrack than they had in chapter one: here, the stock footage is introduced, spliced among more and repeated scenes of the protagonist’s wanderings in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which are increasingly disrupted by flipping, reversing, and scratching. Suddenly, a lightning-like coil of white strikes through what appears to be stock footage of a carpenter filing a small block of wood clenched in a vice (see Figure 3.5). Only cracked fragments of the image remain in the path cut by Isou’s effacing scratch, which splits the image in nearly equal halves. The implications of this and the multitude of marred frames that follow are crucial. First, the scratching undermines the representational function of the original image. Instead of an image of a carpenter at work, we are presented with the fragments of what had been that image. These fragments can only begin to suggest what they had stood to signify before. Indeed, the image is quite literally defaced, as the visage of the carpenter falls victim to Isou’s violent scrapes. It bears repeating here that most of the scratches in Traité de bave et d’ éternité are made over the faces of individuals, usually hovering over single faces or leaping across the countenances of multiple figures in groups. En masse, these faceless armies lend a ghostly quality to the film, all the while reiterating, again and again, that the images flashing before the audience

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are just that: images, not the figures they were once intended to represent. They are— much like the letters Isou privileges as the foundation of his aesthetic platform—the raw material of an artist, in this case, the director, Isidore Isou, and therefore available to material manipulation and transformation. As suggested by the diatribe that the film’s protagonist, Daniel [Isou], rendered at the ciné-club in the moment leading up to the film’s presentation of Le manifeste du cinéma discrepant (Manifesto of Discrepant Cinema) Isou’s intention is to “sculpt flowers on film,” so that “a new order will emerge from the disorder.” Indeed, in the second chapter of the film, Isou does just that, scraping simplistic flower-like drawings into the film stock, obscuring the faces of his would-be subjects, and subjecting his film to manipulations that reveal the materiality of the celluloid itself. Despite Isou’s insistence on the necessary discordance of image and sound, we should remember that it is not insignificant that the first instance of scratched film depicts a craftsman at work filing away, which is to say shaping form by means of subtraction (see Figure 3.5).³¹ This oft-repeated sequence underscores Isou’s process of distressing his film stock with abrasive materials to destroy the quality and integrity of the images contained therein. In rendering these images non-representational, he further disrupts the audience’s urge to passively identify, or name, that which these images would otherwise depict. The film stock and the photographic apparatus upon which it is built are thus revealed in their eminent superficiality, as silent and impenetrable, for example, as the faces of the photographed statues in Malraux’s musée imaginaire. In this way, we might also see Isou’s efforts as meant to undo precisely that kind of spatial certainty or “surface coherence” that Siegfried Kracauer had lamented as key to the duplicitous relationship of the photographic image to knowledge and experience, as discussed in chapter 1. Such efforts to disrupt the space of the image—both its depth as a medium and its temporal cohesion—take additional meaning in light of the film’s sustained focus on disrupting the spatial coherence of the city of Paris with scenes from Indochina and through Isou’s peripatetic wanderings. These disruptions constitute a crucial component of the film’s strategy of deterritorialization, both as this term would come to be defined, for example, by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their Anti-Oedipus (1972) and as the more traditional sense of the term would suggest. For Deleuze and Guattari, deterritorialization involves the general process of decontextualizing a set of relations— especially of labor and production, as Isou’s own models of youth-based externalism would also do—in order to make them newly available for more flexible applications and associations. In more traditional uses of the term, these relations are more explicitly ascribed in relation to a specific place; deterritorializing this place implies removing it from the authority that had already ascribed it as belonging to a specific territory. In Isou’s film, while the backdrop of Saint-Germain-des-Prés remains banal and unmotivated, it is nonetheless extremely specific. Not only does the voiceover name several bars and cafés that the protagonist Daniel [Isou] frequents, but the camera also lingers on the famous awnings and façades of Saint-Germain-

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des-Prés, as if to reinforce Daniel/Isou’s perpetual exteriority as himself a foreigner, interspliced into the fabric of the film. Significantly, these urban spaces are populated by association with the men and women of letters who might normally inhabit them, who are introduced here only through found footage depicting the actors, dramatists, and filmmakers who not only featured prominently in the intellectual culture of the time—Jean Cocteau, Blaise Cendrars, Marcel Achard, Jean-Louis Barrault, Blanchette Brunoy, Danièle Delorme, Edouard Dhermitte, Danile Gélin, André Maurois, and Armand Salacrou—but who are also now associated with the scenes from the war in Indochina that have been spliced into the film’s second chapter. The effect is twofold. On a thematic level, Isou might be seen as making a point about the rift between contemporary speech and political action. While many of the “talking heads” he imports into his montage were known precisely for their words (either their own or those of the authors whose lines they performed), in Isou’s appropriation they are rendered incapable of generating their own speech. Their silence, and indeed what is more acutely represented as their muteness, assumes weight in juxtaposition with the shots from the site of war with which they are intercut, and about which they can say absolutely and literally nothing. Much more significantly in relationship to the project of deterritorialization described above, the montage has the effect of reintroducing aspects of another culture, rooted in another location but presented in a state of ruin, into the heart of the architecture and urban form of the French capital city. Unlike the juxtapositions that Malraux privileged in the photographic pairings of Les voix du silence, Isou’s end in stitching what has been discarded or disallowed as war into a site of peace. That this is achieved through the idiom of a purportedly narrative film becomes especially important, in that the stock narrative that unfolds in the second chapter turns on the sexual conquest of several women, including one “Eve,” whom the commentator describes as being “like the sculptural image of war.³² Indeed, while sexual and romantic relations have often fed into and been appropriated by the metaphoric language of imperialism, they reappear here in the commentator’s description of his (as a stand-in for Isou) own aesthetic agenda as aiming to “conquer” the medium at hand, precisely by dividing it into its constituent parts. At the end of this film segment, the voice of the commentator tells us that the film’s author, “Jean-Isidore Isou,” finds the romantic story insipid, but nevertheless understands that film audiences come to the cinema for their “petite dose de tendresse dominicale et hebdomadaire” (little dose of weekly, Sunday tenderness).³³ We might understand this as parallel to how audiences might also have seen footage like that from Indochina, when they ventured to the state-controlled Sunday newsreels that dominated the diffusion of world news before the advent of televisual reporting.³4 In order to counter this specific variety of banality, Isou concludes the second chapter by proposing Lettrist poetry as a means to resist narrative metaphor through the experience of spontaneous sensation.³5 To this end, he edits into his montage a clip of François Dufrêne reciting two early examples of what Dufrêne would later

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name crirhythmes, nonsensical poems based on a marriage of the human voice as a cry and Lettrist principles of sound-based signification. The poems, an effort to express the body through the means of its immediate capacity for communication, corresponded to Isou and other Lettrists’ belief that the avenue to achieving the kinds of sonorous amplitude they hoped would redefine the conditions of communicating experience in the present involved not only undoing the kinds of narrative emplotments performed in the second Figure 3.6. Isidore Isou, film still, Traité de bave et d’éterchapter of Traité de bave et d’ éternité, but also nité, 1951, showing the effects of Isou’s “ciselant” techinvolved reconsidering the technological apnique and scratched celluloid. paratus that had contributed to their dissemination and evolution.³6 Thus, in Traité, Isou’s emphasis on “chiseling” the form to its material base meant stripping the medium to a point where it could be redeveloped, with a very different eye to the technological process of cinematic montage and its efforts to adhere sound and image. Indeed, in the film’s first chapter, Daniel is “heard” ruminating— or, rather, the commentator reports that he is ruminating— on the original split of socalled silent cinema into separate tracks, one sonic and one visual. It is in the subsequent fusion of these two elements that Isou locates the origins of what he describes as cinema’s “false perfection,” which has limited the medium and turned it into what he considers to be a “bloated” version of itself. Appropriately then, it is only during the Lettrist recitations that the film’s image track gives way completely to an entirely imageless and uninterrupted flow of scratches, thumbprints, fragments of countdown sequences, and other detritus of ruined film stock, as if to demonstrate visually what is occurring at the same moment in the soundtrack, namely, the complete and chaotic annihilation of speech as language (see Figure 3.6). By pairing Dufrêne’s crirythmes, for example, with the most pronounced visualizations of chaos the film has to offer, these moments are, perhaps ironically, the most discordant and yet also the ones in which the film’s image and the soundtrack are most in sync. This occurs thematically—in the simultaneous realization of both visual and aural manifestations of non-meaning—but also sensorially, as the rapid, inconsistent spattering of the white scratches pulse quite deliberately with the rhythm of the poet’s sound-making. From chiseled image and chiseled sound, the film hereby reinitiates an amplic phase based on a new vocabulary of reconstructed sound and image. Isou’s desire to thus generate a dissonant or discrepant cinema in order to reprioritize the parameters of the medium corroborates the hypothesis developed by the art historian and theorist of visuality, Jonathan Crary, regarding the historical parameters of what Guy Debord would claim as “the spectacle,” and the subject that the

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“society of the spectacle” produces through various mechanisms of attention and distraction. Arguing against the kind of dehistoricized leveling of Debord’s analytic— which some might find, for example, in art historian T. J. Clark’s use of the term to interpret Manet’s paintings from the 1860s in relationship to contemporaneous developments in photography and Haussmannian urbanism— Crary draws on Debord’s suggestion in his Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle (1987) that, when he wrote The Society of the Spectacle in 1967, the spectacle itself was barely forty years old.³7 Working from this date, Crary proposes that the spectacle might well trace its origins to 1927, when the release of the feature-length film The Jazz Singer marked the emergence of synchronized sound in film. In that capacity, the film inaugurated what Crary calls “a transformation in the nature of subjective experience,” and initiated “the complete vertical integration of production, distribution, and exhibition within the film industry and its amalgamation with the corporate conglomerates that owned the sound patents and provided the capital for the costly move to the new technology.” ³8 Crary’s location of the spectacle within this historical trajectory is significant in that it complicates the reception of the term as an exclusively optical constellation, while also historicizing the conditions, both cultural and political, of its hegemony. Dislodged from a purely visual register, the spectacle emerges as both a part and a condition of a larger organization of perceptual consumption, which, Crary observes, is more akin in its structure to architecture than the photographic apparatus with which it is usually associated. In what remains the most illuminating text on Debord’s model, Crary writes that “the full coincidence of sound with image, of voice with figure, not only was a crucial new way of organizing space, time, and narrative, but it instituted a more commanding authority over the observer, enforcing a new kind of attention,” a model of subjectivity that he will develop to great benefit in subsequent analyses of art-historical looking.³9 For the purpose of the materials at hand, it is important to emphasize that it was exactly such attention that made the observer newly available to the manipulation of propaganda, especially the televisual variety that would develop with increasing vigor over the course of the twentieth century. Such insight helps make sense of Isou’s suggestion that instead of creating a television of cinema, it would be better to create a radio of the same. In Traité de bave et d’ éternité, when Isou has the commentator ask: “Because of television, radio has become a type of cinema. Why shouldn’t cinema in turn become a type of radio?,” he is not just prioritizing one representational medium over another.40 Rather, by nodding to an emphatically visual practice that would nonetheless hinge on the auralization of moving words as sound, he means to inaugurate a new era of attention and experience. Such would be based not on absorption but on rupture and on a creative re-engagement, precisely the kind of verbal reshuffling that, by schooling audiences in the discrepant but simultaneous practices of seeing, reading, and hearing differentially, might condition those same audiences to see, or better, to imagine the space behind a representation or a façade rather than just its surface coherence. It is

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perhaps the voice identified only as “the voice of the stranger,” who explains the significance of this best in Traité de bave et d’ éternité, when he pronounces enthusiastically, if also somewhat enigmatically, in the film’s third chapter: “It is fantastic all the same, Mr. Daniel, you will be the first to pose the problem of sentences in the cinema, where, up to now, there has been only the problem of images.”4¹ Far from undoing the place that the image has in securing the viewer’s attention or suggesting that Isou’s film means to replace images with sound or with language, whether written or spoken, such tautological affirmation underscores Isou’s investment in the flow of images themselves as phrases, susceptible to the same dislocations and disruptions as their textual coordinates. Indeed, Isou’s film Traité de bave et d’ éternité is as much a treatise on a revolution in— and of—filmmaking as it is one on the failures of language, written and spoken. At the end of the film, Daniel pronounces that contemporary speech has lost its power: “Mon film,” the antagonistic protagonist announces—thereby securing the mise-en-abyme that identifies him as Isou and his film as Isou’s: “I will call my film Drool and Eternity or Drool and Marble or Drool and Steel to mark the distance between the dust of our speech and the height of its power.” 4² As discussed above, reconstituting this power was the first item on Isou’s agenda for articulating the terms of a new society. And, as proposed in both the final chapter of the film, “Le preuve” and in Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique discussed earlier, the letter was the tool that Isou chose to build a new language. Anchoring himself in a tradition dating to the Symbolist poets who employed letters for their associative connotations, Isou believed the emotive power of the letter finds resonance not only in European cultures but also in the entirety of humanity. Single letters, he was convinced, could bear the weight of entire civilizations.4³ It is precisely this faith that must be historicized and carefully considered. The end of the Second World War and the beginning of a global decolonization mark two processes that, perhaps more than any others in the twentieth century, would radically reorient the ways in which language was thought and used to delimit specific territories and how it would also come to be used in efforts to exceed exactly these same demarcations. It was in Romania between 1942 and 1944, which is to say on the heels of the alliance between Romanian prime minister Ion Antonescu and the Axis and the subsequent German occupation of Romania, that Isou first began to develop the central tenets of Lettrism. Such origins help explain, perhaps, the violent rhetoric that infuses both Introduction à une nouvelle poésie and Traité de bave et d’ éternité in a manner consistent with the events of the period. Indeed, Isou’s reliance on words like “détruire,” “témoigner,” “torturer,” “tuer,” (destroy, witness, torture, kill) affiliate the text with efforts to “écrire le rien” and “concrétiser le silence” (write the nothingness and concretize the silence) that such literary figures as Maurice Blanchot would describe as marking the attempt to come to terms with the “catastrophe” or “désastre,” of the Second World War and the impact of industrialized death on poetic, indeed all cultural, production.44 To these conditions we should add the exclusion of

populations from their place of birth, a phenomenon unique neither to the Fascist expulsion and murder of Europe’s Jews or colonization’s similar appropriations and population decimations. Isou’s own reliance on military metaphor and such imagery as the depiction of a French military general constituted entirely of medals and pins— as if made of so many Lettrist ideograms—remind us that such a vocabulary did not remain contained within the register of exclusive references to “The war,” as Blanchot’s phrasing (and capitalization) would have us remember the Second Figure 3.7. Isidore Isou, film still, Traité de bave et d’éternité, 1951, showing Lettrist-style poster World War (see Figure 3.7 and the epigraph cited on of a “General.” page 77). Instead, in Traité de bave et d’ éternité, such images are explicitly connected to the decolonial conflict unfolding in Southeast Asia. “Cris pour 5,000,000 de juifs égorgés” (Cries for 5,000,000 Slaughtered Jews) is one of twenty Récitations graves et joyeuses (Serious and Joyful Recitations) that Isou claims he appended to the Introduction à une nouvelle poésie after he moved to France. He added the text in order to cede to “the necessity of an integration in the contemporary,” by which he perhaps meant to allude to the French problem of remembering the recent past after the end of the Second World War.45 Whether it was written at the same time as the rest of the text or afterward is of less import than the ways in which this poem further evidences the relationship between the poetic formulation Isou articulates and his efforts to address the historical present, and thereby to address the problem of engaged communication suggested by Sartre as the exclusive domain of non-abstract literature. A hybrid poem that he identifies as a “lettrie”—part event score, part musical score, part poem—“Cris” relies heavily on sounds evocative of mass religion to analogize war and its experience. Such usage is even more pronounced in the monumental sonic symphony “La guerre,” which attempts to tell the history of the Second World War through nothing more than the repetition of sounds generated by the chiseling of proper nouns into constituent letters,46 and is also published in the same volume as an illustration of Isou’s Lettrist theories. While it is true that the excess of such representations might have led some audiences then (but more likely since) to receive these poems as kitsch, a historicized reception must attend to the ways in which their reference to the topic of the slaughter of European Jewry would have been received in 1946 and 1947. As discussed elsewhere in this book, it was at this time that the newly emergent (and short-lived) Fourth Republic found itself divided between the épuration or purge and the trials meant to tease out the matter and manner of French complicity in the extermination of Europe’s Jewry.47 The question of what had happened at the detention centers and work camps in France and farther east was thus unlikely fodder for humor or lightheartedness. “Cris pour 5,000,000 de juifs égorgés” demonstrates well Isou’s engagement in the project of rendering a new language in time with its history. The “récitation” also

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Figure 3.8. Isidore Isou, poésie graphique, “Cris pour 5,000,000 de juifs égorgés,” from Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et

performs the “ciselant” characteristic of the Lettrists’ investment in purifying form without eschewing meaning. 1947). Image courtesy Catherine Goldstein. Here then, sonic information is manipulated in order specifically to address and make perceptible the genocide of millions of European Jews during the Second World War. The most important aspect of the Lettrist poem, in this regard, however, is not simply its timeliness, but more so its spatialization of the written word on the printed page (see Figure 3.8). Isou uses diacritics, notational marks, and the sound effects they are meant to evoke in order to address the crises that language—poetic and everyday— experienced in the face of these traumatic events. The notations are also meant as a potential means to counter what we have seen Isou lament as printed language’s privacy by instead activating a public at the precise moment of performance. As was the case with Isou’s modernist forerunners, such as the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, whose work was of paramount importance to the aesthetic practices of the period and to the critical gene-

à une nouvelle musique (Paris: Gallimard,

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alogy they have generated, the visible appearance of Isou’s early lettries on the page is central to their meaning. In the case of the lettrie, this meaning depends upon the hand-set typography and the handwritten phonetic notations for such sounds as whispers, sighs, exhalations, hiccups, inhalations, and clicks of the tongue that annotate and clutter the page. Unlike, then, Mallarmé’s famous utilization of the white space of the page’s margins, Isou’s attention to the graphic qualities of his poetry has very little to do with its visual impact per se (conditions that only secure and fix meaning in Isou’s model), and everything to do with how the text should be verbally articulated. Isou even states that future generations will have to codify the formal typographical devices necessary to communicate his instructions, which in the Introduction à une nouvelle poésie he renders provisional. Whereas Mallarmé and the modernist formalism he would inspire was concerned with the time and space that frame the individual reader’s experience, Isou’s focus on the visual appearance of his lettries indicates his conception of his public as something other than a reading audience, that is to say one formed from beyond the realm of language, strictly speaking. “Cris” begins with a handwritten notation instructing that it is to be read “rauque,” or “hoarse.” 48 The following line includes a single nonsense series of letters, “oiveiguéivéinai,” which, when recited aloud as per the notational instructions printed on the same page, echo the Yiddish expression “oy vey” that traditionally indicates dismay or distress. The next line includes the first graphic symbol, a small triangle, which hand-printed notes at the bottom of the page indicate should be read in a “râle,” a deep-throated rattle. Employing a simple rhyme scheme throughout the first lines of this first four-line stanza, but without turning to a single known word, Isou manages to evoke not only the tone of speaking about the Holocaust—hushed, painful—but begins to allude to its subject. The written instructions for the hoarse tone of voice and the symbols that indicate such extra-linguistic sounds as the rattle in the third line remind us that although the poem appears printed on the page of a book, it is intended as an oral recitation. On the page, the poem makes little sense. Confusing the distinct notions of public and private, graphic and uttered, its significance depends instead on a communal public dimension and on the audience who hears it. The aural dimension was not the only path to this new public, which Isou referred to as grounded in “un nouveau communisme de la poésie” (a new communism of poetry).49 As his initial interruption of Tzara’s play suggests, Isou was certainly aware of, and self-consciously positioned Lettrism in a corrective relationship to, earlier, similar avant-garde “innovations.” The sound poems that Isou belted out at the Vieux-Colombier certainly recall— and in a way not at all lost on his original 1946 audience—the anarchist sensationalism and poetic experimentation of the historical avant-garde: the onomatopoetic tendencies of the Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the Surrealist Guillaume Apollinaire; the zaum experiments of the Russian Futurists Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexei Kruchenykh; the Dada antics of Hugo Ball,

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Raoul Hausmann, and Kurt Schwitters; not to mention such nineteenth-century poets and linguists as Christian Morgenstern, who had explored the onomatopoetic relationship between words and their signifiers. It is no wonder, then, that Isou’s extended reflections regarding his sometimes laudatory, at other times disdainful, relationship to these forerunners (with the exception of the Russians, whom he ignores for several more years) constitute the bulk of the lengthy Introduction à une nouvelle poésie in which “Cris” is published. Beyond using sound to form a community around the commonality of listening, Isou’s lettries attempted to make available an experience of the present otherwise denied a public audience through an assumed direct referentiality of the spoken letter. Here, the phonetic transcription provided by the nonsensical letters that were meant to be voiced attempts to form a new means of signification based on an emphatic transnationalism that was or might have been grounded in multilingualism. Again, as was the case with Lettrism’s similarly trans-media aspirations, guidelines as to how this particular polyglossia should be approached are suggested by the technique of the discrepant montage introduced in Traité de bave et d’ éternité. Just as the film weaves footage of Paris with that of marching troops in Indochina, “Cris” marries Yiddish and Hebrew to French and German, as if to forge a pairing that produces language dialogically, across linguistic boundaries. Following the hoarse allusion to Yiddish lament in the first lines, the poem rises to a rapid crescendo, “ jusqu’ à hurlement” or just to screaming, and begins to incorporate the sounds of German “words,” such as those in the fifth line of the poem, which reads: “VEINEN boudn loudn KLEINEN meinen.” This pattern continues such that by the end of the third stanza, and after several pauses indicated by repeated black dots, sounds evocative of both French and German alternate in the rhyme scheme. Lines eighteen and nineteen read: lebanne—letrain; le train lebanne le vanne—leganne—lemains lélan This is followed by a series of alternating “tffff ” and footnoted annotations indicating more rattles thereby concretizing the allusions of this translingual gibberish by including both the actual sound made by a train, and, at the same time, the rattle which, at the beginning of the poem, is indubitably associated with the slaughtered Jews referenced in the title. When performed in the specific temporospatial coordinates of reconstruction Paris, the shock value of not only these repetitive sounds of a faux German but also the screams and moans that Isou incorporates through notation into the body of the poem—“cri égorgé” and “hurlement,” to name but two—would certainly have imparted a jarring directness to the experience. Such an effect needs to be differentiated from such recitations, for instance, as the famous performance by Hugo Ball of his poem “Karawane” at the Cabaret Voltaire nightclub in Zurich, in 1916. In this instance, Ball’s outlandish Bishop-lobster costume worked to secure the meaning of the sounds Ball emitted within the specific instance of his body and its material pres-

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ence. As such, the appropriated polyglossia of “Karawane” could assume meaning only through distinct reference to the individuality of the human form and the subject it embodied.50 Isou’s poem works differently, creating meaning through the activation of the erosive conjunction formed by what we will have to call his invented word-sounds. Here, it is the jarring contrast of sound itself that creates meaning, not the absurdity of the reference nor the physical presence of the speaker. Such was, in fact, the point of the literal scratching-out of the faces of the Lettrists in Traité de bave et d’ éternité. In “Cris” this contrast is enhanced by the repetition of certain word-sounds that are, significantly, evocative of the same ones that Blanchot names as “absolutes” in the passage that serves as an epigraph to this chapter: Auschwitz, Dachau, Büchenwald. That these words were perceived to be final and full repositories of meaning is precisely what Isou’s “chiseling” aims to undo. In 1946 and 1947, this effect would have been in direct countermeasure to the typical presentation of historical experience in Reconstruction Paris, split as it was into “a dialectic of silence and exposure,” to use Benjamin Buchloh’s phrase for the opposing tensions created by France’s firm commitment to the repression of catastrophic historical experience on the one hand and the rapid development of a new culture of consumption on the other.5¹ This dialectic fed the articulation of such aesthetics as Andre Malraux’s, marking them as fertile ground for critiques poised by the subaltern experiences they rendered “silent.” Other Lettrist works from the period similarly focus on the subaltern experience of being Jewish in Paris during the Second World War and just after. Here, I refer to Maurice Lemaître’s Canailles (Riff-Raff, 1951) and to Gabriel Pomerand’s Saint ghetto des prêts (Saint Ghetto of the Loans), two examples of what the Lettrists called “métagraphies,” traditional narratives told by an invented system of “neo-hieroglyphics where sentences were interrupted or completed by pictures and vice versa, ‘thus introducing into alphabetic writing not only the art of painting, but the graphics of all peoples or social categories past and present.’ ” 5² Often entirely pictographic, the métagraphies invoke a new way of learning to read, imposing the role of detective upon the reader, who must struggle to interpret the written page (see Figures 3.9 and 3.10).5³ As such, the genre might be construed as a commentary on the hermetic system of writing and its privileged space in the printed page, or it might be positioned as an attempt to initiate a more interactive, “readerly” text—in a Barthesian sense— despite arguments voiced by such critics as Johanna Drucker that these novels epitomize the spectacle of modernist impenetrability and the fetishization of a private, writerly project.54 In the métagraphies, the narratival impact follows from the elusive form of its presentation, which eschews any singular mode of sense-making, either textual or pictorial.55 This emphasis in early Lettrism on the experience of being subaltern (here part of the minor culture that grew from the experience of being a Jew from “elsewhere”) returns us to the importance of the German sounds, especially the “-einin” suffix, in “Cris.” 56 In this context, as well as in Isou’s hijacking of a Dada event or interrupting the normal sequence of events at a jazz-filled café, these sounds must be under-

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Figure 3.9. Gabriel Pomerand, page from the artist’s book Saint ghetto des prêts: grimoire (Paris: O.L.B., 1950).

stood as an attempt to introduce a refusal to forget what had been a specifically local complicity under four years of German occupation. Through such an attempt, Isou aspired to write his presence, and the presence of so many absent Jews, into the city’s fabric, again attempting to literally deterritorialize language in order to question the naturalness with which it maps actual space, thereby limiting and circumscribing the experiences and memories that are possible there. It is instructive to compare Isou’s evocation of Germanic sounds with the writings of his much more famous and widely celebrated contemporary, Paul Celan, who insisted in writing in German, despite also being a Romanian Jew. As Celan explained in his important “Bremen Speech” (1958), his decision to write in the language of his

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s on ic you t h, s on ic spac e Figure 3.10. Maurice Lemaître, page from Canailles, 1950. © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

aggressors was motivated by a desire to “bring closer” the “sound of the unreachable.” 57 He explains that, throughout the Second World War and after, when actual distance could not be broached, “Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.” Throughout the experience of his own internment in a Romanian labor camp and in all the accounts he collected from the survivors of the extermination camps to the west, Celan acknowledges this language had gone “through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through.” He continues by noting that “It gave me no words for what was happening.” Instead, it merely “went through it. Went through

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and could resurface, ‘enriched’ by it all.” He concludes the speech by suggesting that poems, as instances of language, are dialogues that reach across time, and so explains that it was in the same language that had “gone through,” and that “could resurface” that he tried “during those years and the years after, to write poems: in order to speak, to orient myself, to find out where I was, where I was going, to chart my reality.” 58 Isou’s interest in language, and indeed in poetry, is different. In the idealized realm that he imagines, language is not rooted in any given place. The distance it travels is not across time, but across space, both that of the page and that of the physical world. Similarly, its temporality is of the present, not of the future. His model is far less optimistic than Celan’s regarding the possibility that what had become conventional tropes of poetic usage, derived from conventional language, particularly national language, could be revived. In his Introduction à une nouvelle poésie, for example, Isou instructs that Lettrist poetry must draw from an explicitly international register of linguistic conventions so that it never privileges one national language over another. He is careful to distinguish such internationalism from what he understands to be the appropriative usurpations of “American” poetry based on “le dos des dialects trouvés (indien, nègre, espagnol)” (the backs of found dialects: Indian, Black, Spanish) or “Russian” poetic language, which similarly leans on the backs of Ukrainian, Armenian, and Kirgizien dialects.59 Instead of restoring such colonialist appropriations (which would only reinscribe a “langue coloniale”), he wishes to find a way by which a Lettrist alphabet might create a new universality, subsequent to which “poetry would become the true and concrete communion between the races.” 60 For Isou, such internationalisms— codified as an “International Phonetic Code” 6¹—respond to what he sees as a necessary move toward the new, integrated society to which he wants to belong. It is not unimaginable to think that, for Isou, such a universally rendered phonetics could eradicate the exclusivity of the priority placed on the very national and ethnic belonging that had deprived him, along with so many other Romanian Jews, of their civil rights in the late 1930s and through the early 1940s under the Romanian prime minister Ion Antonescu.6² The specifics of the Romanian experience notwithstanding, nothing spoke to the exclusivity of national and ethnic belonging in the period more fulsomely than the German language. It is in this context, therefore, that we must understand Isou’s discrepant use of sounds that evoke German in “Cris.” In one of the appendices to his Introduction à une nouvelle poésie, written as an “Épitre aux Lettristes” (A Letter to Lettrists), Isou acknowledges that, despite his protests to the contrary, there remain “puissances souterraines” or “hidden powers” to words, powers communicated by their “sonorous” qualities.6³ In “Cris” he attempts to harness such power by deploying and détourning words stemming from two principal domains: proper names of concentration camps and phoneticized spellings of Hebrew prayers. The first category necessarily continues the German theme, this time replacing the tonal aspects of the repeated “einin” sounds with the actual German names of concentration camps. In what might be called the refrain of the poem, meant to be repeated twice, Isou writes:

These short lines are followed by a second grouping that is also meant to be repeated and in which the catalogue of concentration camps expands to include the infamous camps at Bergen-Belsen and Mauthausen. Intriguingly, Isou prints the name of the Mauthausen camp, first in all capital letters, followed by an exclamation point; then in the next line he rewrites it all lower-case, in a phonetically French version, “mauthaousenne,” as if to underscore that the French have a complicity in this language of destruction while also undoing the national priority of any one naming system. The naming of the concentration camps, words that certainly any French person in the late 1940s would have known all too well, words that would have shaped their very capacity to remember or forget— as Blanchot would suggest in his essay “War and Literature”—helps Isou avoid the abstracting capacities of language that he wants most to resist, even if, as whole words, they do not strictly adhere to the letter of his Lettrist law. Precisely by avoiding such metaphorical poetics as the famous “black milk” image from Celan’s poem “Todesfuge” (Death Fugue),64 Isou hopes to let reality enter untransformed into his poetry, to allow the sound of “Auschwitz” simply to signify itself as an absolute, as something that no poetic language can grasp, and which is therefore not available to the same displacements as those Blanchot would elsewhere generalize as “the space of literature” in order to name the distance that separates the word from its referent. In this naïve but still earnest poetics, Isou insists upon what he hopes to inscribe as the ability of language reproduced as sound to reference traumatic experience and to resist the kind of written poetic language that refers to nothing more than words themselves even as it tries to distill the mechanisms by which such words might refer to the real. Nevertheless, these German words are not stranded within the poem as utterances to be left unchanged. Rather, they are subject to an active disintegration toward the unit of the letter as the poem performs the “chiseling” technique that Isou upholds in his film and in his formulations of modern artistic development more broadly put. “Auschwitz,” for example, becomes through repetition merely “schwitz,” suggesting therefore the superfluity of even the most direct language. More than a unit of proper linguistic signification (such as a word), “schwitz” connotes, on the one hand, a Yiddish term meaning sweating or cooling off, and on the other, through onomatopoeic association, an entirely sonic intonation. Such disintegration is repeated and augmented throughout the lettries appended to the Introduction à une nouvelle poésie, so that even the monosyllabic sounds articulated in “Cris” end as aspirations pure and simple in his multivoiced “La guerre.” In both instances, by containing these sounds within a strictly traditional rhyme scheme that lends itself to a relentless rhythmic progression, Isou mimics what he called the “universal” language of music,

s on ic you t h, s on ic spac e

Auschwitz— schwitz— schwitz Buchenwald! Bouhnwald ! ADONOOOI! ADONOI!

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the pleasures of which he assumed were not culturally specific but rather phenomenological and primal. In borrowing selected sounds from German, Hebrew, and Yiddish, Isou relies on the recognition of these sounds as components of traditionally constituted identities based on separation according to national or cultural divisions, only to transform them immediately into a universal language that communicates sensation. Thus out of the destruction of a language that affirms identity according to division an ecumenical one is born. It was Isou’s hope that these sounds, completely absorbed in the physical quality of their medium—the tonal aspect of the human voice but not the physical identity of the speaker—would be “incapable, objectively, of communicating anything else than a sensation,” in a manner precisely parallel to Clement Greenberg’s description of music’s capacity to enter “the listener’s consciousness,” through the “sensuous terms of (its) physical properties.” 65 This disintegration of the word into vocally articulated sound elements, meant to be experienced as opposed to understood, refused the kind of impenetrability that Isou associated with the word’s incapacity to accommodate change. Moreover, it attempted to model how language rendered as sound could do so. In what may have been his most utopian gesture, Isou diminishes the name of Auschwitz not to indicate that it can be erased from history, but to suggest that its referent—the lamentable world to which it refers—is neither timeless nor, in fact, as “absolute” as Blanchot would have had it, or even as Isou himself had first introduced it in the poem. Instead, the chiseling of language here demonstrates that history itself can progress and that sound is part of that progress. Isou only destroys, in other words, in order to prepare the ground for a rebuilding. This decomposition not only speaks to Isou’s convictions regarding the word’s inadequacy to name history, but also corrects it. At the same time, it suggests that, in order for history to progress, such naming must still happen. Otherwise, like the Jews whose experience Isou hopes to suture into the city’s fabric or the memory of the War in Indochina that he attempts to inscribe within the metropolitan capital, the event itself will disappear from collective memory. It is precisely to such an effect that Isou’s “Cris” borrows from the language of Hebrew prayer, using phoneticized translations of existing words for the second time in the poem that reads: WOI zennenne FANNY moisché rachelle OI! CHEMA ISR AELE! élohénou lad! élohénou Having linked three traditional Jewish names, “Fanny,” “Moisché,” and “Rachelle” with “Israele,” Isou connects the people thus named abstractly to the Hebrew connotations of the call to prayer, “Chema Israelle,” which invites a community to form across space and time through the address: “Hear ye, Israelites.” What follows in the poem is the dwindling “s’étouffant” sighs and invocations of “élohénou” or supreme God, a lengthy pause, and then the final stanza.

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chema israélle barouh adonai israelle Kidischanou israelle barouch mitzwotai wetziwanou . . . wetziwanou . . . wetziwanou . . . This stanza echoes more precisely the Shema Yisrael that, derived from verses in the book of Deuteronomy, constitutes the highest prayer in the Jewish faith, meant to be intoned upon rising and retiring, but also to be uttered by the dying as a means to affirm faith in God’s power. Here, the phrasing comes together like the murmured cries of Jews in distress, asking God and holy Israel to command them and, in turn, invoking the idea of obligations (“mitzwotai”). It is this incitement to command us that completes the poem, trailing off into repetition only at the very end: “wetziwanou . . . wetziwanou . . . wetziwanou.” At the very least, such a usage works to inscribe these sounds in what might be called the “aural landscape” of Paris in the late 1940s, to memorialize the disappearance of an actual language from a city whose Jewish population had been all but annihilated. At best, however, in reinstating this oral tradition—which would have important echoes in contemporary debates about public places available to Koranic recitation and prayer in Paris66—these sounds, which epitomize for Isou the most fundamental component of recited language, the prayer, conclude the poem with the feeling of regeneration and rebirth, the very aspects with which Isou wanted to ascribe his new poetics as a vehicle toward a new society. He also alludes to this in his film Traité de bave et d’ éternité, when the protagonist intones that, as a child, he had always wanted other prayers since the too-frequent assertion of dogma ceased to amuse him. These thoughts are paired with the image of the geometric form of a Star of David, which Isou has inscribed over the footage of someone praying in a synagogue, and which he follows with the Indochinese footage described above. To a certain degree, then, we might understand the dialectic between German and Hebrew that Isou structures in “Cris” as indicative of the rebirth that he hopes to generate from the destruction of both a people and their language. It is, in fact, a deeply optimistic gesture that has him position a silent language at the forefront of a public avant-garde. At the same time, however, we also see his readiness to generalize one condition of repression with another, subtracting from the very specificity of site that his film otherwise earnestly produces. And so it is not surprising that only a year after the publication of his book Introduction à une nouvelle poésie, and with it the “Vingt récitations graves,” of which “Cris” is but one, Isou’s L’ Agrégation d’un nom et d’un messie will give a name and a more particular aspect to this interest of reintegration. In the section “Notes pour Judaïser la France,” Isou responds explicitly to his experiences of French anti-Semitism and, abandoning both his refusal of linguistic

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This last stanza is introduced not by an instruction, as we saw in the earlier stanzas’ “rauque” or “crescendo,” but rather begins with the descriptive nomination, “prière.” And indeed, what follows is:

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absolutes— as well as what a figure like Giorgio Agamben might retrospectively read as the more ethical imperatives of his attempts to have witnessed the essential nature of trauma in his efforts to memorialize an absence—issues a charge for Jewish intellectuals to name themselves as such.67 Identifying themselves in such a way would, Isou reasoned, necessarily challenge the discrimination directed toward the larger ethno-religious group to which they belonged, even if invisibly. The subtitle of the section “Affiches pour les rues de Paris 1947” (Posters for the Streets of Paris, 1947) anticipates the spatial significance of the following passages, which retrospectively shed new light on the significance of the “Lettrist revolution” posters that Isou actually did paste on the streets of Paris in 1946.68 Here, the text does not take the form of a poster at all, but rather a lengthy diatribe that complicates Isou’s ambitions to otherwise refuse language’s claims to physical as opposed to sonic space. Having begun with the explanation “I write because Paris frightens me,” Isou elaborates on the anti-Semitic graffiti he reads on the city’s walls, where he repeatedly confronts such denunciations as “Down with Jews” a slur that is also pictured in Lemaître’s Canailles. It is against such propositions that he explains his hopes to “agiter les hommes,” or incite them to action.69 Advocating a “Judaïsme d’attaque” (Judaism of attack), he links the situation in France to that in Palestine, where newly arriving Jews were already arguing their right to protect themselves physically against the very populations they displaced. Forgetting perhaps his own experience of dispossession and fully in support of such offensives, he encourages Jews everywhere to assert themselves everywhere by “Learn(ing) to circulate around the world like the sea.” He concludes that the enemies of the Jews “have destroyed us and reduced us our essential precisely that we can accomplish this essential thing: to Judaize France.” 70 Here, it would seem that Isou posits a model of nationalization that abandons his earlier deterritorialized models, precisely at the same time that it confers on the making of a “people” the same aesthetic procedures of chiseling and destroying in order to rebuild. In this instance, the new, internationalist society that Isou imagines is recast as an exclusively Jewish one, which is instructed “to circulate around the world like the sea” in exactly the same manner as the French, whose imperial attributes he resents for their exclusions. In this revision of a deterritorialized world— one which borrows more from the traditional sense than the one Deleuze and Guattari ascribed the term—however, Isou reduplicates the same paradigm of conquest upon which he based his models of a more properly sonic space and which, through a dissonant aurality, they had meant to abnegate. Herein lies the paradox of Isouienne Lettrism, along with its failure. For Isou, the printed letter was never meant to be an end in and of itself, but rather a means to achieve a purity of expression realizable only by returning that letter to its sonorous, and hence emotive, capacity. Although they presented their project as if polarized refusals, Isou and the Lettrists unquestionably grounded them on what they

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understood to be historical truth. And yet, their efforts to disrupt normative models of sense distribution—through either the discrepant montage privileged in Traité de bave et d’ éternité or in their similar ambition to render sound and symbol distinct in sonic articulations— cannot but reduplicate the exclusions of the then-dominant models of belonging, which were still predicated on access to pre-determined categories of being, most customarily framed by territorial boundaries and the cultures they contained. As an example of these models, consider Maurice Halbwachs’s musings on the possibility of a memory that was collective and social as opposed to individual, and so transmitted by a subconscious language spatialized beyond the metaphorical dimensions of individualized consciousness.7¹ Based on research conducted and published in the decades leading up to his death in Buchenwald in 1945, Halbwachs’s arguments centered on the idea that even those most subjective memories formed, retained, and articulated by an individual are the function of socially constituted forms, narratives, and relations. Conversely, his thesis emphasized memory’s capacity to be a constituent of the process of constructing and maintaining community. Certainly, language and the weight of a shared linguistic heritage both function as the foundation of almost all socially constituted narratives upon which all groupings—from families to nations and religions, what Halbwachs identified as cadres sociaux—base themselves. Without a common language, he argued, memories cannot and will not be communicable. For Halbwachs, such commonality was generated by the shared temporal and spatial confines that described the nation and the national impulse to recognize itself in instances of the same. Ultimately, despite its attempts to exceed such parameters and the linguistic provisions they impose about national belonging, Isou’s model repeats the humanist universalisms that pervade thinking like that of Halbwachs. Isou’s final proposals to recast the “identity” of France, to remake it as Jewish, do so in the name of the same will to “divide and conquer” that he earlier brought to bear on his ambitions to remake cinema in defiance of the spectacular nature of its hegemonic lure. In mapping aesthetic priorities onto identitarian ones, Isou remains equally unable to see past the limits of a space prescribed by what ends as a reterritorialization of a minoritized population and of language. The project of “conquering France” by deploying a minoritized identity rests upon a reinscription of national divisions as ethnic divisions, which Isou had once rejected as limiting. In such a fashion, his aesthetics resurrect an imperial logic of public, national, cultural, and aesthetic institutions that they had originally hoped to abandon. As charted here, the early Lettrist enterprise thus constitutes an important bridge between the Second World War and the decades of decolonization, pointing to important continuities between the violence that underpinned both moments, and redirecting us to understand the relationship between, on the one hand, efforts to incorporate the memories of genocide into something like a national memory, and, on the other, to see how these same experiences subsequently

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“fed back” into other epistemes of cultural and national hegemony. At the same time, however, Isou’s identification of the space of Paris as a fundamental site in which to think through the relationship of cultural practice to contemporary historical conflict would resonate deeply with the work of such artists as the décollagistes, whose attempts to eschew strategies (like Isou’s) to reinscribe minoritized subjects into dominant histories will figure as the subject of the next chapter.

LA FRANCE DÉCHIRÉE The Politics of Representation and the Spaces In-Between

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Le peuple constitue ses propres archives.— Michel Foucault, “Anti-rétro” interview, Cahiers du Cinéma, 1974

OF PICTURES AND PALISADES

One December day in 1949, Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglé— drop-outs from the Écoles des Beaux-Arts in Rennes and Nantes, respectively¹—took to the streets of Paris looking for inspiration. According to Villeglé, they found what they were looking for on a palissade, a temporary wooden fence erected to contain and conceal a demolition site on the Boulevard Montparnasse, just a few steps from the everexuberant scene at the brasserie La Coupole.² Confronted with layers upon layers of concert announcements that had been posted there, one over the other, and subsequently torn through by countless and unknown passers-by, the young men were certain that they had found art, readymade. Whereas Hains had been photographing and even filming such urban remnants for months prior—in the spirit of the Surrealist-inspired documentation of Parisian graffiti by Brassaï and Wols—Hains and Villeglé decided they would not be content simply to photograph this large frieze of outdated posters (see Figure 4.1).³ Instead, they decided to tear down the ensemble in large chunks, take the fragments home, and adhere them to a canvas.4 Satisfied with their work, which they would later justify with language positioned between the Surrealist aesthetic of “la découverte” (the discovery), the photographic framing of “le choix” (the choice), and the painterly idiom then in vogue, “le geste appropriatif” (the appropriative gesture), they signed the lower right-hand corner and named the resulting décollage “Ach Alma Manetro,” after the three word fragments still visible in the colorful scrim of garbled typography (see Figure 4.2).5 Or so the story has been told. As with so many origin myths, this one has been subject to revisions, exaggerations, and untruths, all of which have colluded to legiti-

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Figure 4.1. Brassaï (Gyula Halasz), gelatin-silver print, Graffiti, from Series II, “Le Langage du mur,” ca. 1935 –1950. 1 7⁄ 8 × 14 in. (4.56 × 35.5 cm). Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; inv. no. AM1996 –170. © Estate Brassaï-RMN . Repro-photo: Adam Rzepka. Photo Credit: CNAC / MNAM / Dist. Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY.

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Figure 4. 2. Raymond Hains (1926 –2005) and Jacques Villeglé, décollage, Ach

mize a certain narrative about the self-inventiveness of artistic practice and its relationship to political context in the Alma Manetro, 1949. Poster fragments glued onto paper and mounted on canperiod just after the Second World War.6 Within this narvas, 28 3⁄4 × 100 3⁄4 in. (58 × 256 cm). rative, the birth of décollage has been taken as the moment Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes, France; in which a line was drawn between the utopian aspirations inv. no. AM1987–938. Photo: Christian of the historical avant-garde, as reincarnated in something Bahier / Philippe Migeat. Photo credit: like the Lettrists’ project, and what Benjamin Buchloh so CNAC / MNAM / Dist. Réunion des Musées forcefully diagnosed in 1991 as the “pessimism concerning Nationaux / Art Resource, NY. © 2013 the revolutionary potential of [this] neo-avant-garde.” 7 In Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ Buchloh’s account, the work of the décollagistes demon- ADAGP, Paris. strated the best the period could manage, a precarious suspension between such pessimism and “an insistence upon radical gestures of opposition.” 8 Since Buchloh’s essay was published, much ink has been spilled debating the merits of décollage’s contribution—realized or potential, intended or accidental—to the political formation of the moment’s aesthetic paradigm. Despite its highly touted origin in the public space of reconstruction Paris in the late 1940s, it would take until 1957 for décollage to return to the public, this time in the form of an exhibition. How it returned and what it would do once there mark a crucial shift in the imagining and reimagining of aesthetic possibilities and their political ramifications during the years between the Second World War and the Algerian War of Independence, or what I have been calling the “decades of decolonization.” This shift orchestrated itself along the continued four-part investigation of space, language, photography, and the reconfiguration of the public in specific relationship to the world of so-called real or actual experience that Isou and the Lettrists had also explored, and against the backdrop of Malraux’s investigations of the same parameters. Hains’s and Villeglé’s joint 1957 debut, Le loi du 29 juillet 1881; ou, Le lyrisme à la sauvette (The Law of July 29, 1881; or, Lyricism on the Sly), took place at the Galerie Colette Allendy. Their exhibition expanded upon the dialogue with painterly production already present in Ach Alma Manetro by associating the aesthetic thrust of the lacerated posters’ interrupted typography even more specifically with the historical and contemporary possibilities of public, indeed urban, expression. The first half of the exhibition’s title was, after all, drawn from the law best known for generating the nearly ubiquitous interdiction, “Défense d’afficher, loi de 29 juillet 1881,” that is

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chapter 4 Figure 4.3. Harry Shunk and János Kender, photograph, Raymond Hains standing on

stamped on all French buildings deemed “public” by virtue of their status as historical monuments or governmenary 1961. Photo: Shunk-Kender / © Roy tal offices, their proximity to intersections of a certain size, Lichtenstein Foundation. and a number of other qualifications far too long and—in the tradition of French bureaucracy—too complicated to catalogue (see Figure 4.3).9 While this stamp does indeed function to prohibit public posting on these surfaces, the Third Republic legislation that generated it was not necessarily intended as a restrictive measure.¹0 Quite to the contrary, the law’s original goal had been to target and reverse the many varieties of censorship that had characterized Second Empire politics, including, but by no means limited to, those prohibiting public posting. In fact, it was precisely to help specify and guarantee the rights of public expression— including freedom of the press and, as time would make manifestly apparent, that of commercial advertising—that the law designated how and where posters could legally and incontestably be posted.¹¹ The logic was that if governmental and hence public (in one sense, at least) spaces were kept at a distance from the realm of private posting, an unprejudiced arena in which to exercise choice would flourish; no government building would purposefully or inadvertently lend support to any particular product, and no particular viewpoint or event would gain authority over another the rue Laplace near a sign that states, “Défense d’afficher.” Paris, 16 Febru-

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by virtue of its placement on an official building. Space was thus reserved for a public authority empowered with the exclusive right to police and patrol that very same space in a self-sustaining cycle. The ultimate guarantee of the freedoms protected by this clause was that it became illegal to tear down or deface those posters that had been properly placed. The act of tearing or defacing electoral posters hung beyond the designated “emplacements résérvés” was also specified as a crime, though of a lesser degree, while the defacement of posters placed on non-public property was punishable by fine if the private owner of that space deemed it necessary. Political propaganda thus became protected in its right to proliferate on the street, even as the distinctions between private and public space were mitigated by the law’s eighteenth article, which specified that anyone wanting to distribute “private” (which is to say non-governmental) announcements, books, tracts, newspapers, and other printed materials, would need to make a declaration to the same mairie that had originally decreed and so designated the emplacements résérvés. As the public authority thus maintained control over both non-publicly owned places of distribution and the circulation of materials containing “private” content, the protection of the language of the commodity and its competing ideologies was equally guaranteed. Accordingly, as with most of the progressive legislation enacted by the Third Republic, the law’s promotion of the freedom of expression and other civil liberties was deeply intertwined with the commercial expansion— especially in advertising and real estate—that would, over the course of the next one hundred years, radically transform the nature of those same civil liberties and the same public sphere that they were originally meant to protect. By naming their exhibition of décollages after this law, Hains and Villeglé foregrounded the contentious nature of the work’s public origins while, at the same time, underscoring the potentially subversive if not illegal nature of the lashes and gashes against the government-protected propagandistic culture from whence the material of their art had come. But while the first part of the exhibition’s title emphasized this significant legalistic component of the work’s critique, the second half— le lyrisme à la sauvette—made sure to keep such legalistic, if not political aspects in strict dialogue with the works’ formal and material qualities. The “lyricism on the sly” or, more idiomatically, “lyricism on the run”— and perhaps even “stolen lyricism”—was, after all, a direct result of the conditions of the work’s making which, in rendering abstract patterns from the posters’ torn surfaces, modeled specific formal and temporal comparisons with the “lyrical abstraction” then in painterly vogue.¹² As the title suggests, it did so with Hains’s and Villeglé’s customary level of wit and wry humor. For those who saw the exhibition, however, the expression might also have intoned an important reference to photography, and moreover to a type of photography understood as abstraction’s anathema, which is to say photojournalism. This particular subgenre of photography had recently made significant advances into the realm of art production. In particular, it had been only a few years before Hains’s and Villeglé’s exhibition at the Galerie Allendy that the art publisher Efstratios Téri-

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Figure 4.4. Raymond Hains and Jacques Villeglé, photogram of unfinished film, Défense d’afficher—Loi du 29 juillet 1881, showing the cut-up posters that Hains and Villeglé would collaboratively render as the décollage Et quand vous nous dites Soviétique Patrie est notre plus juste histoire de lard, 1950. This work was later shown in the 1961 exhibition La France déchirée. The film still is from Georges Paumier (dir.), Défense d’afficher—Loi du 29 juillet 1881, Villeglé, 1981. 16mm, color, sound, 26 min. Produced by Antenne 2. Collection of the artist; courtesy Galerie GP & N Vallois, Paris. © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

ade (Efstratios Eleftheriades) had produced simultaneous French and English editions of a portfolio of photographs by the painter-turned-photojournalist Henri CartierBresson. The book’s title, Images à la sauvette, is certainly echoed in Hains’s and Villeglé’s reference to both the temporal and proprietary orders that conditioned their own image-making and might well have resonated as such for audiences at the time.¹³ As he had done with the launch of Verve magazine, Tériade adorned the cover of the

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Cartier-Bresson book with a tri-color Matisse cut-out, further underscoring the association he wanted to make between Cartier-Bresson, who had recently co-founded the news agency Magnum Photo, and advanced aesthetic practice.¹4 The book itself contained more than 120 of Cartier-Bresson’s depictions of a wide range of global events including, not insignificantly, the Chinese Civil War in 1949. In the text written to accompany the photographs in this publication, Cartier-Bresson laid out the terms of what would come to be known as “the decisive moment,” or the split second when a fact and the formal representation of that fact become visible to the photographer and he releases the shutter to freeze the moment.¹5 For Cartier-Bresson, it was in this “moment”—“à la sauvette”—that photography’s indelible relationship with the real was to be found. And yet, Cartier-Bresson also found in this moment a decision indicative of an artistic gesture, and so therefore justified what he would defend as the medium’s inherent artistic attributes even while he acknowledged that photographers were not necessarily trying to make “art.” These attributes nonetheless depended not only on the constellation of reality and its representation but, importantly, on the photographer’s eye, which discerned and framed the capture of said reality. That Cartier-Bresson’s phrase resonates with what Villeglé defined as the constituent acts of décollage— discovery, choice, appropriative gesture—is not coincidental. Indeed, Villeglé’s terms are in and of themselves already redolent of the language of photography. This too makes sense, especially when we remember that when he and Hains came to create décollage, Hains’s principal aesthetic preoccupations were with photography.¹6 As noted above, it was in this way that Hains had initiated his and Villeglé’s engagement with lacerated posters, first capturing images of them by way of photography and then by means of the moving image in 16mm film, as in the unfinished film he and Villeglé made of the décollage Et quand vous nous dites Soviétique Patrie est notre plus juste histoire de lard (1950), and which they also named Défense d’afficher— Loi du 29 juillet 1881 in reference to the same 1881 law discussed above (see Figure 4.4).¹7 At the time, Hains was also making practical use of his talents, supporting himself by working for Emanuel Sougez at the illustrated newspaper, France-Illustration.¹8 All of which is to say that photography and its relationship to the presumably polar opposites of realism and abstraction— as they were positioned in the aesthetic discourse of the time—was decidedly embedded in the core of décollage from its earliest inception and needs to be thought of in relationship to the representation of public experience that décollage would readily invoke over the next decade. Despite some critical attention following Hains’s and Villeglé’s artistic debut in 1957, it was only after the scandal that followed their inclusion in Malraux’s first Paris biennial (Manifestation biennale et internationale des jeunes artistes, 1959), that the young Bretons’ fates as important artists—individual artists, since their collaborative production had ceased in 1954—was sealed.¹9 Invited to participate in the biennale by Georges Noël, a member of the Jury des jeunes artistes, Hains and Villeglé— along with François Dufrêne, the poet who had been involved with Isou’s Lettrism and

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who began to explore décollage after meeting Villeglé in 1954—were ultimately prevented from installing their décollage. It had been pronounced as not painting and disqualified on those grounds.²0 In response and much to the consternation of Raymond Cogniat, Inspecteur Principal des Beaux-Arts and délégué général of the biennial, Noël and a few other young artists on the Jury threatened to resign. By way of compromise, Noël proposed a “Salle des informels,” where the décollagistes could exhibit their work alongside that of a select group of abstract painters in the museum’s suddenly repurposed auditorium.²¹ As if in direct reply to the implication that abstraction, as it had developed in French cultural practice, had been intended as a refusal of the world of the real— a supposition that, as will be discussed below, Hains’s photographies hypnagogiques had also endeavored to dispel—Hains chose to install a wall-length stretch of palisade in the small space allocated to him and his fellow décollagistes (see Figure 4.5). Titled La palissade des emplacements réservés (The Palisade of Reserved Places), it made reference to both the literal function of the palisade on the streets of Paris (where it would have served as an alternative to the “space reserved” for placing governmental or “public” posters) and its new position, that is to say the “reserved space” that was the Biennial. By taking this twenty-five plank stretch of wooden fencing from the street of Paris (where he claimed to have purchased it from construction workers) and inserting it into the middle of an art exhibition that André Malraux had intended to demonstrate France’s cultural ascendancy, Hains was either denouncing one kind of high art practice (the figurative painting that dominated the biennale) in favor of another (the readymade or perhaps even an emergent concept of site-specific art), or, more compellingly, he was challenging the exclusion of “the real,” as it happened not only in the exhibition but also in urban space. For indeed, on the street, the palisade served the primary purpose of blocking from view the ugly construction holes and semi-demolished structures that evidenced the changes to which the city of Paris was being submitted, changes that worked to make the capital better suited to the new, postcolonial and cosmopolitan conditions of the twentieth century. Drawing on the contradiction inherent in the palisade, which is meant to hide yet also to provide an alternative object to be seen, Hains forged a means of addressing reality in its most visual aspect and yet also a way of questioning the assurance with which viewers trust the certainty that they know what they are being asked to look at, let alone to see. The inclusion of this little slice of “the real” initiated a vitriolic polemic in the press. The artist Bernard Lorjou, a founding artist of the anti-abstract art group l’ homme témoin (1948) and little known for the subtlety of his own figurative Expressionism, denounced the exhibition in the Salle des Informels as auguring a future of the museum that would be indistinguishable from that of a palisade depot, or dump. Lorjou articulated his objections in the form of a tract that he addressed to the director of the biennial, Raymond Cogniat, as well as to biennial curators Jean Cassou and Bernard Dorival, and which he distributed outside the Musée d’art moderne, where the biennale was being held. Hains responded by appropriating Cog-

Figure 4.5. Raymond Hains, installation, La palissade des emplacements réservés,

niat’s broadsheet as if it were any other detritus of public as installed in the “Salle des Informels” at language, and placed this sign of opposition at the center the first Paris Biennale, 1959. On the ceilof his own practice, thus literalizing the claim that art is ing is François Dufrêne’s La brèche pour made through its reception. Titled Manifeste du 3 Octobre Brecht (1959), which was subsequently divided into several individual works. (1959), Lorjou’s broadsheet is now framed as Hains’s own Photo: André Morain / Fonds d’Archives work alongside a three-plank section of the Palissade des Biennale de Paris / Archives de la Critique emplacements réservés, which now bears the title Palissade d’Art. © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), à de Fuegas (De Fuegas’s Palisade, 1959) after the collec- New York / ADAGP, Paris. tor who first purchased it, thereby indicating the ways in which the temporal life of the palisade becomes part of its self-presentation as an art work, ever-dependent on the context in which it is presented. This temporal cascade is reduplicated in the pairing of these two works with a third, La poubelle de l’ école

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Figure 4.6. Raymond Hains, installation, La palissade à de Feugas, Manifeste du 3 octobre 59 et la poubelle de l’École des

Beaux Arts de Blois, 1959 –1996. Photographer: Joël Audebert. Private collection, Brussels. © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Figure 4.7. Raymond Hains, framed broadsheet, Manifeste du 3 Octobre, 1959. Photographer: Joël Audebert. Private collection, Brussels. © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

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des Beaux Arts de Blois (Trashbin of the Blois School of Fine Arts), for an exhibition in 1996, which literalized the “dump” alluded to in Lorjou’s broadsheet denunciation (see Figure 4.6 and Figure 4.7). While they would seem to lead us astray from Hains’s décollage, both this work and the series it inspired provide important insight into how Hains’s photographic practice merges with what I will argue is his interest in exposing the intertwined contingency of language and image.²² Much as this contingency had motivated Isou’s project a decade earlier, it also underpins Hains’s décollage, providing him with the material for his own “chiseling” ambitions, which turn out to be very different from those of Isou, both in terms of their intended target and in their effect. Developed along the horizontal axis of association upon which the visual and verbal pun customarily riffs, the palisade becomes a platform from which Hains can crystallize what I will argue was, from its inception, the emphasis that décollage would place on the linguistic determination of reality. In the case of the palisade, this transition is effected by a second series of works that Hains began during the biennial, when he noticed a copy of the Encylopédie Clarté in a shop window, open to a color photograph of a dessert called Entremets de la palissade. Tickled by the visual resonance of this cake—made from a heaping mound of cream contained behind a “fence” of lady’s finger biscuits—with the form of an actual palissade, and perhaps equally amused by the way in which this picture suggested his own sense of having been “contained” by the palisade episode during the biennial, Hains appropriated this photo, framed it on an ornate iron stand, and exhibited it in 1960 as his contribution to the Salon Comparaisons (see Figure 4.8).²³ At the Festival du Nouveau Réalisme in Nice (1961), he followed the association of cake, fence, vision, and spectacle to its logical conclusion, distributing pieces of L’entremets de la palissade de Raymond Hains as part of a performance that followed a Burgundian tradition wherein the term entremets describes not only the light dish that comes between courses in a formal dinner, but also the dinner-spectacle itself. (In this context, entremets, literally “the stuff between” is the entertainment).²4 Photographs of the festival portray the artist with cream all over his face, the messy remains of the cake in front of him, and a copy of the Encylopédie Clarté opened to the original photograph that had caught his eye (see Figure 4.9). While the full extrapolation of Hains’s interest in such entremets and the paranomastic shifts in meaning they inspire lies beyond the purview of this chapter, I mention this work here in order to illuminate what had already been nascent in Hains’s and Villeglé’s work from the late 1940s and early 1950s, during what may be described as their Lettrist phase. It was during this time, for example, that they collaborated with the painter and poet Camille Bryen to produce an “exploded” version of Bryen’s poem, which they photographed and distorted through grooved lenses before reprinting it in the deliberately illisible or unreadable artist book, Hépérile eclaté (Hépérile Exploded, 1953; see Figures 4.10 and 4.11).²5 While less literal than it appears in this photographically manipulated text, Hains’s interest in puns as one of many potential

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Figure 4.8. Harry Shunk and János Kender, photograph, Raymond Hains with L’entremets de la palissade de Raymond Hains, Paris, 1960. Photo: Shunk-Kender / © Roy Lichtenstein Foundation.

disruptions to the normal patterns of meaning also animates his earliest décollage, when interruptions to the printed typography of street posters generated the work’s formal motivation. By the early 1960s, however, Hains’s exploration of the linguistic parameters of meaning as it is articulated within the container of urban space is no longer limited to the private, almost readerly concerns manifest in such earlier works

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Figure 4.9. Raymond Hains at the first Festival du Nouveau Réalisme, Nice, 1961. Photo © Gilles Raysse, Formentera; courtesy of Centre Georges Pompidou.

as Ach Alma Manetro. As we shall see, this shift depends on the historical contingencies of how language itself was coming to be used in changing public debates about war and its experience. The implications of this shift for thinking about the relationship between Hains’s work and his concerns with public experience as manifest in public space are well demonstrated by a sequence of photographs of the artist taken by Harry Shunk and

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chapter 4 Figure 4.10. Raymond Hains and Jacques Ville-

Figure 4.11. Raymond Hains and Jacques Ville-

glé, artist’s book, detail, Hépérile éclaté, 1953.

glé, artist’s book, detail, Hépérile éclaté, 1953.

Collection FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims.

Collection FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims.

© 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New

© 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New

York / ADAGP, Paris.

York / ADAGP, Paris.

János Kender in February 1961.²6 Drawing on both Hains’s own investment in photography as a framing device that presents direct access to a specific reality and also on the ways that the Shunk-Kender photographic sequence carefully points to the constituent elements of the street that comprised Hains’s repertoire as an “inaction painter,” I read these pictures as more than just portraits of the artist. Instead, they provide documents of the artist’s performance of his own practice and therefore reveal an ulterior context within which we might understand the triangulated relationship of place, picture, and word that increasingly frames his work in the early-mid 1960s, and which will indeed come to color— albeit in different hues—the rest of his capacious œuvre until his death in 2005. This particular series was shot on the streets of the Left Bank in the early months of 1961, several months before Hains’s June exhibition, La France déchirée, at Galerie J (see Figures 4.17, 4.29, 4.30, and 4.31). The year 1961 is especially important within the context of the wars in which I argue the art of this period must be understood, and marks a particular juncture in the Algerian War of Independence and the trajectory of French intellectual and artistic responses to it. Only a few months before Shunk and Kender worked with Hains on these photos, the famous “Manifeste des 121” had been published, spurring a trio of differently intended responses. This open letter, with the full title Déclaration sur le droit à l’ insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie (Declaration regarding the right to insubordination [draft-dodging] in the Algerian

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War), was written by Maurice Blanchot, along with the French writer and political activist Dionys Mascolo and the poet and journalist Jean Schuster. It was signed by 121 leading intellectuals, university professors, and artists, many of whom hailed from the ranks of the Surrealists and their fellow travelers.²7 They were responding to what had already been a four-year discussion of a few celebrated cases of those who had deserted the French army out of ethical, political, or religious refusal but the motivation to write the letter took more immediate root in the arrest and forthcoming trial of Francis Jeanson and his network of porte-valises, figures who supported the FLN by carrying the funds collected in the Paris region to FLN leadership in Switzerland.²8 In the words of Pierre Vidal-Naquet, the discussion about insoumission, and specifically draft-dodging, took place during “two extraordinary months, when the word (l’ insoumission) seemed to have taken on flesh: the debate seemed to have taken over the whole country.” ²9 For its part, the manifesto did not articulate specific reasons for objecting to the war, or even to the continued occupation of Algeria, so much as it adhered to the parameters of the debate about draft-dodging, defining clearly what the text carefully identified as the right of those who disagreed with the war on any ground to refuse to serve in the army.³0 As such, the text is necessarily caught up in the parameters of the rights of “men and citizens,” and very much in keeping with a longer trajectory of debate in France about the inclusions and exclusions that such “human” rights allow within a republican context. This debate, and its relationship to shifting models of leftist engagement, is central to my interpretation of the series of photographs that Shunk and Kender made with Hains in 1961, and in particular to a segment of about eight images that present the artist in relationship to several fragments of political posters and graffiti. In one image— significantly, the one that has been most reliably reproduced as a portrait of the artist—Hains is shown braced against the side of a building, his head turned to smile (cigarette between his lips notwithstanding) for the obliquely angled camera, which other photographs in the sequence reveal as Shunk’s (Figure 4.12). Behind his shoulders, the thickly painted capital letters INS are clearly visible. What the camera angle obscures, but what Hains’s angled body suggests he wants to keep just slightly in view, are the letters, OUMISSION, which, were it not for the interruption of Hains’s body, would have joined “INS” to form the word: “INSOUMISSION.” Some have taken this photograph to be a sign of Hains’s ironic, if not opportunistic, posture as an artist, while others have assumed it to be a transparent claim regarding his political point of view.³¹ To these interpretations, a careful reader of Hains’s interest in the translinguistic slippages of meaning across geographies and histories, especially as enabled by puns and jokes, might also suggest that the artist is celebrating the “omission” that is generated by his body’s obfuscation of the text. The actual import of the picture, however, is more complicated than any or even all three of these readings might indicate. Let us look closer. Behind Hains’s legs, and repeating well into the background of the photo, poster fragments appear on an abbreviated stretch of palisade planks,

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Figure 4.12. Harry Shunk and János Kender, photograph, Raymond Hains posing with political graffiti reading “INSOUMISSION .” Paris, February 1961. Photo: Shunk-Kender / © Roy Lichtenstein Foundation.

which have been posted over the street-level windows of a multi-story edifice. This palisade assumes greater importance in other photos from the same series, one of which shows Hains walking toward it as if to examine it, while another captures him crouching before it and leaning in, presumably to rip off a chunk of poster (see Figures 4.13 and 4.14). While such an action might at first seem ironic or perhaps falsely boastful in relationship to the INSOUMISSION emblazoned just above the artist’s head—which the artist and the photographers have left nearly whole and thereby transformed into something of a caption— closer examination of these two images reveals important details about the particular graffiti under which Hains positions himself, and therefore also about the performative gesture with which he, along with Shunk and Kender, wants to frame the sequence. What appear in the first photo discussed above as quasi-lettrist, disfiguring slashes through the painted letters “INS” (see Figure 4.12) become newly legible in this image as repeated poster fragments, pasted on top of, that is after, the graffiti, as if in strict contestation of its charge (see Figures 4.13 and 4.14). These posters, also already subjected to anonymous acts of laceration, advertise the positions of the Fédération des étudiants nationalistes (FEN), an extreme-right student group that was founded on 1 May 1960, in vehement opposition to the Communist-dominated and increasingly insoumissive Union nationale des étudiants de France (UNEF), in order to advocate for maintaining a French Algeria as part of France.³² Within this second frame provided by this expanded con-

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text, what might at first have been taken as either a portrait of the artist’s aesthetic or his political stance becomes instead a representation of the dialectic of control and erasure between two agonistic factions in contemporaneous student politics. The series of photographs seems intent on remarking that meaning is contextual, and things are not always as they seem. The artist’s job is to make us keep looking and relooking at exactly these givens, in order to see in them realities lurking below the surface. I will return to the “Manifeste des 121,” in the next section of this chapter, and will also come back to this photographic series farther on. For now, I want to suggest that Hains’s artworks themselves, especially as they plumb the vagaries of linguistic meaning within public and political contexts, must be understood in relationship to a similar engagement with the slippage and indeterminacy produced by context Figure 4.13. Harry Shunk and János Kender, photograph, Raymond and exposure that these first three Hains walking toward and looking at the posters hanging below photographs suggest. Such a priori- political graffiti. Paris, February 1961. Photo: Shunk-Kender / © Roy tization of contingency was precisely Lichtenstein Foundation. what had been anticipated in Hains’s Figure 4.14. Harry Shunk and János Kender, photograph, Rayworks for the 1959 biennial and their mond Hains looking at the posters hanging below political graffiti. paronomastic unfolding. Its signifi- Paris, February 1961. Photo: Shunk-Kender / © Roy Lichtenstein cance for the political stakes of art- Foundation. making during a time of war would become even more clear in Hains’s exhibition La France déchirée (France Torn Apart, 1961), to which I now turn.³³ For this exhibition in June 1961—in which Villeglé made a nominal appearance with the aforementioned collaboration Et quand vous dites Soviétique Patrie est notre plus just histoire de lard (1950), and with a second work mistakenly attributed to the pair but actually Villeglé’s own 6 boulevard Poissonnière— Marcel Cachin (1957)³4—Hains selected twenty décollages from the extensive bulk of his accumu-

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lated production from 1950 to 1961 and titled them collectively La France déchirée: France torn-apart, ripped-up, ruined. While explicitly focused on the current debates about the ongoing wars of decolonization, La France déchirée also maintained the 1957 exhibition’s focus on public expression, especially as it is manifest in the space of the city. This time, however, the domination of the city’s public space by political and commercial propaganda found redress in Hains’s mobilization of aesthetic practices—in particular what he describes as a synthesis of “gestural art, expressionist abstraction, and Lettrism”—to document the existence, though not the actual expression, of an under-represented populace in these same public spaces.³5 Certainly, Hains’s continued interest in the physical appearance of the lacerated letters visible on the surfaces of the décollage speaks to the legacy of the Lettrist project of trying to draw from similarly fragmented signs the means to generate a universal, and hence legitimately public, means to access the “unspeakable” of contemporary history. Nevertheless, in this instance the claims made for such a universalization had shifted in accordance with a vantage point that, from 1961, looked back at more than a decade of colonial war and political strife. As with Hains’s 1957 exhibition, the title of La France déchirée provides an important directive, pointing us toward the artist’s continued preoccupation with the possibilities of public expression, but now naming this concern as more specifically located within not only the realm of the territorial space that is the nation, but also both the urban space from whence the posters derived and the correlate, but less-physical “spaces” designated as constituent parts of the public sphere.³6 In particular, the title directs our attention toward the contemporary print media and the institutionalized party politics about which it attempts to inform its readers. As audiences at that time would likely have recognized, Hains borrowed the title of the exhibition from the title of a popular book by the Le Monde journalist Jacques Fauvet, La France déchirée. In his book, Fauvet cites the nation’s sweeping ideological rifts as responsible for what was then the impending demise of the Fourth Republic— actually and only finally undone by the unrest in Algeria— and asserts, in fact, that similar rifts had plagued the French nation throughout its history.³7 While Hains relied on a thematic pun to link his work to Fauvet’s title, his use of this phrase also forges an equivalent relationship between France— a nation torn, in Fauvet’s analysis— and the posters, torn, in Hains’s décollage, by a nation of French subjects. The resulting double-entendre suggests that the physical tears in the posters can be seen as representing the same conflicts that had torn the nation apart. This parallel is further developed in critic Pierre Restany’s signed invitation to the exhibition’s opening, which declares: “It is a fact (a sign of the times?): For over ten years, la France déchirée has been living in a two-room-plus-kitchenette in Montparnasse.” ³8 This strange statement extends beyond the literal reference to the fact that Hains (like many other Breton immigrants to the metropolis) had been living with his collected décollages in Montparnasse in a small two-room apartment for more than ten years. It designates metonymically that the larger Parisian public, privatized and displaced by the housing crisis that

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Figure 4.15. Harry Shunk and János Kender, photograph, Raymond Hains

plagued France in the 1950s and ’60s, was itself “la France in his apartment at 26 rue Delambre, Paris. February 1961. Photo: Shunkdéchirée.” ³9 (See Figure 4.15.) Kender / © Roy Lichtenstein Foundation. In June 1961, the conflicts tearing apart the nation and its people—repeatedly named in the textual fragments of the lacerated posters that hung on the walls of La France déchirée—were specifically spinning out of the once gradual, now rapid and violent disintegration of France’s colonial empire. To rehearse, briefly: what had begun as an isolated uprising in Madagascar in 1947 had risen to a crescendo throughout the French-Vietnamese War and in the multiple insurrections across sub-Saharan Africa. These repeated challenges to 127

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French rule eventually culminated in producing President de Gaulle’s 1958 decision to extend (to all colonies and territories other than Algeria) the choice of affiliation or membership in what his new constitution designated as the French communauté, a euphemism meant to supersede the historical connotations of the French Union as established in the Constitution of 1946, and to which I will return. As demonstrated by the aforementioned “Manifeste des 121,” of particular concern in 1961 were the social, political, and economic fissures caused by the question of Algerian independence and the eight bloody years spent fighting to achieve or disallow it. Because the 1848 Constitution had declared the littoral coast of Algeria an integral part of French Territory comprising three départements, so that it was technically neither a de jure protectorate nor a colony (even if it was certainly treated as one, de facto), in 1961 the French nation had literally been in a state of civil war since at least the FLN’s declaration of independence on Cairo radio on November 1, 1954.40 Three years after this crisis had toppled the Fourth Republic in 1958, viewers in 1961 would more than likely have understood the allusions made by Hains’s title. A few months, in fact, after the failed General’s Putsch d’Alger in April 1961 and the fear it generated that the metropole was also vulnerable to the dissenting Generals, viewers would have been equally likely to remember de Gaulle’s appearance on national television in which he spoke to the French populace in his dual roles, as both president and military general. They would no doubt have also recalled the localized episodes of violence between the OAS and the FLN in Paris itself. There was no doubt: France was quite profoundly a “nation torn.” This became even more evident after de Gaulle reversed his commitment to preserving the integrity that François Mitterand, the French interior minister, had insisted upon in November 1954 when he declared that “L’ Algérie, c’est la France.” THE PUBLIC: CET HOMME EST DANGEREUX

Upon walking into the “galerie laboratoire” that Jeanine Restany envisioned her Galerie J to be, the visitor to La France déchirée would have first been greeted by the bold graphics and jagged striations of a small framed décollage, Cet homme est dangereux (This man is dangerous, 1957), propped up— as if either a sandwich-board advertisement or a painting on an easel— on the reflective surface of a low table placed against a wall separating the gallery’s two exhibition spaces (see Figures 4.16 and 4.17).4¹ Thus positioned in the gallery, the yellowed remnants of what had once been pasted onto city walls as an advertisement for La fraternité française—the newspaper for Pierre Poujade’s right-wing political party, Union et fraternité française— assumed the function of announcing Hains’s exhibition in the manner of more traditional signage. Accordingly, the man named by the title would at first seem to advertise the artist Hains and pronounce him “dangerous,” perhaps because of the critique his exhibition posed regarding the kind of lyrical abstraction favored, for instance, at the 1959 biennial, a preference Villeglé had denounced as “la dictature abstraite.” 4² This critique was implicit not only in the painterly placement of the framed composition, but also in Cet

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(left) Figure 4.16. Raymond Hains, décollage, Cet homme est dangereux, 1957. Collection of The Fondation Ahlers Pro Arte, Hanover, Germany. © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. (above) Figure 4.17. Harry Shunk and János Kender, photograph, Raymond Hains, décollage, Cet homme est dangereux, 1957, as installed at the opening of La France déchirée, Galerie J, Paris, 14 June 14 1961. Photo: ShunkKender / © Roy Lichtenstein Foundation.

homme’s internal form. The blue and black gashes that split the surface into vacillating areas of figure and ground—manipulated at precisely the center of the composition so as to restore an illusory integrity to the text that generates the title— could not have failed to evoke Matisse’s similarly colored but very differently conceived papiers découpés.4³ As the layers of posters that constitute the décollage proliferate and overlap, so too do their meanings. These striations may also have been read more literally by contemporary audiences who might have seen them as an evidentiary record of the violent gestures enacted against Pierre Poujade’s smiling likeness by anonymous passers-by. Indeed, these disfiguring gashes seem intent on disrupting the original flyer’s ironic reversal of the “wanted” poster, which rendered the claim that this man, Poujade, was dangerous because— as the words still visible in the décollage attest—“He speaks . . . He says . . . He writes . . . Against the Republic . . . Against the Constitution . . . Against . . .” For the anonymous pedestrian who might have reached out to deface this tract, perhaps the man whom some had named “Poujadolf” had silenced

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too much. In this reading, then, it would be Poujade who represents the titular danger, but one that is no longer of the celebratory nature proposed by his own party. Indeed, it is to this end that Hains’s appropriation repositions him vis à vis the lacerated surface of the décollage. Historical circumstance would have favored this last reading, since by 1961 not only had Poujade’s party lost all the deputy seats it had won to such consternation in 1956, but the public awareness of the man himself had also faded to become little more than a historical footnote. There would have been something humorous or ironic, then, about framing his boasts in this way. Such irony is often an effective mode of criticism and denunciation, especially in art practices eager to avoid the ease of purely linear assessments. Critics at the time found the major thrusts of these two interpretations—the one aesthetic, the other evidentiary or even contextual—to be mutually exclusive. For the most part, they understood décollage to be either an exclusive comment on the aesthetic possibilities that abstraction specifically and painting in general presented to cultural expression after the Second World War, or a comment on the social and political significance of the lacerated texts that the décollage preserved.44 Never was it suggested that the two approaches might implicate and build upon each other to form a third reading, or that they might actually refer back to the related problem of perceiving and representing a reality that had been recently revealed to be something other than what it seemed. In a rather hostile review of the exhibition in the Communist-subsidized weekly Les lettres françaises, Raoul-Jean Moulin strongly upheld the first reading, even as he castigated such aesthetic pursuits in light of the historical contexts that frame them. Specifically, he intoned, for example, that Hains’s “pleasure” in the discovery of the unanticipated phrases generated by the lacerated posters was tantamount to “indecency,” given the subject of the exhibition, which he names as “the War in Algeria and of the regime that it brought about,” and by which he means de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic, which the PCF had denounced as illegitimate and unconstitutional.45 In Moulin’s estimation, the fact that the words and phrases rendered by the lacerations were put to the service of the artist’s “ambition to rediscover a pictorial space” (l’ambition de retrouver un espace pictural ) and were not, in the end, harnessed to present a single point of view about the war, was tantamount to an act of bad faith. This condemnation of the exhibition for its refusal to articulate one single statement regarding Hains’s “ façon de voir les choses,” his manner of seeing things, i.e., the war over Algerian independence was, however, deeply rooted in Moulin’s inability to see any possibility of political commitment beyond those manifest in direct denunciation, a tactic more clearly associated with Communist party politics and hard-line resistance than with the subtlety of aesthetic acts. Thus limited in his estimation, Moulin could only view Hains’s recourse to the autonomic expression of aesthetics as indecent, especially given the gravitas of the “political subjects” (sujets politiques) that dominated the exhibition as both subject and context. Because Moulin had thus rendered political judgment perpetually separate from any ostensible politics of aesthet-

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ics, it was impossible for him to view the works in relation to the other questions that the exhibition as a whole raised, questions of public expression, historical representation, and linguistic contingency. These, as discussed above, were the same concerns that had fueled Hains’s earlier projects and which, therefore, merited more attention from the overly hasty critic. In any case, what Moulin was unable to see was the very disruption that the aesthetic priorities of the décollages introduced to the codified language of propaganda as a political gesture in and of itself. Today, some critics have inherited Moulin’s inability to see past the imaginary boundaries of a politics built exclusively upon direct denunciation, boundaries that end only in reinforcing a political and aesthetic divide.46 In regard to décollage, and in particular, to the examples exhibited in La France déchirée, both strains of interpretation are equally incomplete and dehistoricized, which I argue is part of Hains’s point. The first more formalist strain remains blind to the specificity of the junctures at which aesthetic and political histories intersect, while the other, which presents itself as ostensibly more conscientious, is unable to see beyond an almost Malrauxian presentism that colors the past in terms of what we think we now know to be true political action. As a result, these tendencies do not situate décollage within the terms provided by Hains’s very specific engagement with both political and poetic language and urban space. Nor do they account for how his practice addressed the incursion of photography into artistic practice, a phenomenon elsewhere celebrated within modernist art history. Here, however, this perspective fails to consider the significance for Hains’s work of the accelerated incursion of photo-documentation into the mass media and the artist’s corresponding interest in how reality was represented—if not also determined—photographically at that time. The shared estimation that décollage’s final object of critique lies no deeper than the surface of its pictorial field owes more than a certain debt— even if often unintended—to the art critic Pierre Restany, certainly the décollagistes’ most famous advocate.47 Desperately anxious to separate the work of those artists he joined together and championed as Nouveaux réalistes from the morass of abstract painting of the period and to assign an organizing principle to their strange union,48 Restany explicitly stated that décollage had morphed out of the lessons that Hains had learned from the abstract patterns of his photographies hypnagogiques, the photographs of everyday objects, statues, and even texts that Hains had “liberated” from the “burden” of mimetic representation through the distorting grooves of the channeled-lens camera he called a hypnagogiscope, and the examples of which had constituted the subject of his first exhibition in 1948, at the Galerie Colette Allendy.49 According to the exhibition announcement issued by the gallery, this exhibition featured views of “Robots, Chimères, Elévations et Obsessions, Déformations et Abstractions . . . en vue du CINÉMA” (see Figures 4.18 and 4.19), a strange claim but one that might help explain Restany’s interest in mapping these minor works onto the more properly pop-cultural forms of the Nouveau Realists of the next decade. Within Restany’s logic, such photographs as Hains’s la Chimère d’Arezzo (1947) (Figure 4.20) and Le conquérant (1948) suggest

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Figure 4.18. Cover, invitation to Raymond Hains’s Photographies hypnagogiques at Galerie Colette Allendy, Paris, 30 June 1948. Courtesy of Fonds Galerie

Colette Allendy / Archives IMEC . Figure 4.19. Inside, invitation to Raymond Hains’s Photographies hypnagogiques at Galerie Colette Allendy, Paris, 30 June 1948. Courtesy of Fonds Galerie

Colette Allendy / Archives IMEC .

the artist’s capacity to engender visions of realities otherwise not perceptible to the eye (Figure 4.21). This capacity is also featured in Hains’s aforementioned, Lettrist-like collaboration with Villeglé and the poet Camille Bryen on Hépérile éclaté (1953), the “exploded” letters of which are repeated in the invitation to Hains’s and Villeglé’s 1957 exhibition, Le loi du 29 juillet 1881; ou, le lyrisme à la sauvette. Here, the phrase “Loi du 1881” is variously cropped, interrupted, and otherwise rendered almost illegible as it runs diagonally across the page, suggesting again the artists’ intention to disrupt the street signage on the simultaneous levels of text and image. Indeed, it was this ambition to engender a new reality that Hains had suggested when he coined the term “direct perception” to describe the relationship that the viewer would have with his photographies hypnagogiques. In many ways, such “direct perception” can be best understood as parallel to Isou’s project of protecting language from being used descriptively, in that it hoped to generate a photographic image that no longer referred back to a pre-existing reality, but instead meant to produce a new one, what Hains called “une autre réalité ” for which no exterior referent exists.50 The act of looking at these photographs thus provides unmediated access— hence “direct perception”—to a new, visual reality, neither indexical nor representational. In such a way, the image is reinvigorated to constitute the substance of

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Figure 4. 20. Raymond Hains, gelatin-silver print, Chimère d’Arezzo, 1947, 9 1⁄ 2 × 11 3⁄4 inches (24.0 × 30.0 cm). Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, AM1981–723. Repro-photo: Philippe Migeat. Photo credit: CNAC / MNAM / Dist. Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY. © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Figure 4. 21. Raymond Hains, gelatin-silver print, Le conquérant (attributed title: Les chevaliers), 1947, 9 1⁄ 2 × 11 3⁄4 inches (23.5 × 30 cm). Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, AM1981– 724. Repro-photo: Georges Meguerdit-

chian. Photo credit: CNAC / MNAM / Dist. Réunion des Musées Nationaux /Art Resource, NY. © 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

experience, a strategy crucial to the eventual interventions that décollage would think to enact within the various spaces—the street, the gallery—that it would investigate. In his after-the-fact explanation of Nouveau réalisme, Restany draws upon this definition to suggest that Hains experienced a revelation the moment he first saw the “exploded typography” of the lacerated street poster, thereby providing yet another origin myth of an artistic practice grounded in the kind of eureka-moment of the individual genius before his invention. Emboldened by this revelation, Hains— according to Restany—understood that the image itself was inherently susceptible to refraction by the real and needed no help from the hand (or tool, in the case of photography) of the artist in order to be realized aesthetically. Restany posits the appropriation of lacerated street posters as the next logical step in Hains’s artistic trajectory, a kind of literalization of the photograph’s inherently ready-made qualities

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and the object-like qualities of his photographies hypnagogiques. Rendered abstract (and hence not necessarily available to the kinds of political denunciation Moulin would have preferred), décollage was not only made to fit within the otherwise unlikely parameters of Nouveau réalisme; it was anachronistically set up to demonstrate the “new perceptive approaches to the real” (nouvelles approches perceptives du réel ) that would come to define the group’s association and to enable its aesthetic platform, born in equal parts from abstraction and an appropriative realism.5¹ Nowhere was the “real,” which might be defined as historical circumstance or experience, accounted for in this explanation of the motivational logic of décollage. Nor did contemporary accounts contend with the ways in which this “real” was increasingly determined on the one hand by the rising importance of photography as the kind of tool that could prompt both Malraux’s musée imaginaire and the urban vision it inspired, and, on the other, language, which had been the point of Isidore Isou’s early but misbegotten efforts. The posters that ended up “décollaged” in Hains’s 1961 exhibition—including such very different examples as Paix en Algérie (1956), Le 13 mai (1958), Négocier, négocier (1958), C’est ça le rénouveau? (1959), Comité pour la paix en Algérie (1960), and De Gaulle veut un bain de sang, il l’aura (1961)— suggest that it is precisely this more complex approach to the “real” that is presented by their content. Even as these works—framed, sometimes behind glass, signed, and hung on the wall of a gallery— announce their difference from much of Hains’s and Villeglé’s other décollage (not to mention the work of Dufrêne and their Italian colleague, Mimmo Rotella), their presentation of content cannot be disassociated from their presentation of form (see Figure 4.22). In other words, the relationship of these décollages to reality and to the politics that configure it cannot be disassociated from their aesthetic organization. As the titles indicate, all of these works specifically evoke the events and debates surrounding the Algerian War of Independence as it was unfolding and being debated in France. Moreover, while the textual fragments from which these titles are drawn are clearly legible—like the word fragments in Ach Alma Manetro— the works themselves differ from the 1949 “discovery” of the posters on the palisade, in that the text now clearly motivates the organization of the visual field, often to the exclusion of color patterning. Far from representing the views of marginal or illegal terrorist organizations, as Robert Fleck has suggested in an effort to assert the political courage of Hains’s exhibition, the posters décollaged in this exhibition all stem from the realm of official publicity, or from the public sphere exactly as Jürgen Habermas defined it and as it had come to be manipulated in increasingly propagandistic fashion in recent decades.5² As with the example of the lacerated flyer that comprises Hains’s Cet homme, which was originally an announcement for La fraternité française, the posters remade here as décollage issue from political party announcements and advertisements, party-affiliated newspapers, or broadsheets mounted and torn during the electoral campaigns that had accompanied the Algerian War of Independence, including, after

Figure 4. 22. Raymond Hains, décollage, Paix en Algérie, 1956. © 2013 Artists

1958, the referenda that formed an integral part of how this Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, war was fought on the level of so-called public opinion. As Paris. such, they also traced their origins to exactly that kind of material most regulated by the 1881 défense d’afficher legislation. Delaying for the moment a more careful discussion of these referenda and their relationship to formulating and representing the appearance of a unified national public, it is worth describing the poster campaigns that accompanied them. So great was the effort to publicize the politics of the day that, as one observer describes it, “the most extraordinary spectacle of the campaign was the sea of posters. . . . In repetition and color, this campaign eclipsed the advertisements for detergents and beverages. For the first time in France, the poster artists contributed intensively to an electoral campaign. Even the most distracted citizen would have had difficulty not noticing such a deployment of means.” 5³ On roadways, buildings, palisades— everywhere voters traveled— colored posters dominated the cityscape, encouraging simply “oui” or 135

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Figure 4. 23. Poster advocating a “oui” vote in the constitutional referendum of 28 September 1958, Photo courtesy of Archives de Gaulle / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library International.

“oui à la France,” as promoted by a vote in favor of de Gaulle’s new Constitution in 1958 (see Figure 4.23). The soaring symbols of de Gaulle’s self-promotion eclipsed not only the usual business of buying and selling soap and coffee but also, significantly for Hains’s exhibition, the facts of colonial domination—the very facts that had led de Gaulle to reform the constitution and hold a subsequent referendum on Algerian sovereignty. They did this by evoking predictable images, such as smiling Algerians interacting with the French, and by resurrecting the “‘V’ for Victory” symbol of the General’s famous triumph as leader of the French Resistance (see Figure 4.24). Playing on the uncanny registers of historical repetition, this “V” would now also stand for the Fifth Republic, and it would be through the open-armed embrace of such a gesture that de Gaulle would signal his return to Algeria on 4 June 1958 (see Figure 4.25). The realities of this urban, electoral advertising established the literal and metaphorical terrain of Hains’s 1961 exhibition, especially in conjunction with the title’s allusion to Jacques Fauvet’s ahistorical analysis of the political situation several years earlier. The material content of the posters that were décollaged in La France déchirée suggest that while we cannot locate the exhibition’s political intervention in a direct

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Figure 4. 24. Poster advocating a “oui” vote in the referendum of 8 January 1961, concerning Alge-

rian auto-determination. Photo courtesy of Musée de l’histoire contemporaine / BDIC © Elie Kagan / BDIC .

Figure 4. 25. Agence-Frances Press (AFP) photograph, Charles de Gaulle with his arms raised in a “V” for “victory,” Constantine (Qusantînah), Algeria, 4 June 1958. The official caption reads: “General De Gaulle’s first task as head of government was to defuse the situation in Algeria. In a four- day visit he tried to calm the Algerian population as well as the French ‘colons.’ ” Photo courtesy Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

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denunciation of specific practices—such as torture, assassination, or the regime that enabled them—neither can we limit the political engagement of décollage to an exclusive critique of spectacular society and advanced consumerism, which has been the standard art-historical reading of the art made in France after the end of the Second World War. In this reading, art primarily serves as a matter of elite practice meant to interrupt institutional authority in a strictly negative relationship to the entertainment industries. To follow this line here would be to err by occluding not only the actual focus of Hains’s critique during these war-bound years, but also, significantly, a consideration of how these décollages attempted to renegotiate the spaces, the political spheres, and the historical specificities of the time. While the streets of Paris were plastered with political party advertisements guiding the electorate to vote “oui” or “non” in de Gaulle’s referenda or urging readers to purchase this newspaper or join that party, it also bears noting that the French press seemed relatively dislocated from the purpose of comprehensively representing the divisive issues at the heart of these elections. At the very least, the press no longer provided a likely or productive means of generating public opinion so much as it codified or confirmed opinions already made. To be sure, during the 1940s and 1950s, the facts and function of newspaper circulation in France had changed drastically, with general readership plummeting precipitously.54 For the most part, fewer and fewer people read fewer and fewer papers. When readership did begin to rise again in the late 1950s, it was in relationship to a new hybrid form of newspaper, one in which political reportage took a second seat to a photo-rich variety of sensationalism in papers that were less concerned with debating the moment than with re-presenting it, as if it too were a reality to be documented without contingency. Witness France-Soir which, at 1.5 million readers in 1955, was one of France’s and Europe’s most widely read papers, and Parisien-Libré, the paper that L’Humanité referred to as “l’assassin libéré ” for its open support of the Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS).55 L’ Aurore, a Catholic, rightwing paper, and Le Figaro, which had become the established mouthpiece of the professional classes, were also widely read during this period. To this newly reconfigured, subscription-driven press, the subject of Algerian independence and the battles being fought for and against it were not of principal concern. Among all post-war newspapers, Le Monde, Paris’s left-center daily, demonstrated the highest incidence of representing news from the Algerian War of Independence on its front page, and it did so at the astonishingly low rate of less than 14 percent throughout the whole eight-year period. L’Humanité clocked in second, with less than 9 percent of its covers mentioning the war.56 According to the historian Benjamin Stora, it was as if large parts of the war in Algeria were effectively removed from public visibility.57 For Stora, it was this omission that allowed the “infected limb” that was Algeria to be cut from the body politic and then to be actively forgotten in the decades to follow. Leaving aside for the moment how actually forgotten, or by whom, the war was in the decades to come, the statistics above demonstrate that, even while French intellectuals debated how Algerian independence would or should shape their future commitments and

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the possibility of their political engagements, such debates did not “trickle down” (at least not much or at first) into venues directed toward the public at large. In order to better understand what this could mean for how art practice addressed public politics, it is helpful to remember that, just a decade later, mass media representations of the Vietnam War (1959–1975) would be held responsible for simultaneously inuring American voters to the human devastation of war and providing the stimulus to act out against it.58 As for the intellectual classes, ample evidence indicates that such debates were indeed front and center. Intellectual historians have long positioned the Algerian War of Independence as a cornerstone of the French left’s reinvention of itself after the Second World War and following the revelations in 1956 about the extent of Stalin’s repressive crimes as well as the subsequent revolutions in Hungary and Poland.59 Most recently, James Le Sueur has named the Algerian War of Independence a “crucible” or absolute defining moment of intellectual self-identification, forcing many intellectuals to question their earlier assumptions regarding their commitment to the disengaged formulation of alterity that was current at the end of the Second World War.60 As the “Manifeste des 121” demonstrates, by September 1960 the question of insoumission had become central to political debate in the metropole. Yet, while the Manifeste is often alluded to as an exclusive demonstration of opposition to the continued colonial rule in Algeria, it was actually prompted by more immediately local concerns, specifically those regarding individual rights as had long been the case in debates about French humanist universalism. As Le Sueur argues, the Manifeste must be understood in terms of a long debate between what he calls the “moderate” and the “avant-garde” left, a debate that had evolved over the years and took as its primary focus the question of bolstering French Republicanism against Fascism. Where Algeria would fall within that model also evolved, in pragmatic conjunction with the unfolding of events and not in accordance with universalist principles of self-determination, no matter what claims were made after Algeria achieved independence.6¹ Within the enclave of French intellectual history, the Manifeste had, for example, less relevance in regard to the outcome of the Algerian War of Independence than for the development of tiers-mondisme and the “new left.” 6² When asked about his involvement in drafting and signing the letter that would be published as the “Manifeste des 121,” Maurice Blanchot signaled the importance he ascribed to the intellectual activity of writing by underscoring the seriousness of declaration as an “act.” He also derided the self-promoting aspects of speaking about it as an individual rather than as part of the collective that had rendered it public. When pressed, however, he explained that his contribution to the collective was important to him “as a writer,” taking care to clarify even further by specifying he had participated “not as a political writer, nor even as a citizen involved in the political struggle, but as an apolitical writer (un écrivain non politique) who felt moved to express an opinion about problems that concern him essentially,” especially the legality of prosecuting young Frenchmen for refusing to bear arms against or conspiring to ad-

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vance Algerian independence.6³ To a contemporary readership accustomed to signing a seemingly ceaseless flow of digital petitions as a means to an allegedly re-invigorated grassroots politics, Blanchot’s emphasis on the non politique is surprising, even counterintuitive, especially given the weight with which the Manifeste is still received as emblematic of political opposition. His emphasis on the prosecution of Frenchmen might also give pause, given the context in which this “act” was rendered. And yet, Blanchot’s claim goes a long way toward providing an essential clue as to what political action actually was or might have been at that time and therefore helps prepare us to revisit the significance of Hains’s La France déchirée. It foregrounds how the idea of political action during the decades of decolonization was still bound up in words, even though the left was moving beyond Sartre’s model of writing as the inherently committed practice he articulated in What Is Literature? During the period, reading also played an important part in marking oneself as political. Indeed it was not unheard of for people to define their politics based on the coordinates of which paper they read.64 When we recall that the décollages in La France déchirée are made of remnants of that kind of advertisement or broadsheet that hawks the political platforms of competing parties, we begin to understand that, instead of retreating from the public, these works were specifically invested in rethinking and reactivating space for precisely such a language of public engagement within both art and the space of the city. In this, of course, they widely surpassed the ambitions of Isou’s Lettrism. In fact, the political potential of décollage and the lessons it has for today’s practitioners lie less with presenting a specific political objection to any particular fact of historical reality (here, the French occupation of Algeria and the divisive politics that the threat of Algerian independence would engender in the French nation) than with actively questioning the capacity of the so-called public institutions it represents to reflect—rather than dictate—the experience of a nation and its people. It also draws our attention to the ways in which language— and not just any language, but that specific variety of language that Sartre had denigrated as poetic or non-representational language— became the locus of a political action of its own. Herein lies the significance of Blanchot’s pronouncements and, perhaps, Hains’s reception of them or of other similar intonations, especially if we are willing to take seriously his interest in the actions and contingencies that are defined by language within public parameters. It is in this engagement with the language of public representation that Hains’s La France déchirée parallels the kind of curiosity and critique that fueled Habermas to develop his account of the demise of the public sphere. However, Hains’s investigation avoids Habermas’s pessimistic conclusions, despite his willingness to name all the same players who participated in the privatization of the public and the speech it once represented: the media, the political parties, and the possibilities of public gathering. The torn surfaces of Hains’s décollaged posters mined the depths of the relationship between the average person, political representation, and the language of the media as enacted in the public space of the street, much as Habermas had en-

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deavored in his written analyses. Décollage thus returned to the site par excellence of enlightened debate in the Revolutionary assemblies of late eighteenth-century France in order to address the crisis occasioned by the radical challenges to institutionalized claims about universality that had resulted from the tripartite destabilizations of the Second World War, decolonization, and France’s accelerated entrance into the new world order of global consumption. Returning to Hains’s Cet homme with these parameters in mind, it now becomes possible to imagine a third, and different, referent for the subject or, as Raoul-Jean Moulin would have preferred, the “sujet politique,” of Cet homme’s address. In opposition to the great heroic figures of political leaders, men like Poujade (to some) or de Gaulle (to others), or even men like the artist (for Restany) credited with being capable of reinventing art and along with it human expressivity, there exists the anonymous homme who lacerated the posters in the first place. It is he or she who, as Kristin Ross suggests in her vivid description of the 1871 toppling of the symbolic register built into the Vendôme column, engages in acts of destruction in order to refuse “the dominant organization of social space and the supposed neutrality.” 65 This man, an “everyman” positioned within the remaining public space of the street and responding to the linguistic construction of the reality with which he or she is surrounded, is dangerous, Hains’s assembled works intone, precisely because he has not acquiesced to an imposed representation of his own experience within the realm of the public sphere and in terms of either the public language or public image given to shape that public sphere. Not just a passive consumer of the image of the city and its history, he acts upon his environment, leaving traces of his passage, if not also his resistance or, on occasion, his support (the tear itself being an ambivalent gesture born of a desire either to shred and destroy or to remove and possess). With La France déchirée’s appearance on the visible space of the gallery walls, this “everyman” is granted a tenuous agency through the décollage. The archived trace of his or her actions on the posters, preserved in flaky layers, dislodges the fact of his or her existence from the privatized, routine transit through the city to the dull pace of dodo, métro, boulot (sleep, metro, work), and recasts him or her as belonging to a public made visible, though still anonymous, through the trace of his or her actions. After all, to be in the 1950s and 1960s was to be seen, or so the multiple efforts to construct a model of the subject in relationship to the gaze would indicate.66 As anonymous and undetermined acts of vandalism, the lacerated posters from which décollage is made had been unremarkable, even invisible. They had not yet entered into what Hannah Arendt, in her 1958 precursor to Habermas’s study, would call the “space of appearance.” 67 For Arendt, this “space” designates a symbolic political realm akin to Habermas’s public sphere, where private persons (she names men) engage in matters of public interest. Departing from Habermas’s conception, however, Arendt’s account suggests that we might understand action and presence through their visual manifestations rather than those centered exclusively on the written word. This crucial insistence on the visual and the concretely spatial in the con-

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struction of a public that was increasingly categorized according to the literal, permits (or did so during the period under discussion) forms of political representation that are not restricted to the increasingly closed-off realms of such discursive enterprises as print media and the linguistic certainties upon which they rest. Under the guidelines established by Arendt’s criteria—visibility within a spatial construct that is strongly reminiscent of photography as will be discussed in the next chapter—political recognition becomes a possibility through interaction with the physical spaces of the city and especially with the complex visual cultures that it fosters, such as the defacement of posters or acts of graffiti and vandalism. In this model, public participation is determined by the fact of being seen, and not by the masterful gaze of possession that had driven urbanists’ plans since the Enlightenment. As but one trace of such a public, the décollage succinctly registers Hains’s attempt to accommodate the public’s effort to represent itself as such, both visually and—if we allow the reconfigured texts or juxtaposed phrases that Moulin so derided for having provided the artist with something like pleasure to serve as a text— linguistically. Given the historical exigencies of the particular moment in which the specific works under consideration here were made and exhibited, it is important to consider the potential of this gesture within the history of the public during the Algerian War of Independence and to isolate it as evidence of a will to refuse the interested representations upon which the state and political publicity hoped to buttress their authority. Indeed, the battle to represent the “everyman” of the French public, to speak for (or as) him, had been an important practice of French Republicanism since the Revolution, when the embodiment of the nation was first transferred from the figure of the king to the people, or rather, the men of France.68 Such efforts to represent became something of an obsession in the second half of the twentieth century, when legislative reform joined both political and financial mobility to transform the makeup of the French electorate at exactly the same time that contests over selfdetermination, stoked by the decisive defeat at Dien Bien Phu, began to spread across the French Union. DIRECT DEMOCRACY AND OTHER MYTHS OF REPRESENTATION

This investment in being able to speak authoritatively for the public, and particularly for a national public designated as such by the rights of citizenship, led Charles de Gaulle to initiate four referenda, three of which directly concerned Algeria. As discussed in chapter 2, one of de Gaulle’s requests for accepting the challenge of returning to power following the events of May 1958 was the assurance that his party would be able to draft a new constitution in accordance with its political platforms. Once such a constitution was completed, French law mandated that a referendum be held to approve the new terms by which the Republic would be governed. And so, on 28 September 1958, ratification of the new Constitution was put to the voting public; the outcome was a 90 percent approval rate. The two subsequent referenda of 1961 and 1962 had different implications, although even the 1958 referendum to approve de

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Gaulle’s proposed constitution and its newly empowered executive branch was largely promoted and perceived as a means to resolve the Algerian “crisis” by strengthening the French presidency and, accordingly, the nation. That 90 percent of those who voted did so in favor of de Gaulle’s new constitution would seem to indicate an overwhelming consensus among French citizens. However, a full 25 percent of the electorate abstained, refusing even to honor the implications of the new constitution’s reconceptualization of the state. Many, especially those on the far left, refused on the grounds that de Gaulle’s return and the special powers he demanded and received in June of 1958 were part of an illegal coup. In order to understand the questions surrounding these referenda and how they inflected the significance of Hains’s 1961 exhibition at the Galerie J, it is first necessary to consider the question of who this electorate was, or, rather, who it excluded. After all, the mission to determine the contours of this national body had been a motivating factor of the anti-colonial nationalisms that might be said to have culminated in the Algerian War of Independence in the first instance and so were important parts of debates about what it meant to represent, politically. Since the 1848 declaration of Algeria as part of France, both indigenous and immigrant populations had been petitioning, to alternating effect, for the right to participate in French politics under the same terms as all other citizens residing within other French departments. Fearful of what such electoral rights would mean, every successive French government denied the Algerian population full access to those rights, if not always in the letter of the law, then through its administration.69 By the time of the Fifth Republic, however, the right to self-represent was chief among the Algerians’ demands of France, and, in 1959 de Gaulle made his first public mention of the phrase “self-determination” in regard to Algeria. When he did, he initiated a process wherein he would repeatedly suggest that the people, rather than the state or the military, would decide the question of Algeria’s sovereignty, no matter how untrue this would turn out to be. To this end, de Gaulle mounted a carefully orchestrated media campaign that culminated in several events in 1961. In January, he promised to let the Algerian populations, both indigenous and European, vote on a series of referenda regarding their future. Such a promise was made even more significant by virtue of the fact that all other public liberties—including the right to vote in local elections for the already powerless Algerian Assembly, the freedom of the press, and the right to congregate or move freely in the city—had been suspended in Algeria since early 1957, and were all but nonexistent for the population of français musulmans d’algérie, or “French muslims from Algeria” as contemporaneous parlance would have it, in the metropole. And so the second referendum of de Gaulle’s administration, the one that was most relevant for the context in which the visitor to Hains’s June 1961 exhibition would have received his work, was held on 8 January 1961. It asked the eligible voters in France and Algeria to register their approval or disapproval of the plan de Gaulle had already submitted “concerning the self-determination of the Algerian populations and the organization of the public powers in Algeria prior to self-determination.” 70

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His plan began with the suggestion that the full exercise of public liberties be restored in Algeria as soon as it was safe to do so. After those civil liberties were restored, de Gaulle proposed that the Algerian people would be allowed to vote on the question of independence. The way this was phrased in the referendum, however, was that de Gaulle asked for a vote to not only support or refuse this plan for eventual independence, but simultaneously to uphold the continued executive and legislative rule of Algeria in terms beneficial to French interests until the proposed self-determination had been effected, in other words, until he, as executive and sovereign, decided otherwise. This is to say that what de Gaulle was asking the voting public to vote for or against was his idea of the nation and its powers. The contradiction between the intentions manifest in the two halves of the referendum confused many voters who were unable, because of the two-pronged aspect of the vote, to approve of only part of de Gaulle’s proposition. The consensus de Gaulle sought was thus contrived not only to smooth over different opinions and minor hesitations, but also to completely erase any record of dissent or disagreement.7¹ Thus the visitor to Hains’s exhibition in June of 1961 would have seen the décollage C’est ça le rénouveau? (1959) and the reconfigured call for a vote that it presented (see Figure 4.26) with a certain sense of déja vu. A much more complicated composition than Cet homme, C’est ça finds at its center an upended, abyssal apostrophe snatched from the heart of what had been originally posted as an advertisement for a Communist-supported campaign to augment workers’ salaries. This assault on the original integrity of the poster interrupts a layer of black text detailing the costs of living in order to expose a segment of blue text belonging to yet another buried poster. The text from this exposed segment reads “Vote,” the familiar “tu” form of the verb rendered by another tear to the poster, and the resulting loss of the “z” that would have completed the more formal “Votez.” Beneath that, from yet another poster, badly scratched segments of the words “La France” stand next to the last half of the word “Indochine” poking through. The round end of the apostrophe reveals still a fifth layer of text, dense typography from which only the words “Du parti ” remain wholly legible. The work’s title comes from the original heading of the PCF flyer “C’est ça le rénouveau?” once meant to suggest an ironic indictment of de Gaulle’s new government and its failure to produce real economic change.7² In the new context provided by their colluded arrangement and preservation, however, these words take new meaning from the resonance of the unearthed “Indochine.” Framed within the exhibition by nineteen other décollages all presenting materials relating directly to the colonial wars of the 1950s, this question could not have failed to evoke an ironic parallel between the unmemorialized and humiliating defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and the contemporary crisis in Algeria, asking if what seemed a nearly perpetual war could possibly constitute the new beginning that the French nation had been promised in return for bringing de Gaulle back.7³ Once initiated, this question and the historical comparisons it triggers— centered around the doubled roles de Gaulle had played in

Figure 4. 26. Raymond Hains, décollage, C’est ça le rénouveau?, 1959. © 2013

this history, as well as what his involvement had meant for Artists Rights Society (ARS), New defining and locating “France” in the first place— cascade York / ADAGP, Paris. backward across the twentieth century, instantly aligning a longer history of genocide and colonialism in what might seem an ironic arc. Furthermore, within the context of the public sphere during France’s colonial wars, the nonsensical phrase at the center of C’est ça?—“vote Indochine la France,” or “vote Indochine contre la France” if we include the printed text of the original poster that remains untouched to the left of the lacerated center—manifests a direct subversion of precisely the kind of publicity-driven politics and linguistic manipulation that the referendum itself had proposed, asking ironically if this too had really changed and if de Gaulle’s “national public,” organized around the French “community” (the Fifth Republic’s new name for what had once been known as an Empire and then, more optimistically, as a Union) was really all that more inclusive, or if the language it generated was necessarily any more representative. The fluid discourses of the media and the political machines that feed it were thus disturbed or, to recast a term that the Situationists also borrowed from contemporary political usage, détourned, in order to enable a parodic representation of the tainted medium of political representation.74 Through the unwitting juxtaposition of words that interrupt each other through lay-

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ers of buried posters, the discursive machinery of linguistic propaganda meant to corral human experience into a general and generalizable public is jammed. Conversely, by having made this impossible vote available through the ripping and tearing of posters, the anonymous lacerator— or “involuntary artist,” in Hains’s words—finds a way to record his or her own experience in the limiting field of history as determined by the media machine.75 In this way, the anonymous lacerator is made to engage in what Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge have designated as an alternative public sphere, one based not on the alienating consumption of the publicly distributed descriptions of experience that constitute the mass media, but on the production of alternative discourses, no matter how small or piecemeal—precisely the kind of ephemeral archives Foucault acknowledges in the passage that serves as the epigraph to this chapter.76 In this last instance, without wanting to determine what the marks or garbled phrases they rendered were intended to signify at any moment before Hains selected them, it is useful to take recourse to a model of experience recently formulated by the philosopher Jacques Rancière in which he describes aesthetic acts as “configurations of experience that create new modes of sense perceptions and induce novel forms of political subjectivity.” 77 Against a current of modernist art history that has rooted its claims to a refusal of any equivalence between the subject of representation and the represented subject, Rancière’s model of aesthetic experience allows room to imagine the significance of Hains’s intervention without requiring, for instance, the simplistic, binary expectation that he pick a side or privilege— as Moulin had demanded—his “way of seeing things” in relation to the discordant voices of others. We might also now be able to appreciate that the garbled and impossible call for a vote as generated by C’est ça le rénouveau? enables a debate that is otherwise less than fully visible and certainly largely unwritten within the dominant print media and the electoral propaganda that had colorfully lined the streets of Paris at the moment in question. As we have seen, all of these are exclusively bound to the dictates of “one side” of the story, so to speak, which corresponds with the state’s authority to control the public space of its territory. To reproduce the opinions, or even singular opinion, expressed in the media would be to follow politicians like Malraux who so greatly invested in the possibility of opaquing the reality of dissent under the uniformity of appearance. In the context of Hains’s exhibition, the call—newly reissued to the “cet homme” of the public, now rendered “dangereux” rather than compliant—to vote “contre” France and so “for” or “against” (depending on how you understand the directive) Algeria or the Indochina of 1959, can be recast in a more significantly critical fashion. It was exactly such an absurd vote that had already served to define the parameters of a false public through the illusions of the 1961 referendum. C’est ça? ’s incitement to vote against “la France” resonates specifically with the implications of this referendum, mimicking its authority to present an actual question at the precise moment it answered it. By re-imaging the vote in the impossible terms suggested by the indexical tears that had first enabled C’est ça? ’s composition, Hains’s décollage

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Figure 4. 27. Harry Shunk and János Kender, photograph, Raymond Hains standing in front of a building under political graffiti reading “RÉSISTANCE, ” Paris, February 1961. Photo: Shunk-Kender/ © Roy Lichtenstein Foundation.

points to the non-representative aspect of the referendum as a vehicle of state authority and illuminates its bogus plea. Estranged from an association with the representative practices of democratic government, the referenda surrounding the Algerian War are thereby repositioned as yet one more faulty component of a public sphere intent on creating the illusion of consensus. FACT OR FICTION: HAINSOUMIS

In the dual context provided, on the one hand, by Malraux’s modeling of Paris based on the fantasy of a coherent past and a unified global order under French cultural hegemony, and, on the other, by Isou’s Lettrist ambitions to reorder experience and its representation by separating word and image, let us return to the Shunk-Kender photographic series documenting Hains’s performance of his art practice on the streets of the Left Bank in 1961. The first two photos of the sequence discussed above had featured Hains positioning himself around a segment of graffiti that read “INSOUMISSION ” and above which were plastered layers of additional posters, suggesting the interface of oppositional points of view (see Figures 4.12, 4.13, and 4.14). In what I consider the “next” picture in the series, Hains leans into the frame from the right, peering over the hood of a car in front of yet another swath of graffiti, this one reading “RÉSISTANCE ” (see Figure 4.27). As in the other images, the graffiti appears high 147

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on the wall, above a stretch of palisade that supports posters announcing language lessons in English, French, and German, a common sight in the internationalizing Paris of the 1960s. Given Hains’s presentation of himself as an avowed “citizen of the world,” and as someone who invested in the shifting meanings produced by varying intersections of linguistic and material form, the insistent framing of these polylinguistic references should be understood as yet another humorous but not insignificant attempt to draw our attention to the constituent elements of Hains’s own practice and the degree to which it is based on the intersecting elements of language, vision, and space. His body acts like the tears that constitute the surface of his décollage, directing our attention to the words and pictures he reframes as new objects for our view. The final photograph that I want to consider from the 1961 series puts the presentation of the artist as alternately heralded by the nouns RÉSISTANCE and INSOUMISSION into a single image and completes the frame for understanding Hains’s work in relationship to the historical and ideological dimensions that I have attempted to trace in this book.78 Shot from across the street (presumably by Kender since we see Shunk on the far left of the picture), Hains here appears less prominently than he does in the other photographs (see Figure 4.28). Instead, our attention is drawn to the seeming disuse and renovation of the building against which he is braced, as if to underscore what I take to be his performative reading of the necessity of historicizing accumulations of meaning in relation to material reality. In this light, it is crucial that with this new point of view, the terms RÉSISTANCE and INSOUMISSION are now revealed to be adjacent. Between these two words, we are now also better able to discern a register of secondary graffiti, which had been cropped out of the frame in the other pictures. This intermediary text situates the two words in relationship to each other, so that résistance and insoumission appear not just as distinct terms in a continuum of activity framing the artist’s stance, but as diametrically opposed political positions. RÉSISTANCE, which we might once have quickly assumed to be of the same order of refusal as INSOUMISSION, is here embellished by a second hand that inscribes the phrase “AVEC LA FEN ” just above RÉSISTANCE and “À DE GAULLE ” just below, so that the entire graffiti now reads, left to right, “WITH THE FEN / RESISTANCE TO DE GAULLE.” As explained above, the FEN was an extreme-right wing student group founded precisely to oppose the insoumissive Union nationale des étudiants de France (UNEF) and to advocate for an Algérie française. Far from being parallel, then, to the insoumission that characterized governmental dissent, résistance has here been rendered its diametric opposite. The artist has thus positioned himself between two ends of the political spectrum: to his right lies the possibility of endorsing the FEN, resisting de Gaulle, and supporting an Algérie française; to his left exists a posture of civil disobedience then manifest in insoumission (and which his location seems to favor slightly). On the one hand, we can read this positioning as an indication of his own ambivalence regarding the question of Algerian independence, a posture that, as discussed above, certain critics subsequent to Raoul-Jean Moulin have assumed he maintained based on his refusal to

Figure 4. 28. Harry Shunk and János Kender, photograph, Raymond Hains standing in front of a building between political graffiti reading “RÉSISTANCE ” and

declare his “manner of seeing things” in La France déchirée. “INSOUMISSION ,” Paris, February 1961. But we might also take Hains’s position to suggest some- Photo: Shunk-Kender / © Roy Lichtenstein thing more literal than that, a way of indicating the kind Foundation. of temporal accumulation of meaning also suggested by his own habit of including earlier projects in later ones, as is the case with the initial spin-offs of the 1959 palisade discussed above. In this scenario, we might understand the two terms historically—that is, as two temporally situated strategies of opposing military power masquerading as government. In this reading, “La Résistance” names the French opposition to the Nazi occupation and the Pétain regime, while “l’insoumission” characterizes, at least by January 1961, the rallying cry of a radicalizing, though still fraught, anti-war stance. The artist is thus positioning himself in relation to two words that indicate the possibilities for political posture in the years between the Second World War and the point when Cold War hostilities began to divide the left from within. It is, in other words, between resistance and insoumission that we need to historicize the political parameters of décollage. The solution that Hains, occasionally Villeglé, and to a lesser degree Dufrêne developed in response to this factionalization was to represent as somehow “real” these samplings from the street: a

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practice that was neither engaged, per se, nor complicit, and was hardly “indecent,” to recall Moulin once again. La France déchirée is more subtle than that, and more political, in the sense that Rancière intones when he describes politics as the disruption of the sensible. While Hains makes no specific statement, the artist repeatedly directs our attention to his capacity to generate meaning through his own strategies of reversal and negation, strategies here enacted by the placement of his body and the repeated iteration of photographic capture. This, I would argue, is the key that the Shunk-Kender photo sequence provides to the analysis of the exhibition. Hains’s careful positioning of his body just after the “S” of INSOUMISSION truncates the word to read “INS,” with “oumission” still recognizable, much as the words in the lacerated posters of La France déchirée are still discernible when one sounds out the rather stock phrases from whence they originate: “Négocier, négocier !,” “De Gaulle compte sur vous !,” “L’Humanité c’est la vérité.” When we do the same here and sound out the word fragments left visible in the photographic images, we have to remember that in French, “ins,” is of course, a homophone for the artist’s name, the nasal “i” sounding exactly the same as “ai” combined with the silent “h.” It is also, of course, equally a homophone for the French negative prefix “in,” suggesting the shared capacity of both the prefix and the artist to endow words with a new and directly opposite meaning. Just as the layered swaths of graffiti subvert layered meanings, the artist frames and reorders images to make new meanings that, while never final, highlight the ways in which other truths, even visual ones, have also been mediated by the tools of language. In La France déchirée, then, the point is not whether the artist should have more clearly pronounced his “façon de voir les choses” or his “way of seeing things.” Rather, what is crucial is how he puts on display the way in which these “things”—in this case, war and representation— are mediated by language and how that mediation is historically and contextually specific. So, for example, in Hains’s C’est ça le rénouveau? the language revealed and repositioned by the hands of the anonymous lacerators with whom Hains has forged unknowing collaboration is less important for the specific impossibility that the juxtaposition of “Vote Indochine” and “La France” conjures than for the doubt such a phrase casts on the certainty with which we assume we know what an entity like “Indochine” or “France” might mean at any given time. In other words, the difference conjured by the décollages in La France déchirée is always contingent. It is never self-sustaining and, for that matter, it is never absolute. Importantly, it is now rendered newly visible and newly readable. Through its deliberate use of a physical space to facilitate this visibility, Hains’s installation of La France déchirée makes of the gallery a portal onto Paris’s faceless populations, and, intentionally or not, short-circuits the typical separation of art institution and society at large. The pedestrian’s engagement with the posters—the historical moment of their laceration—within the public domain of urban space should not, however, be taken as the main catalyst to their formulation as a public body. Rather, it is only the intrusive dynamic characterizing the way décollage chaperones

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Figure 4. 29. Harry Shunk and János Kender, photograph, people on the street looking in the window during the opening of La France déchirée, Galerie J, Paris, 14 June 1961. Photo: ShunkKender / © Roy Lichtenstein Foundation.

the recorded fragments of experience into the gallery that galvanizes and even creates them as such. Before being joined together in the décollages, the evidentiary fragments of lacerated posters had hung on the palisades and walls of Paris as discarded and forgotten refuse, invisible or at least unseen to most people. In removing and representing them, Hains made them not only the stuff of a relevant critique, but also the substance of a public now defined by something other than inclusion within the “imagined community” of an electorally-construed national identity.79 In this sense, there is a performative element to the work of décollage, but, like the performative nature of the Shunk-Kender photographs, it exceeds the picture frame to reengage the reality from whence the work was originally derived. We see this clearly in photographs of La France déchirée taken by Shunk through the windows that frame the Galerie J as continuous with, but separate from, the surrounding streetscape. In one of these photographs, taken from the inside looking out, we see a bourgeois couple looking past the invitation taped to the window and to the décollage within (see Figure 4.29). Their facial expressions register more than their consternation and recall the anger of the “distinguished ladies” or the “right wing” observers who, according to one reviewer of the exhibition, had already subjected Hains to their ire.80 A second photograph presents Hains’s C’est ça and Villeglé’s 6 boulevard Poissonnière— Marcel Cachin (1957) hanging toward the street (see Figure 4.30). Both images deliver the final twist in meaning upon which the décollage depends when it

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enters the discursive space of the gallery.8¹ Like the palisade that Hains hung on the museum wall in the 1959 biennial, these fragments of the city street represent that street in a private space, yet here also become part of it anew. Their reality, as such, is entirely visible, but it is no longer transformable by the anonymous passersby we see gazing in through the windows on the rue de Montfauçon. The reflective surfaces of these windows superimpose the arches of the Marché Saint Germain across the street and back onto the posters that once took such architecture as their support (see Figure 4.30). When preserved and “remade” as art in order to circulate within the “space of appearance” that is the gallery, these lacerated posters testify to the productive capacity of the masses and register the possibility of recording a persevering presence in the spaces made less and less available to them every day as a result of the reconfigured dictates of an increasingly privatized public sphere— don’t touch; don’t tear; believe; buy— Figure 4.30. Harry Shunk and János Kender, photoand its advance on the realization of proper exgraph, gallery- owner Janine Restany installing Jacques Villeglé’s, 6 Bd. De Poissonniere—Marcel Cachin perience. That all of this took place precisely (1957) with Raymond Hains’s C’est ça le rénouveau? when censorship made engagement exceedingly (1959) in the background. Galerie J, Paris, June 1961. difficult, even within traditional media chanPhoto: Shunk-Kender / © Roy Lichtenstein Foundation. nels; when political partisanship and the climate of under-information made public debate difficult to generate beyond specialized forums; when the use of force by police and the occasional threat of terrorist action from the far right made customary use of public space less hospitable; and when even the vehicles of so-called direct democracy were manipulated to function as confirmation of unwavering political support, only confirms the significant interruption presented by décollage’s critique of the existing public sphere. To be clear, Hains’s décollage did not give voice to the “silent majority,” a constituency Kristin Ross employs to suggest that “the term consensus is no longer adequate to describe what is in fact a kind of socializing of people into silence— silence as consent.” 8² Nor did it act like the polls conducted by the Institut français d’opinion publique that, according to Charles-Robert Ageron, represented the public as opposing the continued occupation of Algeria. Rather, décollage offered a critique of these mechanisms of state authority and alleged representative democracy in the first place.8³ Unlike the new and entirely visual realities of Hains’s hypnagogic photo-

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Figure 4.31. Harry Shunk and János Kender, photograph, pedestrians and onlookers outside Galerie J during the opening of La France déchirée, Paris, 14 June 1961. Photo: Shunk-Kender/© Roy Lichtenstein Foundation.

graphs, these works attempt to shuttle back and forth between the existing realities of an aesthetically conceived object and public discourse, asking us to see the distortions in both. In this model, aesthetic acts are, to return to Rancière’s phrase, manifest as configurations of experience that illuminate the possibility of an as-yet-undefined alternative public discourse within the legitimate and legitimating sphere of art. Much of the textual, literal meaning suggested by the décollages in La France déchirée stems from the fact of context, which is ultimately traceable to Hains’s artistic interventions, if not also his intentions. After all, the primary materials of décollage are possibly accidental and certainly nonsensical productions. Without context and outside the space of the gallery, these materials would have remained profoundly meaningless. In providing a context that adds signification to these primary materials, Hains indeed seems to pass off his complex positioning of these primary materials as belonging to the public. In fact, however, he produces a sophisticated fiction. Crucially, this fiction does not rest on falsehoods and in the end mobilizes important interventions. Whether anything like a “real” public or any individual genuinely opined that France’s colonial politics were reprehensible or that the media oppressed him or her, the fact that such a public had only meager modes of expression at its disposal cannot be denied. While a ripped poster cannot be made to stand for a political agenda or even for political consciousness, I would insist that it is this very fact that lies at the core of the experience of La France déchirée and that Hains’s work plays with the space between his imbued meaning and the inherent meaninglessness of the ripped posters. For while Hains offers entry into the possible critical discourses that 153

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might emanate from a(n) (imaginary) public, at no time does he make either explicit or implicit claims about an actual public consciousness or even that of a private individual. La France déchirée included no statements, either within the works or in their presentation, regarding the political objectives of the individuals who had lacerated the posters. There was, in fact, no attempt to speak for or in the voice of. Instead, the work claimed itself as an evidentiary account of the simple fact of that public’s existence and its nonrepresentability, and so as a record of the disruption to the everyday order of normalcy. Through this positive representation, the exhibition attempted to highlight a negative space in the world of public experience and its embeddedness within both linguistic and visual constructions of reality. The consequences of Hains’s action are not small in terms of our thinking about either art practices or the possibility of generating the space for productive, critical publics within urban space. Décollage gains its critical capacity through the illegibility imparted to the propaganda of official publicity as it is articulated by the traditional means of the dominant public sphere. This action trumps the continued dissemination of both political and commercial propaganda. With the laceration of the street poster, the spectator’s quotidian experience coincides with a production that mars official discourse. Located in the negation of actual political discourse or the commercial noise that threatens to encompass it, such “disruptions” stubbornly if nebulously represent the subjects who, consciously or not, choose to destroy rather than preserve the manifestations of official publicity and the reality it attempts to configure. In the conversation between Marie Chapsal and Maurice Blanchot about the “Manifeste des 121” cited above, Chapsal pointedly asked Blanchot whether or not he thought the Manifeste, itself nothing more than a written document signed by just over one hundred literary and artistic figures, could have any political effect. Blanchot’s response was to correct her. “You mean,” he chided, “won’t it be politically ineffectual?” As careful as ever, he adds: “I think the answer must be: it does not seek to have any immediate political effect, or more precisely: it will be effective precisely in so far as it has taken no account of any considerations of practical and political efficacy, for example by attempting, through a compromise over the terms in which it is expressed, to rally as many people as possible.” 84 His concluding remarks make it clear that he was as critical of this endeavor as he was of those who had wished that the text of the letter had been more assertive, more absolute in its pronouncements about the eternal right to be insubordinate.85 For those people he demonstrates nothing but disdain, suggesting that they “were in fact merely looking for an alibi: that refuge always provided, for good conscience, by the theoretical expression of an absolute right bearing no relation to reality,” a clear “manner of seeing” those things that pertain to other people, perhaps.86 Indeed, it is only under precise and specific circumstances that civic duties cease to count as binding obligations. In 1960, these circumstances, the reality to which Blanchot wants to contrast “the theoretical expression of an absolute right” were defined by the transformation of military power

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into political power, a transformation itself enacted by the strict terms of the war fought to contain the decolonizing effort of the Algerians.87 In Blanchot’s recourse to the historical specificity of the qualifications that make insubordination a right, we see an important analogue to Hains’s insistence on the contingency of meaning. While it is indeed true that La France déchirée announces no particular political agenda, it is equally true that it makes no effort to persuade, consolidate, or otherwise “compromise” in order to rally or convert. In this we discern a specific politics that, true to the times, refuses to engage the abstraction that underlines universal truths and their presentation of homogeneous time. That would have been the politics of La Résistance, writ large in the illustrative tendencies of the realist figuration favored in the “committed” art of such figures as Bernard Lorjou mentioned above. By 1961, the era of résistance had ended and the language of direct denunciation along with it. In continually directing our attention to context and to the specificity of meaning, Hains similarly argues against the universalist underpinnings of absolute power and timeless certainty. He instead advocates flux and destabilization, making sure, however, that we understand his arguments are rooted in a historical subject, the Hainsoumis who knows he must do more than stage a creative act to mount a trial of power. Rather than accuse Hains of having missed an opportunity to pronounce a grander, more articulate and politically acute critique in the name of the marginalized or in the voice of the subaltern, we should consider that his invented art practice and the gestures it makes toward re-inserting an evidentiary index of the public’s existence reveal (and preserve) a sensitive knowledge of the epistemological limits of not only the gallery and the art-world, but also of the problems of representation upon which they (and modern electoral politics) are based. How, indeed, could Hains or the gallery visitors hope to have direct access to the “man on the street”? And how could we, from our vantage point today, attempt to discern anything like what this “man” thought in these archived remnants? In eschewing a project whose goal would be the channeling of such an alterity, Hains contents himself with introducing into the gallery the suspicion, if not undeniable proof, of such an Other and the specific historical determinants of his or her condition. Hains offers the gallery visitor the very real specter of the man of the street, though he cannot produce a body. Thus the tension between his own contextualization and the discourses it produces on the one hand and the powerful, resilient aporia represented by his primary materials on the other comes to parallel the incompatibility of the gallery’s audience with the silent, negative double of the anonymous public. The only way to address this incompatibility— nothing less than a manifestation of the hostility of the public sphere to any but the discourses of privatization—is through the physical emergence of this specter.

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REIDENTIFICATIONS: SEEING CITIZENS BEING SEEN

“THE EYE OF HISTORY” Photojournalism, Protest, and the Manifestation of 17 October 1961

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A simple image: inadequate but necessary, inexact but true. True of a paradoxical truth, of course. I would say that here the image is the eye of history: its tenacious function of making visible. But also that it is in the eye of history.— Georges Didi-Huberman, Images Despite All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, 2008

HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT

On the evening of 17 October 1961, some 20,000 to 30,000 men, women, and children of ostensible Algerian origin took to the streets of Paris in opposition to a curfew recently issued by the prefect of police, Maurice Papon. Nine months before Algeria would achieve its independence, but already well after it had become clear that this would be the nearly inevitable conclusion to seven years of fighting, these socalled Algerians amassed to assert their right to the same public space available to the French, whose coordinates as citizens they technically shared.¹ In so doing, they gave a physical body to one of the potential but resolutely spectral publics that had been barely, if at all, conjured by Raymond Hains’s June exhibition, La France déchirée of that same year. In light of the analyses presented in this book (especially in chapters 2 and 4), the marchers’ physical occupation of the city undoubtedly represents the most powerful—but not the sole— challenge to the colonial and privatized nature of urban space that planners and bureaucrats had proposed, and to which some artists had ceded (as discussed in chapter 3). Photographs of the demonstration (in French, manifestation), taken by a variety of non-participants, reveal the potency of the counterimage they proposed. These images evidence both a possibility of subaltern agency and, perhaps more importantly, the remodeling of photography on which presenting such a possibility depended in 1961. Indeed, the photographic documentation from this event that depicts a mass of invigorated and enthusiastic Algerian protestors introduces destabilizing reservations to the validity of the historicist universalisms that underpinned ideas of urban space and national belonging (such as Malraux’s), if not also their representational equivalents in advanced art practices. 159

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The demonstration took root in a summons issued by the Comité fédéral de la fédération de France du FLN (FF-FLN), the organizational head of the FLN in France (itself based in Switzerland). The leadership of this group had compelled the local Algerian population to leave the outer quarters and shantytowns (arrondissements and bidonvilles) that most of them called home and, as detailed below, to congregate peacefully in the symbolic centers of the city.² It was the first time that such a sizeable constituency of Algerians had been organized to march in Paris since just after the war began.³ What happened subsequently—when the protestors met with the approximately 7,000 police and special units of the French riot police (the Compagnies républicaines de sécurité [CRS] who had been mobilized by Papon to “contain” the demonstration—is now well known.4 As the historical record has repeatedly affirmed, Papon and his forces understood “containment” to include exceptional, even lethal violence. The instruction of the day was retaliatory in nature: for every Parisian officer that had been assassinated by the FLN throughout the fall of 1961, the police would take the lives of ten FLN.5 In such calculations, little room was ascribed to differentiate the FLN from the general Algerian population living in Paris. Although the precise count of those shot, beaten to death, or drowned by the police and CRS on the night of 17 October and in the days immediately following is still a matter of debate in France, consensus suggests that the number exceeds one hundred, and reaches perhaps closer to two hundred.6 It is no longer possible to claim, as the police did in the early hours of 18 October 1961, that only two Algerians had been killed, and that these deaths were justified because the FLN had fired first. Indeed, the official press report issued by Papon’s prefecture suggested that it was the FLN who had initiated this so-called Battle of Paris, and that police had thus been obliged to take all necessary precautions to maintain public order.7 Such efforts to purge the public record of any suggestion of wrongdoing typified the official response to the events at the time, even as cries for a formal investigation were issued from across the left, and, in particular, by Claude Bourdet in the Paris Council.8 It was not, in fact, until 1998 that an official correction to the fatality count was issued in a document produced, perhaps ironically, in response to the publicity surrounding Papon’s trial, in which he was charged with committing crimes against humanity by collaborating with the Nazis to destroy Europe’s Jewish population during the Vichy period.9 In 1999, when French courts denied Papon’s charge that the historian Jean-Luc Einaudi had committed libel when he accused him of orchestrating and condoning a “massacre” on 17 October 1961, the historical record was further corrected. The court’s refusal of the libel charge authorized Einaudi’s accusation and therefore allowed the word “massacre” a legitimate space within both popular and official parlance. Two years later, in 2001, an official bronze plaque, rather obliquely worded “in memory of the numerous Algerians killed at the time of the bloody repression of the peaceful demonstration of 17 October 1961,” was posted on the Quai du Marché Neuf bordering the Pont St. Michel. The site was chosen not only because it was an important location of police violence, but also for its symbolic and

bronze plaque on the Quai du Marché Neuf, reading: “A la mémoire des nombreux Algériens tués lors de la sanglante répression de la manifestation pacifique du 17 octobre 1961” (In memory of many Algerians killed during the bloody

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Figure 5.1. Commemorative

repression of their peaceful demonstration of 17 October 1961). Photo by Emma Chubb, 2011.

political significance.¹0 This plaque elicited vociferous protests from both the left and the right, who claimed it was inadequate and excessive, respectively. As it sits now, the plaque is nearly indiscernible from other signs that regularly mark the names of bridges or recount their illustrious histories. Certainly, we might say it is all but “hidden in plain sight” (see Figure 5.1). The tension between the unseen, drowned bodies of the massacred demonstrators and such insufficient and sanitizing memorialization is suggestive of what historian Joshua Cole has characterized as the dominant quality of what it is that gets “remembered” in France about 17 October 1961. In his words, this memory actually commemorates the “disappearance from public discourse of a massacre that occurred in plain sight.” ¹¹ Whereas Cole’s remarks are keyed to the designation of 17 October as a national day of remembrance in France, it is more specifically to the historiographic debates, and in particular how these have focused on addressing and revealing decades of governmental cover-up, that the thrust of his argument is directed. For the purposes of the study at hand, Cole’s insightful analysis is instructive in directing us to ask of the visual record what his text asks of written and historical analysis, prompting us to consider visual documents as historical evidence on their own.¹² How better

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Figure 5. 2. Jean Texier, photograph, graffiti written in November 1961 on the Quai de Conti, presumably by Jean-Michel Mension: “Ici on noie les Algeriens” (Here we drown Algerians). Photo: Keystone / Eyedea; courtesy Getty Images.

to understand how things “appear” or are made to “disappear” or the mechanics of “sight” that determine such phenomena? While most of the texts Cole cites, for example, labor to recapture the facts of what it was that took place during and just after the 17 October demonstration, the suggestion that after 17 October 1961, neither the march nor the “massacre” it engendered were visible as such—which is to say had not properly entered an authorized national “space of appearance”—is implicit in the repeated emphasis on public discourse as an exclusively written phenomenon. Such an argument mirrors the claims made by what historians Jim House and Neil MacMaster have described as the work of so-called memory activists, organizations that have, since the mid-1980s, worked to reinscribe the traumatic events of 17 October 1961 in urban and visual space.¹³ What I want to underscore about these efforts, however, is that they too end by recuperating the memory of the demonstration in terms of the absent or missing bodies that are elsewhere heralded in its historiography. The story they tell is therefore one that highlights the repressive power of the state at the cost, perhaps, of the still absent bodies. We see this not only in the choice of images, such as Jean Texier’s 1961 photograph of the graffiti “Ici on noie les Algeriens” (Here we drown Algerians) to serve as icons of a movement, but also in the demonstrations organized by such figures as Harlem Désir and Julien Fray following their founding of SOS-Racisme in 1984 (see Figure 5.2).¹4 These, too, focus on repeat-

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able and nonspecific signs of absence and invisibility that allude as much to a preexisting symbolism of catastrophe as they do to the specifics of the demonstration or its circumstances. Mounds of unclaimed shoes, for example, were amassed by Désir outside café windows in 1984 to recall those that had been left on the streets of Paris by the quickly fleeing demonstrators on 17 October 1961. In multiple re-enactments staged throughout the 1990s, anonymous, faceless dummies were tossed in effigy into the Seine. Images like these are especially striking in that they have usurped more fulsome and descriptive documents that actually circulated in 1961 of what— and who— took place in “plain sight.” Indeed, the photojournalistic pictures that document the sometimes celebratory course of the demonstration itself are rarely reproduced in the commemorative literature or its journalistic counterpart. Instead, photographs marking the violence of its suppression (or its after-effects) have come to adorn covers of the many books that signal important moments within the historiographic development.¹5 Such substitutions are complex: on the one hand, they depend on the viral and iconic capacity of images to cohere publics around shared sentiments and remembrances; and yet, in proffering a particular form of image, they risk confirming, if not perpetuating, the absence they mean to counter.¹6 Within the context of French visual culture in the decades of decolonization, what is most interesting in this shuffle is that the move to replace one kind of image with another coincides with efforts made by theorists of the photographic image to discredit its capacity to do anything like “testify” or bear witness, a penchant we have already seen in Malraux’s peculiar conception of photography in relation to historical actuality. As we have seen in chapters 1 and 2, the translation of Malraux’s model of the photograph as an agent of superficial isolation from his early musings on aesthetics to the space of the city, was motivated, at least in part, by the visibility of subaltern populations. Certainly his ideas were visited in full upon their urban experiences. Looking away from the images that provide visual evidence of not only how the protestors’ peaceful demonstration was originally seen but also where it was seen, obscures the ambitions and achievements of the demonstration and the historical conditions from within which such claims of representability were made. It also shortchanges us of an opportunity to examine how it was that photographic witness could be turned into its opposite, which is to say, how it became evidence to support a rhetoric of absence, separation, and amnesia. This emphasis on absence and amnesia now haunts the terminology of academic discourse about photography’s complicity with the advent of what Guy Debord first described as “the spectacle” in the 1950s. Despite the fact that he was not writing specifically, or at least not explicitly, about photography, Debord’s deep suspicion regarding the possibility of the visual as a means to agency under the conditions of a media-dominated capitalism continues to underlie the multiple and varied avenues from which the documentary capacity of the photograph has been called into question. Perhaps the most surprising of these is revealed in the philosopher Jacques Ran-

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cière’s account of how absence functions to ground, in the most basic sense, the possibility of political identifications as he articulates them in La mésentente: politique et philosophie (or Dis-agreement, as it has been translated in English) and then again in the essay “La cause de l’autre” (The Cause of the Other). Within the context of this analysis, it is critical that the provocative and complex analyses presented in both of these texts depend upon Rancière’s account of the events of 17 October 1961. In turn, these two texts are of central importance to Rancière’s articulation of what he defines as “the political,” and which he frequently aligns with what he calls “the distribution of the sensible.” ¹7 Rancière’s model counters not only common conceptions, in which it is all too often imagined that the kinds of empathic identification associated with a long history of left-leaning social actions are tantamount to good political consciousness, but also, and more specifically, the humanist instantiations of such a model as manifest by much of the intellectual left during the Algerian War. In Rancière’s formulation, however, such empathic, even ethical identification with those whom he describes as having been “not counted” by those who are counted (such as the leftist intellectuals) and who therefore— according to the same logic he attempts to undo in The Ignorant Schoolmaster— can discern the standards by which such counting should take place, actually constitutes a negation of politics.¹8 Instead, Rancière advocates a politics based on a dis-identification with that which— or who—has done the counting and the discounting in the first place. In his schema, this dis-identification activates possibilities of belonging outside the strictures of the state, strictures that, drawing heavily on the example of 17 October 1961, he aligns closely with the police. For Rancière, 17 October 1961 remains a prime example of the dis-identification process he outlines as political, both paradigmatically and historically. What he describes as the “savage repression” of the demonstration and what he claims was the “news blackout” that followed it constitute “a turning point” in what he defines as the “subjectivation” of the French. A cornerstone of Rancière’s model of politics, such subjectivation depends first on a dis-identification, here specifically a disengagement with and refusal of the governmental imposition of subjectivity through the false politics of police-controlled consensus. Instead, it depends on an active engagement with the concept of an equality that is based on the shared capacity to call attention to a wrong done in the name of this governmentally assigned political subjectification. In Rancière’s formulation, the two-step erasure that obscured the massacre of 17 October 1961—the first order disappearance of the bodies themselves and the second order “blackout” of their images—provided “a moment when the ethical aporia of the relationship between ‘mine’ and the other was transformed into the political subjectivation of an inclusive relationship with alterity.” ¹9 Rancière asserts that it was only in this dis-identification with the state that had massacred “in their name” that the French left was able to find an oppositional politics organized around a denunciation of a wrong, the legacy of which he develops into the model of political subjectivity that he explains was responsible for the contradiction at the heart of the famous 1968 slogan, “We are all German Jews.” ²0 Exemplary of the kind of “heterological

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mode of subjectivation” ²¹ in which he is interested, the impossible “we” conjured by such historically false claims fractures the illusory collectivity of ethical humanitarianism that Rancière understands both as having dominated identitarian politics and their publics in recent decades and as having motivated some of the more trenchant failures of international aid-based politics. It was this kind of ethical identification that was manifest in mid-century humanist efforts to speak for or on behalf of others. Rancière’s invocation of 17 October 1961 in the specific terms of its visibility and erasure appears at the very end of Dis-agreement, which he first published in French in 1995, at the end of the three-year war and ethnic cleansing campaigns in Bosnia. Referring to these events, he states explicitly that “all the bodies shown and all the living testimonies to the massacres in Bosnia do not create the bond that was once created, at the time of the Algerian War and the anticolonialist movements, by the bodies, completely hidden from view and from any examination, of the Algerians thrown in the Seine by the French police in October 1961.” ²² Two years later, in the essay “The Cause of the Other,” he expands his considerations of this productive “bond” as it is generated through absence. Here, he also amends his earlier account by replacing his reference to the bodies that were hidden on 17 October 1961 with comments about their photographic image, thereby expanding the register of not seeing from one enacted in the specifics of a single temporal spatiality to one enacted across time and space in the image that captures such spatiality. The passage of note begins with reference to Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1961 preface to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, first published in Paris by François Maspéro that same year. In refutation of Sartre’s pronouncement that “the blinding sun of torture has now reached its zenith, and it is lighting up the whole country,” Rancière inveighs, “The truth is that this blinding sun never lit up anything. Marked and tortured bodies do not light up anything. We know that now, now that images from Bosnia, Rwanda, and elsewhere show us much more than we were shown in those days. At best, our exposure to them inspires moral indignation, a powerless hatred of the torturer.” ²³ Given Rancière’s preoccupation with the political underpinnings of aesthetics and the technologies by which bodies are rendered visible, this move from bodies to their images makes sense. But it is not without consequence for either the latent theory of photographic visibility that courses through his argument or for the ways, in turn, that photographic practices and objects have increasingly come to illustrate theories of spectacle. In these words, Rancière makes explicit what he presumes to be the given link between the photojournalistic reports of mutilated bodies, dismembered children, epidemic starvation, and other documents of catastrophe that were disseminated with such regularity and, in his account, to such little effect, during the ethnic genocides in Rwanda in 1994 and Bosnia in 1995.²4 Now— almost two decades since these horrors—this dismissive maneuver has become something of a critical commonplace in accounts regarding the impact of photographic witnessing, and the alleged indifference that the media engendered at that time is assumed to continue today.²5 Rancière’s comments about the effect of the images issuing from Bosnia are there-

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fore to a certain degree unsurprising. The problem lies, however, in his assumption that what images did or did not do in 1995 was the same as what they could have done in 1961. This assumes an ontology of photography—if not of all documentary evidence—that is belied precisely by the historical and political purposes to which these media, multiple and changing, have been put. It also imposes upon the photograph the impossibility that it might ever be read outside the gaze of those who took it, such that we continue to see through the power imbalance that renders some the objects of a gaze while empowering others as its subject. Finally, it makes important assumptions about what was actually pictured in these images or how they thereby obscured other claims that the pictures of their bodies in space might have articulated.²6 In 1961, photography was newly important in French life and gained prominence in the public sphere that was built to represent and to sell ideas and attitudes about public life back to the public. As discussed in part 2 of this book, photojournalism had only recently emerged as a mass-media phenomenon, and new newspapers and magazines built around the new medium were just beginning to command significant percentages of the news market, as such photojournalistic agencies as Magnum aspired to uplift the expectations of quality associated with photographic reporting. It was in such a context that Roland Barthes reviewed the Galerie d’Orsay exhibition Photos- Chocs (Shock Photos) in order to understand the cause of their titular “shock” and perhaps also the hold that such photos were coming to have over the larger public. His text asserts that the only photographs actually able to “shock” were several journalistic shots in which the photographer had not assumed the subjective burden of specifying horror and had not therefore imposed a symbolic significance on the photograph other than that suggested by its literal, nominative caption.²7 A few years later, Barthes would begin to develop these ideas in the systematic analysis of photography’s relationship to text that would result in “The Photographic Message,” wherein he famously asserts that the photographic paradox is due to the fact that a photograph has a code and exists beyond such a code and, as such, is simultaneously constructed and contingent yet also real.²8 At this same time, photography was also rapidly replacing the newsreel as the medium of choice for communicating events from the war then being fought in Algeria.²9 Indeed, the French army had placed a photographer-representative of the Service cinématographique des armées (SCA) in each military unit. The images produced by these young conscripts were circulated in Le Bled, the journal of the troops; and La Revue d’ information militaire. Although this subset of photographic imagery was not circulated in the popular press, we have to remember that the French military (at that time including conscripts) was a very broad service and also included the gendarmerie used in domestic law enforcement. The readership they constituted was vast, and the priority given these images by what were therefore large parts of the population was paramount. Television was only just emerging as an important source for news updates and political platforms and, like the newsreels that it eventually replaced, tele-

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vision was also subject to heavy-handed state control. In the era before the military conflict in Vietnam would make daily fodder of war reportage, news announcements on France’s single state-owned channel were often broadcast without sound, followed by the interpretive summary of a newscaster, a format that prioritized text and speech over image. While newspapers were similarly restricted in their use of stock photography, during the 1950s, the tide began to shift, and by the early 1960s, more and more images from Algeria began to circulate. Far indeed from being a war without images, the conflict over Algeria’s independence is better described quite significantly as a war of images in which one side had considerably greater access to the means of production and distribution than the other.³0 In the case of the Algerian War of Independence, the French state’s control of both the means of photographic representation and its distribution (through both financial and censorial means), rendered Algeria as a site that was not easily seen on its own terms, despite how much it could be seen in the terms proposed by the French. In the even more particular instance of 17 October 1961 and its unfolding in the metropolitan capital, this meant controlling the visibility of precisely those who clamored for it as a means to secure their equal footing within the logic of imperial representation. While this public had appeared, and had been seen, and was photographed as such (discussed in greater detail below), these apparitions have been denied and refused in the critical appropriation of the demonstration by such models as Rancière’s that insist on the doubled absence of such images and the positive presence they might have communicated. The problem with Rancière’s pronouncements is that, despite their implicit political ambitions, his assertions end by reasserting the same invisibility as that imposed by the visual logic of imperialism. In the same breath, his model disallows the political viability of the photographic image. On the night of 17 October 1961, the bodies were indeed “hidden” by the government as Rancière suggests, but that does not mean they were not seen. Nor does it mean that they were not seen again in the images—the photographs—that did circulate in the media over the next few weeks. Some of these photographs insist on this fact, on the picture of bodies being seen as they occupied public space. Even those that represent the “marked and tortured” bodies, however, show us something beyond the literal erasure they capture. The act of not-seeing, then, what and who it was that took place in “plain sight” is a voluntaristic one at best, but it is also one imposed by a certain regime of power. To use Rancière’s own logic against him, this regime is one that upholds the standard distribution of the sensible wherein some are seen and some are not. It is also a regime, as suggested by the photographs that do exist and did circulate, that refutes a principal component of the 17 October demonstration: the will to a means of representation that had been denied the marchers explicitly because, through the visual logic of imperialism, they were seen as invisible. At its core, the demonstration waged a contest over the status of the kinds of visibility allotted in colonial France. In 1961, the Algerians who were denied what Henri Lefebvre would categorize six

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years later as their “right to the city” by Police Chief Papon—but also, it bears remembering, by the restrictions of class and the everyday manifestation of prejudice—were juridically citizens. Unlike the French subjects with whom Rancière is concerned, the Algerians could only become citizens politically, however, when they seized the means of representation from both the state authority and the dominant public sphere that wanted to deny them that status. In terms of both photograph and event, the image politics proposed by the 17 October demonstration sought to challenge both who could appear and who could take place. In Rancière’s terms, then, instead of disidentifying with the state on the basis of its exclusions, those who demonstrated chose to refuse instead those same exclusions and did so precisely within the arena configured by the overlap of the image and urban space. But this is, literally, what Rancière cannot see. He cannot see the disagreement that the demonstration engendered, precisely because he is not looking for it. Nor is he looking at the people who caused it. In the Algerians’ peaceful demonstration in central Paris, the image that Debord would later lament as an “apparatus” of spectacle had instead been used as a vehicle to cleave open the very same public sphere that has been understood as authorizing the “society of the spectacle” and the colonial logic of exclusion upon which both were structured in decolonizing France in the first place.³¹ Of course, Debord never specified that the spectacle and mass media were one and the same; quite to the contrary. To wit, in the fifth thesis of The Society of the Spectacle, Debord asserts: “The spectacle cannot be understood either as a deliberate distortion of the visual world or as a product of the technology of the mass dissemination of images.” ³² However, in his model and in the revision to which it is subjected in Jean Baudrillard’s later writings on simulacra, mass media and its imagery cannot be divorced from the rise of spectacular society or the reconfiguration of sociality that it inaugurates. While Debord acknowledges the constructed artifice that permeates “spectacle” and that links it to the rise of mass media, he also explicitly returns it to the arena of image exchange when he insists that the spectacle is the “relationship between people that is mediated by images” and so complicit with them.³³ Arguments against the image and, by extension, the spectacle written in the wake of Debord’s tome have nonetheless misread essential elements of his thesis, and have refused images any place in an effort to negate the relationships they mediate. As a result, the critical tendency has been to discount the possibilities of seeing and being seen in the visual environment, mediatic or otherwise, as political acts in a terrain of contest. I want to insist instead on the validity of those acts in the public sphere. What the demonstration organized by the FF-FLN depended upon was not just the symbolic occupation of space or even its practical repurposing. Instead, it required a spectacular occupation, one enmeshed within what had clearly become the commodification of the public sphere and its steady encroachment on the so-called public space of the city through imagistic appropriation. In a prescient foretelling of Roland Barthes’s much more famous description of being photographed as being made a “self,” ³4 the FF-FLN leadership anticipated the political value of imaging—thereby

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subjectifying—Algerian bodies inhabiting urban space, both in the event itself and in the photographs that would follow. Both the Algerians and their images activated a “spectacular” dis-agreement in the normal distribution of appearances that was constituted by the sudden and unanticipated arrival of dozens of thousands of members of the Algerian working class in the more exclusive districts of the French capital. It is thus against the grain of their own conclusions that Rancière’s model and Debord’s critique provide us with the critical tools— dis-agreement and spectacle— that we need to tease out the complexities of the what I will call the “image tactics” articulated by the demonstration. In the following sections, I will turn first to the event and then to the photographs taken of it in order to theorize differently their combined significance. Rather than taking 17 October 1961 as an invisible prop on which to root a French subjectivity, I want to position the event and its photographic documentation as an alternative foundation from which to understand the stakes of spatial and aesthetic belonging, specifically through image production, during the Algerian War of Independence. Doing this necessitates looking at the demonstration itself differently, as something that took place in plain sight, literally and figuratively, and that, moreover, took its tactical strength from exactly the kind of intersection between the visual and the spatial that such phrasing invokes. More than just a semantic clarification, such a reconsideration enables us to ask questions about the kind of appropriative tactics the FF-FLN used to wage a war from within the mechanisms of spectacle and in contradiction to the supervisory surveillance of the state. What was it, then, that “occurred in plain sight” and what was “plain sight” in the late 1950s and early 1960s? Whose was it, where was it, and how was it policed, protected, and possibly appropriated? TAKING PLACE: THE EVENT

While the particulars of the police repression are now well known, those that conditioned the appearance of the tens of thousands of bodies in the streets of Paris are less so. Indeed, while Joshua Cole does not suggest as much, this imbalance is surely part of the “forgetting” that informs the popular “remembering” of 17 October 1961 to which he alluded in the texts cited above. Returning to these particulars provides the first indication of the visual logic that underscored the spectacularity of the demonstration. They help situate how the sudden appearance of so many heretofore invisible Algerians in central Paris must also be understood as a tactic of war staged by the FFFLN, in accordance with Michel de Certeau’s careful efforts to distinguish “tactics” from “strategies” in The Practice of Everyday Life. For de Certeau, tactics are the means by which the powerless intervene and upset the institutional prerogatives that attempt to script their roles for them. It is telling that his model of tactical intervention derives from the figure of the walker, who interrupts and disrupts the planned networks of routinized urban space.³5 This was precisely what the FF-FLN aspired to achieve when they planned the demonstration as multi-centric and dispersed. As suggested above, the call to march had been issued by the governing body of

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the FF-FLN nearly a week before the actual date of the demonstration in response to a curfew, issued by Maurice Papon on 5 October, directed toward the Algerian populations living in or near Paris.³6 Of course, 17 October was not the only time during the eight years of war that a crowd had gathered to protest— or support—the French occupation of Algeria. However, it was the first time since the FLN had declared France a second front in the fight for national sovereignty in August 1958 that the entirety of the Algerian population in and around Paris had been summoned by the FF-FLN leadership to make themselves visible within the space of the capital city.³7 Participation in the demonstration was not presented as optional; financial and physical penalties were guaranteed those who did not comply with the directive.³8 Previous demonstrations by Berber and Arab Algerians living in France had typically been organized in concert with French labor unions and had tended to focus on shared concerns, such as working conditions, although this is not to say that “Peace in Algeria” was unheard of as a cause that might have united these groups before 1958. More often, however, demonstrations for peace in Algeria by these populations had tended toward the small and localized, as was the case, for example, with a demonstration in Marseille in September 1961, in which a couple of hundred Algerians protested in front of the city’s prison for the release of political prisoners. The date of 17 October 1961 was unique in that it marked the first time that the FF-FLN rallied the masses and did so in a space removed from the site and object of their struggle, i.e., Algeria. In effect, the establishment of the front in France shifted the stakes of the claims made by the FLN from the right to sovereignty within a territorial realm, the coordinates of which might correspond to the birth of a nation, and instead to the trans-territorial interstices of belonging that were, even as early as 1961, already being reconfigured by images in circulation, images that articulated the claims of those excluded from the then-dominant means of being recognized within the textual realms of the traditional public sphere. Issued just a few months after peace negotiations between the FLN and the French government (spearheaded by President de Gaulle and Prime Minister Michel Debré) had stalled, and when the violence of the war had spread to Paris in the form of concerted attacks against the state and its police force by both the FLN and the paramilitary OAS, Papon’s curfew was presented as a necessary response to the recent shootings— eleven total— of Paris police by FLN militants. The fear of future assassinations and how they might influence a police force that was already rapidly radicalizing and therefore increasingly available to the seductive call of the OAS was great enough to warrant the implementation of “new measures,” even if these measures would break the letter of the law by limiting the rights of some citizens.³9 But the curfew was more than a preventive measure. It was also an active component of Papon’s policing strategy, perfected during his tenure as Prefect of Constantine (in Algeria) from 1956 to 1958. In fact, the curfew repeated one that Papon had issued upon his return to Paris during the summer of 1958, which had led to the “round-up” and deportation of approximately 7,000 Algerians.40 This time, in order to avoid

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strict conflict with the laws of the Fifth Republic and de Gaulle’s formal reinstatement of Algerians’ rights as French citizens, the wording of the edict carefully singled out a group that Papon first defined as “travailleurs algériens” (Algerian workers) and then as “français musulmans” (French Muslims) before finally specifying them as “français musulmans d’Algérie” (French Muslims from Algeria, or FMA).4¹ While it could not legally prohibit movement, the proscription strongly cautioned those identified against circulating in the streets of Paris or the suburbs between 8:30 pm and 5:30 am. Those whose work necessitated nighttime movement were directed to the Secteurs d’assistance technique (Technical Assistance Sectors, or SAT) in their respective arrondissements to receive a “contestation” or exception.4² The curfew thus worked in two directions simultaneously. On the one hand, it endeavored to restrict the movement of some, while on the other it facilitated the surveillance and documentation of others, just as had been done with Jews in France during the 1940s and also in Algeria in the 1950s, when the French first established identification cards for those populations it relocated to camps. It is illuminating to compare the governmental, administrative gaze meant to order the spaces of the city with the use given to visibility by the Algerians who planned and took part in the demonstration. While the Algerians insisted upon their entrance into the space of the city as synonymous with the recognition of their rights as citizens (which, again, they had been, legally, since 1947), the administrative gaze upheld by the police conceptualized the visibility of the other as the site of their own control, thus putting into conflict the respective claims made by the physical and visual occupation of space. Furthermore, the curfew criminalized the non-conforming, racialized bodies of Algerians in strict accordance with their presumed visual difference from “les français de la France” (French from France). It is only the degree to which the category FMA was a strictly visual one that its validity as a political marker was correlated by the police. In the face of such overt prejudice and in light of its dependence upon the coordinates of appearance, the FF-FLN leadership (the Comité fédéral ) recognized an opportunity. Not only did FLN operators in France need to overturn the curfew so that their clandestine fundraising operations could continue, but in the protest they also saw the possibility of fomenting the kind of mediatic presence that was then increasingly organizing specular regimes of power, as attested by Charles de Gaulle’s own gradual incursion into the domain of state-managed television. Working specifically to “détourn,” as the Situationists might have had it, and so undermine the ways that modern surveillance systems were being employed in the project of “disciplining” colonial subjects, the leadership of the FF-FLN drew on lessons learned from the massive but spontaneous manifestations in Algiers on 11 December 1960, images of which were shot by Magnum photographer Nicolas Tikhomiroff and circulated in the French dailies as early as the next day.4³ While these manifestations had resulted in massive arrests and the deaths of over one hundred Algerians at the hands of French forces, they were thought by the FLN to have been helpful in convincing

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Figure 5.3. Map, “Trois ‘Bases’ de départ en banlieue,” showing Algerians’ points of

de Gaulle that Algerian independence was the only viable solution to the long-standing conflict, thereby enabling of 17 October 1961, as printed in Francethe start of negotiations. At first, both the FLN leadership Soir, 19 October 1961. and the Gouvernement provisoire de la république algérienne (Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic, GPR A) had preferred to plan the Paris demonstration to coincide with commemorations in Algeria of the 1 November 1954 military uprisings and political declaration that had marked the beginning of the war, but eventually ceded to the arguments presented by the Paris leadership that the opportunity had to be seized more immediately. The call was thus issued for a three-pronged event to be made deliberately and exaggeratedly visible. It was to begin with the boycott of the curfew, which the Fédération leadership specified must indeed be “spectaculaire,” and which would involve the mass demonstration of all Algerian men, women, and children living in and near the Paris area.44 These masses were to assemble in multiple points around the city, and then to circulate in carefully orchestrated paths “dans les grandes artères de Paris” (in the grand boulevards of Paris), specifically the Champs-Elysées and the boulevards Saint-Michel, Saint-Germain, and Montmartre (see Figure 5.3). The routes were chodeparture for the peaceful demonstration

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reographed to pass by the city’s entertainments—its movie theaters, its opera houses, and its grandest cafés— as well as the editorial offices of its major news organs (L’Humanité and Paris Match among them), thereby assuring that the demonstration would take place in “plain sight,” and that people would be there to see it both as it happened and as it would be reported in subsequent days— as indeed it was. While it is not at all clear that Debord ever gave much thought to the 17 October demonstration (he names the violent uprisings in Watts, for instance, in his “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” but never explicitly addresses any of the events surrounding the Algerian War in metropolitan France in his published writings), the organizers of the march were decidedly thinking about spectacle, both as Debord would come to use the term—that is, as a category of historical experience— and as it was manifest in more contemporary usage, the significance of which can likewise not be shorn from Debord’s appropriation of the term.45 In the early 1960s, for instance, the French word “le spectacle” was still deeply attached to the associative connotations of theater, fête, and parade, notions that also would have informed Henri Lefebvre’s simultaneous development of the term and his intermittent suggestions that there was something positive in its unconstrained excess. An announcement published in the 9 September 1961 issue of l’Humanité for the upcoming Fête de l’Humanité illuminates the intersection between pictorial representation, carnival, and simultaneity that the term evoked at the time. The top of the full-page ad boasts, in all capital letters, “Un spectacle qui vous fera tourner la tête !” (A spectacle that will make you turn your head!). Below, photographs of various performers are arranged around the page as if in capsules or gondolas on a Ferris wheel. So, for example, the 10:00 pm dance of Ludmilla Tcherina is sandwiched between the 10:10 “Victoire de la commune et feu d’artifice !” (Victory of the Commune and Fireworks!) and the mime stylings of the “Trois Horages.” The center of the wheel reveals an ensemble band, which assures the opportunity for a “Grand Bal ” with Georges Jouvin. Tightrope walkers and trapeze artists join the montage to spin and pirouette on the rim of the Ferris wheel. Episodic and self-contained in little photographic boxes, each performance adds to the ensemble in a decidedly non-narrative way. At the same time, the apparatus of the Ferris wheel creates a visual unity that is echoed by the event’s participatory nature. This was not far from the Federation leadership’s vision of its own spectacular event. While there were admittedly no plans for a “Grand Ball,” the event was planned to be equally episodic and multiply programmatic, with eruptions of activity at different times and different places, united by what was meant to unfold as their own orchestration of a participatory politics and their own utilization of the mechanisms of appearance. If we allow these parallels, we might also suggest that, in some ways, the Federation understood the city itself to be something akin to a Ferris wheel: a spectacular engine capable of harnessing individual units in a spinning whole. In the initial guidelines issued by the Federation leadership, the curfew-breaking demonstration was to be followed by a 24-hour general strike wherein all Algerian-owned

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Figure 5.4. Unknown photographer, Algerian demonstrators before police arrived. This photograph is similar to one printed on the cover of France-Soir, 19 October 1961. As collected by Roger-Viollet. The

photograph now circulates with a caption reading: “Paris, France: October 17, 1961. Algerian war. Demonstration of Algerian workers.” © Jacques Boissay / RogerViollet / The Image Works.

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or -managed commerce was to shut, much as it had happened in Algiers to great effect during the Battle of Algiers in 1957. All workers were ordered to refuse to work, all students to refuse to go to school, and all prisoners to refuse to eat. The city, at least its Algerian aspect, was to be rendered unusable. Following one more day of protest—this time of women who were instructed in advance to protest in front

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of police stations and internment centers where their husbands would be incarcerated in order to demand their safe return— everything was to return to normal, as if there had been no curfew and no protest against it.46 The disruption was to be of a determinedly ephemeral order: brief, succinct, and episodic. Whereas some demonstrators might have originally been motivated by the threat of fiduciary and physical penalties, they appear to have realized their interruption of the Paris night with enthusiasm (see Figure 5.5). While we cannot be entirely certain who marched or for what reasons they did so, the effect of their action is clear. Their interruption forced a reconsideration of the French capital’s spaces of leisure and, in fact, depended upon entering into these same spaces, real and discursive. This action generated an image that existed on the order of the appropriated city that Henri Lefebvre had advocated as an alternative to an official urban order, one wherein “imagination [is] deployed, not the imaginary of escape and evasion which conveys ideologies, but the imaginary which invests itself in appropriation (of time, space, physiological life and desire).” 47 Thus, their visibility announced the intention to “inhabit” the city and thereby threaten its usual fragmentation into the spaces that Lefebvre lamented for having been more officially designed as “habitations.” 48 For Lefebvre, the assertion of a “right to the city,” which he prioritized in relationship to groups defined by class, constituted a fundamental revolt against the neat and prejudicial parceling out of urban spaces along lines of financial access. Claims for such a right thus marked, for him, an attempt at social transformation and incorporation much as the demand for bread by hungry Parisians had famously done in the eighteenth century. For the tens of thousands of Algerians who marched on 17 October, this claim also spoke to the will to exceed the cramped and impoverished spaces accorded colonial subjects as Frantz Fanon would so famously describe them in his Wretched of the Earth. Conforming with the nature of the mandate inherent in Fanon’s urging colonial subjects to overturn and so decolonize these lamentable urban conditions, the Algerians’ eruption into Paris marked the true arrival of the French nation to the conditions of postcoloniality, insofar as this is generally demarcated by the struggle between a re-emerging, formerly colonized culture and the legacy of the colonial authority, developed in and through the vestigial apparatuses of colonial power such as, in this instance, urban form. This was precisely the struggle in which the demonstrating Algerians participated, inscribing their refusal of the colony across the very heart of the colonial empire and thus imaging for history and the metropole the colonial dynamics that de Gaulle’s administration had obliterated, both from memory and from public view. The stakes of what such a belonging in such a social space entails are well demonstrated by the history of iconic representations that have, in fact, helped to produce it. Even the most recursive glance to the long arc of modern and modernist representations of Paris cannot fail to recall what is at stake here: the distribution of the “right to the city” based on the visual mastery of a seen and seeing subject. The status of seeing and

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Figure 5.5. Gustave Caillebotte (1848 –1894), oil on canvas, Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877. 83 1⁄ 2 × 108 3⁄4 in. (212.2 × 276.2 cm), The Art Institute of Chicago, Charles H.

and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection, acc. no. 1964.336. Photograph © The Art Institute of Chicago.

Figure 5.6. Brassaï (Gyula Halasz), gelatin-silver print, Boulevard des Italiens, 1933. 9 × 7 in. (23.2 × 17.8 cm). Musée national d’art

moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. © Estate BrassaïRMN . Photo: Adam Rzepka.

Photo Credit: CNAC / MNAM / Dist. Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY.

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“the ey e of history” Figure 5.7. Brassaï (Gyula Halasz, 1899 –1984), gelatin-silver print, Les grands boulevards, pedestrians in front of a poster for the film “Le diable au corps,” circa 1947. Private collection, P.451.K. © Estate Brassaï-RMN . Repro-photo: Hervé Lewandowski. Credit:

Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY.

being seen indelibly underscores the social dynamics manifest in some of the most famous images of the regulated splendor of Haussmannian planning imposed on the modern city. Reflected and rooted in paintings like Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877) or his Man on his Balcony, Boulevard Haussmann (1880) and developing through Camille Pissarro’s boulevard paintings of the 1880s and the more individualized representations of dandies and fashionable ladies on the same streets at the same time by such painters as Jean Béraud, Léon Lemaître, and Louis Truchet, such iconography might be said to culminate in the boulevard photography developed by such leading figures as Alfred Stieglitz, Brassaï and even Robert Doisneau, only to be copiously reproduced in postcards and posters ever since (see Figures 5.5, 5.6, and 5.7).49 The demonstration—here significantly, the French manifestation— as a visual cultural practice engages in the same powerful imaging of the city proper including, but not limited to, this line of art production. Indeed, it engaged in re-imaging these 177

Figure 5.8. Unknown photographer, demonstration in front of the cinéma

exact same spaces within the city’s iconic representational history. circulates with a caption reading: “Paris, When Lefebvre asks, “Why not oppose ephemeral citFrance: October 17, 1961. Algerian war. ies to the eternal city, and moveable centrality to stable Demonstration of the Algerian workers.” centers?,” it is as if his model of urban production builds © Jacques Boissay / Roger-Viollet / The explicitly on those very temporalities and flows that charImage Works. acterize the appropriative inventions enacted by the 17 October demonstration and the march through the city that featured at its core. Similarly, comparing this march with the Situationist dérives imagined by Debord and his followers reveals the demonstration’s potential to reorder the same ossified and hierarchical urban imaginary that the Situationists took to task. The city that the demonstration constructed was fragmented, piecemeal, and nonBerlitz on 17 October 1961. As circulated

by Roger-Viollet. The photograph now

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productive—not unlike the one celebrated by the famous dérives suggested by the psychogeographic parceling of the map of Paris in Debord’s The Naked City (1958), for example. But while the Situationists’ intervention remained limited to the visual dimension of the city map and was communicated as social experience only by the members of the group who were to debrief each other on their wanderings, the demonstration remade, albeit briefly and elusively, the fabric of the city itself by inscribing a colonized alterity at the physical heart of the French imagistic imaginary.50 The image of intervention and of claiming a “right to a city” that the Algerians’ presence would reinscribe as their own is suggested by a photograph taken by an unknown photojournalist and since collected in the archives of photographer Jacques Boissay, now held by the Agence Roger-Viollet (see Figure 5.8).5¹ The picture, unpublished at the time of the demonstration, shows a mass of protestors several hundred deep, paused in their march in front of what was then the rather remarkable marquis of the Berlitz Theater, at the magisterial junction of the Boulevard des Italiens and the Rue de la Michodière in the heart of the Grands Boulevards.5² Out of context, it might even appear that the picture documents a crowd anxiously awaiting the opening of a much-touted new movie. Indeed, the top right half of the night scene is illuminated by the glow of a few arched street lamps and—from behind—by the neon lights spelling out the name of the film, Le cave se rebiffe (The Counterfeiters of Paris, 1961), then playing at the Berlitz. The marquee projects the name of the director, Gilles Grangier, as well as that of the star of his newest caper, Jean Gabin, who takes top billing for his role as a master counterfeiter newly returned to France from a “tropic retreat.” The irony secured by the well-lit face of the man made famous for his role as Pépé le Moko in the eponymous Orientalist film (1937)—in which, as is discussed in chapter 2, the young Gabin takes refuge from the police in the labyrinthine streets of Algiers’s Casbah only to find himself trapped by the very un-Parisian aspects of the Casbah that had originally been so alluring—may not have been lost on the photographer. Indeed, the contrast between Gabin’s outsized face and the Algerian street scene surrounding him would have been visible to all bystanders. The photograph is animated by the discrepancy between Gabin’s rather dour, pallid countenance and that of the crowd of mostly dark-skinned men over which his image presides. Like Gabin, the men in the crowd are mostly visible from the chin up, their short-cropped dark hair echoing the dark hat perched atop his head. Lit by the glow of the star’s neon name, the men on the left side of the picture appear content, even enthusiastic. Farther back, the photograph catches hands lifted as if caught in mid-cheer, and more than a few chins tilted upward as those in the rear of the column attempt to peer over the heads of those in front. The protestors wear jackets and raincoats and many sport ties, presumably their finest, or what the press of the time widely— and with customary lack of cultural sensitivity—reported as their “Sunday best.” In the very center of the photograph, almost directly beneath Gabin, stands a well-dressed man. He stands straight with hands in his pockets and squarely faces the viewer, thereby dividing the picture into two equal halves along the neat buttons of

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his overcoat, up the line and knot of his tie, through the V-neck of his sweater, along the symmetrical contours of his face, and through the seam of the marquee. His centrality to the image is underscored by the lightness of his coat, which pulls our eyes toward him. Most striking, however, is his gaze, which returns, calmly, and with the slightest hint of a smile, the gaze of the photographer. He seems quite aware of posing, of inviting the viewer to look at him and to make of him an image like that of the hero-criminal Gabin some fifty feet above. While his identity remains unknown, he is more than likely one of the many shepherds that the FF-FLN sent to organize and chaperone the marchers, whose figures consistently flank the central column of marchers winding through the city. For the historian of visual culture interested, as I am, in understanding how the city’s layered textures and overlapping histories of site inform the reception of every image and thereby complicate simple chronologies and teleologies, this picture and the moment it reflects wherein a typical French street scene is re-presented as ostensibly an other—here “Algerian” one— dispel any notion that the repressive visual and spatial regimes that triggered the march of October 17 were exceptions in French contemporary history. On the contrary, this photograph and the 1961 event recall another historical moment in the racialization of Parisian space. The Palais Berlitz was, after all, a famous building, less so for its architecture than for the history of its interior before it became a movie theater in 1950 (see Figure 5.9). The façade of the palace, named after the English-language school “Berlitz” that moved from just down the street, actually dates to 1932. In that year, the original façade of what was then known as the Pavillon de Hanovre, built by Jean-Michel Chevotet between 1758 and 1760 in the royal gardens of the Duc de Richelieu, was moved to the Parc des Sceaux and the new, more grandiose building shown in the picture was orchestrated on the site by Charles Lemaresquier. While this fact marks the building as a striking precursor to the façadism that Malraux and his urban planners would come to advocate, it is not, for the purposes of this analysis, what most distinguishes this site. Instead, it was a historic exhibition that determined the building’s importance to the central boulevards of Paris and the populations they were meant to contain. Held in the late months of 1941 through early 1942, the infamous exhibition Le Juif et la France alternately delighted and horrified viewers. Where Jean Gabin’s face shone forth on a movie marquee in the fall of 1961, twenty years earlier a caricature of an old Jew had leered, his long, crooked fingers greedily prying into a globe clutched between his arms (see Figure 5.10). The grotesque image, drawn directly from the base of the allegorical statue by Charles Theodore Perron that stood two stories tall in the exhibition’s entrance, announced the exhibition’s critical intentions to the Parisian public then living under Nazi occupation. Organized by the Institut d’ étude des questions juives (Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question, IEQ J), the exhibition opened its doors in early September 1941.5³ When it closed just over four months later, 200,000 visitors (the 100,001st visitor was offered an award) had paid for the privilege of seeing what the Institute presented as the irrefutably dele-

Figure 5.9. Gaston Paris, “The cinema Le Berlitz with Les Diaboliques, directed by Henri- Georges Clouzot, on the marquee, 1955.” © Gaston Paris / Roger-Viollet /

The Image Works.

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Figure 5.10. Roger Berson, photograph, le Palais Berlitz, Paris, France, September– October 1941, showing the exhibition poster for Le Juif et la France. © Roger-Viollet / The Image Works.

terious effects of the Jewish population’s infiltration of French society through what it claimed was a display of “scientific,” artistic, and even urban imagery (see Figures 5.11 and 5.12).54 As Rachel Perry has noted in her agile analysis of Jean Fautrier’s hostage paintings, the kinds of visibility that the exhibition meant to ascribe to the Jewish population it stereotyped, identified, and described through these various displays were not unrelated to the disciplinary visual regime enacted by the law of 29 May 1942, which

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installation view, Le Juif et la France, le Palais Berlitz, Paris, 1941, showing displays depicting the supposed physiognomy of a “standard Jew.” © Roger Berson / Roger-Viollet / The Image Works

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Figure 5.11. Roger Berson,

Figure 5.12. Roger Berson, installation view, Le Juif et la France, le Palais Berlitz, Paris, 1941, showing displays illustrating the Jewish “infiltration” of French cinema. © Roger Berson / Roger-Viollet / The Image Works

imposed the yellow six-pointed star on Jews over the age of six. To this I would add that the central urban location of the exhibition was equally important to the history that would ensue. Marked and identified by this star, the French Jew would become newly recognizable in precisely this same urban space, already by the 1940s an important destination in the leisure culture of Paris. As an issue of Le cahier jaune, pub-

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lished by the same Institute that had mounted the exhibition, declared: “There Are Too Many Jews On Our Boulevards. Since Saturday those wearing the Star of David appear to have multiplied. This yellow flowering unfurls down the boulevards.” 55 Made more visible, in fact, by the yellow star, the Jews’ presence became a subject of greater and greater attention, thus helping to make the case for Adolf Eichmann’s decree that, regardless of their rights as French citizens, French Jews would join those from other parts of Europe being deported to camps in the East. According to Gilles Perrault and Pierre Azéma, by the time of the “Rafle du Vel d’Hiv” (Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup, short for Rafle du Vélodrome d’Hiver), during which over 10,000 Jews were rounded up and held in Parisian sporting stadiums before being deported on 16 and 17 July 1942, the deportation of French Jewry had already been so well anticipated in the press that, when it happened, it received as much coverage as the opening of a new cabaret, which is to say, not much.56 It would seem there was no need to represent this event since an absence of representation was, in fact, the solution to the very problem of visibility that had conditioned the necessity of subtraction. The associative links between the Rafle du Vel d’Hiv and the 17 October demonstration run deeper than the cinema site where the photograph above was taken. One such link, and perhaps the most poignant, was made in the pages of France Observateur : a photo taken surreptitiously in a sports stadium used as an internment center after the massive arrests that also concluded the 17 October 1961 demonstration (and which were, in many cases, a precondition to the subsequent murders) was published above the caption: “Les Algeriens au Palais des Sports. Çelà ne vous rappelle rien?” (Algerians at the Sports Palace. Does that not remind you of anything?), thereby implicitly evoking the Rafle du Vel d’Hiv.57 What is most important in this comparison is that both episodes depend on the question of visibility and, even more specifically, visibility within the central spaces of Paris. And yet, while the linking of political visibility and urban space is paramount, the relationship between the two is not unchanging or static. Consider that the 1942 lament cited above singles out the invasionlike appearance of Jews on Parisian streets. In this instance, the yellow star and the visibility it imparts were meant to provide the police with a tool to better see and discipline a population that had been feared precisely for its invisibility, which is to say for its ability to “pass” as French. In 1961 (as we have seen in the analysis of the motivations of Malraux’s decontextualized urbanism in chapter 1) the concern regarding the Algerian presence was its visibility and the subsequent stain it presented on the image of France. In 1941, it was anxiety regarding the Jew’s invisibility, in fact, that had led to the exaggerated displays of the “France and the Jew” exhibition, displays which attempted to impose discernible visible criteria upon the Jews so that they could be demarcated from other (white) populations. Vision here correlates to an epistemology destined to survey and control. The curfew that would elicit the Algerian demonstration twenty years later was similarly intended as a police means to control when and where Algerians could be seen. But such efforts also produce or impose the subtractive logic that

BEARING WITNESS: THE PHOTOGRAPHS

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results in invisibility. In the case of the 1961 demonstration, the FF- FLN exploited both the police effort to impose on them the conditions of a recognizable visibility—the “registration” and “visas” that would be required to enable unrestricted movement— and the condition of invisibility that characterizes the subaltern’s relationship to the dominant public sphere, appropriating and inverting both in the process. In such an action we see the conditions for rethinking the visual at precisely the same moment and in the same place that it was being discounted by its theorists.

In opposition to French narratives about the collective forgetting and remembering of the events of 17 October 1961, photographs of the demonstration itself— of which about fifty circulate through the major stock photo entities in France (Eyesea, which holds the Keystone, Gamma, and Rapho archives; Roger-Viollet; Corbis / Sygma; and AFP) demonstrate the FF-FLN planners’ deep understanding of the visual regimes of urban space and in particular of the possibilities for making visible within them.58 That so many of these photographs of both the demonstration and the violence that ensued were published at the time they occurred undermines suggestions such as Rancière’s that the bodies were never seen, either as physical corpses or as secondaryorder representation. In an otherwise compelling account of the demonstration that closely parallels Rancière’s analysis, Kristin Ross, for example, has insisted that many newspapers, including Le Monde and France-Soir, “were not talking” about the events in the days immediately following the 17 October event.59 Such elisions are puzzling in view of the fact that several publications did indeed run coverage of the demonstration, which they not only “spoke about” but also documented photographically. On 19 October, for example, the event made the front page of France-Soir, complete with a picture of invigorated marchers, carefully contained behind the backward-facing row of FF-FLN stewards (see Figure 5.4 for a similar image).60 While it is true that the early coverage, especially in the right-wing dailies like France-Soir and Le Figaro, confirmed the police version of the events, including the limited number of fatalities, the left press, including L’Humanité and Libération, soon began to point out that it was the police who fired first, in direct contradiction of the police version of the story. What is more important, however, is that the photographs that circulated are a far cry from depictions of the absence on which presumptions of erasure depends. While those like the one printed by France-Soir or the one reprinted here might not proffer the evidence of dead or beaten bodies (though those were printed, too, as discussed below), we should not overlook or look away from what they do show. They show racially and ethnically identified Algerians enacting the rights allotted to them by the citizenship that they legally held. We might understand this as a small claim and one bound to the already problematic container of the nation-state as the locus of rights, just as we might note that the distribution of “rights” always also implies that there are corresponding “wrongs” and measures of unequal allocation that undergird such distribution. Over and above what the photographs show within their borders and be-

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yond the agential claims we might understand as generated by the Algerians pictured there, however, we must also understand the fact of photography in this context. The photographs themselves, independently of their authorship or circulation (broad or limited) at the time, embody the deployment of spectacle against the strictures of the public sphere. Just as the demonstration itself constituted a critical intervention in the visible space of the city, so too do the photographs engage and upend the troubling notion that the public sphere is foreclosed to—literally, makes invisible—the political valence of such representations. I want to focus the discussion of the extant photographs from this night on a series of images published in a single publication, Paris Match, in the 28 October 1961 edition (see Figures 5.13–5.17). This spread is of particular interest because it endeavors— but, I would argue, ultimately fails—to manipulate the photographic evidence to correspond with the police narrative and so to turn documents of presence into those substantiating absence. It is also of interest because of the position that Paris Match itself has come to assume in modernist accounts of photography and, in particular, of photojournalism.6¹ The Paris Match series—taken by Gérard Ménager and Raymond Darolle, two freelance photojournalists working for Europress—formally and narratively collects the dispersed locations of the march to generate a contained image of a city fully under the authority of the police, even as the narrative attempts to harness such dispersion for the purposes of justification. The photographic series does this through the parameters of a specifically modernist means of communication, not unlike the way Malraux would have parsed the same reliance on photographic image as evidence of abstraction rather than of substance. This observation, however, has more to do with the sequencing, the layout, and— as Barthes would have had it—the captioning than with the photographs themselves. Uncharacteristically for photojournalistic attempts at “shock-photos,” the presentation begins on the cover, which does not present a suspense-building photograph in medias res, but rather one that marks the vantage point of resolution (see Figure 5.13). The image presents a close-up of one of the R ATP buses that had been confiscated by the police in order to convey the over 10,000 arrestees to one of the many detention centers across Paris. It is cropped to focus exclusively on the agitated, angry countenances of ten or more arrested Algerians peering out from their containment toward something that takes place just beyond the frame. One of the detainees in particular catches our attention. He is pressed against the left-hand window. His expression torn between shock and fury, he clenches his left hand near his body in defiance or defense. The block letters printed in yellow above the black-and-white photograph read: “Nuit de Troubles à Paris” (Night of Troubles in Paris). Dramatically presented therefore as a fait accompli in the cover image, the photoessay continues in a two-page spread near the middle of the magazine. Re-situating the reader this time at a beginning, the story announces “Le Drame arrive en metro” (The drama comes by Metro [to the city center]). On the left-hand page, under bulleted text reading: “For an hour, the theater-lined boulevards (boulevards des théâtres)

Figure 5.13. Unknown photographer (likely Raymond Darolle and Gérard Ménager), cover of Paris Match, 28 October 1961, with the headline “Nuit de troubles à Paris” (Night of Troubles in Paris) and showing a bus crowded with Algerian demonstrators who have just been arrested.

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Figures 5.14 – 5.17. Raymond Darolle and Gérard Ménager, series of two-page

would live a nightmare; thousands of North African workers had come from their unknown suburbs and swarmed stration of 17 October 1961, as published worryingly under the lights of the city. All of the sudden, in Paris Match, 28 October 1961. Paris finds itself facing the problem.” 6² Two police officers watch as a single file of fast-moving Algerian men cross from the right side of the page. Fully subject to their police captors, the men hold their hands in the air as they are ushered out of the Metro station, suggesting that while the “drama” came by Metro, it is by other means that it will be ushered out. Ironically, an arrow above their heads points to signage advertising “ journaux,” as if reminding them where to go to achieve publicity. The story continues across the next page, which is split horizontally into discrete frames separated by a thin white line (see Figure 5.14). As on the first page, the conflict is ordered along the sightlines of the police who determine the composition of the photos and from whose point of view the reader is presumably presented the unfolding events. On the top left of the spread, the demonstrators are shown marching down one of the grand boulevards. Their forms are indistinct and obscured by the rain and poor light; en masse, they appear a many-headed Leviathan, a veritable swarm of spreads documenting the Algerian demon-

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Figure 5.15.

bodies. On either side of the boulevard, their bodies are flanked by onlookers, further testimony that their bodies were, in fact, seen. The bottom half of the page shows the marchers moving left to right, in profile, hands in front, eyes mostly forward. The view onto the scene is framed by a row of five black Compagnie Républicaines de Securité (riot police or cRS) helmets glistening in the rain. The caption reads: “At the hour of the evening show, an unexpected crowd braving the curfew begins to appear. It is 9 o’clock. The boulevard movie houses are full. It is also the hour of the curfew newly applied in the Muslim neighborhoods. On the order of the FLN, the demonstrators, accompanied by their wives and children, come en mass to protest against this measure. The first processions take place in calm.” 6³ The reader’s view is again made to align not only with that of the photographer, with whom we thus have to identify as a viewing witness, but also with that of the CRS, who stand with their backs to the camera. Positioned in this way, we are prepared for the narrative shift that the images trace. The next image sequence presents quick shots of agitated cheering, people swarming in and out of traffic, and what looks like looting (one would have to piece together ten different reports to know that the figures in the image are scattering in response to gun shots) (see Figure 5.15). The caption attempts to fix the meaning of what is be-

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Figure 5.16.

ing presented in the images by asserting: “Fear and violence empty the terraces of the cafes. The Muslims chant slogans orchestrated by the FLN leaders. To keep them from gathering in the center of Paris, the police try to disperse them. Tension mounts, windows shatter, drivers find themselves blocked by a sea of menacing faces.” 64 With these words, the otherwise ambivalent images are positioned in an interpretive frame that all but elides the agency of the depicted demonstrators. The page turns to another spread split horizontally (see Figure 5.16). The top half presents a similarly dark image, this time of demonstrators being corralled by the police. Whereas the first group of captured protestors had been shown moving to the right, in this photograph, they move toward the left, indicating that the story is coming to an end as steps are retraced. Streetlight illuminates the center of the image, drawing attention to the ensemble of hands raised aloft as police watch, always with their backs to the photographer and hence, the viewer. In the bottom half of the spread, the photograph shows demonstrators being corralled into R ATP buses stationed in front of l’Opéra. The text overlaid on the lower image informs the reader that of the 20,000 protestors who marched, 11,538 were apprehended and directed to the Palais des Sports, the center of identity verification. “An episode of the Algerian

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tragedy ends in the heart of Paris on the Place de l’Opéra,” announces the caption, without specifying what precisely constitutes this tragedy. Is it what the images present, or the larger event from which they have been excerpted? If it is the latter, is this “tragedy” the long-standing occupation of Algeria or the Algerians’ second-class standing in both metropolitan and extra-territorial France? Or could the reference to tragedy foretell what is to happen immediately afterward? The final page of the essay provides one clear response to this ambiguity (see Figure 5.17). While it is perhaps the most jarring image in the sequence and the most confusing, what it depicts is indubitably tragic. Also, it unmistakably deconstructs the supposition that whatever tragedy the text alludes to “ends” at the Place de l’Opéra. In the foreground of this concluding photograph, three bodies lie on a sidewalk, all in close proximity to one another. Beyond them several more bodies lie in the shallow recess of a doorway to one of the boulevard’s stately buildings, just next to the famous Rex theater and therefore just across the street from the offices of L’Humanité. Next to these corpses sit several more dark-haired men, clearly injured, blood on their brows, leaning against buildings marked with the ubiquitous signage, “Défense d’afficher.” Most of the men look toward something that is happening

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to their left, or they look down toward their hands. The sidewalk glistens with rain and, here and there, something darker, no doubt the blood that eyewitness testimonies describe as having pooled on the sidewalk “like oil.” On the far right edge of the image, a fragment of the glistening black cloth that is easily identifiable as the coat of a CRS officer interrupts the frame, suggesting the view is once again just over the shoulder of the police. The caption repeats information that was printed with a nearly identical, though elevated, view of the same scene taken by Georges Azenstarck from the balcony of l’Humanité and published in that paper a few days before the Paris Match issue, namely, that the “wounded” were waiting to be evacuated by police to the hospitals. The bold letters indicate that “A few meters from this dramatic scene, the who’s-who of Paris (le tout Paris) who do not know [what has happened], laugh at the dress rehearsal of a comic play.” Such phrasing simultaneously underscores the centrality of the event within the urban framework and provides an alibi for the “toutParis” that did not see the event. If the photograph with which I first began (Figure 5.4), the one that situates the protestors in plenitude within the spaces of the city, constitutes one of the two dominant genres of representations that characterize the contemporaneous photographs of 17 October 1961, this final photo partakes of the second genre, which corresponds with images more properly understood as depicting catastrophe or horror. Despite the radical difference in the status of the bodies and subjects presented in each genre, the second equally represents the incursion of these subjects—whether the FLN or the Algerians pictured—into the visual field and their repurposing of the circuits of capitalist consumer visuality in favor of a decolonizing visibility. As Ulrich Baer has argued carefully in his reappraisal of a series of photographs taken by a Nazi accountant in the Lodz ghetto just before its liquidation at the end of the Second World War, the dictate of reading history against the grain obliges us to grasp the composition and contingency of the photographic image against the subjective intent of its author. Here, I would suggest that this means reading these photos against the intent of the editorial offices at France-Soir or Paris Match, the individual photographers who shot the pictures, and even the police view that the spread in Paris Match so carefully preserves. As Baer explains, this obligation is especially true in those instances when the images proffer experiences that “have remained unremembered yet cannot be forgotten,” as these do.65 In the Democritian model of photography that Baer elaborates, these experiences provide the photograph with its event status and generate for it a temporality that is non-narrative and sequential, belonging as much to the present as to the past. The contrast with the photograph conceived as such and Paris Match’s attempt to vanquish the chaotic simultaneity of multiple events taking place across the city is instructive. Rather than tell of an isolated experience, the photographic event occurs and repeats in bursts and echoes across a constellation of time and space, including our own. As such, it is in the photograph itself that Baer argues a sense of place for “those who were violently unmoored from their own experience” might be found.66 For this to happen, however, the pho-

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tographs need not just be seen; the events they present must themselves be witnessed. In this conception— and I argue in the case of the 17 October 1961 demonstration— photography becomes a primary means to achieve this witnessing whether in the shared historical moment or in the posterity generated by the image. And yet, such questions of witnessing are often lost in the manner by which photographs such as those in Paris Match are reprinted in contemporary accounts of the event, where they again fulfill the same police order that constructed the images in the first place. It bears repeating that all of the recent and better-known, book-length texts that aim to “recuperate” or restore the 1961 demonstration to its historical significance feature on their covers images of police coercion and violence.67 The eclipse of images of the marchers’ confirmation of their “right to the city” in favor of their victimization encourages the sense that the most important aspect of the demonstration remains its suppression, thus continuing to place the question of history and its narrative out of the hands of those Algerians who protested. Hardly active agents in their catastrophe, the marchers are divested of the very agency that they did demonstrate when they took to the streets of Paris. Most famous now among this sort of photograph documenting the bloody results of the demonstration are a suite of images taken by Elie Kagan that were also, in part, printed in several journals at the time of the demonstration.68 A freelance photojournalist of Jewish-Polish descent, Kagan had developed strong relationships with most of the left-leaning organs despite— or maybe because of—his propensity for political outbursts and bad behavior. By some accounts, he and other leftists had been tipped off by the FF-FLN leadership about the upcoming events.69 While Kagan’s authorship of the images he took that night is not in question, it is not pertinent to this discussion. In fact, the case of Kagan’s authorship—much like Paris- Match’s attempt to author photos into a narrative of 17 October—is a red herring that does not allow us to understand or, better, to see the agential Algerians in the photographs he took. Taking recourse to Baer’s suggestion above, I want to suggest instead that the Kagan photographs stand as proof of a subaltern appropriation of the reins of representation through the mechanical prosthesis of the camera. This, I propose, is true of all of the photographs of the demonstration of 17 October 1961, and part of why we must attend to the emphasis that the French term manifestation places on the aspects of producing and making manifest, real, and concrete, even when such realities can only be witnessed in the temporal duration provided by the image they produce. Two images from Kagan’s portfolio of photographs taken on the night of 17 October 1961 are especially instructive in this regard. The first concerns an image from a sequence depicting a wounded man on the rue des Paquerettes in Nanterre (see Figure 5.18). Later evidence, compiled by the historian Jean-Luc Einaudi, informs us that this man’s name was Abdelkader Bennehar and that police records indicate he was arrested on 18 October 1961. The records also indicate that Bennehar died two days later of a blow to the head with a blunt instrument. As we see him in the photograph, he appears with an outstretched right arm that reaches toward the viewer as he strug-

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Figure 5.18. Elie Kagan, photograph of Abdelkader Bennehar, on the ground and apparently seriously injured; Nanterre, 17 October 1961. Photo: © Elie Kagan / BDIC

gles to lift himself from the cement on which he has fallen, his jacket splayed underneath him. The foreshortened perspective makes the bloodied knuckles of his hand loom large and draws the viewer’s attention to yet more blood: staining the front of his white shirt, darkening the cement below his head, and running in a neat stripe down his forehead toward a dark brow, where it crosses with the blood that has already pooled in the furrowed creases there. The photo of Bennehar was one of two used to illustrate an article published in France Observateur on 26 October, “Aucun français ne peut plus ignorer ça” (No Frenchman can ignore this any longer). The byline was “A. Delcroix,” the pseudonym that the historian François Furet used after 8 May 1958.70 No information was given about the subject of the photograph; indeed, it is unlikely that any was available, either to the author or the editor. The article presented a direct appeal to the French left, especially the former Resistance, to organize in condemnation of the events of 17 October 1961. It was, in fact, just following this article and Kagan’s photograph 194

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that the aforementioned image of Algerians interned in the sports stadium was published, along with the caption alluding to the repetition undergirding the French relationship to a lineage of historical others: “Çelà vous ne rappel rien?” In the article, Furet argues that no single French(man) can pretend not to have seen or to have understood the “situation created by the police [led by] Mr. Papon,” in relation to the “French from Algeria” (les français d’Algérie). He insists that it is necessary that the French instead “defend the Algerian workers (arrested during the demonstration” because their “freedoms are the guarantee of our own.” To this end, Furet advocates that Parisians travel within their city beyond the regions of Passy and the Champs-Elysées in order to understand and prevent the deplorable conditions in which these “French from Algeria” live. “Knowing” the city in this manner would also enable the French to better understand the situation of their own anti-Arab or anti-Muslim—“whether it be Tunisian, Moroccan, or Algerian” (qu’ il soit tunisien, marocain, ou algérien)—racism.7¹ While Furet’s intentions, along with those of the Communist left, were to oppose the atrocities committed against the Algerians (“French from Algeria”) in specific light of the memory of the crimes committed during the German occupation and under Vichy, the use of Kagan’s photograph as an illustration in this context rings a cautionary note. Bennehar is once again martyrd (we might understand his death to be his first martyrdom, a very real consequence of the FF-FLN’s image tactics) although now exclusively for the benefit of the French. Through the sacrifice made visible by his body, and in the possibility that they might know such sacrifice (the “situation” created by Papon) through this visibility, the French are assured better ways to ensure their own freedom. In this instance, it is difficult not to recall the model of French subjectivity formulated on the erasure of Algerian bodies that Rancière articulates. The meaning of such an appropriation assumes additional significance in the article that follows Furet’s, written by the French-Algerian poet Henri Kréa.7² The short text “Le racisme est collectif, la solidarité individuelle” (Racism is collective; solidarity is individual) presents Kréa’s interviews of a number of Renault factory workers about the question of Franco-Algerian relations.7³ His conclusions, succinctly summarized in the article’s title, suggest the risk implicit in the singular means of national address embedded in Furet’s challenge that “not a single Frenchman” can ignore the police abuse of the Algerians. While Furet’s reference to “not a single Frenchman” reifies hexagonal French identity by implying and so naturalizing a French readership, Kréa’s nod toward a “collective racism” undermines such presumptive unity as founded on discrimination and displacement. In opposition to Furet’s directive that the French travel to the outer limits of their own city in order to see the plight of a non-individualized Arab or Muslim other, Kréa’s analysis, which exceeds neat identifications based on class or nation, demands a decolonial perspective on the sovereignty of a state like France and its claims to a singular public. A final Kagan photograph underscores the relationship between urban space and the tactics deployed by the FF- FLN and the 20,000 subjects who demonstrated in order to briefly occupy the “eye of history,” as Georges Didi-Huberman theorizes

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Figure 5.19. Elie Kagan, photograph, arrested protestors, Paris, Métro Place

photography’s particular place in the dynamics of seeing and being seen in the epigraph to this chapter (see Figure © Elie Kagan / BDIC 5.19).74 The photo shows a group of several dozen men being arrested in the Metro stop at the Place de la Concorde. This image, too, comes from the evening of 17 October 1961, although it is taken more surreptitiously than the photograph of Abdelkader Bennehar on the rue de Paquerettes, a fact we can ascertain from its precarious angle and blurred edges. While it is usually reproduced as a stand-alone image, if we view it in the durational context of its production, and so endow the still photograph with something of the sustained visibility of film, we put ourselves in the position of beginning to witness these subjects’ investment in the tactics of a simultaneously spatial and spectacular demonstration. In the blur and what Didi-Huberman instructs us to see as the nearly-but-not- quite “nothing” captured in such almost insignificant photographs as this and others from the roll on which it was shot, we also see the high stakes of such a gambit.75 Most likely taken from the safe interior of the Metro car just before it pulled out of the station, the photograph is marked by its relative lack of focus as bodies de la Concorde, 17 October 1961. Photo:

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and station platforms meld into the distorted fade of movement. This blur encourages a temporal identification with Kagan’s desire to document discretely the arrest from a point of view no longer authorized by the French police or the officer standing in the immediate foreground of the photo. In the picture, the protestors stand one or two deep, dwarfed by the ironic station name “Concorde” (Peace) emblazoned above them and by the more prosaic advertisement for the dish soap Rex, which seems almost deliberately placed to allude both to the whitewashing vision that needs (still) to keep the Algerians out of the public view and—with the advantage of hindsight—to the disastrous events taking place almost simultaneously underneath the marquis of the Rex theater, which is where the photo that concludes the Paris Match sequence was taken. Almost never reproduced because of its technical inferiority, the photo that Kagan shot less than a split second afterward gives the sense that the crowd of Algerians on the platform with their hands above their heads might stretch into an infinite distance.76 Those in the foreground face the wall, their heads bowed beneath the weight of their clasped hands. Deeper in this image, other men stare out, catching the eye of the photographer and offering their faces to anyone on the train who may (or may not) see them. Although it was probably not their intent to be photographed here, tens of feet below the Place de la Concorde—just as it was most likely not the intention of those who were shot dead or wounded in front of the Rex and beneath the windows of l’Humanité that the site of their capture resonate metaphorically with the martyr-like associations of Rex or “Humanity”—the Algerians’ presence here cannot but resonate symbolically.77 As Maurice Agulhon explains in his contribution to Pierre Nora’s Realms of Memory, the Place de la Concorde had long been a potent symbol of unity, not only for the Parisian left and right as contained within the east and west of the city but also for the nation and its empire. According to Agulhon’s account, in 1840, “This once disputed, ill-defined territory, which was still seen as rather eccentric and unfinished, now took on the politically neutral character that it has had ever since. The obelisk of Luxor, a conveniently timed gift from Egypt, was erected in the center of the square. Statues representing eight major French cities were arranged around the periphery in more or less the position they occupied in reality (Marseilles to the southeast, Strasbourg to the northeast, Bordeaux to the southwest, and so on). The Place de la Concorde thus reflected a certain image of France, and it was incomprehensible that a square that was thus in a sense the center of France should also not be the center of Paris” 78 (see Figure 5.20). While inattentive to the symbolism manifest in the placement of an Egyptian obelisk— and so, too, the history of Napoleonic invasion and conquest— at the center of French unity, Agulhon’s account directs us once more to the reliance of public identity on urban space. What if, instead of dismissing these photographs as conforming to the police order, or abandoning the Paris Match spread to the abstracting purview of its layout wherein the Algerian demonstration is rendered formally equivalent to and no more significant than the things advertised in similar format in the same pages or the de-

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Figure 5. 20. René-Jacques (René Giton),

contextualized “events” also “documented” there—what if we looked at these images in terms of what Didi-Huberman de l’architecture et du patrimoine, Paris, reminds us is photography’s “tenacious function of makFrance. Credit: © Ministère de la Culing visible?” In such a reading, the most striking legacy of ture / Médiathèque du patrimoine, Dist. the Kagan photos is the making visible “in the eye of hisRMN / Art Resource, NY. tory” the fashion in which a certain notion of a postcolonial France was predicated upon the secondary erasure of these Algerians once they had entered the center of the nation where they could be seen. We might read this effort back to those photographs in the Paris Match spread, too, reading them thus against the grain of their original presentation. The failure to reproduce images like those depicting crowds beneath the Berlitz Theater (Figure 5.8), rather than confirming an erasure, makes visible this same inclination. The inscription of Algerians that the image performs in the national body gains significance in light of Furet’s instruction in the France Observateur article discussed photograph, Place de la Concorde, circa

1955. © RMN , RNJ 3347PNR 0. Médiathèque

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above that, following the events of 17 October 1961—to be clear that he interprets as a demonstration for dignity and against racism—the French reading public must also transform itself. It must, he instructs, become a mobile urban public and must in fact “see” the truth of the suburban ghettos where the Algerians live. But if we look at them correctly, the Kagan pictures shift the investiture of agency from the French to the Algerians themselves, and not in terms of being those who see. Rather, they are the ones being seen, but the passive construction belies what this visibility entails: for the marchers and organizers of 17 October 1961, being seen meant usurping the logic and the corresponding mechanism through which space and optics collude to determine the exclusionary rules of society’s visual sphere. That is the magnitude of the Algerians’ agency at the moment of the demonstration. At a time when France could not name Algeria’s war for independence as such, it also could not face the claims of its Other to the shared spaces of the metropole or to the image of the national public that this space had been made to construe. This we have seen in Malraux’s proposals for the center city of Paris. In that sense, the plenitude and presence announced in all the images of the demonstration, including those that depict death and absence, constitute what Didi-Huberman has, in the context of the epigraph to this chapter, encouraged us to learn to see as “refutations snatched from a world” that, like the Nazis he describes, the French—and not just Papon, but most of the populace—“wanted to obfuscate, to leave wordless and imageless.” 79 In a sense, the contradictions between the colonial system and the modern nation-state can be found here, in the visual circulation of these public images. For it is within this circulation that those who are codified as unequal by the colonial state make claims to the ideal of egalitarian belonging, an ideal that undergirds the model of citizenship within the French republic. In making visible historical contestations to this model, the photographs of the catastrophic ends of 17 October 1961 configure an alternate claim for the space of appearance that is the spectacular image. To see it as such, we have to learn to look differently, and to see representations across history differentially.

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LOOKING PAST THE STATE OF EMERGENCY A Coda

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As always in times of emergency, people bow to the imperatives of “presentism,” and tend to forget the deep causes.— Achille Mbembe, “The Republic and Its Beast,” 2005

n 1989, Béatrice Parent curated an exhibition of four mid-career artists from four different countries at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris. Suggestively and self-reflexively titled Images Critiques, the exhibition juxtaposed the work of Jeff Wall and Alfredo Jaar, both well known for their ongoing photo-conceptual investigations regarding photography’s capacity to structure our awareness of the historical present, with that of Louis Jammes, best remembered for his photographs of the artists associated with Figuration Libre, and of Dennis Adams. By that time, Adams had established himself as particularly interested in site-specific questions of history and representation as articulated within the layers of urban space.¹ For his contribution to the exhibition, Adams chose to install the first and ultimately most successful of a trilogy of works about the memory of the Algerian War of Independence in France as it intersected— or didn’t—representational practice and public space.² Another work from this series, realized later that same summer as La Folie Algérienne, was exhibited as part of the (in)famous exhibition Les magiciens de la terre, which curator Jean-Hubert Martin had imagined as a riposte to a long history of colonial and imperial representations in France, one he had proposed as a tool to globalize the history of modern art beyond token internationalisms of such platforms as the Paris Biennale and the decontextualized formalism celebrated by William Rubin in his 1984 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, “Primitivism” in 20thCentury Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern.³ Whereas La Folie Algérienne was positioned outside the exhibition space in the Parc de la Villette, for the Parent exhibition Adams focused on the interior space of the modern art museum and the histories constructed therein. In so doing, his work, The Algerian Annex, deliberately and systematically addressed the mechanisms by which the confluence of culture and

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nation are conditioned by the institutional frameworks that promote themselves as unbiased vessels of aesthetic value. In this way, it proffered a potent critique of colonial dynamics and their expression in representational practices and the public spaces that frame them. In combining and interrogating different orders of representation as they issued from different kinds of cultural practices, The Algerian Annex might also be understood as having offered in and of itself a better example of the kinds of deconstructive impulse Martin had intended his own exhibition to instantiate. The work occupied the enclosed glass room— something of a cross between an architectural pavilion and an expanded vitrine—that is located in the space between the museum’s entrance and exit stairways, the triumphant form of which were realized in 1937 for the Exposition Internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne. Opposite the glass wall, on a separate wall he created for the installation and suspended thirty-two inches above the ground, Adams hung four abstract paintings that he had selected and thereby “re-curated” from the museum’s permanent collection (see Figure 6.1). Made by the prominent painters Hans Hartung, Simon Hantaï, Jean Degottex, and Pierre Soulages in the period between the end of the Second World War (1945) and the beginning of the Algerian War of Independence (1954), these four works were considered emblematic of the “lyrical” and “gestural” abstraction that constituted the most celebrated cultural achievements of the so-called École de Paris. Behind this re-installation and toward a third wall that he had created to foreshorten the space, Adams placed four slide carousels to project a redoubled archival photograph showing a crowd of Algerian women and children in Algiers taken at what appears to be an early 1962 demonstration for Algerian independence. Issuing, in a manner of speaking, from the backs of the paintings, this image became visible from the front of the installation only through the mirage-like reflection it generated off a grid of mirrored tiles that Adams had installed on the floor. In this way, the panorama of protesting women shone forth like a ghostly apparition in the gap beneath the four suspended paintings, shifting focus and moving in relation to the viewer’s position outside the locked glass doors.4 This viewer was literally shut out and forced to remain outside, looking inward and trying to pin down the image with her gaze. By juxtaposing these images of women and children in the midst of claiming their rights to sovereignty with revered abstractions by four male modernists, Adams raises the issue of what sorts of vision institutional space—not to mention its emphatically modern manifestations—foments and how cultural practices can mobilize critical optics in return. These issues, it bears emphasizing, are the same ones that have motivated the thrust of this book’s investigations. Diagrammatic plans for the installation indicate that instead of the photograph he eventually chose, Adams had originally thought of projecting a still from the 1966 film The Battle of Algiers featuring Ali La Pointe, and bracketing the installation with flipped versions of a second still, this time depicting La Pointe evading notice in the Casbah by hiding under a hijab— a representation that would have assumed special meaning in the context of the debates

Figure 6.1. Dennis Adams, installation detail, The Algerian Annex, 1989.

about the hijab that riddled France in 1989. That Adams ARC / MAMVP. Photo credit: Quentin chose instead to project photographs of Algerian women Bertoux. Image rights courtesy: Dennis themselves extends his critique to considerations of gender Adams, Galerie Gabrielle Maubrie, Paris; as it is mobilized and also excluded by institutional histo- Kent Fine Art LLC, New York. ries and representations of war, a topic that limns the explorations of this book even as it exceeds it. Insofar as the orders of colonialism and decolonization range in variance with those of art and popular representations, Adams’s work would seem to suggest that— at least in the context of history that the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris normally posits—the relationship is a distinctly negative one. By juxtaposing the sealed, hermetic space of the reflective-floored, glass-enclosed museum with that of the distorted and chaotic cityscape pictured (and here multiplied) in the photographic image of the Algerian women, Adams’s installation alludes to the institution’s usual exemption of external urban spaces— especially those of public protest— even as its architecture depends on, and has traditionally participated in, the formation of those very same spaces. It also forcibly reminds us of the exemption of many “invisible” subjects from the repertoire of representations within the museum and the histories it constructs regarding what and who constitutes culture. In reminding us of the (absent) historical content of the high modernist abstraction that dominates the paintings he reframes, Adams’s work might be said to conduct something of an art historical lesson by stressing the context in which these works were made and celebrated, a context I have inscribed throughout this book as one “during war,” and equally during the “decades of decolonization.” More than that, however, in presenting both high modernism and its context together and in 203

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reframing them as something to be looked at in equal measure, The Algerian Annex insists we look beyond the surface paradigms of modernist refusals and beyond the debates that pit realism against abstraction. Why, Adams asks, and through what means do we look at one kind of image as culture, while we look away from another, and how can we understand this as the historical lesson imparted by a modern and modernist vision? Furthermore, in this specific instance, how do we understand the stakes of this lesson as explicitly rooted in colonial history and its often violent unravelings? This question resonates with various instances I have treated in this book: Malraux’s imposition of one image onto Paris so that another city, indeed another history, would not be seen; Isou’s aural and visual fabrication of a supposedly universal culture that would overlay and obscure alterity; the décollagistes’ gesture of making visible a public that was actually a mere abstraction; and the tactical strategies of occupying space and inhabiting images that frame the consideration of the demonstration of 17 October 1961 and the photographs that issued from it. The question’s persistence signals its centrality to practices of seeing— and not seeing—in France to this day. These issues are precisely those taken up by Michael Haneke’s 2005 film Caché, which I argue offers a compelling retrospective glance on the history of urban representation traced in these pages and an important glimpse into the legacy of the efforts not to see decolonization as an essential organizing aesthetic regime during what has been— and continues to be—in effect, a long trajectory of war. Released to great critical acclaim and box-office success in France in 2005 and then globally in 2006, Caché (Hidden), stars Juliet Binoche and Daniel Auteuil as Anne and Georges Laurent, two Parisian intellectuals. Georges is the host of a television literary review not unlike the popular series Apostrophe ; Anne works for a publishing house not unlike the prestigious press Gallimard. Their comfortable lives are interrupted by the arrival of a series of videotapes that indicate they are under surveillance by someone whom Georges eventually surmises is from his past. As with many of Haneke’s films, Code Inconnu: Récit incomplete de divers voyages (Code Unknown, 2000) in particular, Caché evidences a preoccupation with the kind of restrained and fragmented surfaces that have been associated in the pages of this book with modern urbanism and the aesthetic ideologies that underpin its formulation of space as well as with the divergences between high and low cultural practices. In particular, the film is preoccupied with how these divergences are made manifest through and around the technologies of vision and representation most explicitly associated not only with Guy Debord’s analysis of the spectacle as the means by which society renders its subjects alienated from their own experience, but also with the technologies of control that Michel Foucault invoked when he inveighed against Debord: “ours is not a society of spectacle, but of surveillance.” 5 Significantly for the analysis presented in the last part of this book, the “hidden” event at the core of Caché ’s plot, one that Georges assumes motivates his presump-

In October 1961, the FLN called the Algerians to manifest. It was in Paris: the 17th October. I won’t draw you a picture (je te fais pas un dessin). Papon. The police massacre. They drowned more or less 200 Arabs in the Seine. It seems that the parents of Majid were amongst them. In any case, they never came back.

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tive stalker, Majid (played by Maurice Bénichou), is the Algerian demonstration of 17 October 1961. Not coincidentally, Caché was actually the second fictional feature film of 2005 to figure the events of 17 October 1961 and the third since 1961. Unlike, however, both Nuit noire, 17 octobre 1961 (Black Night, October 17, 1961, dir. Alain Tasma, 2005) and Vivre au paradis (Living in Paradise, dir. Bourlem Guerdjou, 1998), as well as the more recent Hors la loi (Outside the Law, dir. Rachid Bouchareb, 2010), which carefully and with the utmost attention to the possibilities of cinematic plenitude restage the demonstration and enact the debates that riddle its historiographic positioning, Caché represents the event by means of its absence. In fact, the event and its consequences are not pictured at all. Instead, they are introduced into the film’s diegesis through speech:

With these short sentences and in less than two minutes of screen time, Georges sketches the contours of the hidden historical event that presumably led to the video surveillance to which he and his wife are now being subjected. Given the structural and symbolic weight that the police massacre has for the ostensible plot of the film, if not also for the contemporaneous public debates about its remembrance, the economy of the phrasing is remarkable. But the reference to a visual process of depiction— je te fais pas un dessin—in place of a correlate or actual picture in a film as dedicated to the formulation of the cinematic-frame-as-tableau— is even more startling. In conversational French (as in English), this expression suggests that which does not need to be made visible because it is too obvious. But this kind of making visible is precisely what Haneke’s film traffics in. The meticulousness with which he arranges every shot is astounding and is well documented in the video about the film’s making that accompanies the Sony Classics DVD released in 2006. Here, for example, we are made privy to scenes in which the director spends hours fastidiously arranging the composition of a twosecond shot. In any other film, then, we might allow such a deliberate reluctance to picture to be passed over quickly, even as it tests the medium of its own transmission. But Haneke’s film is arguably about nothing so much as the conflict between what we see and what we live, or more exactly how what we live is mediated by what we see and how we are seen. And so it is important that he replaces this event—historically and, as I have suggested, importantly realized itself in terms of its visuality—with images of abstraction. Everything in the film is surface: from the gridded lines of the blank spines of the faux-books that line the set of Georges’s TV show to their formal equivalent in the patterned glass that adorns the windows of his boss’s corner office (see Figures 6.2 and 6.3). So carefully constructed are these sets that they recall the

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Figure 6. 2. Michael Haneke (dir.), film still from Caché, 2005, showing Daniel Auteil (center), on the set, as Georges Laurent. Figure 6.3. Michael Haneke (dir.), film still from Caché, 2005, showing Daniel Auteil as Georges (right), in his boss’s office.

efforts of artists like Thomas Demand or James Casebere, whose highly orchestrated but thoroughly de-specified photorealism suggest how our memories are formed in relationship to images that we unknowingly consume. This tension between the techniques of surveillance and the terrain of spectacle that is mapped to such productive tension in Haneke’s film dates back to the kinds of shifts in media-determined attention that first prompted Debord to define what he termed “a visible negation of life,” a negation that has “invented a visual form for itself. ” 6 In Caché, this tension is borne out, for example, when we are first introduced to the central characters and their plight through what at first appears to be a long shot of the façade of their house, located serendipitously enough on the rue des Iris in the 13th arrondissement (see Figure 6.4). It is only after several minutes of screen time during which the film’s credits appear letter by letter on screen, as if they were real-time teletype, that the image is interrupted by the horizontal blur that indicates

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showing the house in which Georges and Anne live.

“fast forward” on a VCR, and we are made to realize that what we have been seeing is not actually Anne’s and Georges’s house, but a close-up of the television monitor inside their house, where they, like we, are trying to decode the first of the surveillance videos they will receive throughout the film. The reference to 17 October 1961 in Caché is one of only two historical “actualities,” or what we might call a trace of “the real” that enters the fictional diegesis of the film, and it does so, to repeat, through the absence of a picture. The other actuality, however, intrudes quite explicitly through the form of pictures: televisual images, in fact, that convey a digital flow of news reports about violent conflicts in Iraq, India, and Gaza, and that bring the Abu Ghraib torture-photography scandal into the heart of Georges’s and Anne’s living room. Significantly, while the television is almost always on, neither protagonist ever seems to look at it, and so does not see these images (see Figure 6.5). The contrast between the two registers, the shown but not seen and the concealed but profoundly significant, begs a renewed consideration of the relationship between knowledge or experience and representation. So too does this contrast prompt us to consider the changes in imaging technologies that have impacted how war is represented—if not actually fought—from the Algerian War of Independence to the present. Similarly, in one of only two scenes where the audience sees both Georges and Anne outside their home and together in the space of Paris— once again framed according to a grid of pattern and surface—they are nearly run into by a black-skinned man on a bicycle because they do not see him coming down the street—indeed they are not even looking. Through such moments, the viewer comes to understand that Georges’s reluctance to “picture” (faire un dessin) the real is aligned with his refusal to see the real. That reluctance, if we can read it backward to 1989, resonates with how Adams had conceived modernist abstractions in their relationship to the excess of the Algerian protest scene he presented as a component of his artwork. Similar to

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Figure 6.4. Michael Haneke (dir.), film still, opening shot of Caché, 2005,

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Figure 6.5. Michael Haneke (dir.), film still from Caché, 2005, showing Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliet Binoche) in their living room, with scenes of war visible on the television screen in the background.

Adams’s 1989 presentation of the museum as indicative of an exclusionary model of culture, Haneke uses Georges as a metonymic representation of the nation’s exclusions, that is to say France’s inability—if not also its outright refusal—to incorporate into a national public, image, or culture the racialized and colonized minorities that 17 October 1961 has since come to represent. Such critics as Paul Gilroy have critiqued Haneke for appropriating the events of 17 October 1961 in order to illustrate the well-worn truth about the self-satisfaction of the French bourgeoisie that is embodied in the scotomization that Georges performs. While there is much merit in such analyses, I want instead to suggest that Haneke’s work and its careful emphasis on the surface of vision might encourage us to consider (whether deliberately or as a secondary effect is another question) more squarely the history of the imperial and colonial representations that motivates Georges’s willful blindness and which a history of aesthetic favoritism enables. Looking deeper than the amnesiac surfaces that constitute Georges’s world like they did Malraux’s musée imaginaire permits us to understand what they hide, much like the Soulages and Degottex paintings that Adams re-interrogates. In the words of authors Charles Tshimanga, Didier Gondola, and Peter J. Bloom, it is in this hidden aspect that we might locate the “paradoxical nature of the French postcolonial Republic in which the universal values associated with Frenchness and citizenship function as part of a political discourse that masks the causes for inequality and discontent.” 7 Tshimanga, Gondola, and Bloom’s analysis of the French postcolonial Republic was triggered by two important events that took place in 2005, the year of Caché ’s release. I want here to consider these two events as closing bookends to the “decades of decolonization” examined in this book, decades that are part of a period that starts not just with the end of the Second World War but also with the beginning of the Sétif riots of 8 August 1945 and their radical suppression. The first of the 2005 events that I want to consider was actually the passing of another law that, like Malraux’s, 208

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directly concerns the construction of a view of the national past, even if it does so by way of different terms than the Law Malraux. The second event was a series of urban protests not unrelated to the political and representational claims articulated by the demonstration of 17 October 1961. Both events not only reflect backward on the histories charted in this book’s investigations, but are importantly informed by these same histories. It is important, therefore, to read them together, dialogically. The first event, then, was the February adoption of a controversial law stipulating the recognition of and expression of gratitude (articulated monetarily as well as symbolically) for the sacrifices made by the French army in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Indochina, as well as those “territories formerly under French sovereignty.” 8 The law further forbade discrimination against the so-called Harkis (indigenous Algerians who fought alongside the French and joined the settlers in their return to the metropole after independence) and apologized for any mistreatment they may have received subsequent to the Evian agreements. Significant to the narrative developed here was clause four, which specified how the generally “positive role of the French presence” (le rôle positif de la présence française) in the fomer colonial holdings would henceforth have to be taught in French schools and to be printed in French textbooks. This clause was most objectionable to what Nicolas Bancel notes was a misleading consensus of historians who vehemently opposed the law.9 In essence, these historians complained (and rightly so) that such an effort attempted to sanitize the colonial past by reaffirming both the national sacrifice and—in a repetition of the original imperial gesture upon which colonization rests—rearticulating the importance of the civilizing mission that had formed the primary justification of the French conquests in Africa, the Maghreb, the Carribean, and Asia. Within the twentieth century, such revisionist models predate even the Reconstruction period following the Second World War, when the amnesty laws (discussed in chapter 1) were intended to revise the history of collaboration between France and Nazi Germany. As Bancel notes, these kinds of revisionist models actually date to the Vichy period, when teachers were urged to promote Nazi ideology. However, even Pétain’s quasi-Fascist regime did not have the audacity to propose or pass laws mandating such educational reform.¹0 In tracing the development of the will to generate the law as well as its political effects, Bancel’s analysis is especially useful. He adroitly contextualizes the debates about acknowledging the rapatriés (repatriated citizens, in this context mostly Harkis and European settlers) with— and so as a way to mitigate the public outcry regarding—the French use of torture during the Algerian War of Independence. This outcry had been incurred by the publications of General Paul Aussaresses, whose Services spéciaux: Algérie, 1955–1957 (2001) acknowledged and defended the use of torture in the so-called Battle of Algiers; and of Louisette Ighilahriz, who articulated her own experience of the same as a victim in L’ Algérienne (2001).¹¹ It is also worth noting that national interest in these questions was furthered by the international attention to the issue of military torture as it evolved during revelations regarding American practice during the wars in Afghanistan and later in Iraq.

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Crucially, Bancel positions the law in relationship to the manifestly visible monuments planned at the same time to commemorate the cultural achievements of colonization across France, in a manner not unrelated to how Malraux had once imagined the maisons de la culture would consolidate the provinces and the capital in the display of culture rooted in a particular version of the past. These costly monuments to colonization’s achievements, Bancel notes, included, for example, the National Museum of “France in Algeria,” planned for Montpellier, and a monument to the Overseas Departments and Territories (DOM-TOM) planned for Marseilles. They also included the strangely generic metal-and-light sculpture that serves as the Memorial to the War in Algeria and the Battles in Morocco and Tunisia in Paris, inaugurated by President Jacques Chirac on 5 December 2002.¹² It was in fact at the inauguration of this memorial that Chirac (a veteran of the Algerian War of Independence) repeated the thrust of claims he had first made in 1996, when he suggested that “Pacification, development of the territories, the spread of education, the establishment of modern medical practices, and the creation of administrative and legal institutions are all marks of that indisputable work to which the French presence contributed, not only in northern Africa but also on every continent.” ¹³ The Republic, he announced, should be celebrated for having brought “to the land of Algeria its scientific, technical, and administrative expertise, its culture and its language.” ¹4 Of course, while such efforts to reclaim and recuperate a tainted past need always to be understood in terms of the political rhetoric they enact, they cannot also be divorced from the effects of such rhetoric, from what the words say even if not explicitly. In this instance, efforts to reincorporate the settlers (including, as many lamented at the time, members of the secret army, the OAS) into a national image implied that the other populations “repatriated” to France after Algerian independence were not important and could (or should) remain less visible. These other “repatriated” subjects, of course, included the vast numbers of nominally “migrant” workers whose numbers had grown throughout the War of Independence and continued to do so after 1962, when economic hardship, created in part by the infrastructural collapse after the French left, mandated many of them to leave their homeland in search of work. In addition, and by comparison with the Harkis who were being publicly hailed, the law implied that these other populations were unincorporable into the French civilization that had endeavored to bring them there. Here, even the most cursory comparison of the apology issued to the Harkis with the one issued to the victims of the massacre of 17 October 1961—in the form of the 2001 plaque—is instructive in terms of who is incorporated into official images of the French past, and how (or where) it is done. Such omissions directly prepare for the second event that brackets 2005 and, in so doing, the retrospective analysis presented here. This event, as I am calling it, actually comprised the months of rioting that first erupted in the suburbs of France’s major cities after two youths of Tunisian and Mauritian origin, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, respectively, were fatally electrocuted, and a third, Muhittin Altun, of Turkish origin, was critically injured at a Clichy-sous-Bois substation on 27 Octo-

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ber 2005. The electrocutions happened during what the youth assumed to be a police chase following an evening soccer game, just before the hour of the Ramadan fast-breaking.¹5 Beginning very late that same night, 27 October 2005, in acts of protest and outrage, urban and suburban France was literally set aflame and, as with so many contemporary scenes of urban violence, the cameras were there to record it. Over the course of several weeks that fall, and across the French nation in virtually all 95 metropolitan departments, some 10,000 cars, 200 buses, 100 postal vehicles, and at least several dozen police cars were burned or stoned; dozens of homes, schools, churches, mosques, libraries, and warehouses were destroyed; some 5,200 rioters, mostly youth, and mostly identified as “disenfranchised” (that is, when they were not actually referred to as “foreigners” or “Islamic”), were arrested; and one additional person was killed. There were also just over two hundred police casualties reported and twenty-six injuries to firemen. The damage was estimated to total nearly $300 million.¹6 There were peaceful protests, too, and in fact many of the public assemblies that were organized immediately after 27 October aimed toward silent protest, but what was presumed to be a police-launched tear-gas canister outside the Bilal Mosque on 30 October upped the ante. As a result, it was through violence that what Didier Lapeyronnie has argued were the emphatically political claims of the protests were subsequently articulated.¹7 Rather than politics, however, the police understood the violence as war, a battle one policeman in Clichy-sous-Bois described as: “us against them.” ¹8 As has so often been the case since photography and war first intersected the other’s development, this violence captured the camera’s eye, and the rest of the world could watch what Jean Baudrillard described as the “French exception” disintegrate on television and the Internet.¹9 Baudrillard’s analysis at this early juncture cannily observed that the disintegration on view was not only of “French” exceptionalism, but of a more generically “Western” one as well, and that it did not occur “under the pressure of external violence,” by which he meant to invoke the threat of global terrorism, or “the immigrants,” as the press constantly described the rioters, the nation could not integrate. Instead, he noted that the disintegration was rooted to the internal dynamics of capitalism that had rendered the European exiled “within his own society,” as the ironic proof of what Baudrillard defines as a “successful integration,” but which, he clarifies, means “the integration of a totally standardized, technical, and comfortable way of life, which we are careful now never to question.” ²0 Here, Baudrillard might well have been thinking of Caché ’s Georges Laurent. He also might have been thinking of the imagistic register that shapes Haneke’s representation of this real-fictive world and the ease with which it is made to come undone through Majid’s presumptive stalking and re-picturing when he writes that the society that has produced the October riots “faces a far more terrible test than any enemy force: the test of its own absence, its loss of reality, such that soon it will have no other definition than that of the foreign bodies that haunt its periphery, the bodies of those it has expelled, and who now expel it from itself, but whose violent call

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both reveals what is coming apart within it, and provokes a kind of awakening.” ²¹ While Baudrillard attributes this kind of “pressure” to the larger phenomenon of an expanding globalization as played out in the contemporary image politics of the so-called War on Terrorism, his words here recall Debord’s similar emphasis on the lack of reality characteristic of the earlier moment of spectacle culture as already conditioned by an emergent consolidation of the global economy. And, indeed, the spectacle itself more than pervaded the experience of the riots of October and November 2005 as it was distributed through a litany of images of disaster that ran nearly non-stop for several weeks on television and computer screens across the West in the nightly news during the fall of 2005. It is true that these images could not have been more spectacular, no matter if you take the word to mean big and bright, mass-mediatic, staged, sensational, or, in the well-trod tradition of Debord, as an analogue for the conditions of social relations orchestrated by capital

sous-Bois (Seine-Saint-Denis),” 31 October 2005. Photo: Deroubaix / Gamma. Courtesy

Getty Images.

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(see Figure 6.6).²² But does that mean that they necessarily function in the same way as the surfeit of images that Haneke evokes in his construction of Georges’s world to indicate the way images work to sever their subjects from understanding the historical dimensions of their existence? Do all images function in the same way, or to the same end? Based on the arguments and analyses in this book, but especially those in chapter 5 about how we might reconsider photographic documentation, I suggest that the answer is no, and that we need to honor the deeper history contained in these representations in order to exceed, challenge, or disturb our expectations and thereby look at them from a vantage point that is past the point of knowing what they already show. No doubt spurred on by the euphoria of release as well as by the power of what it might mean, finally, to be looked at after a long spate of having remained unseen, the rioters decried decades of police brutality, discriminatory hiring policies, and unequal housing opportunities.²³ Their rage was fueled by the words of Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior, who referred to “disruptive youth” like the electrocuted teens as “scum” (racaille, which also means rascal), and insisted that France would follow a “zero tolerance” policy, deporting any “foreigner” caught rioting.²4 The implicit suggestion that they were not French only fanned the flames set by those who, for the entirety of their lives, had rarely if ever felt treated as such, despite the factual coordinates of their citizenship. The political subjectivity of dis-identification that Rancière had outlined in the mid-1990s held little promise for a group whose identification had never been with the state and whose relationship to imagistic representation had always been as oblique as their relationship to electoral representation. Unable to quell the spread of violence, President Jacques Chirac took advantage of a law first written on 3 April 1955, in response to the (correctly) perceived threat posed to the Fourth Republic by the insurgency in Algeria. On 8 November 2005, after two weeks of heightened tensions and continued rioting, the government declared the nation to be in a “state of emergency.” ²5 In so doing Chirac, as the legal representative of the state, was endowed with the right to suspend the normal procedures of the Republic and to do so through the measures developed to address and maintain colonial conflicts: the imposition of curfews, the closing of businesses, the censoring of the press, and the prohibition of public assembly. Crucially, the law also equipped the president with the power to employ the military and, potentially, to wage war against the very citizens it was meant to protect. Since this law was first put into effect in April 1955, France has been declared a state of emergency only four times, three of which were directly related to the Algerian War of Independence of 1954–1962. All four times, the declarations of emergency were the direct result of crises conjured by overseas occupation and enacted on-site in those faraway places.²6 In 2005, during the first French state of emergency in over two decades, commentators in France and abroad, but especially in the United States, delighted in watching France burn, victim to, as they described, its own arrogance; subject to, they assumed, its own internal contradictions; and rendered, they concluded,

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precisely as vulnerable to the perceived anger of “immigrants” as was the United States.²7 The riots, they said, were the most pronounced since 1968, and a global or at least Western left was quick to seize parallels between the rioting students and unionists of that year and the angry youth of 2005.²8 They were right that there was something familiar here, but the historical comparison should not have been with 1968, when the students in France mostly demonstrated against institutional constraints and for additional rights, and when no state of emergency was called. Instead, as the threats of deportation and as the very state of emergency should suggest, the riots of 2005 echoed with the events associated with the prolonged and difficult process of decolonization to which the French nation was indelicately submitted by her former empire. Theorists, including Achille Mbembe and Loïc Wacquant, as well as historians, such as Joshua Cole, have noted that the 2005 riots resulted directly from or were at least implicated in a history of urban segregation issuing from the isolation of the French suburbs where the riots occurred, in the wake of gentrification by such efforts as those initiated in Malraux’s plan and by urban planning in the 1960s and 1970s (see chapter 2), when colonial urbanism came home to roost, so to speak.²9 In this context, Didier Lapeyronnie defends the 2005 riots as the highly political collective actions of marginalized ethnic minorities, eschewing their interpretation as a mere criminal rebellion. He suggests that the riots “forced the French public to acknowledge, at least for a time, the presence of the banlieues, to which they had been largely indifferent,” noting however, that “in spite of the large-scale engagement of intellectuals in the press and at colloquia, a few months later the public seems to be content with the absence of any significant measure, with the silence of politicians and of the government, with the return to order.” ³0 We should not forget that both intellectual ineffectualness and public complacency are embodied in Haneke’s figures of Georges and Anne. Haneke’s indicting representation, however, by no means exhausts reflections on the problems of vision and visibility that are made so palpable in the context of the 2005 riots. This book has attempted to reprioritize those historical events that have been elided by historical periodization and aestheticized determinations in much the same way as they were once whitewashed by the tools of the state—including the police, the orchestration of false consensus, legislation, and the control of urban space. In this light it is instructive to consider how the 2005 riots or their aftermath have been “pictured” by art practice, itself a constituent component of intellectual representation. In this endeavor, I am especially interested in a representation of the events of October 2005 that sought to offer not a new view of the subjects involved, but rather a new model of vision through which we might view them. Significantly, this model eschews neither formal aestheticism nor photodocumentary realism. The work I am thinking of here is the short digital video or “cinétract,” Europa 2005–27 Octobre (2006) by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub. Like the 1960s films from which

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this video takes its impetus, it underscores the idea that visibility is bestowed only in the form of an implicit pact with viewers, be they the audience or the public. In this work, as in so many of the documentary images it mimics, there is almost nothing to see, as was the case in Didi-Huberman’s description of the decidedly non-spectacular photographs of the sonderkommando that ground his Images Despite All (discussed briefly in chapter 5). Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more striking contrast to the other images that circulated in the wake of the 2005 riots than Straub’s and Huillet’s quiet video. Yet it traversed the same digital networks and exploited the same investments in seeing what had happened in France during the fall of 2005. For just over ten minutes of screen time, the viewer of the cinétract is presented with ten slow pans, five to the left and five to the right, that capture the same unassuming semi-urbanscape. First the camera lingers on a high cement wall, on top of which is posted a graffiti-style sign cautioning: “STOP! NE RISQUE PAS TA VIE.” Next, it pans right to pause on the unassuming architecture of the electricity substation of Clichy-sous-Bois made (in)famous by virtue of having been the direct cause of death of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré on the date of the cinétract’s title. Finally, the camera arrives at its destination: a squat housing complex and the few spare inches of landscape it might claim as a garden. Having reached this unlikely architectural entity located so close to an electrical substation, the view jumps backward to focus again on the substation, from whence we pan slowly back to the left and to the fence over which Benna and Traoré had climbed in their efforts to hide from the police. In all of this slow and obdurate movement, it is as if Straub’s and Huillet’s camera—the apparatus they control even as it controls them, insisting they keep looking— simply cannot look away and must return, again and again, to the site of death. The trick is that they pull the viewer’s eye back with them each time to look for something, some meaning in this seemingly banal place where nothing seems to mean much of anything. It is as if the camera—importantly, digital video and so instantly transmissible—wants us to watch as it does. Each pan lingers on the contradictions inherent to the site: birds chirp in concert with what sounds to be a tethered attack dog’s incessant and menacing bark, blue skies move slowly over an industrial landscape, a housing complex is positioned immediately adjacent to an electrical transformer. At the end of each pan the words “Chambre à gaz. Chaise electrique” are transposed on screen, recalling in one stroke a continuum of twentieth-century French collusion in situations that cannot be embraced within the nation’s republican view of itself and which, by extension if not as a result, Straub and Huillet suggest France continues to generate (see Figure 6.7). Indeed, we can imagine that some of the men photographed by Kagan might have lived or might still live in the suburbs around the communities from whence Benna and Traoré came. In this reading, the electrical power station figures as the electric chair but, given that France does not use the electric chair for capital punishment, we might also understand the reference as here

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Figure 6.7. Danièle Huillet and JeanMarie Straub (dirs.), video still, “Chambre à gaz / Chaise électrique,” from Europa 2005 –27 Octobre, 2006, 12-minute digital video, circulated

online.

implicating France within what is sometimes called the “American century.” Inaugurated by the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and terminated in the attacks of 11 September 2001, this moment is now cast with the pallor of human rights violations and the exportation of racial inequity to the world that the United States both globalized and privatized. Although initially intended to be premiered on television, the cinétract instead made its debut at a memorial event in Rome in October 2006, after Danièle Huillet’s death. Crafted from mini-DV footage that the couple had shot earlier that year, it was edited in response to a commission for works commemorating the centennial of Roberto Rossellini’s birth. According to the film critic Olaf Möller, participants in the centennial commemoration were asked by Enrico Ghezzi to imagine a moment in the life of a character in Rossellini’s Europa 51 (1952), the saintly and self-sacrificing Irene (played by Ingrid Bergman), loosely based on Saint Francis of Assisi, and to shoot a film according to this scenario for Fuori Orario, a legendary “mavericks-andvisionaries-only” Italian television show.³¹ Bergman’s character in Rossellini’s film is a study in empathic identification. Eventually, her concern for the plight of the poor, whom she sets out to help after having suffered the traumatic suicide of her son (prompted by her own neglect) proves to be all-consuming, and she can live only through the pleasure of seeing those she loves happy. Indeed, the film ends with her gazing out at a family she has come to assist, through the second-story window of the asylum in which she has been placed by her husband and her mother, crying tears of joy as she waves them on. In their response to the invitation to participate in generating what might be imagined as another scene from Irene’s life, Straub and Huillet responded that they “already did,” alluding to the unedited footage they had just filmed with a handheld mini-DV recorder in Clichy-sous-Bois.³² Given this clue, and the way it adheres to the logic of the empathic gaze that increasingly comes to structure the narrative of Rossellini’s film, we might also understand the long cinematic pan that constitutes Europa 2005 as something of a response to the similarly long pan that opens Michael Haneke’s Caché. A ponderous medita216

l o ok i ng pa s t t h e s t at e of e m e rg e nc y

tion on the hidden secrets of mediatic society and of the surveillance techniques on which such secrets depend, it is also a reflection on the still image of photography: a protracted scan of an image—literal and metaphorical—that does not, in the end, change or move. In fact, each pan in Europa 2005 is followed by a black screen that reiterates the film’s title and the date 27 October 2005, as if the date is the only information necessary to understand what is being seen. While some have criticized this telegraphic captioning for being elitist or provincializing, it might be more productively queried for its capacity to produce a model to think about the temporality of the photograph when it circulates digitally.³³ In this form of circulation, the flow of images has come to constitute a thickening of spectacle such that our lives are increasingly tied to those of others in the simultaneity of the photographic blur. When the Straub and Huillet cinétract first appeared and subsequently “went viral” online, this date did, in fact, have the immediacy required to signal what was being addressed. Now, that immediacy has faded, but it is quite likely that the effort to commemorate and so build singular events as exceptions to, rather than components of, historical time will resurrect it someday, just as has been done in this book with the images of 17 October 1961. It is possible to imagine that Straub’s and Huillet’s interest in looking past stillness and the finality of the image coalesces around the concerns that also anchored Dennis Adams’s installation. Both works have a great deal to tell us about the viewer’s implication in watching, imagining, witnessing and, as importantly, the viewer’s responsibility to allow that such watching, imagining, and witnessing take place. In insisting upon and not releasing the viewer’s gaze, Straub and Huillet taunt us to look at something we think we know, suggesting that there is an image of something we do not and which we cannot see buried there or hidden just behind. Nevertheless, what is primary to the logic beneath the photojournalistic representations of the public demonstrations and massacres discussed in the last part of this book, and to these three artists’ work is not the question of immediacy. It is their embodiment of a contestatory, decolonizing possibility, rather than simply their indexical nature, that constitutes the work’s deep continuity with, but not identity of, subalternity. As practices that span the spatial and the visual across public manifestations and institutions of art, this strategy finds a deep commonality with that articulated by the art historian and political theorist Ariella Azoulay, who has endeavored to understand photographs—both documentary and artistic— of what she calls “existence on the threshold of catastrophe.” ³4 In her book, The Civil Contract of Photography, Azoulay spends several hundred pages considering numerous images issuing forth from the Israeli occupation of Palestine, a situation she proffers as paradigmatic of this “threshold of catastrophe.” Through images of this kind, which stem from sites such as this, she argues that those who are “governed without the rights of citizenship” might achieve membership in a community that exceeds and thus challenges the state’s sovereignty. This community is governed by the shifting and contingent relationship between the photographer, the person photographed, and a tool, which is

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to say, the camera. In each photograph, none of these individual elements is sovereign, and, if we accept the conditions proffered by what she articulates as the “civil contract of photograph,” the photograph can articulate an “emergency claim,” to which it is the spectator’s contractual responsibility to respond. In order, however, to respond to these claims, Azoulay suggests we need to develop an alternative model of looking, one that she likens to the temporal duration of “watching,” which suggests equally an engaged search for that which is presented to us or, to use slightly different language, that which the photograph offers us through its capacity to witness. Crucial to her argument and to the ones I have made in this book is a reinvestment in the capacity of the institutions of the public sphere and the confines of urban space to provide a stage for citizenship beyond the mediaphobia engendered by years of post-Debordian cultural analysis, which would have us believe that capital’s (and thus the state’s) control of spectacle— and even the increasing corporate control of states—precludes any non-state disruption in the flow of images and the politics they mediate. Instead of treating photographic and image flows as objects, then, I have spoken of photojournalism and visual art as sites of circulation and social exchange. To think with and through Debord, the monolith of “the spectacle” has splintered into many spectacles, and their relationship to the state and its organization of social life are not at all uniform. This absence of uniformity is what Caché ’s Georges cannot see and what Europa 2005 insists we see, again and again. In fact, Europa 2005 is a short video about nothing more than seeing— or, in Azoulay’s terms, watching—for difference in a society on the “threshold of catastrophe.” Just as Azoulay’s book tells us is necessary for ethical viewing, the cinétract positions us as empathic, embodied spectators whose capacity to see depends on our capacity to bear “witness to (the) desubjectification” that structures the deprivation of one’s claim to speak, pictorially or linguistically.³5 In the terms outlined famously by Giorgio Agamben, this desubjectification is based on the fractured status of the vying modalities of the “possibility (to be able to be) and contingency (to be able not to be),” the conditions of which are generated externally to the subject and thus impose an ethical demand on the witness to allow the subject the final word, as Agamben does in the formulation of his own Remnants of Auschwitz (2002) or as the photographic capture of the arrestees in Kagan’s final image also does.³6 In its simplicity, Europa 2005 is neither as anti-art as it would first seem, nor is it as anti-aesthetic. Whereas the image of the world that Caché wants to present is always already mediated by television (remember that its first establishing shot is actually a close-up of footage being viewed on a television screen), Europa 2005 gives us the world precisely as we experience the cinétract: as always already mediated by the technologies of surveillance, the means of their distribution (the Internet) and the conditions of blindness or incomprehension. At the same time, it leaves that world unparsed, asking us not to look away as Georges is able to do all too frequently. Herein lies a marker for what, against Rancière, an ethics of looking might accom-

l o ok i ng pa s t t h e s t at e of e m e rg e nc y

plish, politically. If, as theorists of the image from Debord through Didi-Huberman have suggested (albeit to divergent ends), “the question of images is at the heart of the great darkness of our time, the ‘discontent’ of our civilization, then we must learn how to look into images to see that of which they are survivors. So that history, liberated from the pure past (that absolute, that abstraction), might help us to open the present of time.” ³7 In this model, the present becomes resonant with the radical contingency of the photograph’s capacity to capture images of worlds we have not seen because we have not looked at, for, or with them. Within the history that this book has outlined, such obfuscations, indeed, such oversights have risen in association with and in tandem to the rise of modernist aesthetics of a period commonly referred to as “post-war.” While the past few chapters should have debunked the possibility that there was anything like a “post-war” situation in France during the 1950s and 1960s, it bears repeating this claim until we begin to see this history differently, and so see what history itself has rendered unseen. This book has attempted to formulate— sometimes through explicit direction, sometimes through critique and substitution— a model for what might be a decolonized, deterritorialized model of looking that seeks to see what is not yet readily visible because it understands the efforts made to occlude certain realities. This model of looking seeks to exceed archival strictures or disciplinary limitations that register us always beholden to what we already know. In addition, as much as it is a model that comes from what I consider to be an art-historical approach to largely visual cultural material, it is also meant to exceed the pages of such efforts and indeed the classrooms in which they are taught. Understanding the stakes of art or the complex representational codes on which it draws and to which it gives rise during war means seeing the plenitude of agential and political representation behind these absences, which is to say imagining the possibility of impossibility and the presence of absent subjects. This is an entirely different venture than believing the truth of fiction. It is learning to see in plain sight what is already there. This is the project of decolonizing art and representation.

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION: ART DURING WAR AND THE POTENTIALITIES OF DECOLONIAL REPRESENTATION

In important ways, this ambition to understand what the art of the French 1950s and 1960s was coincident with corresponds to Terry Smith’s efforts to historicize the notion of “contemporaneity” that is so fundamental to the study of contemporary art. See Smith, What Is Contemporary Art? and the collection of essays in Smith, Enwezor, and Condee, Antinomies of Art and Culture. 1

2

Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (L’Écriture du désastre), passim.

This is all the more surprising given the persistent efforts within the field to understand the origins of modern aesthetic practices in relation to these same colonial and imperial occupations, especially as they issued from France, and especially in relation to the subgenre of Orientalist painting. Here, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby’s Extremities is exemplary for its analysis of early nineteenth-century French painting in relation to imperial conquest and slavery. 3

The extensive historical literature about the war that was fought to achieve Algerian sovereignty has made a great deal of the fact that the war was “sans nom” (nameless), although it is perhaps more accurate to suggest it had too many names— events, operation, pacification, rebellion, revolution, insurgency— even if the effect is precisely the same. Regardless of the state’s reluctance to name the war as such, it was still often referred to in precisely that way in much of the popular discourse of the time. It was not until 10 June 1999 that the French National Assembly voted to name this war la guerre d’Algérie. In Algeria, it is called both La guerre de libération nationale and La révolution Algérienne, or Thawra Jazā’ iriya in Arabic, terms which both carry their own ideological baggage. See Blandine Grosjean, “La France reconnaît qu’elle a fait la ‘guerre’ en Algérie. L’assemblée vote aujourd’hui un texte qui enterre le terme official d’ ‘opérations de maintien de l’ordre,’” Libération, 10 June 1999, www.liberation.fr. I have chosen to use the term “Algerian War of Independence” throughout this book for the sake of consistency and to distinguish the 1954–1962 war from the subsequent Algerian Civil War. Although it is not conventional in English-language scholarship, I note that calling it the “Algerian War of Liberation” would perhaps better reinscribe the Algerians’ agency in both the fight and 4

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notes for the introduction

its naming. To this end, there might also be good reason to follow the Algerians in calling the war the “Algerian Revolution.” I do not use that term, however, because I want to maintain emphasis on the fact that this was a war that France fought against the Algerians as much as it was one that the Algerians fought for themselves. On the topic of naming, I should clarify that in order to avoid the self-legitimating tendency of French colonial law, which endeavored to consolidate autochthonous Algerians as well as a diverse array of migrants as “indigènes,” I will refer to non-European populations in Algeria as “Algerians” and the European (and primarily French) populations as “settlers.” My thanks to one of the anonymous readers of an earlier draft of this book for this suggestion, and to Julia Clancy-Smith, whose research has been very helpful in helping to illustrate how even the “indigenous Algerian” population of Colonial Algeria was made up of migrants from many other parts of North Africa and Southern Europe. See Clancy-Smith, “Exoticism, Erasures, and Absences,” 23. Specifics regarding the rights these various populations enjoyed will be addressed in subsequent chapters, especially chapters 4 and 5, which focus more specifically on the “Algerian” populations in France during the Algerian War of Independence itself. Hannoum’s designation of modernity as violent pertains specifically to the history of “France in Algeria,” which is the subtitle of his book, Violent Modernity. Here I am interested in the term for its correctives to the more utopian characterizations of “alternative” or “simultaneous” modernities, for example, those that would seem to slight the core fact that modernity was and is inherently built from and intertwined with a history of exploitation and colonization. 5

For details on the massacre, see Benot, Massacres coloniaux, 1944–1950, esp. 9–36; and Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 149–150. Questions of when and where the Algerian War of Independence or the resistance it engendered began are equally questions of representation. Indeed, many in Algeria extend the war’s timeline all the way back, in fact, to 1830 and the Ottoman resistance to the French landing, thereby attempting to ground the roots of “Algerian-ness” in a longer Islamic history as much as an autochthonous one. This is the story presented in the Museé national du moudjahid in Algiers, which is overseen entirely by the Ministry of the Moudjahid and presents a view of history sometimes at odds with the same chronology privileged, for example, in the nearby Musée de l’armée. 6

More specifically, Colin de Verdière also acknowledged that the massacre at Sétif was an “inexcusable tragedy.” See “Algerians Remember Massacres of 1945,” Washington Post, 9 May 2005, www.washingtonpost.com.

7

The date 1 November 1954 is now known as la toussaint sanglante (Bloody All Saints Day), and, in Algeria, commemorates the concerted and systematic attacks that were launched against both French military and civilian targets in the rural regions of Algeria. On this day the leadership of the FLN issued a radio appeal from Cairo to Muslims across the region, asking them to fight for the “restoration of the Algerian state— sovereign, democratic and social—within the framework of the principles of Islam.” This call continued to define the terms of the Algerian resistance to French occupation over the next eight years, and still structures the retrospective imposition of a unified consensus in the fight for Algerian sovereignty. This consensus is well demonstrated in the reiterated slogan of “Un seul hero, le peuple” (A single hero: the people), or “La révolution par le peuple pour le people” (The revolution by the people, for the people). 8

222

Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” 44.

In his essay “Provincializing France?” Achille Mbembe responds to and builds upon the project of history writing outlined in Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. 10

11

Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 45.

My interests run tandem to but do not reduplicate those presented by various leading historians of France whose reflections on the personal and intellectual reasons for their continued interest in France even though the myths to which the country was once so romantically aligned have been so effectively debunked are assembled by Downs and Gerson in Why France?.

12

13

Mbembe, “Figures of Multiplicity,” 57.

14

Arendt, The Human Condition, 199.

notes for the introduction

9

15 In thinking about a decolonial practice of looking as related to the project of imagining the representational possibilities of a temporality positioned during and not post-war, I am also thinking of Walter Mignolo’s recent work on the “decolonial option,” especially the “Decolonial Aesthetics” manifesto and the exhibition of the same name organized at Duke University’s Jameson Gallery in April 2011. See also Mignolo, “Delinking.” 16 While the English-language prefers the word “demonstration” to “manifestation,” the translation loses something important to the French. “Manifestation” efficiently suggests the quality of “making manifest” that is associated with the root term “manifeste” (manifesto), as both a political and an artistic genre. The English “demonstration” places much more emphasis on showing and also diminishes the comparison between the kinds of use to which Malraux wanted to put Paris in making it the site of his first Manifestation biennale et internationale des jeunes artistes, as discussed in chapter 2, and the use of the Algerian ambitions for the same space. 17 See Mbembe, Notes on the Postcolony, esp. 14–15, wherein Mbembe describes the impossibility of attributing “post-” coloniality to a specific moment in a historical trajectory. See also 102, where he describes the “postcolony” in relationship to the ongoing challenges orchestrated by “societies recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the violence which the colonial relationship involves.” It is this combined historical specificity and temporal fluidity that makes Mbembe’s formulations so helpful for a project of thinking about the durational significance of decolonization. 18

Joselit renders this charge in the manifesto that concludes his book Feedback, 171–173.

The phrase “war on terror,” first used by President George W. Bush on 20 September 2001, announced the policy of actively waging war to eradicate al- Qaeda and any other organizations associated (by the West) with terrorist threats. In 2009, President Barack Obama requested that such a nomination be replaced by the term “Overseas Contingency Operation.” In 2013, he asked that the war, however named, be considered as over. The politics and economics of perpetual war are analyzed in relation to visuality and visibility in a book by Retort [Ian Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, and Michael Watts], Afflicted Powers. 19

20

Blanchot, Writing the Disaster, 1.

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notes for chapter 1

CHAPTER 1: FRAGMENTS; OR, THE ENDS OF PHOTOGRAPHY

“La psychologie de l’art” was the title of an article by Malraux that was published in the inaugural issue of Verve magazine in 1937. Malraux’s 1933 novel La condition humaine (Man’s Fate) presents a fictionalized account of the failed 1927 Revolution in Shanghai, in which Malraux considers the relationship between social change and individual action. His 1937 book L’espoir (Man’s Hope) fictionalizes what he claimed to be his own experiences fighting for Republican Spain.

1

Malraux’s choice to publish his essays in Verve, the journal newly founded by Tériade (born Estratios Eleftheriades), is not insignificant in view of the transformations to which Malraux would subject subsequent versions of the text. Proudly presenting a red, blue, and black cover designed by Matisse expressly for the journal, the inaugural issue of Verve announces its commitment to representing art of all types, “intimement mêlé à la vie de chaque époque” (intimately intertwined with the life of each epoch), and to using only the most technologically appropriate forms to do so. Surrounding Malraux’s original “Psychologie de l’art” (on which, it is noted, Malraux has already been working for several years) are reproduced a Dora Maar black-and-white photograph of Picasso’s Guernica as it stood in his Paris studio; photographs by Brassaï, a sequence of photographs by Blumenfeld of Maillol’s sculptures; lithographs by Léger of “air” and “water” and his drawn renditions of the Paris Exposition 1937; a work by Henri Michaux; and a selection of medieval illuminated manuscripts. Such eclecticism in a journal introduced by André Gide’s “A Few Reflections on the Disappearance of the Subject in Sculpture and Painting,” corresponds not only to the principle of technological reproduction on which Malraux’s analysis will be built, but also to Malraux’s continued reinvention of his text in accordance with “the life of each epoch.” See Verve 1, no. 1 (Winter 1937). 2

3

Verve 1, no. 2 (1937).

4

Verve 1, no. 3 (1938).

All subsequent references to Malraux’s text will be to this translation, albeit a subsequent edition: The Voices of Silence, translated by Stuart Gilbert in 1978 and published by Princeton University Press. The titles of the separate volumes of this edition are: vol. 1, The Museum Without Walls; vol. 2, The Metamorphoses of Apollo; vol. 3, The Creative Process; and vol. 4, The Aftermath of the Absolute. Despite its long gestation, the ideas proclaimed in Le musée imaginaire are not actually deployed by Malraux until his 1952–1954 publication of the three volumes of reproductions devoted to La sculpture mondiale (World Sculpture), the introduction to which stresses that this collection indeed constitutes the first actual musée imaginaire. For an account of the post-1951 revisions to which Malraux subjects his ideas, see Lyotard, Signed, Malraux.

5

An early critic of Malraux’s text went so far as to castigate Malraux for his “banal” and “obsolete” readings of individual works and to claim that Malraux’s model threatened a “disastrous impoverishment of art history.” See Davezac, “Malraux’s Ideas on Art and Method in Art Criticism.” On the history of art history as it developed in the American academy, see Crow, “The Practice of Art History in America.” For evidence of how a major figure in this history received Malraux’s method, see Gombrich, “Malraux’s Philosophy of Art in Historical Perspective,” and Gombrich, “André Malraux and the Crisis of Expressionism.”

6

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Here, Rosalind Krauss’s comments are characteristically acute. In contextualizing the shift of meaning enacted by the English language’s preference for the tangible and the real, she offers exactly the kind of culturally specific assessment that Malraux’s own text does not. See Krauss, “Postmodernism’s Museum without Walls,” 341–342.

8

Cadava, Words of Light, xviii. Jeanine Ferguson touches on similar points of analysis in “Benjamin’s Blur: The Site of Practice in the History of Photography,” 11.

9

10

Foster, Design and Crime, 77–80, passim.

11

Benjamin, “L’œuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproduction mécanisée.”

12

See Lebovics, André Malraux and the Reinvention of French Culture, 222.

notes for chapter 1

7 See Bergson, Matter and Memory (1896); and Sartre, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination (1940).

13 See Malraux, “Forging Man’s Fate in Spain,” The Nation (20 March 1937): 316. This article is a revised version of a speech that Malraux gave at a dinner organized by The Nation in his and Louis Fischer’s honor. Fischer, a communist who would later be accused of being a Stalinist, had also covered the Spanish Civil War for The Nation and is alleged to have fought there against Franco’s fascistas. See Lebovics, André Malraux and the Reinvention of French Culture, 222n31. 14 Nicholas Mirzoeff has written on the relationship of the overseer and corresponding models of “oversight” as important strongholds in the history of colonial visuality. See Mirzoeff, The Right to Look. 15

Kracauer, “Photography,” 58.

Kracauer, “Photography,” 52. In this instance, we might well see Kracauer as anticipating the “hauntological” attributes that Jacques Derrida describes in The Specters of Marx, and which, as he explains, position the temporality of the “event” as always yet to be finished in a future yet to come. While this suggestion depends on important anachronisms, and while I do not wish to impose a deconstructive rubric on Kracauer or even on Malraux, it bears noting that this model of the event and the temporality it contains infuses the manner in which the past is made to participate in a nearly simulacral rendition of the future in decolonizing France. Here, my choice of the word “simulacral” is meant to suggest some of the more negative implications of this anticipation of the hauntological in the interest of state hegemony. 16

17

Kracauer, “Photography,” 62.

18

Maleuvre, Museum Memories, 11.

19

Duthuit, Le musée inimaginable, 23.

Duthuit, Le musée inimaginable, 12–13. In the original French: “naît d’une rupture. Et par elle se laisserait le plus aisément définir sa nature, son existence due à un immense déchirement: on arrache les produits de l’art à la vie comme l’ongle de la chair. Auparavant, ils étaient partie intégrale d’une totalité présente: ils ne sont plus que des fragments condamnés à l’ inertie. Dépaysée, dépareilles, déracinés. L’ infranchissable abîme ouvert entre l’absence où ils s’engloutirent et nous qui vivotons encore, la grille refermée sur eux à l’ heure voulue par les règlements, nous le signifie assez durement. Il y a toujours des heures de visites pour les cimetières, mais c’est à toutes heures que les choses vivants communiquent. Interdiction aux belles

20

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notes for chapter 1

incarcérées d’agir sur nous; déposée à leurs pieds la gerbe d’admiration qu’elles méritent encore, nous n’avons plus qu’ à nous en retourner à nos chronos et à nos calendriers.” 21

Duthuit, Le musée inimaginable, 24–25 and passim.

22

Malraux, Voices of Silence, 623.

23

Malraux, Voices of Silence, 68.

Michelson, “Beaubourg: The Museum in the Era of Late Capitalism.” The claim about the “triumph” of American painting famously derives from Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting, and is echoed, with greater subtlety and historical nuance, in How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, Serge Guilbaut’s explanation of the ideological underpinning of the American investment in Abstract Expressionism.

24

25

Michelson, “Beaubourg,” 64.

26

Malraux, Voices of Silence, 17.

The references here are to Baudelaire’s “Salon of 1859,” and “Le peintre de la vie moderne” (1863).

27

The Rousseau painting is The Customs Post, circa 1890, oil on canvas, Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London. It is compared to the anonymous photograph in Malraux, Voices of Silence, 510 but legal restrictions prohibit its reproduction here. 28

29

Malraux, “Forging Man’s Fate in Spain,” 316.

30 Malraux, Voices of Silence, 514. In his 1950 response to Malraux’s text, Maurice Blanchot focuses on Malraux’s choice to emphasize mass production in relation to concerns regarding technologically motivated shifts from the spoken word to the printed word. See Blanchot, “Museum Sickness,” 42. 31

Malraux, Voices of Silence, 514.

32

Malraux, Voices of Silence, 17.

33

Lyotard, Signed, Malraux, 304.

Malraux, Voices of Silence, 122. Here it is also interesting to note that Malraux’s example of “fiction” would seem to represent the truth of the historical past as is suggested by the adjacent claim that the photograph could “record a dancer’s leap, but it could not show the Crusaders entering Jerusalem.”

34

35 Malraux is quite specific here: “The means of reproduction in the cinema is the moving photograph, but its means of expression is the sequence of planes.” See Voices of Silence, 123. Malraux’s model of film editing as the condition for storytelling assumes greater significance in light of the juxtaposition of actual images that he uses to illustrate the musée imaginaire. While, by his own definition, this act grants him the powers of expressivity, it also implies that he is involved in telling a story and, moreover, one that takes its form from the world of fiction. 36

Barthes, Camera Lucida, 76.

37 Malraux, Voices of Silence, 14. This shift from subject matter to art is how Douglas Crimp describes the fate of photography once institutionalized in the museum. For Crimp, the entrance of photography marks the end, rather than the continued reentrenchment, of the modernist aesthetic, a claim that the past twenty-some years of pho-

226

38

Malraux, Voices of Silence, 66, 68.

39

Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” 202.

notes for chapter 1

tographic representation in the museum would certainly seem to challenge. See Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins, esp. 44–65. In relationship to Malraux’s promotion of art above and beyond context, it is here fascinating (if not also ironic) to note that since the publication of Voices of Silence, it has been proven that The Man with the [Golden] Helmet, is, in fact, not a work by Rembrandt after all. See Otto Friedrich’s report on this “discovery” and its implications for popular conceptions of art-historical attribution in “The Man with the Golden Helmet,” Time, December 16, 1985.

40 My gratitude is due Antoine Coron, Director of the Rare Books Reserve at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, for having provided access to the numerous editions of Malraux’s text, including his handwritten annotated proofs. 41 The reference to the silence of “statues” is not made arbitrarily. In 1953, Alain Resnais and Chris Marker collaborated on Les statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die), a film that purported to discuss African art, but which was censored for its allusions to and indictment of French cultural imperialism. Further, Resnais has referred to L’année dernier à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) as a “documentary about a statue,” an allusion to its allegorical function as a representation of an event without a history. For more on this statement, see Lynn Higgins, New Novel, New Wave, New Politics, 101.

See Farmer’s analysis of the Oradour trials as indicative of the “guerre Francofrançaise” that categorized the purge of the late 1940s and early 1950s, “Postwar Justice in France: Bordeaux 1953,” 196.

42

43

Higgins, “The Barbie Affair and the Trials of Memory,” 20.

44

Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome, 50.

45

Judt, Past Imperfect, 47.

46 The original French reads: “Au nom d’un État pratiquant une politique d’ hégémonie idéologique.” Cass. Crim., Dec. 20, 1985, 1986 J. C. P. II G, No. 20, 655, Barbie. Cited in Curran, “The Politics of Memory / Errinerungspolitik and the Use and Propriety of Law in the Process of Memory Construction,” 6. 47 In 2001, suppressed evidence of torture employed in France and Algeria during the war became the subject of a new controversy following publication in the French newspaper Le Monde of Louisette Ighilariz’s personal account of torture at the hands of the French authorities during the Algerian War of Independence. Ighilariz’s claims were immediately refuted by those parties responsible for the suppression of the famous “Battle of Algiers,” including General Jacques Massu. In response, General Paul Aussaresses published Services spéciàux, Algérie 1955–1957, in which he conceded that torture had been employed and furthermore insisted that it was a necessary tool in military actions. His claims were quickly denounced by the surviving war generals who were implicated by his report, despite the plethora of evidence supporting his allegations. 48 For more on this, see Donadey, “ ‘Une Certaine Idée de la France’: The Algeria Syndrome and Struggles over French Identity.” 49

Rousso makes a similar point in The Vichy Syndrome, 17.

227

notes for chapter 2

50 Emmanuel Mounier, “Fidélité,” Esprit (February 1950): 178; as cited in Judt, Past Imperfect, 175. 51

Judt, 175.

For more on this topic, see, in particular, Jacques Rancière’s Disagreement (1999; 2002), which becomes so central to Kristin Ross’s analysis of the events of May 1968 in her May ’68 and Its Afterlives.

52

53

Malraux, Voices of Silence, 468.

54 While it exceeds the parameters of this discussion, it might be fruitful to compare the temporal dimensions of Malraux’s humanist universalisms with the roughly simultaneous efforts of the Annales School, a group of French historians, to discredit the long durée of narrative history in favor of structural epistemes and recurrent significations. 55

Malraux, Voices of Silence, 515.

56

Malraux, Voices of Silence, 520.

57

Malraux, Voices of Silence, 68.

58

Lyotard, Signed, Malraux, 305.

See Moncef Khémiri, “André Malraux et le Monde Arabe, Lettre ouvert à André Malraux,” www.malraux.org, article 64, December 2009.

59

See Malraux’s Presentation á l’assemblée nationale, 29 December 1945, as printed in the Journal officiel des débats de l’assemblée nationale constituante, no. 21 (1945): 521–523.

60

61 For details about this early precursor to Malraux’s list of official Maisons de la culture (Houses of Culture), see Janine Mossuz-Lavau, André Malraux et le gaullisme, 58. 62

For more on this history, see Cooper, France in Indochina.

63 For a revisionist account of the fantasies that fueled Malraux’s Indochinese sojourn, see Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina, 72–106. 64 Jeanette Greenfield discusses Malraux within the context of her broad analysis of the legal and cultural ramifications of remunerating and repatriating stolen cultural property in The Return of Cultural Treasures, 282–286. 65

Krauss, “The Ministry of Fate,” 1001.

66

See Hollier, “Au-delà du collage,” 22–23.

67

Michelson, “Beaubourg,” 44.

68 Jules Ferry’s ambitions to universalize education in France were codified in the eponymous laws of 16 June 1881 and 28 March 1882. These laws made primary education in France mandatory and free, and also removed it from the oversight of the church. For a complete account of Malraux’s ministerial programs as well as reprints of his parliamentary speeches, see Le comité d’histoire du ministère de la culture, Les affaires culturelles au temps d’André Malraux, 1959–1969.

CHAPTER 2: FAÇADES; OR, THE SPACE OF SILENCE

This vote would become one of the most divisive issues among the French left, since it would later be pointed out that even the Parti communiste français (PCF) had voted to support the coup.

1

228

The Soustelle appointment makes clear how concerned the de Gaulle administration was with assuaging the generals, who had threatened to take Paris. Soustelle’s support of the generals was so great that he would eventually be exiled for fear of reprisal. For details about Soustelle and the multiple reversals that would characterize his political understanding of Algerian independence, see Le Sueur, Uncivil War, esp. 28–34. 3

notes for chapter 2

See the letter written to President René Coty, signed jointly by Malraux, Roger Martin du Gard, François Mauriac, and Jean-Paul Sartre, asking the government to reverse its ban on La Question, a personal account by the French Algerian journalist, Henri Alleg. By the time of its ban, the book had already sold 65,000 copies. More than likely, Malraux’s objection to the confiscation of Alleg’s book had as much to do with his commitment to authorial rights as it did to the subject of torture; nonetheless his open stance during the last weeks of René Coty’s presidency made the conservatives in de Gaulle’s 1958 government nervous.

2

To understand some of the reasons why it was thought that France needed a minister of culture, see, for example, Robert Brichet’s adamant condemnation of the cultural administration as overseen by the Third and Fourth Republics, “Pour un ministère des Arts,” 39–42. 4

Regarding Malraux’s appointment, it was more precisely, on 3 February 1959 that de Gaulle announced Malraux as minister of state charged with some dossiers from the Ministries of Education and of Industry. On 24 July 1959, this charge was refined to minister of state charged with cultural affairs. See Poujol, “The Creation of a Ministry of Culture in France,” 251–260. See also “Decrét 59–212 du 3 février 1959 relatif aux attributions d’un minister d’État,” in Journal officiel de la République française, 4 February 1959. 5

6 The original French of the 24 July decree reads: “[faire] accessibles les œuvres capitales de l’ humanité, et d’abord de la France, au plus grand nombre de Français, d’assurer la plus vaste audience à notre patrimoine culturel, et de favoriser la création des oeuvres et de l’esprit qui l’enrichissent.” Reprinted in Lantelme, La grand pitié des monuments de France, 43n81. 7

Lebovics, André Malraux and the Reinvention of French Culture, 42–45.

Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, 5n11. Shepard’s analysis of the impact that decolonization would have on metropolitan intellectual life develops upon insights manifest in Paul Clay Sorum, Intellectuals and Decolonization in France, but extends these arguments to consider the equal impact that decolonization would have on governmental ideology. 8

Again, like the traumas with which it is sometimes aligned, the idea that the event is “unique” does not prevent it from being repeatable or existing only in one temporality. This is one of the crucial lessons gleaned from Derrida’s model of “hauntology” for the structures of historical time and it is certainly essential to the kinds of layering and repetition that mark the 1950s and 1960s as epochs of both reconstruction and decolonization. 9

10 This is how Lebovics presents Malraux’s formulation of fame. See André Malraux and the Reinvention of French Culture, ix.

See Présentation du budget des affaires culturelles, 17 November 1959, reprinted in Malraux, Discours prononcés à l’Assemblée nationale, 1945–1976, 13.

11

12

Sherman, review of “Mona Lisa’s Escort,” by Herman Lebovics, 1027–1028.

229

notes for chapter 2

13 The first Paris Biennale was held from 2 to 25 October 1959 at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris. The biennial’s archives (1959–1987) have recently been deposited in the Archives de la critique de l’art in Châteaugiron, where they are overseen by Laurence Le Poupon. 14 Cogniat had also been artistic director of the Galerie des Beaux-Arts at the time of the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme (1938) and was also concurrently the Inspecteur Principal des Beaux-Arts. 15 Significantly, the members of this jury were Georges Boudaille, Michel Conil-Lacoste, Pierre Descargues, Michel Ragon, Pierre Restany, Guy Weelen, and Yvon Taillandier. 16 These ten students represented l’Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, l’Ecole nationale des arts décoratifs, the Salons de la “Jeune peinture,” “Jeune sculpture,” and “Jeune gravure,” and, eventually, the Groupe des Informels, which will be discussed in chapter 4. 17

In addition, there were a number of attendant exhibitions.

18 The original French reads: “Dans aucune autre ville, des rues entières, auprès d’un fleuve que bordent les boîtes des bouquinistes et les boutiques des marchands d’oiseaux, n’opposent familièrement les toiles des plus grands maîtres aux œuvres des débutants, le génie d’ hier à l’espoir d’aujourd’ hui. C’est ici seulement, que la peinture semble pousser entre les pavés. . . . Ces tableaux que le monde vivant vient d’envoyer à Paris apportent l’ hommage de tous les peintures à la ville dont le monde futur dira, lorsqu’elle aura disparu: ‘Là, la peinture vécut en liberté.’ ” See Malraux, Première biennale de Paris, unpaginated.

When Pierre Sudreau was appointed Commissaire à la construction et à l’urbanisme in May 1955, he was charged with coordinating the redevelopment of an expanded Paris region in conjunction with the Prefecture de Seine, an appointment that the urban historian Rosemary Wakeman suggests was met by local planning entities, including the municipal council, as evidence of the state’s intention to intervene in local planning. See Wakeman, The Heroic City, 319–324, passim. A member of the Resistance, Sudreau had spent the Liberation of Paris in Buchenwald and later returned to a position of authority in France, eventually becoming Prefect of the Loire-et-Cher before assuming his Paris post in 1955. In 1956, he published the ironically titled “Reconquête de Paris,” which advocated slum clearance in order to improve living conditions in the capital. For an illustration of Sudreau’s own understanding of Parisian urbanism in response to the concerns of Europeanization and economic competition, see also his “À l’heure de l’Europe.” 19

See Présentation du projet de loi de programme relatif à la restauration de grands monuments historiques, which is reprinted in Malraux, Discours prononcés a l’Assemblée nationale, 48. As Herman Lebovics notes, this ambition is not without its irony; the Rockefeller Foundation of New York would pay for most of the restoration program at Versailles. See Lebovics, André Malraux and the Reinvention of French Culture, 101.

20

This law was updated on 7 May 1936, to clarify that the 1852 legislation was to be understood as specifically concerned with ravalement (cleaning by means of scraping, washing, or recoating), thereby further illuminating the nature of what it meant to be in a “good state of cleanliness” (un bon état de propreté) and confirming that such a state was specifically about the exterior, i.e., the public component of the building.

21

22 Stéphane, André Malraux, entretiens et précisions, 130, cited in Lantelme, La grande pitié des monuments en France, 25.

230

Lantelme, La grand pitié des monuments de France, 123.

In arguing for urban improvements, Malraux had suggested that, because of the decay of so many important buildings, “La France perd ainsi peu à peu son visage et si elle continue dans cette voie elle ne présentera bientôt plus d’attrait pour le tourisme, que constitue pourtant l’une des sources importantes de revenus du pays” (France thus loses face [son visage] little by little, and if it continues down this road it will soon no longer present any attraction for tourism, which still constitutes one of the nation’s important sources of revenue). Journal officiel de la République française, 24 November 1960, as cited in Lantelme, La grand pitié des monuments de France, 45.

24

25 Such debates about whether or not the settler— or so-called “pied noir”—populations, were or could be French would only increase after the Algerian War of Independence, when thousands of these nominally “French” citizens, along with the harkis, the nativeborn Algerian paramilitaries who, for one reason or another, had joined the French in fighting for l’Algérie française, sought to re-establish themselves in mainland France. These debates would culminate in the 2005 legislation discussed in chapter 6. See also Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization, esp. 207–247.

notes for chapter 2

23

The dense history of race and color in France is mitigated not only by practice but also by various legislative codes regarding the acknowledgment of ethnic or racial difference. The Color of Liberty, edited by Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall, is excellent on this topic, especially for its expanded historical overview and its presentation of carefully selected case studies.

26

Debates about wearing the hijab in public have produced an important bibliography in recent years. Of special note here are Scott, The Politics of the Veil and Laborde, Critical Republicanism. 27

28 In his original wording, “la situation des monuments historiques en France est dramatique . . . il faudrait pour y remedier un budget considerable.” Malraux, Discours prononcés a l’Assemblée nationale, 13. 29 Having considered and issued resolutions regarding the “question of Algeria” first on 15 February 1957 and then again on 10 December 1957, the United Nations General Assembly would formally recognize the right of the Algerian people to self-determination and independence, in Resolution 1573 (XV), issued 19 December 1960.

In French phrasing, these monuments were “bâti pour le roi, conquis par le peuple, sauvé par la nation.” See Assembleé nationale, 8 September 1966; reprinted in Lantelme, La grand pitié des monuments de France, 149–150.

30

For an extended account of this history, and in particular of Viollet-le-Duc’s founding principles of restoration as articulated in response to a burgeoning culture of museum and tourist architecture, see Murphy, Memory and Modernity. See also Choay, L’allégorie du patrimoine; and François Loyer, Ville d’ hier, ville d’aujourd’ hui en Europe. 31

32 Nabila Oulebsir is especially helpful in delineating the use of Roman patrimony in Algeria by Napoleon III’s scientific committee in order to legitimize French claims to the territory. See Oulebsir, Les usages du patrimoine, especially chapter 2. Also of interest in this regard is the fact that it was Louis-Philippe (reigned 1830–1848)—the first popular sovereign, i.e., the first “King of the French,” rather than “of France”—who had committed the French to full war and to the long-term occupation of Algeria following

231

notes for chapter 2

Charles X’s original conquest in 1830. And, while it may not exceed the significance of the play on words that it suggests, it is also worth noting the irony that Charles X’s abdication in 1830 marked the end of the period of French history that has been self-designated as “the Restoration.” The phrase derives from Walter Benjamin’s famous 1935 essay, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century.”

33

In reality, this practice of clearing urban space in order to afford better views onto singular monuments had begun long before Haussmann, whose ideas only developed on the rationalist, enlightened urbanism articulated by such figures as Marc-Antoine Laugier, who wrote “De l’embellissement des villes” (On the Embellishment of Towns) in 1753; and Pierre Patte, who wrote Monuments érigés en France à la gloire de Louis XV (Monuments Erected in France for the Glory of Louis XV) in 1765. Patte’s conception of urban planning is best evidenced in his comprehensive designs for rebuilding Paris, mapped as if it were merely an account of otherwise discrete proposals for a monument to King Louis XV. 34

35 For greater detail regarding the French history of conservation and the debates that surrounded it during this period, see the special issue of Urbanisme 147, no. 8 (1975). 36

Wakeman, Heroic City, 297.

37 See Conseil municipal de Paris, “Solutions aux problèmes de Paris.” Here, Wakeman’s account of “Planning Paris” during the Fourth Republic is particularly helpful in addressing an important lacuna in the English-language literature about Paris. See Wakeman, Heroic City, esp. 289–341. 38

Lopez, “Paris se meurt,” 84.

39 Of course, conservative preservationists and disgruntled regionalists, unimpressed by the failure to reallocate funds away from Paris, were not the only ones to object to the destruction of old Paris or the building of the new city. These urban changes became fodder for the prolific, and now rather celebrated, writings of the Situationist International, who saw in the increasingly modernist plans for the city a state-ordained refusal of the everyday and the individual, in favor of spectacle and control. The Situationists’ writings on the city have been fervently translated and anthologized. See Andreotti and Costa, Theory of the Dérive and other Situationist Writings on the City; and McDonough, The Situationists and the City. For analysis of these documents, see Stadler, The Situationist City.

Abel Durand, as cited in the Journal officiel, 24 November 1960, and reprinted in Lantelme, La grand pitié des monuments de France, 49.

40

41 The disparate architectural portions of five medieval French cloisters that had been collected by the American sculptor George Grey Barnard were eventually purchased, rebuilt on property in north Manhattan according to the designs of Charles Collens, and opened as a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1938, thanks to the largesse of benefactor John D. Rockefeller Jr.

Additional research on urban planning in the early Fifth Republic remains to be done, but important trends and details are noted in the concluding chapter of Wakeman’s Heroic City, esp. 341–344. For more on the destruction involved in French urbanism of the 1950s

42

232

43 For more on this topic, see Fijalkow, La construction des îlots insalubres; and LévyVroelant, “Le diagnostic d’insalubrité et ses conséquences sur la ville: Paris 1894–1960.” Lévy-Vroelant’s analysis is especially interesting in this regard, as she documents the failure of the peripheral quarters to achieve the patrimonial status ascribed to central neighborhoods, even if and when the “atmosphere” celebrated in some of the preservationist discourse was the same. Taking particular focus on the discussion of public health and sanitation as a fundamental justification for clearance, she also notes that buildings and occasionally entire blocks were razed, even though only a few isolated or individual residents had tuberculosis. Her argument implies that even the city planners knew that the demolitions had less to do with lowering tuberculosis rates than with augmenting patrimonial or economic value. 44

notes for chapter 2

and 1960s, see Evenson, Paris, 199–362; Eveno and de Mezamat, Paris perdu; and Pillement, Paris poubelle.

Stewart, “Middle East Urban Studies: Identity and Meaning,” 178.

Durand, as cited in the Journal officiel, 24 November 1960; reprinted in Lantelme, La grand pitié des monuments de France, 49.

45

Le quartier du Marais was officially bordered by the rue François-Miron, the rue SaintAntoine, the rue Saint-Paul, the quai des Célestins, the quai de l’Hôtel de Ville, the rue de Brosse, and the place Saint-Gervais. It is ironic that these boundaries actually coincide with one of the last sites that had arbitrarily been preserved, despite the razing of tubercular-related areas nearby. See Lévy-Vroelant, “Le Diagnostic d’insalubrité,” 23, 46. 46

In addition to the texts by Lévy-Vroelant and Fijalkow cited above, for analysis of the debates about sanitation during the Vichy regime, see Backouche, “Rénover un quartier parisien sous Vichy.” See also Wakeman, Heroic City, 333–340 for an instructive forerunner to Malraux’s plans in those proposed by Robert Auzelle and Georges Sébille in 1939 to clear out the bâtiments parasitaires (parasite-infested buildings) while maintaining the ancient streetscape and public courtyards. Wakemen presents the Auzelle-Sébille plan as a compromise between the preservationists—most notably those ascribing to the experimental humanist urbanism in Gaston Bardet’s Atelier supérieur d’urbanisme appliqué at the Institut d’urbanisme— and the modernist impulse to clear the area entirely in an extreme gesture of slum abatement. Crane’s “Mutable Fragments” and Heckart’s “The Balance and the Bridge” present evidence of similar trends in both Marseille and Avignon, each of which brought its own historical and regional interests to bear on the preservationist debate. See also Newsome, French Urban Planning, 1940–1968, esp. 41–54 passim. 47

48

Wakeman, Heroic City, 298, 332.

49

Wakeman, Heroic City, 332.

50

See Bandyopadhyay, “The State, Private Capital and Housing in the Paris Region.”

51 See Eisinger, “French Urban Housing and the Mixed Economy,” 136. Eisinger notes that SEMs are common in France and have been developed to accommodate various quasipublic enterprises, including the rail system, Air France, various utilities, and a number of banks. He argues that, based on familiarity with such models, the Fourth and Fifth Republics turned to similar arrangements to solve the housing crisis, noting the reversals that had led to an increasing reliance on state authority for public utilities in the decades following the First World War. It was, for example, in 1935 that the government expanded

233

notes for chapter 2

the federal statutes governing its holdings of utility shares. In turn, this legislation led to the production of 30,000 housing units, mostly in Paris and Marseille just before the Second World War. Subsequent decrees of 1953 and 1954 provided the terms by which local governments could become majority shareholders in mixed corporations concerned with all kinds of housing. Manuel Castells writes, for example, that of the changes facilitated by these new economic structures between 1951 and 1963, the most “spectacular” were the “public and parapublic sector of social and subsidized housing.” See Castells, City, Class and Power, 51.

52

Gwendolyn Wright makes this point in The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism, 92. John Zarobell puts this early episode of military urbanism to use for art historical analysis in his Empire of Landscape. See especially 9–32 for his analysis of Jean-Charles Langlois’s Panorama of Algiers. For more on Lyautey’s formulations and Prost’s plans, see also Cohen and Eleb, Casablanca; and Cohen’s “Henri Prost & Casablanca.” In the chapter “Techno-Cosmpolitanism: Governing Morocco” in French Modern, Rabinow also analyzes Lyautey’s urbanism from a decidedly Foucauldian perspective. His analysis of Prost is in the same volume, 232–242. 53

54 See Hubert Lyautey, Paroles d’action: Madagascar, Sud- Oranais, Oran, Maroc (1900– 1926 ) (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1927); as cited in Abu-Lughod, Rabat, 143. 55 Colonial Modern, edited by Avermaete, Karakayali, and von Osten, makes much of this model of the laboratory, which was visually and materially developed in the exhibition In the Desert of Modernity: Colonial Planning and After at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin in 2008; and at La Fabrique Culturelle des Anciens Abbatoirs de Casablanca in 2009. What is especially interesting about this exhibition is the equal attention it gave to the mistranslations and opportunities that arose from such experiments in the precise locations of their original enactment. 56

See Wright, “The Ambiguous Modernisms of African Cities,” 226.

On this history, see Hadjri and Osmani, “The Spatial Development and Urban Transformation of Colonial and Postcolonial Algiers,” esp. 30–35. For a historical analysis of the Place du Gouvernement from its inception until the early post-Independence period, see Çelik, “Colonial / Postcolonial Intersections,” 63–72. See also Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations; Deluz, L’urbanisme et l’architecture d’Alger; and Almi, Urbanisme et colonisation. A comprehensive history of Algiers from Roman to contemporary times is found in Mezali, Alger. For an expanded architectural survey of all of France’s colonial empire, see Culot and Thiveaud, Architectures françaises outre-mer. 57

Oulebsir, Les usages du patrimoine, 136. On the Boulevard de l’Imperatrice itself, see also Cresti, “Une façade pour Alger,” 64–88. 58

Thanks to one of the anonymous readers of my manuscript for the suggestion to mention this film here, in relationship to the Battle of Algiers, and not just in chapter 5.

59

Ginette Vincendeau observes that, in 1937, the film ranked seventh at the box office, and exported well except in the United States, where its release was delayed to accommodate its remake as Algiers in 1938, by John Cromwell. See Vincendeau, “Pepe le Moko,” 370, n2. The film would be remade again as a musical in 1948 by John Berry. 60

61 See Megherbi, Les Algériens au miroir du cinéma colonial, 244–255. See also ClancySmith, “Exoticism, Erasures, and Absences,” for a thorough description of the migrant

234

62 Pontecorvo, La battaglia d’Algeria, 1966; re-released 2004 (New York: Criterion Collection). See also Solinas et al., Gillo Pontecorvo’s “The Battle of Algiers”; and Saadi’s La Bataille d’Alger. The film begins in medias res with the capture of Ali La Pointe, whose exploits structure the narrative. All the same, it is not quite accurate to say that La Pointe is the principal male protagonist. One of the most important aspects of this film, one which merits further discussion elsewhere, is its cinematic retelling of the legend about the extent to which the Algerian War depended on both the illusion and the fact of the transfer of power and leadership from individuals to large collectives. See Prochaska, “That Was Then, This Is Now.”

notes for chapter 2

and cosmopolitan populations that had settled in Algiers in the first half of the period of French occupation. For an account of internal migration as it impacted the Casbah, see Lawless, “Algeria.” On the Casbah itself, see also the Étude pour la rénovation et la restructuration de la Casbah d’Alger: Les transformations du tissue de la Casbah pendant la période colonial; and Djiar, “Symbolism and Memory in Architecture.”

The degree to which the marine quarter was a subject of focus can be seen in the multiple plans drafted for this particular area by the architects associated with the Prost plan, but also, and more famously, by Le Corbusier in the early 1930s. See especially the wellillustrated and documented chapters by Hakimi, “René Danger, Henri Prost et les débuts de la planification urbaine à Alger”; and Cohen, “Le Corbusier, Perret, et les figures d’un Alger moderne,” in Cohen, Oulebsir, and Kanoun, eds., Alger, 139–185. 63

64 For more on the variety of tropes through which indigenous populations in Africa and North Africa were pictured for tourist pleasure, see Tamar Garb, ed., Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive: African Photography from the Walther Collection (Göttingen: Steidl, 2013). My thanks to Monica Rumsey for directing me to this resource. 65

Prost, “L’urbanisme au Maroc,” 36–37.

66

Chatelain, “Quartiers historiques et centre ville,” 340.

See Stungo, “The Malraux Act 1962–1972,” 360. On the SEM, its past and future, see also Chazel and Poyet, L’Économie mixte.

67

68

Stungo, “The Malraux Act 1962–1972,” 362.

69 In Britain, a similar preservation act is encoded in the “Civic Amenities Act of 1967.” It is ironic, given the anti-American thrust of Malraux’s reverence for the city as well as the fear of Lopez-style planning, that the United States had already developed the practice of claiming entire neighborhoods as historic sites as early as 1931 in Charleston, South Carolina. See Datel and Dingemans, “Why Places are Preserved.”

In her analysis of Gordon Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect (1975), Pamela M. Lee provides an excellent summary of the debates surrounding the renovation of the Beaubourg platform as they persisted throughout the 1970s. See Lee, Object to Be Destroyed, 169–197.

70

71

Wakeman, Heroic City, 319.

72

See Laprade, “Aménagement des quartiers historiques,” 156–160.

73

Wakeman, Heroic City, 339.

74

See Wieviorka, “Un lieu de mémoire,” 80–98.

For more on the Marais in this period, see Cobb’s sprightly “The Assassination of Paris.” 75

235

notes for chapter 2

76

Chatelain, “Quartiers historiques et centre ville,” 346.

According to the legal conditions of Algeria’s statehood and Algerians’ legal status as French citizens after 1947, their immigration was, juridically speaking, a migration. See MacMaster, Colonial Migrants and Racism, passim.

77

78

Stungo, “The Malraux Act 1962–72,” 358.

79

Kain, “Conservation Planning in France,” 221.

80 Georges Simenon’s novella Le Déménagement (1967) provides an interesting example of a French family that chooses to move from the Marais to a new housing unit in one of the suburban developments, noting, in particular, the psychological impact of such a move on the traditional family structure.

Although the bidonville is typically associated with the image of North African families, it was actually mostly Portuguese immigrants who were the first inhabitants. In addition to Noiriel’s Creuset français, Hervo’s Chronique du bidonville is useful for a personal account of time spent in the Nanterre bidonville during the Algerian War of Independence. Site-specific details are provided in Sayad, Un Nanterre algérien, terre de bidonvilles, and in Soulignac, La banlieue parisienne.

81

In fact, while Fanon was writing “On Violence” and the collection of essays that would become The Wretched of the Earth, he was living in Tunis, where he was working as an editor of and contributor to El Moudjahid, the official organ of the FLN.

82

83

Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 3–5.

This film, based on Brahim Benaïcha’s autobiographical novel, Vivre au paradis, d’un oasis à un bidonville, also demonstrates how the Algerian migrants to Paris during the war were subject to a doubled erasure after Algerian independence. Forgotten not only by the French, who continually promised them integration, they were also disregarded by the Algerian government that had once promised rewards for the continued source of income that all Algerians in France were mandated to deliver to FLN representatives during the war.

84

85

MacMaster, “Shantytown Republics,” 80.

For more on this, see Kennet, Preservation, 64; also cited in Stungo, “The Malraux Act 1962–72,” 361.

86

The original French reads: “Dans ces terres que vous devastez, vivaient des peuples industrieux et prospres? Qu’ importe, puisqu’elles vous servent à fonder un empire.” Duthuit, Le musée inimaginable, 25. 87

“Le plan de sauvegarde du Marais (1965),” Paris Projet, 23–24 (1983): 51; as translated in Evenson, Paris, 315.

88

89 Mayol, “The Neighborhood,” in The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 2: Living and Cooking, de Certeau et al., 7–14.

In the original text: “Ces monuments sont les témoins de nos histoires.” See Michel Lantelme, La grande pitié des monuments de France, 141. Italics mine.

90

Malraux’s original wording referred to his “Projet de loi complètent la législation sur la protection du patrimoine historique et esthétique de la France et tendant à faciliter la restauration.” See Malraux, Discours prononcés a L’ Assemblée nationale, 52. The law itself can be

91

236

92 Malraux, “23 juillet 1962 présentation du projet du loi complétant la legislation sur la protection du patrimoine historique et esthétique de la France et tendant à faciliter la restauration,” Discours prononcés à l’Assemblée nationale, 52–55. 93

Prost, “L’urbanisme au Maroc,” 36–37.

94

Stungo, “The Malraux Act 1962–72,” 361.

95

Bouguignon, “Les secteurs sauvegardés.”

96

Forster, “Monument / Memory and the Mortality of Architecture,” 2.

notes for chapter 3

read in Journal officiel, Lois et décrets, 7 August 1962, where it was passed as article number 62–903, “complétant la législation sur la protection du patrimoine historique et esthétique de la France et tendant à faciliter la restauration immobilière.”

CHAPTER 3: SONIC YOUTH, SONIC SPACE

The term “disciple” corresponds to Isou’s Messianic self-perception and is perpetuated by such figures as Roland Sabatier, who use it to name the larger flock of young poets and artists who surrounded Isou in the 1940s and early 1950s. See Sabatier, Le Lettrisme, les Creations et les Créateurs, 55. Pomerand was born in Paris in 1926, but grew up in Alsace and Marseille. During the war, his mother was deported to Auschwitz. He met Isou in a soup kitchen for orphaned Jews in Paris, just after each of them had arrived there.

1

Along with Serge Berna, Jean-Louis Brau, and Gil J. Wolman, Debord parted ways with Isou after Isou publicly denounced their protest of Charlie Chaplin as “Fascist” at a press conference for Chaplin’s film, Limelight, at the Ritz Hotel, Paris, on 29 October 1952. The content of their protest was detailed in the form of a mimeographed broadside, “Finis les pieds plats” (No More Flat Feet), signed “l’Internationale lettriste”: Serge Berna, GuyErnest Debord, Jean-Louis Brau, and Gil J. Wolman, and was dated 29 October 1952. Led by Debord, the splinter group re-formed itself as the Lettrist International on 7 December 1952 at the Aubvervilliers Conference and developed many of the practices, including the dérive and psychogeography, for which the Situationists, as they would come to be known, are best remembered. Following the split with Isou, Debord was characteristically vehement in his excoriation of the Lettrist project, despite having first come to Paris to join the group after the Cannes Film Festival in 1950 and despite the debt his early film projects owe to Isou’s Traité de bave et d’ éternité. 2

Sussman’s exhibition was accompanied by an important catalogue that set the tone for early research into both the Lettrist and Situationist Internationals. See Sussman, On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time. While the present study cannot accommodate the body of well-known work that has issued since that exhibition, the privilege this material has received in art-historical circles, and the authority allowed Debord’s language, has occluded other practices and the genealogies to which they might give rise. 3

The particulars of Isou’s economic model were first published in his Traité d’ économie nucléaire: le soulèvement de la “jeunesse”(1949) and the subsequent journal, Front de la jeunesse, which he began in 1950. He also printed multiple versions of a “Manifesto” detailing the revolution of the young. In Isou’s customary refusal to cede the standardized understanding of terms, he specified that “ jeune” need not be associated only with the young, as did Filippo Tomasso Marinetti in his famous claims about the age of the Futurists in

4

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his Futurist Manifesto (1909). Instead, Isou explains that he means the term as a marker of those whose existence had not yet become (or had refused to become) equivalent to their economic function. Richard Ivan Jobs notes how confused Isou’s economics were, and how marginal their effects. See Jobs, Riding the New Wave, 45. See in particular Blanchot’s analysis of the linguistic category of the word, which for him evokes, in its very distance from what it means to describe, “the absence of everything.” For Blanchot, “This language of the unreal, this fictive language which delivers us to fiction, comes from silence and returns to silence.” Blanchot, “Mallarmé’s Experience,” 39.

5

The phrase is central to the arguments Habermas mounts in The Structural Transformation of the Bourgeois Public Sphere.

6

According to a widely repeated anecdote, Isou’s visit to the editorial offices of the French literary magazine Nouvelle revue française in the summer of 1945 was one of the first callings the young exile made upon his arrival in Paris. Hoping for an audience with the magazine’s director, Jean Paulhan, but finding him absent, Isou made do with presenting himself and his “revolutionary” manuscript instead to the editor, Gaston Gallimard. When even this direct approach failed to garner Isou the approval he desired, he took a page from the avant-garde he hoped both to emulate and undermine, and staged the interruption at the Théâtre du vieux-colombier. It was on the heels of the press attention resulting from this enterprise that Gallimard agreed to publish Isou’s book, which was released in 1947 and included not only Isou’s lengthy analysis, but also “Le manifeste de la poésie lettriste” and several examples of the Lettrist poems, including “Vingt récitations graves et joyeuses” that Isou had recited at the Vieux-Colombier. 7

Although the event received no media attention, Isou had first performed his poetry at the Salle des Sociétés Savantes, weeks before his disruption at the Vieux-Colombier.

8

Isou’s original words were: “Douze millions de jeunes vont descendre dans la rue pour faire la révolution Lettriste.” See the preface by Mark Partouche to Isou, Contre l’ internationale situationniste 1960–2000, 14.

9

See Isou’s autobiographical account, L’ agrégation d’un nom et d’un messie (The Aggregation of a Name and the Making of a Messiah). 10

Isou, “Le manifeste de la poésie lettriste,” in Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique, 14. 11

While Isou made this claim in many different publications, he perhaps stated it most succinctly with the advantage of hindsight in his 1964 tract, “Tour de feu,” where he asserts explicitly that “when the crisis of language and poetry is pushed beyond certain limits, it ends up placing the very structure of society in question.” See Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 266.

12

In a 1948 tract published in the short-lived journal Hikma, which issued from Tunis, Isou specifically denounces Surrealism’s failures as having prepared for Lettrism’s success. See Isou, “Lettrisme et révolution de la jeunesse,” Hikma 1, no. 2 (1948): n.p.

13

14 Originally located somewhere between music and poetry, Lettrist production eventually expanded to a totalizing aesthetic principle that included all the arts under the domain of an integrated practice. As such, Isou’s production and theorization encompass work not only in the traditional literary and visual arts, including the novel and paint-

238

15 As if following Isou’s lead, Seaman organizes his Concrete Poetry in France more or less according to the same schema. 16 Consider, for instance, Isou’s declaration that “la Lettrie ne devait apparaître qu’en France, parce que ce pays est la source du langage clair et aussi la terre de la plus belle poésie et musique contemporaine . . . la Lettrie est française, premièrement parce qu’elle est une oeuvre consciente (c’est-à-dire que par ses possibilités mêmes, conserve tout ce qu’on veut faire voir).” (The lettrie could only have appeared in France because this country is the source of clear language and also the land of the most beautiful poetry and contemporary music. . . . The lettrie is French, primarily, because it is a conscious work [which is to say that by its own possibilities, it preserves everything you want to see]). Isou, Introduction à une nouvelle poésie, 280. These words come in an appendix, the fifth, that Isou writes to the section “Explications aux critiques” (Explanations to Critics), which concerns “La lettrie comme oeuvre française” (The Lettrie as a French Work of Art). 17

Isou, “Le manifeste de la poésie lettriste,” 12.

18

Isou, “Le manifeste de la poésie lettriste,” 14.

notes for chapter 3

ing, but also in performance, photography, dance, theater, and even theoretical musings in such seemingly unaesthetic realms as “erotology,” psychology, and economics. His bibliography, for instance, includes both La mécanique des femmes (1949), a rather provocative defense of a woman’s rights to sexual pleasure (including some tips on how to achieve it); and Traité d’ économie nucléaire: Le soulèvement de la “ jeunesse” (1949), in which Isou attempts to assemble a revolutionary class based not on traditional economic disparities but on the economic function of varying age groups.

Repeated frequently in Isou’s writing, this claim is perhaps best articulated in Les journaux de dieux, précédes d’un éssai sur la définition, l’ évolution et le bouleversement total de la prose et du roman, 41. The lengthy introduction to Les journaux de dieux articulates Isou’s theory in relation to the amplic and chiseling phases of the novel, which almost exactly parallel those of poetry. 19

20

Isou, Les journaux de dieux, 140.

In Lettrist paintings, the letter’s graphicality is emphasized for its strictly visual capacity, thereby reminding us that the history of painting is also one in which meaning is construed by the reading of signs and the organizing of texts. In this way, Isou’s art-making practice anticipates the linguistic turn that would mark advanced production in the later parts of the century. See Between Poetry and Painting, the catalogue published in conjunction with the exhibition of Isou’s work in 1965. See also Isou, Le lettrisme et l’ hypergraphie dans la peinture et la sculpture contemporaines, in which Isou traces a genealogy of painterly practice that closely echoes that of his account of modern poetry.

21

22 The Cannes Film Festival was planned to open for the first time in 1939, but was forced to close after only one day in the wake of the 1939 German invasion of France. The festival was reinitiated in 1946, when twenty-one different nations submitted films for competition. The festival saw only three editions before fall 1950, when it was rescheduled for April of 1951, a change of date that was meant to allow for a better integration with the Venice Film Festival. Such measures indicate the degree of international cooperation that slowly developed in the cultural arena after the end of the Second World War. For more about the history of the festival, see de Valck, Film Festivals.

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“Film art” is a category that Uroskie understands as epitomized by De Sica’s “gritty,” Neorealist, Miracle in Milan, but which also includes, for example, Luis Buñuel’s Los olvidados, which, mixing Surrealism and Socialist Realism, won the Cannes film award for Best Director. See Uroskie, “Beyond the Black Box,” 23. Uroskie’s article is one of the first English-language efforts to argue the significance of Isou’s film in relationship to the development of a “postwar tradition of expanded cinema.” I am grateful to the author for his astute comments about the frequent mistranslation of Isou’s title and for reminding us that the “bave” of the title might be better translated as “drool” instead of as “slime” in order to emphasize Isou’s connection of this kind of “slobber”—which the French “bave” imputes as either canine or infantile—to the body as the specific vessel from which speech is uttered. See esp. 24–25n5. 23

The unfinished film (which was already over four hours long) created a scandal before it even premiered; columnists cited it in a range of French newspapers, including Combat, Nice-Matin, and L’Humanité.

24

In regard to Cocteau’s prize, Frédérique Devaux notes that at this point in the festival’s history, impromptu prize-naming was not uncommon. For more on the Cannes event, see Devaux, Le cinéma lettriste, esp. 55–62. Devaux also discusses the premiere of Isou’s film at the Studio de l’Étoile in Paris, 62–77. For its part, the Studio de l’Étoile had gained a venerable reputation for having housed the post-liberation revival of Henri Langlois’s Cercle du Cinéma long before Malraux supported its move to the Palais de Chaillot. See Mannoni, “Henri Langlois and the Musée du Cinéma.” 25

26

Kauffman, Guy Debord, 17.

Isou, “Traité de bave et d’eternité,” in Isou, œuvres de spectacle, 15. The screenplay corresponds with Isou’s intended, four-hour film and so not necessarily with the realized and distributed two-hour version of the film, although all citations provided here are included in both versions of the film. A DVD re-issue of the 1951 film, as restored by the French National Film Archive, was released by Re:Voir Video in 2008, with a soundtrack remastered by Frédéric Acquaviva.

27

See Devaux, Le Cinema Lettriste, 63. The Section cinématographe des Armées was founded in 1915 to complement the Section photographique de l’Armée Française, which was created by the joint ministries of the Army, Public Instruction, Beaux-Arts, and Foreign Affairs. From 1917 to 1919 the sections were joined as the SPCA, but later disbanded. The charge of these organizations was three-fold: 1) take images that would “be interesting” from a historical point of view, i.e., images documenting ruins, destructions, etc; 2) take images that would aid in developing propaganda to send abroad; and 3) take images with an eye to developing comprehensive governmental archives for the future. The collections were also enriched with camera shots of works of art, monuments, and museums. See Guillot, “La section photographique de l’armée et la Grande Guerre.” During the Algerian War of Independence, the SCA and the SPA would be responsible for the vast outpouring of still and moving images documenting the French military experience in Algeria. These are now collected in the archives of L’ établissement de communication et de production audiovisuelle de la défense (ECPAD). 28

29 The action here presumably surrounds Bao Dai, the last (and first) Emperor of Vietnam who, for a time, was also the country’s puppet leader under the Japanese occupation before he abdicated to Ho Chi Minh and eventually returned to power as the Frenchsupported “Head of State” in South Vietnam.

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31 My thanks to Elliot Reichert for sharing with me his insights regarding Isou’s scratching of the film stock. The fact that Isou chose a carpenter to embody the creativity of an action otherwise presented as destructive or, at the very least, reductive, must certainly be read with an eye to the religious implications of such an association. 32

Isou, “Traité de bave et d’éternité,” 32.

33

Isou, “Traité de bave et d’éternité,” 64.

notes for chapter 3

30 Such a bias toward the textual or spoken components of the film may derive from the possibility that its first and most celebrated screening, at Cannes, might have presented only the soundtrack; or that audiences might have only stayed long enough to “see” that part of the film. It may also have to do with the centrality that such films as Guy Debord, Hurlements en faveur de Sade (1952) and Gil Wolman, L’ anticoncept (1952)—both of which lean heavily on their soundtracks—have assumed in the now-standard narratives about the dematerialization of art and cinema in the 1960s.

This ironic juxtaposition assumes even greater significance when we remember the emphatically internationalist connotations of the film festival wherein Isou first screened Traité de bave et d’ éternité, and there too the picture of Paris literally “invaded” by the Indochinese footage.

34

35

Isou, “Traité de bave et d’éternité,” 65.

36 The other Lettrists who shared Isou’s interpretation of this concept were, notably, Gabriel Pomerand, Maurice Lemaître, and Dufrêne, but also, for a short while, Guy Debord, Gil Wolman, Jean-Louis Brau, and Serge Berna (all of whom followed Isou for periods of time in the late 1940s to early 1950s, and all of whom, except for Debord, participated in “Traité,” either as participants in the chorus, as performers, or as members of the production and editing crew). In regard to the achievement of sonorous amplitude, Dufrêne’s crirythmes— somatized cries of a body in performance—provide an interesting example. Eventually eschewing pure, live performance, Dufrêne would come to make these poems by exploiting the distortion produced by magnetic tape recording, as in his Paix en Algérie (1958). Eventually he would privilege this technological medium as a means to both the generation and the transmission of poetic form, in lieu of print media altogether. At roughly the same time, Guy Debord also developed an interest in what was then the new technology of magnetic tape recording. For Debord, however, the performative dimensions of magnetic tape allowed him to stage elaborate disruptions to otherwise sincere endeavors, which was precisely counter to Dufrêne’s investigation of the medium’s formal properties. A significant instance of this tendency is found in Debord’s staged interruption of a Surrealist meeting organized to denounce revelations regarding the French army’s use of torture and rape in Algeria. Whereas the Surrealists had hoped to articulate a formal denunciation, Debord was content to stage a disruption of their meeting, an intervention that relied on poetic allusion and reference, to make an oblique critique—not of the military practices in question, but of the tactics used to denounce it. 37 Crary, “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory,” 100; in reference to Debord, Commentaires sur la société du spectacle, 13. 38

Crary, “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory,” 101–102.

39

Crary, “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory,” 102.

40 As spoken in the film and transcribed in the film script, “Le radio, par la télévision, est devenue une espèce de cinéma. Pourquoi le cinéma, en retour, ne deviendrait-il pas une

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espèce de radio?” Isou, “Traité de bave et d’éternité,” 25. Here, it is important to note that when Isou was writing and making the film, radio in France was a state-owned enterprise, much like the state-owned television in the Soviet Union that Crary so convincingly articulates as a second originary site of the spectacle’s stronghold over modern subjectivity. Crary, “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory,” 104. 41 As spoken in the film and written in the film script, “le voix de l’ étranger” says: “C’est fantastique, tout de même, monsieur Daniel, vous serez le premier à poser des problèmes de phrases dans le cinéma où il n’y a eu, jusqu’ à present, que des problèmes d’ images.” Isou, “Traité de bave et d’éternité,” 75. It is important that the one to see the ingenuity of Isou’s/ Daniel’s ideas is singled out as “l’étranger,” a foreigner, because this redoubles and thus confirms Isou’s position as an outsider who is able to see what others cannot. The fact that this is a foreigner also underscores in the film the importance of transnational relations, identities, and permutations, a thematic that is echoed in the mention of the nationalities of the various women whom Daniel pursues.

As spoken in the film and written in the film script: “Je l’appellerai ‘La bave et l’ éternité’ ou ‘La bave et le marbre,’ ou ‘La bave et l’acier,’ pour marquer la distance entre la poussière de notre parole et la hauteur de son pouvoir.” Isou, “Traité de bave et d’éternité,” 85.

42

43

See Seaman, Concrete Poetry in France, 206–207.

44 Many of these phrases and the activities they describe come from Maurice Blanchot. See in particular his retrospective analyses in The Writing of the Disaster.

Isou, “Avertissement,” in Introduction à une nouvelle poésie, unpaginated; “Le Cris des 5,000,000 juifs égorgéés,” is printed in the same volume, 326–327.

45

46

Isou, “La guerre,” in Introduction à une nouvelle poésie, 365–406.

47 On the evolution of the “memory” of Vichy collaboration and its realities, Henry Rousso’s The Vichy Syndrome remains an important text, even as its arguments have begun to be contested by younger generations. See also Watts, Allegories of the Purge; and Cone, French Modernisms.

All citations here are to the poem as printed in Isou, Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et à une nouvelle musique, 326–327. Another edition of the poem exists as a broadsheet that Isou made subsequent to this first publication.

48

49

Isou, Introduction à une nouvelle poésie, 131.

50 The analysis of Ball’s performance by T. J. Demos is exemplary in its efforts to understand the political effects of Ball’s polyglossia in relationship to the historical circumstances of migration during the First World War. Demos is, however, less attentive to the implications of the inherent individualism that might have undermined such effects. See Demos, “Circulations,” 149. 51

Buchloh, “Plenty or Nothing,” 88.

52

Seaman, Concrete Poetry in France, 210–221.

I discuss several instances of “metagraphic novels” in relationship to mid-twentiethcentury artistic investigations of language and Isou’s models in my essay, “New Writing Systems / Writing New Systems.”

53

Drucker, “Hypergraphy: A Note on Maurice Lemaître,” and “The Art of the Written Word,” in Figuring the Word, 57–75 and 90–99. Drucker interprets the larger Let54

242

55 In regard to Lemaître’s Canailles, Drucker’s interpretation may stem from her reading of a five-plate version of the text that Lemaître reprinted in his La plastique lettriste et hypergraphique (1956), as opposed to the original ten-plate version that constitutes the original (published in Ur no. 1, 1950), which Lemaître also reprints, with annotations and “translations,” in his self-published Canailles: monographie supertemporelle. Drucker therefore misses the narration’s efforts to ground its experimentations in form within representations (in the first plates) of the way in which the Second World War was communicated as it happened, principally through newspaper articles and radio broadcasts, two media explicitly conjured in the other pictographic representations in Canailles. Without these significant historical markers, it is difficult to imagine the contextual implications of Lemaître’s storytelling.

notes for chapter 3

trist project in precisely the terms of such impenetrability, which was, after all, a principal component of the ongoing privatization of language as it was being promoted by a postMallarmean tradition of poetry in European modernism, enacted in this case by further removing reading from the realm of the “real” and instead immersing it in the unfathomable and impenetrable reign of the author’s imagination.

56 We also see this emphasis in the poetic riffs associated with the capital city’s monuments as they are filtered through the Romanian intonations and vocabularies of Isou’s “Paris vu par un étranger,” in Introduction à une nouvelle poésie, 346–347. 57 Within the context of the German-speaking audience in Bremen, it is especially interesting to note that Celan refers to German as “our language.” See Celan, “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen,” in Collected Prose, 34. 58

Celan, “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize,” 34.

59 As he put it, “les dos des dialectes ukraïnienes, arméniens, kirkiziens, etc.” Isou, Introduction à une nouvelle poésie, 179n 1. 60 In the original text: “La poésie deviendra la veritable et la concrete communion entre les races.” Isou, Introduction à une nouvelle poésie, 179.

Lemaître, Qu’est-ce que le Lettrisme. In this code, for example, the notation “1” would indicate that the sound in question should be emitted during aspiration; “54” while yawning. 61

62 These rights were first restricted in 1938, and then further limited in 1940 and 1941. On the history of Jewish civil, economic, and legal rights in Romania, see Radu Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania, esp. 3–38.

Isou, Introduction à une nouvelle poésie, 305. Isou’s self-presentation of his appendix as an “epistle”— an archaic word found more frequently in the Bible than in contemporary use—indicates his frequent reliance on religious and messianic references.

63

64

Celan, Poems of Paul Celan, 60–63.

65

Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoön,” 31.

66 In April 2011, President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party, the Union for a Popular Movement (led by Jean-François Copé since 2012) re-initiated plans to stage a national debate about the compatibilities of Islam with the secular values of the French state, a misadventure criticized from all sides of the political spectrum. Whereas questions of visible

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religious affiliation— such as Muslim women wearing the hijab—have long been the subject of debate in French society, the specifics of this most recent crisis result from the socalled “problem” of street prayer, which Marine Le Pen infamously compared to the Nazi occupation. It was in a politically motivated reply to Le Pen’s provocation that Sarkozy exclaimed that he did not want any “minarets, any calls for prayer in the public space, or street prayers.” See Steven Erlanger and Maïa de la Baume, “French Panel Debates Secularism and Islam,” New York Times, April 5, 2011. www.nytimes.com. I am grateful to Rosalyn Deutsche for directing me to think about what Agamben’s reflection on witnessing the absence at the core of testimony might mean for Isou’s aesthetics of integration. Agamben’s model of witnessing is most clearly articulated in Remnants of Auschwitz.

67

68 See Isou, L’ Agrégation d’un nom et d’un messie, 413–432. It would be hard to imagine that those who take Isou’s Holocaust-themed poetry as purposely humorous could continue to hold this opinion after reading these passages. 69

Isou, L’ Agrégation d’un nom et d’un messie, 413.

In the original text: “ils nous ont détruit et réduits à l’essentiel justement pour accomplir cette chose essentielle: Judaïser la France.” Isou, L’ Agrégation d’un nom et d’un messie, 423; 432.

70

71

See Halbwachs, On Collective Memory.

CHAPTER 4: LA FRANCE DÉCHIRÉE Epigraph:

In English, “The people constitute their own archives.”

1 Villeglé and Hains met at the École des Beaux-Arts in Rennes in 1945. Hains was enrolled in the department of sculpture, and Villeglé was in the department of architecture, having abandoned the study of painting. In 1947, Villeglé transferred to the department of architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, where he stayed until 1949, when he moved to Paris.

In a later interview with Nicolas Bourriaud, Villeglé changed the location of this first “discovery” to an abandoned coal warehouse located between La Coupole and Le Dôme. See Bourriaud, “Interview with Jacques Villeglé,” 136.

2

3 Brassaï (Gyula Halasz) published some of his photographs of the near-etching-like graffiti that he observed in Paris as “Graffiti Parisiens” in Minotaure 3–4 (1933): 7. In fall 1956, Edward Steichen invited Brassaï to exhibit 120 of these photographs at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in the form of an exhibition titled Language of the Wall: Parisian Graffiti Photographed by Brassaï. Steichen, speaking in his role of curator, described Brassaï ’s work as “a substitute for indiscrimate snap-shottery or inane pictorialism.” The press release in the exhibition archives suggests that the graffiti was “presumably drawn by Parisian children of various ages (graffiti are usually scrawls by boys, street idlers, the casual ‘Tripper,’ according to the Encyclopedia Brittanica) [sic]” and promotes graffiti as “valuable for the light they throw on the everyday life of the ‘man in the street’ of the period, and for the intimate details of customs and institutions of people in a particular time and place.” See “Graffiti Photographed by Brassaï to be on View at Museum of Modern Art,” Press Release No. 100, 24 October 1956, 1–2. For his part, Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze) remains better known for his quasi-tachiste paintings and watercolors than for the often surprisingly pictorial photographs of Paris streets that he took during the 1930s.

244

Villeglé insists that the canvas support was chosen for practical, not symbolic, reasons, noting that its pliability and elasticity made it an excellent surface on which to mount the lacerated posters, either in a collaged composition or as integral sheaths. He also insists that neither he nor Hains meant their signatures to designate the work as their own creative property. Instead, he maintains that they would have been happy had the “next collector” added his own signature. This explanation fails to account for the financial import of the signature, even as early as 1949. See Dieter Schwarz, “Aperçu historique des affichistes,” in the exhibition catalogue for the exhibition at the Centre d’histoire de l’art contemporain, Rennes (1994), Murmures des rues, 36.

5

notes for chapter 4

In 1998, Hains added Daniel Buren’s name to his group of influences, despite the inverse dates of the priority of their practice. See Hains and Dachy, Langue de cheval et facteur temps, 33, 42.

4

6 Ach Alma Manetro was not, strictly speaking, the first décollage, although it was the first décollage that Hains and Villeglé made in collaboration with each other. According to Villeglé, Hains had first “discovered” décollage some months earlier when he tore down a poster promoting Gary Davis’s pacifist campaign for World Citizenship. Villeglé maintains that the political significance of La France déchirée “was in gestation from this moment” (était en gestation dès cet instant ). See Villeglé, “In illo tempore” in Urbi & Orbi, 7. In the catalogue that accompanied Hains’s 1990 exhibition at the Musée national d’art modern, the caption of a very small, 12 x 15 cm décollage describes it as the “first morsel of a poster, pulled from the corner of Delambre street and the boulevard Edgar Quinet” (premier morceau d’affiche arraché au coin de la rue Delambre et du boulevard Edgard Quinet) and dates it to December 1949. This corner was next to Hains’s apartment on the rue Delambre. See Hains, “Guide,” unpaginated. 7

Buchloh, “From Detail to Fragment: Décollage Affichiste,” 110.

8

Buchloh, “From Detail to Fragment,” 110.

The law specifies that the mayor (mairie) of each commune or urban district is responsible for determining the places that, by decree, would become sites for posters issuing from the “public authority” and no others. In contradistinction, posters advocating so-called private concerns (political and cultural organizations, as well as commercial enterprise) could not be placed on these “emplacements réservés.” See “Loi sur la liberté de la presse,” Journal officiel de la République française, 30 July 1881.

9

10 See Bernelle, Des restrictions apportées depuis 1881 à la liberté de l’affichage, esp. 25–27; and Fitoussi, L’Affichage.

The classic definition of freedom of the press in France comes from Article 11 of the Déclaration des droits de l’ homme et du citoyen (Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen) that the Assemblée nationale constituante approved on 26 August 1789. This article states that “the free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious rights of man; every citizen can thus speak, write, [and] print freely, except to respond to the abuse of this freedom in those cases determined by law” (La libre communication des pensées et des opinions est un des droits les plus précieux de l’ homme; tout citoyen peut donc parler, écrire, imprimer librement, sauf à répondre de l’abus de cette liberté dans les cas déterminés par la loi ). The article is archived on www.textes.justice.gouv.fr. As will become especially significant in the context of this chapter’s discussions, Martin Harrison reminds us that this freedom of information was “one of the earliest casualties of the

11

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Algerian war.” He notes, in fact, that at the height of the press seizures in 1960, a senatorial task force had written a reform of the 1881 press law that proposed to entirely legalize seizures and all other acts of censorship of the written word. Had it passed into law, such reforms would have significantly changed the spatial implications of urban advertisements and political signage also addressed by 1881 law. See Harrison, “Government and Press in France during the Algerian War,” 273, 280. 12 In French, the expression “à la sauvette” means in haste, but it is also idiomatic for sales made on the street without a license and hence, illegally.

See Cartier-Bresson, Images à la sauvette. The English edition, The Decisive Moment, benefited from the collaboration of Marguerite Lang. 13

Alongside the 1952 release of Cartier-Bresson’s book, it is important to note a few other important episodes in the history of photojournalistic realism as it entered and shaped the parameters of political-aesthetic debate in the 1940s and 1950s. The 1947 founding of Magnum is inescapably important as would be, in an expanded context, the re-founding of Life as a weekly news and photojournalism magazine by Henry Luce in 1936. In France, such photo-based reportage was responsible for a shift in newspaper production and consumption, as will be discussed later in this chapter, and also the rise of such magazines as Paris Match, which was founded in 1949 by Jean Prouvost. In 1957, Roland Barthes published a critical review of the exhibition of “Shock Photos” at the Galerie d’Orsay in Les lettres nouvelles, arguing that such images did not introduce the viewer to horror but instead to the scandal of horror, or its spectacular components. This essay was reprinted in Barthes’s compilation Mythologies. 14

Cartier-Bresson drew the phrase “moment décisif ” from a saying he attributes to the seventeenth-century Frenchman, Jean François Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz, and which he used as the epigraph to his essay: “Il n’y a rien en ce monde qui n’ait un moment décisif ” (There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment). CartierBresson, Images à la sauvette, unpaginated.

15

16 This thesis is supported by Hains’s first major retrospective exhibition (and catalogue), Raymond Hains et la photographie, which took place in 1976 at the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, and was curated by Daniel Abadie. Hains’s first photograph of lacerated posters is said to have been a view of the palisade in front of the restaurant Rôtisserie du Roy-Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1949. It is published in the 1990 exhibition catalogue compiled by Catherine Bompuis, Guide des collections permanentes ou mises en plis, Raymond Hains, unpaginated.

This is how the film and the décollage it pictures are named in the massive catalogue released by the Centre Pompidou on the occasion of a 2008 Villeglé retrospective. See Villeglé, Jacques Villeglé, 251. However, in Hains, Guide des collections permanents ou mises en plis, this same film is credited to Hains alone and the caption suggests it was made in 1947 from a palisade of ripped posters for the wine store Nicolas, not the 1950 décollage. Many thanks to Marianne Le Métayer for crucial clarifications, which reveal the actual source of the image reproduced here (and in the aforementioned catalogues) as actually from a film about Villeglé by Georges Paumier, which was produced by Antenne 2 for a television program called “Fenêtre sur . . . Peintres de notre temps” in 1981 and also titled Défense d’afficher-Loi du 29 juillet 1881, Villeglé. 17

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In an interview with Nicolas Bourriaud in 2007, Villeglé specifies that, in response to his publication of “Des réalités collectives” (1958), Hains became furious with him and began to formulate “personified abstractions” as a means to refuse the anonymity of the defacement of the posters. See Bourriaud, “Interview with Jacques Villeglé,” 137. The essay to which Villeglé refers was published in the Ultra-Lettrist review Grâmmes that he, Gil Wolman, and François Dufrêne launched in 1958. It responds to Pierre Restany’s assessment of Villeglé’s and Hains’s 1957 exhibition in relation to the collage work of Kurt Schwitters. Rather than understand décollage as related to the additive strategy of montage or to the expressive mark of painting, as Restany had endeavored to do, Villeglé emphasizes the subtractive and anonymous qualities of these forms and their withdrawal from subjective records of experience, aspects that correspond more precisely with the concept of photographic “capture” than with the physical process of montage. See Villeglé, “Des réalités collectives.”

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18 France-Illustration was the post-1945 reincarnation of the storied weekly newspaper L’Illustration that, in 1891, had been the first French newspaper to publish a photograph. The photographer Emanuel Sougez had founded the photographic department of L’Illustration in 1926, before achieving greater fame for his photos of sculpture, in particular the work of Rodin. Nonetheless, he stayed on at the newspaper through the collaborationist 1940s and after.

On the specifics of this invitation and their subsequent exclusion, Dufrêne and Hains tell slightly different stories. See Hains’s “Palissade,” an unpublished text for the 1959 Paris bienniale and Dufrêne’s interview with Daniel Abadie, originally published in Raymond Hains et la photographie. Both texts are reprinted in the Barcelona exhibition catalogue of 1999, Raymond Hains, 110–113. Insofar as there might be lingering debate about the matter of originality and primacy concerning the “invention” of the palisade, it should be noted that Dufrêne’s décollage Ma palissade (1958) definitely precedes Hains’s contribution to the biennial.

20

In addition to Dufrêne, Villeglé, and Hains, this group included Lucien Favory, Jean Miotte, Yehuda Neiman, and Pierre Foldès, although Foldès did not participate.

21

22 The importance of this vein of inquiry to the study of European artists of the 1960s and 1970s has been recently clarified by Rachel Haidu, who reads the work of Marcel Broodthaers against, for example, the nominalism of the nouveau romanciers. See Haidu, Marcel Broodthaers; or, the Absence of Work, esp. 280–284.

For the observation that Hains might have enjoyed self-identifying with the cream, I am indebted to Dorléac, L’Ordre sauvage, 355n68.

23

Many thanks to Christina Normore for so generously helping me to see not only the multiple meanings of the “entremets,” but also their origins in Burgundian court practice and its corresponding visual culture.

24

25 Villeglé develops his model of unreadability as divergent from similar-looking Lettrist practices, yet still related to the same history of avant-garde production, in the essay “De l’illisible,” in his La traversée Urbi & Orbi, 81–88.

Although less well known than the artists he photographed, Harry Shunk— and, from 1957–1973, János (Jean) Kender—is responsible for having photographed almost all of the performance-based work of the Nouveau Realists, and in that capacity for having

26

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grounded much of how we perceive their work. Little is known about the life of either Shunk or Kender. We do know that Shunk met Kender following the latter’s immigration to France in 1956 after the Revolution in his native Hungary. In 1967, the two men moved to New York City. While it is unclear who shot what in the entirety of their archive, the extensive repertoire of images previously attributed to Shunk are properly credited ShunkKender during the period of their association. Insofar as the images under consideration here are concerned, they have long been misattributed (when they have been attributed at all) to Harry Shunk alone. However, viewing the whole series of images now owned by the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation proves that the sequence was photographed by both men, because we occasionally catch glimpses of the one or the other in the various frames. I have therefore referred to these photos as made by Shunk-Kender. My thanks to Evan Ryer at the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation for his time and assistance with the Harry Shunk Archive. The “Manifeste des 121” was first published in the magazine Verité-Liberté 4 on 6 September 1960, although it had been announced in Le Monde two days before. Its history is recounted in a number of publications. See, for example, the complete account in Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement, 593.

27

See Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “Une fidélité têtue,” 3–18. In this text, Vidal-Naquet takes care to recount how the debate about insoumission actually dated to July 1956 and to a few famous cases from that year. Stoked by party concerns, the debate simmered for years until the publication of Le Déserteur by Jean-Louis Hurst, under the pseudonym Maurienne. The issue was galvanized significantly by the arrest of Francis Jeanson and his network in February 1960 and their trial on 5 September of that year. 28

In Vidal-Naquet’s own words, during “deux mois extraordinaires, où le verbe semblait avoir pris chair: le débat paraissait gagner le pays tout entière.” See Bracco, Pour avoir dit non, 16. The punishment for inciting insubordination or draft-dodging was three years incarceration, and Vidal-Naquet was not alone among intellectuals who were punished with temporarily curtailed teaching opportunities.

29

The “Manifeste des 121” was followed by another one, issued from the political right, which amassed 300 signatures, and still a third from the moderate left, which included as signatories such prominent scholars as Roland Barthes, Paul Ricoeur, and Edgar Morin, whose politics had certainly become more passive since his early involvement with the Comité d’action des intellectuels contre la poursuite de la Geurre en Afrique du Nord (Action committee of intellectuals against the continuation of the War in North Africa). 30

See, for example, McDonough’s “1961: Algeria and the Politics of Décollage,” in “The Beautiful Language of My Century,” 53–97, which presents both of these analyses. 31

32

See de Maupeou-Abboud, Ouverture du ghetto étudiant, 15–50.

Since I first began researching this exhibition and its relationship to the Algerian War of Independence, it has become an object of much attention and is, accordingly, much better situated in the literature. See two essays I wrote: “Of the Public Born,” which developed from my early research; and “Words, Actions, Inactions, and Things.” Some of the arguments and analysis from both of these texts are reprised here. Tom McDonough has also focused on this exhibition, which he reads as returning “to quiescence” the political concerns of the moment. See “The Beautiful Language of My Century,” 97. Cabañas, “Poster Archaeology,” provides a more nuanced analysis, especially in relationship to Vil-

33

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34 In the exhibition checklist, Villeglé’s work is misidentified as L’Humanité c’est la vérité and is incorrectly attributed to both Hains and Villeglé. Both works are reproduced and are properly attributed in Francblin, “Le bon genie de Jacques Villeglé,” 30. 35 In Hains’s own words: “l’art gesturel, l’abstraction expressioniste, et du lettrisme.” See “Raymond Hains, décolleur d’affiches,” Le Journal de Paris, 25 June 1961, 3.

In the wake of Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, the phrase “public sphere” has come to be nearly synonymous with a shape-shifting agglomeration of media and representational institutions, metaphorically (and sometimes regrettably) abstracted to assume a set of spatial delimitations.

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leglé’s concern with the institutions of the public sphere. I have enjoyed in Cabañas an excellent interlocutor about art in France since I first presented my research about La France déchirée at a conference she convened as a graduate student at Yale in 2001.

37 See Fauvet, La France déchirée. Translated and republished in 1960 as The Cockpit of France in reference to the book’s arguments about the nation’s proclivity for a masculinized variety of politicking comparable to cock fighting, and thereby a rather pessimistic reading of the rooster as the unofficial symbol of France. The first person to associate Fauvet’s original phrase—La France déchirée— with décollage was actually the critic Claude Rivière, who used it in her defense of the works exhibited by Hains, Villeglé, and (by inference) Dufrêne in the 1959 biennial. Rivière asserts that Hains’s “famous” Palissade bears witness to “arrachements tragiques” (tragic uprootings) and “est là comme une presence de la France déchirée, cette France que d’aucuns voudraient anéantir et qui grâce à ces jeunes avant- gardes est loin de périr” (stands there like a presence of torn France, a France that no one would want to annihilate and that, thanks to these young avant-gardists, is far from perishing). Rivière, “Biennale de Paris: Du monde pictural à la palissade,” 16. Contrary to the suggestion that Hains or his gallerist might have capitalized on Rivière’s association in order to sensationalize the 1961 exhibition, Villeglé asserts that Hains was not only familiar with Fauvet’s work but in fact had also read it. See Villeglé, Cheminements 1943 / 1959, 132. Tom McDonough uses Rivière’s claim to defend his thesis that the décollages exhibited in 1961 were invested in bolstering or repairing the nation. This suggestion is confusing, given Rivière’s explicit reference throughout her review to an “artistic” France, the primacy of which was, in her assessment, otherwise challenged by the Paris biennial but saved by the avant-gardists. See McDonough, “The Beautiful Language of My Century,” 70n27.

In the original wording: “C’est un fait (un signe des temps?): depuis plus de dix ans la France déchirée occupe un deux-pièces-cuisine à Montparnasse.” The invitation to the exhibition is collected in the Raymond Hains dossiers at the Bibliothèque Kandinsky at the Centre Pompidou; it is also reprinted in a number of the Hains exhibition catalogues cited above.

38

39 The photographers Shunk and Kender took numerous photos of the artist’s small apartment in which the floor, walls, and even parts of the ceiling—literally every surface except his single bed— are entirely obscured by piles of lacerated posters, some of which are discernible as works that will be framed and exhibited as décollage in La France déchirée. These include, for example, the appropriated poster for La fraternité française, which constitutes the primary source for his work Cet homme est dangereux.

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40 Schematically: the French occupation and annexation of the land that is now known as Algeria began with the French landing at Sidi Ferruch on 14 June 1830 and the French Army’s subsequent conquest of Algiers on 5 July of that same year. Occupation and annexation of the colonized territories continued apace over the next decades, and a Royal Ordinance of 22 July 1834 decreed the legal annexation of the land occupied by the French. An additional Royal Ordinance issued by Louis-Philippe I on 15 April 1845 recognized the division of the conquered territories into three administrative divisions along the coastal reaches of the territory. To oversee these divisions, three types of administrative orders were developed: communes de plein exercice, which described areas with heavy European settlement where French civil law would apply; communes mixtes, which were ruled by the military (régime du sabre) with pockets of self-legislated areas of French civil law; and communes indigènes, which were ruled exclusively by the military. Even with their rights largely protected by French civil law, the settler populations resented both the military rule and the instability it often occasioned, and thus advocated for the assimilation of the colony into French territory so that they could enjoy their full rights as French citizens. This ambition was achieved in 1848, when the Second Republic fully incorporated and departmentalized the Algerian territories. While this narrative is well told in many volumes about French and Algerian history, it is most concisely rehearsed in John Ruedy, Modern Algeria, 73–75. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer of this manuscript for reminding me that, in addition to the Mediterranean littoral départements of Algiers, Oran, and Constantine, colonial Algeria also comprised the “Territoires du Sud,” although these were only departmentalized in the early years of the twentieth century, and even then only according to provisions of the General Act of the 1884 Berlin Conference. In the 1950s, the départements were further “cut away,” such that the Saharan département (Territoires du Sud) was subdivided into Oasis and Saoura, and the littoral areas were reconfigured from three departments to thirteen. Following what Time magazine referred to in 1959 as the “French Gold Rush,” the Saharan départements featured as an increasingly important point of reference in negotiations regarding Algeria’s future relations with France. Three years after oil was discovered in Saharan Algeria, an article was published in Time magazine touting its newfound riches. The cover featured the face of Jacques Soustelle, the Algerian general governor, emerging from the sands at Hassi Messaoud, surrounded by the usual Orientalist tropes of camels, Bedouins, and expected signs of the military-industrial complex. The teaser text announced “The Sahara: France Finds Wealth in the Desert.” See “France: The Visionary,” Time, 17 August 1959. www.time.com. 41

“Interview with Jeanine Restany” in Raymond Hains et la photographie, 50.

42

Villeglé, “In illo tempore,” in Urbi & Orbi, 7.

Benjamin Buchloh has named an interest in reversing the preoccupations of Matisse’s cut-outs as one of many possible epistemes of post-war painting, and indeed it is one that we have seen, for instance, in Tériade’s repeated interest in using the artist’s cut-outs to adorn the covers of his editions. See Buchloh, “Hantaï, Villeglé, and the Dialectics of Painting’s Dispersal.” 43

See, for instance, brief reviews published in Le Monde, Journal de Paris, and Arts. For example, Conil Lacoste’s “A travers les galleries,” Le Monde, 23 June 1961, commented on the “personal” nature of the artist’s project (9); while Michel Ragon lamented the work’s “meager” artistic achievements in his “Plus vraie que nature,” Arts 827 (21–27 June 1961). 44

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45

Moulin, “La France déchirée (Galerie J),” Les lettres françaises 881, 22–28 June 1961.

46 Kaira Cabañas’s aforementioned writing on Villeglé’s interest in the lacerated poster’s relationship to “the stymied access that existed to the public space of represented speech” in the 1950s and 1960s provides a notable exception to these general trends. See Cabañas “Poster Archaeology,” 77. Her conclusions diverge significantly from those of McDonough, whose “The Beautiful Language of My Century” reiterates and extends what Yve-Alain Bois had celebrated in Formless: A User’s Guide as the “noise” and the “entropic deliquescence of language” in Hains’s work. McDonough generalizes these claims to substantiate his critique of Hains’s presumed political neutrality in exactly the same terms originally issued by Moulin in 1961. Such a reading is surprising, especially in relationship to McDonough’s efforts to uphold Guy Debord’s work as more properly or productively political. Enigmatic and elusive to a fault, Debord’s aesthetic actions and even many of his explicit statements rarely made clear his “façon de voir les choses,” especially as such things concerned the conflict over Algerian sovereignty.

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Tellingly, both Hains’s De Gaulle compte sur vous, aidez-le (1961) and Villeglé’s 6 boulevard Poissonière (1957) were exhibited in The Art of Assemblage (1961) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, with nary a mention of the context from which they had come or in which they had been shown earlier. Such lack of interest in both the “content” as well, perhaps as the “context” of modern art is, by now, well associated with the narrative constructed by figures like that exhibition’s curator, William Seitz. Few, if any, of the works included in the 1961 Assemblage show are singled out for mention in terms of properties beyond those of form or art-historical derivation. See Seitz, The Art of Assemblage.

47 Pierre Restany was also the husband of Jeanine Restany, the owner and director of Galerie J. 48 These artists included, at first, Hains, Villeglé, Dufrêne, César, Arman, Yves Klein, Martial Raysse, and Daniel Spoerri. 49 Restany, Le Nouveau réalisme, 50. For more on these photographs, see Hains, “Graphisme en photographie.” 50

Hains, “Graphisme en photographie,” 131.

51 See the signed declaration of the Nouveaux réalistes, 27 October 1960, which exists in an edition of nine copies, handwritten by Restany and signed by the founding members on monochromatic paper (seven of which were blue, one pink, and one gold) designed by Yves Klein. One of the seven blue editions is in the permanent collection of the Musée national d’art moderne in Paris. For a descriptive history of the movement, see also Carrick, Nouveau Réalisme, 1960s France, and the Neo-avante-garde.

Fleck, “Raymond Hains,” 67. McDonough reads Fleck’s suggestion that the posters provided a testament to the civil war then tearing France apart as tantamount to suggesting that the décollages demonstrate Hains’s political agenda as an “ ‘artiste engagé ’on behalf of the Algerian insurgents, taking up the Sartrean mantle of commitment much as the French had honorably resisted their Nazi occupiers only twenty years before.” See McDonough, “The Beautiful Language of My Century,” 55. This, however, is not how or what Fleck’s catalogue entry argues, even if Fleck does incorrectly assess the nature of the posters themselves. The truth is that not only were the posters put up by the FLN and the OAS not the primary constituent of Hains’s décollage, as Fleck suggests (Hains did make 52

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one décollage from a lacerated OAS poster, but it was not included in the exhibition under discussion), but such posters did not exist on the streets of Paris with nearly the frequency that Fleck imagines. In fact, before the 1961 formation of the OAS, such posters did not exist. And, as Laurent Gervereau reminds us, “the FLN, to our knowledge and for obvious reasons and security measures, did not really practice posterizing.” See Gervereau, “Des bruits et des silences: Cartographie des representations de la guerre d’Algérie,” in La France en guerre d’Algérie, novembre 1954–juillet 1962, 181. During the Nazi occupation of Paris, similar concerns for safety made Resistance posting difficult, to the point that it was rarely employed. Interestingly, public dissent was frequently, if surreptitiously, manifested by pedestrians’ tearing down or through Nazi posters. See Bourget and Lacretelle, Sur les murs de Paris, 1940–1944; as well as Gervereau’s La propagande par l’affiche. 53

Duval et al., Referendum et plébescite, 71.

54 In 1946, 16 million French people read a daily newspaper, whereas in 1952 only 10 million did so. For further details about this history, see Andrews, French Politics and Algeria, 24. 55 The British critic Richard Hoggart notes a parallel transformation in literary publications in Great Britain at roughly the same time. See The Uses of Literacy, esp. 206–272. 56 See Andrews, French Politics and Algeria, 27. Censorship and financially motivated self-censorship account for some aspects of this underreporting. News publications such as those cited here were frequently subject to governmental seizure and all “offending” reportage was excised. Most newspapers and magazines ran the censored issues with blank pages where the original articles had been. These glaring white pages present an interesting complication to our thinking about the place of such “blankness” within the history of modernist visual production as it is currently theorized. See Thogmartin, The National Daily Press of France; Harrison, Censorship and Its Metaphors in French History, Literature, and Theory; and Scriven, “Les Intellectuels et les médias: de la censure à l’autocensure.” Frédéric Genevée suggests that L’Humanité was subject to more seizures during the period than any other newspaper, a claim echoed in the Martin Harrison text cited above. See Genevée, “La répression: poursuites et saisies de L’Humanité, 1949–1962,” 265–279. 57

Stora, La gangrène et l’oubli, esp. 25–28.

58 For more information about how this history of representation and public debate would impact art practice in the United States during the 1970s, see Ward, “Gray Zone.”

Especially important in this context are accounts of French intellectual support of the FLN and other Nationalist parties. See Hamon and Rotman, Les Porteurs de valise: and Rioux and Sirinelli, La Guerre d’Algérie et les intellectuels français. 59

60 Le Sueur’s text adroitly responds to the vast literature on this topic, and I do not intend here to detail the important divergences his text, based on private as well as newly opened public archives, presents from earlier models as these historiographic debates exceed the parameters of this study. It is important to note that Le Sueur’s focus on figures on both sides of the Mediterranean, especially Jacques Soustelle, Albert Camus, Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jacques Berque as well as the groups that formed to contest their policies or pronouncements, means to challenge a claim like Tony Judt’s that “to see the Algerian conflict ‘as a major turning point is to concede rather too much.’ ” Le Sueur’s project forcibly stakes the relevance of the debates about decolonization for studies of

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broad social, political, and cultural production during the time many have been otherwise content to leave as better understood in relationship to the politics of “Resistance” derived— and unchallenged— after the Second World War. Le Sueur’s efforts also prepare us to enquire about resistance beyond that of the official intelligentsia. See Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 3. Le Sueur here cites Judt, Past Imperfect, 286. Important precedents to Le Sueur’s study include Sorum, Intellectuals and Decolonization in France, which carefully traces the formation of and changes within the intellectual elites’ “engaged” responses to the battles fought over decolonization across the empire and Schalk, War and the Ivory Tower, which similarly focuses on the role of the so-called public intellectual, comparing responses in France regarding Algeria to those in the U.S. during Vietnam. My thanks to one of the anonymous readers of an earlier version of this manuscript for reminding me of the enduring importance of Schalk’s and Sorum’s texts. The model of intellectual engagement they develop in their studies is not, however, the one I hope to articulate in reference to Hains’s project. Le Sueur, Uncivil War, 205–213.

62 Todd Shepard develops the first thesis in The Invention of Decolonization, 70–73, while the latter is asserted by Marie Pierre Ullua in her intellectual biography of Francis Jeanson, Francis Jeanson, 210. 63 Emphasis mine. The interview was conducted by Madeleine Chapsal for L’Express, an avowedly pro-independence magazine, but was never published there. Instead, it appeared in Maspero, Le Droit à l’ insoumission. This citation is on page 90, where the French reads “écrivain non politique.” The text is translated as “The Right to Insubordination,” 196.

See, for example, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, who defined his own political position as that of a reader of France- Observateur. Vidal-Naquet, “Une fidelité-têtue,” 4.

64

65 See Ross, The Emergence of Social Space, 39. This symbolism of destruction goes back even further in French history to 1793, when the Conseil générale de la commune issued a decree that the public should destroy royal statues and monuments. 66 Consider, for example, Sartre’s “The Look” from Being and Nothingness (1953) and Jacques Lacan’s concept of the “mirror stage” especially in its late 1940s elaborations. 67

Arendt, The Human Condition, 199.

68 It should not pass unnoticed that the construction of the public as represented by “cet homme” is characteristic of the fact that the public sphere is often gendered male in accordance with the heteronormative dictates of privacy and publicity. At the time of the construction of what Habermas would describe as the ideal public sphere, the public body— or at least the one that could take shape through the count of a vote— consisted exclusively of men. On the history of the public sphere as shaped in this regard, see Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, esp. the chapter he co-authored with Lauren Berlant, “Sex in Public,” 187–209. 69 A more comprehensive survey of the complicated history of electoral rights in colonial Algeria exceeds the parameters and purposes of this analysis, although a brief survey is helpful for preparing for the discussion of the referenda here and for the claims articulated by the Algerians who demonstrated in Paris on 17 October 1961. In brief, the 1865 Sénatus- Consulte, designated the Algerian (or what it described as “indigenous”) population as French “subjects” and therefore eligible for military service, etc., but unable to

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achieve civil status or the rights ascribed therein unless they renounced Islam. Jews whose families had been in residence in Algeria before annexation, however, were incorporated as French citizens by the Crémieux decree of October 1870. In 1889, children of all nonFrench Europeans, including Jews not addressed by the Crémieux decree, were similarly nationalized as French citizens, provided they were born in France (which included Algeria at this point) to at least one parent similarly born in France. After the First World War, renewed efforts were made to obtain electoral rights for Algerians: in 1919 new laws made it easier for men of Islamic status who wished to renounce their local civil standing to become citizens as opposed to subjects; and in 1936 the first Algerian Muslim Congress drafted a document requesting complete assimilation into administrative France, to be achieved through the formation of a single electoral college. In 1944, approximately 65,000 Algerians were granted full citizenship rights according to terms established by the Blum-Violette proposal, while the 1946 law Lamine-Gueye, codified as Article 80 of the Constitution of the Fourth Republic, declared that all subjects governed in the overseas departments were thenceforth to be considered citizens of the “French Union.” According to the subsequent Organic Statute of Algeria of 1947, they were therefore allowed to vote in a separate electoral college for an Algerian Assembly and affirmed as French citizens. Said Assembly was, however, not empowered to pass a law without the French-appointed Governor General. That Assembly was dissolved in 1955, although the 1956 Deferre Law proposed that, “once order was restored,” the double college would be eliminated. The constitution of the Fifth Republic absorbed this law, but its effects for universal suffrage remained seriously limited by the series of decrees regarding Special Powers. See Collot, Les institutions de l’Algérie durant la periode coloniale, 1830–1962; Barrière, “Le puzzle de la citoyenneté en Algérie”; and, Rosanvallon, Le sacré du citoyen. According to Article 2 of the “Décret n° 60–1299 du 8 décembre 1960 décidant de soumettre un projet de loi au referendum proclamation du Conseil constitutionnel du 14 janvier 1961,” printed in the Journal officiel de la République française (9 December 1960), 11043, the referendum asked the electorates assembled in the metropole as well as in Algeria, the Sahara, the Départements et regions d’outre-mer and the Territoires d’outre-mer (DOM- TOM) “Approuvez-vous le projet de loi soumis au peuple français par le président de la République et ‘concernant l’autodétermination des populations algériennes et l’organisation des pouvoirs publics en Algérie avant l’autodétermination?’ ” (Do you approve the project of the law submitted to the French people by the president of the Republic and ‘concerning the auto-determination of the Algerian populations and the organization of public power in Algeria before self-determination?) In the metropole, approximately 75 percent of those who voted (about 54 percent of those registered) voted “yes,” while in Algeria, that number was closer to 66 percent (with only 40 percent of registered voters voting). See http:// mjp.univ-perp.fr/france/ref1961.htm. Accessed 27 August 2013. The results were codified in La loi 61–44 du 14 janvier 1961.

70

The third referendum, in April 1962, asked the French electorate, but not the Algerian one, to approve the principles proposed by the Evian Agreement made with the FLN in March and to grant de Gaulle the powers necessary to implement it: “Approuvez-vous le projet de loi soumis au people français par le président de la République et concernant les accords à établir et les mesures à prendre au sujet de l’Algérie sur la base des déclarations gouvernementales du 19 mars 1962?” The overwhelming vote in the affirmative was affirmed in the Loi 62–421 du 13 avril 1962 concernant les accords à établir et les mesures à prendre au

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sujet de l’Algérie sur la base des declarations gouvernementales du 19 mars 1962. See Journal officiel, 14 April 1962, p. 3843. The fourth and final referendum was actually not held in France at all but in Algeria, under the authority of the Algerian Provisional Executive in accordance with the stipulations of the Evian agreement. It asked: “Voulez-vous que l’Algérie devienne un Etat indépendant coopérant avec la France dans les conditions définies par les déclarations du 19 mars 1962?” (Do you want Algeria to become an independent state in cooperation with France according to the conditions defined by the declarations of 19 March 1962?), and was confirmed 5,975,581 to 16,534. See “Proclamation des Résultats du Referendum d’Autodétermination du 1 juillet 1962,” Journal officiel de l’État d’Algérie, 6 July 1962, 3. 72 Hains made a second décollage from this same poster and with a similar laceration to the center. In this version, also dated 1959, the swathe carved through the PCF’s poster reveals not political signage, but patches of green and blue color fields. The PCF poster is also differently torn in this earlier work, such that the line that reads “Contre la Indochine” is here revealed in its entirety: “Contre la dictature des banquiers.” Comparing the two versions reveals the degree to which the lacerations— opaque and impenetrable as they can be— successfully frame and reorient the linguistic content of the signage by differently treating text as image to be montaged, edited, and spliced. The 1957 version was sold to a private collection in a 2006 auction. 73 Indeed, in all but literal ways, the Algerian War of Independence re-started the conflict fought in Indochina, where France had hoped to preserve its colonial government in territory recently declared independent after the victory of the Allied Forces over Japan. The historical differences are paramount, but the continuity remains important. For instance, many of the reservists called upon to serve in Algeria were those who had just returned from the humiliating defeat in Indochina, and many of the generals and parachutists who became so famous for their right-wing resistance in Algeria landed there directly from Indochina or Suez. It was also the first recall of the reservists in 1956 that occasioned the first (and ultimately most potent) wave of opposition to and strikes against the war being fought to keep Algeria French. In fact, it was in response to the 1956 call that the first deserters made their case, thereby laying the ground for the 1960 debate regarding insoumission.

Much has been said about this practice, and so it is not necessary to detail it in any greater depth here. It is useful, however, to keep in mind that the phrase had other uses in the epoch, and was not invented by Debord or his colleagues.

74

Writing at the same time as the referenda, Philip M. Williams describes the media’s complicity with efforts to influence the vote, noting that six million copies of the journal France-Référendum (modeled after France- Soir), which had not been published since the 1958 election, were circulated for free. He also notes that the French Radio and Television Service (RTF), long a government instrument, was obliged to provide the President as much time as all the political parties together. See Williams, “The French Referendum, 1961” esp. 342–347. Williams also analyzes the outcome of the vote, by region, in France and in Algeria. 75

For Negt and Kluge, this emphasis on production is an essential part of their response to Habermas’s conception of the public sphere under the conditions of capitalist modernity. In their lexicon, such production makes of the public sphere a “proletarian” con-

76

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struct, adaptable to the needs of larger publics, be they “counter” or “alternative” to the bourgeois-derived model, the demise of which Habermas laments. See Negt and Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience. 77

See Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 9.

78 This photograph has seldom, if ever, been reproduced, which may account for some of the misreadings that have characterized the art-historical positioning of the other photographs in the sequence. 79 The well-known phrase “imagined community” comes from Benedict Anderson’s account of how language and literature figure into the formation of national identities in Imagined Communities. 80

See Journal de Paris, 25 June 1961, 3.

This is the aforementioned work originally misidentified as L’Humanité c’est la vérité and incorrectly attributed to both Hains and Villeglé.

81

82

Ross, “Democracy for Sale,” 86, 88. Italics in the original.

Algeron, “Les Français devant la guerre civile algérienne,” 25–44. Benjamin Stora, in his introduction to Le dictionnaire des livres de la guerre d’Algérie, explains that the public opinion poll was first developed in France as a governmental strategy during precisely this period in order to appease the demands of the so-called public. Such an observation supports the suspicion with which Michel Foucault viewed the opinion poll itself, as another false instrument of consensus. See Foucault, “The Eye of Power.” 83

84

Blanchot, “The Right to Insubordination,” 198. Emphasis mine.

Most famously, this group includes André Breton, who objected to Blanchot’s suggestion that the title of the “Manifeste” include the word “droit.” For Breton, it was categorically impossible to endow a right to refuse because, for him, such refusal constituted a duty. 85

86

Blanchot, “The Right to Insubordination,” 197.

87

Blanchot, “The Right to Insubordination,” 197.

CHAPTER 5: “THE EYE OF HISTORY”

As discussed in chapter 4, Algerians had been granted official status as citizens at least as early as 1947. In France, the Algerian population was often referred to as the français musulmans d’Algérie, a nomination that is discussed at greater length in this chapter.

1

2 The Federal Committee comprised five members of the French Federation of the FLN, and was based abroad, alternately in Germany and Switzerland, from whence it organized the FLN’s activities in mainland France in coordination with the FLN proper and the GPR A (Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic) in Tunis. Its history is narrated by a member of the committee, Haroun, La 7ème wilaya: La Guerre du FLN en France, 1954– 1962. See also House and MacMaster, “La Fédération de France du FLN et l’organisation du 17 octobre 1961.” 3 Algerians sometimes participated in PCF protests during the years coincident with the war. There were occasional small, local protests, but not since 14 July 1953 had there been a specifically Algerian demonstration for Algerian independence. Organized by the Mouve-

256

Once subject to censure and scrutiny, the events of 17 October 1961 are now extensively researched and described in a bibliography that is as vast as it is riddled with disagreements across political, national, and ideological lines. Important episodes in constructing this bibliography are as follows. The first book-pamphlet on the topic was Péju, Ratonnades à Paris, which was censored by the authorities and thus sparsely distributed, despite being largely a review of current press accounts. The topic is not reprised significantly until Levine, Les Ratonnades d’octobre, which was published after changes in French politics brought the Socialists back to power and, with them, the return of many of Papon’s original opponents. The 1980s were also marked by the growing cultural emergence of “Beur” (French-born Arab) production and a concomitant interest in the events of the Algerian War of Independence as it had been experienced in France. Because of the French restrictions imposed in 1979 regarding access to all archival documents, official archives (state, municipal, and police documents) regarding the event were unavailable for Levine and many of his contemporaries, including Einaudi, whose La bataille de Paris (1991) was based on documents in personal FF-FLN archives and oral histories. His view, which countered Papon’s 1988 account of the events in Les chevaux de pouvoir, helped prompt renewed interest in the event. This was further advanced by publicity surrounding Papon’s 1997–1998 trial for crimes against humanity during his tenure as secretary general for the Prefecture of Police in Bordeaux, which brought mention of the 1961 events into public discourse and prompted the Minister of the Interior to open state archives for limited access related to the purposes of an official investigation. The objectivity of the report that issued from this investigation, published in 1998 and known as the “Mandelkern Report” after one of its authors, Dieudonné Mandelkern, was quickly disputed by a group of historians who were also given limited access. See Mandelkern, Wiehn, and Jean, “Rapport sur les archives de la Préfecture de police.” In 1999, Papon himself re-initiated interest in the event when he accused Einaudi of libel, triggering a second trial that resulted in sanctions against two employees at the Archives de Paris, Brigitte Laîné and Philippe Grand, for having breached the contents of unopened archives, as well as a corresponding flurry of petitions, articles, and debates about archival freedom and responsibility. No doubt influenced by the mounting public interest, Catherine Trautmann, the minister of culture, authorized the opening of the archives in 1999, which was several years earlier than it would have been in the terms described by the 1979 law. (Permission to archives in France are granted by the individual ministry in charge of the archive, although it is not without interest that the Ministry of Culture technically oversees access to all such government documents.) House’s and MacMaster’s Paris 1961 (2006), written with special permission—une dérogation—to access the entire archive of the Prefecture of Police, provides only one important piece in a puzzle about how a history of state violence can and should be written. (Oral testimony is another, as are other kinds of archives that have contributed to the fashioning of the historical record, including especially those of the Communist, trade, and humanitarian organizations.) Nonetheless, their book has become the authoritative reference for this event and has laid to rest many debates and misinformation that informed several earlier accounts, especially those presented in Brunet, Police contre FLN (1999). In 2008, Brunet responded to their text in his “Police Violence in Paris, 4

notes for chapter 5

ment pour le triomphe des libertés democratiques (MTLD), this demonstration had also met with excessive police violence that resulted in fatalities. At this time, Papon was secretarygeneral of the Paris Police Prefecture. See Einaudi, La Bataille de Paris, 45–46.

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October 1961.” While this historiography itself is also accounted for in contemporary analyses of the event, the best accounts of the political and ideological motivations responsible for generating it in both France and in Algeria can be found in House and MacMaster, Paris 1961, esp. 7–21; and in Joshua Cole, “Remembering the Battle of Paris”; and Cole, “Entering History.” In addition to scholarly sources on the events of 17 October, several French-language novels that narrate the events should also be noted: Rachid Boudjedra, Topographie idéale pour une aggression caractérisée (Paris: Denoël, 1975) and Le vanqueur de coupe (Paris: Denoël, 1981); Didier Daeninckx, Meurtre pour mémoire (Paris: Série Noire, 1983); Nacer Kettane, Le sourire de Brahim (Paris: Denoël, 1985); Medhi Lallaoui, Une nuit d’octobre: roman (Paris: Éditions Alternatives, 2001); and Leila Sebbar, Le Seine était rouge (Paris: Thierry Magnier, 1999). The events are re-enacted in three films, four if you count Michel Haneke’s Caché (2005): Bourlem Guerdjou (dir.), Vivre au paradis (1999); Alain Tasma (dir.), Nuit noire (2005); and Rachid Bouchareb (dir.), Hors la loi (2010). In turn, these have generated an equally extensive volume of secondary criticism and analysis. Several important documentaries about the events include Jacques Panijel’s Octobre à Paris (1961–62), which was censored and only released for distribution in 2012; Philip Brooks and Alan Hayling, Drowning by Bullets (1992); and Daniel Kupferstein, Dissimulation d’un massacre (2001). In 2001, the collective Au nom de la mémoire mounted an exhibition dedicated to 17 octobre‒17 illustrateurs in Paris at the mairie of the 19th arrondissement and the nearby animation center, Curial. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue. 5 See, for example, the report in Le Monde, 3 October 1961, regarding Papon’s pronouncements at the funeral of a police offer assassinated by the FLN on 28 September 1961. 6 Paul Thibaud, “Le 17 octobre 1961.” The “Mandelkern Report” suggests that thirty-two deaths on 17 October 1961 were related to police violence, a statistic that is largely corroborated by Brunet’s reliance on the same statistics in his Police contre FLN, 329. See Mandelkern, Wiehn, and Jean, “Rapport sur les archives de la Préfecture de police relatives.” In May 1999, the Ministry of Justice elevated this number to forty-eight in what is now known as the “Géronimi Report.” Einaudi has claimed this number is closer to 150 and rises to nearly four hundred if the period is extended earlier, to include both September and October of 1961. See Einaudi, Octobre 1961, 347–356; and Cole, “Entering History,” 121. On this matter, House and MacMaster suggest that, regardless of total counts (which they specify at closer to 108), the event still marks “the bloodiest act of state repression of street protest in Western Europe in modern history.” See Paris 1961, 1, 167. “Time to Move On,” their rebuttal to Brunet’s response to their Paris 1961, was published in the same issue of The Historical Journal that carried the Brunet essay. 7 Papon reprises this 1961 claim in Les chevaux de pouvoir, 212, and it was indeed often repeated in the contemporaneous press, which eventually updated the death count to three, per Roger Frey’s pronouncements the next day. The 1961 press also noted Papon’s plans to deport several hundred of those arrested. See, for example, the front page of France-Soir, 19 October 1961, 3, and the report signed by Jean Ferniot, “Les musulmans ont obéi à un mot d’ordre qui a été largement suivi pour protester contre certains mesures prises à leur égard ” (The Muslims have obeyed an order that has been widely followed in protest against certain measures taken against them). The term “Battle of Paris” was coined (by people on both ends of the political spectrum) with the likely aim of comparing and thereby associating the Battle of Algiers in 1956–67 with domestic events in Paris during the last year of the Algerian War of Independence.

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The so-called “Mandelkern Report” adjusted the death toll upward to thirty-two, a number protested vigorously by such figures as Jean-Luc Einaudi, who objected that the report relied exclusively on police archives, heretofore unavailable to other investigations. See Einaudi’s editorial in Le Monde, 20 May 1998.

9

notes for chapter 5

8 House and MacMaster, Paris 1961, 139. Boudet demanded a commission of inquiry, but lost with 43 votes against and only 39 votes for. Drawing on accounts issued in the Journal officiel, débats parlementaires, House and MacMaster describe how the issue was again addressed in the National Assembly on 30 October, and then by the Senate, where Gaston Defferre based his demands on private testimonies of abuse amassed by Hervé Bourges, the editor of the newspaper Témoinage chrétien. Papon and Frey blocked the investigation that ensued by flooding the system with judicial inquiries that, by law, prevented simultaneous investigation by commission. See Paris 1961, 140–141.

10 For a summary of debates regarding the site of the plaque and the phrasing of its ultimately anodyne commemoration, see Philippe Bernard and Christine Garin, “Le massacre du 17 octobre 1961 obtient un début de reconnaissance officielle,” Le Monde, 20 March 2001. Photos circulated at the time by the Agence France-Presse (AFP) show Mayor Delanoë inaugurating the plaque before a modestly sized crowd. Other plaques and memorials would follow at other sites in and around the city: one in Aubervilliers, one at a Metro station in Gennevilliers, and one that took the form of renaming the Avenue Maréchal Hubert Lyautey in the northeastern suburb of La Courneuve as Avenue 17 Octobre. Lyautey, it should be remembered in order to fully understand the symbolism of such a renaming, was the Resident-General in Morocco discussed in chapter 2.

Cole, “Remembering the Battle of Paris,” 24. Emphasis mine. See also Stora, “17 octobre 1961,” 151. In addition, articles and testimonials were assembled in Hommes et Migrations, especially issue 1233 (September– October 2001); Chimères 44 (Fall 2001); and Vacarme 13 (Summer 2000), “Archéologie d’un silence.”

11

The rhetoric that accompanies such commemorations is also interesting in light of Cole’s argument. Consider the slogans of the nearly 10,000 demonstrators on 17 October 2001, whose charge was “No to racism, no to forgetting.”

12

“Memory activist” is a phrase used by House and MacMaster to name the vying contingencies responsible for re-introducing the memory of 17 October 1961 into French political life after 1981, and especially after the 1983 Marche pour l’ égalité et contre le racisme, which brought 100,000 protestors from Marseille to Paris. They explicitly map the different motivations—identitarian, anti-racist, etc.—that informed what, how, and where these groups “remembered” the absence of the event in official public life. See Paris 1961, esp. 288–328. For views that challenge the purview of the strictly “national” parameters of communal memory, see Graebner, “Remembering 17 October 1961 and the Novels of Rachid Boudjedra”; and Jelen, “17 octobre 1961–17 octobre 2001.”

13

14 The photograph by Jean Texier was taken in November 1961, but lay dormant in the archives of L’Humanité (which had acquired the image files of the publication for which it was originally taken) until it was selected to illustrate Claude Lecomte’s commemorative article, “Les noyés du 17 octobre,” L’Humanité, 18 October 1985. After that point it began to circulate widely. It has been repeated in countless newspaper articles but has also assumed greater prominence as the cover illustration for the book assembled by Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison on behalf of l’Association 17 octobre 1961 contre l’oubli, as well as for

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Mehdi Lallaoui’s Une Nuit d’Octobre. Photographs of protestors—including Jean-Michel Mension who claimed to have originally authored the graffiti captured in the photo— holding the image as evidence of their claim against the state are also commonplace. See Lemire and Potin, “ ‘Ici on noie les Algériens.’ Fabriques documentaires, avatars politiques et mémoires partagées d’une icône militante (1961–2001).” For a perhaps apocryphal account of having rendered the graffiti in question, see Mension, Le temps gage, 203–212. 15 For example: the cover of Einaudi’s La bataille de Paris reproduces a cropped image of a photograph by Elie Kagan of a wounded man in Nanterre (about whom more below). The cover of Einaudi’s Octobre 1961 features a detail of a photograph by Georges Azenstarck, showing several wounded protestors assembled near the Rex movie theater (across the street from Azenstarck’s newspaper, l’Humanité ); and Scenes de la guerre d’Algérie en France presents the same image from a different perspective. The cover of Amiri’s La bataille de France uses another photograph from the Azenstarck / l’Humanité archives, which shows the police corralling the demonstrators. Brunet’s Police contre FLN proffers a similar image of Algerians being arrested, their hands in the air. Interestingly, a nearly identical photo covers the French translation of Paris 1961 by House and MacMaster (Tallandier, 2008), while their English-language edition uses a different version of the cover photo as Le silence de fleuve, by Anne Tristan and the collective Au nom de la mémoire, the only book to focus on photographic documentation of the demonstration and the resulting massacre. This photo depicts bodies cowering against a wall in the suburb of Puteaux, shrinking away from what the crop on Tristan’s book allows us to see is a police baton and the lurking shadow of a police officer, who is himself more visible in the version used by House and MacMaster. 16 On iconic photos and their capacity to structure public sentiment, see Harriman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 27.

Rancière’s philosophies have been of distinct and ever-growing importance to arthistorical and art-critical writing of the past decade, as the special dossier assembled in the March 2007 issue of Artforum confirms. Without wanting to be too hasty, it would seem that this has been, at least in part, because his sensorially defined model of politics endows the enterprise of the arts with a newly invigorated justification of its political potentiality.

17

18 In this earlier text, Rancière resuscitates the life and teaching of Joseph Jacotot in order to argue for a pedagogy based not on expertise but on the cultivation of students’ will, which is to say on their own agency. In Rancière’s extended model, expertise-based pedagogy presupposes what counts and who might ascertain what matters. This precludes actual politics, since it removes alternative claims to knowledge or experience from the place where they might be valued or otherwise “counted.” See Rancière, The Ignorant School Master. 19

Rancière, “The Cause of the Other,” 28.

Rancière, Dis-agreement, 126. In her analysis of the events of 1968, Kristin Ross draws heavily on Rancière’s analysis of the “police conception of history,” finding in his philosophical claims both the methodological frame she needs to substantiate her claims as well as the weight of historical evidence. See Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, 57–88 passim for specific references to the importance she ascribes the rallying cry “We are all German Jews.”

20

21

260

Rancière, Dis-agreement, 126.

Rancière, Dis-agreement, 139. Emphasis mine.

Rancière, “The Cause of the Other,” 28. Emphasis mine. Here, it bears confirming that Sartre’s essay was not about the events of 17 October 1961, but rather about the general and accelerating revelations regarding French use of torture in Algeria, which are addressed briefly in this book in reference to Henri Alleg’s publication of La Question in chapter 2. These revelations, Sartre thought, would surely stimulate the French to political outrage on behalf of both the French and Algerian victims of such torture.

23

As the journalist David Rieff writes in his popular memoir, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West, “200,000 Bosnian Muslims died, in full view of the world’s television cameras, and more than two million other people were forcibly displaced. A state formally recognized by the European Community and the United States . . . and the United Nations . . . was allowed to be destroyed. While it was being destroyed, UN military forces and officials looked on, offering “humanitarian” assistance and protesting . . . that there was no will in the international community to do anything more.” David Rieff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 23, as quoted in Keenan, “Mobilizing Shame,” 104. In what I take to be a historical corrective to the kind of universalist argument Rancière presents, Keenan has argued that such indifference is best understood in light of the constant flow of real-time information that meant intervention never needed to justify itself on the level of politics but could, instead, gain support from repeated denunciations on the order of ethical and moral, i.e., what he understands as affective, outrage.

24

notes for chapter 5

22

Linfield, The Cruel Radiance, provides an effort to seriously reconsider the value of photojournalistic reportage against a model she finds most staunchly articulated in Susan Sontag’s 1977 On Photography and recapitulated in art criticism throughout the 1980s.

25

Subsequent to his discovery by the art world, Rancière reversed his stance on the passivity engendered by actual images. In his essay “The Intolerable Image,” he wrote against Gérard Wajcman’s critique of Georges Didi-Huberman’s essay cited in the epigraph to this chapter, that “the critique of the spectacle has identified with it Plato’s denunciation of the deceptiveness of appearances and the passivity of the spectator. The dogmatists of the unrepresentable have assimilated it to the religious controversy over idolatry. We must challenge these identifications of the use of image with idolatry, ignorance or passivity, if we want to take a fresh look at what images are, what they do and the effects they generate . . . we must challenge the received opinion that this system drowns us in a flood of images in general, and images of horror in particular, thereby rendering us insensitive to the banalized reality of these horrors. This opinion is widely accepted because it confirms the traditional thesis that the evil of images consists in their very number, their profusion effortlessly invading the spellbound gaze and mushy brain of the multitude of democratic consumers of commodities and images. This view is critical in intent, but it is perfectly in tune with the functioning of the system. For the dominant media by no means drown us in a torrent of images testifying to massacres, massive population transfers and the other horrors that go to make up our planet’s presence. Quite the reverse, they reduce their number, taking good care to select and order them. . . . What we see above all in the news on our TV screens are the faces of the rulers, experts and journalists who comment on the images, who tell us what they show and what we should make of them. If horror is banalized, it is not because we see too many images of it. We do not see too many suffering bodies on the screen. But we do see too many nameless bodies, too many bodies

26

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incapable of returning the gaze that we direct at them, too many bodies that are an object of speech without themselves having a chance to speak.” Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 95–96. In this passage, Rancière directly evokes Jean Baudrillard, whose The Evil Demon of Images was an important component of the postmodern refusal of the signified as a means to interpretation and representation. 27

Barthes, “Shock Photos,” in Mythologies.

28 Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” in Image, Music, Text, 15–31. In Geoffrey Batchen’s introduction to his 2009 anthology on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, Batchen expertly situates Barthes’s writings about photography in the context then current in France. See Batchen, “Palinode: An Introduction to Photography Degree Zero.” 29 This history is well recounted and evidenced in a number of publications, many of which reproduce the ideological purview of the authorizing agency that commissioned the original photographs. A recent exception includes the presentation of Agence France-Presse photographs in Bakhtatzé, La Guerre d’Algérie. See also essays by Fabrice d’Almeida, “Photographie et censure,” and Thèrese Blondet-Bisch, “La Photo-Déclic des Appelés,” in Gervereau et al., La France en guerre d’Algérie. 30 Benjamin Stora has been a staunch advocate of the need to understand the Algerian War of Independence as “une guerre inégalitaire” in terms of its image production. See especially his essay “France: images vues, perdues, retrouvées,” in Gervereau and Stora, Photographier la guerre d’Algérie, which corresponds with his earlier work on film and televisual production, especially Imaginaires de guerre.

Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 19. The full citation reads “If the spectacle— understood in the limited sense of those ‘mass media’ that are its most stultifying superficial manifestation— seems at times to be invading society in the shape of a mere apparatus, it should be remembered that this apparatus has nothing neutral about it, and that it answers precisely to the needs of the spectacle’s internal dynamics.” Emphasis in the original. 31

32

Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 12.

33

Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 12.

Barthes’s statement reads: “Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of ‘posing.’ I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image.” See Barthes, Camera Lucida, 10.

34

35 De Certeau distinguishes tactics from strategies in his “ ‘Making Do’: Uses and Tactics,” The Practice of Everyday Life, 29–42. My thanks to Ali Behdad for directing me to de Certeau’s important model of tactical resistance as a way to understand the importance of 17 October within the larger context of the Algerian War of Independence.

The document is the “Communiqué du préfet de police de Paris, rendu public le 6 octobre 1961, instituant le couvre-feu” (Press release from the Paris prefect of police, released October 6, 1961, establishing the curfew). Papon’s text is reprinted in Le Cour Grandmaison and Anderson, Le 17 octobre 1961, 204–205. 36

The opening of the “Second Front” in France was announced in the 17 September 1958 issue of El Moudjahid, 585–587. One justification for this move forty-five months into the 37

262

38 House and MacMaster draw on Mohammed Zouaoui’s 14 October instructions, which had been intercepted by the Paris police and are therefore housed in the police archive. See House and MacMaster, Paris 1961, 114. 39

“Communiqué du préfet de police de Paris,” 204.

At the time, many Algerian deportees were interned at the Vel d’Hiv and the Japy gymnasium, prompting comparisons in such left-wing organs as L’Humanité with Petainist deportation during the Second World War. 40

notes for chapter 5

combat was Papon’s mass roundup of Algerians on 27 August 1958 and their subsequent deportation/repatriation to Algeria, which is even here (in an FLN publication) cited as evidence of the kind of racism and discrimination that France claims to have eschewed since the Pétain regime.

41 “Communiqué du préfet de police de Paris,” 204–205. Kristin Ross makes a similar point in her discussion of Papon’s curfew. See May ’68 and Its Afterlives, 55–56.

Communiqué du préfet de police de Paris, 204. On 10 October 1961, the Director General of the Paris Police made even more precise the degree to which Papon’s “couvre-feu” was meant to control the movements of the FMA population, declaring the terms of the contestation to be more like a “visa,” which would be valid for one month only and would only pertain to specified routes or movement. It also specified that FMAs were prohibited from riding or driving in cars at all times unless their work also qualified them for a similar visa. Most compellingly, the Director General’s specifications exempted from the curfew: “élus français musulmans d’Algérie” (elected French Muslims from Algeria), high functionaries, employees of R ATP (Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens), “aux facteurs en tenue d’uniforme” (those who work in uniforms), “personnels de l’Assistance publique sur présentation de leur carte professionnelle” (public assistance personnel upon presentation of their professional identification papers), Moroccans and Tunisians carrying verification of their nationality, and student FMAs carrying their cards and conducting approved activities. See Circulaire n° 43–61 du directeur général de la police municipale concernant la “circulation des Français musulmans algériens,” Directeur général de la police municipale de Paris, 10 October 1961. See www.17octobre61.org.

42

Regarding the FF-FLN planning, see the documents assembled by Mohammed Harbi, “L’Algérie vingt-cinq ans après,” and in particular the correspondence between Ali Haroun and Mohamed Zouaoui, 74–77. See also Haroun, La 7ème wilaya, 359–378. This material is analyzed in House and MacMaster, “La Féderation de France du FLN et l’organisation du 17 octobre 1961.” 43

The reference to the fact that the responses to Papon’s curfew “doivent être spectaculaires,” is made in “Document 21,” a letter of instruction written by Kaddour [Ladlani] on behalf of the Comité federal de la FF-FLN to the FLN leadership. See Harbi, “L’Algérie vingt-cinq ans après,” 75. Emphasis mine. 44

Debord’s first use of the term “spectacle” in printed form appears in his “Le Cinéma après Alain Resnais.”

45

46 On 20 October, the Algerian women of Paris and the surrounding suburbs marched in front of the Hôtel de Ville to protest the disappearance of their husbands. Thirty-five women were arrested, along with eighteen children, in front of métro Châtelet. In many ways, this remains the most invisible component of the march. These women, doubly

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invisible, at least in practice, as Algerian in a French world and women in a male world, figure infrequently in the growing literature regarding this event. 47

Lefebvre, “The Right to the City,” 155. Emphasis in original.

48

Lefebvre, “The Right to the City,” 153.

49 My thanks to Mary Roberts for reminding me to think of these paintings in relation to the photographs of the demonstration, taken on the grand boulevards of the 2nd and 9th arrondissements. 50

Debord’s famous work is printed in an insert in Jorn, Pour la forme.

I have never seen this photograph published, but Emma Chubb has reminded me that it is included in the display regarding 17 October 1961 in Paris’s Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration. My essay, “Flash Forward: Pictures at War” considers this photograph and several of the Kagan photos discussed below in light of Orientalist photography, broadly construed. 51

The photograph was originally taken for Europress, a stock photo agency that eventually sold its image rights to Sygma / Corbis and, it would seem, to Roger-Viollet (both agencies claim they hold exclusive copyright). According to Nathalie Doury at Parisienne de Photographie, the agency into which Roger-Viollet was absorbed several years ago, the records naming the photographer are no longer extant. (E-mail correspondence with the author, 17 August 2007.) Comparison with other images, however, suggests it was likely shot by Gérard Ménager or Raymond Darolle, two photographers whose images appear in the Paris Match spread discussed below. The fact that the photograph was not published, even though it is of greater technical clarity than those that were printed, furthers the argument I make below, regarding visibility and invisibility of the Algerian population being of principal concern to the French authorities.

52

The Institute was a private institution founded by the Frenchman Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, but it was financed by the Germans.

53

54 See Perrault and Azéma, Paris Under the Occupation, 85. Among its displays, the exhibition featured a reconstruction of a Jewish streetscape from the Marais.

See Chaumet, “Les nécessaires clartés d’une étoile,” Le Cahier Jaune 6 (July 1942), as cited in Perry, “Jean Fautrier’s Jolie Juives,” 56. Perry also describes how the text of the article was printed over a field of Stars of David, each inscribed with the word “Juif.” 55

56

Perrault and Azéma, Paris Under the Occupation, 31.

57

France Observateur, 26 October 1961, n.p.

58 There is no doubt these numbers would have doubled if the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris had allowed the France- Soir photo archive, which they maintained in their private collection, to circulate or to be reproduced. Benjamin Stora calls this refusal to republish the images an act of censorship. See his “France: images vues, perdues, retrouvés,” 100n 11. As of 14 September 2009, these fonds (which include 500,000 prints and 150,000 negatives from Paris- Soir, Match, and France- Soir) were confirmed not consultable for “des raisons juridiques” (legal reasons). (Written correspondence between the author and Carole Gascard, photo curator at BHVP, September 2009.) In March 2010, this situation was revealed as even more strange still, when it was leaked that the BHVP was deaccessioning these archives for what they cited as financial considerations. A few of the

264

59 Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, 56. For the most part, newspaper coverage on the 18th, 19th, and 20th focused primarily on individual photos of the demonstration as it unfolded in disparate parts of the city. These photos present an enthusiastic and at times almost celebratory crowd. 60 The headline read: “10,000 Nord-Africains arêtés a Paris après la manifestation de 25,000 F.L.N.” The caption under the photo described the event: “The demonstrators moved from the Boulevard des Italiens to the intersection with Bonne Nouvelle. They are at the top of Gremont Street. In a few minutes, a shootout will break out” (Les manifestants se dirigent par le boulevard des Italiens vers le carrefour Bonne-Nouvelle. Ils sont à la hauteur de la rue de Gremont. Dans quelques minutes, une fusillade va éclater).

notes for chapter 5

France- Soir images that were not published in 1961 are printed in Labarde and Pourquery, La Photo à la Une, 115–132.

61 Famously, it is on a cover of Paris Match that Barthes bases his analysis of “Myth Today,” as printed in Mythologies. For more on Paris Match during the Algerian War of Independence, see Thomas Michael Gunther, “Le choc des images de Paris-Match,” in Gervereau, Rioux, and Stora, eds., La France en Guerre d’Algérie, 228–232. 62 The French reads: “Pendant une heure, les boulevards des théâtres vont vivre un cauchemar; Des milliers de travailleurs nord-africains sont venues de leurs banlieues ignorés et surgissent, inquiétants sous les lumières de la ville. Paris se trouve tout à coup face au problème.” 63 The French reads: “A l’ heure du grand film apparait une foule inattendue qui brave le couvre-feu. Il est 21h. Les cinémas des boulevards sont pleins. C’est aussi l’ heure du couvre-feu nouvellement appliqué dans les quartiers musulmans. Sur l’ordre du F.L.N. les manifestants accompagnés de femmes et d’enfants viennent en masse protester contre cette mesure. Les premiers défiles se déroulent dans le calme.” 64 The French reads: “Le peur et la violence font le vide à les terrasses des cafés. Les musulmans scandent les slogans orchestrées par les meneurs du F.L.N. Pour les empêcher de se regrouper au centre de Paris, la police essaie de les disperser. La tension monte, les vitrines volent en éclats, les automobilistes se trouvent bloqués face à une marée de visage menaçants.” 65

Baer, Spectral Evidence, 7.

66

Baer, Spectral Evidence, 17.

Rancière, Dis-agreement, 139. Here it is also worth noting that it is a photograph by Elie Kagan, the one of Abdelkader Bennehar to be discussed below, that is printed on the cover of the 1988 folio edition of Daeninckx’s fictional account, Meurtres pour mémoire.

67

68 Six of Kagan’s photographs were published in Péju’s Ratonnades à Paris (1961), which was, as above, seized by authorities. The images had nonetheless already circulated without censure in several newspapers, including Témoinage Chrétien, France Observateur, and, as will be discussed, L’Humanité. Individual images have been reprinted in conjunction with the literally hundreds of newspaper articles that have issued since the mid-1980s in regard to the events of 17 October 1961, where they are often singled out for providing unique visual testimony. The images, or most of them, were published by the BDIC (Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine), which acquired Kagan’s archives subsequent to his death in 1999. See Kagan and Einaudi, 17 Octobre 1961. These photographs are also discussed in terms of Kagan’s itinerary, in Benayoun, “Photopsie d’un massacre,” 65–67; Kagan and Rotman, Le reporter engagé ; and Tristan, Le silence du fleuve.

265

notes for chapter 6

Kagan’s centrality to the representation of 17 October 1961 is underscored by the fact that he— and the moped often mentioned in popular accounts of his itinerary that evening— are reprised in Tasma’s docu-fictional film from 2005, Nuit Noire: 17 octobre 1961. The degree to which Kagan risked his life and how he exercised his profession (since it is often reported that he had to hide either his camera or the film within it) as he moved throughout the city is emphasized in accounts that also suggest his photographs of the 17 October demonstration were never shown. See, for example the text that introduces Kagan’s photographs in “Massacre in the city,” Index on Censorship 30:1, 80–86. This suggests that the FF-FLN understood the likely consequences of their call to protest. See François Maspero’s postface “Les mensonges grossiers de M. Papon,” in Péju, Ratonnades à Paris, 195. 69

70

See Christofferson, “François Furet Between History and Journalism, 1958–1965.”

The French, which I have here translated loosely, reads: “ la situation crée par les policiers de M. Papon: celles-ci sont pourtant évidentes en ce qui concerne les Français d’Algérie. Il s’agit de prendre la defense des travailleurs algériens, dont les libertés sont la caution des nôtre.” Delcroix, “Aucun français ne peut plus ignorer ça.”

71

Born in Algeria to a French father and an Algerian mother, Kréa spent much of his life in Paris, where he worked frequently as a journalist. His early poems and plays are explicitly concerned with themes of alienation and identity. During the Algerian War of Liberation, he was a staunch advocate—if not often more—for Algerian sovereignty.

72

Henri Krea, “Le racisme est collectif, la solidarité individuelle,” France Observateur, 26 October 1961.

73

74

Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, 39.

75

Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, 21.

Permission to reproduce this image, or any of the other blurred shots from the same sequence, was denied by the Kagan estate and the BDIC, a refusal that is best understood in light of the estate’s will to recast Kagan as an auteur.

76

My thanks to Nicholas Wylie for reminding me of the symbolic association with Christ conferred on these martyrs by the word “Rex” or “King” above them.

77

78

Agulhon, “Paris: A Traversal from East to West,” 535.

79

Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, 20.

CHAPTER 6: LOOKING PAST THE STATE OF EMERGENCY

See the introductory texts and documentation published in the exhibition catalogue Images Critiques.

1

One of these works was never realized. Though it had been planned for a public commission in the city of Dijon, the municipal authorities cancelled it when they learned that Adams planned to use photographs related to the Algerian War of Independence. See Staniszewski, “Architecture of Amnesia,” 8.

2

3 The literature on this exhibition and its relationship to an ever-emergent “global” art history is vast. See in particular the translated version of the essays that accompanied the exhibition in Les Cahiers du musée national d’art moderne as they appear in Third Text 3, no. 6 (1989). Of these, Rasheed Araeen renders a scathing critique of the authors’ “igno-

266

Of this image, Adams notes only that it depicts the “rush” of women and children toward the camera in a 1962 demonstration in Algeria. See Adams, Staniszewski, et al., The Architecture of Amnesia, 68.

4

5

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 217.

6

Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 14. Italics in the original.

7

Tshimanga, Bloom, and Gondola, Frenchness and the African Diaspora, 6.

notes for chapter 6

rance,” which he claims only perpetuates the assumptions about the relationship of the “other” to modernism that the exhibition had meant to call into question. Araeen also laments the liberal and humanist strain of the national framework still employed to understand the art in question and sets the ground for what will be decades of critique levied at the exhibition. See “Our Bauhaus, Others’ Mudhouse,” 3. Perhaps the most trenchant criticism of Les Magiciens de la terre was realized in another exhibition, this time Documenta XI, curated in various platforms overseen by Okwui Enwezor in 2002.

“Article 4, loi 2005–158 du 23 février portant reconnaissance de la Nation et contribution nationale en faveur des Français rapatriés,” Journal Officiel du 24 février 2005. Accounts of the law in relationship to the history described in this book are found in Liauzu and Manceron, La colonization, la loi, et l’ histoire; Bancel, “The Law of February 23, 2005”; and Bertrand, Mémoires d’empire.

8

Per the historians’ insistence that history is written by historians, not by governments, President Jacques Chirac authorized Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin to amend the law, which was done in January 2006. In the context of this book’s arguments, it bears noting that, these historians’ insistence notwithstanding, histories are also written (in a variety of ways) by all sorts of people.

9

10

Bancel, “The Law of February 23, 2005,” 167.

For more on the French army’s use of torture during the War of Independence, see Branche, La torture et l’armée pendant la guerre d’Algérie. For more on the re-emergence of these debates into public discourse, see also Joshua Cole, “Intimate Acts and Unspeakable Relations”; and Duremlat, “Revisiting Ghosts.”

11

12

Bancel, “The Law of February 23, 2005,” 172–173.

13

Bancel, “The Law of February 23, 2005,” 171.

14

Bancel, “The Law of February 23, 2005,” 173.

15 On 8 February 2007, a French judge charged the two police responsible for this chase with the crime of having failed to assist people in danger. The elaborate trial, which refuted the police officers’ claim that they had not chased the youth, went so far as to orchestrate an elaborate reenactment of the event, which proved definitively that the youth had been chased and that they had committed no crime. Nonetheless, in April 2011, a Paris appeals court dropped the “failure to help” case and the police were acquitted of any wrongdoing. 16 These statistics are frequently repeated. I cite them from the introduction to Tshimanga, Bloom, and Gondola, Frenchness and the African Diaspora, 4.

See Lapeyronnie, “Primitive Rebellion in the French Banlieues,” 25. Lapeyronnie draws on definitions that include George Rudé’s assessments of rioting in the French Revolution, as well as Eric Hobsbawm’s work to argue that “Rioting is therefore a collective 17

267

notes for chapter 6

action. . . . Even when it is accompanied by violence, vandalism, and looting, even when it is ‘unconventional’—that is, when it unfolds outside the legitimate institutional mechanisms, in contrast to a workers’ strike or a demonstration—it stems in the first place from an understanding of the social and political mechanisms that govern the formation and orientation of social and collective movements. In other words, rioting belongs to the normal repertoire of political action.” 18

L’Humanité, 5 November 2005.

Jean Baudrillard, “Nique ta mere!” re-issued in English and with some minor changes and the innocuous title “The Pyres of Autumn,” The New Left Review 37 (January– February 2006).

19

20

Baudrillard, “The Pyres of Autumn,” np.

21

Baudrillard, “The Pyres of Autumn,” np.

See Debord, The Society of the Spectacle. As has been noted by numerous scholars, Debord was intent on disaggregating what he called “spectacle” from the image, pure and simple, and yet the two are indisputably linked in Debord’s text and have become even more wed in the nearly fifty years since the text’s original publication. The brief definition I provide here depends on a merger of Debord’s fourth thesis, which asserts “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (12); and the thirty-fourth, which revisits this ontology to claim “The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image” (24). 22

The question of whether or not “tu m’as bien regardé?” was the subject of the exhibition Clichy sans cliché: Propositions pour un autre regard sur la banlieue that took place in Clichy-sous-Bois at L’Espace 93 in October 2006 as part of a post-riot effort to improve social existence in the French suburbs. It travelled in November to the Hotel de Ville in Paris. The exhibition collected works by a range of well-known photographers in order to stimulate “les Clichois” to initiate their own self-representation at provided photo and video facilities. For details about the exhibition, see Bouvier, “Etat d’urgence(s).” 23

As Ahmed Boubeker notes, Sarkozy’s use of the term “racaille” is made even more complex given the back-speak slang “caille-ras,” that black French have used to name themselves alongside “zupiens,” or “rebeux.” See Boubeker, “Outsiders in the French Melting Pot,” 88n1.

24

25 Chirac’s declaration is printed in Le Monde, 14 November 2005. Giorgio Agamben describes the 1955 law as it is incorporated as article 16 in the 1958 Constitution, but notes it has not been invoked since 1961. See Agamben, State of Exception, 14.

In 1955, 1958, and 1961, the powers afforded by the state of emergency were used to quell uprisings in what is now Algeria. The state of emergency was evoked as well in the French overseas territory of New Caledonia in 1984, when the FLNKS (Front de libération nationale Kanake et Socialiste), an indigenous independence movement, rose against French settlers known as cadoces.

26

To fully appreciate the pleasure taken in this spectacular display across the Atlantic, it is important to situate the riots within the larger context of Franco-American relations. These had recently been strained by “Fry-gate,” which concerned the French refusal to join the U.S.-led “coalition of the willing” in the Iraq invasion and subsequent American

27

268

28 The reference to “’68” was nearly ubiquitous in the weeks when the riots first broke out. See, for example, the Reuters article, “An Underclass Rebellion,” that ran in The Economist (11 November 2005) as part of a feature on what the magazine’s cover announced as “France’s Failure.” Such references ironically obscured an equally important history of sometimes violent urban uprisings in France, including those of 1981 in the suburban housing developments just outside Lyon, and again those of 1990 and 1994. In all of these instances, the story of the riot is the same: there is an issue between the police and an individual or a group of individuals that leads to a disagreement, its escalation, an act of police brutality, and a subsequent riot. At this point it might be said that the representation of rioting, including the occlusion of these representations—by legislative acts that do not find the police at fault and do not correct the imbalances that created the initial occasion of encounter—influences the very impetus to riot. On the articulation of violence as a political tool, especially in terms of violence intended for the camera, see Retort, Afflicted Powers.

notes for chapter 6

efforts to purge the culture of French influence and reference, including, in some extreme instances, removing “French fries” from restaurant menus.

29 In addition to the text by Mbembe cited above, see Joshua Cole, “Understanding the French Riots of 2005.” See also the writing of Loïc Wacquant, who argues for important differences in the French and American “ghettos,” most notably in his Parias urbains. Ghetto, banlieues, état. 30

Layperonnie, “Primitive Rebellion in the French Banlieues,” 21.

31

Möller, “Quei loro incontri.

32

See Renzi, “Danièle Huillet (1936–2006), A Materialist Filmmaker,” 7.

33

See Rosenbaum, “Historical Meditations in Two Films by John Gianvito,” 30.

34

Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, 28.

35

Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 153.

36

Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 147.

37

Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, 182.

269

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INDEX

Note: Page numbers followed by f indicate a figure. Abadie, Daniel, 246n16, 247n20Abbas, Ferhat, 4 Abu Ghraib prison photos, 16, 207 Abu-Lughod, Janet, 55–56 Ach Alma Manetro (Hains and Villeglé), 109, 111f, 121, 134, 245nn5–6 Adams, Dennis, 14, 201–8, 203f, 217 Afghanistan War of 2001– present, 16, 209. See also war on terror Agamben, Giorgio, 106, 218, 244n67 Ageron, Charles-Robert, 152 L’Agrégation d’un nom et d’un messie (Isou), 105–6, 244nn68, 70 Agulhon, Maurice, 197, 266n78 Algeria: Boulevard de l’Impératrice (Algiers) in, 56f, 57f ; colonial urban policies in, 55–62, 234n55, 235n63; Crise de mai in, 41, 42, 228n1; de Gaulle’s referenda on, 142–47, 253–55nn69–71, 255n75; film portrayals of, 58–61,

202–3, 227n47, 234n60, 235n62; French occupation and annexation of, 42, 128, 231n32, 250n40; indigenous and foreign populations of, 143–44, 221–22n4, 253n69; Malraux’s position on, 42, 229n2; migration to France from, 48, 67–69, 210, 231nn25–27, 236n77, 236n84; photos of manifestations in, 171–72, 202–3, 207–8, 267n4; Provisional Government of, 37, 38, 172, 256n2; UN recognition of, 49, 231n29; urban neighborhood demolition in, 53 The Algerian Annex (Adams), 14, 201–8, 216, 266n2, 267n4 Algerian Civil War, 221n4 Algerian War of Independence, 3–10, 26, 128, 221n4; Adams’s work on, 201–8, 217, 266n2, 267n4; in The Battle of Algiers, 58–61, 202–3, 227n47, 235n62; civil rights during, 5–6, 152, 159, 164, 167, 195, 213, 245n11, 262n56; décollagistes on, 13, 122–28, 130–31, 134–42,

248n33; Evian Accords of, 35; factions of, 5; French coup attempt and, 5–6, 128; impact on Malraux of, 22; intellectual self-identification of, 139, 252n60; inventing decolonization and, 43, 229n8; military photography of, 166–67; naming of, 3, 221n4; official beginning of, 4–5, 222n6, 222n8; postcolonial revisionism of, 208–10, 267nn8–9; press coverage of, 138–39, 252n56; second front in France of, 170, 262n37; Sétif uprisings and, 3–4, 6, 208; torture in, 34–36, 209–10, 227n47, 229n2, 261n23. See also manifestation of 17 October 1961 L’Algérienne (Ighilahriz), 209 Alleg, Henri, 42, 229n2 Altun, Muhittin, 210–11 Amiri, Linda, 260n15 Annales School, 228n54 L’anticoncept (Wolman), 241n30 Anti-Œdipus (Deleuze and Guattari), 90 Antonescu, Ion, 94–95, 102 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 97 Araeen, Rasheed, 266n3

305

index

Arendt, Hannah, 9, 141–42 Armée de libération nationale (aln), 5 Arretche, Louis, 70, 72f art historiography, 8, 15, 21 Article 4, loi 2005–158 du 23 février portant reconnaissance de la Nation et contribution nationale en faveur des Français repatriés, 208–10, 267n9, 267nn8–9 The Art of the Assemblage exhibition, 251n44 Au nom de la mémoire collective, 257–58n4 L’Aurore newspaper, 138 Aussaresses, Paul, 209, 227n47 Auteuil, Daniel, 204, 206f, 208f Auzelle, Robert, 233n47 Azéma, Pierre, 184 Azenstarck, Georges, 192, 260n15 Azoulay, Ariella, 217–18, 269n34 Baer, Ulrich, 192–93, 265nn65, 66 Ball, Hugo, 97, 98–99, 242n50 Bancel, Nicolas, 209–10, 267nn8, 10, 12, 14 Barbie, Klaus, 35 Bardet, Gaston, 233n47 Barthes, Roland, 246n14, 247n30; epigraph, from “African Grammar,” 1; on linguistic representation of war, 2–3; on photographic captions, 186, 265n61; on photographic making of “self,” 168–69; on photographic paradox, 166; on the preterite tense of the photograph, 32; on readerly text, 99 The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo), 58–61, 60f, 61f, 202– 3, 227n47, 235n62

306

Baudelaire, Charles, 29, 81, 83 Baudrillard, Jean, 168, 211–12 Benaïcha, Brahim, 236n84 Benjamin, Walter, 23–24, 32–33, 73 Benna, Zyed, 210–11, 215 Bennehar, Abdelkader, 193– 95, 265n67 Bergman, Ingrid, 216 Berlitz Theater (Palais Berlitz), 179–84, 198, 264n52 Berna, Serge, 241n36 Binoche, Juliet, 204, 208f Blanchot, Maurice, 16, 226n30; epigraph, from “War and Literature,” 77; on the “Manifeste des 121,” 122–23, 128, 139–40, 154–55, 248n27, 248n30, 253n63; on the space of literature, 81, 103, 238n5; on writing of war, 2, 77, 94, 99, 103–4, 139–40, 241n44 Blaue Reiter Almanach, 39 Bloom, Peter J., 208–9 Blum, Léon, 19 Blum-Byrnes agreement, 86 Boissay, Jacques, 179 Bosnian genocide, 165–66, 261n24 Boubeker, Ahmed, 268n24 Bouchareb, Rachid, 3–4, 205, 257–58n4 Boudjedra, Rachid, 257–58n4 Boulevard des Italiens (Brassaï), 176f boulevard paintings, 176f, 177–78 Bourdet, Claude, 160 Brassaï (Gyula Halasz), 109, 110f, 176f, 177, 244n3 Brau, Jean-Louis, 241n36 La Brèche pour Brecht (Dufrêne), 117f “Bremen Speech” (Celan), 100–102, 243n57 Breton, André, 38, 256n85 Brooks, Philip, 257–58n4

Brunet, Jean-Paul, 257n4, 258n6, 260n15 Bryen, Camille, 119–21, 132 Buchloh, Benjamin, 99, 111, 250n43 Buñuel, Luis, 240n23 Buren, Daniel, 245n4 Bush, George W., 223n19 Cabañas, Kaira, 248n33, 251n46 Caché (Haneke), 14, 204–18 Cadava, Eduardo, 23 Caillebotte, Gustave, 176f, 177 Camus, Albert, 252n60 Canailles (Lemaître), 99–102, 106, 243n55 Cannes Film Festival, 85–95, 239–40nn22–24, 240n34 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 114– 15, 246n14 Casablanca (Morocco), 55–56, 61–62, 68–69 Casebere, James, 206 “La cause de l’autre” (Rancière), 164–65 Celan, Paul, 100–102, 243n57 Certeau, Michel de, 70–71, 169, 262n35 C’est ça le rénouveau? (Hains), 134, 144–47, 150, 255n72 Cet homme est dangereux (Hains), 128–30, 134, 141, 144, 249n39, 253n65, 253n68 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 7–8 Chaplin, Charlie, 237n2 Chapsal, Marie, 154–55 Chassériau, Charles Frédéric, 57 Chavannes, Georges C., 86 Chema Yisrael, 104–5 Les chevaux de pouvoir (Papon), 257n4, 258n7 La chimère d’Arezzo (Hains), 131–32, 133f Chirac, Jacques, 210, 213–14, 267n9, 268n25

Coty, René, 229n2 Crary, Jonathan, 92–93 La création artistique (Malraux), 19 Crimp, Douglas, 226n37 crirhythmes, 91 “Cris pour 5,000,000 de juifs égorgés” (Isou), 95–99, 96f, 102–8 The Customs Post (Rousseau), 29–30, 226n28 Daeninckx, Didier, 257–58n4, 265n67 Danger, René, 61 Darolle, Raymond, 186, 187– 91f, 264n52 Darquier de Pellepoix, Louis, 264n53 Davis, Bette, 86 Davis, Gary, 245n6 Debord, Guy, 218–19, 237nn2–3, 241n30; Lettrist defections of, 79; on magnetic tape, 241n36; on spectacle, 15, 92–93, 163, 168–69, 173, 204, 206, 212, 262n31, 262n45, 267n22; urban imaginary of, 178–79 Debré, Michel, 42, 170 decades of decolonization, 3–5; Lettrist movement’s bridge to, 107–8; nascent global leveling of, 28; nationalist movements of, 80; postcolonial revisionism of, 208–10, 267nn8–9; production of culture in, 5–10, 21–24, 42–46, 203–4. See also decolonial looking Déclaration sur le droit à l’ insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie, 122–23. See also “Manifeste des 121” “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy” (Debord), 173 décollage/décollagistes, 13, 81, 109–55; Ach Alma Mane-

tro, 111f; Algerian War of Independence and, 122–28, 130–31, 134–42; constituent acts of, 115; on contingency of language and image, 119–28, 154–55; critical response to, 130– 34, 141, 142, 146, 149–50, 247n19, 250n44, 251n46; debut by Hains and Villeglé of, 109–16, 119, 244n2, 245nn5–6; “Défense d’afficher” law and, 111–13, 135– 36, 245n9, 245n11; direct perception and nouveau réalisme of, 132–34, 251n48, 251n51; everyman’s agency in, 108, 141–42, 151–55, 253n57, 253n65; at the first Paris biennial, 115–19, 128, 247nn20–21, 249n37; La France déchirée exhibition of, 114f, 124–42; performative element of, 150–51; photography’s embeddedness in, 113–15; temporal accumulation of meaning in, 147–55, 256n78 decolonial looking (decolonized art), 9–16, 42–46, 201–19, 223n15; engaged practices in, 2, 13, 16, 155; ethical model of, 218–19; experience and, 10–11; Malraux revision of, 26–34, 43; politics of being seen in, 8–10, 15. See also décollage/décollagistes; linguistic modality of representation; photographic documentation; subaltern political agendas; urban space Défense d’afficher law (1881), 111–13, 135–36, 191f, 245n9, 245n11 Défense d’afficher—Loi du 29 juillet 1881 (Villeglé and Hains), 114f, 115, 245n9, 246n17

index

cinétract(s), 14, 214‒218 citizenship, 7, 10, 13; of Algerians, 143, 159, 168–69, 185, 199; endowed rights of, 49, 123, 142–43; of French Jews, 184 The Civil Contract of Photography (Azoulay), 217–18 Clark, T. J., 93 Clichy sans cliché: Propositions pour un autre regard sur la banlieue exhibition, 268n23 Cocteau, Jean, 86, 240n25 Code inconnu: Récit incomplete de divers voyages (Haneke), 204 Cogniat, Raymond, 45, 116– 17, 223n17, 230n14 Cole, Joshua, 161, 162, 169, 214, 257–58n4, 269n29 Colin de Verdière, Hubert, 4, 222n7 colonial remembrance, 7, 221n3. See also decades of decolonization colonial violence. See wars of decolonization Comité fédéral de la fédération de France du fln (ff-fln), 160, 168–73, 185, 195–96, 256n2. See also manifestation of 17 October 1961 Comité pour la paix en Algérie (Hains), 134 Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle (Debord), 93 Communist party (cpf), 26–27, 36; on the Algerian War, 130–31; Fourth Republic and, 41, 228n1; Isou’s views of, 81; Malraux’s association with, 30, 39; Spanish Civil War and, 225n13 La condition humaine (Malraux), 224n1 Le conquérant (Hains), 131–32, 133f contemporaneity, 221n1

307

index 308

de Gaulle, Charles, 141; Algerian peace negotiations of, 170; appointments of Malraux by, 22, 37–42, 229n2, 229nn4–5; on French communauté discourse, 128, 145–46, 255n74; referenda of 1958 and Fifth Republic of, 33, 39, 41–42, 130, 136, 142–47, 228n1, 253–55nn69– 72, 255n75; Sétif massacres and, 4; visit to Algeria of, 136, 137f De Gaulle compte sur vous! (Hains), 150, 250n44 De Gaulle veut un bain de sang, il l’aura (Hains), 134 Degottex, Jean, 202, 208 Deleuze, Gilles, 90, 106 Demand, Thomas, 206 Le déménagement (Simenon), 236n80 Derrida, Jacques, 225n16, 229n9 Le Déserteur (Hurst), 248n28 De Sica, Vittorio, 86, 240n23 Désir, Harlem, 162–63 “Des Réalités collectives” (Villeglé), 247n19 deterritorialized language. See linguistic modality of representation Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XI e au XVI e siècle (Viollet-leDuc), 49–50 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 195–96, 198–99, 215, 261n26 Dien Bien Phu defeat, 4, 142, 144, 255n73 Documenta XI exhibition, 266n3 Doisneau, Robert, 177 Don, Jean, 86 draft dodging. See insoumission Drucker, Johanna, 99, 242–43nn54–55

Dufrêne, François: décollage of, 115–16, 117f, 134, 149, 247nn20–21, 249n37, 251n48; Lettrist/ Ultra-Lettrist aesthetics of, 80–81, 87, 91–92, 241n36, 247n19 Durand, Abel, 52–54 “during-war” contexts, 1–5, 13, 16, 203–4, 223n15 Duthuit, Georges, 27–28, 62, 70, 236n87 Duvivier, Julien, 58–61 École de Paris, 202 Egypt, 50 Eichmann, Adolf, 184 Einaudi, Jean-Luc, 160, 257n4, 258n6, 260n15 engaged practices, 2, 13, 15, 155 L’entrements de la palissade de Raymond Hains (Hains), 119, 120f, 121f Enwezor, Okwui, 266n3 L’Espoir (Malraux), 224n1 ethics of looking politically, 218–19 Et quand vous nous dites Soviétique Patrie est notre plus juste histoire de lard (Hains and Villeglé), 114f, 115, 125 Europa 51 (Rossellini), 216 Europa 2005–27 octobre (Huillet and Straub), 14, 214–19 Evian Accords, 35 façadisme, 65–66 Facism. See Second World War Fanon, Frantz, 69, 165, 175, 236n82, 252n60 Fautrier, Jean, 182–83 Fauvet, Jacques, 126, 136, 249n36 Favory, Lucien, 247n21 Fédération des étudiants nationalistes (fen), 124–25, 148

Ferry, Jules, 39, 228n68 Festival du Nouveau Réalisme, 119, 121f Le Figaro newspaper, 138, 185 Figuration libre, 201 First (French) Indochinese War, 4, 13, 26, 37, 127; defeat at Dien Bien Phu in, 4, 142, 144, 255n73; film footage of, 87–88, 91, 92, 95, 104, 240n28, 241n34; Viet Minh rebellion and, 80 Fischer, Louis, 23, 225n13 Fleck, Robert, 134, 251n52 Foldès, Pierre, 247n21 La Folie Algérienne, 201 Foster, Hal, 23 Foucault, Michel, 146, 204, 256n83; epigraph, from “Anti-retro” interview, 109 français musulmans d’algérie (fma), 143, 171, 256n1, 263n42 France: Algerian population of, 67, 143, 159–60, 168, 170, 184–85, 195, 210, 256n1, 256n3; American influence in, 43, 52, 53; anti-Semitism in, 105–6; citizenship rights in, 49, 123, 142–43, 159, 168–69, 185, 199; colonial order of, 19, 22, 26–28, 43, 50, 62, 78–79; communauté discourse in, 128, 145–46, 255n74; Crise de mai of 1958 of, 41, 42, 228n1; crises in public memory in, 33–36, 227n41, 227n47; cultural nationalism of, 43–44; Défense d’afficher law (1881) of, 111–13, 135–36, 191f, 245n9, 245n11; de Gaulle’s referenda and Fifth Republic of, 33, 41–42, 130, 136, 142–47, 228n1, 253– 55nn69–71, 255n75; ethnic and racial assimilation in, 15, 48, 67–68, 231nn25–27;

Marcel Cachin, 125, 151, 152f, 153f, 249n34; temporal accumulation of meaning in, 147–55, 256n78 France Observateur, 194–95, 198–99, 265n68 France-Soir newspaper, 138, 185–86, 264n58, 265n60 Fray, Julien, 162–63 French Communist Party (cpf). See Communist party French exceptionalism, 211 French Federation of the fln. See Comité fédéral de la fédération de France du FLN French Mandate in Lebanon and Syria, 26 French Revolution, 26, 142, 175 Front de libération nationale (fln), 5, 59, 67, 222n8, 236n82, 236n84, 251n52; declaration of a second front by, 170, 262n37; declaration of independence of, 128; French support for, 123, 252n59; understanding of spectacle of, 171–75. See also Comité fédéral de la fédération de France du fln La fuite: poème dramatique en quatre actes et un épilogue (Tzara), 81 Furet, François, 194–95, 198– 99, 266n71 Gabin, Jean, 58, 179 Gallimard, Gaston, 81, 238n7 Genevée, Frédéric, 252n56 genocide, 164–66, 261n24 German Expressionism, 39 Ghezzi, Enrico, 216 globalization, 28 Goldschmidt, Clara, 38 Gondola, Didier, 208–9 Gouvernement provisoire de la république algérienne (gpr a), 172, 256n2

graffiti, 106, 109, 123, 124f, 125f, 142, 147f, 148, 149f, 150, 162f, 215 “Graffiti” (Brassaï), 110f, 244n3 Les grands boulevards, pedestrians… (Brassaï), 177f Greenberg, Clement, 104 Guattari, Felix, 90, 106 Guerdjou, Bourlem, 69, 205, 257–58n4 la guerre d’Algérie, 221n4 La guerre de libération nationale, 221n4 “La Guerre” (Isou), 95, 103–4 Guha, Ranajit, 7

index

Fourth Republic of, 6, 36, 41, 95, 126; monumental preservation in, 49–54; Muslim practices in, 48, 105, 243n66; national imaginary of, 8, 12, 19–24, 43–44, 223n12, 228n54; newspaper readership of, 138–39, 262n54; postcolonial paradox of, 208–19; production of culture in, 5–10, 21–24; Revolution of, 26, 142, 175; Second Empire censorship in, 112; as site of artistic production, 45–46; suspensions of civil rights in, 5–6, 152, 159, 164, 167, 195, 213–14, 245n11, 262n56, 268nn25– 26; Third Republic of, 42, 112–13; transnational histories of, 8, 10; 2005 riots in, 14–15, 210–19, 267n16, 268–69nn23–28; universalist republican ideals of, 6, 26–27, 34, 39. See also Paris; wars of decolonization; Second World War La France déchirée (Fauvet), 126, 249n37 La France déchirée exhibition, 13, 125–42; C’est ça le rénouveau? in, 144–47, 150, 255n72; Cet homme est dangereux in, 128–30, 134, 141, 144, 249n39; critical response to, 130–31, 134, 141, 142, 146, 149–50, 250n44, 251n46; Et quand vous nous dites Soviétique Patrie est notre plus juste histoire de lard in, 114f, 115, 125; “everyman’s” agency in, 141–42, 151–55, 253n57, 253n65; photos by Shunk and Kender of, 147–55, 249n39; public sphere and, 126, 134–47, 247n33, 251n52; 6 boulevard Poissonière—

Habermas, Jürgen, 81, 134, 140–41, 238n6, 249n36, 253n57, 255n76 Hadj, Messali, 4 Haidu, Rachel, 247n22 Hains, Raymond, 13, 109–28, 244n1; Ach Alma Manetro of, 109, 111f, 134, 245nn5– 6; on contingency of language and image, 119–28, 154–55; on direct perception, 132–33; La France déchirée exhibition of, 13, 114f, 125–42; Le loi du 29 juillet 1881; ou, Le lyrisme à la sauvette exhibition of, 111–16, 132, 245n9, 246n12; La palissade des emplacements réservés of, 116–19, 249n37; Photographies hypnagogiques of, 116, 131–34, 166, 246n14; photos by Shunk and Kender of, 112f, 120f, 121–25, 127f, 129f, 147f–55, 247n26, 249n39, 256n78; preoccupation with photography of, 115, 246n16; public sphere and, 134–47, 251n52; work in relationship to time of, 147–55, 256n78 Halbwachs, Maurice, 107–8

309

index

Haneke, Michael, 14, 204–18, 257–58n4 Hannoum, Abdelmajid, 3, 222n5 Hantaï, Simon, 202 Harkis, 208, 210 Hartung, Hans, 202 Hausmann, Raoul, 98 Haussmann, Baron GeorgesEugène, 50, 51, 65, 177, 232n34 Hayling, Alan, 257–58n4 Hépérile éclaté (Hains and Villeglé [with Bryen]), 119– 21, 122f, 132, 247n25 the hexagon, 8, 19 Hitler, Adolf, 37 Hobsbawm, Eric, 267n17 Holocaust. See Second World War Hors la loi (Bouchareb), 3–4, 205, 257–58n4 Hôtel de la Fare, 47f House, Jim, 162, 257n4, 258n6, 259n13, 260n15 Hugo, Victor, 50, 83 Huillet, Danièle, 14, 214–19 L’Humanité c’est la vérité (Hain), 150, 249n34, 265n68 L’Humanité newspaper, 138, 185, 191–92, 252n56, 259n14 human rights violations, 5–6 Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Debord), 241n30 Hurst, Jean-Louis, 248n28 “Ici on noie les Algeriens” (Texier), 162f Ighilahriz, Louisette, 209, 227n47 The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Rancière), 164 Images à la sauvette (CartierBresson), 114–15, 246n14 Images critiques exhibition, 201–8, 266n2 Images Despite All (DidiHuberman), 215; epigraph, extract from, 159

310

imagined community, 151, 256n79 Indochina. See First (French) Indochinese War; Vietnam insoumission, 122–25, 139, 247nn28–29, 255n73 Institut d’ étude des questions juives (ieq j), 180, 183–84, 264n53 “International Phonetic Code,” 102 Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et une nouvelle musique (Isou), 80–86; historic avant-garde mention in, 97–98; letters appended to, 94–99, 102–8, 243n63; publication of, 81, 238n7; schema of poetic material in, 83–84, 239nn15–16 Iraq War, 207, 209 Isou, Isidore, 12–13, 77–78, 119, 204, 237n1; aesthetic doctrine of, 79–85, 93, 95, 238nn7–9, 238nn12–14, 239n19, 241n40; L’agrégation d’un nom et d’un messie of, 105–6; chiseling techniques in film of, 82–83, 88–90, 92, 96–97, 99, 103–5, 239n19, 240n31; “Cris pour 5,000,000 de juifs égorgés” of, 95–99, 102–8; economic model of youth of, 79–80, 237n4; on international linguistic conventions, 102–3; Introduction à une nouvelle poésie et une nouvelle musique of, 80–86, 94–95, 97, 102, 238n7, 243n63; Les journaux de dieux of, 239n19; “La Guerre” of, 95, 103–4; “Lettrist revolution” posters of, 106–7; media scandals of, 79, 81–82, 85–86, 240n24; on prayer, 104–5; subaltern agenda of, 78–79, 99–102, 105–8, 244nn67– 68; Traité de bave et d’ éter-

nité of, 13, 80, 85–95, 98, 237n2, 240n24, 240n27, 241–42nn40–41; visible and aural dimensions of texts of, 92, 96–107, 134, 243n66. See also Lettrism Israel, 79 Jaar, Alfredo, 201 Jammes, Louis, 201 Jarnoux, Maurice, 77 Jaujard, Jacques, 45 The Jazz Singer, 15 Jeanson, Francis, 123, 248n28, 253n62 Joselit, David, 15 Journal officiel de la République française, 229n5, 231n24, 245n9, 254n70 Les journaux de dieux (Isou), 239n19 Judt, Tony, 34, 36, 252n60 Le Juif et la France exhibition, 180–85, 182f, 183f, 264nn53–55 Kagan, Elie, 193–99, 215, 218, 260n15, 265nn67–68 Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry, 39 “Karawane” (Ball), 98–99 Kaufman, Vincent, 86 Keenan, Thomas, 261n24 Kender, János: work with Hains of, 112f, 120f, 121–25, 127f, 129f, 147–55, 249n39; work with Nouveaux réalistes of, 247n26 Kettane, Nacer, 257–58n4 Khlebnikov, Velimir, 97 Klein, Yves, 251n48, 251n51 Klossowski, Pierre, 23 Kluge, Alexander, 146, 255n76 Kracauer, Siegfried, 27, 66, 225n16; on duplicity of the photographic image, 90; historicist analysis of photography by, 24–25, 28; epigraph on photography, from “Photography,” 19

Lacoste, Conil, 250n44 Lafay, Bernard, 51 Lafay Plan, 51–52 la Loi des Sept Monuments, 49 Lallaoui, Medhi, 257–58n4, 259n14 Lapeyronnie, Didier, 211, 214, 267n17 La Pointe, Ali, 59–60, 202–3 Laprade, Albert, 65–66 Laugier, Marc-Antoine, 232n34 Lebanon, 26 Lebovics, Herman, 42, 43–44, 230n20 Lecomte, Claude, 259n14 Le Corbusier, 51–52, 57, 235n63 Le Cour Grandmaison, Olivier, 259n14 Lefebvre, Henri, 63, 167–68, 173, 175–79 Leiris, Michel, 81 Lemaître, Maurice, 78, 99–102, 106, 241n36, 243n55 Le Pen, Marine, 243n66 Le Sueur, James, 139, 252n59 Le Troquer, André, 41 Lettrism, 12–13, 77–108, 204, 237n2; aesthetic doctrine of, 79–85, 95, 238nn7– 9, 238nn12–14, 239n19, 239n21; disciples of, 78, 80–81, 237n1, 241n36; “Lettrist revolution” posters of, 106–7; métagraphies of, 99–102, 242–43nn53–55; multimedia platform of, 79–81, 238n14; poems (crirhythmes and lettries) of, 92, 102, 238n7, 241n36; subalterity and, 78–79, 99–100, 105–8, 244nn67–

68; Ultra-Lettrists and, 80–81, 247n19; visible and aural dimensions of texts of, 92, 96–108, 134, 241n36, 243n66. See also Isou, Isidore Lettrist(s), 12, 78, 80-82, 85, 96, 11, 119; aesthetics of, 87; and décollage, 126; ideograms, 95; and Isou, 106; Isou’s principles of, 89, 92, 99, 147; platform of, 78; symphony, 86, 87; poetry, 87, 91, 96, 102 Lettrist International (LI), 79 Levine, Michel, 257n4 Lévy-Vroelant, Claire, 233n43 Liberation of France, 34, 35, 37, 41, 54, 68 Libération newspaper, 185 Life magazine, 246n14 linguistic modality of representation, 10–13; Blanchot on the space of literature in relation to, 81, 103, 238n5; Blanchot on writing of war as part of, 2, 77, 94, 99, 103–4, 139–40, 241n44; commonality in social memory and, 107–8; of décollage, 13, 109–55; in Lettrism’s acoustic agenda, 12–13, 77–108; Malraux’s aesthetic model and, 11–12, 77–79; Sartre’s case for engaged practice in, 81–82, 95; totalitarian use of semiotic associations in, 80 Loi des sept monuments, 49, 52 Le loi du 29 juillet 1881; ou, Le lyrisme à la sauvette exhibition of, 111–16, 245n9, 246n12; hypnographic photography in invitation to, 132; legal reference of, 111– 13; photojournalism references of, 113–15 Lopez, Raymond, 51

Lorjou, Bernard, 116–19, 155 Louis-Philippe, King, 49, 231n32 the Louvre, 26 Luce, Henry, 246n14 Lyautey, Hubert, 55–56, 61, 63, 68–69, 259n10 Lyotard, Jean-François, 31–32, 37, 39

index

Krauss, Rosalind, 21–22, 225n8 Kraux, Jacques, 58 Kréa, Henri, 195, 266n72 Kruchenykh, Alexei, 97 Kupferstein, Daniel, 257–58n4

MacMaster, Neil, 162, 257n4, 258n6, 259n13, 260n15 Madagascar, 26, 127 Maghrebins, 35 Les magiciens de la terre exhibition, 201–2, 266–67n3 Maleuvre, Didier, 25–26 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 83, 96–97 Malraux, André, 19–74, 204; on aestheticizing war, 23; amnesiac aesthetics of, 11–12, 14, 43–46, 74, 99, 223n17; art thievery of, 38, 42; conceptions of photography of, 22–25, 29–32, 43, 163, 226nn34–35; fiction of, 31, 224n1; imaginary museum of, 26–34, 43; leftist models of, 26–27; Lyotard’s biography of, 31–32, 37, 39; as Minister of Culture, 11, 21–22, 29, 38–40, 42–46, 229nn4–5; as Minister of Information, 37–38, 41–42; Paris Biennale of, 45–46, 115–19, 223n17, 230nn13–18; on popular art, 30; promotion of cultural production by, 21–22, 210; psychology of art project of, 19–21; universalizing aesthetic vision of, 21–40, 77–79; urban restoration projects of, 23, 40, 46–74, 199, 214. See also Le musée imaginaire; Les voix du silence Malraux Law of 1962, 63–65, 68, 72

311

index 312

Mandelkern (Dieudonné) Report, 257n4, 258n6, 259n9 Manifestation biennale et internationale des jeunes artistes. See Paris Biennale manifestation of 17 October 1961, 14, 159–99, 204, 223n16; access to archives of, 257n4, 264n58; arrests and detentions of, 184–85, 186, 187f, 190, 195, 196–97, 262n38; bibliography of, 205, 257n4; Caché ’s representation of, 205–8, 211; deaths and injuries at, 160–62, 164–65, 185, 191–95, 205, 258nn6– 7, 259n9, 265n67; filmic restagings of, 205; image tactics in, 163, 168–69, 171–85, 195–99; Kagan’s photos of, 193–99, 215, 218, 260n15, 265nn67–68; memory activism of, 161– 63, 259n13; Paris Match photos of, 186–93, 197; participants in, 170, 189; photographic witnessing of, 162f, 174f, 178f, 179–80, 185–99, 259–60nn14–15, 264n52, 264n58; planning and organization of, 160, 169–75, 180, 185; plaques and memorials of, 160–61, 210, 259nn10–13; police response to, 193; press coverage of, 185–99, 265n68, 265nn59–64; Rancière on dis-agreement and, 163– 69, 260nn17–18; right to the city and, 175–80, 193; visual logic of imperialism and, 159–69; women’s manifestation of 17 October 1961 after, 174–75, 262n45 “Manifeste des 121,” 122–23, 128, 139–40, 154–55, 248n27, 248n30, 253n63

Manifeste du 3 octobre (Hains), 116–17, 118f Manifeste du peuple algérien (Abbas), 4 Man on His Balcony, Boulevard Haussmann (Caillebotte), 177 The Man with the [Golden] Helmut, 226n37 Ma palissade (Dufrêne), 247n20 Marais neighborhood, 233n46; curettage policies in, 71–72; deportations of Jews from, 54; displacement of residents of, 68–70; Église St-Gervais in, 65, 66–67f; façadisme in, 65–66; Malraux’s preservation of, 62–74, 236n84; Plan de sauvegarde et de mise en valeur du Marais, 69–70, 71f, 72–74; population of, 66–68; Vichy regime’s renewal plans for, 53–54, 63, 65 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 97, 237n4 Marker, Chris, 227n41 Marot, Michel, 70, 72f Marshall Plan, 44 Martin, Jean-Hubert, 201–2 Martin du Gard, Roger, 229n2 Mascolo, Dionys, 123 Maspéro, François, 165 Massu, Jacques, 60, 227n47 Matisse, Henri, 27, 115, 129, 224n2, 250n43 Mauriac, François, 229n2 Maurois, Andre, 91 Mayol, Pierre, 70–71 Mbembe, Achille, 7–8, 14, 214, 223n10, 223n18; epigraph, from “The Republic and Its Beast,” 201 McDonough, Tom, 248n33, 251n46

La mécanique des femmes (Isou), 238n14 the media. See the press Ménager, Gérard, 186, 187– 91f, 264n52 Mension, Jean-Michel, 162f, 259n14 Mérimée, Prosper, 49 La mésentente: Politique et philosophie (Rancière), 164–65 Mestais, René, 54 Les métamorphoses d’Apollon (Malraux), 19 Michelson, Annette, 29 Mignolo, Walter, 223n15 Minost, Maurice, 70, 72f Miotte, Jean, 247n21 Mitterand, François, 128 modernist aesthetics, 8–12, 221n3; blindness in, 16; elevation of style in, 32, 36–37, 43, 226n37, 229n9; future orientation of, 45–46; historical content addressed by, 201–4, 207–8; transition to post-modernist aesthetics from, 14; violence inherent in, 3, 222n5. See also Lettrism; Malraux, André Le Monde newspaper, 138, 185 La monnaie de l’absolu (Malraux), 19 Moreux, Jean-Charles, 65 Morgenstern, Christian, 98 Morin, Edgar, 247n30 Morocco, 55–56, 61–62, 69 Moulin, Raoul-Jean, 130–31, 134, 141–42, 146, 149–50 Mounier, Emmanuel, 36 Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 201–3 Musée de l’homme, 42 Le musée imaginaire (Malraux), 19, 21–40, 208, 224n5; critical responses to, 27–28, 70; imperial conquest and, 62; on universal

The Naked City (Debord), 179 National Museums, 26 Nation magazine, 23, 225n13 Négocier, négocier (Hains), 134, 150 Negt, Oskar, 146, 255n76 newspapers. See L’Aurore, Le Figaro, France-Soir, L’Humanité, Libération, Le Monde, Parisien-Liberé. See also the press Nieman, Yehuda, 247n21 Noël, Georges, 115–16 Nora, Pierre, 197 Nouveau réalisme, 119, 121f, 131–34, 251n48, 251n51 Nouveaux réalistes, 131; declaration of, 251n51 Nuit noir, 17 octobre 1961 (Tasma), 205, 257–58n4 Obama, Barack, 223n19 “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India” (Guha), 7 Organisation de l’armée secrète (oas), 5, 35, 67, 128, 138, 170, 210, 251n52 Oulebsir, Nabila, 57, 231n32 Paix en Algérie (Dufrêne), 241n36 Paix en Algérie (Hains), 134, 135f le Palais Berlitz, 180, 182f (Berson), 183f Palestine, 106 Palissade des emplacements réservés / Palissade à de Fuegas (Hains), 116–19, 249n37

Panijel, Jacques, 257–58n4 Papon, Maurice, 14, 159–61, 168, 256n3, 258n7; deportations to Algeria by, 170, 262n37; Les Chevaux de pouvoir of, 257n4, 258n7; Paris curfew of, 170–71, 184–85, 189, 195, 262n36, 262n42; trial of, 257n4. See also manifestation of 17 October 1961 Parent, Béatrice, 201 Paris, 159–69, 223n16; 2005 suburban riots in, 14–15, 210–19, 267n15, 268–69nn23–28; architectural preservation in, 48–52; boulevard paintings of, 176f, 177–78; Jewish population of, 54, 105–6; Malraux’s restoration projects in, 11–12, 14, 23, 40, 46–74, 223n17, 230n19; Marais neighborhood of, 53–55, 62–74, 236n80, 236n84; neighborhood demolition in, 52–53; North Africans in, 67–69, 170, 184–85, 195, 236n77, 236n84; Papon’s curfew in, 170–71, 184–85, 189, 195, 262n36, 262n42; Place de la Concorde of, 196f, 197, 198f; poster art of, 135–36; Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood of, 90–91; suburbs and shantytowns of, 69–70, 236nn80–81, 236n84; Turgot plan of 1739 of, 71, 73f. See also manifestation of 17 October 1961; urban space Paris Biennale, 45–46, 223n17, 230nn13–18; décollage at, 115–19, 128, 247nn20–21, 249n37; token internationalism of, 201 Parisien-Libéré newspaper, 138

Paris Match, 20f, 186–93, 197, 246n14, 264n52, 265nn61–64 Paris Street; Rainy Day (Caillebotte), 176f, 177 Parti communiste français (pcf). See Communist party Patte, Pierre, 232n34 Paulhan, Jean, 81, 238n7 Paumier, Georges, 114f, 246n17 Péju, Paulette, 257n4, 265n68 Pépé le Moko (Duvivier), 58–61, 234n60 Perrault, Gilles, 184 Perron, Charles Theodore, 180 Perry, Rachel, 182–83 Pétain, Philippe, 33, 51, 209 photographic documentation, 10–11, 13–14, 201–19, 246n14; absence and amnesia in, 163–66; Adams’s exploration of urban space with, 201–8, 217, 266n2, 267n4; Azoulay on the civil contract of, 217–18; of boulevard life, 176f, 177–78; Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” in, 115, 246n15; of contemporary violent conflict, 207; in Haneke’s Caché, 14, 204–18; image tactics and, 163, 168–69, 171–85, 195–99; of the Lodz ghetto, 192–93; Malraux on reproductive function of, 29–32, 226nn34–35; Malraux on thinking of history through, 22–25, 43, 163; of the manifestation of 17 October 1961, 159–69, 185– 99, 259–60nn14–15, 264n52, 264n58; Rancière on, 163– 69, 185, 261n26; relationship to décollage of, 113–15; of riots of 2005, 214–19; rising prominence in the 1960s of, 166–67

index

aesthetic experience, 25–34, 43–47, 77–79, 99 Le musée inimaginable (Duthuit), 27–28, 60, 62, 70, 236n87 Mythologies (Barthes), 3, 246n14, 265n61. See also Barthes, Roland

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“The Photographic Message” (Barthes), 166 Photographies hypnagogiques (Hains), 116, 131–34 “Photography” (Kracauer), 24–25 “Photos-Chocs” exhibition, 166, 246n14 pieds noirs, 8, 231n25 Pissarro, Camille, 177 Place d’Armes, 56 Place de la Concorde, 196f, 197, 198f Place du Gouvernement, 56, 59, 234n57 Place Royale, 56 Plan de sauvegarde et de mise en valeur du Marais, 70–71, 72f, 72–73 Plan de Turgot of 1739, 71, 73f Plan d’urbanisme, 55, 61 Plan d’urbanisme directeur (Lafay Plan), 51–52 La plastique lettriste et hypergraphique (Lemaître), 243n55 political posters. See décollage/ décollagistes Pollock, Jackson, 29 Pomerand, Gabriel, 78, 99–102, 237n1, 241n36 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 58–61 postcolonial paradoxes, 208–19 post-modern aesthetics, 14 post-war contexts, 1–3, 6, 13, 219 La poubelle de l’ école des Beaux Arts de Blois, 117–19 Poujade, Pierre, 128, 129–30, 141 The Practice of Everyday Life (de Certeau), 169 the press: constitutional freedoms of, 245n11; manifestation of 17 October 1961 coverage by, 185–86, 265nn59–64, 265n68; read-

ership of, 138, 252n54; referendum coverage in, 255n75; reporting on Algeria’s War in, 138–39, 252n56; spectacle and, 168–69; state control of, 5–6, 37–38, 91, 113, 164, 167; on W WII deportations of Jews, 184. See also newspapers, photographic documentation “Primitivism” in 20th-Century Art exhibition, 201, 266n3 production of culture, 5–10; flux of, 8; France’s civilizing mission in, 42–43; of globalization, 22; in Haneke’s Caché, 14, 204–17; Malraux’s promotion of, 21–24, 42–46; official and invisible versions of, 9; realism vs. modernist abstraction in, 201–4, 207–8; subaltern agendas in, 6–10; of the Third Republic, 42. See also decolonial looking Prost, Henri, 55–56, 60–63, 71, 235n63 Prouvost, Jean, 246n14 La psychologie de l’art (Malraux), 19–21, 33, 37, 224nn1–2 public opinion polls, 153, 256n83 the public sphere: alternative version in La France déchirée of, 134–47, 151–55, 251n52, 255n76, 267n79; Habermas on, 134, 140–41, 249n36, 255n76; male makeup of, 142, 253n57; Negt and Kluge on, 146, 255n76; occupation in October 1961 and, 168–69 Putsch d’Alger, 5–6, 128 Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (Sartre), 81–82, 140

Ragon, Michel, 250n44 Rancière, Jacques, 36, 146, 150, 153, 218–19, 260nn17– 18; on disagreement and photography, 163–64, 213, 261n26; on manifestation of 17 October 1961, 164–69, 185 ravalement, 47f, 48, 69, 230n21 Raymond Hains et la photographie exhibition, 246n16, 247nn20–21 Raysse, Martial, 251n48 realism, 119, 121f, 131–34, 203– 4, 251n48, 251n51. See also nouveau réalisme Realms of Memory (Nora), 197 Remnants of Auschwitz (Agamben), 218 René-Jacques, 198f Resnais, Alain, 227n41 Restany, Jeanine, 128 Restany, Pierre, 126, 131–34, 141, 247n19, 251nn47–48, 251n51 La Révolution Algérienne, 221n4 Ricoeur, Paul, 247n30 Rieff, David, 261n24 Riegl, Alois, 73–74 right to the city, 175–80, 193 Rimbaud, Arthur, 83 Rivière, Claude, 249n37 Ross, Kristin, 141, 153, 185, 260n20 Rossellini, Roberto, 216 Rotella, Mimmo, 134 Rotival, Maurice, 61 Rousseau, Henri, 29–30 Rousso, Henry, 34 Rubin, William, 201, 266n3 Rudé, George, 267n17 Rwandan genocide, 165–66 Saadi, Yacef, 59 Sabatier, Roland, 237n1 Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood, 90–91

6, 11, 19, 33–35, 51, 53–54, 63, 65, 160 secteurs sauvgardés, 63–65 Seitz, William, 251n44 Services Cinématographiques des Armées, 87–88, 166–67, 240n28 Services spéciaux Algérie 1955– 1957 (Aussaresses), 209, 227n47 Sétif uprisings and massacre, 3–4, 6, 208 Shema Yisrael, 104–5 Shepard, Todd, 43, 253n62 Sherman, Daniel J., 44–45 “Shock Photos” exhibition, 166, 246n14 Shunk, Harry: work with Hains of, 112f, 120f, 121–25, 127f, 129f, 147–55, 249n39; work with Nouveau realists of, 247n26 Simenon, Georges, 236n80 Situationist International, 79, 81, 178–79, 232n39, 237nn2–3. See also Debord, Guy 6 boulevard Poissonière— Marcel Cachin (Villeglé), 125, 152, 153f, 250n44 Smith, Terry, 221n1 social memory, 107–8 Sociétés d’ économie mixte (sem), 54, 63–64, 233–34nn51–52 The Society of the Spectacle (Debord), 93, 168 Solinas, Franco, 59 Sontag, Susan, 261n25 SOS -Racisme, 162–63 Sougez, Emanuel, 115, 247n18 Soulages, Pierre, 202, 208 Soustelle, Jacques, 35, 42, 229n3, 252n60 Soviet Union, 36, 37, 80 Spanish Civil War, 225n13 spatial modality. See urban space

spectacle: Debord’s analysis of, 15, 92–94, 163, 168– 69, 204, 206, 212, 262n31, 262n45; Isou’s Traité de bave et d’ éternité as, 92–94, 241–42nn40–41; Lefebvre’s usage of, 173, 175; manifestation of 17 October 1961 as, 163, 168–69, 171–85, 195–99; Paris’s riots of 2005 as, 212– 13; state control of, 218 The Specters of Marx (Derrida), 225n16 Spoerri, Daniel, 251n48 Stalin, Joseph, 36, 37, 139 Les statues meurent aussi (Resnais and Marker), 227n41 Steichen, Edward, 244n3 Stéphane, Roger, 47–48 Stieglitz, Alfred, 177 Stora, Benjamin, 138, 256n83, 262n30, 264n58 Straub, Jean-Marie, 14, 214–19 Structuralism, 77 subaltern political agendas, 6–10, 27; of décollage’s promotion of everyman’s agency, 108, 141–42, 151– 55, 253n57, 253n65; of Isou and the Lettrists, 78–80, 99–102, 105–8, 244nn67– 68; of photographic witnessing of manifestation of 17 October 1961 of 17 October, 159–69, 185–99; politics of being seen in, 8–10, 15; visibility and, 9, 184–85 subjectivity: of Algerian demonstrators, 14, 168–69; Malraux’s positioning of, 30; as manifest in spectacle, 93, 168–69; post-W WII shifting of, 22; Rancière’s model of, 146, 164–65, 195 Sudreau, Pierre, 46–47, 65, 230n19 Suez Crisis, 26 Sussman, Elizabeth, 79, 237n3

index

Saint Ghetto des Prêts (Pomerand), 99–102 Salan, General Raoul, 41 Salle des Informels, 115, 116, 117f Salon Comparaisons, 119 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 213, 243n66, 268n24 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 95, 229n2, 252n60; engaged writing of, 82, 140; on torture, 165, 261n23 “Schèma II: L’évolution du matériel poétique” (Isou), 83–84 Schuster, Jean, 123 Schwitters, Kurt, 98, 247n19 La sculpture mondiale (Malraux), 22, 224n5 Sebbar, Leila, 257–58n4 Sébille, Georges, 233n47 Second World War, 21, Blanchot on writing about, 2, 77, 94, 99, 103–4, 139–40, 241n44; colonial context after, 21, 26, 28, 37, 252n60, 263n40; cultural aftermath, 77, 80, 94–96f, 99, 100–108, 130, 202, 208–9, 239n22, 243n55; French collaboration in, 33–34, 95, 103, 209; French Resistance of, 13, 36, 37, 149; Jewish deportations and genocide of, 54, 66, 95–108, 160, 184; Jewish laws of, 48, 102, 182–84, 243n62; Le Juif et la France exhibition of, 180–85; Lettrist representation of, 12, 96–108; Lodz ghetto of, 192–93; population identity following, 8, 9, 42–43, 79, 80; population shifts following, 21, 26, 28, 37, 252n60; post-war contexts of, 2–6, 11, 13, 219, 263n40; Romanian-Axis alliance of, 94–95; Vichy regime and,

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tactics, 169 Tasma, Alain, 205 television, 166–67, 207–8, 211–12, 218 Temple of Banreàï-Srey, 38, 42 Tériade, Efstratios, 113–15, 250n43 Texier, Jean, 162, 259n14 Third Republic, 42, 71, 112, 113 Tikhomiroff, Nicolas, 171–72 “Todesfuge” (Celan), 103 “Tour de feu” (Isou), 238n12 Traité de bave et d’ éternité (Isou), 13, 80, 85–95, 107, 237n2, 240n24; chiseling techniques in, 88–90, 92, 99, 240nn30–31; as cinematic spectacle, 92–94, 241–42nn40–41; discrepant techniques of, 86–87, 92–93, 98, 240n27; found film stock in, 87–88, 91, 240n28, 241n34; war and chaos in, 87–88, 91, 92, 94–95, 105, 240n29 Traité d’ économie nucléaire: le soulèvement de la ‘ jeunesse’ (Isou), 237n4, 238n14 Traoré, Bouna, 210–11, 215 Trautmann, Catherine, 257n4 Tristan, Anne, 260n15 Le 13 mai (Hains), 134 Tshimanga, Charles, 208–9 Tunisia, 37 Turgot Plan of 1739, 71, 73f Tzara, Tristan, 81, 83, 97

racial inequity of, 216; Vietnam War coverage in, 139; war on terror of, 15–16, 207, 209, 212, 223n19, 268n27; W WII debt forgiveness by, 86 urban space, 10–12; Adams’s photographic exploration of, 201–8, 217, 266n2, 267n4; architectural preservation in, 48–54, 232n34; colonial experiments in, 55–62, 234n55, 235n63; décollagistes’ exploration of, 109–13, 116, 120–28, 134; Lafay Plan for, 51–52; Malraux’s restorative impulse in, 11–12, 23, 40, 46–74, 199, 230n19; Malraux’s whitewashing (ravalement) of, 46–48, 69, 230n21; manifestation of 17 October 1961 and, 171–80, 185, 192; neighborhood preservation debates, 52–55, 232n39, 233n43, 235n69; population control in, 67–69; public claims of ownership of, 54–55, 70, 197–98, 234n52; racial segregation of, 214; right to the city and, 175– 80, 193; Sociétés d’ économie mixte (sem) and, 54, 63–64, 233–34nn51–52; surface parameters of, 53–74, 204– 8; tourism and, 48, 231n24; Vichy regime’s policies on, 51, 53–54, 63 Uroskie, Andrew, 86, 240n23

Ullua, Marie Pierre, 253n62 Ultra-Lettrists, 80–81, 247n19 Union et fraternité française, 128, 130 Union nationale des étudiants de France (unef), 124–25, 148 United States: hegemony and influence of, 43, 52, 53, 80;

Vergès, Jacques, 35 Verlaine, Paul, 83 Versailles, 230n20 Verve magazine, 19, 114–15, 224n2 Vichy regime, 6, 11, 19, 33–34; Le Juif et la France exhibition of, 180–85; legislation on Jews of, 48, 160;

Symbolist poets, 94, 96 Syria, 26

revisionist models of, 209; urban renewal policies of, 51, 53–54, 63, 65 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, 123, 247nn28–29 Vietnam: French army in, 87–88, 240n29; independence proclamation of 1945 of, 37; rights movement in, 38; U.S. war in, 139; Viet Minh rebellion in, 80. See also First (French) Indochinese War Villeglé, Jacques, 13, 109– 16, 119, 128, 149, 244n1, 249n37; Ach Alma Manetro of, 109, 111f, 134, 245nn5–6; “Des réalités collectives” of, 247n19; Le loi du 29 juillet 1881; ou, Le lyrisme  à la sauvette exhibition of, 111–16, 132, 245n9, 246n12; 6 boulevard Poissonière— Marcel Cachin of, 125, 152, 152f, 249n34, 251n44; 2008 retrospective of, 246n17; on unreadability, 247n25 Villepin, Dominique de, 267n9 Vincendeau, Ginette, 234n60 “Vingt récitations graves et joyeuses” (Isou), 238n7 Viollet-le-Duc, EugèneEmmanuel, 49–50, 74 visual modality. See décollage/ décollagistes; photographic documentation Vitry, Paul, 70, 72f Vivre au paradis (Guerdjou), 69, 205, 257–58n4 Vivre au paradis, d’un oasis à un bidonville (Benaïcha), 236n84 Les voix du silence (Malraux), 11, 19–40, 224n5; critical responses to, 27–28, 224n6, 226n30; on the decontextualized image, 29–36, 40, 71, 73; elevation of style in, 32,

Wacquant, Loïc, 214, 269n29 Wajcman, Gérard, 261n26 Wakeman, Rosemary, 51, 53–54, 65–66, 230n19, 232n42, 233n47 Wall, Jeff, 201

war on terror, 15–16, 209, 212, 223n19 wars of decolonization, 3–5, 21, 127–28; décollage and, 122–28; duration of, 1–2, 4–5; during-war contexts of, 1–5, 13, 16, 203– 4, 223n15; French crises of memory and, 33–36, 227n41, 227n47; insoumission debates of, 122–25, 139, 247nn28–29, 255n73; in Isou’s Traité de bave et d’ éternité, 87–88, 91, 92, 94–95; photographic memory of, 201–19; political posters of, 13; production of culture of, 5–10, 21–22; revisionist history of, 208–10, 267nn8–9; sus-

pensions of civil rights in, 213–14, 268nn25–26; torture in, 34–36, 42, 209–10, 227n47, 229n2, 261n23. See also Algerian War of Independence Williams, Philip M., 255n75 Wolman, Gil, 80–81, 241n30, 241n36, 247n19 Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze), 29, 109, 244n3 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Benjamin), 23–24, 32 World War II. See Second World War Wretched of the Earth (Fanon), 165, 175

index

36–37, 43, 226n37, 229n9; epigraph, from, 41; on fiction and cinema, 31–32; French crises of memory and, 33–39; on photography’s reproductive function, 29–32, 226nn34–35; on thinking through photography of history, 22–25, 43, 163; on universal aesthetic experience, 25–34, 43–44. See also Malraux, André

317