inventing happiness
Not long ago, the late English historian E. P. Thompson persuaded me that radical change, in any situation from the most intimately and narrowly personal to the most publicly and broadly social, can arise only from an affirmative desire that burns, with greater or lesser intensity, in the lives of those living that situation.
Even then, this affirmative desire must be joined with a willingness to risk the present. To risk it for an alternative arrangement carried out first in the imagination. Radical change, in other words, entails a kaleidoscopic, imaginative and creative, rearrangement of the elements given in a situation. Radical change involves us imagining something different.
The values governing Thompson’s work and life could be given new lives by bringing them into contact with other lines of thought, in which those values, or versions of them, also play a central role. Possibly, some of these lines of thought – William James’ and John Dewey’s pragmatism, Gilles Deleuze’s empiricism and stylistics, Antonio Negri’s autonomist politics – would have been unacceptable, or at the very least, unfamiliar to him.
However, you could see this mixing as a kind of creative recontextualization along the lines of what the French Situationist Guy Debord called “détournement.” In that procedure, an element – perhaps an image, word, event, or idea – strongly associated with a given context is lifted from its original frame and inserted into a new one—where it might spark fresh effects. For Debord, as for the tradition of left artists and intellectuals – from Duchamp to Brecht – who worked with some variation of this procedure, détournement is a way of exercising the imagination and refreshing the perception in the service of activating a critical awareness and creating possibilities for new actions.
Seen merely as the self-conscious m.o. of an intellectual or artist, I’m tempted to dismiss détournement as either esoteric or historically superceded, and in both cases as of limited political effect. But, on the other hand, I recognize détournement in the sometimes unselfconscious process operating daily wherever change is made, from the making of a new friend to the making of a revolution.
In what C. L. R. James called “the struggle for happiness,” human beings work to break the grip of an unhappy present. They create new contexts in which they can grow, experiment, release their fullest potential. They “détourne” themselves. It is with such forces and processes, I believe, that politically progressive intellectual work must align itself, in substance and form. This alignment might be all that Julio’s practice of invention ever sought to accomplish.
1 Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch, Trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Pantheon, 1966), Ch. 66, p. 362. In Spanish, Rayuela [1963] (Barcelona: Edhasa, 1984), Ch. 66, p. 425.
2 Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,
3 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigree, 1980), p. 18.