The Cowboy Philosopher was almost ready to begin his journey; only a detail remained to be added. In 1967, Christopher Gray translated De la misère en milieu étudiant into English and published it, with excerpts from Bertrand’s strip for illustrations, as Ten Days that Shook the University: The Situationists at Strasbourg. Looking back on Gray’s version, one can begin to see not just how the metaphor was shaped, but how it began to shape itself.
Gray’s translation of Bernstein’s dialogue as it came out of the Strasbourg cowboy’s mouth was not literal. He let the picture change the text: the cowboy “Nope” replaced Bernstein’s literate “No.” More vitally, Gray’s familiarity with the Situationist International’s secret language allowed him to change Bernstein’s flat and Bertrand’s anomalous “promène” (which, regarding a man on horseback, can at best mean “ride”) back into what the word was meant to mean: the “I drift” of Gray’s cowboy is what Bernstein’s Gilles would have said (“Je me dérive”) if Bernstein, writing for money, hadn’t had to fashion Gilles for the market. For the first time, then, the metaphor speaks in its own tongue–and, buttressed by the English-language cliché of the “drifting cowboy” (the Drifting Cowboys were, among other things, Hank Williams’ band), what the cowboy is saying about his struggle against reification is at once more recognizable and more displacing than it ever was in French. The real anomaly of the panel–the real tension implicit in the mysterious juxtaposition–comes forth. The Cowboy Philosopher moves out, into a drift that, so far, has taken him through almost two decades, and halfway around the world.
PARIS, 1968
Figure 1. The Strasbourg scandal left students across France waiting for the next act. In late 1967 and early 1968, at the University of Nanterre, in the Paris suburbs, Situationist International (SI) followers calling themselves “les enragés” fomented campus disruptions that led directly to the general wildcat strike of May 1968–when first students, then factory workers, then clerks, then artists refused work, took to the streets, or occupied their workplaces and turned them into laboratories of debate, thus creating a revolutionary festival (or, as Gary U.S. Bonds put it in 1962, a “Seven Day Weekend”), and bringing France to a standstill.
In the early days of the revolt, the enragés and the SI gained control of the “Liberated Sorbonne,” using it much as the Strasbourg students had used their student union. They issued astonishing manifestos, made impossible demands–the difference being that this seemed to be less an experiment than a chance to make history: a chance to begin it again from the beginning. Soon, though, they walked out in protest against the timidity and bureaucratization of the Sorbonne assembly. Reforming as the Conseil pour le maintien des occupations they published tracts, warnings, posters, and “detourned” comic strips.
Here, they reappropriate the Cowboy Philosopher from Strasbourg, but the poetry is gone. The point is just macho toughness: the-situationist-revolutionary-is-a-gunslinger. Despite the strip’s use of détournement as its subject matter (“Isn’t this a manifestation of a new concept of revolutionary practice?,” etc.), the metaphor, less than two years into its body, begins to die. Suddenly armed by the revolt the SI had predicted, the cowboy doesn’t need to philosophize. Created as a talisman of the reversible connecting factor, as the SI dream of a new Paris Commune came true the metaphor began to reverse itself, to separate back into its original constituent elements.
BERKELEY, 1971
Figure 2. The Cowboy limps on. In 1971, May ’68 was a fading chimera, and the SI was effectively defunct (the SI had dreamed history; then history woke up and went back to work). In San Francisco, SI epigones from Berkeley attempt to reuse the Cowboy Philosopher to spark change-life-not-wages demands in a wildcat AT&T strike. The cowboy is not convincing; Marx is given a six-shooter, but he’s far more lively in the contemporaneous Monty Python sketch “World Forum”–where, along with Mao Zedong, Lenin, and Che Guevara, he agonizes over questions on workers’ control of factories and English football trivia in an attempt to win a “complete lounge set.” “What is not superseded,” the SI liked to say, “rots.”
LONDON, 1976
Figure 3. In 1970, SI fan Jamie Reid cofounded the journal Suburban Press in the huge London planned suburb of Croydon, focusing on a situationist critique of city planning as a spectacularization of alienation (a cartoon showed a Godzilla-like figure perched on a cosy Croydon cottage: “His Frank Sinatra collection,” read the accompanying poem on the Croydonite, “turns into weird death chants”). In the first number of Suburban Press, a comic strip shows two consumers making gestures of consumption in the Tate Gallery; behind them, Andy Warhol’s cowboy Elvis aims his gun straight at them.