LONDON, 1982
Figure 7. The joke continues: Baxter makes the cowboy so philosophical he ceases to be a cowboy.
AUSTIN, 1984
Figure 8. As a joke, the Cowboy Philosopher mutates, and turns history into a cartoon. Bill Barminski makes Hitler, Hermann Goering, Charles de Gaulle, and Winston Churchill into cowboys, and, on the terms his strips set up, Tex Hitler triumphs because he has a superior philosophy (“I’m plumb irritated with democratic thinkers,” says “Jingles Goering,” joining Marshal Hitler’s campaign). The cowboy diffuses back into the seamless culture he was once invented to destroy; he has forgotten his own name. Now he is truly drifting–drinking wherever his endlessly “detourning” shape takes him.
LONDON, 1985
Figure 9. In 1985, the Mekons, the first Leeds punk band, precursors and comrades of the Gang of Four, released an album about the exiled persistence of the punk dream of the transformation of art and life, which was a situationist dream, which was part of a very long line of projects to turn art into life and life into art. On the label, John Wayne reappears out of the Gang of Four’s entertainment! He is fat now (this is probably a still from True Grit), shadowed by stars, a half-moon, and the towers of giant apartment complexes, fruits of the city planning that, three decades before, the Lettrist International and then the SI had, through the dérive, meant to escape, and then contest. But that was a long time ago. Now the cowboy is mute, squinting, old, unsure of himself–but, circling him on the Sin label (a parody of the Sun label, which in 1954 released Elvis Presley’s first record), cowboys gallop free: ghost riders in the sky. On the album itself, the band sings, “Over the horizon, I saw John Wayne ride / Darkness and doubt / Just followed him about.”
BERKELEY, 1985
Figure 10. The Cowboy changes his philosophy. The context is Berkeley philosophy professor John Searle’s rejection of the Free Speech Movement, which in 1964 had turned the Berkely campus into a laboratory of crisis and critique–a perfect example, the SI had written in De la misère en milieu étudiant, of the exemplary act, of a fragment of a truly modern revolution which lacked only the theory the SI meant to provide. Searle supported the Free Speech Movement in 1964, but now he sees it as a black hole–not as an event with its own limited and reasonable goals, but as the first manifestation of a contagion of irrationality that led directly to May ’68, and, he tells us, from there to the academic embrace of such fashionable, relativistic French sophistries as poststructuralism, semiology, and deconstructionism: those ‘60s students haven’t changed they’ve just turned into professors. They’re dangerous, says Searle, here dubbed “The Sherrif of Commonsense,” in an image that shows him as the cowboy in his reclaimed American identity, shooting down the frog poseur like Indiana Jones casually plugging the Arab swordsman. As the residue of the likes of Berkeley ’64, Strasbourg ’66, and French ’68, the insistence of the new French philosophers that nothing is as it seems, that anything can be turned into its opposite, may, Searle believes, be laying the ground for a reappearance of those long-gone revolutionary nihilisms–”festivals,” Searle calls them. “The only way to deal with the touching, moving, and utterly sincere imbecility of such religious outbursts,” he says, “is by way of a relentless exposure of their preposterousness.”
Strange echoes in those words: that muscled hyperbole had been the situationist style. That voice could have been heard all through the pages of International Situationniste, carrying the SI’s millenarian critique of what it called the “Old World,” which, in 1985, was still the only world anybody knew. Unhorsed, the frontier closed, the cowboy takes what work he can get. It is, for the moment, as far as the story goes.
SUNSET
A few phrases appear in a novel. Years later, they are grafted onto a found movie still. A metaphor– certain imposed, ironic, anomalous tension between a text (“philosophy”) and an image (“the cowboy”)–appears. Soon enough it is available to anyone. Willing to do what it’s told, it also somehow tries to hold its shape.
What strength the metaphor has is in the way the discontinuity of its juxtaposition is made to see at once natural and odd. Juxtaposition, after all, is a basic tactic of 20th-century avant-garde art: “Things are not as they seem.” Most often the discontinuity is simply visual: if, as Hegel put it, Napoleon was “Zeitgeist on horseback” (the first Cowboy Philosopher, predating the cowboy himself?), then one could paste Napoleon’s head onto a cowboy’s body to make the point. But the discontinuity in Bertrand’s picture is more complex, which is why the elements of his juxtaposition have been separating and recombining for twenty years.