Better known as a novelist, Trocchi tried and failed to form a much more ambitious movement. He called it project sigma, after the mathematical sign that can stand for the sum or the totality. He thought it “free of bothersome semantic accretions.” He set out his sigma project in two luminous texts, “The Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds” and “Sigma: A Tactical Blueprint.” “Revolt is understandably unpopular,” he writes, and generally conceived in a somewhat backward way. Just as Leon Trotsky knew enough to seize the railways and the power stations while the old guard persisted in defending the offices of the state, “so cultural revolt must seize the grids of expression and the powerhouses of the mind.” Rather than a frontal confrontation, Trocchi suggests a more subtle practice of installing the material basis for a new practice of creation. It is no longer a question of a new journal or art movement. “Art can have no existential significance for a civilization which draws a line between life and art and collects artifacts like ancestral bones for reverence.”1 It’s a question of new relations of creation.
The key Trocchi finds in a stray quote from his contemporary Raymond Williams (1921–88), a pioneer of cultural materialism and British cultural studies: “The question is not who will patronize the arts, but what forms are possible in which artists will have control of their own means of expression, in such ways that they will have relation to a community rather than to a market or a patron.”2 Williams is best known today for the project of democratizing the practice of critical reading. Here he takes up the production side of the creation of a people’s culture. This appealed to Trocchi, who found proletarian culture rather more stifling than did Williams. In what must have been a charming thought to Debord, Trocchi wanted to bypass the brokers of the culture industry—the publisher and art dealers. In an extraordinary mix of the practical and the sublime, he plots the means of creative autonomy within capitalism itself.
Trocchi’s project sigma is partly inspired by Black Mountain College (1933–57), the famous North Carolina school, where Franz Kline, Robert Creeley, Merce Cunningham, John Cage and so many other transformative figures of the American avant-garde once taught. Trocchi also conceives of sigma as “a continuous, international, experimental conference.”3 Spaces of free creation, of ongoing and unfolding situations, could be based just outside metropolitan areas, a network of experimental sites in constant communication.
The actually existing university has become a microcosm of spectacular society. It reproduces and reinforces a strictly functional approach to creation. Trocchi mentions a contest at Cambridge University to come up with a use for its neglected chapels. Many are quite beautiful and once functioned as the unitary heart of their respective colleges. The winning suggestion was to turn them into canteens or student housing. Trocchi thought brothels would at least be a more spiritual solution. The postwar university was rapidly becoming a mere functional support for the spectacle, training the mediators who would manage its desires. What was lacking was a point at which to start making situations.
The sigma texts are part manifesto, part manual. The practical side to Trocchi’s proposal is the means of funding it. Project sigma is not just a university, it is also an agency for what Jorn called the creative elite. Those who join it become part of an agency controlled by the creators themselves. Sigma lives off residuals, patents, commissions, even what one would now call consultancy fees. Its network of spontaneous universities function as advertisements for themselves. One might almost say that they are brands. Trocchi’s solution is a weird kind of Leninist dual power.4 An autonomous, self-managed, unalienated power of seamless creativity exists alongside the old commodified spectacle until such time as it can subsume it within its new means of creation. It is both science fiction and a business plan, a utopian future and an almost exact description of sophisticated spectacular business in the twenty-first century. It could almost be the model for the Blue Ant agency of Hubertus Bigend (b. 1967), the fictional son of a Situationist in the novels of William Gibson.5 It is a summation of Trocchi’s own extraordinary experience, yet it is also a program he was in no sense fit to carry out in person.
Trocchi survived a genteel-poor upbringing in Glasgow. During the war he sailed on convoy ships taking supplies to the Soviet Union. After a stint at Glasgow University he took advantage of a scholarship to ship off to Paris. He was an editor of the English-language journal Merlin (1952–54), which coexisted in friendly rivalry with the Paris Review of George Plimpton and friends. In Paris he fell under the spell of Samuel Beckett and managed to get Beckett published, together with Jean Genet and Eugène Ionesco, with Olympia Press, a Paris-based, English-language imprint best known for its porn. Like more than a few expats, Trocchi wrote porn novels for Olympia’s charming but deeply dodgy impresario Maurice Girodias.6
The best of Trocchi’s porn novels is Helen and Desire (1954). Growing up in the far north of Australia, Helen is a bored teenager with only her own immediate sensations to amuse her. “I count the sea as my first love … it was an impersonal one.” She embarks on the adventure of renouncing her own will, her subjectivity, her interiority. Instead she allows herself a terrible and ungovernable thirst for annihilation. And yet Helen remains a writer. The book purports to be a found manuscript, a diary not of a person but of a process of depersonalization. The body becomes a surface for the replacement of self with sensation: “Riven now at twin poles of delight, my glistening torso slithered under discs, flats, and surfaces, under flanges of containment and protusion, all seeking the weld of female union. My breasts, charged with ambiguous alluvial sensations, slipped to and fro under their counterparts …”7
Helen’s writing recounts the steps by which the very possibility of authorship is undone. Her diary ends when there is no longer a subject to be writing it: “And gradually the whole desire to commit my experiences to history has been outflanked by the terrible pleasure I experience in approaching the unconscious state of an object … It is indeed doubtful whether I can still usefully use the word ‘I.’”8 Helen gives herself over to the situation, and abolishes the act of writing, the possibility of literature as a separate art, in the process.
Self-destruction seemed preferable to self-construction, to the institutional forces that pinned the self in place. Trocchi wrote about such institutions in a short story for his Moving Times, a literary journal that was supposed to appear as posters in subway stations:
At the third jolt the patient’s body was seen to shudder like a tall jelly within the leather harness, and a wisp of blue smoke issued from his nostrils, a reaction generally regarded as a symptom of what, in technical nomenclature, is called “reintegration.” The patient reintegrated slowly, the shuddering subsided gradually over a period of two and a half hours, after which he was returned to the deep freeze as a precaution against pong.9
The construction of the stable subject requires a huge effort of disciplinary force, but it is not as if there were a natural self which such techniques suppress. Rather, it’s a choice between two kinds of process, between the psychiatric techniques of the subject, or the crafty whittling of the body into sensate being within the unstable, unfolding embrace of the situation. As the social and medical sciences claim the body as their own, Trocchi finds resources for the body’s self-experiments in writing.
As a writer Trocchi connects Beckett to William Burroughs, and both to Debord. His great, Cain’s Book (1960) is often considered a Beat classic, but it is rarely read as a Situationist text. Debord was an admirer of Malcolm Lowry (1909–57), author of Under the Volcano (1947), with whom Trocchi had at least two things in common. They both produced only one book that was a literary success, and they both preferred to destroy themselves rather than inflict more literature on the world. Lowry was an alcoholic; Trocchi a drug fiend. Both explored in depth the practice of playing with time, with time outside of both labor and leisure. Trocchi’s advice to ambitious writers: “Let them dedicate a year to pinball and think again.” Both were adepts at what Trocchi called “the chemistry of alienation.”10 Both found the limits to becoming a professional in the art of intoxication.
“Tomorrow is an age of Doctors,” Trocchi says prophetically. By 2007 the American Environmental Protection Agency will announce that what it calls the emerging contaminants in drinking water come mostly from anti-depressants, painkillers, antibiotics, hormones and blood pressure remedies.11 It’s the effluent of the affluent world of spectacular medicine. The disintegrating spectacle has inadvertently medicated whole populations, not only of humans but of other species too, a whole biosphere rendered comfortably numb. It’s a byproduct of constantly reintegrating the human body into the uniform time of production and consumption, for a time that repeats the same steady intervals without end; and rendered efficiently, without the blue smoke.
The central character in Cain’s Book avoids work as best he can, and takes to its extreme the practice of playing with his own life. This play is far from a joyful distraction. It is an immersion in one intensity after another. “To mean everything and for everything to be a confidence trick, tasting power coming into being for others; I had often thought that only through play could one taste that power safely, if dangerously, and that when the spirit of play died there was only murder.”12 From Sartre, Trocchi took the idea of being condemned to freedom. Unlike Sartre, he did not limit himself to discussing banal situations in which one might be confronted by this freedom. Rather, new situations had to be created. For Debord this creation of situations was always a collaborative project, of love and play and boisterous rivalry as a means of effacing bourgeois consciousness. For Trocchi it was a much more grim and solitary business, a lone self-purgation amid the purgatory of other people.
Cain’s Book was, for all its brilliance, something of a dead end. It lacks the self-annihilating power of Helen and Desire. It allows itself the one masochism the earlier book did its utmost to refuse: that of becoming the plaything of literature. Its failure to put an end to literature led the critic James Campbell to declare with smug satisfaction: “The novel didn’t die, after all, but, following Cain, Trocchi’s part in it did.”13 This is not the least reason that Trocchi’s post-Cain writing calls for a fresh appreciation. He borrowed in part from his friend and contemporary Wallace Berman (1927–76) and his attempt to redefine circuits of communication for poetry and visual art with his homemade journal Semina (1955–64). Trocchi shifts attention from form as a question of arranging words on the page to form as the question of the medium and economy by which words are communicated.14
While Cain’s Book is now a captive of its own literary success, the same cannot be said of the sigma portfolio (1964). The portfolio allowed Trocchi to abandon literature and yet keep writing. It’s a project he hatched in New York, but brought back to London with him, “close under his eyelids, an electronic load, an unwritten book, a plan in four dimensions, a shadow one, including time …” This puckish, punkish project would be self-generating and self-published. “The sigma portfolio is an entirely new dimension in publishing, through which the writer reaches his public immediately, outflanking the traditional traps of publishing-house policy, and by means of which the reader gets it, so to speak, ‘hot’ from the writer’s pen, the photographer’s lens, etc.”15
Through a probably deliberate misunderstanding, Trocchi presents the early Letterist movement as being based, not on chipping writing down to the letter in the typographic sense, but on the sending of letters in the postal, or perhaps topographic sense. He borrows from the Letterist International the name Potlatch, but to designate what he calls an interpersonal log. It is to be an open-ended series of simple typed and duplicated documents. “This gambit, a round robin which includes n participants, an interpersonal experiment in expression; a man responding as and when he pleases; copies of his response at once roneo-ed for circulation; individuals chiming in, checking out at any time.”16
Trocchi calls it a log to stress the temporal aspect, the sequence of statement and rejoinder: “it should literally discover many things, including the dialectical process of its own growth.” Where the book puts an end to the transformations of the text and sets up a distinction between author and reader, the interpersonal log keeps transforming itself, and makes of its readers writers and of its writers readers. “Essentially ludic, and calling, it seems to me, for a particular kind of gesture, it might be called potlatch.” It might also be called blogging.17 Trocchi invented a web of logs before there was even an internet.
Or it might be called sigma, that blank, elusive, all-embracing one-word poem that Trocchi put at the heart of the enterprise. “For, sigma is a word referring to something which is quite independent of myself or of any other individual, and if we are correct in our historical analysis, we must regard it as having ‘begun’ a long time ago.”18 The term sigma stands in for a process, without beginning or end, without subject or goal, and yet which is not a mere abstract force, but something experienced within the lived time of everyday life. This willful and collaborative play within and against creative forces is the thread that becomes lost under the conditions of spectacular society.
And so “it is the object of sigma to bring all informations out into the open.” The sigma portfolio is a kind of residue of a process, which leaves behind a diagram of the ephemeral forces that make and unmake situations. Passing through the interstitial spaces of spectacular society, not least its literature, the sigma portfolio finds light, cheap, temporary means to bypass the spectacular and yet, for all its evanescence, to become an exemplary instance of the new power at work in the world. Sigma is a new power which is at the same time the ancient power of homo ludens, joining in with the ineffable play of the world.
Trocchi quotes Debord: “Everything being connected, it was necessary to change it by a unitary struggle, or nothing.” Trocchi’s sigma texts abound in tactical maxims: the round robin of Roneoed texts is an outflanking gesture, which exploits a loophole in the technical apparatus of mechanical reproduction. But where Debord’s tactics are always elusive, seductive, Trocchi wants to create a center, which he sometimes calls the box office, as if it offered tickets to the endgame of the spectacle itself. “The box office will be a primitive micro-model of a possible future.” This plan for a consciously constructed environment includes audiovisual media as well as futiques (future antiques), objects designed for open-ended play. The resources of all the arts are to be integrated into the conscious construction of situations.
The portfolio includes Trocchi’s détourned version of a “Situationist Manifesto.” What he adds and subtracts from the orthodox Situationist document is instructive. Like Constant, he stresses the role of automation in clearing the way for a ludic world. “Automation, and a general ‘socialization’ of vital goods will gradually and ineluctably dispense with most of the necessity for ‘work’: eventually, as near as dammit, the complete liberty of the individual in relation to production will be attained.” In place of surplus value, a play value. But play meets resistance. Just as the church resisted the festival, so the authorities seize Cain’s Book. The unions resist automation and defend work. Sigma has to take place outside of all forms of existing power: “we propose immediate action on the international scale, a self-governing (non-)organization of producers of the new culture beyond, and independent of, all political organizations …”19
No matter how euphoric his theory, Trocchi’s practice is modest in scale: “so long as our techniques for the passing on of informations grow with the passage of time more and more effective, etc., our insurrection will snowball of its own momentum.”20 The means of dissemination for sigma was the stencil duplicator, or mimeograph machine. Ironically enough it was a popular medium for the kinds of organization sigma eschews, such as churches, schools and social clubs. It was the original medium for science fiction fanzines. Trocchi found that this low-tech device also afforded a means for making low theory. Duplicating was an easy and cheap means of making copies by the hundreds without recourse to a professional printer. Popular makes included Gestetner and Ditto. Trocchi used another trademark as a verb—to Roneo—although strictly speaking this brand worked by a slightly different process.
Trocchi claims at least some sigma texts were composed directly on the stencil. He would have taken the ribbon out of the typewriter, inserted the stencil and typed away. The stencil was a stiff sheet of card backed with wax, and attached to it a thin sheet of tissue paper. The impact of the keys cuts the letters into the wax, with the residue sticking to the tissue paper. Judging by the sigma portfolio, Trocchi was a good stencil cutter: type too hard, and the enclosed spaces within the letters turn to black blobs. Once Trocchi cut the stencil, he removed it from the typewriter and attached it to the drum, which was filled with ink. He would then turn the crank by hand, each rotation drawing a sheet of paper under the drum, through the pressure rollers, copying his text in the process. On most duplicators, it takes a bit of fiddling with various settings to get good copies. Judging by surviving copies, Trocchi and his sigma associates mastered it. Martin Heidegger: “the typewriter makes everyone look the same.”21 Perhaps not, if one looks closely enough.
Trocchi was not exactly master of his own life. Constant: “Freedom is the most difficult way of living that man can lead. For freedom can only be realized in creation and creation means discipline.”22 The quest for extreme situations quickly collapsed into the sheer habit of junkie life. When he was living in Venice Beach, California, hanging out with the Beats, he was visited one day by Irving Rosenthal (b. 1930), who wrote down his impressions of Trocchi’s materialist and experimental attitude to life there in his very own Musée Imaginaire:
Everything functional had been drafted into the service of art, taken apart and reassembled, and many things looked subjected to more than one transformation, as if the lust to create had been so overpowering as to become cannibalistic, or as if each object of art, once created, became as stupid as a lamp or bookend, and had to be destroyed and built anew. The whole room seemed to belong to another world, to whose inhabitants these uncanny furnishings were the beds and chairs of everyday life.
Rosenthal quickly soured on Trocchi and his miniature version of unitary urbanism: “Even the little true beauty I picked up there, to pop in my mouth and suck on, was mixed with a slow-acting poison to make the eyes opaque and dreamless …” It would not be long before the whole place burned to the ground.23 Trocchi was an addict, and like many addicts, left a wake of casual violence behind him. The poet, artist and jazz musician Jeff Nuttall (1933–2004), who assisted him for a time, left a portrait that has the rare quality of being critical but nonjudgmental: “Trocchi once told me he first took heroin for the sense of inviolability it gave him. If the cool hipster is severed from identificatory processes and thus from other people’s pleasure and pain, he is nevertheless an athlete of time. … No user is punctual.”24 This queer athleticism has nothing to do with stopwatches and world records. It is not an athleticism of measurable time. Rather, it is an extreme sporting with duration, with immeasurable time itself.
In his novel Tainted Love (2005), Stewart Home (b. 1962) is not so kind.
Alex liked women, but clearly he preferred getting them fucked up on drugs to any kind of physical intimacy. Trocchi got a kick out of watching a beautiful woman like Lyn spiraling downwards through endless cycles of degradation. And when Lyn did die Alex was mortified, and it seemed to me that he’d been killed either with or before her. Trocchi no longer simply took drugs; he had become heroin. Alex was dead and didn’t yet know it. I liked and admired Trocchi, he was a visionary who’d written two brilliant novels, but when it came to his relationship with other people he could be a complete cunt.25
This is written from the point of view of a young woman who is herself hustling for heroin, who is the mother of the novel’s narrator, and who dies in dubious circumstances. It’s a timely reminder that not everyone survives bohemia, and that those who rise to it from delinquency rather than fall into it out of privilege have rather a hard time of it. The romance still clinging to Rosenthal’s version is here—almost—expunged.
For someone like Constant, the failure of Trocchi’s project sigma had less to do with Trocchi’s personal limitations than with objective necessity. The spectacle required a structural transformation which no mere passing of informations between disaffected hipsters could ever achieve. New Babylon placed its bets on changing the forms within which everyday life is experienced. Constant: “The culture of New Babylon does not result from isolated activities, from exceptional situations, but from the global activity of the whole world population, every human being engaged in a dynamic relation with his surroundings.”26 In an era that would become absorbed with the permutations of cultural superstructures, Constant’s obsession with infrastructure was a rare corrective.