Alexander Trocchi and Project Sigma

It does not exist except for those who are with it

Over the years, Alex Trocchi’s importance to British underground culture has been sorely neglected. The only published biography deals with Trocchi solely as a literary figure and skims over his association with the likes of Wallace Berman, Guy Debord, RD Laing, William Burroughs, Michael X and others. Rather than restrict Trocchi to this literary classification and berate him for never having come up with the goods after a promising start, it is better to take him on his own terms: as an energised cultural catalyst, one interested in meta-categorical (r)evolt, the insurrection of a million minds. Trocchi never used these phrases in a flippant self-promotional manner. He was deadly serious and being so, how could he restrict his notion of creativity to that of the novelist? In one of the many passages in Cain’s Book that question the practice of writing and the role of the novelist, Trocchi writes: I am of course incapable of sustaining a simple narrative…with no fixed valid categories…not so much a line of thought as an area of experience…the immediate broth.

By the time he settled in London in the early 60s, Trocchi had passed through various scenes, he had experiences that took him beyond any one form. After 40s Glasgow, he passed through the cultural melting pot of post-war Paris. Here he cultivated his heroin habit whilst he edited the influential literary magazine Merlin – a project that issued the first English language editions of Beckett and Genet. Whilst in Paris he published his first novel, Young Adam, under the same pseudonym that he used for the porno novels he wrote for Olympia Press. At some point during his stay, he began his friendship with Guy Debord and became a member of the Lettrist International (one of the groups that would later feed into the Situationist International). From Paris and its pinball machines, he travelled to New York where he lived aboard a scow on the Hudson River, becoming involved in the late 50s beat-scene and writing the occasional article for Evergreen Review. It was this imprint that, in 1960, published Cain’s Book – his second, and most widely acclaimed novel. Whilst in the States he also hung out in Venice Beach with experimental artist Wallace Berman. However, his time in the States was cut short by a drugs bust and a term in prison. He returned to Britain with false papers supplied by Norman Mailer.

Back in London, Trocchi would never seriously attempt to embark on a follow up to Cain’s Book (1). However, he returned to a situation where his two novels had been published in this country for the first time: Adam in 1961 and Cain in 1963. His publisher, John Calder, was busy promoting him as a central figure in a beat movement he had left behind and his work attracted notoriety when a Sheffield magistrate deemed Cain’s Book obscene. Instead of satisfying the demands of publishers and living up to his ‘beatnik’ reputation, Trocchi began Proect Sigma. The opening salvo of this transpersonal counter-cultural venture, which attempted to link together cultural dissidents, was the publication of his Revolutionary Proposal in Internationale Situationniste #8 (1963) and then in City Light Journal #2 (1964). In Autumn of 1964, Trocchi becan to distribute the Sigma Portfolio – an ongoing series of written works collated into a foolscap folder that outlined the scope of the project:

So the cultural revolt must seize the grids of expression and powerhouses of the mind. Intelligence must become more self-conscious, realise its own power, and, on a global scale, transcending functions that are no longer appropriate, dare to exercise it. History will not overthrow national governments; it will outflank them. The cultural revolt is the necessary underpinning, the passionate substructure of a new order of things.

We propose immediate action on an international scale, a self-governing (non) organisation of producers of the new culture beyond, and independent of, all political organisations and trade and professional syndicates which presently exist; for there is none of these which does not have the fogs and vapours of ataxia in its own basement.

The portfolio expanded to include essays from R.D. Laing, Robert Creeley, Michael McClure, Stan Brakhage, Joan Littlewood and Colin Wilson. Trocchi added several of his own texts, two of which are reproduced here, as well as a translation of a Situationist Manifesto. A caustic letter to universities was included as was a flyer by Marcus Field distributed as an intervention at John Calder’s Writer’s Nights (Calder is still Trocchi’s publisher). William Burroughs was also involved, submitting a text for the flyposter work Moving Times which Trocchi attempted to get London Transport to display as a hoarding in tube stations. But the portfolio was only a fragment of Project Sigma. An unpublished chart maps out the breadth of Trocchi’s plans, plans that in the prevailing spirit of 60s agitation, seemed to develop from one another in rapid succession as Trocchi made contact after contact.

The hub of these plans was the Sigma Centre or spontaneous university… a non specialised creative workshop… a general operations base for the whole project. Spiralling out from this are a whole host of ventures: a Living Gallery coupled to a “showroom” he called the The Box Office as well as an International Index of Sigma supporters that became known as Pool-Cosmonaut. Trocchi also opened negotiations with the pirate radio station Radio Caroline and entered into closer links with Laing’s ideas for therapeutic environments and with Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price’s interest in experimenting with architectural ambience. Two of his more wide-ranging plans were for Sigma to operate as General Cultural Agents and in a field he calls Cultural Engineering. At root here was Trocchi’s keen concern to outflank the normal channels and establish a culture autonomous from that of the media and the institutions. Rather than snipe bitterly from the sidelines he saw a use in tactically subverting the prevalent mechanisms — the worship of “individual genius” and “talent” would work for Sigma, firstly by attracting attention and legitimacy through the support of figures like Burroughs, Laing and Wilson (already in the spotlight), and then to attract younger artists and intellectuals that would support Sigma and work for the project as much as for their own ends. Trocchi hoped that the Agency would come to exercise a cultural monopoly as more and more people defected to Sigma. In a connected direction, Trocchi hoped that cultural agency work would expand into a more general form of Cultural Engineering: providing counsel on artistic matters including negotiating with large companies; the sale of cultural products produced by sigmaticians; educational advice and conventional publishing projects.

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.

It’s safe to say that Project Sigma had been bubbling away in Trocchi for quite some time. There are those passages in Cain’s Book where it is becoming apparent that the form of the novel is insufficient for Trocchi – I’m all the time aware that it’s really art and literature I’m engaged in. Part of the books restlessness stems from a solitariness that needs to link up with others, those whom he considered where instinct with the same principles, who shared a broad identity of interest. Of these, his association and membership of the Situationist International (SI) seems crucial. Like Trocchi, the situationists were coming to doubt the institutional channelling of culture and like the European avant-gardes before them, they were attracted to actually transforming the social situation in a collective effort. Whereas the situationist project tended to narrow its focus and get bogged down in the false divide of culture and politics, Trocchi was more interested in leaving things undemarcated. As we have seen, for him the possibilities and collaborations were endless. The choice of the word Sigma, meaning “all” or “the sum of” is indicative of this approach to open creation and his willingness to get his hands dirty is contrastable to the situationist preference for transcendence through theory. Although never a Marxist, it could be said that Trocchi was more inclined to resolve theoretical contradictions through practical means – Project Sigma, for Trocchi, was a means of practical experiment. It wasn’t solely a matter of the understanding but an activity that didn’t set purely theoretical problems. However much his Sigma writing may look idealistic when contrasted to the apparent rigour of the SI, we should not forget the tricks that language is capable of and be careful to remember that idealism can show many faces. It is not unfounded to infer that Trocchi would have had a certain amount of truck with excluded German situationist, Heimrad Prem, when the latter insinuated that the SI was being idealistic when it counted on the existence of a revolutionary proletariat.

Though the SI and Trocchi mutually agreed to part company in 1964, Trocchi carried over into Project Sigma some of the themes that had been discussed by the situationists and his own contributions to the Portfolio are indicative of a long-standing involvement in this milieu. He was attracted to the notion of constructing situations and appears to have an understanding of them that doesn’t rely on the prevalent “happening” interpretation. For Trocchi a ‘situation’ was more a means of creating moments of a passional quality: autonomous spaces that dissolve the divide between “actor” and “spectator” and raise the tenor of daily living beyond the level of stock responses (on a daily level he related to his heroin use as a means of creating a situation). Like the early SI, Trocchi also showed an interest in the possibilities for automation to increase leisure time and saw this as a way that Sigma could expand and come to exercise a more influential role: what is becoming is homo ludens. In one of his texts from the Portfolio that follows, Potlatch, Trocchi takes up the ideas behind the Lettrist International’s bulletin of the same name. The latter was distributed for free in Paris, but Trocchi develops it from being a centrally produced manifesto into being a form of group writing and collective creation.

But there are two overall “programmatic” links between the SI and Sigma. A text from Internationale Situationniste #5, The Adventure, articulates in a different style of language what it was that Sigma was hoping to achieve: a situation of dual power in culture…The re-invention of a project of generally transforming the world must also and first of all be posed on this terrain [i.e. cultural sphere]: To give up demanding power in culture would be to leave that power to those who have it. As the SI drifted away from this approach, Trocchi seems to have always kept it close to mind as the motivating force of Project Sigma. The other link is Trocchi’s description of the cultural revolt as an invisible insurrection. This can be taken as a less elitist articulation of the SI’s declaring, at the point of organisational dissolution, that their ideas were in everyone’s heads, that it wasn’t a question of a theory of the SI but of a theory of the proletariat. In a similar, yet differently accented direction, Trocchi resists defining revolt. For him such definition is a means of confining revolt, of boxing it off, making it identifiable and limiting its activity to the prevailing level of political process. The invisible insurrection is far more diffuse and heterogeneous, an (un)common inner-ground, existing independently of personalities and correlating the actions of autonomous individuals. Invisible because, being meta-categorical, it occupies no readily perceivable ghetto. Invisible in that it traverses time and space. Invisible in the sense that it isn’t so much a question of choosing to co-operate as of discovering oneself in and of the invisible insurrection by virtue of one’s practical posture. If the SI located themselves as part of a transhistorical revolutionary workers movement then Trocchi was doing the same in light of cultural revolt. Mutually exclusive?

Many individuals…have judged it to their advantage to break with sigma and to exploit sigmatic techniques for immediate personal gain, almost inevitably they felt bound to justify their lack of integrity…their obvious tactics were to identify sigma with myself personally.

The prevailing judgment of Project Sigma is that it was a failure. For those who participated it was a chaotic failure. For the literary types it was a distracting failure. For those who look back on it now it is an idealistic failure. On Trocchi’s terms it was a failure because the project was, and is, too readily identifiable with Trocchi himself. It never became independent of the personalities who sustained it. There are many more reasons. In Bomb Culture, Jeff Nuttall describes how he responded to Sigma by asking Trocchi: “what do you want me to do?”. There is very little in that response that suggests a future for a non-hierarchical, leaderless project! Artist John Latham, another participant, could say nothing in recollection of Sigma other than Trocchi spent too much time hanging around with ex-gangster Michael X. There is nothing here supportive of a variegated approach! Could it be that too many “sympathisers” were waiting for Trocchi’s command?

In his unpublished short history of Sigma, Trocchi suggests that competitive impulses were part cause of the dissipation of Sigma. In this sense it’s interesting to draw a parallel with the Neoist Alliance’s call for an “Art Strike” (1987-90) for Sigma was effectively asking for creative people to jettison their individual careers and work with the dual power aims of Sigma in mind. R.D. Laing, a one-time close collaborator, becomes a counter-cultural superstar. We have seen the breadth of possible directions that Trocchi had suggested for Sigma and if we shift our approach from gauging the success or failure of Sigma we can see how some of these initiatives evolved as part of the general and simultaneous terrain of the invisible insurrection, independent of having any one originary point: the Sigma Centre became Kingsley Hall became the London Anti-University became the Free University of New York became Kommune 1. Sigmaticians became Motherfuckers, Provos, White Panthers, Enragés. The lines blur into a rhizomatic unfurling. Invisible insurrection as a palimpsest: The actual existence of this all pervasive ghost mode.

Howard Slater

Note: 1. Tom McGrath relates how “for a while he was writing what he called the Long Book. This was being written in a cash ledger…” (Edinburgh Review 70, 1985) p.44.

• Wikipedia on Alexander Trocchi
• Other texts by Howard Slater on datacide-magazine.com
• Table of content of Break/Flow 1

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