Steve_Bamlett_blog

BLOG ON: Ross, Kristin (2002) May ’68 and its Afterlives Chicago & London, University of Chicago Press. Available as ebook at: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/open/detail.action?docID=496636 (Accessed 04/04/19).

              This book helps me to reinterpret events in my own memory – for me May 68 in France was the prequel of changes in my experience of the institutions that claim to have a right to mould us as people and as citizens. Take the sixth-form at my grammar school, of which I was one the very few learners to come from a local council estate. My mum was a school-cleaner at the same school.

Yet I remember being co-lead on setting up a ‘council’ which claimed its independence of the school administration and which, memorably, refused to allow the school headmaster to sit on the council except as an invited guest, sitting back from the council round table and able to speak only when invited. In 1970s London, I remember the demonstrations of which I was a frightened part. My politics, though remaining decidedly on the left of the Labour Party, tended to give way to personal politics – the politics of gay liberation seemed so much to matter more in the light of laws that made the manifestation of my emotions illegal. But my perception of this as a ‘natural’ line of autobiographical development is probably the very idea that this book convinces me to be false (155f.).

The reason Ross helps me interpret those memories and begin painful revision processes of them simultaneously is her analysis of how personal episodic memories of such events become hijacked by stereotyped career paradigms. As she shows, from 1968 onwards there were forces that led to the reframing of the history of May 1968 as a matter best understand through the structure of individual biographies – particularly of ‘reformed’ participants, including but not solely that ‘star’ figure, Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Ross presents this tendency in terms of an ‘generational’ (100, 165, 200f, 205) interpretive paradigm that produced a version of May ’68 as a revolt of the young and (by spoken or unspoken implication) immature. It is the paradigm most evident in Hanley & Ker (1989).

That paradigm was resisted by Sartre, Jacques Rancière and Guy Hocquenhem. I remember the alpha and omega in this trinity, the latter because of his radical queer theory, but have only recently began to realise the massive importance of Rancière. Sartre in What is Literature (1965 cited p. 165) characterised it as the paradigm of the autobiographical fiction novel:

A narrator looks back from a great distance on turbulent events of his youth: “…the adventure was a brief disturbance that is over with. It is told from the viewpoint of experience and wisdom: it is listened to from the viewpoint of order.

Even the intellectual ‘heroes’ of the event, sometimes wrongly thought of as the protagonists of sixties revolution – the anti-humanist philosopher/psychologists such as Lacan, Foucault & Althusser – are thus only this as a product of misremembering. Their role at the time reined one of critical detachment, and often absence, as Ross shows (190f.).

As Ross presents May ’68 the over-riding theme is the refusal of any perceived or performative (other than as ‘mauvaise foi’) correlation between established power hierarchies and a right to lead or represent others. The movement longed for new ways of identifying itself in Ross’ evidence, even in the ‘insults’ handed out by their enemies – such as the difficult to characterise term, ‘pegré’ (108). The tendency is to undermine, sometimes by verbal or visual satire, notions of ‘authority’ that it was the function of ‘autobiographically-authored’ generational readings of May ’68 to reinstate. The figures of authority undermined in the visual and textual records and combinations thereof (architectural graffiti for instance) were the author / ‘auteur’ in film, novel and art (112, 140), ‘expert’ (78f. 140, 146), ‘leader’ (144), ‘intellectual’ (174). The aim was power from the bottom up (“la base doit emmener la tête” cited 157). See also pp. 79, 92f. 95 on power ‘à la base’. Power was to be re-presented in action not represented in appearances alone. Ross has some fine summary phrases – as fine as the slogans of the period: the ‘political imaginary becomes the everyday fabric of people’s lives’ (145f.); there is ‘flight from social location’ of identity (207), a ‘chain reaction of refusal’ (207) which Sartre saw as a redrawing of the ‘field of the possible’ (91), Rancière later as a reconfiguration of the ‘sensible’.

As Ross shows us the aim of generational readings is to belittle those forms of re-presentation of power as illusory or immature or a passing phase in favour of a teleology favouring the status quo:

And if the revolt attributed to youth does not pass, then this is because one has not outgrown adolescence. (205)

The usable material for me will relate to the rejection of the link between authority and value-judgements intrinsic to art—history, the ‘massive refusal on the part of thousands, even millions, to see in the social what we usually see’ (7), the inventive bricolage played with icons (even repressive icons like the police baton 27). There is also an attitude to time that became intensely politicked and antagonistic (in my view here) to the ‘longue durée’ necessitated by the marriage of standards and authority in art-history (which if not found in the art itself must be found in the credentials of the art-historian). There are interesting things here about Rosa Luxembourg, whom I had forgotten again (75) and on the contrast between co-operative engagement and the refusal of dialogue with bourgeois values: the ‘stinking seduction of dialogue’ (187). And Danielle & Jacques Rancière, again non-elitist heroes who refused to capitulate to generational arguments but whose role and public recognition so differed from the primarily anti-humanist intellectuals (173f.).

A wonderful book.