The Long 1968: Revisions and New Perspectives

By Daniel J. Sherman, Ruud van Dijk, Jasmine Alinder and A. Aneesh

Delving into a tumultuous year’s impact on art, culture, and politics, this book “illuminates the often-overlooked histories of 1968” (The Journal of American History).

From the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, revolutions in theory, politics, and cultural experimentation swept around the world. These changes had as great a transformative impact on the right as on the left.

A touchstone for activists, artists, and theorists of all stripes, the year 1968 has taken on new significance for the present moment, which bears certain uncanny resemblances to that time. The Long 1968 explores the wide-ranging impact of the year and its aftermath in politics, theory, the arts, and international relations—and its uses today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9780253009180

Book preview

Introduction

JASMINE ALINDER, A. ANEESH,

DANIEL J. SHERMAN, AND RUUD VAN DIJK

In his gripping documentary Le fond de l’air est rouge (A Grin without a Cat), the French filmmaker Chris Marker posits that the upheaval subsequently associated with 1968 actually began as a student demonstration against a visit by the shah of Iran to West Berlin and an attack on the students by the shah’s secret police in June 1967. Released in several versions over more than a decade, from 1979 to 1992, Marker’s film reflects the continuously changing contours of the long 1968; with footage from the jungles of Venezuela to the streets of Tokyo, from Czechoslovakia to China to Chile, from Vietnam to the Pentagon, it also provides a visual touchstone for the global reach of 1968. In its final cut, Le fond de l’air extends as far as 1977, with Marker’s voice-over, a unique fusion of elegance, rue, and disillusionment, taking the viewer even closer to his present.

Although the decade or so covered by Le fond de l’air est rouge represents a reasonable chronological framework for the long 1968 of our title, this book is concerned less with chronology than with connections, diachronic as well as synchronic. The book has several objectives. First, it seeks to explore both the commonalities and the variations of the long 1968 around the world: a pervasive search for new forms of social organization and political action, as well as new ways of thinking about them; an impatience, sometimes to the point of violence, with existing authority; an eagerness to find in other parts of the world, the more remote and exotic the better, the means of combating that authority and creating an alternative to it; disillusionment, but in some places the continued hope as alternatives were increasingly foreclosed. Second, by examining events, groups, and ideas through new lenses—whether the broader focus of Jeremi Suri; the inclusion of sites rarely considered in histories of 1968, such as Simon Prince’s Northern Ireland and James Ferguson’s Zambia; and Bernard Gendron’s rereading of a familiar figure like Michel Foucault—the book seeks to question what was in danger of becoming, by the time of the fortieth anniversary of 1968, a kind of canonical treatment quite alien to the spirit of that age, focused on familiar figures in the Paris—Berkeley axis. Finally, by looking at the continued resonance of 1968 in the first decade of the twenty-first century, we add another layer to the idea of the long 1968, one that includes those who continue to invoke, study, and interpret it in our own day, as well as parallels in our own time, whether intentional or not.

Readers will find many resonances among and across the different essays; we have organized them thematically in an effort to enhance those resonances. We begin with three essays that look at influential theorists who had different associations with the events of 1968: Michel Foucault, Theodor Adorno, and Henri Lefebvre. In no way do we suggest that theorists from the European continent were the only ones inspiring actors and events elsewhere: other bodies of theory are evoked and developed in later essays, notably that of James Ferguson. Indeed, Foucault himself questioned the Eurocentrism of 1968: It wasn’t May of ’68 in France that changed me; it was March of ’68 in a third world country. In Tunis he was struck by the desire, the capacity and the possibility of an absolute sacrifice without our being able to recognize or suspect the slightest ambition or desire for power and profit, where the precision of theory, its scientific character, was an entirely secondary question.¹ Rather than attempting a comprehensive examination of the precision of theory, part 1 seeks to launch the book’s larger project by examining the work of these three theorists within new contextual perspectives. Just as all three in different ways questioned the distinction between theory and practice, the essays in the second part of the book, which moves from text to the context of politics, are also concerned with the force of ideas, images, and concepts on the political events that led up to, constituted, and followed from the events of 1968. Part 3 continues this scrutiny with particular emphasis on both the symbolic and the physical action of particular bodies. The final section, 1968, the Movie, offers two new ways of thinking about the complex relationship between the long 1968 and its filmic representations.

Part 1 begins with Bernard Gendron’s bracingly revisionist interpretation of Michel Foucault’s 1968. In part because Foucault was teaching in Tunis in the spring of 1968 and missed what the French thought of as the events of May, in part because the many commentators on the philosopher have preferred internalist explanations of changes in his work, little attention has been paid to the effect of 1968 on Foucault’s thought. But to cast the emergence of a genealogical method in the 1970s, first in Discipline and Punish (1975), as the result only of Foucault’s dissatisfaction with his early archaeological method misses key elements of Foucault’s work in the six years after his return to Paris in the fall of 1968. That period, which roughly corresponds to the gap between The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) and Discipline and Punish, an unusually long one in Foucault’s publishing career, Gendron shows to be one of significant engagement on a number of fronts.

Far from the apolitical technocrat he was reputed to be prior to his departure for Tunisia in 1966, Foucault—who had experienced student unrest and a government crackdown while in Tunis—became deeply involved in political militancy on his return, notably in the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (GIP). On the basis of records of Foucault’s political involvement in the early 1970s, including interviews published largely outside of France as well as essays from the time, Gendron argues that Foucault’s reflections on the long 1968 affected his work in a number of ways. For the first time since his student days, Foucault had to take Marxist analysis seriously again, since Marxist views dominated the interpretation of 1968; rather than rejecting 1968 itself, he sought to recover and understand it from a leftist perspective free of what he saw as overly reductive Marxist schemas. And, as a political activist with strong connections to Maoist circles, Foucault had to rethink not only the nature of disciplinary power but the contours of praxis broadly conceived. In Gendron’s subtle and nuanced account, this was anything but a simple or linear process; it included a number of false starts and a moment when Foucault rejected theory altogether in favor of practical action—a position that must be regarded, on Foucault’s own terms, as part of his intellectual output. By 1973 the combination of his militancy, his confrontation with Marxist critique, and his continued research was beginning to produce the outlines of the theory of institutionalized and interiorized disciplinarity that he would flesh out in Discipline and Punish. Although that book, like virtually all Foucault’s scholarly work, limits its objects to the period before the mid-nineteenth century, Gendron provides readers a way of understanding it as very much a history of the present—that is, of the long 1968.

Yet, appeals to creative or revolutionary praxis do not subsume, despite common assumptions, the spirit of 1968. Palimpsests of 1968 do not contain only calls to action; they also have traces of its opposite: indeed, actionism inherent in praxis was declared regressive by Theodor Adorno, as Richard Langston so lucidly reminds us. Langston analyzes the conflict around praxis between Adorno and his students, a conflict that has cast a long shadow on social theory since 1968. In contrast to actionists’ call for direct revolutionary praxis, Adorno asserted that the only feasible praxis was theory itself. Praxis arose from labor, Adorno contended, and labor, in contrast to theory, could not escape the political economy of capital. It is theory that must rise to the challenge of freeing itself from capital’s immanent dynamic. Hans-Jürgen Krahl, his most brilliant student, recognized Adorno’s restriction on social praxis as rooted in the trauma of Fascism as well as bourgeois idealism, both of which constrained him from realizing the renewed significance of productive labor. Under the humbling assaults by his students, Adorno left for Switzerland in the summer of 1969, succumbing to a heart attack two weeks later. Krahl’s vision, too, was short-lived. Doctrinaire functionaries within the crumbling Socialist German Student Union were already busy locating rigid class antagonisms advocated by Mao and Lenin as the only practical framework for organizing social change.

Actionism lives on, according to Langston, in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire trilogy (Empire, 2000; Multitude, 2004; and Commonwealth, 2009); indeed, there seems to be a renewal of 1968’s concern for the vagaries of labor, its humanist imperatives, and its dogma of the unity of theory and praxis. Thus, it is not in Hardt and Negri’s trilogy but in the often-overlooked work Geschichte und Eigensinn (History and Obstinacy, originally published in 1969) of German thinkers Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge that Langston identifies the promise of overcoming the tension between theory and labor. For Negt and Kluge, while the industrial proletariat no longer exists, proletarian qualities linger as remainders that capital fails to assimilate. Negt and Kluge locate them in biological self-regulation, whereby cells, tissues, bones, and muscle from below . . . refuse on account of their own laws and limits the dictates of capital from above. Revolution must derive from within the proletarian qualities and self-regulation, from living feeling rooted in pain, not from Habermasian communicative reason. Theory can, at best, seek only to provide orientation for praxis to unfold itself. It can identify the means with which workers shield the ego from the pain of an alienated reality. One such means is fantasy, an inverted critique of alienation and a by-product of proletarian feelings. But capitalist forms tend to domesticate fantasy through a variety of media—television, film, and the culture industry, in general—robbing it of the time and space necessary for its fruition. The aesthetics of montage is neither theory nor praxis; it is for Kluge only a condition of possibility for the organization of protest.

Few books can claim a closer connection to the streets of Paris than Henri Lefebvre’s Right to the City (Droit à la ville, 1968). Judit Bodnar’s essay speaks to the book’s complex legacy, including its rampant success as well as its misappropriations since 1968. In reclaiming the streets for radical politics, Bodnar writes, people acted as if they had all read Lefebvre and were staging his work in the streets of Paris. While Lefebvre had an ambivalent relationship to the May events, Right to the City has remained a lasting inspiration for urban theory as well as social justice movements ever since. The book not only made inroads into academic discussions, it also informed social movements of diverse political hues and large bureaucratic organizations of which Lefebvre was quite critical. Drawing enduring connections between Right to the City and contemporary urban practices, Bodnar traces its effects on the United Nations, including UNESCO’s Right to the City series of high-profile conferences. She locates them in the 1988 creation of the French Ministry of the City and the 1991 Urban Development Act, also known as the antighetto law. Undergoing a globalization of sorts, Right to the City begins to inform such documents as the European Charter for Women in the City, the European Charter for the Safeguarding of Human Rights in the City, Target 11 of the Millennium Development Goals of the UN, and the NGO-initiated World Charter on the Right to the City, promoting "equal access to the potential benefits of the city for all urban dwellers, democratic participation of all inhabitants in decision-making processes and realization of [their] fundamental rights and liberties."

In its very success as an all-encompassing slogan, however, the right to the city comes to represent an official urbanism with a concomitant evacuation of politics from the urban. Decontextualized, Bodnar argues, it gets incorporated into a politically liberal rights-based discourse that is invoked and deployed in framing demands for integration and participation. For participatory democracy, however, the structure of participation itself remains beyond the democratic reach; its basic rules and liberal assumptions are not open to deliberation; its embedded priorities remain the presumed horizon of participation. In the widespread appropriation of the term, Bodnar reminds us, it is often forgotten how radical the right to the city was in the Lefebvrian formulation, a formulation that was more than the simple right to urban services. Lefebvre in fact warned us of the obsessional themes of integration and participation, of an elaborate pretense at information and social activity after which one could return to easy passivity and retirement. In its liberal transformation, one forgets the pleasure and playfulness of participation that was central to Lefebvre’s urban imagination, a transformation that leaves us with depoliticized, sanitized, and routinized claims to participation in urban life. So, what’s left of the right to the city? We are left with an idea, Bodnar answers, that suits the liberal discourses of urban justice and participation: an idea whittled and truncated, a far cry from Lefebvre’s call to rehabilitate the dream, if not utopia, and put to the forefront its poetry, the renewed idea of creative praxis.

Part 2 of the volume begins with a broad overview of the long 1968 as a moment in international politics. In a wide-ranging but ultimately tightly focused review of, as he calls it, the rise and fall of the international counterculture between 1960 and 1975, Jeremi Suri argues that where traditionally this movement has been treated separately from the political history of the Cold War, the two were, in fact, deeply intertwined. A dissatisfaction in both East and West with the dominant culture of the Cold War around 1960 among those, ironically, who were benefiting from higher standards of living and greater educational opportunities led to a movement for rapid personal reform within existing social and political structures. Countercultural movements were not revolutionary; rather, they were an expression of the empowered questioning their own power. Part of this urge was a direct result of policies implemented by Cold War leaders in East and West designed to energize and strengthen their own side in the standoff. While Suri sees the phenomenon at work in the Soviet Union following Nikita Khrushchev’s reforms of the late 1950s, he focuses on Western societies, where in the course of the 1960s younger generations launched a rebellion against the wise men from the World War II generation, inspired also by Third World revolutionaries—even China’s Cultural Revolution—and with Herbert Marcuse as a prophet.

The counterculture’s influence, Suri writes, was so pervasive because of its powerful presence within mainstream society. Identification with revolutionary examples was one reason why gradually the level of violence went up, also giving birth to paramilitary groups dedicated to violent revolution such as the Weather Underground and the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction). Reaction from governments included repression but also a conscious decision to deny protesters a voice in (foreign) policy and the rise of law-and-order politics (and politicians). The latter impulse was shared by a new and different kind of culture war waged by the early 1970s by Christian fundamentalists. In the Cold War, leaders in East and West embraced détente—an application of law and order to international politics. They did so for strategic reasons but also in order to insulate policy from domestic interference. Yet, Suri argues, much had changed by the mid-1970s. Cold War ideas, resources, and institutions made the counterculture. The counterculture, in turn, unmade these ideas, resources, and institutions.

James Ferguson’s essay offers a different kind of sweep. When Adorno called actionism regressive, he was also voicing a posthumanist trajectory in theory that was already apparent in Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967), Althusser and Balibar’s Reading Capital (1968), Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968), and Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966), among many others. As Gendron’s essay shows, 1960s Marxist humanism was already under assault before the decade was over. Ferguson offers a fascinating examination of 1968’s humanism, but he does so by taking us to none of the familiar sites; rather, he takes us to unlikely places in Africa to witness an African 1968. Ferguson connects this African 1968 with the better-known Parisian one in order to interrogate the humanism that animated both. Humanism was as crucial to ideas of praxis and revolutionary subject among Adorno’s students as it was to Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism; it was inherent in the idea of the socialism with a human face that was part of the celebrated Prague Spring. But Western humanism was not as harmless as it professed. For Derrida, the Western insistence on understanding difference as a relation of presence to absence enabled the white mythologies of colonialism; it contrasted, Ferguson points out, an imagined full, light humanity with a vacant, inferior, dark one, understood as the absence of light, a heart of darkness awaiting Western salvation and enlightenment. The violence of bringing humanity to those who supposedly lacked it could be witnessed from state socialist projects to create a new man, Ferguson writes, to colonial humanitarians stealing children from their parents so they could receive the light of a proper education. Humanist enlightenment heavily depended, in Foucault’s depiction, on the vast disciplinary infrastructure of prisons, mental hospitals, factories, and labor camps. Thus, a taken-for-granted set of metaphysical assumptions, in fact, enabled certain sorts of violence and, indeed, inhumanity.

Yet African humanism, Ferguson argues, is based not on the presence/absence divide but a different epistemological divide of the visible and the invisible. What is not visible is not absent, it is only invisible. Thus, one needs to pay attention to the occult and the secret, to spirits and shades, Ferguson writes, because there is always more going on than meets the eye. The visible world always has another side, a hidden side, according to the principle of what Mbembe has called simultaneous multiplicities. One cannot understand African 1968s with the borrowed metaphysics of Western humanism. To understand certain kinds of violence and inhumanity specific to African humanism, one must take into account basic differences in cultural metaphysics. In colonial encounters, for instance, while Europeans were busy telling themselves that Africans were really children, Africans were nurturing their own suspicions that Europeans were secretly blood-sucking vampires. Both beliefs were misguided, Ferguson notes, but in ways that reveal different metaphysical cultural assumptions that inspired them, assumptions that are crucial to understanding the disappointments of 1968’s largely disagreeable aftermath in places like Zambia and the Congo.

One of the major themes of 1968 historiography is that protests and uprisings occurred in many places besides Paris, Prague, and Berkeley and that the connections between activists worldwide were numerous and significant. It is still relatively rare, however, to come across work that seeks to write the story of ’68 into the history of Northern Ireland and the story of Northern Ireland into the history of ’68. Simon Prince does exactly that with an analysis centering on the October 5, 1968, Derry march and its aftermath. Prince demonstrates how the march’s organizers—the so-called Derry radicals, led by Eamonn McCann—maintained personal ties to activists abroad and how their protest strategy drew directly on approaches pioneered elsewhere during the long 1968. A central theme in Northern Ireland’s 1968 was the strategy of nonviolent direct action, most prominently employed by the U.S. civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. With the ultimate aim to use the social and economic squalor that affected both the Protestant and Catholic communities to promote a broad, anticapitalist revolt, the Derry radicals understood that in order to stage a protest that would provoke the authorities into a violent overreaction, it would be impossible to steer clear entirely from sectarian differences in the city. They succeeded on October 5, 1968, when the civil rights march coorganized with the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association ended in violence that was blamed on the police. In subsequent days, the violence escalated, leading the Northern Ireland government, pressured by London, to offer a series of limited social and economic reforms. The activists weren’t the only ones consciously emulating activists abroad. Prime Minister Terence O’Neill, too, made a public appeal for calm that he deliberately modeled on Charles de Gaulle’s address to the French earlier that year. The prime minister may have been more successful than the activists in this. Prince argues that the Derry radicals were rather careless in their application of the lessons of Birmingham, Selma, and Paris: In a mockery of the traditional timeline, moments from across the sixties were restaged in Northern Ireland in ways that disregarded the original script. Sectarianism began to take over. Early in 1969 things got further out of hand in the streets; unlike in the United States in 1963, there was no one in Derry who could persuade the crowd not to seek first-class citizenship through second-class methods. Yet, the legacy of Northern Ireland’s 1968 is ambiguous, containing violence but also progress on civil rights. It is difficult to assess which has been of more significance.

In few countries, if any, did 1968 have the kind of lasting impact it had in Mexico. Outside of the People’s Republic of China, the Plaza de Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City on October 2 was probably also the bloodiest denouement of student-led protests that year, dividing twentieth-century Mexican history into pre- and post-1968 eras. As Jacqueline E. Bixler writes, it was Mexico’s Tiananmen Square, Mexico’s Kent State, the point at which Mexico entered an extended political crisis. Bixler argues that government suppression of a full accounting of the true extent of and culpability for the mass killings that day put the politics of memory at the center of Mexican society, with intellectuals and artists working to counter the politics of amnesia through the creation of a repertoire of collective memories. These artists and intellectuals, and their efforts in the forty years following the massacre to get at the truth, are the central focus of her essay. In the run-up to the Olympic Games, during the summer of 1968, student-led protests challenged the government’s shining image of a developing, democratic, and peaceful Mexico. Graphic artists played an important role, manipulating official Olympic propaganda images to highlight political and social abuses in Mexican society. Immediately after October 2—when hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed and wounded and several thousand arrested—writers such as poet Octavio Paz and journalist Elena Poniatowska either protested or began to document what had really happened, in direct opposition to the government line that only twenty were killed and thirty-six wounded. Playwrights and filmmakers were not far behind, although all had to cope with government censorship, which only eased gradually in the following decades. Bixler also highlights the Plaza de Tlatelolco as a lieu de mémoire, a place where contests of memory had been located for centuries prior to 1968. In 1993 a monument honoring the dead of 1968 (acknowledging the incomplete record of the 1968 massacre) was erected in the square, followed in 2001 by an official investigation that, while leading to charges, failed to produce any convictions. Truth and justice, therefore, continue to elude the victims, and this has remained a weakness of Mexico’s growing democracy. In the meantime, however, the repertoire of factual and fictional memories has engraved 1968 permanently on Mexico’s collective consciousness. As such, in author Jorge Volpi’s words quoted by Bixler, it constitutes an authentic victory over manipulation and oblivion.

The essays in part 3 show the salience of the long 1968 when considering connections between bodies, rights, politics, and violence. In White Power, Black Power, and the 1968 Olympic Protests, Martin A. Berger focuses on the iconic photograph of sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who raised their arms in tight-fisted salutes during their medal ceremony. The quiet protest was vociferous enough for the U.S. Committee to expel Smith and Carlos from the team and from the Olympic Village. In the following days, the photograph generated enormous controversy, and Berger charts the reception of the image through its extensive coverage in the press. According to Berger’s research, the white press rejected the protest for three reasons: it inserted politics into the supposed apolitical arena of the Olympics; it diminished the possible progress of race relations; and it was an embarrassment to both the United States and Mexico, the host country. White mainstream newspapers leveled damaging critiques of the gesture as juvenile and discourteous and found it to be on a par with radical protest by white supremacists and the Black Panthers. Black newspapers, including the Chicago Defender, placed the Smith and Carlos action within a broader context of politics and the Olympics, citing mass student protests in Mexico City and the participation of a segregated team from South Africa.

After an examination of media reception, Berger brings the reader’s attention back to the iconography of the protest itself, which is not completely visible in the press image. Smith’s and Carlos’s gloved fists raised in the Black Power salute are prominent, but their shoeless feet to signify their poverty are mostly hidden behind two white officials who stand in the image’s foreground. In case these gestures were lost on the photograph’s audience, Smith decoded the protest’s symbols in a television interview with sports broadcaster Howard Cosell. But Berger delves even more deeply into the image’s iconography to find its source of tension, and he points readers to the large letters USA on the sprinters’ uniforms, a prominently visible element in the photograph that is rarely analyzed. It is the juxtaposition of the raised fists with the letters marking nationality (and the unpictured U.S. flags) that creates the most compelling and potentially controversial meaning here. Smith and Carlos assert that the dual identities of American and black are mutually sustainable, not mutually exclusive. Berger argues that the combination of black and American disrupted whites’ notions of the United States and its symbols as patriotic territory restricted to the racial majority. Berger corroborates his reading with the comments of track and field Olympians Ed Caruthers and Vincent Mathews, who insisted that the protest was a sign of black power at the same time that it was not an affront to the flag. Or as Smith explained three decades later, They say we demeaned the flag. Hey, no way man. That’s my flag. Smith’s claim to citizenship fell on mostly deaf white ears. As Robert O. Self writes in his essay, Bodies Count: The Sixties Body in American Politics, Most whites were not prepared to accept Black Power on any terms. Under any other circumstances Olympic medalists are national heroes, but in the case of the photograph of Smith and Carlos, Self’s claim is confirmed.

Whereas Berger centers his discussion on a single image and act of protest, Self takes a broad perspective, examining the growing significance of the corporeal body as a site of protest and conflict as battles raged abroad in Vietnam and at home in civil rights arenas defined by race, gender, and sexuality. Self argues that the 1960s and early 1970s . . . marked a distinct moment when human bodies organized a set of ideological breaks with Cold War liberalism. The media (particularly television, magazines, and newspapers) deployed a visual rhetoric of bodies, and social movements in turn capitalized on the body by making the physical self a key marker of rights abuses and demands.

Nonviolent civil rights demonstrations in the South depended upon violence but equally on the media. Well-trained protesters who absorbed physical brutality without its replication offered up their bodies as the stage on which acts of white supremacy were brutally performed, recorded, and then televised to audiences. These suffering, peaceful, dignified bodies made it more difficult to justify the racist hierarchy of the Jim Crow South as custom or tradition and made the violence crucial to its maintenance a staple of picture magazines and news reports. With the rejection of nonviolence and embrace of black power in the late 1960s, Self argues that the media again played a crucial role in the articulation of an unrestrained masculine black body. As members of the Black Power movement armed themselves and embraced a militarized look, U.S. soldiers continued to wage war in Vietnam. The body took on particular valence in this context as the U.S. military’s success in the war was expressed in terms of kill ratios and body counts. Although the massacre at My Lai occurred in the spring of 1968, the revelation of U.S. atrocities did not surface in the press until the fall of 1969. Photographs of slain innocent bodies reproduced in Life magazine forced Americans to confront a national moral vacuity and question a tenuous political position.

With the feminist body, Self argues that politics was explicitly about bodies, particularly control of one’s body as a fundamental individual right. That control was central to debates about abortion rights, birth control, and rape that brought up issues of self-control and external control. Linked to eugenics and white supremacy, forced sterilization had been performed in large numbers on women of color particularly in the South, and the pill was seen as an extension of the desire to limit black births. Black feminists negotiated between their own desire for reproductive rights along with black male demand to birth more revolutionaries and white feminists who failed to notice the links between reproduction and racism.

The reclamation of sexual desire that was important to 1960s feminism was also crucial to the gay liberation movement, which is often traced to the 1969 Stonewall riots but has older roots. Gay protest that had been marked by decorous straightened bodies was transformed by the unleashed queer body. Still, using the body to perform homosexuality did not always question dominant gender roles. Some saw lesbian adherence to butch/femme culture as reproducing traditional gender roles and notions of power. Lesbian feminists revealed the relationship between sexism and homophobia, breaking open the structure of patriarchy at its root. As Self concludes, Sixties social movements forced bodies back into politics and made the violence done to them visible, indeed inescapable.

In her essay on the celebrated performance piece 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, Michelle Kuo reminds us that the conditions of control, autonomy, and cooperation at issue in the long 1968 had preoccupied artists of all stripes for some time. The eponymous nine evenings took place in the Sixty-Ninth Regiment Armory in New York in October 1966 and represented an attempt by visual, sound, and performance artists to harness two forms of technology: the latest devices in automated and remote electronic information transmission and the collaborative research practices that had produced those devices. Although it brought together such well-known avant-garde figures as Robert Rauschenberg, Yvonne Rainer, and John Cage, the event’s majordomo was an engineer at Bell Labs, Billy Klüver. Intended as an experiment both in new forms of collaboration and in the use of advanced technology for creative expression, 9 Evenings proved difficult for those involved, as it challenged artists’ understandings of collaboration as creative process and shone a harsh new light on some of the long-standing devices of the twentieth-century avant-garde, such as the use of chance, abstraction, and audience participation, making clear that they had become part of the society of the spectacle they were originally trying to critique. It was precisely because 9 Evenings defied expectations that had become standard in avant-garde milieux that the event prompted a largely hostile response from critics. Later scholars have dismissed it as a moment when prevailing tropes of avant-garde art and performance exhausted themselves and yielded to commodified corporate structures. Yet such a reading, Kuo argues, fails to take into account the way 9 Evenings and the fraught process of its production opened the way for new forms of collaboration and a new aesthetic of the unintended. Both, she shows, grew out of—and, in a sense, outgrew—the systematic operations of global corporate research. The aleatory, she writes, was experienced as both phenomenological and virtual, always in contest with unstable modes of transmission and control. In this as in many other ways, 9 Evenings was a harbinger and a prototypical moment of the long 1968.

Noit Banai’s essay, Sensorial Techniques of the Self, also examines one of the central tropes of twentieth-century avant-garde practice, spontaneity, in its complex interweave with the political conditions of the long 1968. Like Kuo, Banai probes the contradictions of an engaged aesthetic practice that at once recognizes its embeddedness in larger sociopolitical structures and maintains some distance from them. But Banai’s essay actually begins in the streets of Paris—or, strictly speaking, in the halls of the university campus in Nanterre—in May 1968 while recognizing that the conditions of possibility for what transpired there grew out of a decade’s worth of experimentation that reconfigured notions of the object and the subject. The first part of the essay focuses on the figure of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the leaders of the student revolt in May 1968, and particularly on what became an iconic image of the protests, a photograph showing an insouciant Dany le Rouge confronting a stolid policeman. Cohn-Bendit’s smirk epitomizes, as he himself acknowledged in retrospective interviews, the idea of jouissance, a combination of desire and playfulness that both fueled his activism and served as its ultimate objective, a way of maintaining the students’ independence and avoid co-optation by alternate forms of authority or bureaucracy, such as the French Communist Party (PCF). The price for this carefully considered political stance was vilification from both the establishment Left and the Right, which quickly came to focus on Cohn-Bendit’s status as a foreign (though born in France, he held German citizenship and was Jewish to boot) body in the French polity. In response, students working at the Atelier Populaire des Beaux-Arts used the canonical Gilles Caron photograph of Cohn-Bendit as the basis for a poster inviting a participatory as well as a spectatorial identification with the nous (we/us) it proclaimed: The public is meant to assume a double subjectivity and identify with the protests’ call for a new collective at that very moment and at every moment to come.

Two aspects of the Atelier’s poster served as crucial precedents for the future: the centrality of visual representation to thinking about alternative modes of politics and the way spontaneity led to a recognition of perpetual deferral as a condition of such alternatives. Together, Banai argues, these two elements enabled students and artists to push at the limits of what Foucault would, a decade later, theorize as biopower. In the second part of her essay, she explores a more recent manifestation of this conjuncture in the work of the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, specifically, his 2003–2004 installation The Weather Project at the Tate Modern in London. Occupying the museum’s Turbine Hall for five months, the project attracted over two million visitors to its transparently mechanical simulations of sun, mist, and fog. Working within the parameters of what the critic Nicolas Bourriaud has called relational aesthetics, in which social interaction becomes the substance of rather than something separate from the artwork, Eliasson disclaimed any particular political purpose. The artist’s ongoing collaboration with museums necessarily subjects his goals to institutional constraints, and Banai acknowledges that The Weather Project’s considerable potential for arousing spontaneous political engagement was only minimally realized—in a lone anti-Bush inscription devised out of visitors’ bodies and in one critic’s discernment in it of a larger message about global warming. But, Banai argues, Eliasson’s notion of looped participation, with its own mechanism for evaluating one’s own involvement, has much in common with the politicized aesthetics of 1968 in that it both gains its critical potential by unfurling within a temporal delay and opens out to a new, agonistic collective subject. Over and above their different methods and objectives, the student-artists of 1968 and the participant-subjects of our own era share a structural link to biopower that bears further reflection. For inasmuch as biopower, in Foucault’s usage, signifies both an increased government investment in the totality of human life and the production of new forms of subjectivity, it offers both a situational framework and a possibility of response.

The last section of the volume looks at the cinematic 1968. Of the many media that have refracted our understanding of the long 1968, film has claimed a privileged position, in part because, as Julian Bourg observes, cameras were rolling in May 1968, and many people first experienced the events of those years via television. Bourg’s essay offers a concise history of the multiple and shifting cinematic accounts of 1968 in France, one of its epicenters, from alternative newsreels by New Wave directors to early documentaries and the more distanced and personalized (but far fewer) features of the 1980s and early 1990s. But Bourg’s focus falls squarely on the first decade of the twenty-first century, as the approach of the fortieth anniversary produced a glut of new films that say much about the retrospective search for meaning in 1968 and its aftermath. The films selected for detailed study, Philippe Garrel’s Les amants réguliers (Regular Lovers, 2005) and Christian Rouaud’s Lip, l’imagination au pouvoir (Lip: Imagination in Power, 2007), exemplify two main trends in recent French cinematic treatments of the long 1968. Garrel traces a long (nearly three hours) arc of doomed romance, frustrated art making, and personal disillusionment around 1968; the film frames the political excitement of May as an interval that does not fundamentally change the lives of its ardent but ultimately ineffectual protagonists. Lip, on the other hand, though it deals with a famous 1973 strike and short-lived experiment in worker self-management (autogestion, one of the key words of 1968 in France) in eastern France, refuses to ratify the prevailing narrative of failure that surrounds the social experiments of the long 1968. Using recent interviews with the protagonists as well as contemporary footage to construct a web of interlocking oppositions, Rouaud presents, in cinematic form, a dialectics of 1968 that suggests, in the lingering words of its close, that it can still be useful.

The two films in Bourg’s essay trace a continuing divide in perceptions of 1968 as having vastly different impacts in the social and cultural spheres. Regular Lovers is, Bourg shows, more diagnostic of the complex and lasting effects of memory on accounts of 1968 than of the actual cultural impact of the years, which Garrel minimizes. In contrast, Rouaud, using a surprisingly comic structure to suggest that the social experimentation of the post-1968 years cannot be understood in simple terms of success or failure, proposes a more constructive role for memory-images in a contemporary era of political reaction. But over and above their many differences, Regular Lovers and Lip both manifest, in Bourg’s trenchant analysis, a tempering of nostalgia for 1968—in the multiple senses of cooling, hardening, and even restaged anger—that may—in the absence of any equivalent landmark moment in France in the ensuing period—mark the beginning of a more reflective historical approach to those years.

Without having planned to do so, his work having its own distinct genesis, Mark Tribe presents a project that engages our concerns in a very direct way. As he recounts it, around 2005 he was struck by the relative absence of antiwar activism among college students. Why was there so little protest, even though circumstances in many ways resembled those of the mid-1960s? It was not difficult to see differences, how the post—Cold War / post-9/11 era was not one for leftist radical political agendas, but Tribe nonetheless decided to try to bring elements of the legacy of the 1960s’ protest politics into the present. The founding in 2006 of a new Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) led him to create The Port Huron Project (referencing the founding document of the original SDS) to engage the legacy of the New Left by reanimating largely forgotten protest speeches. At the original venues, actors would reenact speeches by 1960s icons such as Coretta Scott King, Cesar Chavez, and Stokely Carmichael (images of several of these reenactments accompany Tribe’s presentation in this volume). The aim was to create situations in which the New Left’s specific political positions, as well as its spirit of political urgency and utopian possibility, might be grasped intellectually, through rhetoric, and aesthetically, through embodied experience. The reenactments raised more questions than answers about the legacy of the earlier era, but, Tribe writes, his experiences in documenting The Port Huron Project and then sharing the results on public media sites through public screenings (including New York City’s Times Square) and at exhibitions did highlight the changed role of media in protest politics. Activists can no longer get the attention of the mainstream media as they did in the 1960s. New media, however, are emerging as both new vehicles and new venues for protest politics. In the words of art critic Christopher Knight, cited by Tribe: It’s the scripted, taped and electronically distributed nature of these performances that is distinctive. . . . The Port Huron Project is a kind of digital samizdat. . . . The possibility for closing the contemporary gap between activism and the individual is underway in the netroots.

If Tribe’s project suggests the continued pertinence—or, to use a term of the times, relevance—of the long 1968 to scholars, activists, and artists today, it underlines an underlying theme of the book as a whole. The unpredictability of reenactment, the impossibility of separating media from content fit into a larger pattern in which the long 1968 blurred the lines between theory and practice, art and technology, politics and culture. In many instances those lines have reappeared, but in new configurations and tracings that correspond only partially to those obtaining before the upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s. Whether through conscious acts of memory, like the literary accounts of Tlatelolco and films recalling and restaging 1968 and its aftermath, through appropriative and performative tributes, like the art of Eliasson and The Port Huron Project, or through political and theoretical invocations of ideas such as the right to the city, the long 1968 continues to shape our lives.

As this book was in the final stages of preparation, in the fall of 2011, the spread of the Occupy movement, itself the echo of earlier protest movements in North Africa, the Arab world, Europe, Israel, Chile, and the American Midwest, notably Wisconsin, led some observers to draw parallels with 1968.² Certainly, some of the characteristics of the Occupy actions, including the strong influence of anarchism, the linkage between broad anticapitalism and specific student demands, notably on several campuses of the University of California, and the endorsement coupled with nervousness of a broad spectrum of leftist intellectuals, seemed reminiscent of 1968.³ At least one ghost of 1968, the Olympic athlete John Carlos, was invited to address the Wall Street encampment. Even the pervasive use of new media to coordinate protests all over the world, though technologically unimaginable forty years before, partakes of a similar spirit, in which spontaneity is valued more highly than organization and in which the mainstream media cannot be trusted. The differing outcomes—regime change in Libya and Tunisia, a more ambiguous situation in Egypt, civil war in Syria, and variable political shifts in Europe—also suggest the pertinence of a flexible chronology, whether we are living the end of a long twentieth century, the beginning of a short twenty-first, a transition between them, or all three. The protest movements of 2011 will soon enough find their own theorists, critics, analysts, and historians. Whatever the connections—via historical knowledge, creative inspiration, or common readings—that might one day be established between the long 1968 and our own time, the essays in this book, separately and together, offer a critical framework for thinking about the one in terms of the other.

NOTES

1. Michel Foucault, Between ‘Words’ and ‘Things’ during May ’68, in Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trambodori, trans. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito (New York: Semiotext[e], 1991), 136–37. Originally published in Italy by 10/17 cooperativa editrice, 1981.

2. See, for example, Occupy Wall Street VI: Déjà Vu 1968? October 20, 2011, Politics and Letters (blog), http://politicsandletters.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/occupy-wall-street-vi-deja-vu-1968/. Although the blog entry is unsigned, it is easy to establish the authorship of James Livingston, a historian at Rutgers, through links provided on the blog. In a different register, see Alyosha Goldstein, From the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign to Occupy Wall Street, Counterpunch, October 21–23, 2011, http://www.counter-punch.org/2011/10/21/from-the-1968-poor-people%E2%80%99s-campaign-to-occupy-wall-street/.

3. For early reporting on Occupy Wall Street that emphasizes some of these trends, see Michael Greenberg, In Zuccotti Park, New York Review of Books, November 10, 2011, 12–14; and Zuccotti Park: What Future? New York Review of Books, December 8, 2011, 12–14; Mattathias Schwartz, Pre-Occupied: The Origins and Future of Occupy Wall Street, New Yorker, November 28, 2011, 28–36; and Nathan Schneider, Thank You, Anarchists, Nation, December 19, 2011, http://www.thenation.com/article/165240/thank-you-anarchists.

PART 1

1968, THE TEXT

CHAPTER ONE

Foucault’s 1968

BERNARD GENDRON

Michel Foucault’s career as a public intellectual, his stances in words and deeds, in theory and practice, were deeply informed by the events of May 1968 and the political struggles that followed upon it. It is difficult to single out any cultural theorist or political philosopher of importance for whom May 1968 had such a decidedly dramatic impact or who was more engaged with its meaning and import. Yet, there has been scant scholarly attention to this relationship, perhaps because it is thought to be of little interest beyond the biographical or because it is surmised that he was not particularly sympathetic to the uprisings of May 1968, given his often-expressed skepticism concerning the emancipatory promise of mass revolutionary movements.¹ Absent from Paris in May 1968, he had no memories to share of the barricades nor any badge to wear.

Against these doubts, I argue that Foucault’s relation to May 1968 was extensive and intimate as well as crucial for understanding his theory and practice in the 1970s. Most obviously, in the wake of 1968, Foucault became a militant political activist, whereas earlier his posture toward politics was one of ironic detachment. Less appreciated is the shock and disruption that the events of 1968 administered to his theoretical work and methodologies. It is well known that, roughly between 1969 and 1975, Foucault’s thinking underwent a major transformation, usually described as the transition from archaeology to genealogy, that eventuated in the publication of Discipline and Punish in 1975. According to most commentators, this resulted from Foucault’s discovery of basic