Martin Wooster: May ’68 as the impossible space of contradiction
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May ’68 swept down on France like an avalanche, and no sooner had it appeared then it disappeared, mysteriously, practically without a trace. It seemed to implode in on itself like a black hole swallowing everything into it. Where had all the energy gone? For Jean Baudrillard May ’68 was the first event that corresponded to this inertial point of the political scene. For this reason it marks a point of interruption. Continuity, as embodied in that old faith in history and the forces of production, disappears. But leaving exactly what? Doubtless it is this question that makes May ’68 still relevant and fascinating today. Certainly it is difficult to agree on any definition as to what exactly took place forty years ago. Neither revolt, reform or revolution but borrowing from all three, its novelty might be said to come from the fact that each one of the three neutralized the others and nothing really came of it. That month of May was emotional, for just how emotional one need look no further than the slogans which poured out of artists workshops in tandem with the giddy unfolding of events, displaying emotions that were as equally immediate as they felt urgent. Slogans like, ‘Be realistic, demand the impossible’, ‘They are buying your happiness – steal it back’, ‘Forests come before men – the desert comes afterwards’ might have an air of familiarity today but then they shook the very foundations upon which our public institutions stood. But what exactly was being demanded? Where has all the enthusiasm for real political change gone? Are we to agree with Baudrillard that May ’68 is an event both impossible to rationalize or exploit, and from which nothing can be concluded. It remains indecipherable. It was the forerunner of nothing.
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As we reflect on these questions today, it would seem for many on the political left that much of the enthusiasm for real political change had suffered a considerable blow. Marxism as practiced by countless historians and sociologists, particularly by those with a belief and faith in historical progress usually embodied in discourses of resistance and renaissance (always bound up with the demand for revolution), have continually had recourse to look back with no little resentment at the cruel twist of events dashing their hopes. Backed into reinterpreting May ’68 as only a movement of youth eager for sexual liberation and new ways of living (I’m all for the revolution if it means I can take that pretty girl home tonight), they have since concluded that both the young and the desire for liberty, by their very definition, neither know what they want or what they are doing. For this very reason May ’68 becomes a tragic event that ended up bringing about the contrary of what they were proclaiming but also the truth of what they sought, the unlimited reign of the market and the destruction of all the old values; familial, educational, communal, etc. that stood in its way. Tradition gives way to a deadening conformism. The vices of the capitalist system, drawn out so beautifully then, and as fresh in insight today, by Guy Debord in his book ‘Society of the Spectacle’, a system that operates like a runaway train in its insatiable appetite to devour commodities, human rights and televisual spectacles, joins hands with the very same vices existing equally in the individuals whose life it governs. By proclaiming that the individual subjected to this system of domination and the one that denounces it are amalgamated, Marxism, wounded, is eclipsed by other lines of thought and forced to undergo a major revision. After Mao’s death, the year 1977 marks a new turning point, signalled in France by the electoral gains made by the Union de la Gauche, and in the intellectual realm by the appearance of the ‘nouvelle philosophie’* In Britain and in the United States, Thatcher and Reagan prepare to take power. The Liberal reaction is proclaimed. The ‘obscure disaster’ befalling politics is underway.
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The sense we have of ourselves and the world we inhabit gains assurance through various separating mechanisms creating different equivalences (commercial, technological, democratic) which in turn are brought into some kind of meaningful order by being subordinated to notions of absolute value (humanity, dignity, community), and which ever since the Enlightenment have been allied to the progression of history and its culmination with knowledge, justice and nature (representing destiny). The more dynamic elements which Foucault understood as so many power relations, which by their very nature are transitive, unstable, faint, almost unseen and unknown, become joined, formed and given meaning through the various forms of knowledge that are far more stable in nature. This operating mechanism is carried out through integrating factors or agents of stratification and make up our institutions: State, Family, Religion, Production, Marketplace, and even Art itself. Allied to this is perhaps the real glue of solidification. Operating in a similar fashion, thought, whose nature is both experimental and molecular and produced through the temporal differences that make up the world and its interaction with language, becomes consolidated around transcendent ‘molar’ poles, the sovereign or the law with the State, father with the Family, God with Religion, sex with Sexuality. This has the effect of restricting thought to a mere supervision of those forms of mental behaviour (recognition, classification, consumption), merely identifying and consolidating a picture of ourselves that becomes more and more divorced from the reality of the world. An alienation from the world reduced to consumption, a world consumed in advance. If Marx outlined the extent of our alienation from our potential drawn from his notion of the ‘general intellect’, we now also need to recognize that when everything ends in visibility, a kind of unilateral reality principle in which the dialectic could be seen to fulfill itself (everywhere the negative must be transformed into the positive), we will have reached that most degraded form of existence, an existence endlessly circling in on itself and making of itself a dead weight. It could be that it is no longer one’s alienation one is fighting against but rather one’s transparency.
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For Jacques Ranciere this all adds up to producing what he calls the factory of the sensible, the forming of a shared sensible world with the desire to provide a common habitat for all. His thinking is a constant reminder of the consequences of just how extreme the factory can be in this desire if allowed to go uninterrupted. A desire fuelled by a politics entirely subsumed by the economy and the unlimited power of wealth, a population increasingly seen in terms of its mass, as a totality without fracture and needing to be managed in the way inert matter needs to be moulded, a cry of absolute freedom in which all form is absolved, creating a terrifying autonomy, the sense of our world appears as no longer opposed or justified by anything and instead produces a vacancy at its heart. Is this the dream of an artificial procreation in the service of a desexualized humanity? A world dehumanised, depersonalised, a world mechanically ordered, a uniform world as if ruled by some sort of crazed machine (a desire that causes everything to be projected and controlled by intelligence alone) whereby the ‘sense’ we give to and demand of the world becomes utterly senseless. As Captain Ahab said, ‘All my means are sane; my motives and object are mad.’ However within each actual historical moment there remains something in excess of what can be thought, an objective reality is never complete. There is always an affective indeterminate space with a strong sense of flux or oscillation between the objective as ‘no longer’ and ‘not yet’, and interruptions are usually to be found in the troubling aspect of this excess, in many instances being far from benevolent. Because this excess is indeterminate, always composed of a certain vagueness or uncertainty, having no sense as present but always still to be made, it is often blocked by that pathological rage for order and fundamentalism. Moreover, as Terry Eagleton points out in his book ‘Holy Terror’, the problem with power is not that it is repugnant but that it is excessive, and as such can always get out of hand through its own built-in perversity which delights in domination for its own sake. The same could be said of reason, which at its heart always wants more than the reasonable, for has it not come to know that there is always something about truth that lies beyond every validated or sensible meaning? However this self same excess, that Jacques Lacan called those ‘grains of the real’ and Henri Bergson as the ‘virtual’ (as opposed to the actual state of affairs), being less a quantitative but qualitative surplus and thus existing in another register like oil from water (thought and communication differ in kind not degree), might offer an opportunity for new avenues of thought. To see the unrecognisable less as a limitation, always to be overcome or banished from our everyday language, but rather as a potential to engender unprecedented, unforeseen and unthinkable qualities of being.
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It is perhaps the human being among all the creatures of the world that best embodies this excess; it is our nature to be quite literally in excess of our natures. It is as if nature, which has always practiced the economy of abundance, has in fashioning man found the place where this excess of energy can be stored up. It is this superfluity that makes us peculiar, but it is also why Blaise Pascal was to call us the weakest reed in nature. This can be seen in the fact that man’s performance lacks the sureness and perfection of other animals, who have to learn only one role. The spider has no existential angst when it comes to weaving its web. Instead man, by opening up a make-believe world, allowing a reign of fantasy to exist and be furthered through our rich emotional life coloured by love, hate, fear, anxiety, laughter, tears, has in turn demanded yet other outlets of expression and communication. This brings with it not a duty to consume but rather a readiness and propensity to create. It is this surplus that we call culture, and Nietzsche reminds us that while Dionysus is the god of surplus he is also the patron saint of culture. Yet the problem is always that there never has been a politics of Dionysus, being unbearable to behold, never showing himself as himself, his appearance always already divided, he appears only as wearing different masks. If one such mask shows up in the image of Apollo and the idea of beauty, and if Plato sought an idea of beauty in its reassuring face of eternity, beauty as immortality, it is surely this idea we need most of all to critique. Just like the different masks of Dionysus, cultures exist only in their ability to cultivate one another, clear one another’s ground, irrigate or drain one another, plough one another for what goes around in a circle entirely identical to itself. Likewise communities that are at one with themselves become their own crystalline abyss. What we have in common is always what distinguishes and differentiates us, and as such there can be no outline to determine humanity other than that of the uncompleted figure, always and for all time in the process of being invented. According to Freud we must mourn the evanescence of beauty and thus affirm it in all its fragility. If it takes bravery and strength to grieve, to acknowledge to ourselves that it is not possible to recuperate all the conditions of our own emergence, it must be remembered that it is the death only of a certain kind of fantasy of impossible mastery, a loss of what one never had. It is a necessary grief.
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Fantasy is fully a part of being human, it feeds our imagination, it opens the future poetically through our unconscious and is intrinsically bound to the sensual impulses of our body. It constitutes for each of us something apart, something singular that resists mediation, it can never be made a part of a larger, universal, symbolic medium. Being the part that we can be sure we can never share, forming itself in how each one of us ‘dreams his world’, organises his enjoyment, it is that part which partakes of the eternal. Always in excess, it is the beyond of production itself. But this space as opening, as the potential held in the otherness of the other, that colours our desires, our behaviours, and organizes our enjoyment, is also what is most illusionary, fragile, helpless. A space without any content with which to fashion an idea of contentment, this fantasy space is equally that which keeps us from ever fully knowing what it is we desire. I can never be completely known to myself for there resides an abyss, an absence where all is dark and empty but for the feeling left by the enigmatic trace of others in the depths of my body. A sense of this is given in J M Coetzee’s novel, ‘The Life and Times of Michael K’, ‘Always when he tried to explain himself to himself, there remained a gap, a hole, a darkness before which his understanding baulked, into which it was useless to pour words. His was a story with a hole in it, a wrong story always wrong.’ The meaning we find in the world derives not simply from the common language of science and pragmatic reason but also from fantasy and its understanding of pain, suffering, sadness or melancholy, and its emphatic appreciation of ephemeral beauty. We can equally gain instruction through our fantasies, for it colours our desires, gives them a surface for feeling oneself feel, and to feel the fact that there is no unique and final form for desire to reach its end. The self whose meaning takes place as it gathers itself through an erotic interchange of feeling and felt, fractures the inside-outside dichotomy and forms itself in the manner of a mobius strip, where exterior and interior in-determine each other. Gained is a sensibility of the world (although radically different from the idea of globalization where all parts of the world harden into a unified whole), it is through this idea that the world becomes a proper philosophical concern, as something infinitely gentle but infinitely suffering, a huge encircling stillness yet swift and intransient all at once. A world that opens, in the same way as the present can open out, can overflow into any presence whatsoever, gains a sense of the infinite number of worlds residing in each world. To be human it is necessary to lose a world and to discover that there is more than one world, and that the world isn’t what we think it is. Without that we know nothing of the mortality and immortality we carry.
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Can we accept the limits of acknowledgment, to begin to experience the very limits of knowing? Can we turn our preoccupation with the literal, the factual and the concrete into something other, to engage with other aspects of our being, aspects that might cultivate a greater disposition toward humility and generosity alike? Can we revise our temptation for recognition, for satisfaction which only seems to arrest our desires, blocked by their own insatiable need to consume, and like Michael K open an ethical project in which the logos and the ethos infuse one another, whilst giving no reason for why the world is here and why we are in the world. Of course this would ask that we redefine the concept of the transcendental (the outside space without signification) in relation to language, but it is surely then that we come to understand that the limits of language are not found outside language in the direction of the referent but in the experience of language itself. To venture to that perfectly empty dimension, the pure exteriority of language, the space of literature that Maurice Blanchot spoke of, is the very space we might constitute as thought. It is only where language arrives in its recognisable state through the process whereby the signifier becomes the signified in its act of naming that the world in its capacity to think through language disappears. It is in this way that we can come to understand that when something is reflected, becomes perfectly representable, it can no longer be thought. Where thought ends reflection begins. In Borges’s fable ‘Fauna of Mirrors’ the political implications are cleverly drawn out in the picture of a defeated people who merely reflect the image of their conquerors, but as they come to resemble them less and less they pass through the other side of the mirror and invade the empire. In a similar yet different manner the poet Paul Celan, who acutely understood the need to escape the traps of consciousness in order to change our manner of thinking, and who found art to be integral only when it refuses to play along with communication, ceaselessly set his writing the task of disrupting, shaking and dispersing the ‘said’. He gives this advice,
‘Support yourself by inconsistencies
Two fingers snap in the abyss, in scribble books,
A world rushes up, this depends on you.’
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At moments of interruption, of which May ’68 is without doubt an example, we come to understand afresh that the truth of our future is not given, neither as seed nor as final term. The truth of our future is open, open again to its own truth, becoming instead the structure and substance of an encounter with itself. Revealed is a sense of truth as empty, devoid of meaning, devoid of signification but also devoid of exhaustion, for letting go of its weight it now truly has opened itself to the future. History loses its fullness, its sense of meaning and purpose. Exhausting both its flat representations of progressivisms and the mythological frenzy of fascisms, it opens itself to the sense that sense is again lacking and can begin again. In the opening where other possibilities, requirements and potentialities are offered, freedom seems to open its eyes again, time breaks in on itself and the present is shattered. Reality that had weighed so heavily becomes nothing more than a bad dream we have awoken from, a moment apart, a pure revelation of something in excess of what we took ourselves to be. Maurice Blanchot talked of May ’68 as that brief moment of utter joy, and, where it might be mentioned, the incidence of suicide fell to almost nil. He writes, ‘What ever the detractors of May might say, it was a splendid moment, when anybody could speak to anyone else, anonymously, impersonally, welcomed with no other justification than that of being another person.’ A language stripped bare and belonging to everybody and thus nobody. It was as if the sensible space of meaning and representation had given way to another space, an indeterminate incalculable space, host to a whole syntax of feeling formed through nothing other than its touching (always again for any sense we gain of the world is each time finite and must be given again) the immense co-existence of things and people free from any prescribed place of destiny.
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If May ’68 marks the turning of a page in man’s history and if it can be seen as an event in its own right it is because it contained an act of thought by which life in a sense took on a certain form. That is, it was able to transform its ordinary form whilst simultaneously changing countless lives at that same moment. The proof of this transformation is that we have not forgotten it even though it is still not clear how we unravel this reasoning. If it is clear that May ’68 is a political event, it exists as a question that still confounds any answer and disrupts all the arguments. The question remains open and still as urgent and immediate today. Yet since that time, the meaning of the word ‘political’ has increasingly lost its power to be specific. Found to be lacking in ordinary language, it has taken on the form of a nebulous and totalitarian notion, in a consensually somnambulistic manner. If the political is merely the execution of managerial tasks, endless in their width and breadth then this simple logic allows us to conclude that if everything is political then nothing is. I think it is to this sense that Baudrillard wishes to direct us when he says May’68 is the forerunner of nothing. But it is also the case that precisely by being nothing it affords the greatest possibility for thought to ignite anew.
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According to Ranciere ‘nouvelle philosophie’ is the term given to a group of philosophers elected to interpret day-to-day contemporary phenomena and the formation of public opinion, having been shaken by a movement the comprehension of which exceeded the intellectual tools then available. The group remains firmly in place today, omnipresent in the media, though without any influence on governmental decisions – showered with benefits, it is humiliated in its aims, be they noble or base.