by Nica Cornell
And
the walls pull back, they are transparent and they pull back, they separate,
they fade away, they leave room, and it’s now and now and now (Kaplan
cited in Ross, 2002: 141).
The old End Conscription Campaign
slogan “Waar is die grens nou?” translated as “Where is the border now?” is
pertinent to Kristin Ross’ book May ’68
and its Afterlives. The slogan was used to engage white South Africans on
the question of the presence of troops in the townships. Here however, the same
question points to a more positive reality. As seen in the above quote’s
description of life within the May ’68 movement, the book has a trope of
national, social, spatial and teleological borders being breached as the
movement “swept away categorical territories and social definitions” to form alliances
rendered impossible within the existent framework of the social division of
labour “between very diverse people working together to conduct their affairs
collectively,” (Ross, 2002: 7). This is encapsulated by the main idea of May -
“the union of intellectual contestation with workers’ struggle” (Ross,
2002:11). This remarkable expansion to overcome prescribed social identities
and encounter people located in different categories is a key tenet of what
makes May ’68 distinct. This response will therefore focus on that process of
transcending borders, because it was this character that necessitated such a
forceful and meticulous confiscation of the events of May ’68. The experience of
May’s transcendent equality could not be represented within the available forms
of representation because it could not be felt within the established social
functions. These had to be disregarded for movement to develop. This disregard
for that which was previously thinkable “threatens everything that is inscribed
in our repertories for all the various ways we have to represent the social”
(Ross, 2002: 11), hence the state response at the time and the containment and erasure
since then. This character is also what created the possibility of afterlives,
rendering the text relevant to 2015.
This book is relevant in many ways
one of which is that the memories and experiences that the book recovers
provide inspiration for contemporary struggles. While May has been falsely
constructed as a student struggle, contemporary South African student struggles
can look to May’s characteristics of a living praxis, the openness to different
political subjectivities and the refusal to be reduced to their prescribed
social category as the basis for an expanding movement. Importantly, and as
articulated by Ross (2002: 213), the afterlives of May do not position it as a
prescriptive “’model’ that could be repeated, successfully or unsuccessfully,
later on.” Instead, the division separating “’those who know’” from those who
are “considered incapable of knowing” (Ross, 2002: 213) emerges as a theme that
was contested prior to May 68, in the Algerian War, the Vietnam War, Mao’s
China (Ross, 2002: 27), and again in the 1995 strikes in France. Rather than
providing a model or a definition of what change should look like, the re-membering
and opening up of the memory of May ’68 and its capacity to refuse standard
borders of social life, “expand[s] the field of the possible” (Sartre cited in
Ross, 2002: 32) and allows one to “think the present as something that can
change” (Ross, 2002: 120).
The centrality of borders being breached
is immediately apparent in the description of May ’68 as “the first general
strike that extended beyond the traditional centers of industrial production to
the whole sphere of social reproduction” (Ross, 2002: 4). Contrary to the
social histories that reduce the event to something to be “measured,
categorized and contained,” the manner in which this event exceeded the
“expectations and control of even its most alert protagonists” (Ross, 2002: 4)
establishes its scope. This immediately suggests the expansive capacity of this
event and therefore the possibility of new afterlives, including here. The
events around May ‘68 – specifically approximately two decades from the
mid-1950s to the mid-1970s – support its magnitude and relevance by preventing
its depiction as a comet that came from nowhere and disappeared as swiftly (Ross,
2002: 26). Prior to 1968, the social category of nationality and the national borders
along which it is constructed were overcome or discarded. Slogans such as
“Vietnam is in our factories,” (Ross, 2002: 11) relay the identification and
intersection between organising against the Algerian or Vietnam War and
learning that one is not defined by a single social category – in this case, being
French. Therefore the boundaries of nationality were breached by the May ’68
movement.
The soluble and contestable nature
of borders was already present in the first of these two wars, as France’s
colonial relations with Algeria were a manifestation of the “thought disorder
that is colonialism” (Ross, 2002: 53). As far back as 1848, Algeria had been
put under the charge of the Minister of the Interior, and therefore was
considered part of France –legitimating the reduction of the Algerian War to a
“domestic, interior affair” (Ross 2002: 49). As of the 7th of March
1944, Algerians were classified as French citizens. However, the boundaries of
social categorization did not end with official nationality, with classifications
such as “Muslim French” and “Muslim French from Algeria” (Ross, 2002: 54)
featuring in orders or ‘recommendations’ from the Prefect to obey a curfew. This
curfew and the repression of its enforcement led to the first mass
demonstration of the 1960s – a peaceful protest of 30-40000 Algerians organised
by the Front de Liberation Nationale Algerien (Ross, 2002: 42). Police opened
fire almost immediately.
In Didier Daeninckx’s detective
novel Meurtres pour memoire, the
detective discovers the extent of the government’s cover-up of the massacre and
exposes “the way the state and police archives limit what is perceivable and
knowable by the public, and names that limitation as the crime itself” (Ross,
2002: 45). In such a context, information is itself “an act of militancy”
(Ross, 2002: 85) and its political potency is evinced by the reality that this
cover-up was for many French people, their first experience of having such a
restriction imposed. This caused a “chasm opening up in many peoples’ identity
as French” (Ross, 2002: 57) – a breach of an established social category,
necessary to open people to other forms of political subjectivity. Acknowledging
the cover-up and its politically awakening implications is to acknowledge that
May was not a comet. Rather it was an event with a “long preparation” (Ross,
2002: 26) of which the October 17th massacre is a part. This
preparation entails neither that it was an inevitable chapter in the linear
march of ‘progress,’ nor that it was a turbulent adolescent rebellion destined
to end. Rather, it renders visible the past of May ’68, and if it has a past,
it renders possible a future afterlife. For if “the action took place, at a
time when everyone judged it to be unthinkable, then it can happen again”
(Sartre cited in Ross, 2002: 1).
On October 5th 1961, the
Prefect issued the curfew, stating that it was “advised” that “Muslim Algerian
workers” (Ross, 2002: 54) stay out of the streets between 8.30 pm and 5.30 am –
effectively that they may only leave the house to go to work. This form of
social control shows how time is utilized to create boundaries, as an
instrument for the pursuit of a capitalist “unilinear conception of progress”
(Ross, 2002: 204) as maximum productivity. It also ascribes to a capitalist
specialization process which separates “manual and intellectual work” and
professional or cultural qualifications are used to justify “social hierarchies
and systems of political representation” (Ross, 2002: 79). In such a framework,
the sole function and identity of a worker is that she works, while it is the
task of a particular elite to ‘be political’.
“We want time in order to live,” (Ross,
2002: 32) chanted Renault workers in 1964. This demonstrates that the refusal
of the division of labour cannot be reduced to a battle to improve work
conditions. It was a refusal of the capitalist functionalist understanding of
social identity, and a breaching of the prescribed narrow units with which one
was allowed to identify. This breaches the boundaries of a specific teleology
in which May ’68 is a necessary chapter, a sociobiological rebellion of the
youth “’acting out” (Ross, 2002: 204) because
they are young that would end because youth passes. Another strand to this false
representation is its portrayal as the “’movement of modernization’”
(Cohn-Bendit cited in Ross, 2002: 211) the goal of which was contemporary
liberal, capitalist society. The borders of the established teleology were also
disrupted by the praxis of those within the movement - living as though the
social distinctions and divisions, and the structures that prescribed and
enforced them, had already been obliterated (Ross, 2002: 96). This utopian view
was an immediate one and shed the Leninist-Marxist model of a vanguard
communism – instead, people experienced the immediate transcendence of
boundaries into a different kind of collectivity, where existent divisions are
discarded and overcome, without attempting to obliterate difference.
Spatial borders are also breached.
The occupation of factories entails the “appropriation of the space of the
dominant power” which should ideally lead to the expansion of the workers’
movement beyond the borders of the factory (Ross, 2002: 71). However the
occupation strategy also constrained workers to their “proper, habitual place”
(Ross, 2002: 71) and broke the communication networks between different
factories. The connections between the students and workers of May were centred
on the forms and practices that grew up around militancy that developed in
response to the Vietnam War. These forms and practices brought students “into
direct, concrete contact with workers and with others outside the university”
(Ross, 2002: 92) – rooted in a physical dislocation out of their prescribed
spaces to create new social relations (Ross, 2002: 95). This seems particularly
relevant to contemporary student struggles – the university is a site of
struggle within a society and just as the critiques emerging at universities
relate to wider society, communication with and movement between different sites
of struggle remain integral to the development of a critical student movement
that cannot be reduced to the affairs of students alone.
To mobilize against the Algerian
War or later the Vietnam War, to “espouse the cause of the Other,” required one
to construct an “impossible ‘we,’ a subjectivation that passes by way of the
Other” (Ross, 2002: 57) and breaches the boundaries of one’s own social
category, hence its impossibility. This depends on a “political opening to
otherness” (Ross, 2002: 25), centred in the years prior to ’68 around two
particular figures, “the worker and the colonial militant” (Ross, 2002: 10). This
process is an expansive one – the opening grows. Such a process of identification
requires a certain level of disassociation with the social category assigned to
oneself, often growing from similar breaches as encountered by some French
after the October 17th massacre and cover-up. This is supported by William Gardner
Smith’s novel The Stone Face which tells
the story of the political awakening of the protagonist Simeon, a black
American in France, whose identification with the Algerians depends on his
“first disidentifying with his own
social group” (Ross, 2002: 46), an experience of disidentification and declassification
(Ross, 2002: 57). “There is no student problem any longer. The student is not a valid notion,” (Ross,
2002: 206) read a tract from the middle of May.
This articulates the reality that according to Ross (2002: 3) it was “a
shattering of social identity that allowed politics to take place.” This is in
stark contrast to the constructed memory of May as being a student or youth
movement. While students were the initial instigators of the protests, the
movement “consisted mainly in students ceasing to function as students” (Ross,
2002: 25) and workers who refused to
be reduced to being only that.
Nicholas Daum (cited in Ross,
2002: 144), in the introduction of his book about May as a mass movement, says
something remarkable. Referring to his refusal to caption interviews with tidy
descriptions he explained as such, “This kind of reductive and insignificant
detail will remain an insignificant mystery because Adek is not only a painter,
J.-P. is not only a physician, etc.; they say it themselves, they are many
other things as well.” This is central to the relevance of Ross’ book to current
events. Students involved in the May movement did not pretend not to be; rather
they ceased to fulfil the prescribed social function of a student – to be only
that. Similarly, Jean-Paul Sartre (cited in Ross, 2002: 177) describes how “It
isn’t by saying that I’m not petit-bourgeois that the intellectual can join
with workers. But rather, on the contrary, by thinking I am petit-bourgeois and
simply, by criticizing myself and by becoming more and more radicalized, I can
refuse – without it interesting anyone but myself – my petit-bourgeois
conditioning.” This is relevant at present because as a white student on Rhodes
campus, I am trying to comprehend how to be part of a movement that is centred
on the experiences of working-class black people, how to believe in the importance
of that movement while knowing that my experience is mostly not important
there.
The understanding of social
category as not reductive does not make it less real, and a nuanced telling of
May seems to grasp that. The question of how to accept one’s social categories
and how to acknowledge their implications without being reduced to them is one
of the aspects of May that I believe to be relevant here and now. The
importance of not reducing people to their social category is emphasized by Ross
(2002: 78) in her conclusion that, “In a mass movement, what matters is the
concrete form that the real movement takes and the meaning individuals
attribute to their actions.” Simultaneously, Simeon does not stop being
American, Sartre does not stop being petit-bourgeois, and I do not stop being
white. Nor do the social structures that enforce divisional categories
immediately wither away because of one’s political subjectivity. May’s
realization of this is important because it is part of why the events were not
merely homogenizing or coercive. Finding a community of people with whom one could
live equally allowed people to live as different and therefore not be limited
by or reduced to it. While the contemporary student struggles occur, this
offers something of an ideal to aspire to.
Sartre’s specification that this
is only of interest to him is important because May ’68 has been written as a “moment
of individual, spiritual transformation” (Ross, 2002: 178). This is not the
case, and is one of two frequently trotted out depictions – either it was about
“losing one’s self to the masses in a quasi-religious abjection or a purely
lucid instance of self-expression” (Ross, 2002: 100). Once again, May ’68 is
about breaching the boundaries – in this case the binary between the individual
and the collectivity. Martine Storti’s (cited in Ross, 2002: 101) testifies
that, “Everyone was living beyond their intellectual, emotional and sensorial
limits: each person existed above and beyond himself.” This is a description of
a self who, within the movement, was being constituted in such a way that they
held “individual and collective identity together in an unresolved,
unresolvable manner” (Ross, 2002: 101). Evelyne Sullerot (cited in Ross, 2002:
101) supports this when she describes how many participants viewed the short-wave
transmitters as “endow[ing] every individual with his own autonomy of judgment
without cutting him off from the mass.” Gathered in clusters around the radio,
they would listen together and then each decide for themselves where to go,
based on what they heard. The pleasure of “overcoming both physical and social
compartmentalization” (Ross, 2002: 104) described by Storti offers an
alternative conception of the good life to that provided by the contemporary capitalist
order – “this work was pleasure” (Ross, 2002: 103).
The response of the state and
specifically Charles de Gaulle reveals the nature of the movement he viewed himself
as ‘up against’ – a rally to “to all the different fractions of the middle
class to unite against the common enemy” (Ross, 2002: 59). Unite with one’s class
and chant slogans such as “Let students study, workers work, teachers teach,
and France be French” (Ross, 2002: 60). This attempt to restore ‘order’ was
necessitated in his view by the movement before him – which disrupted and
dislocated the established functionalist hierarchy. Jacques Ranciere (2002: 23)
supports this when he describes the role of the police, enforcer of the state,
as establishing “what is or is not perceivable” and maintaining that division. This
is why these structures are threatened by the May movement which “took the form
of political experiments in declassification”
(Ross, 2002: 25), bridging and breaching prescribed social categories. The
classification framework also positions the state as the structure of legitimate
power. This allows May to be reduced to a failed attempt to seize state power
and limits the definition of the political to the state, erasing the political
aspects of the movement that “may in fact have constituted the true threat to
the forces of order” (Ross, 2002: 74) in their refusal to be contained within
the existent hierarchies.
This response immediately reveals
the distinctive characteristics of May 68 as a movement that was constituted by
the transcendence of prescribed social and political categories and the
hierarchy between them. The re-membering of the breaching of these borders, in
allowing participants to wonder where the borders are, expands the realm of
possibility for here and now.
Bibliography
Ross, K., 2002, May ’68 and its Afterlives, Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press.
