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.
