Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power by Max Haiven

Author:Max Haiven
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2014-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

The empire strikes back

More tragically, how do we re-create ourselves to conform once again with the world as we knew it before the radical event? While many of such radical events have had important and lasting impacts on the structures of everyday life, social institutions, relationships and values, these changes are usually not immediate. When the event ends, how does the one recalibrate oneself to the order of the done? How does one reconform and once again take up one’s place in the reproduction of the status quo?

It is for this reason that Passerini in concerned with depression, melancholy and psychoanalysis. She writes that, for her and those she interviewed, ‘there remains a regret for politics, not for what was but for what could be, as project, as communication and community’ (159–60). In contrast to the intensity of human connection and solidarity experienced amidst the radical event, Passerini writes eloquently of a haunting loneliness experienced in its aftermath, for some still years, even decades, later.

Likewise, Ross quotes a variety of memoirists, interviewees and fictionalized accounts that address the months and years following the events of 1968, which concur that feelings of deep melancholy, depression and loneliness were common. This sort of feeling is due not simply to a feeling of defeat and the effects of withdrawal from the power of radical political adrenaline. It can be understood, I would suggest, as a symptom of a certain dissonance within us as the person we were in the radical event fails to match the person we had to become afterwards. There is a mourning for a lost future, ‘not for what was but for what could be’.

It is here that memory and remembrance become deeply political. Ross’s book not only recounts the personal and artistic recollections of the events and their subsequent resonance within French culture; it also traces the way certain influential ‘leaders’ of the ’68 movements ‘cashed in’ their radical credentials and used their falsified or selective remembrance of the events of ’68 to leverage themselves into positions of power and influence in mainstream French society. Here Ross draws on the French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s concept of ‘the police’, by which he means not only those authorities in uniform but also the way that society is governed by a policing of history and meaning. The policing of memory attempts to force it to conform to official histories which, as we saw above, render the past as merely the unavoidable precedent of the inevitable present. Policing history is the process by which the radical event is domesticated and defanged, held to have distinct and discrete causes and effects, and reduced to vignettes in the biography of individuals.

Policing the memory of 1968, Ross argues, typically takes the form of relegating it to the realm of youthful folly, a hormone-driven explosion of rage and resentment. For many ’68ers who would go on to occupy positions of fame and fortune in the media, in mainstream electoral politics or as writers and intellectuals (many on

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