Even though the historical sequence of revolts, strikes and other elements of the social upheaval associated with May ’68 is generally considered primarily as an event – and thus as something sudden, immediate, but also fleeting and ephemeral – the turbulent discussions about its historical meaning often focus on its long-term consequences. The conflict of interpretations does not revolve around the complex knot of diverse moments and movements that have constituted the event as much as it does around the series of consequences that can be said to have followed from the event. As Alain Badiou, one of the French philosophers inspired by May ’68, likes to reiterate, an event can only be judged based on its consequences (see Badiou Reference Badiou and Feltham2005, 207, 211; Badiou Reference Badiou and Burchill2011, 83; Badiou Reference Badiou2018, 13–14). But what counts as a consequence? It remains unclear what can be considered as a consequence of an event identified with an immediate and ephemeral rupture. There is a gap, a distance between the immediacy of the event and its supposed consequences.
It is thus understandable that in her book on the subject, Kristin Ross discusses the ‘afterlives’ of May ’68 instead of its outcomes or aftermath. While the ‘afterlives’ refer to the fact that the event ‘has been overtaken by its subsequent representations’ (Ross Reference Ross2002, 1) and employed primarily to neutralize its political radicalism, they could also be understood as indicating the disentanglement of consequences from the event itself. The proliferation of afterlives can be related to the apparent absence of an aftermath. Was May ’68, as an event, exhausted in its immediacy? Reclaiming its ‘eventfulness’, as Ross (Reference Ross2002, 1) sets out to do in her book, and as I will also try to do in what follows, involves showing how immediacy was indeed constitutive of the politics of May ’68 as enacted in the practices of its actors: immediacy in terms of breaking with political mediation and representation; immediate practice of politics instead of declaring a political programme with the view of seizing power; and the immediate link between different social groups and problems.
Limiting my account to the events in France, I will first briefly discuss several ways in which interpretations of May ‘68 tackle the distance between the event and its consequences by entirely breaking the link between the politics practised by its actors and its actual social consequences. This leads either to the depoliticization of the event or to ascribing to it political consequences that were opposite to the intentions of the participants. I will then focus on two attempts to reconnect the consequences with the event or, more accurately, to consider the consequences of the very immediacy of its political practices. I will thus examine the accounts of May ‘68 given by Badiou and Jacques Rancière, French philosophers for whom the event in question remains a crucial political and theoretical turning point.
These two accounts, however, come with a distance of their own. First, like many other French thinkers who are often associated with May ’68, they were initially sceptical towards the event and played only marginal roles in the movement itself. Their reflections on the event should therefore be understood, as Antonia Birnbaum claimed recently, in the context of ‘political and theoretical clarification of the shadow thrown by an event that was at first ignored’ (Birnbaum Reference Birnbaum2018). Second, as my focus is on long-term consequences, on looking back on the event from a distance, I will focus on Badiou’s and Rancière’s relatively recent writings on May ’68 rather than on their texts from the late 1960s or the 1970s. Third, the immediacy which they both recognize as a crucial characteristic of the politics of May ’68 consists of producing a distance: a distance from state power, from representational politics, from pre-existing social identities and relations, etc. It is ultimately this distance that allows immediate political practices to produce their own continuity, their own consequences.
Consequences
The easiest way to resolve the problem of the consequences of such an event is to deny their existence. From this point of view, May ’68 was primarily a student protest carnival that for all the radicalism of its declarations was left bereft of any real political effects. Sociologist Raymond Aron, an intellectual authority at the time, was quick to denounce the imaginary revolution that never took place as a psychodrama of the student population, a spectacle reflecting deep-rooted sociological causes that he was ready to analyse (see Aron Reference Aron and Clough1969). Similar claims about the absence of effects can, however, also be found among commentators who were otherwise much more sympathetic to the political aims of the protesters. Right-wing and liberal critiques of 1968 should not make us overlook the fact that the events of May have been divisive for the left itself. In a typical fashion, Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm (Reference Hobsbawm1995, 285) states that despite all the drama, the student unrest of 1968 only involved a minor sector of the population and ultimately remained ‘a phenomenon outside economics and politics’. On a certain level, considering the actual aftermath of the events, these judgements are difficult to argue with. The counter-protests and the elections of June 1968 did in fact reconsolidate Gaullist power; and, later, many of those associated with the movement renounced their radical positions and enjoyed successful careers in politics (of the type championed by Daniel Cohn-Bendit) or in media-friendly academia (of the New Philosophers variety).
The lack of political consequences is, however, often compensated for by cultural consequences. From enjoying without chains (as one of the slogans demanded) to more moderate versions of lifestyle liberalization, a range of cultural shifts have retroactively been attributed to May ’68. This view focuses on the movement’s anti-authoritarianism while only partially accounting for the other side of the event, namely the largest general strike in the history of the country. In Ross’s (Reference Ross2002, 21) estimation, the view that, in May ’68, ‘[n]othing happened politically’ while ‘culturally the changes were enormous’ was prevalent in France at the turn of the millennium. These changes can of course be viewed more or less favourably, depending on the point of view. In any case, however, the result is a depoliticized version of the event whose actors are reduced to a sociologically determinable category of youth.
In their watered-down version, the cultural changes, which are believed to have their origin in May ’68, can hardly be distinguished from the demands addressed to individuals by the contemporary capitalist society. Another way of bridging the gap between the event and its consequences emerges along these lines: May ’68 may not have had any real political consequences, but the cultural changes it gave rise to did – but these consequences were opposite to the anti-capitalist agenda of its actors, as, in the long run, May ’68 contributed to the renewal of capitalism. This is the view established by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism. According to Boltanski and Chiapello (Reference Boltanski, Chiapello and Elliott2005, 167–215), May ’68 marked the turn from a social critique of capitalism to an artistic one in which social problems of the working class got replaced by the themes of individual autonomy, freedom and creativity. The artistic critique of capitalism ultimately paved the way for a modernized version of capitalism that incorporated such freedom and creativity within its forms of exploitation.
Immediacy
Considered either as a failed political revolution or as a successful cultural revolution, May ’68 becomes, as Rancière remarks, ‘a typical example of the imaginary event that expressed an underlying sociological process ignored by the actors of this “event”’ (Rancière Reference Rancière2018, 290). If a sting of its eventfulness nevertheless persists, if there is something about the event that cannot be dissolved in cultural changes and appropriated in their economic exploitation, then the question is where to look for its enduring effects beyond such symptoms as Nicolas Sarkozy’s attack on the heritage of 1968 during his 2007 presidential campaign.
To consider its effects, we should first return to the immediacy of the event. If we are to look for political consequences of May ‘68, we should first stop to ask ourselves what kind of conception of politics determines our view. According to both Rancière (Reference Rancière2018, 290–291) and Badiou (Reference Badiou, Badiou, Macey and Corcoran2010, 52), May ’68 introduced a new understanding of the very meaning of politics. In the light of this new conception, Rancière (Reference Rancière2018, 291) claims, ‘politics exists thanks to the suppression of the mediations and intermediaries that constitute the very consistency of a society according to the sociological form of rationality.’ The protests, strikes and occupations by-passed the institutions that were supposed to represent their interests in the political arena. The movement happened at a distance from intermediaries and representatives, including the unions and the Communist Party of France. Badiou (Reference Badiou2018, 47) even claims that such political immediacy, enacted in the here and now, constitutes a sort of ‘immediate communism’.
Second, the immediate connection established between the otherwise separate social spheres of students and workers is emphasized by many as the key trait of the French May ’68. This connection between students and workers, however, far from simply implying some sort of solidarity or cooperation between different social groups, shows us that political subjectivities cannot be reduced to pre-existing sociologically determinable categories. According to Ross,
May ’68 had very little to do with the social group – students or ‘youth’ – who were its instigators. It had much more to do with the flight from social determinations, with displacements that took people outside of their location in society, with a disjunction, that is, between political subjectivity and the social group. (Ross Reference Ross2002, 2–3)
The new conception of politics announced by the event is thus characterized by an immediacy not of social identities but of political subjects that emerge as disturbances in the distribution of social positions. Reflecting on the movement in December 1968, Maurice Blanchot, who stood by the students along with a group of writers in the Students-Writers Action Committee, already emphasized the difference between students as a specific minority sector of the population and students as part of the movement of May ’68:
Thus, the first danger to avoid is that the movement should seem reduced to a student movement, that it confines itself to universities and schools. What was its force in May? The fact is that students never acted as students in this so-called student action, but as those who unveiled a collective crisis, as the bearers of a power of rupture questioning the regime, the State, and society. The University was only a point of departure[.] (Blanchot Reference Blanchot, Blanchot and Paul2010b, 106)
From this point of view, the mass politicization of the late 1960s can no longer be explained away by the social psychology of the so-called youth. It was rather, according to Ross (Reference Ross2002, 10), a product of ‘polemical relations and impossible identifications’ that took the participants away from what they were supposed to be. According to Badiou, theirs was a political practice ‘that was not willing to keep everyone in their place’ and ‘that accepted new trajectories, impossible encounters, and meetings between people who did not usually talk to each other’ (Badiou Reference Badiou, Badiou, Macey and Corcoran2010, 60).
Finally, the immediacy of the event can also be seen in the absence of a defined political programme or strategy designed to eventually seize state power – a fact often brought up by those who want to deny May ’68 any real political consequence. Such judgements, however, apply to the event criteria pertaining to a conception of politics that the actors of May ’68 wanted to move away from. It attributes a failure to an non-existent goal with the aim of denouncing the true efforts that lay elsewhere; in Ross’s words: ‘The narrative of a desired or failed seizure of power, in other words, is a narrative determined by the logic of the state, the story the state tells to itself.’ (Ross Reference Ross2002, 74) Blanchot (Reference Blanchot, Blanchot and Paul2010c, 83) claimed that the movement, as ‘a movement of refusal’, was right to refrain from outlining any ‘premature statements or programs’ which could only be ‘formulated in a necessarily alienated or distorted discourse’, a discourse that would ultimately come from the enemy. The refusal, a seemingly negative gesture, is in fact ‘a refusal that affirms’, according to Blanchot (Reference Blanchot, Blanchot and Paul2010a, 89, emphasis in original): it is this affirmation that provides the momentum of the movement beyond any envisioned programme or project, and it is this affirmation that should be the object of a new political thought. A new conception of politics indeed emerges among the many ‘immediate experiments’, as Badiou (Reference Badiou, Badiou, Macey and Corcoran2010, 52) calls them, within political practice itself.
To grasp the stakes of this new conception, we should first consider how it affects our thinking on the long-term linkage of causes and effects within society. According to Rancière, understanding the event requires first of all a conception of temporality that is not based on the opposition of the ephemeral and the long-term: ‘the movements that are called ephemeral actually make breaks in the ordinary course of long-term time, which is a time of endless mediations and postponements’ (Rancière Reference Rancière2018, 292). From these breaks, new lines of temporality and new ways of linkage between different social groups and problems can emerge. However, moving away from the political criteria of long-term goals and strategies, we find it increasingly difficult to identify effects, especially as the politics of the event was enacted in its immediacy, in its practices themselves. As Ross writes: ‘The experience of equality, as it was lived by many in the course of the movement – neither as a goal nor a future agenda but as something occurring in the present and verified as such – constitutes an enormous challenge for subsequent representation.’ (Ross Reference Ross2002: 11) How do Badiou and Rancière respond to this challenge?
Reading the Event
May ’68 kept polarizing the field of French philosophy and reshuffling allegiances decades after the event. While many members of Maoist groups later became harsh critics of all things left-wing, Badiou and Rancière were not at the centre of the movement in May ’68, yet later devoted much of their theoretical work to thinking through the political implications and consequences of the event. While Badiou and Rancière are profoundly different authors, the former dedicated to redefining ontology while the latter engaged in a critique of historical regimes of the sensible, May ’68 seems to function as a point of convergence rather than divergence between them. Despite sharing a number of major emphases, however, their respective ways of reading the event remain profoundly different.
Their recollections of personal experiences in the month of May have much in common. Both were more or less absent from Paris: Badiou (Reference Badiou2018, 43–47) held a teaching post in Reims and Rancière (Reference Rancière2012, 36–37) was recovering from an illness in the countryside. Their Althusserian background prompted an initial critical response to the event. As Rancière admits (Reference Rancière2012, 38), ‘it was, for us, a petty-bourgeois revolt’. But it was a revolt that ultimately profoundly changed their respective views on making and writing about politics. Both point out the meetings between students and workers in the factories as a turning point. Rancière (Reference Rancière2012, 37) explains that this was the element of May that immediately struck him, as it was completely at odds with the version of Marxist theory the Althusserians practised at the time. Similarly, Badiou testifies as follows: ‘We are marching […] towards the workers’ base. What are we going to do there? We haven’t got a clue, apart from the vague idea that the student revolt and the workers’ strike have to unify, unify outside of the classic mediating organisations’ (Badiou Reference Badiou2018, 44). For both Badiou and Rancière, the immediacy of the link between students and workers – which neither the Communist Party nor Althusserian theorists would affirm as a political event – marks the demise of a certain conception of Marxist politics and implies, as Birnbaum (Reference Birnbaum2018) emphasizes, ‘a decentring of proletarian politics’. For Rancière, the acts of the political subjects of May ’68 ‘displace the very lines of distribution of social identities and the very modes of articulation between words and actions, spaces and times’ (Rancière Reference Rancière2018, 291). Badiou, who went on to place the notion of the event at the centre of his philosophy, considers May ’68 as an event in the sense of something arriving ‘as a supplement, beyond all calculation’, something ‘that displaces people and places’ and ‘provides a new situation for thought’ (Badiou Reference Badiou, Badiou and Spitzer2013, 106). While, for Rancière, in his subsequent work on the archives of the workers’ movement, this decentring ‘occurs within the working-class itself’, Badiou goes on to explore political subjectivity ‘within an immanent relation to its own subjective process’ under the condition of the new (Birnbaum Reference Birnbaum2018).
The centrality of the concept of the event in Badiou’s philosophical work since the late 1980s, which is, as Badiou says (Reference Badiou, Badiou and Spitzer2013, 110–111), partly influenced by what he experienced in May ’68, should not, however, falsely lead us to believe that the immediacy of the event is for him an end in itself. Reducing the event to its ‘glowing disappearance’ blinds us to the only thing that ultimately validates it, namely the ‘persistence of its consequences’ (Badiou Reference Badiou2018, 13–14). Consequences are key to Badiou’s philosophy of the event: the collective political subject is constituted in its fidelity to the event and acts within the situation in order to change it in accordance with the implications of the event. Figuring out what the consequences of this event actually consist of is not, however, an easy task. Badiou (2018, 18; Reference Badiou, Badiou and Spitzer2013, 119) admits that May ’68 remains in many ways an enigma, an extremely heterogeneous affair in which anyone can see whatever he or she wants to see. The question of how to read the event can therefore not be avoided.
Badiou (Reference Badiou2018, 9) starts with the enigmatic statement that ‘the truth of “May ’68” is not readable in May’. It is not readable in the immediacy of the event, because the truth is what comes after, in the consequences. The ten years that followed produced reactionary movements, but also intense political experiments that were faithful to the event. Yet the lack of readable truth within the event itself could also be seen as a way of coping with what Birnbaum calls the shadow of the initial failed encounter with the event.
Badiou first claims that the heterogeneity of May ’68 is such that the heap of subsequent interpretations – to which he is less hostile than one might expect – is in a way justified by the thing itself. But he then nevertheless goes on to provide his own reading of this diversity as he distinguishes between three Mays: the May of the students, the May of the workers and the May of the libertarians. To this he finally adds an additional, fourth, May in which the truth of the event will finally be readable. As it turns out, the diverse complexity of the event itself is not so difficult to read, even though there is no truth to it, while the actual truth of the event remains a challenge, since it consists of proposing a new conception of politics that only existed in a sequence of experiments and remains to be fully developed.
In his account of the three elementary Mays, Badiou (Reference Badiou, Badiou, Macey and Corcoran2010, 46–51) reproduces some of the tropes that the afterlives of May have brought up. The student protesters were indeed a privileged bourgeois minority; while their actions were important for their reclaiming of violence and display of ideology, a lot of energy was wasted on acting out and dealing with partial, fringe issues related to university reforms (see Badiou Reference Badiou2018, 19–24). The second May, again related to a specific social group, the workers, is praised by Badiou for the enduring strikes and occupations outside the unionist apparatus. The libertarian May, an affair of aesthetic transformation and sexual liberation, epitomizes the cultural aspect of the movement. This is the multiplicity that constitutes the heterogeneous material from which the real event will emerge.
The fourth May, the true event whose implications and consequences are still to be developed today, is nothing but a ‘diagonal’ (Badiou Reference Badiou, Badiou, Macey and Corcoran2010, 57) or ‘a direct link’ (Badiou Reference Badiou2018, 41) between the other three. What does it entail? First, the break with the old conception of politics: a politics of emancipation can no longer be understood in terms of an objective historical agent (the working class or the people) that is supposed to become a historical subject through the leadership of a vanguard party. Even though the actors of the event still articulated their practice in the discourse of the old conception, their practice was based on the displacements that occurred as the result of a direct link between the different Mays. The link entails posing the question of the definition of politics anew through direct experiments of those political organizations that were established in continuity with the event. May ’68 is thus ‘the event of a new idea of politics’ (Badiou Reference Badiou2018, 46). Its ultimate consequence is the search for new forms of political organization, forms adequate to the displacements that occurred in the manifold immediacy of the event (see Badiou Reference Badiou, Badiou, Macey and Corcoran2010, 61). If May ’68 can still be an event for us, it is because we still have the same problem today – we are still faced with the urgent task of inventing such forms (see Badiou Reference Badiou2018, 62).
On the one hand, it could be said that Badiou does well to integrate all the multiplicity of the insurgent situation into his account. However, a direct link exists ‘especially between the student movement and the workers’ movement’ (Badiou Reference Badiou2018, 58), which reveals an unease with the libertarian May and ultimately with the multiplicity of Mays altogether. On the other hand, therefore, the separation of the three Mays allows the initial Althusserian reservations towards bourgeois aspects of the movement to linger on.
For Rancière, too, social displacements and immediate linkages are crucial for understanding May ’68. Political subjectivations create ‘a space of manifestation of capacities and possibilities, which did not exist in the “normal” distribution of places, activities and capacities’ (Rancière Reference Rancière2018, 291). This introduces ‘a totally different view of what politics means’, a move away from the ‘Marxist tradition of strategic action’ (Rancière Reference Rancière2018, 290, 295), away from long-term temporality and the conception of social totality that it presumes. This is the event of May ’68: an opening up of a new way of perceiving political struggle in terms of the ephemeral moments that produce their own lines of temporality. But this does not mean that such moments are exhausted in their immediacy without any consequence: ‘The temporal accelerations, the reconfigurations of spaces, the unexpected sequences of actions, the forms of dis-identification produced by words create ways of perceiving, feeling, thinking and acting that are active forces of struggle and transformation’ (Rancière Reference Rancière2018, 295). Such moments make up ‘a tradition of political invention’ that constitutes a history of emancipatory politics which is not identical with the history of state institutions or with the relation of forces within the social totality (Rancière Reference Rancière2018, 294–295).
The affirmation of social displacement and political invention is the major point of convergence between Rancière and Badiou with regard to May ’68. Yet their manner of reading the event is substantially different. For Rancière, there are no three or four Mays. The direct link between different social groups and political problems is not a link between distinct moments or movements that do not otherwise hold any truth within their multiplicity. The immediate connection is not limited to their common ground – after the link is established, the whole can exist in any part. Instead of relating the multiplicity of interpretations to the heterogeneity of the movement, Rancière focuses on what he sees as the crucial conflict of interpretations: how to understand the parts in relation to the social whole? Insofar as the sociological form of rationality understands each part on the background of a complex totality, it is able to reduce the event to fluctuations in relations between social groups and to deny the event any meaningful long-term consequences. Rejecting this approach, Rancière argues for a logic that sees everything in everything, treating each part as a condensation in which the whole is immediately present (Rancière Reference Rancière2018, 294–295). This also entails that there is no need to make a distinction between the event and the truth that follows it. Rancière (Reference Rancière2018, 291) thus goes to the origins of the student movement and quotes from a pamphlet that calls for ‘the abolition of exams and capitalism’. Where Badiou sees the revolt of students as a minority sector of the population and their over-engagement in partial social problems of their particular situation, Rancière sees a new way of relating the parts to the whole:
The activist students invent, from their specific position, a process of condensation of the power relations that govern the social order. They decide that the issue of exams contains in itself the whole of the relation between the university and the social system, which in turn condenses the whole of the social organization of domination. They decide that the question of that relation can be raised directly by skipping all the mediations that normally mark out the steps – which means the distance – between their situation and the global assault against the capitalist system. (Rancière Reference Rancière2018, 291–292)
This apparently naive immediate short cut between a local problem and a global problem is characteristic of the political rationality introduced by May ’68. There was thus no distinct May of the students; if we take a close look at student demands we actually find few references to creative autonomy or sexual freedom: ‘No claim against the family order, few calls to sexual freedom, no exaltation of artistic creativity, no claim of the youth as such’ (Rancière Reference Rancière2018, 290). What was thus introduced was not a new, artistic or libertarian social critique. The modernized forms of capitalist exploitation that Boltanski and Chiapello see as the long-term consequence of the culture of ’68 were actually, according to Rancière, already at work in the discussions on modernizing the university system that were taking place at the time. The renewal of capitalism was therefore already a target of the students as they declared the following: ‘We don’t want to be trained in order to become the instruments of the capitalist exploitation of the working class’ (Rancière Reference Rancière2018, 290, emphasis in original). There is hence no futile agitation related to the obscure problems of the students; on the contrary, the students have established an immediate connection between the problem of the university and the problem of the social system as a whole.
Politics at a Distance?
Despite significant differences between these two ways of reading the event, Badiou and Rancière both enable us to attribute its consequences to its immediacy. May ’68 outlined a new conception of immediate politics that requires the invention of new forms of political struggle. To see it as consequential, however, the break with various kinds of political mediation should also be seen in its immanent productivity. The immediate politics practised in May ’68 produces a distance from social forces and their representatives, a distance that enables the production of its own immanent consistency. In Badiou’s words:
Politics must preserve a radical autonomy in terms of both its organization and its practice. That’s what I call the need for political distance. Politics can only be constituted when it’s able to create its own distance, in this case from the parliamentary state. This is something that was invented as a direct result of ’68. (Badiou Reference Badiou, Badiou and Spitzer2013, 112)
For Rancière, too, the power of politics ‘becomes autonomous by distancing itself from the world of the enemy rather than taking up arms against it’; this is after all the meaning of the barricade: ‘The Barricade is the self-affirmation of a community of equals rather than an efficient means of fighting against the enemy’ (Rancière Reference Rancière2018, 297). The twofold problem that is opened by these accounts of May is therefore, on the one hand, the problem of distant immediacy – the problem of how to read the long-term consequences of an event of this kind – and, on the other hand, the problem of immediate distance – of how an immediate politics can operate by distancing itself from pre-existing social positions and forces. These two aspects are of course deeply related, as the consequences of such an immediate politics are precisely what is so difficult to read from a historical distance.
Looking back at May ’68 now, more than 50 years later, the argument that immediacy has no real consequence can again be recalled, especially considering how left parties, unions and other structures of representation that May ’68 by-passed have in the meantime been significantly weakened. In the light of the triumphant modernized forms of capitalism – to which May ’68 has contributed according to some – it is easy to make the argument that instead of the immediate forms of politics, the reconstruction of more traditional forms of political organization is what is truly needed today. But it is also possible to come to a different conclusion, one that sees in May ’68 a footing for different forms of struggle that can emerge at the impasses that such reconstructions necessarily encounter along the way.
Acknowledgements
This article was written at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in the framework of the research project ‘The Problem of Objectivity and Fiction in Contemporary Philosophy’ (J6-9392) and the research programme ‘Conditions and Problems of Contemporary Philosophy’ (P6-0014), both of which were financed by the Slovenian Research Agency.
About the Author
Rok Benčin is Research Fellow at the ZRC SAZU Institute of Philosophy and Assistant Professor at the Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Paris 8 and the University of Ljubljana. His essays on continental philosophy and aesthetics have appeared in La Revue Littéraire, SubStance, Theory, Culture & Society and Filozofski vestnik. He is the Slovenian translator of works by Alain Badiou, Simon Critchley, Monique David-Ménard and Jacques Rancière.
