Co-presence or Interaction?

In her book May ’68 and its Afterlives, Kristin Ross takes pains to counter the hegemonic interpretation of the student revolt in France as a predominantly generational phenomenon limited to the lifestyle liberation of the youth and their countercultural rebellion against the ossified state and university. In her view, mainstream media have strategically promoted this kind of reduced social memory of the events of 1968 ever since the movement’s decline. In the 1980s, obliterating or immunizing May’s revolutionary impetus has become instrumental in establishing the new world order of globalized capitalism. Postmodern neoliberalism, oddly pretending that it has satisfied students’ demands of individual liberties, declared victory over Communist totalitarianism, fostered economic growth through flexible modes of globalized production, and spread the human rights discourse across the planet (see Ross Reference Ross2002). This world order seems to have stamped out any utopian alternative that could draw its inspiration from the memory of May ’68.

In contrast to these immunized recollections, which mark every anniversary of the 1968 revolt, Ross stresses the movement’s temporal and spatial breadth. Seizing Paris along with the province, the movement lasted from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s. The temporal extension of les années 1968 has been canonized recently by Richard Vinen’s book under the term ‘the long ’68’ (Vinen Reference Vinen2018). Ross celebrates the mass character and the revolutionary drive of the long ’68 that bypassed the established Old Left through de-centred and grassroots strategies of social transformation. Across France, numerous student demonstrators fought together with millions of striking industrial workers and peasant protesters. Although seemingly dispersed, anarchic, spontaneous and disorganized, their struggle shared anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist intentions. In opposition to revisionist narratives that reduce May ’68 to the emancipation of the youth through new non-conformist social identities (hippies or flower power), Ross argues that countercultural phenomena were, in fact, inessential and merely co-present with the movement’s antisystemic thrust.

In a similar vein, Ross depreciates the importance of theory and literature for the revolt. Emphasizing the masses and the radical redistribution of social roles, Ross seems to downplay the role of charismatic student leaders such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit and adopt a sceptical point of view on the prominence of the intelligentsia, literature and theory in the revolt. In this context, Ross resumes critiques of Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut’s 1985 pamphlet La Pensée 68 to reject their belief that the ‘anti-humanism’ of structuralism (later branded and globalized as French theory) represented the ‘thought’ of the revolt (see Ferry and Renaut Reference Ferry, Renaut and Cattani1990). In her opinion, Ferry and Renaut – both adherents of liberalism – wanted to denounce Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Pierre Bourdieu as anti-humanist ‘philosophistes’ that had inspired the insurgents. Reducing structuralist theories to a kind of ideal-type anti-humanist thought, Ferry and Renaut ignored the fact that these theorists were ‘left speechless by ’68’; ‘Derrida, for example, showed the utmost reservation during the events, and Foucault, in Tunisia, was not even present at all for the insurrection’ (Ross Reference Ross2002, 190). Ross reminds us that Bourdieu did not join May ’68, and Louis Althusser was hospitalized, while Lacan rejected, according to Ross (Reference Ross2002, 191), the very aspirations of the student movement by giving the students this infamous diagnosis: ‘What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one.’ (Lacan Reference Lacan, Grigg and Miller2007, 207)

Theorists were thus ‘left in a kind of disarray by the political events’, whereas student protesters supposedly did not read them (except for Althusser). As Cohn-Bendit recalls, student activists preferred Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin, Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, Henri Lefebvre and, above all, Jean-Paul Sartre; at the time, they were not familiar with Herbert Marcuse, who later came to figure as their mentor (quoted in Ross Reference Ross2002, 191). In his history of French intellectuals, David Drake (Reference Drake2002, 136) argues that Sartre, the old-fashioned humanist philosopher of existentialism and a favourite target of ‘anti-humanist’ structuralists, took a leading role in the student insurgency. As a Philo-Marxist dissenter from the Communist Party, Sartre felt committed to May’s anarchic methods of revolutionary struggle. Because of the intensity of his involvement, he renounced the role of a moralizing classical intellectual to embrace the concept of the ‘revolutionary intellectual’ who partakes in the action of the masses.

Polemicizing with Ferry and Renaut, Ross concludes that structuralist theory and the student revolt were merely co-present. They evolved simultaneously yet separately: ‘By suggesting an ultimately fallacious amalgam between what Althusser would call two “semi-autonomous” orders of reality’, writes Ross, Ferry and Renaut ‘sought to kill two birds with one stone, that is, to bury May and denounce antihumanism’ (Ross Reference Ross2002, 191). For Ross, the theory came in only later to explain what May ’68 had been all about. If she is right, I will have to revise my assertion that the theory of intertextuality – a by-product of the text theory that characterizes the transition from structuralism to post-structuralism – has initially been energized by the radical politics of the long ’68 (Juvan Reference Juvan2008, 76–80). For instance, Julia Kristeva, a member of the neo-avant-garde and the post-structuralist Tel Quel circle, ascribed a revolutionary character to modernist language, most emblematically in the book she published at the time of the student movement’s decline (Kristeva Reference Kristeva and Waller1984). Is, then, the alliance of (post)structuralist theory, radical politics and modernist literary practices only a retrospective illusion?

As far as France is concerned, the issue still needs to be examined in more detail. Ross herself occasionally departs from privileging the masses and action at the expense of ideas and ideologies. She concedes that students admired Althusser although he was not able to join the movement in person; she also acknowledges some intellectual influence of theorists and writers such as Guy Debord, Maurice Blanchot, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière or Lefebvre (Ross Reference Ross2002, 113–137). Contra Ross’s inclination to neglect literature and theory, Patrick Combes argues in favour of ‘the presence of the literary, of writers in May and June, despite the prejudice that they were absent or hidden’ (Combes Reference Combes2008, 9). Drawing on retrospections by Philippe Sollers (‘The “crisis” of literature … was a major symptom in the historical process’) and Roland Barthes (‘The literary enunciation participates in something of the macro-historical order, of monumental history’), Combes (Reference Combes2008, 20–22) suggests that the need to transform literature as both an institution and a signifying practice was at the heart of Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which undoubtedly strongly influenced the long ’68 in France.

Combes adduces cases that demonstrate how literature and literary theory set the ground for the student movement or even became its protagonists. Structuralist critique dismantled literature and artworks as corollaries of the bourgeois ideology and economy (Combes Reference Combes2008, 15–19), whereas the neo-avant-garde groups in which theory mixed with experimental writing (the Situationist International, the Tel Quel group) explicitly wanted to revolutionize the society by revolutionizing literature and arts. For example, as early as 1958, Debord, the intellectual founder of the Situationists, proclaimed his ‘Theses on the Cultural Revolution’ (Combes Reference Combes2008, 30). This manifesto introduces the modernist concept of art as an intervention into a fluid reality. In contrast to the aim of an aesthetics to reproduce bygone fragments of life, Situationist art is described as ‘an experimental method for constructing everyday life’ which revolutionizes the capitalist regimentation of labour and leisure (Debord Reference Debord and Knabb2006). As Combes points out, the recurring topic of ‘literature and revolution’ appears prominently in the statement by Sollers, a prominent member of the Tel Quel group, published in Les lettres françaises a week before the irruption of the student protests. Here, Sollers criticizes the established notions of literature, the author and the work of art as so many symptoms of decadent bourgeois ideology; in contrast, he proclaims that ‘writing’ as practised in Tel Quel and the revolution both struggle for the same cause (Combes Reference Combes2008, 31–32).

In his meticulous sociology of the French avant-garde of the 1960s, Boris Gobille also contends that the student and working-class uprising caused a multi-levelled political crisis in which modernist writers and intellectuals of different generations and orientations (from surrealists and leftist existentialists to materialist structuralists) generally embraced a belief that literature, textual writing or speech had the capacity to transform not only the literary establishment but also capitalist society at large. Concomitantly, the political turmoil instigated the avant-garde authors who supported the movement to rethink the role of literature and their profession in view of revolution. According to Gobille (Reference Gobille2018, 149–199), they all attacked the nineteenth-century mythologies of the author-creator, whereby their attitudes ranged from a trade-unionist notion of the writer as worker – aligned with the working class in a transpersonal movement – to a detached posture of Leninist structuralists condemning ‘68rs for their pseudo-romantic and petty-bourgeois acting-out that failed to recognize the proletariat as the true transformative agency and the materialist structuralist theorists as the exclusive masterminds of revolution.

As for structuralist theory, the relations of its protagonists towards the student movement were more complicated as one might infer from the notorious anti-structuralist slogan ‘Structures don’t go down into the street’ (Rabaté Reference Rabaté2009, 36). Jean-Michel Rabaté shows that Lacan, for instance, readily signed a petition supporting the protesters, and praised their leader Cohn-Bendit, while his term jouissance appeared among the ’68 graffiti. Nevertheless, Lacan refused to play the role of the intellectual master of the movement and theorized instead on the impossibility of a breakthrough revolutionary act. Focusing on ‘Lacan’s tiered and layered responses to May ’68’, Rabaté, building on the work of Frédérique Mattoni, persuasively concludes that ‘the process of politicization’ also pervaded so-called structuralists

Whereas the opposing views on the roles of neo-avant-garde literature and structuralist theory in the French revolt of 1968 still incite hesitation, there is no doubt that Ljubljana – as a Yugoslav example of what Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek (Reference Tötösy de Zepetnek1999) has called ‘in-between peripherality’, and as a hub of a small-scale literary system – enabled a political interaction of the fields that in Paris were thought to be only co-present, if not separate.

May ’68 – The Last Season of Modernism and Slovenian in-between Peripherality

According to Fredric Jameson (Reference Jameson2002, 171–180) and Perry Anderson (Reference Anderson1984, 104–105), modernism of the first decades of the twentieth century is characterized by the resistance to academicism and to the commodification of culture; Anderson also foregrounds the imaginative proximity of revolution as a defining feature of modernism. After the Second World War, this defying potential of early modernism was commodified and canonized (in core modernisms) or lost in belated repetition (in peripheral modernisms), according to Anderson. The Eurocentric view that the primary measure of modernity resides in Western metropoles has recently been countered by the conception of plural modernisms (Wollaeger and Eatough Reference Wollaeger and Eatough2012). However, this conception masks the single ideological and economic background of the various modernisms, hollowing out the very notion of modernism in the process. Following Jameson’s critique of the idea of alternate modernities, the essence of modernism is to be found neither in the Western metropoles nor in the global periphery, but instead in the asymmetrical structure of relations between particular modernisms within the modern world-system (Juvan Reference Juvan2019a).

Franco Moretti asserts that, before the Second World War, modernism was ‘the last creative drive of European literature’ (Moretti Reference Moretti2013, 41). In his view, modernism, the last season of innovative European literature, was followed by the rise of postcolonial literatures. Anderson (Reference Anderson1984, 104–105) grasped modernism as ‘as a cultural field of force’ that opposes both aesthetic academicism and the modern cultural market while experiencing the ‘imaginative proximity of social revolution’. Similarly, Moretti used the term ‘the last literary season of Western culture’ (Moretti Reference Moretti2005, 209, emphasis in original) when he discussed early modernism as an ‘extraordinary concentration of literary masterpieces around the First World War’. Building on both Anderson and Moretti, the experimental literature produced in the global socio-political conjuncture of May ’68 could be viewed as the last season of modernism. This is when modernism in Slovenia synchronized with Paris, the city that Pascale Casanova has dubbed ‘the Greenwich meridian of literature’ (Casanova Reference Casanova and DeBevoise2004, 87–103).

In contrast to the military-political (and revolutionary) overtones of the notion of the avant-garde, experimental literature connotes rationality of scientific method, which is consistent with the theoretical or conceptual dimension of the neo-avant-garde, in which the procedural reflection of the artistic field and its environment is more important than the production of artefacts. Even though experimentation is an integral part of the hard sciences, it is their most contingent, risky and critical element: the experiment can lead to a new theory, but it can also destroy the working hypothesis. Explorative openness to the unpredictable is one of the essential intentions of the neo-avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s. This move fits the spirit of the experimental grassroots forms of the political struggle of the masses during the long ’68.

Peripheries in the literary world-system are, according to Moretti (Reference Moretti2013, 116), generally compelled into a belated compromise between local topics or perspectives and globalized forms emanating from metropoles, the monopolist origins of modernity. In the case of Slovenian literary culture, however, its peripherality (within the Yugoslav inter-literary community) enabled it to produce innovative political interlacements of theory and literature.

Ever since the long nineteenth century, the Slovenian literary field has been positioned at the periphery of the world-systems of languages, economies and literatures. Its texts were written in a minor Slavic language for a relatively slim readership of a small and dependent community embedded into a predominantly foreign-speaking polity and its faraway metropole. A populace of less than two million, its predominantly peasant class structure and insufficient economic capital did not allow for great numbers of literary actors and media. Consequently, writers performed several social roles, the literary one being often secondary to those in the economy, the Church or politics. As was often noticed, the literary discourse as such – with its representative language, fictional worlds and names – contributed substantially to the dissemination of nationalist ideology (Juvan Reference Juvan2019b, 136–137). Encouraging ethnocentric self-awareness through print media and the aesthetic elevation of the vernacular, the nineteenth-century literatures of small nations sought international recognition. They demonstrated their individuality by drawing on purportedly autochthonous folk traditions or by canonizing the figure of the national poet as their supposed representative in the canon of world literature. In the Slovenian case, the national poet is believed to have masterfully emulated the peaks of the classical canon and contemporaneous European literary achievements, thus proving that Slovenian literature has finally met supposedly universal aesthetic standards (Juvan Reference Juvan2019b, 35–56, 173–181).

Literary metropoles such as Paris typically base their global influence on the cultural capital that they have converted from the economic capital accumulated through imperialist exploitation of peripheries (for forms of capital, see Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu and Richardson1986). These peripheries of the literary world-system of course have much less cultural capital at their disposal. Thus, in its position of dependency, Slovenian literature has had to adopt models of global centres or regional sub-centres without any likelihood that its poetry, drama or fiction would start a transnational current prior to being consecrated by a metropole. The nation-building role of literature, the multi-functionality of its actors and the lack of their literary specialization, in turn, reduced the evolutionary potential of Slovenian literature by preventing it from differentiating internally.

In a small-scale literary system, the low numbers of producers, mediators, publishers and print media specialized in literary circulation may occasion a condensation of temporally and spatially heterogeneous imports – a sort of ‘time–space compression’, to borrow a term from David Harvey (Reference Harvey1990, 284–285, 291–307). A single item that a minor literary system is persuaded to select out of the series of equivalent phenomena from a more prosperous system acquires the quality of a metonymic exemplar of the core system, which may intensify its semiosis in the receiving system. Rudimentary as it is, the Slovenian media landscape virtually juxtaposes foreign texts that have been translated, adapted, imitated, re-written or commented on; even though works are imported from various traditions, they become neighbours in the gaze of Slovenian readers. This time–space compression of translated texts stimulates their interaction and hybridization in the receiving system. Accordingly, small and peripheral literary systems such as the Slovenian one are prone to unpredictable kinds of syncretism and do not evolve along the lines of core literatures – Dionýz Ďurišin (Reference Ďurišin1992, 43–48, 159–160, 170–183), referring to Georgi Gachev, speaks about an irregular and accelerated development of small literatures, while the Warwick Research Collective (2015), building mainly on Leon Trotsky and Jameson, discusses ‘combined and uneven development’ in the literary world-system.

These characteristics of peripheral and small-scale literary systems – including their capacity for global innovation based on irregular and syncretic development – continue to shape the relationship of Slovenian literature to the literary world-system in the twentieth century, as can be exemplified by the practices of the student journal Tribuna during the last season of modernism in the long ’68.

The literary peripherality of Ljubljana’s linkage to Paris during the historical conjuncture of the student revolt has its roots in a more extended geopolitical history. Until 1918, the Slovenian lands were provinces of the Habsburg Empire. When Vienna, the empire’s metropole, lost its centrality in the aftermath of the Austro-Hungarian defeat in the First World War, Slovenians, Croatians and Serbs formed their South Slavic nation-state. Fearing Austrian and Hungarian territorial aspirations on the one side and the ideological impact of Communist Russia on the other, the interwar Yugoslav kingdom sought support primarily from Western powers, particularly France. During the Communist-led revolution that was incorporated in the Partisan resistance against the Nazi-Fascist occupation, Democratic Federal Yugoslavia was established in 1943 under Tito’s leadership. This provisional state attempted to imitate the Communist model of the Soviet Union. Until the 1948 Tito–Stalin Split, the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, which emerged after the Second World War, gravitated to Moscow, the Communist metropole, and embraced the Soviet single-party alternative to Western capitalism and liberal democracy.

After 1948, Yugoslavia began to play the role of a buffer state between the capitalist West and the socialist East, that is, the First and Second Worlds. Having found themselves between two hostile centres of geopolitical influence, Tito’s Communists attempted to transcend Yugoslav in-between peripherality by taking a leading role in the global Non-Aligned Movement. Moreover, the experiment of Party-led socialist self-management started in the 1950s to replace both Western capitalism and Soviet planned economy. Western loans that strategically supported Yugoslavia during the conflict with Cominform and the ensuing tensions with the Warsaw Pact forced the Yugoslav economy to become dependent on the core of the capitalist world-system. Through an ideological and political distantiation from the Soviet bloc and the growing financial dependence on the core of the world-system, the Yugoslav Communist model of social modernization (industrialization, urbanization, education, women’s rights, equality, health-care) became increasingly open to capitalist modernity during the 1960s. Despite the ideological barrier, many elements of Western economic and political liberalism, consumerism, high culture and counter-culture trickled into Yugoslavia. Demonstrating the modernity and openness of the Yugoslav model of socialism, the government mostly tolerated or – in the case of architecture and fine arts – even supported the typical peripheral compromise with Western modernism. The compromise between Western metropolitan forms and their content or function, defined against the background of the policies and ideologies of Yugoslav self-management, could be viewed as socialist modernism. This took shape in the transition from the ‘socialist aestheticism’ of the 1950s to the ‘moderate modernism’ of the 1960s (Šuvaković Reference Šuvaković and Vičič2001, 25–26).

During the so-called Slovenian liberalism of the 1960s (parallel to Alexander Dubček’s reforms in Czechoslovakia), the hybrid of capitalist and socialist modernization produced a historical conjuncture that set the ground for the Slovenian participation in the global student movement (see Klasić Reference Klasić2012). Moretti’s formula of world literature as a compromise between imported global forms and local topics and perspectives (Moretti Reference Moretti2013, 116) can recapitulate this socio-economic context. Influenced by metropoles, Slovenian students imitated global forms of the insurrection (demonstrations, graffiti, sit-ins, campus occupations) to protest against what in their socio-economic system resembled the deficiencies of capitalism. They were against social inequality, poverty, unemployment, elitism, consumerism, bureaucracy, inadequate financing of education and the university, and the rigidity of university structures and curricula. Applying an anti-capitalist critique to the crisis of Yugoslav socialism (resulting partly from the interference of the market economy), student protesters in Slovenia and elsewhere in Yugoslavia appealed to the original ideals of the socialist revolution and called for a full realization of self-management, which the Communist hegemony was thought to betray. On the other hand, students appealed to western ideals of liberties to defy the democratic deficit of the Yugoslav regime (Fischer et al. Reference Fischer2005, 1024–1035, 1056–1075, 1125–1127, 1139–1143).