Common Knowledge

Common Knowledge 10.2 (2004) 361

Kristin Ross, May '68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 238 pp.

Historical events, even when they are caught up in teleologies that relegate them to dustbins, can surprise us by their afterlives—or so Ross persuasively argues in her political history of the representations of May '68 in France. Ross's narrative follows the establishment, ascendancy, and (she hopes) ultimate dissolution of a consensus view in the historiography and popular memory of the May events, a consensus she refers to as the "police conception of history." What she means is a view ensuring "that a properly functional social order functions properly" even at the expense of effacing "any singularity of experience." That uniform representation was attained over time through the writings, films, and commemorations offered by loosely affiliated monopolists of memory: ex-gauchistes in search of redemption, individuals associated with nouvelle philosophie (these tended to use the medium of television—initially the program Apostrophes—to remarkable effect), and once-radical media organs (Libération) that moderated their message to gain broader legitimacy.

Against this consensus and the categories that ground its reductive interpretation ("youth revolt," "generational conflict," "individual consumerism"), Ross counterposes her own "lost history." She argues that the documents of May '68 amount to a critique of specialization, "a critique of the social division of labor," and that they return us to the "thematics of equality: overcoming the separation between manual and intellectual work, refusing professional or cultural qualification as a justification for social hierarchies and systems of political representation, refusing all delegation, undermining specialization."

Greil Marcus argued, in an essay ("Sixty-Eight Eighty-Sixed") published in Common Knowledge a dozen years ago, that the antidotes to revolutionary historical amnesia are the archival traces of the event. Ross's work has done us the great service of drawing on an exhaustively wide array of French sources on May and its subsequent figurations. In this way, Ross not only provides a theoretically self-reflexive rescue of the varied memories of May, but also produces a politically engaged historical scholarship that, while less skeptical and more polemical, nevertheless may help illuminate elements of a past that surely have implications for brighter possible futures.

Lawrence Jones is a senior analyst at Lexecon, Inc., in Chicago.