boredom is always counter-revolutionary

If anyone who reads this is from Brighton or the University of Sussex, I’ve recently been involved in curating a small exhibition from the Library’s Mai 68 archive, and we’re putting it up on Friday (2nd May) in one of the glass cabinets on the right as you enter the building.

It comes as my small contribution to the commemoration of May 68 on its 40th anniversary. There are some good things going on in London: some tenuously-associated, already over-documented movements; but also some level of tracing how the events were felt in wider cultural spheres. All interesting stuff, of course, but problematic in how the evenements are (re)historicized. The passage below comes from a collection of posters produced by the Atelier Populaire, the renamed Ecole des Beaux Arts, occupied by students early in May ‘68, who would screenprint posters to be wheat-pasted all over Paris during the strikes:

The posters produced by the Atelier Populaire are weapons in the service of the struggle and are an inseperable part of it. Their rightful place is in the centers of conflict, that is to say, in the streets and on the walls of the factories. To use them for decorative purposes, to display them in bourgeois places of culture or to consider them as objects of aesthetic interest is to impair both their function and their effect. This is why the Atelier Populaire has always refused to put them on sale. Even to keep them as historical evidence of a certain stage in the struggle is a betrayal, for the struggle itself is of such primary importance that the position of an outside observer is a fiction which inevitably plays into the hands of the Ruling Class. That is why these works should not be taken as the final outcome of an experience, but as an inducement for finding, through contact with the masses, new levels of action, both on the cultural and the political place. (Atelier Populaire)

Their fear is that their material legacy will function as an inert historical document rather than a dialogic interpretation of specific circumstances and an active site of propagandhist resistance in an ongoing conflict. Whilst many of the more famous images appear to carry vague, catch-all anti-capitalist slogans, most of the posters were reactions and responces to particular events (as opposed to the graffiti, which takes a more Situationist/Surrealist inflection). Taken out of their particular historical instance and experiential context, it is feared that the posters will become either art – bourgeois and decorative – or history – depoliticized and static – shorn of their revolutionary purpose. The dilemma to a contemporary enthusiast (who, for whatever reason, hesitates in acting against the express interests of those more immediately involved) is in what context these artefacts can now be brought to attention.

A similar situation was played out when the ICA held an exhibition on the Situationists in 1989. This was perhaps even closer to the bone: in 1961, at a conference also at the ICA, it was announced that “the Situationists of which you believe yourselves perhaps to be the judges, will one day judge you”. When asked exactly what Situationism is, Guy Debord said “We’re not here to answer cuntish questions!” and promptly left. Nearly thirty years later, though, and relations between the institution and the (ex)situationists seemed to have calmed down. Ralph Rumney, in interview with Stewart Home, sounds apathetic and quiescent to the ironies of the exhibition, willing to myth-bust Debord and concede to his own material circumstances: “Now I’m getting older and want to earn a living, its nice to see the work doing something for me after all these years”.

So, is my glass cabinet of ephemera doing a disservice to the Atelier Populaire? Is this exhibition counter-revolutionary? I imagine that really depends on how you perceive the revolutionary situation at present. I’m certainly not working for The Man, but neither am I advocating a Situationist sense of despecialized social roles. The exhibition enforces the artist-observer, producer-consumer divide, producing a very real distance between the observer and the revolutionary situation. Yet that is to assume that these images still have some revolutionary potential, that they are molotov cocktails only to be unleashed in the fight against the forces of alienation and division. Really, what these posters have come to represent is a nostalgia for revolutionary potential. Although still constituting a political aesthetic, the emphasis is on the aesthetic.

This is not to say, however, that these are simply decorative items to be displayed within triumphant capitalist environments like the pelts of slain beasts. This circumstance is more true when applied to the co-option of revolutionary or anti-capitalist iconography into explicitly commercial settings, from Che Guevara t-shirts to ad campaigns drawing on Situationist aesthetics: capitalism’s seemingly inevitable reification of oppositional voices, its de-detourement of iconography. Rather, we can understand exhibitions of revolutionary cultural material in a sense of reconfigured semiotics, which doesn’t hold onto these artefacts as revolutionary tools in and of themselves, but as crystallisations of a revolutionary ideology that has passed but that allows for new formations and new aesthetics. Valentin Volosinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929), reacting against the algebraic fixity of Saussurean linguistics, locates the site of revolutionary struggle at the sign, on the plane of these images, as opposed to an idealistic conception of ideology behind culture:

Every phenomenon functioning as an ideological sign has some kind of material embodiment… consciousness itself can arise and become a viable fact only in the material embodiment of signs.

The ideology, then, exists within these artefacts, rather than behind them. Volosinov continues to identify a distinction between “theme” and “meaning”: the theme, or initial significance, is “individual and unreproducible, just as the utterance [in this case, the poster in situ on the Parisian street] is individual and unreproducible”; whilst the meaning, although the “lower level of linguistic significance” and essentially meaningless itself, “possesses potentiality”. A contemporary observer may now be unable to grasp the theme of these posters – that can only be understood by those who were there at the time – but can sense their meaning, however dislocated it may be from a specific stuggle or moment of revolutionary potential.

If this is beginning to sound apologetic or even defensive of bourgeois ritual, then I shall take recourse to Derrida’s “La Parole Soufflee” from Writing and Difference (1967). Here, in relation to Antonin Artaud – who was himself quoted via ‘68 street graffiti – Derrida says that,

Artaud knew that all speech fallen from the body, offering itself to understanding or reception, offering itself as a spectacle, immediately becomes stolen speech. Becomes a signification which I do not possess because it is a signification. Theft is always the theft of a speech or text, of a trace.

As such, although the primary signification of the Atelier Populaire posters may forever be lost, they offer speech to be stolen, voices to be spirited away and recontextualised, reexamined. La lutte continue. We should not shy away from revisiting these materials out of context, nor should we be delicate about coddling this iconography as if we could damage its revolutionary potential. At the risk of sounding trite, these images have an inspirational function, rather than a more immediately revolutionary one. The meaning of the posters is now partly nostalgic, yes; but it is a nostalgia for a moment when representation became real, when counter-alienation forces took material form. We are not to reproduce these forms, but we can sense the continued relevance of their meaning. These posters should be seen and felt.

[I may re-draft this post. Its late and I'm tired.]