The Poverty of Our Protests by Katie Crabtree

As the month of May draws to a close, I think it fitting to consider the reverberations of the movement led by students, which occupied university and public space and, in tandem with a mass workers’ strike, brought the state of France to a halt. Fifty years on, and elsewhere from Paris May 1968[1], I do this with some reservation, because in the years that have followed this month of protest, interpretation and analysis have multiplied on these events obscuring, devaluing or fetishizing its meaning. As Joan Brandt, in the preface to the 2001 L’Esprit Créateur special issue, “The Legacy of May 1968” comments, “Despite the proliferation of commentary, however, or perhaps because of it, our understanding of the events remains no more complete than it was 30 years ago” (p. 3). Indeed to declare the meaning and historical significance of these events is to do violence to the nature and spirit of this movement. My aim is not to concretely analyze May ’68’s place in History, but to reflect upon educational protest in its poverty. This is in response to Brandt’s gloss on the two main interpretations of May 68’s non-revolution: as either an exposure of the Marxist utopianism as a mythic metanarrative, or as a failure demonstrating the prevailing order of liberal capitalism. I will consider the political writings of a figure often left out of commentary on May 1968: Jean-François Lyotard. Though May ‘68 is remembered as a ‘philosophical’ revolt and the involvement of French intellectuals such as Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault and Sartre on these events are often cited (Van Reeth, 2018), Lyotard’s analysis and direct involvement is largely forgotten or misinterpreted[2]. His commentary on the student revolt sheds light on May ’68 without subverting these events to capitalism or a Marxist dialectic. Rather than thinking of the movement in terms of reformist political maneuvers, Lyotard’s thinking demonstrates a sensitivity to the political ‘event’ and indicates the educative potential in protest, revolt, or refusal.

That the dark and riotous protest of the students did not ‘succeed’ in changing the political order, is perhaps not a failure.

To situate Lyotard’s writing on the student movement of ’68 and the large dissatisfaction with the educational climate in France under de Gaulle, it is important to consider the context of the University of Nanterre, where Lyotard taught philosophy at this time. In 1963, the year before the opening of Nanterre, the Fouchet reforms introduced a two-tiered higher education system in which working class students were tracked into shorter technical degrees, as such reducing access to university study (Benét and Daniels, 1980). The centralized administration of higher education institutions, in addition to antiquated, disciplinary university cultures was a breeding ground for unrest; specifically, Nanterre, a campus-style university founded as a nod to critiques against the traditional structure of French universities, was built in the Northwest suburbs of Paris, in largely working class and migrant communities (Bamford, 2017). The juxtaposition of this privileged university site amongst Paris’ less well-off proved explosive and Nanterre would become an epicenter of revolt in 1968. The lack of university spaces meant that in 1967, classes were overrun and teaching faculty went on strike (Bamford, 2017). In the early months of 1968, Nanterre saw several incidents of unrest. Most notably, was the March 22 movement during which students occupied the university buildings in response to the arrests of National Vietnam Committee members (Lyotard, 1970). Lyotard was directly engaged in this movement, even drafting a document urging workers to join the protest of the students (Butor, 2001), which rejected the educational reforms, and largely the French political order. Nanterre saw the suspension of classes, as on May 3 police broke up protestors at the Sorbonne, May 10 saw a riot in the Latin Quarter of Paris, and on May 13 the start of a general strike of workers, culminating a call for a referendum by de Gaulle with groups of the political right gaining ground against the left (Marxist Internet Archive, n.d.).

The revolt of 1968 is often depicted in pictures of students in the streets, altercations with the police, barricades, and university spaces occupied by protesters and General Assemblies. To demonstrate the extent to which the activism led by students disrupted daily life on campus and throughout Paris, I will consider the experiences of Roger McKeon, a former student of Lyotard’s at the time. McKeon describes the extent of the damage to the Nanterre campus after March 22: “the building housing philosophy and sociology (i.e. leftist disciplines), was completely vandalized and so depressing that I would always take the shortest route to whatever class I was attending” (R. McKeon, personal communication, May 14 2018). Further McKeon alludes to the susceptibility of demagogy at General Assemblies. This speaks to the variety of schools of thought and figures present in the revolt: iconic student leaders like Daniel Cohn-Brendt, Trotskyism, Maoism, and the French Communist Party which actively discouraged relations between the student protest and the workers’ strikes (Abidor, 2018). McKeon describes this era as a bleak one: “To me, anxiety was the main affect pervading the events of that whole period, which was very dark in spite of its superficial ebullience” (R. McKeon, personal communication, May 14 2018). That the dark and riotous protest of the students did not ‘succeed’ in changing the political order, is perhaps not a failure.

“The movement affirms the freedom to speak equally, mockery of the hierarchy, the courage to submit all questions to open debate, the destruction of enforced isolation, encounter, and initiative, against the continuing violence of oppression in businesses, in leisure, in families, in the establishments of so-called education” Jean-François Lyotard (1968, p. 42).

Lyotard’s writing on the revolt addresses the poverty of such a protest or event to incite revolution. He, however, addresses the students’ vague and defuse refusal of their society and political order, which points to the radical, educative potential of such an eruption in itself. In addition to the explicit bureaucratization of higher education and society, Lyotard also rejects the structure of the French university, with its rigid hierarchical system: “Why has this crisis occurred, if not because traditional cultural values, relics of all kinds (to cite a few at random: the predominance of a university discourse and freedoms characteristic of the Middle Ages, the Napoleonic hierarchy, the secularism and neutrality of the Third Republic) combined in the university practice, are being annihilated by capitalism?” (1970, p. 46). Lyotard’s reflections on the revolt is two-pronged, there is of course an anti-capitalism but also a resistance to modernist assumptions of the place and purpose of the university[3].

This necessitates thinking about political action differently. Veering from his earlier more militant Marxism and inspired by the students’ revolt, Lyotard’s political thought “engage[s] a politics of writing that will not assume the fixity and authority, will not seek the ‘last word’” (Readings, 1993, p. xvi). This is the poverty of such an eruption, that it lacks the foresight of its own meaning. Lyotard’s thinking points to the radical political action of this eruption of desire, of force, of refusal, claiming that the movement of 1968 was the signaling of a ‘new era’ in history. This ‘era’ is not a stage of history but “the spirit that shook the nation to the point of creating a power vacuum was not about claiming rights within society. This is not a will for political renewal but the desire for something different, the desire for another society, for different relations between people” (1968, p. 41). Here Lyotard, concedes that the university can never be a site of revolution, or a place from which political reform can emanate. Rather, what happens at university (or any studious thought elsewhere) can unleash a desire or intensity in the political field: “The movement turned out this way, caught everything off guard, offering a figure of what this society repress or denies, a figure of its unconscious desire” (1993, p. 63)[4]. As such, Lyotard explicates the ‘poverty’ of the protests, in that they did not (could not) engage in a dialectical politics, which would result in reformism. Rather, the movement of the students was an eruption of the students’ desire for a different political, societal relation, and notion of the knowledge of created and sustained at universities.

Apedagogy then is the continuation of invention, of being enthused by thought, of chasing after desire in thought. This inverts the traditional role of the intellectual or the educated person, as a leader of others in a democracy.

This is not a reason to stop educating, or even to leave the university. The eruption of May ’68 magnifies the place of thinking, judging, and studying. What is interesting here is that for Lyotard, this force, in order to retain its potency, the students’ philosophic protest and the workers’ more practical protest must continue to relate to one another. That is, social experience and knowledge creation are necessarily intertwined; “The movement affirms the freedom to speak equally, mockery of the hierarchy, the courage to submit all questions to open debate, the destruction of enforced isolation, encounter, and initiative, against the continuing violence of oppression in businesses, in leisure, in families, in the establishments of so-called education” (1968, p. 42). This rebuke of the university’s place in divesting knowledge and creative production from ‘social experience’ carries into Lyotard’s reflections upon May 1968’s ramifications for the faculty, who can also act as repressors: “The teacher/pupil relation ought to be permanently protected against both a falling back into the old hierarchic magisterial relation and the demagogy that proposes a symmetry between the teacher and the pupil, as well as against the training of the pupil as a mere expert/counselor” (1968, p. 45). What results is not a system of critical pedagogy but an apedagogy: “I call it apedagogy because all pedagogy participates in this repression, including that which is improved in the internal and external relations of the ‘political’ organization” (1970, p. 59). Apedagogy then is the continuation of invention, of being enthused by thought, of chasing after desire in thought. This inverts the traditional role of the intellectual or the educated person, as a leader of others in a democracy. Rather, the ‘intellectual’ or the student is led (educatively) within thought. This makes education performative, it must be carried out in study, and not predetermined by the political order or the regimes of the university.

To borrow a tactic of the French 68ers, I will end with an ironic note to flesh out the distinctness of an apedagogy. That is to compare it to an entirely different protest, impoverished in another light. That of the response to the proposed ‘Grad Tax’ which ultimately did not succeed, in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act[5]. These responses range from the bumbling and flustered; take the words of Kalamazoo College President Jorge Gonzalez, “It’s baffling to me that in a time when we are in the era of the knowledge economy, Congress is trying to impose a tax on knowledge” (Stateside, 2017). There were less inane responses such as the walk-out organized by PhD students at the University of Southern California, whose aim is to reclaim and make visible the place of graduates in the system of higher education: “Graduate student workers are the future of science, research, the arts, technology, development, education, health, and social science. And we are on the verge of being pushed out by an administration that does not see the value of graduate student workers on the larger education system” (Grad Tax Walkout, 2017). But is this not also impoverished?

This is no longer in the sense of lacking direction, or the ability to enact a reform or revolution in that of May ’68, but lacking in an educative sense. Despite our colleges and universities’ relentless defenses of their existence by way of the critical thinking their education instills in their students, these responses to the Grad Tax have accepted the place of higher education and labor of the graduate student within it, as a system of production of future employees and knowledge makers for the economy? This accepts pedagogy, the university’s training exercise for the de facto way of being in society. Whereas apedagogy suspends such presumptions of education and finds in studying, in thinking, a desire for entirely different ways of relating to education, to each other.

[1]It should be noted that student protests this month of May 2018, have brought universities to a close and have caused the suspension of exams at several French universities, including Nanterre and Lyon; these protests are in response to plans introduced by President Macron that would reduce university access by making ‘stricter requirements’ to enter university (RFI, 2018). Though it is too soon to tell if, in the 50th anniversary of May 1968, the present protests by French students is an echo of the revolt.

[2]Marcel van der Linden (1997), in his account of the radical French group Socialisme ou Barbarie which was marked by its anti-bureaucracy and its opposition to the French communist party, lists Lyotard as an ‘orthodox’ Marxist when he split from the the group to work on the publication Pouvoir Ouvrier, but concludes by consigning Lyotard to a postmodern relativism. Neither is correct in understanding Lyotard’s engagement in ’68 and his shifting engagement with Marxism, from a more militant position in his work on Algerian independence to that of his figural, libidinal, or even sublime ways of resisting capital. Lyotard’s unpopular drifting from orthodox Marxism made him the butt of an attack by the student communist group U.E.C. in 1968.: “Le solo funèbre de J.F. Lyotard” or “The Funeral Solo of J.F. Lyotard” (Bamford, 2017).

[3]Both themes can be found in the later, infamous The Postmodern Condition (1984).

[4]This is in part a precursor to Discourse, Figure (1971) in which Lyotard presents the figural as that which is dissimulated in rational discourse. In the preface to the recent English translation, John Mowitt (2011) contends that the figural is a way in which Marxism can continue to be heard in Lyotard’s writing.

[5]The House tax bill would have repealed Section 117(d) which included the tax exemption for tuition fee waivers as well as the Student Loan Interest Deduction, which allows tax payers to deduct up to $2,500 from student loan interest (American Council on Education, 2017).

Katie Crabtree is a Ph.D. student in the Philosophy of Education at Leeds Trinity University, University of Leeds. Her research attempts to re-imagine liberal arts university education and the meaning of being a student. She focuses on the philosophy of Jean-François Lyotard. Katie holds a M.A. in the Philosophy of Education from UCL Institute of Education, a M.Sc. in Higher Education from the University of Oxford, and a B.S. in Psychology from Grand Valley State University.

References

Abidor, M. (19 Apr 2018). 1968: When the Communist Party stopped a French revolution. The New York Review of Books. http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/04/19/1968-when-the-communist-party-stopped-a-french-revolution/

American Council on Education. 2017. Tax reform and higher education: What students, families, and institutions need to know. American Council on Education. http://www.acenet.edu/Pages/Higher-Education-and-Tax-Reform.a…&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b10ee3006d-e8bd840390-168819529

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Stateside. (20 Nov 2017). Kalamazoo College president: It’s baffling that Congress is trying to impose a “tax on knowledge”. Michigan Radio. http://michiganradio.org/post/kalamazoo-college-president-it-s-baffling-congress-trying-impose-tax-knowledge

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