HAPPENINGS
539
attention did the insult not mask a dangerous attempt to cut the student
movement off from the worker movement, and to maintain the latter
within the social order and established politics. We must counterattack
by consolidating our union with the workers on the basis of a critique
of this "order" in its entirety. But this union is not a subordination,
either of workers to students or students to workers. The student move–
ment has brought to the revolution a dimension that the workers move–
ment, such as it is today, had lost. The student movement is far more
than a detonator in the class struggle; it is a constituant element in
theory and practice. For the real problem posed by modern societies is
no longer simply that of the suppression of the boss as the owner of
capital, but that of the separation between those who give directives
and those who carry them out. By placing this problem in the fore–
ground, the student movement has shown that this point of the revolu–
tionary program, representing the most radical content of socialism,
IS
the only valid reply to the contradictions of modern societies.
II.
The Faculty
1) The Faculty is not an independent institution consecrated to the
elaboration and transmission of a knowledge for its own sake. A society
like ours, which can subsist only by striving ceaselessly for the complete
integration of all its functions, cannot maintain within itself a zone of
free knowledge and free expression. The Faculty is at the center of two
grand operations directed at the means of understanding and expression:
their defusing and their recuperation. Their defusing is the Faculty of
Dead Letters; their recuperation, the Faculty of Human Relations. In
the first case, intelligence and inventiveness are subverted from practice
toward fetishism of the finished work, of the past, of what is established;
in the second case, these qualities are employed to condition the work
force, to increase its efficiency. Defusing creates erudition, recuperation
expertise. All the imagination of which the ruling class is capable can
go no further than this: to arrange for the Faculty to produce experts
rather than esthetes. . . .
2) Not only are the means of understanding and expression reserved
to a few;
by this very tact
they cease to be means of comprehension and
creation, they become a culture which is separated, barricaded behind
pure enjoyment or efficiency, denatured. It is a fact that expression and
understanding are most often doomed to find their field of development
outside the University.
It
would be vain to democratize admission to the
University if the alienation of the spirit which reigns within its walls
were to remain intact. The Faculty must become the smithy of tools
and works.
