12
PETER BROOKS
REVOLUTION; THE MORE I MAKE THE REVOLUTION, THE MORE I WANT TO
MAKE LOVE.
And, above a sign forbidding smoking,
IT IS FORBIDDEN TO
FORBID
(Law of May
13, 1968).
For five extraordinary weeks, from the evening of May 13 until the
arrival of the police on June 16, Imagination held power at the Sor–
bonne. "It is forbidden to forbid": in the courtyard, orthodox party
Communists, Maoists, Trotskyites, Castroists, Anarchists, Situationists set
up tables side by side to distribute the tracts which kept the mimeograph
machines running round the clock. Groups formed and dissolved around
workers come from the striking factories to discuss the next move in the
crisis. The loudspeakers crackled out over the discussions: "Com–
rades ... ," then a call for five female volunteers to cook lunch for un–
specified hundreds, announcement of a new march to the Renault fac–
tory in Boulogne-Billancourt, a request for blankets for the nursery, or
medicines for the wounded - victims of police clubs and grenades–
in the infirmary. In the large lecture halls of the ground floor, sessions
of "permanent questioning" sat continually: on the future of culture, the
role of women in the revolution, poetry and anarchy; while in the class–
rooms upstairs, "paritary committees" worked feverishly to formulate
their vision of the future university. One sensed that what was once
the amorphous and atomized mass called the Faculty of Letters and
Social Sciences of Paris had become a great community, diverse, often
divergent, but moved by a feeling of urgency and joy
in
the creation of
a new order. As one student painted on the wall on May 23:
ALREADY
TEN DAYS OF HAPPINESS.
The Cultural Revolution was a Happening,
but a Happening that would perpetuate itself into the Reign of Imagina–
tion. Already,
it
had exploded into the body politic, throwing into ques–
tion all the established hierarchies, all the commonplaces about authority
and expertise, their control and exercise. The future was etched in the
phrase TOUT EST POSSIBLE.
Where did this cultural revolution come from? What did it mean?
What may
be
its future resonances, now that the Sorbonne posters have
been turned into expensive art books, and the May days of 1968 assi–
milated to a folkloristic rite of a type which the bourgeoisie may - occa–
sionally - permit itself as a supplemental luxury?
It
is in accordance with the classical dynamics of revolution that
everything should have started in the most advanced and relatively
liberalized sector, at the new suburban campus of the Faculty of Letters
and Social Sciences at Nanterre. Even physically, Nanterre makes mani–
fest the contradictions which set a revolution in motion: a concentra–
tion of factory-modern steel and glass buildings rising in the midst of
