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PETER BROOKS
not see this: what swept across France - to the point of creating a
power vacuum - was not the spirit of professional demands, nor the
wish for a political change, but the desire for other relations among
men." This judgment by the Inter-Disciplinary Committee of "Liber–
ated Nanterre"2 strikes to the center of the human condition created
by the processes of modern industrial society (not capitalism only:
bureaucratic state socialism provoked a similar response from the stu–
dents of Prague): human relationships are deformed and alienated by
recuperation within the "consensus" because their place, extent and
nature are assigned by the demands of productivity and efficiency; the
individual loses the power to change anything of substance, to feel that
his life is an exercise of freedom. Desire, the key term of the Nanterre
report, is "disarmed," repressed and falsified: play and pleasure are
defined in terms of the "values" which promote commercial prosperity.
Repression in the Marxist sense
is
doubled by repression in the Freudian
sense. Hence Cobn-Bendit's original call for a revolt against "sexual
alienation"; hence his insistence on the value of play, ridicule, "buf–
foonery," as forces which can show up the absurd contradictions of the
system, and make the machine crack under the pressure of the human.
The students, the "unassimilated," have not yet entered the con–
sensus. Yet they are on the verge of doing so: they are in fact under–
going a process of conditioning designed to assimilate them, and
"disarm" their desires. The origins of the student revolt should be
sought in the interplay of the three terms
university-culture-society :
the
way a society uses its university to transmit and impose a cultural pat–
tern which is essentially a conditioning to assure that society's future
elites will participate fully in society, will accept its methods, goals and
ethos. The university indeed holds a monopoly (and in France it is a
state monopoly) of what is clearly the most important commodity in
any advanced society - knowledge. It alone selects, informs, conditions
and licenses those who will make the machine run. The body of future
managers - the students - are as helpless as a real proletariat in the
face of this process, and their helplessness is reinforced by their isola–
tion from the real productive forces of society, their "ghettoization."
Escape from the university ghetto cannot be sought in an alliance with
the managerial class, which exploits the ghetto's isolation; the way
out can only consist in a gesture of fraternity with those exploited by
the managers, the other potentially revolutionary force, the workers-
2. A translation of a portion of this Committee's report appeared in
PR
(Fall, 1968).
