34
PETER BROOKS
fonns of action discovered by the insurgents. We could call this real
revolution a cultural revolution because it has to do with changes in
mentalities, ideologies and language, with mental structures and cate–
gories, and finds first expression in those groups professionally con–
cerned with mentalities, with culture and communication. The political
revolution that seemed so close on May 29 and 30 did not take place
in large measure because there was no political solution possible, given
the present condition of the French political left. But in a modern
industrial society, the point is less one of the party in power, or even
the form of the regime, than of the organization of labor, the distribu–
tion of technological power, the control of information and publicity:
"who rules" is a question that can be answered outside the political
structures. The students symbolized this in one of their earliest demon–
strations, in a march where they passed the
Assemblee Nationale
without
even so much as stopping, but went on to the offices of
Le Figaro,
that
daily dispenser of the platitudes of French bourgeois culture, shouting
aLe Figaro contre nous!"
Another goal frequently set for marches
was the ORTF: the "right to information" was one of the students'
major themes, and they early demanded an hour of television time a
week to bring their cultural revolution to the people. Throughout the
crisis, they emphasized the need to explain what they were doing and
what they wanted, to workers in the factories, to journalists, to anyone
who would listen. The reporters of the independent "peripheral" radio
station, Radio-Luxembourg, which provided excellent direct coverage
of the month's events, were welcomed as heroes in the student camp.
And it is unquestionably in the communications field that the students
evoked the most profound response: at the ORTF, among film makers,
writers, directors of theatrical troupes (some of which organized per–
formances in the factories during the strikes), directors of the
Maisons
de la Culture,
journalists.
It would of course be an error to confuse the artistic avant-garde
with the revolutionary avant-garde - the former has too often shown
itself reactionary in politics. The point is rather the creation of a
critical attitude toward the totality of our cultural assumptions, in
education, communications, art and so on, a new test of the validity
and relevance of the "values" which existing society has utilized or
fabricated for its self-perpetuation. Here, the "Critical University"
could evidently be a real revolutionary force, as could a freed television
in ferment, new experiments in the theater and the cinema, in the
programs of the
Maisons de la Culture
in the working-class suburbs.
Such a cultural revolution would already implicitly be the "anarchist"
