FOURTH WORLD
35
revolution because it would mean the insurrectional seizure of the
power of the word - the power of the intellect and the power of com–
munication - by those who did not previously wield it, the expropria–
tion of established cultural hierarchies.
What the students did for a time clearly achieve - with the tur–
moil of communications media, with the proliferation of flamboyant
tracts composed, mimeographed and distributed almost instantaneously,
with the stark and beautiful posters produced by the
«atelier populaire"
of Beaux-Arts, perhaps most of all with the graffiti which appeared
on walls everywhere to give voice to the individual's participation in the
new order of things - was a redistribution of the power of the word,
and of the word as power. They seized and exercised a language
which had belonged to the "others," to the forces of alienation, to the
government, to official sources of information, to propaganda and
advertising, gave it a new vitality and originality and made it serve
imagination in power.
If
several of the soviets' reports talked about
effecting an "accession to language" of a proletariat which
has
his–
torically always been dumb and let others speak for it, this is because
they felt a new movement was seeking articulation - an articulation
which has nothing to do with ballots, at least for the time being, but
could
be
the basis for a future cultural revolution to end alienation
and repression - in the Freudian as well as the Marxist senses - by
a reconquest of the power of expression, its redistribution to those
from whom it had been taken away, or to whom it had never been
granted. Already, during the May crisis, one felt a certain reconquest
of the city by the citizens: every morning after the nights of protest
and violence, groups of people would gather on the sidewalks or in the
devastated streets to discuss the night's events, the future of the crisis,
new solutions. The Latin Quarter became a vast forum. And this was
a first satisfaction of the "desire" that swept across France in May, 1968,
shaking "the edifice of exploitation, oppression and alienation."
Peter Brooks
