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PETER BROOKS
jects were and how one went about studying them, something virtually
unknown in the French educational system. The celebrated phrase
L'imagination prend le pouvoir
did not mean only the Dada carnival of
the Sorbonne courtyard ; it meant also the work of the
commissions
paritaires
in the various disciplines, groups which produced both utopian
generalities and very concrete proposals for the reorganization of studies
- to which Edgar Faure's reform, as far as it got, owed much. Here
again, the French revolt seems to me exemplary: destruction and crea–
tion, dreaming and practicality, revolution and reformism met in the
student soviets, in the spontaneous anarchist seizure of power within
the factory of knowledge.
Spender is attentive to the importance of the anarchist model; he
has an interesting discussion of Voline's anarchist account of the Russian
Revolution, and some fine pages on the anarchist imagination. But I
think he underestimates the real value of the imaginative anarchy which
the French students, reviving their indigenous revolutionary tradition,
brought to the problems of seizure of power and reconstruction of the
university, the way in which they returned power and responsibility to
those directly concerned. The students' anarchist model indeed proved
temporarily exportable, to the factories where the strikes began outside
the framework of the Marxist trade unions, with "spontaneous" organiza–
tion at "the base." The anarchist model may in the future prove far
more enduring a revolutionary ideal than the Marxist because it pro–
vides for a direct and immediate reordering of human social experience
along with the reordering of economic structures. To ask the students
to go beyond this model and present a "program" for a restructured
technological society is, as Spender sees, absurd: such a society could
only be seen
in
terms of what it was, of what exists. Cohn-Bendit is
surely right when he talks of "lauching an experiment" that breaks with
existing society and wins "a glimpse of a possibility," something that then
vanishes, but has shown what the truly new could be.
To the anarchist imagination Spender effectively contrasts the
cloistered virtue of George Kennan's and Raymond Aron's university,
and the brave new technetronic totalitarianism of Zbigniev Brezezinski:
the worlds of those who, if forced to choose, prefer order
to
social
justice. In his critique of Kennan's
Democracy and the Student Left,
Spender has very pertinent things to say about the evasion of mo–
rality through the invocation of complexity, and the resimplification
of complexity in war.
If
he convincingly renders the sense of free–
dom for the Czechs, Spender also masterfully records the experiential
meaning of cynicism in the case of
Encounter
and the CIA. Against
this sellout world of politics, the students are forced to wage what
