1 THE POLICE CONCEPTION OF HISTORY SOCIOLOGY AND THE POLICE “But nothing happened in France in ’68. Institutions didn’t change, the university didn’t change, conditions for workers didn’t change—nothing happened.” The speaker, a well-known German sociologist, was responding to a talk I had given about the problems presented by the social memory of ’68 in France. He continued: “ ’68 was really Prague, and Prague brought down the Berlin Wall.”1 Nothing happened in France, and everything happened in Prague—this was an interpretation I had not encountered be- fore in such a succinct form. Certainly, a more international perspective on ’68 than the one I offered that day has long been available, one that emphasizes the convergence in the 1960sof the national liberation struggles (Cuba, Indochina), the antibu- reaucratic struggles (Hungary, Czechoslovakia), and the anti- capitalist and anti-authoritarian struggles that erupted in the imperialist metropoles of Europe and North America. But the direction of this remark was clearly different. Not only had the third world been eliminated from the picture, but now France was disappearing as well. It was not that many different things happened throughout the world in a brief set of time, it was that only one thing happened; it happened in Prague, and what happened in Prague were the seeds that would later fulfill a triumphant Cold War teleology: the end of actually existing socialism.2 Was this the post-1989 voice of the Cold War victor, 1. Wolf Lepenies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, October 1999. 2. The idea that “Prague ’68 brought down the Berlin Wall” in some sort of direct relation of cause and effect in itself raises basic questions of historical causal- ity, particularly since insurgents in Prague in 1968 (unlike those of 1989) did not seem to view their aspirations for more democracy as being at all incompatible with socialism. See Jean-François Vilar, “Paris-Prague: Aller simple et vague retour,” Lignes 34 (May 1998): 87: “The fact is that no one, in Czechoslovakia [in 1968] en- visaged departing from a socialist schema. The fact is also that in 1989–90 almost no 19 20 chapter one sweeping up everything that occurred in the twentieth century into that one framework, into that one lone narrative? And if something doesn’t fit in that narrative, such as May ’68 in France, does it then have no significance? Has change become unthinkable outside of that narrative? The fall of socialism and the seemingly undisputed hegemony achieved by capitalism distances our world from the world of ’68 to the point where it becomes quite difficult to imagine a time when people once envisioned a world different in essential ways from the one in which we now live. In this sense, the sociologist’s remarks at Princeton are in keeping with much of the post-1989 assessment of May, a recasting or a forgetting that harnesses May’s energy directly to the inevitable outcome of the world of the present. Even French May, by some accounts now, when it is acknowledged to have happened, had this outcome—the world of today— as its goal.3 Through a curious ruse of history, the assault from the left on the reformism and bureaucracy of the French Communist Party had the paradoxical effect of sounding the death knells for the hope of any systemic or revolutionary change from that moment on—and this, according to some ex-gauchistes claiming an after-the-fact prescience, was precisely what was desired at the time. In this view, the years separating ’68 from the virulent anti-Marxism of prominent ex-gauchistes in the mid-1970s are erased from memory, so that those counter-movement phenomena can be made to appear as the secret “meaning,” the “underlying desire” of the event all along. Was the succinctness of the sociologist’s assessment of French May grounded in the confidence with which the discipline of sociology—the field that has dominated the interpretation of the May events—claims the ability to measure change and even determine the criteria according to which change can be measured? The feeling that “nothing happened” in May is, of course, frequently expressed—with differing political/affective tones—throughout France today. “Nothing happened, except for the wo- men’s movement—and look what that has done to the family”—that is, nothing happened, but everything that did happen was regrettable. This is one version. Another version sounds like this: “Nothing happened. The one defended fixing up the social system within the framework of any kind of ‘socialism.’ ” Vilar, a resident of Prague, states that 1968 in the area that was formerly Czechoslovakia today, far from representing the founding liberatory moment in the march to the present, is instead “never thought about, except among friends.” At the level of official history, Prague ’68 seems best forgotten, its aspirations incompatible with, rather than leading to or causing—as Wolf Lepenies and others like him imagine—the present-day market democracy. 3. See, for example, Gilles Lipovetsky, L’ère du vide: Essais sur l’individualisme contemporaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1983). the police conception of history 21 French State was able to absorb all that political turbulence and now all those guys have fabulous careers and are driving BMWs”—as though those French driving BMWs today were the only participants in the move- ment then. Or “Nothing happened politically—but culturally the changes were enormous.” This is perhaps the most prevalent version heard in France today, an assessment that relies on a view that the two spheres of politics and culture can be definitively isolated the one from the other. And an assessment where the surfeit of culture’s visibility—lifestyle, cus- toms, habitus—exists in direct proportion to the invisibility of politics, the amnesia that now surrounds the specifically political dimensions of the ’68 years. What, in fact, can be perceived about those years now? It is perhaps when viewing French television commemorations of the ’68 events, par- ticularly those that accompanied the twentieth anniversary of May, that the viewer is most clearly left with the suspicion that “nothing happened.” Is this their purpose? Frequently, the commemorations create the im- pression that everything happened (and so nothing happened); a global contestation of just about everything—imperialism, dress codes, real- ity, dormitory curfews, capitalism, grammar, sexual repression, commun- ism—and therefore nothing (since everything is equally important) oc- curred; that May consisted of students saying absolutely anything and workers having nothing to say; or, as in this representative conversation between two former gauchistes on a 1985 television commemoration: R. Castro (a former Maoist leader, since psychoanalyzed by Lacan): May ’68 wasn’t political, it was a movement purely of words. R. Kahn (ex-gauchiste, converted to liberalism): It’s true . the terrible evil of replacing reality with words . the idea that anything is possible . one of the most lamentable periods . children who no longer have any culture . even the National Front is a result of ’68. R. Castro: May ’68 was a crisis of the elites. R. Kahn: Sure, now we listen better to kids . the system of the petits chefs was shaken. Alfonsi (the TV moderator, to Castro): Are you wearing a “Don’t touch my buddy” [“Touche pas à mon pote”] button? R. Castro: Yes, it makes me feel less anxious.4 Amid this discursive and syntactic jumble May, once again, comes to incorporate everything and therefore nothing. The mainstream media, 4. Maurice Dugowson, “Histoire d’un jour: 30 mai 1968,” television documentary, Europe 1, France 3, 1985. 22 chapter one working in conjunction with ex-gauchistes, maintain a haziness or blurring of focus on the event, a blurring that succeeds in dissolving the object through chatter. Viewers witnessing the verbal delirium of ex-gauchistes on television might well be drawn to form the same conclusion as the sociologist I encountered in Princeton, particularly when the ’68 goal of “seizing speech” is represented as having produced nothing much more, in the long run, than the contemporary spectacle of the commemoration as talk show.Still, the starkness of the sociologist’s pronouncement bears fur- ther commentary. “Nothing happened in France”: nothing changed, ma- jor institutions remained unaltered. Was this the voice of the professional sociologist, he whose task it is to say why things invariably remain the same, for whom a rupture in the system gets recuperated so as to reinsert it back into a logic of the same, the logic of the continuous, the logic of re- production? It is for that reason that sociological interpretations of May and other events have always seemed to me to verge on the tautological. And facts seem to be explained according to the terms of their existence. “Youth rebelling” is one such hypostatic sociological category frequently mobilized in relation to May: youth rebel because they are young; they rebel because they are students and the university is overcrowded; they rebel “like rats or other animals, when forced to live at an excessive den- sity in a confined space.”5 This last is the analogy that another sociologist, Raymond Aron, came up with shortly after the events—marshalling an animalizing vocabulary underused since the time of the Paris Commune. Or was it the voice of the police? “Nothing happened.” In a recent text, Jacques Rancière uses that phrase—only in the present tense: “Nothing is happening”—to represent the functioning of what, broadly speaking, he calls “the police.” Police intervention in public space is less about interpellating demon- strators than it is about dispersing them. The police are not the law that interpellates the individual (the “hey, you there” of Louis Althusser) unless we confuse the law with religious subjection.