Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

printing a series of uncomplicated but graphically powerful posters and leaflets
“Addressed to all workers.” They reprinted their text “Minimum DeWnition
of a Revolutionary Organization” in a new edition of between 150,000
and 200,000 copies while seeing to its translation into English, German,
Spanish, Italian, Danish, and Arabic. They also published several revolutionary
songs and some forty comic strips and used grafWti as a means of urban
détournement arguing that the spray can, far more than the street poster,
offers the writer the one way he can be certain of being read by everyone. 76
It was de Certeau who succinctly summarized May Day 1968 as
a “symbolic revolution,” 77 one whose most signiWcant achievement was not
merely a reversal of values but the creating of a new space and giving “everyone
a right to speak.” 78 “More importantly at the outer limit,” he wrote, “it
was a revolution of humor. . . . Instead of expressing what an entire nation
surely knew, the symbolic action was aimed at opening perspectives that,
until then, had been forbidden.” The exemplary action “opens a breach, not
because of its own efWcacy, but because it displaces a law that was all the
more powerful in that it had not been brought to mind. It unveils what was
latent and makes it contestable. It is decisive, contagious and dangerous
because it touches this obscure zone that every system takes for granted and
it cannot justify.” 79
Still, insofar as May 1968 was an instance in which collectivism,
direct political action, and the grotesque critique of formalist internationalism
all converged, it was also a remarkable moment of reconstitution that
witnessed the rebirth of fraternalism between students and workers, Frenchpeople
and foreigners not seen since the days of the “Internationale.” 80
DIVIDED WE STAND:
THE USE, ABUSE, AND REUSE OF THE GROTESQUE
Internationaleries 37
Bakhtin insists on the importance of the grotesque for his idea of carnival. In
both its temporal and spatial aspects, grotesque imagery and grotesque realism
are part of carnival’s “festive laughter,” whose utopian character acts as
a guarantee of freedom for the people. “Carnival,” he assures, “is not a spectacle
seen by the people: they live in it, and everyone participates because
its very idea embraces all people.” 81 The long tradition of grotesque realism
continued to inform art and literature well into the nineteenth century. However,
with the arrival of the modern as an accepted category it was seen as
a “gross violation of natural form and proportions.” 82 Rejected on aesthetic
terms, in reality this prohibition meant much more. It signaled an important
reorientation of European culture away from its utopian, collective
character and toward individualistic endeavor and functionalist rationality.