Bibliographic record
Abstract
Kristin Ross, May '68 and its Afterlives, Chicago, University of Chicago, 2002, 238pp. Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought, Montreal, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007, 468pp. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, London, Verso, 2007, 601pp. Serge Audier, La pensee anti-68, Paris, La Decouverte, 2008, 380pp. Francois Cusset, Contre-discours de Mai. Ce qu'embaumers et fossoyeurs de 68 ne disent pas a ses heritiers, Arles, Actes, 174pp. Gregory Elliott, Ends in Sight: Marx/Fukuyama/Hobsbawm/Anderson, London, Pluto, 2008, 148pp. As a political date, 1968 arguably rivals far more momentous years (1789, 1848, 1871, 1917, 1956 ...) for sheer magnitude of bibliography. Especially in its Parisian guise, it continues to call forth innumerable chronicles, confessions and genealogies, of widely varying quality and scope. This fortieth anniversary has not been short of publications. However, as the primacy of the personal narrative wanes and younger generations of scholars and intellectuals who 'weren't there' take the stage, there are signs of greater perspicacity and insight, especially as concerns the location of '68 within various strands of cultural, social and political history. (1) In this review essay, I'd like to consider a number of recent attempts, both Anglophone and Francophone, to tease out certain intellectual lineages from the tangled web of positions and arguments that stem, in one way or another, from the events of that year (and of its metonymic month, May). In books such as Audier's La pensee anti-68 and Bourg's From Revolution to Ethics this explicitly takes the guise of intellectual history; in Cusset's Contre-discours de Mai and Ross's earlier May '68 and its Afterlives we are dealing with an overtly partisan and critical history, wanting to counter the 'embalming' and 'burial' of the political potentialities of '68 by memoirists and sociologists, for the sake of the present (and the future); in Boltanski and Chiapello's The New Spirit of Capitalism (only considered here to the extent that it focuses on '68) we are instructed instead about how '68 may be understood as a crucial fulcrum for the contested recomposition of capitalism and its normative codes; finally, I have included a discussion of Elliott's Ends in Sight, a book which is not expressly preoccupied with '68, in order to draw into relief the contrast between the sense of a beginning commonly associated with '68 and the sense of an ending that has pervaded a certain strain of Left thinking faced with the predominance of an imperial neoliberalism. These books are also the occasion to home in on certain themes which belong to the vital legacy of '68: the tension between political and social thought; the role of modality in our understanding of systemic change; the politics of time; the irreducibility of experience to explanation; the relationship between socio-political upheavals and the reproduction of capitalism. In order to sketch out what I think is at stake in a number of these debates, I have also made reference to some crucial contributions that were made in the heat of the moment (Tom Nairn's 'Why it Happened') or in the dispassionate hindsight of earlier anniversaries (Regis Debray's 'Modest Contribution'). THE IMPOSSIBLE EVENT 'Is it still possible?' This question, adorning a poster for one of the innumerable recent commemorations of 'May '68', seems to succinctly capture the drive behind the compulsive attentions that this often under-specified and yet over-determined moment continues to garner. As many have noted, the general tendency of an epoch to project its hopes and anxieties into past events is exacerbated when it comes to the phenomena rather gnomically encapsulated in the signifier 'May '68'. In an interview with Peter Hallward, Alain Badiou has noted that the strange formality or hollowness of its name is a sign of the obscurity of the occurrence it strives to indicate: I'm very struck by the fact that today everyone says 'the events of May 1968', but if we say that the event has 'event' as its name, it means that we haven't yet found its name. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.022 | 0.013 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".