metropolis m

Museifcation is a composite process. One of its aspects is the deactivation of the living potential of an object or an event – this is what the Situationist critiques mostly focused on, calling it ‘cooptation’ or ‘recuperation’. But recently there is also another force: the petrifaction that occurs when an event, object or artwork is declared iconic. The museified object freezes a form within the collective memory, so that this form doesn’t appear anymore if not accompanied by a police of physiognomy.Tracking the resemblance of the institutionalized being with others of its kind becomes in fact the only way one keeps museified creatures alive. The object that has been classified and recognized by the Institution only bears poorer brothers and sons; if something similar happens or is made, it is a redundant repetition, and therefore a degraded version of the original. From the point where something becomes part of the official cultural patrimony, forgetfulness starts being unforgivable, as much as appropriation and plagiarism become crimes; the Parmenidian paradox stops the proliferation of life through the curse of taxonomy. Museification mesmerizes the present whilst it fossilizes the past, it is the Gorgon’s head that we are all forced to contemplate. As the philosopher Deleuze explains in Difference and Repetition (1968), repetition never occurs as a doubling of the same. Repetition is nothing but the other name of our everyday life: if we wanted to eliminate the repetitive elements from our existence we couldn’t experience love – where repetition intervenes as the true object of desire and as the main factor of its intensification; or friendship – where the accumulation of encounters produces intimacy and joy; or physiological life itself – whose cyclic structure requires to perform reiterated and very similar if not identical operations in order to subsist. When we start to perceive repetition as a problem, this is inevitably the symptom of the end of love, the end of friendship or the beginning of a depressive spiral, where banal actions become almost indigestible within the slow metabolism of the day. The tragedy of the industrial mode of production is not to be found only in the repetitive gesture of the worker chained to a senseless task, but in the fact that this very task never gives the feeling of achieving anything, as Robert Linhart wrote in The Assembly Line (1981) as soon as a piece was fixed the same one seemed to come again under his hand and it needed to be fixed another time and so on.1 Fordism has transformed the workers’ life into Sisyphus’s destiny. But a dialectical relationship links the collection of singularities that the Museum hosts and conserves indefinitely and the mass of identical goods produced industrially, ready to be consumed and eventually transformed into waste. In France, May ‘68 has been subjected to a consistent process of museification. The most recent anniversaries, 1998 and 2008, have been advertised as widely as possible and were the occasion for the launch of all kinds of derived products. Within the specific temporality of social movements, an intensified Present takes place that is the result of the coordinated movement of the past and the future in the same direction. Ghosts from the French revolution were seen on the streets of Paris in 1968 together with creatures and behaviours that we now recognize as belonging to the twenty-first century. Nevertheless the tabloids, documentaries and television movies have decreed exactly what May ‘68 was, and that it took place 41 years ago, so we can now commemorate it and buy its visual traces in expensive DVD boxes and coffee table books. Its protagonists, no matter where they speak from, whether it be parliament, prison or the side of a swimming pool, are pointed out by President Nicolas Sarkozy as being responsible for any catastrophe existing in our contemporary society.2 The petrifying power becomes frightening when spread retrospectively by a movement such as May ‘68. It reminds us with discomfort of the pathetic destiny of the avant-gardes and their mummified traces that we all admire. Rather than providing us with tools to overcome difficulties, the relics of these stories of transgression leave us only with the sterilizing power of role models in our hands. For example, the story we hear in the French media every time somebody throws a stone at a police officer, every time a student or a worker or an unemployed person (or even just a woman, or a foreigner) rises up against injustice and misery, is that this is nothing but a pale imitation, a pathetic re-enactment of May ‘68. Revolts only seem to have a past in France, because their present is never glamorous enough to be reviewed. The fact that Paris has become an unpleasant city, where public space belongs to the police, the bars are the sad kingdom of rich people and everything that is labelled authentic or charming is subsequently overpriced, shows that the French are finally resigned to no longer producing their present and to walking with their backs to the future whilst consuming the leftovers of their past. This involves capitalizing on the views from apartments and restaurants, on the physical proximity of anything and everything to a monument or to the subway line that leads to it. In short, fully embracing the cultural and not only the economical dogmas of liberalism – which is exactly happened to Italy during the 1980s, and prepared the ground for Forza Italia, the new ‘respectable’ fascism and the North League. All this recent speculation on the past goes hand in hand with the militarisation of public space and the end of the legendary freedom that bohemian people could enjoy in Paris.3 Casualties are so frequent that a police union recently declared ‘we will no longer accept to be the scapegoats of irresponsible politicians that start the fire and then throw stones in the political and media arena at those who are in change of putting it out’.4 The academic year between 2008 and 2009 has seen the universities completely blocked all over France and, more specifically, in Paris. In faculties across the capital city, not one single lesson was taking place; everybody, the students and the teachers, was on strike against the reforms. In front of the Hôtel de Ville [City Hall, ed.] an endless carrousel of researchers and professors walked around the square nonstop for months, with people replacing each other and considering this vicious circle a new form of protest. The economic crisis also started to spread its disastrous effects, and conflict came back into the French factories. Never before have so many factory owners been kidnapped and held hostage by their outraged employees. Godard’s film Tout va bien was restaged for real all over the country. Polled on this matter, the population appeared to be understanding of the workers’ reasons and the statistics declared that more than seventy percent of the French people did not condemn the sequestrations. The suburbs have not stopped burning since last year; the flames of revolt have kept dancing here and there, mostly unreported by the news, along with the massacres that the police have perpetrated to repress them. Almost no image of these uprisings has migrated into the collective imagination or nested inside the aesthetic space – not even the most creative gestures, such as the actions of the Intermittants du Spectacle or the blackout caused by the strike of the EDF (Electricité de France) workers at the premiere of the 62nd Cannes Festival.2009 has also been the year of the official museification of Guy Debord and his oeuvre: the French government has declared it a national treasure and expropriated it from its heiress, Alice Becker-Ho, who was about to sell everything to Yale University’s research centre on the avant-garde. Far from representing the cooptation that Debord himself feared in a paranoid way, this ‘becoming treasure’ of his oeuvre proves that his self-historicization and his nostalgic and moralistic gaze at the continuously dying world are syntonic of the spirit of our times. Nobody more than Debord insisted on the devastating effect of knowing that everything ‘has already been done’, that we just turn around in circles and are consumed by fire, that we must become old in a society of spectacle that will always show young bodies, that authentic food and authentic people have gone. In short, being revolutionary means being melancholic.The good news is that the actual present is as indifferent to commemorations as the youth is to warnings. If revolts do not translate into images, this probably means that they are acting on a non-visual level, on a non-televised frequency, whose intensity is greater than we can imagine. Maybe this imageless energy that runs underground is only perceptible for some people, like the frequencies that teenagers use for their ringtones because they cannot be heard by anybody over the age of twenty; and maybe this is the actual proof that May ’68 is not what they have told us. That in the end, May ’68 is not even so important as an event of the past but as a tool for the future. That ’68 is secondary and may be forgotten in comparison what is taking place in secret around us. That what is fundamental, and what no one wants to tell us, is not what ’68 was, but what it has not yet been.Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective artist. Working in neon, video, sculpture, painting and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of ‘the political impotence’ that seems to define contemporary art today.1.Robert Linhart, The Assembly Line, University of Massachussets Press, 1981.2. For President Nicolas Sarkozy, les soixante-huitards are to blame for French society’s current ills. Last year, during his election campaign, he suggested ‘the ‘68 legacy should be “liquidated” once and for all’. It had imposed ‘intellectual and moral relativism’ on France, he said. It had spawned ‘those who had said that anything goes; that authority, good manners and respect were out of fashion; that nothing was sacred, nothing admirable; that there were no rules and no standards; and that nothing was forbidden.’ Nicolas Sarkozy Blames the Generation of 1968, by Henry Samuel, 29 April 2008, The Telegraph.3. The enormous success of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s pathetic movie Amélie (2001) proved that a picturesque, thinly populated and totally white Paris represented the dream town that French and foreigners would love to live in. The movie was released at the same moment when the extremely repressive Laws for Internal Security (mostly addressed against illegal foreigners) became operational under Sarkozy’s ministry of the interior.4. The statement comes from a press communication from Synergie, the second French police union; it was distributed at the beginning of an investigation of a policemen suspected of being guilty of irregularly using a Flash-Ball gun. On 8 July 2009, a thirty-four-year-old demonstrator in the suburbs of Paris was shot in the face and lost an eye while he was peacefully protesting. Un policier mis en examen pour des tirs de flashball in: Le Nouvel Observateur, Nouvelobs.com and the AFP, 29 September 2009.