POLITICAL REPRESENTATION AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

In her excellent book on May 1968 in France, Kristin Ross (2002) argues that the importance of that particular event lies elsewhere than in the question of whether it was a ‘failed revolution’ or not. Rather, she suggests, ‘the narrative of a desired or failed seizure of power … is a narrative determined by the logic of the state, the story the state tells to itself. For the state, people in the streets are people always already failing to seize state power’ (p. 74). Focusing on the dimension of power – and thereby restricting the idea of politics to the state – has served to efface what was perhaps the predominant threat to power of that event: ‘the subjectivation enabled by the synchronization of two very different temporalities: the world of the worker and the world of the student’ (p. 74). The subjectivation produced by this transcendence of the categories of the social division of labour as well as with the identities that accompany them ‘lay in the verification of equality not as an objective of action, but as something that is part and parcel of action, something that emerges in the struggle and is lived and declared as such’ (p. 74).

Ross recounts that practices were developed that ‘demonstrated such a synchroni-zation’. Because they revealed the irrelevance of the division of labour, they formed ‘as direct an intervention into the logic and workings of capital as any seizure of the state – perhaps more so’ (p. 74).