{"id":12609,"date":"2018-04-25T09:32:53","date_gmt":"2018-04-25T08:32:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/may-68-a-structuralist-riposte\/"},"modified":"2024-11-21T03:52:42","modified_gmt":"2024-11-21T03:52:42","slug":"may-68-a-structuralist-riposte","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/may-68-a-structuralist-riposte\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Structures don’t take to the streets!’ May ’68: a structuralist riposte"},"content":{"rendered":"

May \u201968: a structuralist riposte<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

by Chris Norris<\/em><\/p>\n

A cloud no bigger than a man\u2019s hand crosses the English Channel from Paris, and then, in an instant, the trees, the orchard, the hedgerows, the field of wheat, are black with locusts. When at length they rise to fly on to the next parish, the boughs are bared of all culture, the fields have been stripped of every green blade of human aspiration; and in those skeletal forms and that blackened landscape, theoretical practice announces its \u2018discovery\u2019: the mode of production.\u00a0<\/em>– E.P. Thompson<\/p>\n

\u2018Structures don\u2019t take to the streets!\u2019<\/em>\u00a0–\u00a0graffito on wall of the Sorbonne, May 1968<\/p>\n

OK, point taken: it’s not ‘on the street’
\nYou’d find them, all those ‘structures’ that we went
\nOn endlessly about till soixante-huit
\nWhen we skulked in our academic tent
\n(Or so the story goes). We’d failed to meet
\nOur one great chance and challenge heaven-sent
\nTo end the left’s two-centuries-long defeat
\nBy making good the two decades we’d spent
\nOn theory-talk.<\/p>\n

Small wonder should they greet
\nUs lot, those militants, with slogans lent
\nAn added force by dint of our elite
\nNormalien credentials, native bent
\nFor high-flown chat, and tendency to treat
\nThe world as theory’s oyster. We’d frequent
\nOnly those streets (they said) where a discreet
\nEscape-route helped us twisters circumvent
\nOur own past calls to action. Then some neat
\nDebating-trick did service to augment
\nOur cultural capital, and take the heat
\nOff any failings that we might repent
\nWere they not wiped clean from our record-sheet
\nBy the fine structuralist expedient
\nOf counting subjectivity a cheat
\nThat’s foisted on us when we represent
\nOurselves as ‘free’.<\/p>\n

Thus all our thoughts repeat
\nThe lie that has us willingly assent
\nTo ideology’s absurd conceit
\nWhereby the hoodwinked subject rests content
\nWith a fake \u2018freedom\u2019 that would have him beat
\nIts own unyielding bounds. How orient
\nOurselves to action if the driver’s seat
\nOf willed intent contains a subject pent
\nBy structures that perpetually secrete
\nThe solvent of each self-constituent.<\/p>\n

That’s the idea: that all those Althusser-
\nPrimed theorists could do, faced with the May
\n\u00c9v\u00e9nements, was to disown all share
\nOf agency, urge strikers to delay
\nThat premature revolt, and so declare
\nThe present conjoncture not one that they
\nCould possibly endorse. Then they’d compare
\nThe current prospects with the grisly way
\nThings go whenever passions start to flare
\nAnd, as so many times before, betray
\nThe white-hot zealots to the black despair
\nThat comes of hopes and dreams long kept at bay
\nBy the same powers that soon must conquer their
\nIll-timed charade.<\/p>\n

Yet I’d still say,
\nAll these years on, that you’d best spare
\nUs street-averse soixante-huitards your pay-
\nBack accusations of our taking care
\nTo hide ourselves behind a great array
\nOf abstract propositions framed to bear
\nWhatever weight of evidence might fray
\nOur threadbare theory-hope. It’s you who err
\nMost grievously if you take that clich\u00e9,
\n‘No structures on the streets’, as if to square
\nAccounts with real-world history and play
\nThe role of less-deceived. Who more aware
\nThan us how world-events will often stray
\nFar wide of anything that the armchair
\nPhilosopher might dream hors de m\u00eal\u00e9e
\nSince structures don’t emerge out of thin air
\nBut just when subjects meet the come-what-may.<\/p>\n

Quick recap for the faint of heart or weak
\nOf memory: ‘structure’ signified the site
\nOf struggle, contestation, and critique
\nWhere subjects found a leverage-point despite
\nAppearances. It seemed to show a bleak
\nSince language-based determinism quite
\nDevoid of all idea that we might speak,
\nAct, criticise, and thus relieve our plight
\nAs drifters up the croc-infested creek
\nOf any ideology that might
\nRecruit compliant minds.<\/p>\n

That’s how the clique
\nOf New-Right, mostly ex-left types indict
\nUs true soixante-huitards, we who still seek
\nA way to get the basic issue right,
\nThe one that comes to us from Ancient Greek
\nPhilosophy and yet remains the blight
\nOf system-builders as of those who’d sneak
\nFree-will back into some (it seems) airtight
\nConstruction through a small but handy leak
\nOf subjectivity. No inner light
\nFor us old structuralists, no high mystique,
\nLike Sartre’s, of a freedom shining bright
\nWith existential promise through that freak
\nOf nature, human choice. Hail the White Knight
\nWho comes (though often by the most oblique
\nOr complex ways around) to wing our flight
\nFrom the iron grip of causal laws that wreak
\nDestruction on our human will to slight
\nMere circumstance and end the losing streak
\nWe suffered as if fate had fixed the fight.<\/p>\n

My point: that structuralism helped us see
\nBeyond that Sartrean fix by letting go,
\nOnce and for all, the thought of subjects ‘free’
\nIn the sense ‘really, deep down, prone to no
\nImpediments of kind or of degree
\nTo their free choice: ‘defend the status quo
\nOr strive against it!’
\nThat’s the reason we
\nTook language as our model, or \u2013 you know
\nThe story well enough \u2013 the master-key
\nOf structural linguistics. This we owe
\nTo Saussure, Jakobson and company,
\nPlus Althusser who managed to bestow
\nOn Marx a reading that could claim to be
\nBoth rigorous and well equipped to show
\nOur own conjuncture with the clarity
\nSuch thinking brings. The syntagmatic flow
\nOf speech is like the combinatory
\nOf actions and events, an ordered row
\nThat bears the mark of willing agency,
\nWhether to hold in place or overthrow
\nSuch order. Yet it shows unconsciously \u2013
\nSo structuralists maintain \u2013 the sous-niveau
\nOf differences and contrasts that decree
\nHow speech or actions signify although
\nThe speaker, like the agent, won’t agree
\nThat what they’ve said or done makes sense on so
\nArcane a set of terms.
\nThink: why should she,
\nThe militant, however street-wise, grow
\nConversant with depth-codes of strategy,
\nOr speaker venture nothing till, below<\/p>\n

The surface utterance, he too can trace
\nThe signifying systems that elude
\nOur conscious grasp? For else they\u2019d slow the pace
\nOf speech, or thought, or action, and preclude
\nAll access to the generative space
\nWhere subjects somehow find the aptitude
\nFor words and acts that promise to displace
\nThe ideologies that once subdued
\nAll stirrings of revolt. So we gave chase
\nTo errant signifiers, or pursued
\nThose fleeting signs \u2013 exposed to us by grace
\nOf Marx and Freud, plus insights late accrued
\nFrom Althusser and Lacan \u2013 that the case
\nIs not at all as it’s naively viewed
\nBy those who take our words and deeds at face
\nAcceptance but, more tellingly construed,
\nHalf-yields to ideology’s embrace
\nYet kicks against it.<\/p>\n

Hence the multitude
\nOf symptoms that would promptly self-erase
\nAt its behest if not for us, the brood
\nOf old-school structuralists who opt to base
\nOur strategies and methods on a clued-
\nUp symptom-reader’s grasp. This shuns the race
\nFrom thought to deed, reminds us what ensued
\nIn \u201868, and bids we play our ace
\nCard to warn just how easily a mood
\nOf premature euphoria takes the place
\nThat, we say, falls more aptly to a shrewd
\nSince theory-guided project to retrace
\nThe structural constraints that had us screwed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

May \u201968: a structuralist riposte by Chris Norris A cloud no bigger than a man\u2019s hand crosses the English Channel from Paris, and then, in an instant,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":464,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1660],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/464"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12609"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12609\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20644,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12609\/revisions\/20644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}