Great Refusals & Accidental Rebels...
Protesters shouted anti-French slogans at the entrance of the French retail chain store Carrefour in Chongqing, China, on Thursday. [article]
Spring is in the air; the anniversary of the May 1968 revolution is being mulled over everywhere as we seem to be tracking the threads of recent and current wars and civil unrest, wondering how the hell we got here, and what happens next.
via NYTimes:
Anti-French Boycott Stumbles in China
BEIJING - They came. They expressed patriotic fervor. Then they shopped.
On Thursday, the first day of a planned boycott against Carrefour, a French department store chain here, there were a few low-key protests around the country but most Carrefour outlets did a brisk business in peanut oil, petit fours and family packs of lychee juice.
The boycott call, publicized through text messages and popular websites, has been urging Chinese consumers to avoid the stores as a way to punish France for what China considers its shabby reception of the Olympic torch. During the Paris leg of the relay last month, pro-Tibetan agitators lunged at a wheelchair-bound Chinese torch bearer. The images that captured her shocked and wounded expression have fueled a backlash against Western countries that many here believe are seeking to spoil China's Olympic moment of glory as Beijing prepares to play host to the Summer Games.
It did not help that the Paris City Council followed up by making the Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader-in-exile, an honorary citizen. Many Chinese believe the Dalai Lama was responsible for anti-Chinese rioting in Tibet last month.
On Thursday, the start of a three-day national holiday here, there were reports of small rallies at a dozen Carrefour outlets around the country but the absence of any mammoth groundswell, coupled by the throngs of unapologetic shoppers, suggested that nationalistic fury may be fading. "Politics is one thing but the people have to eat," said Zheng Wu, 55, a Beijing housewife whose shopping cart was loaded with a 12-roll bundle of toilet paper, two large sacks of rice, a box of corn flakes, three pairs of pink flip flops and a plunger.
The government has also been working hard to dampen the anti-French zealotry. In recent days, government ministers have gone on television reminding people that the 40,000 employees at the nation's 112 Carrefour stores are Chinese. Newspaper editorials have hinted that bygones might as well be bygones, urging citizens to heartily embrace foreign friends, about 1.5 million of whom will be arriving here in August for the Olympics. "We Smile to the World" read an editorial headline in the People's Daily celebrating the 100-day countdown to the games.
In case that did not do the trick, state censors made it hard for organizers to get the word out...
While elsewhere... (via Activate):
Photography By: Reuters/Gopal Chitrakar
A Tibetan protester shouts anti-China slogans from a police van in front of the Chinese Embassy Visa Section in Kathmandu, Nepal, on April 29, 2008. Nepal has seen almost daily protests, which police initially broke up with beatings. Use of force has decreased, however, in the face of criticism from rights groups such as Amnesty International. [more on the Tibet crisis]
And as the 40-year anniversary of May '68 is upon us, we hear from Paul Auster in the NYTimes that he and everyone around him felt "crazy" back in '68 -- and that, not surprisingly, he feels even more crazy now...
via NYTimes:
Op-Ed Contributor
The Accidental Rebel
By PAUL AUSTER
Published: April 23, 2008illus: Paul Hoppe
IT was the year of years, the year of craziness, the year of fire, blood and death. I had just turned 21, and I was as crazy as everyone else.
There were half a million American soldiers in Vietnam, Martin Luther King had just been assassinated, cities were burning across America, and the world seemed headed for an apocalyptic breakdown.
Being crazy struck me as a perfectly sane response to the hand I had been dealt - the hand that all young men had been dealt in 1968. The instant I graduated from college, I would be drafted to fight in a war I despised to the depths of my being, and because I had already made up my mind to refuse to fight in that war, I knew that my future held only two options: prison or exile.
[...]
What did we accomplish? Not much of anything. It's true that the gymnasium project was scrapped, but the real issue was Vietnam, and the war dragged on for seven more horrible years. You can’t change government policy by attacking a private institution. When French students erupted in May of that year of years, they were directly confronting the national government - because their universities were public, under the control of the Ministry of Education, and what they did initiated changes in French life. We at Columbia were powerless, and our little revolution was no more than a symbolic gesture. But symbolic gestures are not empty gestures, and given the nature of those times, we did what we could.I hesitate to draw any comparisons with the present - and therefore will not end this memory-piece with the word "Iraq." I am 61 now, but my thinking has not changed much since that year of fire and blood, and as I sit alone in this room with a pen in my hand, I realize that I am still crazy, perhaps crazier than ever.
Read full piece as well as some angry letters in response to his comment that not much of anything was accomplished.
AND the May issue of Artforum focuses on the lessons of '68, radical art, and revolution-as-process (etc) from philosophers, artists, et al.:
So while Sylvere Lotringer and Antonio Negri discuss the never-ending Revolutionary Process, Liam Gillick reminds us that "1968 IS NOT JUST A SYMBOLIC MOMENTor subject for academic study..."
...Students were massacred, peasants were slaughtered, political figures were removed by force. And for the past forty years, we have witnessed the reassessment of those events, such that the progressives of that time have often been attacked precisely because they undercut stable value systems throughout society. Or, more specifically, because they demanded that difference - the specificity of histories, identities, and desires - be acknowledged at all times. They believed that difference could and should be the primary marker of a creative and democratic society, to which end they claimed solidarity with others and developed new forms of meta-identification. Yet here it becomes clear why we might want an issue of Artforum on the occasion of the anniversary of May '68 as opposed to, say, the anniversary of the end of the Second World War or that of the collapse of the Berlin Wall: The revisions of 1968 were both institutional and personal in nature. Amid a postwar, cold-war situation defined by class-ridden, hierarchical stasis (punctuated by explosive but isolated expressions of defiance), some individuals believed that a better set of human relationships would emerge from the permanent reassessment of positions, rather than from any singular event. That is what was fought for: a multiplication of sensitivity and doubt. And so 1968 extends beyond its boundaries, reaching out in both directions, past and future, at the same time that it cannot be discussed in political or aesthetic terms alone.
[read full article][illus: A May 1968 poster: "Be young and shut up", with stereotypical silhouette of General de Gaulle.]
Elsewhere in Artforum we revisit The Paris Commune via Courbet, and Tom McDonough discusses reverberations between France's May '68 and the riots of 2005...
Wreckage of a McDonald's in the Parisian suburb Corbeil-Essonnes, France, November 6, 2005. Photo: Jacques Brinon/Associated Press.
Paris ablaze during La Semaine sanglante (The Bloody Week), the final days of the Commune, May 21–28, 1871. Color lithograph, artist unknown.
Gustave Courbet, The Wave (detail), 1869, oil on canvas, 43 11⁄16 x 56 3⁄16".
Courbet! There's still time to catch him at the Met...
