May 1968 and Other Dates in the Memories of Imagination

Abstract

‘The 1968 years’ draw into memory the thoughts and images of other dates, protests, and political formations worldwide. The Naxalite movement of India was as different from the French May as was the Prague Spring from the Hungarian Uprising. Yet each gathered currents of ideas, energies, tactics – in brief, memories – from others and then released them into the world again. These are ‘dates without places’ which became possible after the Second World War, giving us to think not the excess of ‘68 but that which was in excess of ‘68: intertwined insurrectionary components, only some of which were ‘local’ while others were more mobile and remote. They reveal memory as a contagion of the imagination which must cease to be defined only in relation to the past, or to a place, and must instead be recognized as the faculty relating to the future. Memories of imagination do not commemorate particular events, places, or even forms like ‘protest’ and ‘resistance.’ They gather through the homologies and analogies perceived by the imagination. Homology obtains the memories of the powers of constructability in an object by transporting it materially into a new reality, while analogy maintains the memories of the partial powers of the abstractability of an object in imagination. May ‘68 and other dates without places harbour the memory of this imagination which opens new spans for things, their range of actualizable trajectories. Some of these memories have carried forward to the great recent protests – Occupy, Syntagma Square, the Arab Spring – but we live less and less in a time when the semblance of Elias Canetti’s ‘open crowds’ can harbour imagination in politics. Our time would have to discover for itself the hidden spans of these twenty-first-century components, such that our memories of our own imagination remain actualizable.