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CHAPTER 1
THE PHILOSOPHICAL AND LITERARY CONFIGURATION OF '68
José Revueltas on Cognitive Democracy and Self-Management
The revolutionary movement of '68 is ongoing; it has not yet ended, nor will it ever end.
— JOSÉ REVUELTAS, México 68
What does it mean to approach the moment of '68 through the gaze and ideas of a heterodox, self-taught, and irreverent Marxist philosopher who, at the age of fifty-four, left his position at the Cultural Olympiad at the start of the university strike and relocated to the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where he thought and wrote about this crucial moment in Mexican history? Concurrently, one may also ask: What does it mean to enter José Revueltas's prolific body of work at the crucial juncture that was '68, which many conceive as a turning point of the twentieth century? How does this vital moment affect the very style of his Marxist thought, particularly his views of dialectics and history? Without a doubt, to approach '68 through the kaleidoscopic lens imposed by such a complex and singular thinker as Revueltas decenters the usual tendency to rely on more familiar '68 voices. Rather than starting with an analysis of the movement's most prominent figures — former students, leaders, and members of the National Strike Council, who powerfully shaped the narrative about this moment — I have selected a thinker who, in addition to being older at the time, had never even studied at a university. He had abandoned formal education at the age of fifteen to begin his long vocation as an autodidact.
In Revueltas's work, '68 appears in various incarnations throughout his philosophical, literary, affective, and personal lives; his writings on the impact of that moment range from a radical revision of the dialectic to more intimate ruminations on the impact that this historical moment had on his own life. In some respects, it would seem that the philosopher set about translating the complexity and freshness of those crucial months into many different styles of thought, elevating '68 as a transversal language of sorts — composed of philosophical, literary, political, and autobiographical words — that underpins his later work. From the universal to the singular and vice versa, the heart of '68 lies in its everyday practices, which adhere to finite ideas about freedom: democratic and horizontal organization, self-management, and the importance of cognitive democracy. From his position on the margins of academia, Revueltas intuited how remarkably important '68 would be to Mexican history and surrendered himself wholly to his experience of it. From that moment until his death, he would surpass all other thinkers in his obsessive and systematic consideration of the event. As Jorge Volpi recounts, "As soon as the movement began, Revueltas showed solidarity with the students and devoted himself, body and soul, to supporting them. The School of Philosophy and Letters became his headquarters. There he wrote his articles and lectures, and even slept when he needed to recover his strength. From August to September, Revueltas penned countless essays, articles, manifestos, and letters intended to provide theoretical support to the student protest." The result is a rare crucible of discursive genres through which he "performs" and thematizes '68.
Unlike Louis Althusser, who underwent the experience of '68 from a certain political distance, Revueltas wholly commits to participating in the experience and endeavors to position it both inside and against the grain of an entirely closed narrative within Marxism. As early as May, captivated by news of events in France, Revueltas wrote, "It is forbidden to forbid Revolution," an open letter dedicated to "French revolutionaries, independent Marxists, workers, students, and intellectuals from the days of May 1968." In it, he expresses admiration for the radical novelty of that singular revolution, which occurred "despite and in conflict with the fetishes of political parties and syndicates." He calls attention to the wide-ranging significance of the phenomenon in the international panorama of Vietnam and the start of the nuclear era. A few months later, he published "Our 'May Revolution' in Mexico," where he emphasizes the importance of occupying the university and sustaining the strike by means of a parallel system of academic self-management wherein the university would become "the most critical, active element of society," based on the notion that "learning is disputing." From that point on, Revueltas continually produced notes, pamphlets, and essays about the national and international importance of '68. The texts comprising this phase of his work add a certain philosophical and conceptual density to '68, one that insists on the necessity of thinking about this politically creative moment historically. Thus, the varied spectrum of his texts conceptualizes '68 within a broader philosophical history of freedom and the struggle to transform the languages of collective emancipation.
One of Revueltas's uncommon perspectives hints at the possibility of analyzing this social movement using a multitude of languages that restore richness to the manifold horizon of contemporary thought about politics and freedom. Hence the two questions intimated above — namely, how Revueltas configures '68 as well as how '68 configures Revueltas's own thought — uncover myriad concrete and singular ways to access this event. When Revueltas wondered from his Lecumberri Prison cell, "Is our life the revolution? What is the revolution for each of us?" he was posing a crucial philosophical question regarding his personal experience and the uncertainty it generated at the precise moment when history was being made. How can a revolution transverse such a plurality of layers: ways of thinking, living day-to-day, connecting the present to a history affected by this event, relating to one another as a collective that sows the seeds of its own destiny, and testing out various ways to be free and express it? By inquiring about these events, studying their everyday manifestations, and reflecting on their present historicity within the frame of a greater past, we are able to grasp the style of '68 as a time when political and personal, historical and quotidian, wove together in one smooth, unbroken fabric.
Still, it is important to note the peculiar degree of affinity Revueltas felt with '68. This closeness seems to have been mediated by constant, reflexive action, lending a shade of critical distance and historical perspective to that which hit so close to home. Roberto Escudero describes his singular habit of being present in an illuminating way: "It was hardly unusual for participants in the '68 movement to arrive at the School of Philosophy and Letters and find José Revueltas writing, at all hours of the day or night, behind a desk that very often doubled as a pallet where he would sleep or rest for a few hours. Withdrawn from everyone and everything, he consolidated the impressions and theoretical observations that the reader now holds in her or his hands." This rich passage demonstrates how the thinker was suffused by his experience, immersing himself in his work in an effort to live it, conceive it, and conceptualize it. By the same token, that kind of nearly obsessive commitment yielded a constant, reflexive meditation that shaped his writing for months and years to come, as if while "withdrawn from everyone and everything," the writer was in fact participating actively and translating what he witnessed onto paper. Such theoretical dexterity helped him develop a style of narrating the events of '68 that simultaneously acknowledged its uniqueness and situated it within a greater historical context.
His inseparable companion and former cellmate Martín Dozal, to whom he dedicated "Ezequiel, or the Massacre of Innocents," remembers him in precisely the same way: "He was a man who got up at six in the morning to write, then read. He dashed off In Search of Lost Time as a quick break. He would say, 'Look here, look what this says,' eager to share every emotion he experienced." That nearly constant commitment to writing was one notorious symptom of the generational distance between Revueltas and the students. Dozal explains that the terms Revueltas used to describe the dialectic and alienation proved extremely challenging for students new to philosophy: "Revueltas's knowledge was so vast that it was hard to put yourself on his level, which made you feel like he was the greatest man in the world. But that wasn't enough. What you really wanted was to insert yourself in his philosophical arguments, his dialectical arguments. He had been working with all these materials for forty years." Although Revueltas was always remembered as a "comrade" (compañero), Alberto Híjar admits that Revueltas's profound meditations on self-management and alienation sounded extremely abstract to the youthful audience of Philosophy and Letters, embroiled as they were in the intense process of agitation and rebellion. Along these lines, his daughter Andrea maintains that starting in '68, a myth of Revueltas began to develop, as he became a "symbol of opposition and struggle" that channeled the sentiments of an entire group. However, she also points out the distance between the myth and the philosopher who advanced a series of ideas that sounded "abstract and iconoclastic." In La estela de Tlatelolco, Álvarez Garín remarks that Revueltas was very prominent in intellectual circles; although at that time, his effectiveness at the level of concrete political action was limited. ... During the Movement, Revueltas's ideas carried relative weight among professors and influenced the creation of the Committee of Intellectuals. Many of his ideas — his critique of the Mexican Revolution and the actions of the Mexican Communist Party (PCM, Partido Comunista Mexicano), his thesis about the lack of historical precedence for the Party, his emphasis on the necessity and importance of critical thought, and his criteria for self-management, the structure and militant organizing on base, the committees of struggle (comités de lucha) and coordinating bodies — were already widespread.
In some sense, my interest in analyzing '68 in and through Revueltas has to do with the fact that he was neither the typical subject-stereotype of '68 nor an outsider. Rather, he was a person who lived in a singular way — in his own skin, from the very first day — the daily life of the student movement, enduring his imprisonment at Lecumberri, released under protest on May 13, 1971, but retaining criminal charges until his death on April 14, 1976.12 In theorizing the philosophical, literary, and political implications of '68, Revueltas's ideas acquire a wild and more creative tone because they come from multiple sources and cleave to the concerns of the time: university self-management and criticism of the dogmatic nature of political thought. When I say a "wild" tone of thought, I mean that his work remained untamed by the specificity of a discipline. Revueltas lives and writes his obsessions in various registers — philosophical, literary, essayist, and cinematographic — without becoming a great academic specialist in any of them. His ability to consider freedom and the dialectic from many different angles coheres with his understanding of self-management and cognitive democracy. For him, a democratic and critical education meant being able to break with the growing specialist technocracy and its burgeoning role in tertiary education. Unequivocally, this issue lay at the core of the student demonstrations opposing a "lack of a global university purpose" and a "rupture between national problems and the academic objectives of the university." Self-management was intimately related to the possibility of rethinking the role of the university and scrutinizing its function within a greater social schema, especially when knowledge threatens to become a mere mechanism for churning out "middle management for the industrial sector of the economy."
The most difficult part of writing about a dialectical thinker is figuring out how to narrate successively the simultaneous co-implication of concepts that comprise a line of inquiry. In Revueltas, these concepts are theorizations derived from his innovative ways of organizing his thoughts on '68 via a constellation of ideas: theoretical act, self-management, critical university, and cognitive democracy. Faced with the challenge of how to develop the key points of Revueltas's work on '68, I decided to organize these sections by means of vital, deeply interconnected words and concepts: a ring of keys that unlock various horizons. Moreover, employing key words as signposts to guide us though '68 emphasizes the fundamental role of the word in periods of discursive and political opening. As we will see, for Revueltas, words were sites of reflection, liberation, and opening. They offered the chance to interrogate and propagate the meanings that sometimes cling to them — particularly when there is a certain monopoly over meaning, over what can and cannot be said. Delving into their meanings involves the work of opening up language, dissenting with the state's monopoly over language — thus democratizing it. Therefore, the task of re-signification creates the possibility of spacing out words and stringing them together to generate new ways of experiencing the language in which political life takes place. Preparing his "Literary Workshop" in prison, Revueltas wrote: "Vocable and word. We will always read badly, but we can always read better. In each text, we can discover, with constant rereading, hidden words and unexpected uses of the tiny bonds that make up language, which deliver previously unobserved richness. ... The sundry 'meanings' of the word, of a word." The same can be said of the words that persist in his written work from 1968 until his death, such as theoretical act and cognitive democracy, self-management and critical university, apando (the punishment cell), time, and freedom.
Placing '68 in History: Theoretical Acts, Self-Management, and Cognitive Democracy
In the epigraph for a collection of Revueltas's texts on '68, posthumously compiled and published by his daughter Andrea under the title México 1968, he asserts the need to reflect on events, almost as part of the political process. "I believe that the experience of 1968 is highly positive and that it is going to lead to enormous benefits," he writes, "on the condition that we know how to theorize the phenomenon." Indeed, it could be said that nearly all his written material since 1968 constitutes a sustained effort to carry out this theorization. Although Revueltas's preoccupation with understanding the dialectic in finite and uncertain terms long predated '68, the outbreak of the movement inspired him to deepen and enrich this vein of thought. As Bruno Bosteels extensively analyzes, the essence of Revueltas's finite dialectic amounts to an awareness of the constant gap between what happens in the world and the ways in which we can conceptualize it; that is, the uncertainty that emerges in the wake of an "unrepresentable" event whose singularity exceeds thought. The visions of dialectics found in Revueltas's texts from Lecumberri Prison — edited posthumously as Dialectic of Consciousness — create a deep backstage for the texts of México 68, allowing us to see the effects that the political event had on his views on dialectics and historicity.
By positioning '68 as a theoretical act, Revueltas sought to interpret the historicity of '68 while explaining this singular event as part of a greater history — one that, far from erasing its singularity, would deepen its already profound implications. In other words, the question guiding his thought is: how can we historicize the radical singularity of '68 without chalking it up to "youthful spontaneity" or subsuming it under the unity of a traditional category, such as a party or an ideology? One way or another, we ask this question every time we witness the eruption of a social movement that defies the typical categories created to make politics legible. Either the event is interpreted as spontaneous — lacking demands, coherence, and consistency — or it is absorbed, cataloged, or programmed within a greater narrative. Sometimes, '68 itself is made into a label used to classify phenomena that are incomprehensible to traditional modes of political organization. In the case of Occupy Wall Street or #YoSoy132, it is evident that when faced with the novelty of a nonpartisan movement, which nonetheless includes the tensions and conflicts among different positions, some use '68 to explain the outbreak of these movements.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "1968 Mexico"
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