Abstract
Kristin Ross, in her magisterial study of social amnesia concerning the militant past of May 1968 in France, deftly recovers this past through its forgotten figures and targets as well as its various forms and practices.1 She resuscitates this militant past against the weight of interpretations that reduce May 1968 to a student-led form of cultural modernization that simply prefigured contemporary capitalism. As part of this critical undertaking, Ross dwells briefly but incisively on the practice of investigations (enquêtes) launched by various Maoist groups under the broad imperative of “ ‘going to the people’ ” to facilitate their voices and to learn from them.2 What is entirely novel about Ross’s approach to these Maoist investigations is her interpretation of them through Jacques Rancière’s crucial distinction between politics and the police. Ross suggests that the practice of investigations expressed politics in the sense of a disruption of the hierarchical distribution of places and functions in the logic of the police. Students and intellectuals physically dislocated themselves from universities to go to factories and rural settings to conduct investigations there, and these investigations were themselves placed under the “direction and control of workers.”3 For Ross, the Maoist investigation and other practices that flourished in and beyond the event of May 1968 entailed forms of “dislocation” and “declassification” that induced a whole “crisis in functionalism.”4 Students, in her strikingly succinct formulation, simply ceased “to function as students, workers as workers, and farmers as farmers.”5
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Notes
Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its After lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
Ibid., 109–113.
Ibid., 112.
Ibid., 25, emphasis in the original.
Ibid.
Cecile Brich, “The Groupe d’information sur les prisons: The Voice of Prisoners? Or Foucault’s?” Foucault Studies 5 (January 2008): 26–47.
Alain Badiou, certainly no stranger to Maoist investigations, goes so far as to insist that Marxism is first and foremost “a taking of sides and systematization of a partisan experience” in Théorie de la contradiction (Paris: François Maspero, 1975), 16, translation mine.
Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 17–18.
Ibid., 131, 159.
Ibid., 17, 370.
Ibid., 304–305.
Ibid., 4–5, 36, 178, 342.
T. B. Bottomore and Maximilien Rubel, Introductory Note to “Marx’s Enquête Ouvrière,” Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology & Social Philosophy. by Karl Marx, trans. Bottomore, ed. Bottomore and Rubel (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 203.
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 91.
Ibid.
David Harvey points out that the landed aristocracy “promoted” the factory inspectors to limit an increasingly powerful industrial bourgeoisie; see A Companion to Marx’s Capital (New York: Verso, 2010), 151.
Lars T. Lih, Lenin (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 55.
Ibid., 14, 43, 54–55.
V.I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement (New York: International Publishers, 1999), 148n.
Ibid.
Mao Tsetung, “The Important Thing Is to Be Good at Learning,” in Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Tsetung (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1971), 59.
Mao Tsetung, “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan,” Selected Readings, 23–29. A theorist no less important for Subaltern Studies than Ranajit Guha draws quite extensively from Mao’s report in his seminal analysis of insurgent consciousness, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).
Rebecca E. Karl, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 28.
Mao Tsetung, “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society,” Selected Readings, 16, 18–19.
A. Belden Fields, Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States (New York: Praeger, 1988), 122.
Groupe pour la fondation de l’Union des communistes de France marxiste-léniniste (UCFML), Le livre des paysans pauvres: 5 années de travail maoïste dans une campagne française (Paris: François Maspero, 1976).
Daniel Defert, “L’émergence d’un front nouveau: les prisons” (2003), FGIP-AL, 318.
Philippe Artières, “Militer ensemble: Entretien avec Danielle Rancière,” Michel Foucault, ed. Philippe Artières, Jean-François Bert, Frédéric Gros, and Judith Revel (Paris: Éditions de L’Herne, 2011), 53, translation mine.
Defert, “L’émergence d’un front nouveau,” 317. Rancière chronicles this meeting as the moment in which the nascent GIP adopted the questionnaire but she dates the meeting from the end of February 1971 in Artières, “Militer ensemble,” in Michel Foucault, ed. Artières, Bert, Gros, and Revel, 54. The problem with this date is that the GIP had already distributed questionnaires as early as the day of its public founding on February 8, 1971. On the distribution of questionnaires on this day, see David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 261–262.
Daniel Defert, Une vie politique: Entretiens avec Philippe Artières et Eric Favereau avec la collaboration de Joséphine Gross (Paris: Seuil, 2014), 54. Defert nevertheless remains critical of the focus on material conditions inspired by Marx’s questionnaire, suggesting that it too easily lost sight of daily humiliations that prisoners considered more important.
GIP, “Questionnaire aux détenus” (1971), FGIP-AL, 55–62, translation mine.
Ibid., 62.
Prisons Information Group (GIP), “Investigation in 20 Prisons,” in Foucault and Power: The Influence of Political Engagement on Theories of Power, by Marcelo Hoffman (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 155–204.
Ibid., 156, emphasis in the original. Of course, Foucault later adopted a more critical stance toward the language of the “dominant class” and “oppression” because this language seemed to imply a possessive rather than a relational understanding of power. But, even as he gravitated toward this stance, Marxism continued to inflect the vocabulary and contents of his analyses in the early 1970s. To take one prominent example: Foucault, in his genealogy of the prison-form, treated working class attacks on capital, in the form of plundering material wealth and dissipating labor-power, as the basis for the generalization of disciplinary power. See Michel Foucault, FCF-PUN.
GIP, “Enquête-intolérance” (1971), FGIP-AL, 53, translation mine and emphasis in the original. Maoists too had already distinguished their own investigations from sociological investigations. In her discussion of this distinction, Ross submits that sociological investigations treated workers as objects of study to be accessed from a position of exteriority whereas Maoist investigations depended on the “direction and control” of workers themselves in May ’68 and Its Afterlives, 112.
GIP, “(Manifeste du GIP)” (1971), FDE1, no. 86, 1042–1043. I thank Perry Zurn and Andrew Dilts for this reference.
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Hoffman, M. (2016). Investigations from Marx to Foucault. In: Zurn, P., Dilts, A. (eds) Active Intolerance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137510679_12
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