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Without elevating the French revolts of May 1968 to the status of mythical events that can be neither captured nor repeated, it is apparent that their power to connote new forms of governance and subjectivization has not waned. Especially in the last decade, contemporary art practitioners, such as Olafur Eliasson, have harnessed the participatory, democratic discourse that surrounded the events of May 1968 as a way of invigorating the public to generate forms of subjectivization within art institutions. This ostensible repetition raises important questions about the afterlives of 1968 as a particular (yet plural) historical confluence of political circumstances, material practices, and representational and textual artifacts that still resonate in the contemporary imaginary. Indeed, if the last forty years have seen diverse recuperations and reproductions of May 1968 as a global seismic shift, the one I would like to excavate revolves around the intersection of phenomenological experience and the democratic opposition to government power within the French context. Articulated as a critical paradigm for collective organization by diverse voices during the ’68 revolts, this particular history becomes all the more pronounced through its novel iterations in aesthetic manifestations such as Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project at the beginning of the twenty-first century.1 At the crux of this essay is the presentation of a microhistory that asks how the modality of participation, considered both a political manifestation of and resistance to biopower, has gone through a radical transformation since the “long ’68” to become a conceptual platform for contemporary aesthetics. My main focus is the way in which the discourse of revolutionary “spontaneity” that characterized the French revolts has been modified into an insistence on the CHAPTER ELEVEN Sensorial Techniques of the Self From the Jouissance of May ’68 to the Economy of the Delay NOIT BANAI 294 NOIT BANAI ethical experience of the “delay” in Eliasson’s installation. To crystallize the implications of this conceptual and temporal reformulation, it is imperative to understand how the body and visual apparatus of the “participant” have been envisaged and deployed in these two disparate moments and to what ends. Through such an analysis, we can assess the continuing valence of 1968 and confront the complex methodological problems that come with evaluating such apparent paradigm repetitions. Though the elaboration of the “long sixties” as a convergence of historical, institutional, and ideological circumstances extending both retrospectively and prospectively beyond the strict parameters of the chronological decade is already established in the writing of European and American history, the concept has not yet found its way into the narrativization of French aesthetic practice .2 Similarly, while the term Les trentes glorieuses (The glorious thirty) identifies a historical period of accelerated modernization in French history that spans 1945 to 1975, there are very few sustained discussions that link the shifts in aesthetic practice and the singular revolts of the French ’68, and those that do exist focus almost exclusively on the role of the Situationist International .3 Most commonly designated as “postwar” or “neo-avant-garde,” the aesthetic and architectural practices that emerged between 1958 and 1968 are cast predominantly as a period of French artistic decline and depoliticization.4 Some claim that while artists in the Hexagon, the colloquial term for metropolitan France, were retrospectively engaged with the trauma of World War II, the United States usurped France as the epicenter of artistic innovation; others argue that compliance with capitalist processes diminished the political potential of artistic practice, especially in comparison with earlier avant-garde movements, other geographical regions, and the subsequent “events” of May ’68.5 In contrast to the retrospective inflection of “post” or the revivalist emphasis of “neo,” the introduction of the concept of the long ’68 can help frame the specific sites of mediation between aesthetic practice and political events. Elsewhere I have argued that the seemingly punctual, political events of May ’68 were only possible because of an already reconfigured field of techniques and discourses about individual and public participation that took shape in the preceding decade.6 Roughly between 1958 and 1968, a heterogeneous sphere of practices, including aesthetics, actively reimagined concepts of the object, the subject, and the relation between them. This sweeping reexamination destabilized the last remnants of high modernism and, with it, the valorization of an autonomous, unchanging object separated from a self-enclosed, fixed subject . Intertwined with the intensified economic rehabilitation of the postwar years and the democratization of consumer culture, the subversion of the absolute authority of artwork and author went hand...

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