Digital Graffiti Posters

May 1968 has largely been positioned and remembered as a student movement; young unruly university students dominate both the contemporary imagery and the popular memory of the general strike in France. Kristin Ross has additionally argued that a romanticization of the “poetic graffiti” of the Paris streets overshadowed the fact that nine million workers participated in the general strike that reached virtually every aspect of French life. This willful forgetting of the larger context of the 1968 general strike reframes sincere complaints regarding objective injustice as the gripes of a few rebellious teenagers protesting the Beaux Arts education. Ross’s argument could be made, mutatis mutandis, for the way “the ’60s” are often thought of in the United States. Image narratives of long-haired hippies protesting war and privileged college students demanding free speech and free love obscure the way in which 1968 was a genuine continuation of the 1950s civil rights moment.

I am in full agreement with Ross’s argument that the reduction of May 1968 to the handbills, posters, and graffiti of Paris is an establishment-serving narrative. However, even as this fetishization of the symbolic production of a social irruption overwhelms a long and complex history leading up to the general strike, those same posters and graffiti inspired a crucial and salient debate in media theory. The early 1970s exchange between Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Jean Baudrillard used May 1968 and its poetic graffiti to explicate opposing positions on the prospects of social movements and political protest in the postwar age of mass media. Briefly, Enzensberger argued that by using the old media modes of silk screening and poster making, the students were abandoning the technological tools of the future for those of the past, participating, in fact, in the very Beaux Arts protocols against which they were protesting. This doomed them to failure, since the Gaullist regime controlled French television and much of French radio. In Enzensberger’s sense, these were the means of communication that actually corresponded to the means of production. For Enzensberger, only through embracing new media technologies can a media strategy successfully support a revolutionary movement. He therefore called for increased participation in the mass media production process and suggested that mass media should be used to mobilize people in the sense of giving people the gift of movement. Baudrillard responded that this view was naïve and suggested that mass media, by the nature of their structure and mode of production, foster noncommunication by cutting off response and reciprocity, regardless of who operates the cameras or appears in front of them. Baudrillard advocated for media production that would break the code of mass communication and suggested that graffiti posters of May 1968 served as a potential model because of the rapid response and counterresponse they enabled. Further, Baudrillard argued that by using the streets as a space of communication, the students created media network that both bypassed and stymied official channels. Unsurprisingly, the debate between those who favor taking over the means of communication and those who prefer jamming the media while creating their own systems has endured these past fifty years.

Take, for instance, the contemporary #NeverAgain movement. Here, once again, we have images of unruly students, some of whom refuse to conform to notions of what a proper teenager should look like (too polished and professional, in the case of David Hogg, or not properly adhering to gender norms, in the case of Emma González). These teenagers have been selected and celebrated by establishment television channels (broadcast television networks, CNN) in a move that often limits the scope of activism against gun violence to school shootings (at wealthy suburban schools). Additionally, it serves to sideline concurrent social justice movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, and the labor activism of public school teachers. And, once again, we encounter debates over the proper relationship between media practice and social movements. This time, however, instead of a juxtaposition of the new medium of television against old graffiti posters, television has become the old medium, and digital social media, positioned as more vibrant, responsive, fluid, and mobile, represent the new. We see...