Autumn 1994
Volume 21, Number 1

What does it mean to be accused of being '68 in the 1990s? What nuclear button does the word utopia push? Why does pressure on the politics of professionalism elicit such rage and contempt? How is it that a narrative of failure has come to frame that "revolution" with a black edge, an edge that has become a bar to reimagining a radical relation of politics and professional life? What, if anything, does this anxiety have to do with the increasing institutional authority of feminism, and with the additional pressures of queer politics and multiculturalism, on the value of knowledge production, intellectual identity, pedagogy, and criticism? This essay is written in favor of refusing to learn the lessons of history, of refusing to relinquish utopian practice, of refusing the apparently inevitable movement from tragedy to farce that has marked so much of the analysis of social movements generated post '68. I mean to place '68 in a scene of collaborations and aspirations for thinking, describing, and theorizing social change in a present tense, but a present tense different from what we can now imagine for pragmatic, possible, or useful politics.

Lauren Berlant, a coeditor of Critical Inquiry, teaches English at the University of Chicago. She writes on the cultural/sexual politics of national identity and on the relations between mass nationality, mass culture, modernity, and postmodernity. She is the author of The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (1991).