Hypertexting Someone Else's Article

What do we have to look forward to in the new year? Chaos. Por que? Lets let Jennifer Allen from Artforum fill us in.

Fidel Castro, Macanadas

2008: THE YEAR OF 1968

The year has only just begun, but the European feuilletons are already indicating that 2008 will be a year of looking back—and celebrating—the political upheavals that rocked the world in 1968, from the Prague Spring to the Paris riots.

Die Welt kicks off the trend by publishing articles—both historical and contemporary—to mark the fortieth anniversary of the events of 1968.

The first installment in this ongoing series of "retro politics": The International Cultural Congress of Havana, which first took place in Cuba in January 1968.

More than 450 intellectuals—including Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, British historian Eric Hobsbawm, French philosopher André Gorz, and West German philosopher Hans Magnus Enzensberger—gathered in solidarity with the "freedom movements" around the world and to protest "US imperialism."

Fidel Castro gave an hour-long speech under an image of Che Guevara, who had been executed just three months prior in Bolivia. The exhibitions are surely soon to follow.

Why would we glom onto failed past revolutions? Isn't that list of intellectuals a pantheon of Marxist losers? Come on, get over the Baudrillard and start living again.

Then again, why not reproduce and replace these facile revolutionaries with humor and triviality? We can exorcise the phantoms of old liberalism and throw a party too!