The End of the Sixties

The essay considers the sixties as a global irruption of political and cultural revolution, of world-making of various kinds: decolonization, new subjectivities, new forms of daily life and politics, and new scenes of the political. It holds the sixties to be a global phenomenon, whereby events as disparate as the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the rise of the U.S. counterculture were linked through their contemporaneity, through the shared global situation to which all uprisings were responses, and through the extraparty character of radical politics in the realm of the every day. The essay's central focus is on the Sino-Soviet split, on how one of the most radical elements of sixties' ideology became the impetus for rapprochement with the U.S. and attendant deradicalization. In considering the sixties' end, the essay rejects a discourse of failure or unintended consequences, and seeks to consider, through an examination of ways in which the energies of the period were transformed, a new way of approaching the temporal politics of the period.