1 The Luddite in Ludism: literary play as the destruction of ideological state apparatuses Marko Juvan Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana marko.juvan@zrc-sazu.si Student revolution and the revival of modernism According to Arrighi, Hopkins and Wallerstein, the international student movement in the “long year 1968” was a world revolution which, even if it did not achieve its utopian goals, brought about major changes in politics, economics and culture. 1 On the one hand, these changes resulted from the transformative energy of the movement, but on the other, they were also a backlash against its emancipatory potential. Among the transformative effects of the movement’s revolutionary drive, I will focus on the revival of modernism. The Western anti-traditional art, which had been largely marginalized since the turn of the 20th century, was academized and commercialized in the late 1950s and 1960s. The newly coined critical concept of modernism bridged the cognitive-evaluative gap between the idiosyncratic contemporaneity of artworks and the common sense of the cultured class. What Jameson terms “the ideology of modernism” 2 enabled even the most radical artworks to be ennobled by international art institutions and prizes. They also found favor with the self- styled progressive bourgeoisie and promised to sell well on the world market. Such a development seems to negate the original radicalism of modernism. It arose as an anti- systemic esthetic response to the historical conjuncture between the Paris Commune and the October Revolution, in which artistic creativity sought to map the unknown in the face of what Anderson calls “the imaginative proximity of social revolution,” overcoming both 19th century academicism and contemporary mass culture. 3 1 Arrighi, Giovanni, Terence Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein, “1968: The Great Rehearsal,” 97–118, Antisystemic Movements, Verso, 1989. 2 See Jameson, Fredric, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, Verso, 2002, 171–180; Anderson, Perry, “Modernity and Revolution,” 96–113, New Left Review 1. 144 (1984): 108. 3 Anderson, o. c., 105.