Contributed by Joshua Clover to the Archive of Suburban Dissent

“Chateau Gaillard” was a barricade named after its architect, a shoemaker by trade, and rose two stories at the place de la Concorde. This fell, as would the “woman’s barricade” a couple kilometers to the north staffed by the Union des femmes. They would all fall, and barricadists unable to flee would be shot. The barricade is an example of the monument that must be rebuilt over and over, that must be designed to be practical in different practical situations of riots and revolts. What I wish to draw attention to here is a collective process that keeps material practice wedded to the monumental idea in a way that resists being detached and abstracted. This is my demand for monuments: they must resist the division of manual and intellectual labor in their creation and existence, even if that means the existence is premised on repeated construction and thus on impermanence and/or multi-locationality. Let us say that it is a commune's overcoming of that division between architects and shoemakers, between aesthetic memorialists and street fighters, that is the monument. Barricades — to be built as needed during struggles— are instances, affirmations, and clarifications of the monument. They are also barricades.