by Tony Judt
Theorists of liberation now surfaced, in Western Europe as in North America, whose goal was to release the human subject not from socially enforced bondage but from self-imposed illusions. The sexual variant on this theme—the idea that social and sexual repression were integrally linked—was already a truism in certain milieux of the late Sixties. But Marcuse, or Wilhelm Reich, stood in clear line of descent from both Freud and Marx—seeking collective transformation through individual liberation. The followers of Jacques Lacan on the other hand, or contemporary theorists of feminism like Kate Millett and Annie Leclerc, were both less ambitious and more. They were not much concerned with traditional projects of social revolution (which the feminists correctly identified with political movements led by and primarily for men). Instead they sought to undermine the very concept of the human subject that had once underlain them.
Two widespread assumptions lay behind such thinking, shared very broadly across the intellectual community of the time. The first was that power rested not—as most social thinkers since the Enlightenment had supposed—upon control of natural and human resources, but upon the monopoly of knowledge: knowledge about the natural world; knowledge about the public sphere; knowledge about oneself; and above all, knowledge about the way in which knowledge itself is produced and legitimized. The maintenance of power in this account rested upon the capacity of those in control of knowledge to maintain that control at the expense of others, by repressing subversive ‘knowledges’.
At the time, this account of the human condition was widely and correctly associated with the writings of Michel Foucault. But for all his occasional obscurantism Foucault was a rationalist at heart. His early writings tracked quite closely the venerable Marxist claim that in order to liberate workers from the shackles of capitalism one had first to substitute a different account of history and economics for the self-serving narrative of bourgeois society. In short, one had to substitute revolutionary knowledge, so to speak, for that of the masters: or, in the language of Antonio Gramsci so fashionable a few years earlier, one had to combat the ‘hegemony’ of the ruling class.
A second assumption, one that was to acquire an even stronger grip on intellectual fashions, went considerably further. This was the seductive insistence upon subverting not just old certainties but the very possibility of certainty itself. All behavior, all opinion, all knowledge, precisely because it was socially derived and therefore politically instrumental, should be regarded with suspicion. The very idea that judgments or evaluations might stand independent of the person making them came to be treated in certain quarters as itself the expression and representation of a partisan (and implicitly conservative) social position.
All iterations of judgment or belief could in principle be reduced in this way. Even critical intellectuals could themselves be thus ‘positioned’. In the words of the French sociology professor Pierre Bourdieu, the most influential European exponent of the new sociology of knowledge, ‘professorial discourse’ is but the expression of ‘the dominated fraction of the dominating class.’ What this beguilingly subversive way of positioning all knowledge and opinion did not disclose was how to determine whether one ‘discourse’ was truer than another: a dilemma resolved by treating ‘truth’ as itself a socially positioned category—a stance that would soon become fashionable in many places. The natural outcome of such developments was a growing skepticism towards all rational social argument. The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, whose 1979 essay on the subject, The Post-modern Condition, nicely summarized the air du temps, put the point clearly enough: ‘I define postmodern as incredulity towards meta-narratives.’
The underlying and usually unacknowledged source of these predominantly French intellectual influences was, as so often in past decades, German. The Italian writer Elio Vittorini once observed that ever since Napoleon, France had proved impermeable to any foreign influence except that of German romantic philosophy: and what was true when he wrote that in 1957 was no less true two decades later. Whereas the humanist sensibilities of an earlier generation had been drawn to Marx and Hegel, the self-doubting Seventies were seduced by an altogether darker strain in German thought. Michel Foucault’s radical skepticism was in large measure an adaptation of Nietzsche. Other influential French authors, notably the literary critic Jacques Derrida, looked instead to Martin Heidegger for their critique of human agency and their ‘de-construction’, as it was becoming known, of the cognitive human subject and his textual subject matter.
To scholarly specialists on Heidegger or his German contemporary Carl Schmitt (whose historicist realism was attracting attention among students of international affairs), this interest was more than a little odd. Both Heidegger and Schmitt, after all, were identified with Nazism—Heidegger quite explicitly thanks to his acceptance of academic office under Nazi auspices. But the renewed interest in criticizing optimistic assumptions about progress, in questioning the underpinnings of enlightened rationalism and its political and cognitive by-products, established a certain affinity between early-twentieth-century critics of modernity and technical progress like Heidegger and the disabused skeptics of the ‘post-modern’ age—and allowed Heidegger and others to launder their earlier associations.
By the time German philosophy had passed through Parisian social thought into English cultural criticism—the forms in which it was familiar to most readers of the time—its inherently difficult vocabulary had attained a level of expressive opacity that proved irresistibly appealing to a new generation of students and their teachers. The junior faculty recruited to staff the expanded universities of the time were themselves in most cases graduates of the Sixties, raised in the fashions and debates of those years. But whereas European universities of the previous decade were preoccupied with grand theories of various sorts—society, the state, language, history, revolution—what trickled down to the next generation was above all a preoccupation with Theory as such. Seminars in ‘Cultural Theory’, or ‘General Theory’ displaced the conventional disciplinary boundaries that had still dominated even radical academic debate a few years before. ‘Difficulty’ became the measure of intellectual seriousness. In their disabused commentary on the heritage of ‘’68 Thought’, the French writers Luc Ferry and Alain Renault tartly concluded that ‘the greatest achievement of the thinkers of the Sixties was to convince their audience that incomprehensibility was the sign of greatness.’
With a ready-made audience in the universities, newly lionised theorists like Lacan and Derrida elevated the vagaries and paradoxes of language into full-fledged philosophies, infinitely flexible templates for textual and political explication. In institutions such as Birmingham University’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, the new theoreticism blended smoothly into the old. Marxism was relieved of its embarrassingly atavistic attachment to economic categories and political institutions and recycled as cultural criticism. The inconvenient reluctance of the revolutionary proletariat to vanquish the capitalist bourgeoisie was no longer an impediment. As Stuart Hall, the leading British spokesman for Cultural Studies in those years, expressed it in 1976: ‘The idea of the “disappearance of the class as a whole” is replaced by the far more complex and differentiated picture of how the different sectors and strata of a class are driven into different courses and options by their determining socio-economic circumstances.’
Hall himself would in later years concede that his Centre was ‘for a time, over-preoccupied with these difficult theoretical issues.’ But in fact this narcissistic obscurantism was very much of its time, its detachment from daily reality bearing unconscious witness to the exhaustion of an intellectual tradition. Moreover, it was by no means the only symptom of cultural depletion in these years. Even the sparkling originality of 1960s French cinema declined into self-conscious artistry. In 1974 Jacques Rivette, the witty and original director of Paris Nous Appartient (1960) and La Religieuse (1966), directed Céline et Julie vont en bateau (‘Céline and Julie Go Boating’)
. At 193 minutes in length, a plot-less, stylized parody (albeit unintended) of the French New Wave, Céline et Julie marked the end of an age. Artistic theorizing was displacing art.
If one strand in the heritage of the Sixties was high-cultural pretension, the other, its intimate inversion, was a hardening crust of knowing cynicism. The relative innocence of rock and roll was increasingly displaced by media-wise pop bands whose stock in trade was a derisive appropriation and degradation of the style forged by their immediate precursors. Much as popular romances and tabloid journalism had once fastened on to mass literacy for commercial advantage, so ‘punk’ rock appeared in the Seventies in order to exploit the market for popular music. Presented as ‘counter-cultural’ it was in fact parasitic upon mainstream culture, invoking violent images and radical language for frequently mercenary ends.
The avowedly politicized language of punk rock bands, exemplified in the Sex Pistols’ 1976 hit ‘Anarchy in the UK’, caught the sour mood of the time. .But the punk bands’ politics were as one-dimensional as their musical range, the latter all too often restricted to three chords and a single beat and dependent upon volume for its effect. Like the Red Army Fraction, the Sex Pistols and other punk rock groups wanted above all to shock. Even their subversive appearance and manner came packaged in irony and a certain amount of camp: ‘Remember the Sixties?’ they seemed to say; ‘Well, like it or not, we are what’s left.’ Musical subversion now consisted of angry songs decrying ‘hegemony’, their counterfeit political content masking the steady evisceration of musical form.205
However bogus their politics and their music, the punk generation’s cynicism at least was real, and honestly come by. They were the sour and mostly untalented end of a growing spectrum of disrespect: for the past, for authority, for public figures and public affairs. In its wittier incarnations, this scorn for pomposity and tradition took its cue from the disabused young British political satirists who had first surfaced nearly two decades earlier: the theatre review Beyond the Fringe; the BBC late-night show That Was the Week That Was; and the weekly magazine Private Eye. Exploiting the rapidly growing television audience and the steady retreat of state censorship, Monty Python and its successors and imitators blended broad slap-stick, ribald social commentary and sardonic political mockery—a mixture last seen in the trenchant political cartoons of Gillray and Cruikshank. The close interplay between rock music and the new burlesque is nicely illustrated in the financial backing for two of the Python films, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974) and Life of Brian (1979): underwritten respectively by Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, and by George Harrison of the Beatles.
The low standing of public figures offered rich pickings to weekly television shows like Spitting Image or France’s Bebête Show, where leading politicians were routinely held up to a degree of ridicule and scorn that would have been unthinkable a few years before (and still is in the United States). Satirists and political comedians replaced writers and artists as the intellectual heroes of the hour: when French students were asked in the early Eighties which public figures they most admired, older commentators were shocked to learn that the late Jean-Paul Sartre had been replaced by Coluche, a ribald and occasionally licentious television comedian who sardonically acknowledged his newfound standing by running for President of his country.
Yet the same public television channels that broadcast pointed and irreverent parodies of popular and middlebrow culture also provided humorists with copious raw material. Perhaps the most widely celebrated object of ridicule was the ‘Eurovision Song Contest’, an annual television competition first broadcast in 1970. A commercial exercise glossed as a celebration of the new technology of simultaneous television transmission to multiple countries, the show claimed hundreds of millions of spectators by the mid-Seventies. The Eurovision Song Contest—in which B-league crooners and unknowns from across the continent performed generic and forgettable material before returning in almost every case to the obscurity whence they had briefly emerged—was so stunningly banal in conception and execution as to defy parody. It would have been out of date fifteen years earlier. But for just that reason it heralded something new.
The enthusiasm with which the Eurovision Song Contest promoted and celebrated a hopelessly dated format and a stream of inept performers reflected a growing culture of nostalgia, at once wistful and disabused. If punk, post-modern and parody were one response to the confusions of a disillusioned decade, ‘retro’ was another. The French pop group Il Était Une Fois (‘Once Upon a Time’) sported 1930s clothing, one of many short-lived sartorial revivals from ‘granny skirts’ to the neo-Edwardian hairstyles of the ‘New Romantics’—the latter reprised for the second time in three decades. In clothing and music (and buildings) the temptation to recycle old styles—mixing and matching with little self-confidence—substituted for innovation. The Seventies, a self-questioning time of troubles, looked backward, not forward. The Age of Aquarius had left in its wake a season of pastiche.
XV
Politics in a New Key
‘Je déclare avoir avorté’ (“I have had an abortion’).
Simone de Beauvoir (and 342 other women), April 5th 1971
‘Within a generation at most, the French and Italian Communist parties
will either break their ties with Moscow or shrivel into insignificance’.
Denis Healey (1957)
‘With this Treaty, nothing is lost that had not long since been
gambled away’.
Chancellor Willy Brandt, August 1970
‘When two states wish to establish better relations they often reach for the
highest common platitude’.
Timothy Garton Ash
In the 1970s the political landscape of western Europe started to fracture and fragment. Since the end of the First World War, mainstream politics had been divided between two political ‘families’, Left and Right, themselves internally split between ‘moderates’ and ‘radicals’. Since 1945 the two sides had drawn ever closer, but the pattern had not radically altered. The spectrum of political options available to European voters in 1970 would not have been unfamiliar to their grandparents.
The longevity of Europe’s political parties derived from a remarkable continuity in the ecology of the electorate. The choice between Labour and Conservatives in Britain, or Social Democrats and Christian Democrats in West Germany, no longer reflected deep divisions over particular policies, much less profound ‘lifestyle’ preferences as they would come to be known. In most places it was an echo of longstanding, trans-generational voting habits, determined by the class, religion or locality of the voter rather than by the party’s program. Men and women voted as their parents had voted, depending on where they lived, where they worked and what they earned.
But beneath the surface continuity a tectonic shift was taking place in the political sociology of European voters. The block vote of the white, male, employed working class—the universal bedrock of Communist and Socialist party support—was contracting and splitting. In much the same way, the ‘ideal-typical’ conservative voter—older, female, churchgoing—could no longer be counted upon to furnish the core electorate of Christian Democrat or Conservative parties. To the extent that they persisted, such traditional voters were no longer the majority. Why?
In the first place, social and geographical mobility over the course of the postwar decades had diluted fixed social categories almost beyond recognition. The Christian voting bloc in rural western France or the small towns of the Veneto, the proletarian industrial strongholds of southern Belgium or northern England, were now fissured and fragmented. Men and women no longer lived in the same places as their parents and often did very different jobs. Unsurprisingly, they saw the world rather differently as well; their political preferences began to reflect these changes, though slowly at first.
Secondly, the prosperity and social reforms of the Sixties and early Seventies had effectively exhausted the programs and vision of the
traditional parties. Their very success had deprived politicians of moderate Left and Right alike of a credible agenda, especially after the spate of liberal reforms of the Sixties. The institutions of the state itself were not in dispute, nor were the general objectives of economic policy. What remained was the fine-tuning of labour relations, legislation against discrimination in housing and employment, the expansion of educational facilities and the like: serious public business, but hardly the stuff of great political debate.
Thirdly, there were now alternative denominators of political allegiance. Ethnic minorities, often unwelcome in the white working-class communities of Europe where they had arrived, were not always invited into local political or labour organizations and their politics reflected this exclusion. And lastly, the generational politics of the Sixties had introduced into public discussion concerns utterly unfamiliar to an older political culture. The ‘New Left’ might have lacked a program, but it was not short of themes. Above all, it introduced new constituencies. The fascination with sex and sexuality led naturally to sexual politics; women and homosexuals, respectively subordinate and invisible in traditional radical parties, now surfaced as legitimate historical subjects, with rights and claims. Youth, and the enthusiasms of youth, moved to center stage, especially as the voting age fell to eighteen in many places.
The prosperity of the time had encouraged a shift in people’s attention from production to consumption, from the necessities of existence to the quality of life. In the heat of the Sixties few troubled themselves much over the moral dilemmas of prosperity—its beneficiaries were too busy enjoying the fruits of their good fortune. But within a few years, many—notably among the educated young adults of north-west Europe—came to look upon the commercialism and material well-being of the Fifties and Sixties as a burdensome inheritance, bringing tawdry commodities and false values. The price of modernity, at least to its main beneficiaries, was starting to look rather high; the ‘lost world’ of their parents and grandparents rather appealing.