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
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
However bogus their politics and their music, the punk generation’s
The low standing of public figures offered rich pickings to weekly television shows like
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
XV. Politics in a New Key
‘Je declare avoir avorte’ (“I have had an abortion’).
‘Within a generation at most, the French and Italian Communist parties will either break their ties with
