Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (96 page)

That democracy and the rule of law in Italy survived these years is a matter of no small note. From 1977 to 1982 especially, the country was under siege from random acts of extreme violence by far Left, far Right and professional criminals alike—it was in these same years that the Mafia and other criminal networks assassinated police chiefs, politicians, prosecutors, judges and journalists, sometimes with apparent near-impunity. While the more serious threat came from the extreme Right—better organized and much closer to the heart of the state—the ‘Red’ terrorists made the greater impact upon the public imagination. This was in part because, like the Red Army Fraktion in Germany, they traded upon widespread local sympathy for radical ideas. Official Communists correctly saw this appropriation of the revolutionary heritage as the terrorists’ chief asset, as well as a symptom of the risk that they posed for the credibility of the mainstream Left.

Ironically, and unbeknown to local Communists themselves, the Red Brigades and the Red Army Fraktion—like the similarly motivated but ineffectual
Cellules communistes combattantes
in Belgium,
Action Directe
in France and other, even smaller operations elsewhere—were financed in part with money supplied by the Soviet secret services. This cash was not part of any coherent strategy: it was paid out, rather, on general principles—the enemies of our enemies, however absurd and insignificant, are still our friends. But in this case the undertaking backfired: the one incontrovertible achievement of left-wing terrorism in Western Europe in these years was the thoroughness with which it expunged any remaining revolutionary illusions from the local body politic.

All the mainstream political organizations of the Left, Communists especially, were constrained to take and maintain their distance from violence of any kind. Partly this was a spontaneous response to the threat terror posed to them as well as others—trade unionists and other representatives of the traditional labor movement were among the most vilified targets of the underground networks. But partly it was because the ‘lead years’ of the 1970s served to remind everyone of just how fragile liberal democracies might actually be—a lesson occasionally neglected in the heady atmosphere of the sixties. The net effect of years of would-be revolutionary subversion at the heart of Western Europe was not to polarize society, as the terrorists had planned and expected, but rather to drive politicians of all sides to cluster together in the safety of the middle ground.

In the life of the mind, the nineteen seventies were the most dispiriting decade of the twentieth century. In some measure this can be attributed to the circumstances described in this chapter: the sharp and sustained economic downturn, together with widespread political violence, encouraged the sentiment that Europe’s ‘good times’ had gone, perhaps for many years to come. Most young people were now less concerned with changing the world than with finding a job: the fascination with collective ambitions gave way to an obsession with personal needs. In a more threatening world, securing one’s self-interest took precedence over advancing common causes.

There is no doubt that this change in mood was also a response to the heady indulgence of the previous decade. Europeans who only recently had enjoyed an unprecedented explosion of energy and originality in music, fashion, cinema and the arts could now contemplate at leisure the cost of their recent revelries. It was not so much the idealism of the Sixties that seemed to have dated so very fast as the
innocence
of those days: the feeling that whatever could be imagined could be done; that whatever could be made could be possessed; and that transgression—moral, political, legal, aesthetic—was inherently attractive and productive. Whereas the Sixties were marked by the naive, self-congratulatory impulse to believe that everything happening was new—and everything new was significant—the Seventies were an age of cynicism, of lost illusions and reduced expectations.

Mediocre times, wrote Albert Camus in
The Fall
, beget empty prophets. The 1970s offered a rich harvest of them. It was an age depressingly aware of having come
after
the big hopes and ambitious ideas of the recent past, and having nothing to offer but breathless and implausible re-runs and extensions of old thoughts. It was, quite self-consciously, a ‘post-everything’ era, whose future prospects appeared cloudy. As the American sociologist Daniel Bell observed at the time, ‘The use of the hyphenated prefix post- indicates [a] sense of living in interstitial time.’ As a description of the real world—‘post-war’, ‘post-imperial’, and most recently ‘post-industrial’—the term had its uses, even if it left uncertain what might follow. But when applied to categories of thought—as in ‘post-Marxist’, ‘post-structuralist’ and, most elusively of all, ‘post-modern’—it merely added to the obscurities of an already confused time.

The culture of the Sixties had been rationalistic. Mild drugs and utopian revelries notwithstanding, the social thought of the age, like its music, operated in a familiar and coherent register, merely ‘expanded’. It was also strikingly communitarian: students, like ‘workers’, ‘peasants’, ‘negroes’ and other collectives, were presumed to share interests and affinities that bound them in a special relationship with one another and—albeit antagonistically—to the rest of society. The projects of the Sixties, however fantastic, presumed a relationship between individual and class, class and society, society and state, that would have been familiar in its form if not its content to theorists and activists at any point in the previous century.

The culture of the Seventies turned not on the collective but the individual. Just as anthropology had displaced philosophy as the Ur-discipline of the Sixties, so psychology now took its place. In the course of the Sixties the notion of ‘false consciousness’ had been widely taken up by young Marxists to explain the failure of workers and others to liberate themselves from identification with the capitalist interest. In a perverted variant this idea formed, as we have seen, the core premise of Left terrorism. But it also took on a curious afterlife in less politicized circles: adapting Marxist background language to Freudian subjects, self-styled ‘post-Freudians’ now emphasized the need to liberate not social classes but aggregated individual subjects.

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.’