1968 was a year of the Revolution in France, May 1968 had a disruptive effect on society. But the revolution failed. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello wrote in their book “The new spirit of capitalism” that the revolutionary critique was split into two groups: the workers on the one hand, who mostly supported a kind of social critique, focused on social securities, fair wages, and stable living standards, and the students on the other hand, who supported an artistic critique, focused on flexibility, self-fulfilment at the working place and flat hierarchies. Capitalism in the aftermath of 68 co-opted the artistic critique. Organizing the working conditions became more flexible and implemented creative forms of working, identifying with the brand or the enterprise became more important and therefore, the self-fulfilment. The social scientist Andreas Reckwitz embedded the artistic critique in a history of counter-culture. Following Boltanski and Chiapello he marks the 60s/70s as “a pivotal point in history which ushered in a post-materialist labour ethos” (Reckwitz: 124). Integrated into the mainstream capitalism many elements of this kind of critique became hegemonic: “The formerly anti-capitalist ‘artistic critique’ […], the critique of alienation in the name of self-realization, cooperation and authenticity, is already built into the current project-based way of working and to the organizations with their flattened hierarchies” (Reckwitz: 4). Reckwitz analysis a hegemonical complex of creativity in many areas. Its concentration can be found “in postmodern art, in the critical psychology of self-realization, in design, fashion and advertising made for a progressive audience, in the rise of pop and rock culture, and in critical urbanism” (Reckwitz: 31). The subversive wish of being creative mutated to an imperative to be creative.
“Patti Smith and man others became a new kind of individual radical, who watched the decaying city with a cool detachment. They didn’t try and change it they just experienced it. […] Radicals across America turned to art and music as means of expressing their criticism of society. They believed that instead of trying to change the world outside the new radicalism should try and change what was inside people’s heads and the way to do this was through self-expression, not collective action.” (Hypernormalisation: Minute 8)
What Curtis describes in his movie HyperNormalisation (2016) is very similar to the artistic critique. He describes the hope that change comes through the individual first. If we isolate the underlying focus on the individual, we definitely can see something in common with neoliberalism in which “private enterprise and entrepreneurial initiative are seen as the keys to innovation and wealth creation” (Harvey: 64). Disruption starting within the individual is something that neoliberalism and some versions of the counterculture share. In one version it’s the subversive disruption of the capitalistic system and in the other, it’s the Schumpeterian disruption bringing the whole system forward.
The cultural theorist Mark Fisher argues that in this context capitalism has appropriated the creatively produced “new” in a broader sense. A version of politics that challenges this appropriation shouldn’t reclaim it by “adapting to the conditions in which we find ourselves – we’ve done that rather too well, and ‘successful adaptation’ is the strategy of managerialism par excellence” (Fisher: 28).
But why and how was this critique co-opted? David Harvey mentioned something very important:
“But many students were (and still are) affluent and privileged, or at least middle class, and in the US the values of individual freedom have long been celebrated (in music and popular culture) as primary. Neoliberal themes could here find fertile ground for propagation” (Harvey:44).
One could argue that some ideas of the counterculture found their way into the capitalistic production: The “workers” at Google and Facebook are trying out new forms of relationships or LSD-micro-dosing. But obviously, they are forming a new liberal middle class or even an elite. The key workers, the cleaning workers, the securities in Google and Facebook are other people. And this topic wasn’t implemented, this would be a contemporary social critique: to raise the awareness of class differences, the lack of financial and social securities. On the surface, for the upper-middle class, the working conditions changed, but in general the divergence between the rich and the poor became bigger (Harvey: 25) and competition for jobs became harder.
To change this could be a starting point for today’s social critique: to change the financial and material vertical differences.
On the one side, one can argue that counterculture was a pivot point in history from which creativity and the creative individual was more and more integrated into hegemonical culture. But on the other side, it is more complicated. Curtis who blames the counterculture for today’s individualism might oversee the accomplishments achieved by them.
If you identify concrete movements just like the second-wave feminism or the Free Speech Movement in the US (there were many others: gay liberation, Ontological Hysterical Theatre, radical therapy organizations, Mental Patients’ Liberation), you definitely can argue, that they changed everyday life for some oppressed minorities and the public discourse and awareness.
It does not do justice to the counterculture of the 60s and 70s describing their heritage as something that failed totally. The neoliberals “wanted to extend the market across into the social area” (Olssen: 199). This economization of the social leads to the extension of economic criteria and “market exchange relations now govern all areas of voluntary exchange amongst individuals” (Olssen: 199). In view of this neoliberal project, it becomes more and more clear that it differed very much from the intentions of the counterculture, which is a broad and to some extent inaccurate category to summarize locally different “countercultures”. The counter cultures often tried to escape a capitalist apparat and focused on a mental aspect of the subject to overcome the subject, viewed as a capitalistic and individualistic form of existence. We will take the Schizo-Culture as an example. There exists a historical direct link between Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, leading figures of Schizo-Culture and Patti Smith: on a visit to the U.S., the French philosophers met her and attended her concerts (cf. Demers: 266). Sylvère Lotringer, strongly involved in America’s Schizo-Culture, defines it: “‘by Schizo-Culture, we don’t mean, of course, the end-product of institutional repression or social controls of all kinds, but the process of becoming, the flow of creative energy unchecked by ego boundaries: body intensity, affirmative, revolutionary disposition’ (Lotringer, Letter to Allen Ginsberg)” (Demers: 290). I would argue that it is too easy to see the counterculture as a scapegoat for today’s post-Fordist “new spirit of capitalism” as Curtis might do. The counterculture has certainly indulged in certain naiveties and thus missed out on real political opportunities. It has also prepared the ground for a perverse and simplified form of itself, which runs towards a distinction-seeking individualism. But the imagination and the real change that was also part of its time should not be underestimated.
To conclude, I am coming back to Mark Fisher and will risk a gaze into a possible future of taking action:
"If neoliberalism triumphed by incorporating the desires of the post 68 working class, a new left could begin by building on the desires which neoliberalism has generated but which it has been unable to satisfy. For example, the left should argue that it can deliver what neoliberalism signally failed to do: a massive reduction of bureaucracy" (Fisher: 79).
References:
Boltanski, Luc/ Chiapello, Eve: The new Spirit of Capitalism. Verso, 2005.
Curtis, Adam: HyperNormalisation. BBC, 2016.
Demers, Jason: COLLECTING INTENSITIES: THE ARRIVAL OF FRENCH THEORY IN AMERICA, 1970s. Library and Archives Canada, 2009.
Harvey, David: A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, 2005.
Ollsen, Mark: Structuralism, post-structuralism, neo-liberalism: assessing Foucault’s legacy. In J. Education Policy,, 2003, Vol. 18, No. 2, 189-202.
Reckwitz, Andreas: The Invention of Creativity. Modern Society and the Culture of the new. John Wiley & Sons, 2017.
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