We may say, in some sense, that this is what went wrong in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was in this era, of course, that the rejection of bourgeois adulthood first took on a national visibility, first became a trend whose attraction was therefore necessarily in part its very trendiness. (It was also in this era, that adolescent rebellion became intermingled with a program of political resistance (the anti-war movement), and thus the two forms of rebellion became confused.)
There must have been, in 1967 and ’68, a wild sense of possibility, a feeling that everything was changing. Indeed, a number of things did change: sexual mores, clothing styles, the acceptability of drug use. But, by the 1980s, all of these changes were smoothly reincorporated, not only into the same stable class structure that had been there before, but into the whole consumerist-conformist construction of identity that lay at the heart of the sudden revulsion that had precipitated the rebellion in the first place. If anything, the liberalization of sexuality, clothing, etc. seemed to lead in the end to an even more firmly consumerist culture. Without the old taboos, identity was all the more free flowing, all the less grounded in anything but success, acquisition, choice. I am hardly the first to make this observation.
One way to explain this reincorporation—this failure of the rebellion, this victory of the existing system of class and identity—is to say that the hippies rejected the existing forms of adulthood but failed to discover any new notion of adulthood to put in its place. The standard line on the hippies is that their rebellion was essentially adolescent and when the party wound down, they grew up, got jobs, and settled down. This is not the point I’m making. If the rebellion was adolescent, this was perhaps necessary: to alter one’s life, one must begin with a movement of rejection—not a wholesale rejection but still a revulsion, a turning away, yes, in disgust, for it requires energy to dislodge things. But there is a second movement, much harder than the first, and this movement was never made. The second movement consists in going back and understanding and salvaging from the wreck those elements necessary to human life. An inevitable effect of this second movement is that one discovers how much more value there was in the things one rejected than one had realized, how cleverly that old hideous system had met the demands of human dignity and human frailty and human desire.
Pasolini wrote in 1973:
…[T]he radical and indiscriminate condemnation that they [the hippies] have pronounced against their fathers… rearing up against them an insurmountable barrier, has in the end isolated young people, blocking them from engaging in a dialectical relationship with their fathers. Now only through this dialectical relationship—even if dramatic and extremist in character—could youths have obtained a true historical conscience of themselves and moved forward, “passing beyond” their fathers. Instead, the isolation in which they have enclosed themselves – like a world apart, in a ghetto reserved for youth – keeps them stuck in their unbudgeable historical reality; and that inevitably implies a regression. They have actually ended up in a position behind that of their fathers, resurrecting inside of their own souls terrors and conformisms, and in their physical appearance, conventionalities and wretchedness that seemed to have been permanently overcome.
(Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Contra I Capelli Lughi,” Corriere della Sera, January 7, 1973)
Having written all this, I see that it is, really, only a parenthesis. It was my intention to write about something else entirely. But I got carried away. Perhaps I have only written things that were already obvious.
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