An Intellectual Mass-Transformism: Restoration and Postmodern Passive Revolution in the Neo-liberal Cycle

ABSTRACT

In the 1970s, the historical-political cycle that had long characterized Western social conflict was reversed, and the rise of the lower classes was followed by a massive counter-offensive by the ruling classes. It was then that modern democracy began to end, just as a neo-Bonapartistic and media-oriented regime took hold that today constantly forms and restructures Western public opinion. If the rise of the lower classes was made possible through their conscious unification, a necessary precondition for the weakest parts of society to be able to act effectively in the conflict, the deconstruction of modern democracy, on the contrary, has since then inevitably involved the disarticulation of the antagonist subject and even the very concept of identity. It was a process that took place mainly in the production domain and in the capitalistic factories, of course. But it was also a process that would not have been possible without a radical parallel transformation of forms of consciousness, a transformation that calls into question the ideological sphere and its philosophy. Generated primarily within the intellectual left, the cultural shift towards postmodernism should therefore be understood, in this perspective, as the prevailing ideological feature of an enormous historical shift. It is a transition in which restoration is intertwined with passive revolution, resulting in a process that could be defined as a sort of intellectual mass-transformism.

KEYWORDS:

• Revolution
• restoration
• transformism
• neo-liberalism
• Gramsci

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Stefano G. Azzarà teaches history of political philosophy in the Department of Humanities at the University of Urbino. He is also secretary at the presidency of the Internationale Gesellschaft Hegel-Marx. His research deals with the great philosophical and political traditions of contemporary age: conservatism, liberalism, historical materialism. He collaborates with international reviews and is director of Materialismo Storico. He has spoken at several meetings in Italy and abroad and recently published books including Un Nietzsche italiano (An Italian Nietzsche), L’humanité commune (The Common Humanity), Democrazia cercasi (In Search of Democracy) and Friedrich Nietzsche.

ORCID

Stefano G. Azzarà http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4323-0856

Notes

1 See Roberts (1991), Fest (1992), Lévesque (1997), Fejtô (1998), Conquest (1999), Engel (2009), Dalos (2009), Meyer (2009), Sebestyen (2010), Kotkin and Gross (2010). A bibliographic review in Brown (2010).

2 See Lomellini and Varsori (2013) for a review. Then, see Cavarero (1989). Yet Braidotti (2003, 42) asserted that, “in Europe the Eighties were a period of expansion of the social democracy that led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall.” On eco-pacifist thought, see Langer (1990, 1992). A more general vision is in Revelli (2001).

3 See, even much later, the attitude of authors such as Badiou, Eagleton, Hardt, Jean-Nancy, Negri, Rancière and Žižek in Douzinas and Žižek (2009).

4 Less clear, but certainly far from the “revolutionary” enthusiasm, are the opinions in Boffa (1995), Karol (1990), and Magri (2009).

5 See Gramsci (1975, Notebook I, §151, 134). Starting at this point, quotations from Gramsci's Prison Notebooks will be reported directly in the text, in parentheses.

6 “Heterogony of ends” is a basic principle in Gianbattista Vico's philosophy, which means that when we act, we think to obtain something but what we really obtain is different from our original purpose. In consequence of this result, also our original idea changes, in a sort of continuous feedback process. At the end of the nineteenth century, the German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt coined it, in order to express a concept that meanwhile was used by many other authors.

7 The dispute about the nature of 1968 and contestation movements arose, it could be said, almost in real time: see Viale (1978).

8 “Detournement” is a French word put forward by Debord (1967), a French leftist intellectual. In 1967 he “prophetized” the transformation of capitalist society into a “society of the spectacle” ruled by the mass media and by their production of images and imagination. “Detournement” means that changing the context or the way of use of something will change the meaning of this thing at the same time. Debord thought that this was a way for subverting the bourgeois order. But what happened was exactly the opposite: leftist culture was detournated and subjugated by capitalistic hegemony.

9 About Foucault, see Zamora (2014); about Vattimo, see Azzarà (2011); then see Furet (1995).