'A London Child of the Seventies'

Well, okay, I was always on the outskirts of London, like a Steppenwolf, and I don't really remember too much of the seventies-perhaps not enough to associate with the literature, music of the times anyway...but only perhaps. Those who know me will say: more like a child of the 1870's ! And there is some truth to that, or at least I like to imagine so. Something of that older world survives-even if it is a site of ruins..ancient heart, modern mind. Have I always been so very old?!

Or was it I who was the only one who wasn't serious?

We now think in terms of decades: the roaring twenties, the chaotic thirties, the permissive sixties, the greedy eighties and (perhaps C will correct me here) the fifties were a time when all was perfect in the green and pleasant land, when England was England. This decade, no doubt, will be summarised by that one event on 9/11-perhaps not unreasonably so. [Note: I can't even remember what the nineties were!]. But the seventies, what were they?

The Seventies marked the end of the Keynesian consensus, the birth of neoliberalism (the first 9/11 being a convenient starting date). Capitalism changes gears. Thatcher, on assuming power, changes number 10 so that it has a grander feel to it. The new always has to take on the forms of the past to assure itself, to construct around itself a halo of legitimacy. And so the interior is re-modeled on older forms: pastiche: the re-creation of the past. Is this because power is acutely aware of time biting into it, and that only buildings , space, can represent the continuity of power? The King is dead, long live the King.

[Incidentally, the White House is modeled on a country house to distinguish it from old Europe and monarchical power but is also a series of stage sets. Bush's theatrical performances in the 'reading room' are a case in point. The Kremlin, instead of being a springboard for power ends up entrapping those who would wield power..as if the very contours of space determine how one acts (this made me think of Kadare's 'Successor')]. But behind the facades, what insecurities! How the lips quiver below those grand mustachioed smiles (Elgar, Stalin)

Elgar: enigmatic music that seems to capture something that is quintessentially English, as if to say that the patterns of the landscape mirrored those of his soul. Freud's unheimlich..blood and soil.

The seventies is also the decade when history came to an end, when nothing happened. After the exuberance of the sixties what remained could only be the afterglow of the ashes, empty and vacuous, a reaction to the perceived dissolution of the sixties: post-history, post--modernity. A stark realism after the supposed innocence of what went before. In political terms: realpolitik. But there was also the appeal of the Edwardians in this decade. What was that but a nostalgia for an unblighted golden summer's afternoon before the looming shadows of the Great War had entered the soul? There is the projection of stability-even though the reality was one of highly contested issues- and clearly marked class divisions from which the poor can comfortably be excluded (costume-dramas would become immensely popular).

But everything about the seventies is fake, is porn. It is the beginning of a retro culture (modernism has exhausted itself in experimentation) and a time when conservative forces would be gathering strength (Iran, Saudi, Pakistan, America, India). Perhaps of more significance is the close neoconservative alliance with neoliberalism (economically) even as it remains culturally conservative (thus demonstrating the cultural contradictions of capitalism). But we also see the growth of a conservation movement (the environment, the heritage industry, the archival instinct, 'the countryside' [just as it is being dismantled], Brideshead Revisited).

But England is going, going.
Cemented over. The reflected lights at Blackpool dance and grin but the pleasure-seekers who once moved jauntily now all have the same mechanical expressions and gestures about them. The seventies are null and void.

One wonders if the depictions of a highly stratified society were not, in the final analysis, for the benefit of power or the elites -as a way of preventing the slide away from the old order of things -but for those who had been clamouring for change for so long-the left? In a time of consumer affluence (the share of the top o.1 % of the population had been declining for many years now) might not the idea of radical class distinctions further revolutionary politics? What impetus, what forward movement could the left have it if had actually succeeded in its political aims? [Nothing grates on the Marxist's nerves more than this lack of precision..peasants and the lumpenproletariat are always so inconvenient!]

In this sense , then, Thatcher represents not the restoration of power to a traditional ruling class but the second stage of capitalism, liquid modernity, where the very notion of class comes to be of little importance, where the self-made man is king and everyone is (potentially) that man. We're all working class now! (or, one could just as well say, we're all middle class now and we've never had it so good..so speaks the Eloi!).

The sixties, with its narcissistic exploration of the self would fuel the neoliberalism of the seventies and the 'me-generation' of the eighties.

C:
This blog being posted under Politics, I feel I have little to offer by way of comment BUT:The Fifties - Everything perfect in a green and pleasant land? Not in MY world. Mind you, things were going on smoothly enough: lots of gadgets were coming on stream, women's mags were full of good ideas for Home Improvement and DIY was becoming the leisure activity of choice. TV started to make an impact - even my gran had one in her Council house in Welling.

Fashion was fun: stilletto heels and shorter skirts, although (proper) young ladies still wore white gloves in summer. There was definitely a feeling around of the post-war pieces being picked up and of renewal. Generally, it was agreed: We'd never had it so good.' BUT THEN the rot set in: Teddy Boys appeared on the scene - my friend Rita fell in love with one and was expelled from school for flouting the uniform rules by wearing winkle-pickers and chopping six inches off her tunic. After Bill Haley and his Comets hit these shores it was downhill all the way.

But I'm really not the one to talk about the Fifties: by 1955 I was a sober-minded law student whose only nod to the prevailing intellectual zeitgeist was to advertise my Leftish tendencies by wearing the regulation black roll-neck sweater, black tights,T-bar shoes and a duffle coat - and haunting Bunjies coffee shop in Soho. All around me the chaps were discussing politics, while I was reading Gide, Tagore, Kerouac and Ginsberg. A poor effort, really.One recollection which is very clear is that as a student in the Fifties one really was poor - none of my group could have survived without Egg on Toast and Tea at the ABC cafe (one shilling and 6d) and the canteen on the top floor of India House where you got as much rice, curry and dahl as you could eat for 2 shillings and 6d. The canteen at Ceylon House in Queensway was cheap, too, but the curry there was so devastatingly hot we only went there occasionally.

Thanks. I didn't know what to put this under..and I didn't want to add any more labels! Maybe I'll add one called 'general rubbish' (don't say that'll mean I'll have to transfer most of the posts there! )

C, next time you're in town let's go tramping around to see if we can find any of those places..it can be part of the Molly Hughes search?

Kerouac and Ginsber..Gawd...I'll never here the end of this from Jonah! :)

I was thinking of the retrospective view of the fifties..how people see it now. Cricket and village greens and women who knew where their place was?