Of Roberto Pecchioli

Source: Heretically
The small bookstores and street bouquinistes are precious. Old editions can be found from them, books that were thought to be out of print, authors and texts from small publishers, garrison of freedom. Visiting a bookshop in the historic center of a small town we came across a little book of a few pages written in 2011 by the philosopher and art historian Mario Perniola, passed away recently. The title is intriguing, The text is interesting and can be read in one go: Berlusconi or '68 realized...
The thesis of the intellectual from Asti is that the Knight would be proof of the success of the anthropological revolution triggered by the ideas, Parisian and Californian, of the 1968. Strange indeed that the heterodox positions of a few thinkers are considered reactionary, together with powerful but isolated voices accused of "Rossobrunism" (Costanzo Preve) are accepted in some way, or at least revisited, by a figure like that of Perniola. Already a left-wing extremist, close to the Situationist International in his youth until his personal friendship with Guy Debord, subsequently historian and philosopher of art on very critical positions of post modernity, enemy of “weak thinking”, protagonist of heated controversies with Gianni Vattimo, presents a surprising thesis and not without a certain charm. The knight of Arcore would be, in the vision of Luigi Pareyson's student, the one who achieved what 1968 had supported.
As an insider of the movement (Perniola was born in 1941 and began to intervene in the cultural debate in the mid-1950s 60) he sees in the figure of Berlusconi “that will to power, that ranting triumphalism, that extreme desire to destabilize the whole of society which pervaded 1968. End of work and family, deschooling, destruction of the university, deregulation of sexuality, counter-culture, and discredit of medical expertise and collapse of healthcare facilities, hostility towards judicial institutions considered repressive, youthful vitalism, triumph of mass media communication, oblivion of stories and spontaneous presentism, all this has now become reality.”
Words of condemnation of 68 which sound strange, in the mouth of the old situationist who became a professor of aesthetics, similar to those exhibited in L'arte espansa, in which he claims that “the dimension of art has expanded enormously. Everything can be transformed into art, even without its author knowing anything about it. But who has the legitimacy and authority to carry out this metamorphosis?” A lexicon close to that of a conservative who looks with a certain horror at the central slogan of 68 “imagination in power”. The Pavlovian reflex that has run through the entire Italian left since 1994, the demonization of the adversary, to whom all the evils of the present are attributed.
No, Berlusconi did not realize 1968 at all, but without a doubt it is a product of it. The overthrow of all values ​​is an element of the creative destruction intuited by Schumpeter as the driving force of capitalism; il 68, born revolutionary, it was then absorbed by a new ideology, progressive libertarian individualism. As Perniola intuits, an economy and ethics based on work are replaced by a world based on social relations, where the required qualities are adaptability, flexibility, versatility, therefore cynicism and moral indifferentism. The man from the post 68 he is a Zelig who "changes his accent and thoughts" depending on the interlocutors, of situations, of conveniences. He has a special relationship with entertainment and does not tolerate prohibitions (it is forbidden to prohibit). The figure of Berlusconi can be paradigmatic of a certain way of being in the world, but it is only an effect of a general explosion of which Perniola himself, which seems to depreciate the results, he was an active promoter.
Our position is different. Il 68 it was a revolution in interior homine that totally deconstructed European and Western society, whose poisoned fruits can be summarized in ten points brilliantly theorized by Marcello Veneziani. According to the Apulian thinker, Sixty-eight was fascist, parricide, infantile, arrogant, extremist, toxic, conformist, reductive, neo bigot, immeasurable. Destroyer, since he left the thrill of breaking down, reject. Not by chance, it was called global protest. I was parricide, since the revolt designated an absolute enemy, the Father. That parricide was destituent, since he reduced all authority and authority to ashes. It was infantile in that it triggered an enduring Peter Pan syndrome among the masses: no will to grow, irresponsibility in power as much as imagination. Without fathers, permanent children built the childless society, through declining birthrates, abortion, contempt for old age, the forced and ridiculous youthism.
He was also arrogant, il 68, with ignorance, amateurism elevated to merit, the removal of duties in favor of rights, the abolition of limits. The extremist drift is obvious, which led to the season of violence and terrorism, of the glorification of every revolt, starting with the Chinese revolution, from the myths of Che Guevara and the Viet Cong (“Vietcong wins because they shoot!”). Toxic it certainly was, so much in a figurative sense, as well as in generalizing - often glorifying - the use of drugs and psychoactive substances, in which radical culture, the hippie trend met the permissive wave, Dionysian, orgiastic sex, droga e rock and roll. But he was also a conformist, in the sense that he turned off yesterday's ideas to find himself at the service of the new anti-bourgeois Lord, anti-popular but globalist and privatizing. The old tradition was canceled, reducing everyone to serial pleasure-seekers, consumers, move, without family.
It was reductive in the sense that everything was limited to current events, to a linear present, a world of successive removals on the altar of the moment. From modernity we moved to today. The returning '68 bigotry is very bizarre. From unbridled freedom to political correctness, to the thought police, to the rebellion against words. From old fogies to new fogies, to whom, the proletarian revolution failed, the lexical one remained. In the end, Veneziani talks about immoderation; il 68 it was the apology for trespassing. Of places, seat, peoples. The embankments were bombed, every dam was blown up, the river overwhelmed everything. What is left is an immense pile of unrecognizable debris.
If we compare the conclusions of Perniola and those of Veneziani, overlapping them like fingerprints, we are surprised to see, beyond the diversity of languages, quite a few similarities. The ultimately naive expedient of the former '68 philosopher who became an expert in aesthetics is to consider a physical person considered an enemy of his own ideas, Silvio Berlusconi, as the embodiment of the evils of a worldview criticized after not only having shared it, but actively promoted. Berlusconi is the product- one of many- of a world that has all the flaws exposed by Venetians, but it is only one side of a much more complex geometric figure.
Its happy capitalism, basically still tied to work, aspires to consensus, to legitimacy, as Boltanski and Chiapello observed in underlining the only real difference between the new capitalism and the mafias, but it makes no sense whatsoever to say that Berlusconi would have "completed a project to destroy the family". Too much grace. From Sigmund Freud to his consistent epigone Wilhelm Reich to the Frankfurt professors, passing through the various phases of the sexual revolution and feminism, the responsibilities are very different. The TV of which Silvio is a dominus can be blamed for being rude, bad teacher, o, following Perniola, even “bad mother”, but he just went with the flow, strengthening it, worsening its course; he certainly didn't create it.
As for school or university, his reforms were so numerous that it was difficult to even mention them. If Tullio De Mauro, distinguished Italianist who became minister of a left-wing government, had to recognize the impressive functional illiteracy of millions of Italians, also diploma holders and graduates, the fault lies with 68 and its numerous false teachers, not poor Silvio with his three I's, English, internet, business. Means, not purposes in the service of globalization and a capitalism whose totalizing scope not even Perniola seems to fully grasp.
Nonetheless, he entrusts us with a capital reflection, not yet adequately developed: the dismantling of schools and universities has an epochal motivation: “the existence of the bourgeoisie no longer serves capitalism, which today finds in the middle class an obstacle to the overflowing expansion of the neo-liberal model. “Removing any possibility of socio-economic advancement, also through the devaluation of qualifications, with mass graduations and promotions, become objectives of the school-company, there are no longer any obstacles in assigning professorships, offices, top positions and positions of power to the most incompetent, ignorant and corrupt. In this sense, everyone, in the West they have done their part. Berlusconi's, with the aggravating circumstance, right, of having promised an equivocal "liberal revolution" which he achieved only in the many inferior elements and in the ostentatious contempt for the culture in which however, his fake right is in good company. Dal 68 and for various reasons, only technical specialization counts, the rest is amateurism, as the mature art critic Perniola laments, very different from the young situationist of half a century earlier.
Who sows wind, gathers storm and certainly cannot attribute it to a political opponent with very little merit, but he had neither the strength nor the strength, nor the time, much less the will to exercise a destructive power as depicted in the pamphlet. Even Berlusconi's somewhat Texan and very "ganass" barker optimism is considered as evidence against him. The truth is that the entire entertainment society in which we are immersed is pervaded by it- a friend and associate of Guy Debord should teach it. The same undeniable Berlusconi contempt for culture has ancient ancestors, to be traced in the ideal political universe close to the first Perniola. Let's think about the anti-educational spontaneism of Jean Jacques Rousseau, to his pernicious myth of the noble savage, to certain Jacobins convinced that "the revolution does not need scholars", to the most extreme currents of the first 68, like the Movement of 22 March, until the Chinese cultural revolution, which took place in the same years as the 1968 explosion in the West, aimed at erasing the two thousand year old principles of Confucianism.
If in the wake of imagination ignorance came to power, the responsibility does not lie with Arcore, but of the enthusiastic reception of the principles theorized over the years 60 e 70. Of the 1979 It is Lyotard's The Post-Modern Condition, a sort of acknowledgment of the exhaustion of a civilization that has become repetition, digression on the topic, mannerism. The rise of "weak thought" around Gianni Vattimo dates back to that same period, another student of Pareyson. Vattimo allowed the transition of Italian culture from relativism to complete nihilism, with the aggravating circumstance that the so-called weak thought denies the truth in the name of a higher and more all-encompassing inverted truth, or the absence of truth. No civilization is based on anti-principles. Let's think about the damage of anti-psychiatry (also the daughter of the meeting between 68 and some Marxist strands).
The most serious loss of the last half century has been the absence of the idea of ​​quality. Reducing everything to the horizontal dimension, quantitative, excellence has been despised, the depth, the elevation, what Evola called summit lines. The authority of knowledge, of whose loss the last Perniola feels nostalgic, it was cast into doubt precisely by that vulgarized sixty-eightism, sloppy, who walks in slippers and is the sign of the anarchic republic of quantity on which liberal capitalism has built its dominion. Berlusconi has nothing to do with it, Unfortunately. If only we could blame one man, or to a single political or cultural current the decadence in which we are immersed.
The channels of global communication, Perniola explains it, they have already been effectively described by the Stoic philosophers, for whom a fool is someone who changes his opinion from one moment to the next, unable to sit still, he runs headlong towards the first objective he encounters, only to easily regret what he had done and suddenly change direction. Unable to listen, incapable of developing stable evaluations and making definitive choices. It looks like a fresco of the liquid society, which is not Bauman's invention, but an effective definition. The attack on 68 it couldn't have been more devastating, taking into account the virtues accepted into Mario Perniola's pantheon, the rational inclination for logos, decency, sociability, modesty, self-control.
Remember the four cardinal virtues of the Christian tradition, prudence, fortress, justice and temperance? Different words to express similar concepts. To an unclouded mind, 1968 must have foreseen from the beginning the effects that we are experiencing today in their entirety.: lack of quality, no sense of limits, victory of ignorance, an unbridled subjective imagination that came to power without knowing what to do with it except abuse it, short circuit of ancient virtues, that also our philosopher (partially) repentant shows that he regrets, not replaced by a new system of values ​​other than weak nihilistic thinking.
Dear illustrious philosopher, eminent aesthete and critic, cultured, fine and brilliant, don't attack Berlusconi, one effect among many of a vulgar time, to hide his defeats. The pits are full of hindsight, cries over spilled milk, but he is among the many who lit and stoked the flame under the kettle. Silvio, the terrible Silvio, it's just a convenient scapegoat, a mirror of the bad conscience of two Italian generations. We will need just as many, and perhaps they will not be enough, to erase '68. To unseat the Knight it was enough to manipulate the spread.